Design Principle 5 – We Will Design So Knowledge Can be Reused & Shared
Studio Notes | Short Reads
This post is part of a series exploring the Design Principles for Government in Ireland. If you’d like to start from the beginning, check out our introductory post here.
Government, and our public services, are a system of interacting systems. From healthcare to local authorities, from emergency services to our civil service, from national infrastructure to our economy, and policies… we have hundreds, if not thousands of complex organisations delivering the services that keep Ireland ticking over.
Principle number 5 calls for generous sharing of insight and innovation across those systems – if we design something that works well in one place, it should be shared so that its impact can be scaled to others.
This isn’t just about sharing outcomes from design work, but also the user research and human insights that are part of that work, and the methods and processes that help progress toward better outcomes for people.
A trailblazing example of this sharing can be found in the publications of the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) through outlets like the GDS blog. Designers in the UK civil service have consistently shared in the open the work they do, how it’s done, insights which were uncovered, and more.
Principle number 5 is a mindset principle… whereby across our public service everything of value is designed to be shared, repurposed, or reused in another context or service, to scale positive impact. It’s a far-reaching ambition, that includes small things like making sure that designs or prototypes are reusable, sharable, and iterable, and extends to huge concepts including the sharing of processes and tools across and between organisations.
So what does this look like?
In our work we have embraced this principle. An example at smaller scale would include our work with Cork County Council, during which insight helped us drive, prototype, and test new ideas for the intranet service within the council.
When creating “mockups” of the potential new intranet site we made a conscious decision to make these using Powerpoint… not the easiest of tools to use for visual design! Why? Because inside most local authorities, Powerpoint is a tool that most people have access to. We wanted our designs to be accessible to all, shareable, and most importantly iterable – so that they could evolve over time.
Another great example is the work we have been doing with funding from Creative Ireland’s Creative Climate Action Fund II, to explore new ways for Sustainable Energy Communities (SECs) to decarbonise, reach new groups of people, and share knowledge with one another to advance climate action.
SECs are formed under a scheme run by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland – diverse groups the length and breadth of the country, united in a mission to decarbonise their companies, homes, and neighbourhoods.
There are over 900 SECs nationally, and in our work, we spoke at length to a subset of those communities to learn what’s working, what’s not, and what creative workarounds work well in different contexts.
We learned so much in our initial research that we immediately prototyped a means to share our insights… you can find those at the (still a prototype!) website www.fromplantodo.ie.
But sharing remained a theme, in our continuing collaboration with Connecting Cabra, a particularly active SEC in Dublin. How might we engage under-reached members of the community? How might we facilitate sharing of knowledge of decarbonisation tips?
We hosted a collaborative workshop for renters in Phibsborough, at the The Spark Climate Co-op, where members of the local community who rent their homes shared their tips on saving energy and keeping a cosier home. The output of the “Climate Chats & Chips” workshop included so many tips and tricks that we filled a home-made “zine”, an example of a means by which others can learn, but also something that other communities across the country might replicate.
Those “zines” or booklets have now been printed too – for distribution to communities across the country. It’s like “sharing, by default”. We’d love to do more work like this, sharing the value created by the things we do.
How might we get started?
So, principle 5 is about the bigger picture… and the key thing to do to get started is to share something. This might mean reaching out to another department in your organisation, or publishing evidence of your work for others to understand. A key thing leaders can do is allow time for this sharing, in the full understanding that a “rising tide raises all ships” as the old saying goes. When it comes to services, in particular public service, knowledge shared is value added– and that’s part of our national government’s definition of innovation.
