Dott Festival | Day 2

I spent Day 2 wondering around the project spaces of Design of Sexual Health (DaSH) and Alzheimer 100.

If there is one thing that I can say to any visitor going to the Dott Festival, it would be to talk to the Dott Crew at each project space. I can't stress this enough (even I needed some things clarified!) because if you don't, you might miss out on really understanding what the project is all about.

And if you want an even deeper understanding of the project and the issues around it, you must attend the Dott Debates. They bring deeper insights, understanding and richness to each project. The Debates are also a great place to network, bring ideas to the table and find out more on what we can do next.

Design for Sexual Health (DaSH)


A process map of how the DaSH project was done


Stakeholders are of critical importance. DaSH’s stakeholders include the project team to the young people on the streets


DaSH Boardgame shows the different scenarios of an individual navigating their way through sexual health services


An idea could be... sexual health services in high street shops

Alzheimer 100


A guide of the different elements of the Alzheimer 100 project space


Persona's get us well-acquainted with people in the Alzheimer community


Over 80 disparate services for the Alzheimers' community makes for a confusing experience for everyone


The idea of signposts can help people identify the services available and also talk to someone


Talking to a wider group of people can occur in physical meeting places such as cafes


Designing with artists a garden for Alzheimer carers and sufferers


A powerful one-minute video conveying stories of people in the Alzheimer community

Dott Festival | Day 1

The Dott Festival opened today with an attendance of over 3000 people flocking to the big white and red tent along the Tyne Riverside in Baltic Square.



The Dott Festival is a showcase of projects in the Dott programme that have been going on in the past 18 months. The projects have formed around the themes of:

- Education
- Energy
- Food
- Health
- Tourism
- Movement (transport)

And all the projects have involved local people designing solutions to local problems.

I volunteered some of my time today to help out at the Festival. It gave me the opportunity to strike up conversations with designers, project stakeholders and people on their thoughts on Dott 07. It was a great day of meeting, greeting and seeing engaged and happy faces as they toured the issues that touch everyone in some way, shape or form.

I was in the Our New School project zone when I was approached by a team of students from Köln International School of Design, Germany, who were in town to blog, film, tape and photograph the Dott Festival experience. Jenny, Melissa, Ollie and Lisa were all Service Design students who study under Professor Birgit Mager, who was one of the first academics to write about Service Design.







As the evening fell on Baltic Square, it was time to prepare for the Dott Creative Community Awards night. Held in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, the Awards night attracted a huge invitation-only crowd and was a fantastic celebration of the projects.



The night was opened by Dott’s Programme Director, John Thackara. Welcome words were delivered by representatives of the two funding partners of Dott 07, Mick Henry of One NorthEast and David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council. David set the tone for the night, gently reminding us that Dott 07 was about designers both professional and public.

The ECO Design Challenge was a competition that got Year 8 students in the UK designing environmental sustainability into their schools. By beginning with diagnosing their school’s carbon footprint, Year 8 students all over the UK were inspired to come up with creative solutions to try and reduce their school’s carbon emissions. Eighty-six schools entered their work into the competition and five were selected as the finalists (you can view the finalists’ work on display at the Dott Festival). These five schools were guests and presenters at the Dott Awards night. Three of them were to receive a £20,000 grant from theNational Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to realise their idea, with the other two runners up being awarded £5,000.

All the presentations on the Awards night were done Pecha Kucha style. This means that the presentations were 3 minutes, 6 slides and the presenter had 20 seconds to talk through each slide. The schools were first up to present. It’s daunting to think about being first and to speed through your project in 3 minutes in front of an adult crowd, but the Year 8 students made it look like a piece of cake. Not only that, but they were professional, worked as a team (each school had about 8 presenters) and clearly impressed us all. I felt a pang of jealousy at the ease of which the students could get up on that stage and do it!

Following the schools were the 10 Dott 07 projects. Each project leader presented stories of their Dott projects Pecha Kucha style. While it was a lot to take in at once, it was a marvellous way to get acquainted with the projects if one had not known much about them before.

After short break of water and chocolate ices, in our seats (well the night had to go on!), we had two wonderful keynote speeches from Ezio Manzini, Professor of Design at Politecnico di Milano, and Sunil Abraham, Director of mahiti.org, an NGO in India. Both of them commended the Dott 07 programme and inspired us to think a bit differently about how we should be going forward now.



The Awards were presented with the project, Urban Farming, sweeping the floor for the night. The Urban farming project’s work in Middlesbrough got the locals growing food in their gardens and allotments over the summer and celebrating the grown food at a huge Town Meal just last month. The participation and response has been phenomenal and Middlesbrough Council will be continuing the concept and event in 2008.

After a closing speech from Alan Clarke of One NorthEast, the audience and presenters retired for drinks and canapes at the Baltic’s Riverside Restaurant.

Four months on…. The Initial Project Application (IPA)

It’s now 4 months into my PhD and I have spent the past months transitioning from Australia to the UK; from big city to regional city; from full-time work to full-time student and while it has been a bit of a roller-coaster challenge, the dust has finally begun to settle.

Over the past months I have spent time getting to know the projects and the designers who have worked on them. I have also spent time with the Dott 07 Management Team and the Design Council. I have found conversation to be a powerful learning tool, especially with the lack of Service Design literature on designing public services (two key references here are the work of the former RED unit of the Design Council and Jim Collin’s monograph titled, ‘Good to Great and the Social Sector’).

The designers have especially helped me with recognising what have been the most topical and challenging issues in Service Design, and I thank everyone who has spent time talking with me.

The IPA is a research proposal I have to submit to the Northumbria University for approval of my study over the next 3 years. The University also needs to know that I will be making an original contribution to knowledge.

Here’s a brief overview of what I submitted (and the Panel just reviewed it today). My working title is:

Understanding the role of Design Practice in public design commission projects, and their broader relevance to Service Design contexts.

To flesh this out, I will be looking at the design practice (that is the methods, processes, tools, techniques and roles of the designer) used in the Dott 07 public sector projects. I will be looking at 7 projects, which used Service Design-type practices. These projects are:

1. Alzheimer 100
2. Design and Sexual Health (DaSH)
3. Low Carb Lane
4. Move Me
5. New Work
6. Our New School
7. Urban Farming

These 7 projects will form a case study, which will build evidence and an argument for the value and role of design in public sector services.

My original contribution to knowledge lies in thinking about Dott 07 as an artificial ecosystem, created by the Design Council, for designers to experiment and play in. The implications of this mean that there are conditions bespoke to the Dott 07 programme, that may not be relevant to the broader context. For example, the tolerance of failure in Dott 07 projects may be higher because the funding partners (the Design Council and One NorthEast) are not going to pull the plug like a commercial client might if things go a bit hairy. What I intend to do is identify what is bespoke to Dott 07 and what can be applied in the ‘real-world’ of Service Design. I hope to make a contribution here to the embryonic discipline and along the way, design a method to do this. I know that designers, researchers, academics are creating these artificial ecosystems all the time, but how do you then transfer and apply the knowledge and ensure a legacy?

To further illustrate what I mean, the Designing for Services project at Said Business School, Oxford University is a programme of similar nature.

A bit about Dott

Designs of the Time (Dott ) is a ten-year programme, to be initiated every two years in a different region of the UK. Each Dott consists of a suite of public commission projects utilising design-led interventions (i.e. Design processes, methods, tools and the roles of designers) to involve people (the public) in designing solutions to local issues. The key issues were:

- Education
- Energy
- Food
- Health
- Tourism
- Movement (transport)

The first Dott (Dott 07) was undertaken in North East England between 2005 and 2007.

To celebrate the projects, a showcase Festival will begin tomorrow on the Tyne River at Baltic Square. I will be blogging updates of the Festival here.

Inspiration and Influences

The funny thing about the mind map that I first did for this blog is that it led me to an idea for my next posting here.

I often pass on my favourite articles that have been my comfort food during the challenging and questioning times (only with less calories). I thought I would post links and put references to these here on my blog.

The one that shall always top my list, is a collection of people-centred stories in design by Lauralee Alben, gathered together in an article called At the Heart of Interaction Design. The full article can be downloaded by clicking on the link or going to Alben Design’s website.


*Image from Alben Design's website

The next reference I love to pass on, has fed my interest in always having one foot in a design bucket and the other in a business bucket. It is a fabulous book called Managing As Designing. The authors who put the book together, Richard J. Boland and Fred Collopy, came to recognise the potential of a ‘design attitude’ in a business through their interactions with renowned architect Frank Gehry during the conception, planning, designing, development and construction of their faculty building, the Weatherhead School of Management. The result of these interactions resulted in a conference in 2002 and the subsequent published works are the papers delivered at the conference. It is a great read for both designers and business people. What I also love about Managing as Designing is that it is a demonstration of the transformative experience non-designers may have with design.



Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan (which can be found in the book the Idea of Design) is an article which really sharpened my focus on what I wanted to do in design. Buchanan provides for us a framework of Four Orders that designers work in. He uses the Four Orders to encourage our thinking about the potential of design in new and different areas and even today, Wicked Problems offers a rich and colourful seabed which always gets me thinking about design in so many directions.



An article that did precede all other articles, was one by Anne Patterson called Managing Upwards. As a Graphic Design Intern, I was struggling with being ostracised for using the wrong length hyphen (sorry em-dash) and knowing there was a greater potential for design. As we had a lot of down time between projects I would immerse myself in the graphic design studio’s library and one day came across this article which made me see a light!

In Managing Upwards, Patterson wrote about a Designer’s journey throughout their career which begins as a designer and moves forward and upwards into management. She wrote about how Designers applied their design thinking to managing


*An illustration from Patterson's thesis

Last and definitely not least is the thing that began it all- The Design Council. In 2002, a Creative Director I was working under passed me a brochure to read and from that point on, I was hooked!



The Design Council is the UK’s national strategic body for design and have a role in creating the right eco system for design and designers to play, experiment and work in. They are advocates for design and its use in business, government and society. I have been using the Design Council website as a source of inspiration and information for my personal, education and career interests over many years now, so I feel very lucky to be here, in the UK, at Northumbria University and collaborating with the Design Council on this PhD.

Starting Points

I think one of the hardest things we come across in daily life is beginning something- to write that first line, pull a pencil across the page, open that book, pluck up the courage to do it first… As you can see, these are a few things I have been grappling with for the past month since I started this blog!


But thinking about beginning things actually led me to a small mind map called 'Starting Points' and there are two things that I would like to discuss here. Firstly, that design offers us a great place to begin, and secondly, that this place is exactly the reason why I am a designer and why I am here.

I believe that all designers have their different reasons for being. Mine simply has to do with people. And this is, most often, my starting place when embarking on a new design project. Asking, observing, empathising, enquiring, experiencing… I’ve always been curious about people.

In our rapidly advancing world of tangled, networked, complex and complicated technology, communications and things, I find comfort in design for its ability to remind us, and draw us closer to what has and always will matter, and that is people.

For design, problem-solving is about putting people at the centre, not products and/or technology. This is one of the many unique things that design offers us, that is, if we so choose to go forward with it in this way.

About a PhD in Design

My name is Lauren and I am undertaking a PhD in Design at Northumbria University. My PhD is co-sponsored by the Design Council, London and Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The brief set for my PhD is to explore emerging methods in design, namely Service Design, using the Design of the Times (Dott07) regeneration program happening in the north-east of England as my main case study. By case study, I mean a few things (and this list is not exhaustive):

• Capturing the stories of Dott07 ie. What has happened
  
• Capturing the design methods that have been used in Dott07’s many projects
  
• Capturing the learnings from the projects and look at what we might possibly take forward into Dott09 (and what would best be left behind).

I have set this blog up as a platform to share my ideas and add some discipline around capturing thoughts for my PhD. I welcome your thoughts, comments and questions in response to my posts and have opened up posting to everyone (ie. You don’t have to sign in as a Blogspot member).

I hope you enjoy reading and interacting with this blog. It’s one of the many ‘activities’ I have in store to engage people with my work and research, and also help me develop my thoughts throughout this three year journey.