WRITTEN ON June 14th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Ideal Goverment - project, Identity, Pertinent Art, Transformational Government, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
It’s publicly official! We’ve had a sensational ideal government walk-thru experience. Ruth and I have been a bit preoccupied creating it and therefore perhaps a little quiet on this blog. Forgive us, but I hope you’ll agree the efforts were not in vain.
Inpsired by our dear friends at the NCC and with the support of Cable & Wireless, EDS and Nortel on behalf of the new Innovative Communications Alliance we engaged the LikePeopleDo team at Central St Martins College of Art & Design. They created ThePublicOffice, a space where we can all work together to redesign public services around the needs of users. It responds to the challenge earlier this year by Sir Gus O’Donnell that
ʻWe need more innovative ways of conveying to public service leaders that transformation is all about the customerʼ
Nick Leon at Naked Eye did some exemplary ethnography for us, just looking at public services through the eyes of people when they really need them. You can see the stories the five families shared on ThePublicOffice web site.
ThePublicOffice ran a series of workshops over 12 and 13th June amidst the vibrant din of GCExpo, Smart Healthcare and Procurement Solutions shows at Earls Court. And guess what? It works! Hurrah.
Click the image to see Shirley, Andrew, Victoria and Jeremy’s story
W says thanks to:
Phil and Martin at Cable & Wireless
Charles at EDS
Kevin, Jayne and John at Nortel
Ed at the NCC
Matthew
Chris
Nick
Tricia, Despina Rakhi and all at LikePeopleDo
Sheina, Anita, Lisa, Mark, Shirley
everyone who took the trouble and come and listen to their stories, comment, and practice redesigning public services
Mark, Paul, Steven, Emma, Keith and all at Kable for taking the risk on this
Caireen and the next generation for loaning us the mothership
and Ruthie who is a ninja of a special sort.
7 Responses to “ThePublicOffice: morning-after reflections on the Sensational Experience”
Oh yes, so there is thanks, thanks (also neatly supporting one of ThePublicOffice themes about how user generated fedabck can help improve services). We”l try to sort it.
My congratulations to you. You did it! Photo reveals domestic atmosphere in the office. And this is nice
Congratulations on this skilfully constructed experiment.
However, I got the disappointing impression that all examples reflected the “dependency” model of public services – one where the “State,” along with semi-state organisations, is at the centre of people’s lives.
Perhaps I was mistaken, perhaps in the wrong mood, but I “walked thru,” around and out – admittedly before the VIPs arrived.
There could be more, of course. We could have squaddies in Iraq (are they adequately supported); consumers (do they get the info, choice, redress they need) or any other number of experiences where people “touch the state” as the Design Council RED team put it. We thought examples of people facing crises in life and requiring complex service packages was most telling. It’s widespread, but by no means universal. I think they are the group that is most seriously let down, and perhaps therefore best place to bring empathy into public service reform with the urgency this requires.
Also, the idea was that people in their home context – their families of whatever shape and format – are at the centre. Not the state. Given that they’re entitled to state services, let’s design them to work well.
William and Ruth and all others who made it
Well done. I attended the show and took part in a workshop.
Workshop stats. 2 women and 25 men. Perhaps a telling reflection on public sector and private sector gender equality.
Members of the families who were able to attend – none. A telling reflection on life for those who are suffering. This was the emotive part – the people who Gus O’Donnell wants to put at the heart of public services can never be there because they are struggling to find public tranport, get their voice heard, gain access to their children, etc…
I do not believe GO’D should talk of customers. This implies that we have a choice and we do not. We are more likely to be citizens.
If this is to work, then maybe we could give the five people and families who took part access to a member of the public sector for 6 months, and see what could be done.
WIBBI the five families who took part had someone from the public sector show they care, and try to act as a trusted friend and adviser, document their experience as a blog, who knows what else to show what might be done ?
Congratulations!
There’s a minor technical blip on http://www.thepublicoffice.org.uk/lisa.html – looking at the page through Firefox it looks like there’s a smart quote in “children’s”. It’s displayed as some garbage characters.