Last week, we ran a workshop on Co-design for the Smart Cities project looking at the challenges that co-design presents local government – so we were privileged to be joined by managers from four cities around the North Sea region as well as a mix of academics and consultants.
The day was led by Ewan McIntosh in the gaps between running the SNP’s social media strategy, coming from an education and creative industries perspective – so the day started off with two examples of projects for Channel he had been involved with:
- MirrorMe – which shows the impact of unhealthy lifestyle by morphing an uploaded picture
- “Scenic or not” as part of the mapumental project with MySociety
Both showing how mass participation can be used in social projects – for education or crowdsourcing data that could not be created in any other way.
Design thinking
But the main thread of the day was provided by working our way through a five-stage design thinking process of:
- Problem statement
- Immersion and empathy
- Synthesis
- Ideation
- Prototyping
A great reminder of the importance of the design part of co-design.
Ewan suggested a book as starting point : ThinkerToys by Michael Michalko
The day was taken up in groups working in three groups through real challenges faced by the cities – the example in my group was the challenge of writing letters that were meaningful to their recipients – and helped them to do the best thing.
I’ll stop this post here, but more – presentations, notes and some great interviews from the day – can be found on the Smart Cities site and the Posterous blog of the day.
Background brief: co-design in Smart Cities
Here’s a short document that summarises the main findings from the internal formative evaluation of the practice of co-design within the Smart Cities project. It formed the starting point for the workshop, and contains examples of the different approaches to co-design that have been taken by the project partners
