Co-designing for Society (journal paper)

This year the Australasian Medical Journal (AMJ) ran another special Design + Health edition to explore ideas in designing for health. Deborah Szebeko, founder of social design agency thinkpublic and I followed up our previous year's Co-designing for Dementia: The Alzheimer100 Project (2009) paper with this new one called, Co-designing for Society (2010).


In this paper, we elaborate more on co-design, its approach, tools, processes and practices using several of thinkpublic's projects. At the end of the paper we also touch on what next for co-design, especially in line with the political climate here in the UK where the Coalition advocates Building Big Society which sees “a society where the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control.”

The Design Council have also been actively exploring co-design and organising discussions among the design community to understand the practice better. Check out their published summary here.

Published paper in the Australiasian Medical Journal, Nov 2009

Last month, the Australiasian Medical Journal (AMJ) published a 4-part series special issue on design and health.

Image from the AMJ website

Editors of the journal, Moyez Jiwa and Christopher Kueh, write in their Editorial titled, 'Designing the Future in Health':

The design of the structures in which we work, rest and play serve the health agenda by ensuring that all who use those facilities, irrespective of their physical or cognitive capacity are able to contribute to society. Designers also claim that human emotion is a very significant confounding variable in design for health. Therefore authors in this special edition of the AMJ suggest that the aesthetic qualities of the objects and symbols around us, indeed the very clothes our healers choose to wear, have a significant impact on our experiences and ultimately on the speed of recovery when we are ill [...] We seek to foster the debate which will ultimately change the way we craft solutions to global health care problems from dementia to deafness, from the packaging of medicines to how we find our way around hospitals, from tools to measure the severity of pain to the design of websites to promote self help.

I am pleased to announce that Deborah Szebeko (Founder and Director of thinkpublic) and I had our paper on the Dott 07 project, Alzheimer 100, published in the 3rd of the 4-part series.

We worked on this paper for many months earlier this year. Our intent was to give insight into the Alzheimer 100 project and the co-design practices of thinkpublic. The paper is titled, 'Co-designing for dementia: The Alzheimer 100 project' and if you click on the title, it will automatically download a pdf of our paper. Otherwise, visit the AMJ website where our paper sits alongside other design and health papers in Volume 1, No. 12, Design and Health III.

If you get a chance to read our paper, please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback (positive and/or critical) as we'd love to hear from you!

I feel really honoured that we had the opportunity be part of the journal's initial design and health conversation. I'm excited to see where the AMJ goes from here in discussing and debating design and health, contributing valuable stories, insights and lessons for the future of healthcare and livelihoods of everyone in society.

Touchpoint (service design journal) and other service design knowledge disseminations

The Service Design Network has just released Touchpoint, a journal about service design. Some of the content reviews the Service Design Conference held in Amsterdam last year.


If you are looking for other (more academic) reading on service design....

• The Service Design Network provides a neat list here.

• Service designer and long-time service design blogger, Jeff Howard, also compiled a great collection of service design-related articles, mostly from business and marketing journals here.

• In 2006-7, Lucy Kimbell and Victor Seidel, set up an academic research project called, Designing for Services, which looked at observing and understanding service design in science and technology SMEs. Live|work, IDEO and Radarstation were the design consultancies who participated in the project. I blogged the event on my travel blog here.
  
  D4S produced a blog, short film and publication which brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives on service design (highly recommended alongside Jeff's website to get a good grasped of the state of service design).
  

• The Design Council also have a recommended reading list on service design here. Their Public Service by Design team are also doing timely and excellent work in the area of how designers can add value to public sector services. Some related links on my blog here.
  

Some service design researcher blogs I know of include:

• Qin Han's blog, Design Generalist
• Lauren Currie's blog, Redjotter

Some service designer blogs I know of include:

• Nick Marsh, Choosenick!
• Jeff Howard, Design for Service
• Experentia, Putting People First ('service design' category)

Finally don't forget previous postings on this blog:

• Design-led consultancies involved in service design
• Universities exploring service design (which includes some links to conferences on service design).