Health Promotion

KEYNOTE

Sarah gave the closing keynote speech at this years IUHPE World Conferences on Health Promotion organized by the International Union for Health Promotion and Education and Health Promotion Switzerland.

She talked about the potential of ‘working backwards’ and challenged participants to start their own problem solving in the day-to-day worlds of Nancy and Mo.

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The Public Office

TRAVELLING WORKSHOP

We worked with Kable to develop a travelling workshop that would raise the profile of user-focused innovation amongst senior civil servants and local government.

The 3-hour event took place in a custom designed space at a trade show or in the foyer of the town hall. After watching films of service users talking about their experiences, participants were challenged  to identify how a user-centered project could help them achieve their aims and what it would take to make that project happen.

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Re-design Your MP

PUBLIC PROJECT

At RED, to raise the profile of our design approach amongst MPs, we initiated a project to redesign MPs constituency offices. At a workshop in Westminster, MPs collaborated to generate ideas on ways to better engage constituents. The following week, we tested and improved our ideas by relocating to an MP’s constituency office.

By the end of the project we’d engaged 15 MPs in a workshop, redesigned the constituency ‘services’ of a minister, made a film and distributed a publication to all MPs.  The project was featured on the BBC’s premier current affairs radio show and one year on we held a follow up workshop.

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Distributed Headship

FILM & ROADSHOW

We worked with the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), current, former and future Heads to co-design leadership models that would make headship more desirable, effective and sustainable.

We made a documentary of the project featuring the Heads talking about the problem and solutions, and re-cut a John Cleese movie to create a spoof documentary “How not to be a Headteacher.” Armed with the film and presentation,  the Heads hit the road to speak at conferences and raise awareness of new ways of doing.

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Evidencing Innovation

ACTION RESEARCH

Policymakers talk about the need for evidence-based policymaking, but don’t often think about what counts as evidence. We developed training and tools to help policymakers recognize and use ‘user-generated’ evidence in program and service design.

When policymakers in Oregon and Rhode Island wanted to come up with new ways to address teenage pregnancy, we worked with them to build youth action research teams where young people and practitioners developed solutions & evidence at the same time.

Food, Sex & Drugs

SHORT COURSE

Working with Jennie Winhall, we ran intensive learning projects in Paris and Leipzig to develop design students’ capacity to do social innovation. Over a week students worked in groups to research, define, and prototype solutions to topical local issues such as obesity in children, sexually transmitted diseases, social isolation, and vacant properties.

The practical work was balanced with teaching key concepts including user research, problem definition and scenario building.

Rules of Engagement

SHORT COURSE

More and more people recognize the need for user engagement when developing new programs and policies. But, what does good user engagement look like? What do users need in order to engage? And what do organizations need to have in place to support good user engagement?

These were the questions addressed in a series of day-long courses with young people and youth service providers in New York, Minnesota, and Georgia. Courses used a variety of teaching methods like case-studies, role plays, readiness assessments, and even specially designed board games.

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Civil Service

ACTION LEARNING SETS

We all know how easy it is to get stuck in a rut, and perform our jobs on autopilot. We worked with groups of civil servants in England, New Zealand and the United States over 3-months to carve out space for reflection, explore what good work looked like, and try out some ways to engage users in problem-solving and decision-making.

Civil servants experimented with new ways of doing; small changes to their routines that might help them approach problems from a different vantage point. These were things like starting a meeting with a story of a user. Or broadening what counted as evidence in the policy process. Or coming up with a new metric to capture how people engaged in services, rather than just what services did for people.

Family Thriving

PROTOTYPE

We’re currently working in, with and for the Australian Centre for Social Innovation in Adelaide, South Australia. Our focus is families.

We’ve partnered with families, state government, NGO’s and the City of Marion – to identify what it means for families to thrive and to build a platform for family thriving.

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LOOPS

PROTOTYPE

We worked with Participle, two local authorities and a foundation to prototype a new model for universal youth services; one that could improve youth outcomes, not just reduce youth risk behavior. The model, called Loops, came out of 9-months of on-the-ground work with young people, families, community members, and practitioners. Loops brings young people and adults together for shared and surprising in-community experiences. Loops is currently being scaled by Participle.

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Get-Together

PROTOTYPE

With Partciple and Westminster City Council we worked to address social isolation and developed a service to build social networks for older people who are housebound.

In a 9-month project, we developed a prototype that connected like-minded older people in ‘phone groups’, 1:1 and through local transport. Participle are currently getting partners on board to finance and launch Get-Together across London in 2010,  later scaling to the UK.

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Activmobs

PROTOTYPE

One in four Britons has a chronic disease. Activmobs was developed from a project with Kent County Council and local residents to find new ways to increase physical activity and in doing so reduce chronic disease.

Activmobs harnesses social networks, bringing together groups of friends to do and sustain activities with the support of a motivational personal trainer. Activities can be anything; the prototype ‘Wellimob’ turned dog walking into something that would get friends fit whilst in ‘Backmob’ a group of friends, all with back and joint problems, took part in custom exercise sessions in the local community centre.

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