Design is meeting needs

We attended a ‘design quality’ conference for the built environment. One workshop, ‘Winning the hearts and minds’ was summarised as, ‘Engaging the community to obtain a YIMBY instead of a NIMBY (not in my back yard),’ or ‘How to assure you get your design through planning without local opposition’.

This suggests quality design is not a result of quality engagement, but rather, engagement is simply a tool to gain people’s favour (and that we already know what quality design is, so why would we need to learn from those who live and work there?)

What our project with Emmaus St Albans shows is that quality engagement right from the outset is vital for design that does what it’s supposed to do - meet users needs, hopes and dreams.

We began working with homelessness charity Emmaus UK in collaboration with Ryder and CRASH. We led a participatory design process to define the ‘big idea’ for expansion of their building in St Albans. This building is responsible for housing, training and employing 33 formerly homeless people.

Emmaus UK supports over 700 homeless men and women every year, known as companions. The social enterprise arm of Emmaus UK - their shops - recycles or reuses 3,302 tonnes of items. The shops are central to the charity’s success. They provide opportunities for companions to rehabilitate, learn and grow, while supporting the financial sustainability of the charity.

We gained insight into the experience and needs of those using the building - the companions, staff, leadership and trustees through co-design workshops, interviews, focus groups, participatory photography, and most importantly conversations over cups of tea.

A consensus was reached to expand the storage and shop floor space, something that came as a surprise to the Chief Executive, who believed the companions would have chosen to expand the leisure space.

Since the completion of the building, “profitability went up 23%”. The CEO, Tony Ferrier, believes the expanded space and storage has allowed staff to better look after and store items, creating an improved experience for them and for customers.

The St Albans location has added resiliency to the greater Emmaus Hertfordshire branches. One staff member shares,

“It’s taken a bit of pressure off. We have another shop that isn’t doing quite as well. It still means that we’re keeping steady. [It’s] a safety net.”

Our early conversations with companions revealed that there was a fundamental issue with loading furniture and other goods into the shop. There were between 7 and 10 tonnes of furniture going through the front door each year, which caused “havoc” one companion described.

“It’s made a vast improvement on the shop. I could remember one time we were having to lug an item, trying to stack it in there and trying to lift [sofas, king sized beds and stuff like that] past customers without hitting them... trying to get it through that front door, which is not exactly the biggest.”

Friction with customers before the extension led to arguments. This friction was aggravated by the physical and psychological state the companions may be in at any particular time. One companion shared, “a lot of people that come in here they suffer from anxiety, depression… not able to talk to people. When I first moved in here, I had really bad anxiety”.

The new space has gone a long way to address the range of needs for the range of users. As a result of the building “you’re not banging around so much, you’re not trying to dodge customers” and “we don’t have customers diving on us before the furniture’s even been put up”.

Since construction, companions and staff have noticed a range of positive outcomes. Aside from, “it has made life a lot easier” the expanded space has ultimately resulted in:

• Increased safety in the management of stock coming into and out of the shop - greater ease of working

• More opportunities for companions to work and grow

• Fewer mistakes, particularly around merchandising - greater confidence working on the shop floor

• Reduced friction between companions and customers

• A greater sense of place and belonging in the building

• More professional layout of goods

These outcomes are a direct result of brilliant collaboration between companions, staff and customers. The shop has improved financial sustainability for the charity, the shopping experience for customers, and physical and psychological security for companions.

To learn more visit the project page.

Author: N. Ardaiz

Understanding homelessness through a qualitative lens

Homelessness in London hit record highs towards the end of 2018 – a trend that unfortunately shows no signs of slowing. At AzuKo, we have been working with several partners across the city to combine our human-centred design mindset with a big-data analytics approach to shape solutions to homelessness and other issues affecting our most vulnerable citizens.

Supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and their forward-thinking Ideas & Pioneers Fund, this project launched in Autumn 2017 in partnership with the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD).

Led by Pye Nyunt, LBBD’s Insight Hub and Insights and Innovation team were working with data to predict homelessness and drive their service provision. Alongside the LBBD Community Solutions services team headed up by Mark Fowler, this gave us the opportunity to blend our approaches to better serve the Borough’s residents

Visit our project page and read our report

As the project draws to a close, we sat down with Pye and his colleagues Michael Sinclair and Tim Pearse to reflect on the work. Sharing the initial impetus behind the partnership, Pye emphasised that at “Barking and Dagenham, our transformation program is all about making sure that we leave no resident behind… That means bringing residents closer to the design process and ensuring that the council is more participatory, more engaging, and to never assume that we as the local government have always designed the best thing.” 

• Filling in the gaps: adding stories to the numbers 

At AzuKo, the partnership was anchored in the shared belief that placing human experiences at the core of design work, combined with a willingness to reflect, learn and grow leads to effective full picture understanding and responsive, sustainable solutions.

Pye agreed, explaining that “our focus [at LBBD] over the past couple of years has been on the quantitative side of things”.

“But the problem with solely focusing on quantitative data is it doesn’t necessarily tell us people’s life journeys… what we wanted to do was properly understand through a qualitative lens the reasons how people ended up in the situations that they are.”

LBBD Insight and Data Scientist, Michael Sinclair added that the “particular [numerical data] fields that we choose to capture are very good for driving the service and very good for the performance reporting of the service… but it doesn’t allow us to capture the perspective of the resident … or the view of the officer… it’s a very black and white record of what has happened.”

To address this need, we worked with the Community Solutions housing and homelessness service to conduct a workshop to identify collective interests, concerns and questions to ground our research. What followed was several ethnographic exercises with frontline workers, managers and service users, including ten in-depth interviews with residents to gain insight from their perspectives.

Pye strongly supported this approach, arguing that

“Our residents know best; the residents who have lived through those experiences can give us a layer of insight which we typically cannot view on a spreadsheet. Bringing those people into the design process as a blueprint for the wider transformation of the Borough is going to be vital to ensuring we leave no one behind.”

• Delving into complexity to tease out solutions

Ultimately our human-centred research presented the complexity of people’s experiences with homelessness. From psychological needs to the physical experience in the service space, these interviews gave colour to the core data.

According to Pye, this work allowed LBBD to “reflect on our own processes and how we've designed them. It has helped us reflect on the type of conversations that we are having with our residents when they are most in need. It has helped us reflect on the protocols, the systems, the technology that we have in place to make sure that it is most suitable for those residents who are most in need.”   

Behavioural Science Lead Tim Pearse went on to explain the perspective change this project brought to the team; “it’s too easy to look at services and think, ‘oh, it’s really stretched and we haven’t got any more houses, so we’re stuck, right?’ But I think just getting deeper into the issues and what’s driving behaviour, what’s driving demand can help you think more broadly about the types of solutions.” 

• Looking to the future and the need for a critical friend

The team at Barking and Dagenham are dedicated to expanding their methodology and using this project as a blueprint for future works around other challenges such as debt and unemployment.  

Looking to the future, Pye underlined that “local government has spent a lot of time designing services only to have defended what they've previously designed, and we've invested a lot of time doing that.”

“Our engagement with AzuKo has helped us to understand how we can design better initially using a participatory approach and bringing the human into that design process.”

He concluded that what is really important “is not that an external organisation is going to consistently praise us… [but that it] embeds itself deeply into understanding our residents and can equally challenge our own behaviours. And whilst we have done some incredibly positive things across the Borough for residents, there is always opportunities to improve. Working with AzuKo has been brilliant because they've been a critical friend of ours and that has helped us highlight new techniques that we can scale and deploy ourselves.” 

At AzuKo, we’re excited to follow the progress of the LBBD teams. The success of this project has been rooted in their consistent willingness to ask difficult questions, reflect on challenging hypotheses and test current models of working. As a team that thrives on active, inclusive participation and continuous learning, this is the ultimate compliment and deepens our belief that given the right opportunities, people ultimately hold many of answers to the challenges they face.

If you’re looking to add human-centred insights to your current work please get in touch and we can explore how AzuKo can help further your aims.

Author: N. Ardaiz

Who are museums created with?

"I'm not sure if that's right..." He expanded,

“the things I suggested - I’m not sure if they are the right design answers for those problems.”

The gentleman had participated in a workshop with AzuKo at Tate Britain as part of the museum's Soapbox series, "for people near or beyond the age of 60 to meet up and share views on life and art through topical discussion and debate".

The Public Programmes team at Tate hired us to design and facilitate the July edition of Soapbox - Who are museums created with? (Though we were quickly informed by one of the participants that museums are where dead elephants and historical artefacts are housed and galleries are where art is presented. A common mistake, she reassured us.)

The man was unsure about the recommendations he had made about the signage design for one of the galleries. He suggested that the intention of the room should be communicated better and that the signage be designed in a way that was more welcoming and informative.

He was critical, he had a point of view and he was confident about the types of design changes that could make the space more user friendly. Nevertheless, he was uncertain about his voice as a designer.

We asked the group to explore and observe the galleries and speak with other visitors about the current experience at Tate Britain. We prompted them to challenge how participatory the spaces currently are, and why that was relevant.

When we spoke with the group about their observations and their conversations it was immediately apparent that the discussion was a voicing of design perspectives on how the museum could be more welcoming, more useful and how it could support a better experience.

We were inspired by the diversity of ideas they put forward, despite only having half an hour to complete their task. They touched on:

• Particular aspects of the galleries that aren't culturally relevant for foreign visitors

• Importance of communication and signage in the space and the ineffectiveness of some signage in the galleries and the Common Ground community garden. The size, messages, colours and coordination were all discussed.

• Learning styles that should be considered which would affect the nature of the experience e.g. extroverted and introverted personalities will experience the space differently

• Insights about the user experience - some staff have the opportunity to participate in the experience of the museum unlike roles such as Security, spatial curation could be better and certain rules in the space didn't work for their age group e.g. no sitting on the temporary exhibition which has several spaces to seemingly sit

• Seasonality and planting in the Common Ground garden, and how it could have been more collaboratively created

• Children offer their own perspective (a mindset and from the floor) on the art in the museum; a relevant perspective

(Photo: N. Ardaiz)

The man's comment after the workshop is telling. It highlights to us the hierarchy inherent in the world of design and, more importantly, the nature of education in our society. Of course he was correct - he was also incorrect - there is no right design for the museum which would meet the needs of all users at Tate Britain.

What was most impressive about the session, was that despite any doubt the group had about their age, their lack of training as designers or the subjectivity of the 'right' design, in just two hours the group united around a task and over-delivered an assembly of relevant design voices that Tate couldn't ignore.

Learn more about our public workshops and events.

Author: N. Ardaiz