“Green Camden” – Co-Designing Shared Assets & Public and Collaborative Services to Reduce Carbon Emissions for Sustainable Futures
BACKGROUND
In the complexity of contemporary society, social innovation is spreading and its potential, as a driver of
sustainable change, is increasing. To facilitate this process, the design community, in general, and design schools, in particular, can play a pivotal role. Ezio Manzini, DESIS International
Social Innovation
“Social innovation is a new idea that works in meeting social goals” (Mulgan, 2006). In other words, social innovation can be seen as a process of change emerging from the creative re-combination of existing assets (social capital, historical heritage traditional craftsmanship, accessible advanced technology) and aiming at achieving socially recognized goals in new ways. A kind of innovation driven by social demands rather than by the market and/or scientific and technological possibilities (i.e. because the innovation is socially desirable not solely because the innovation is possible. Typically, this social innovation is generated more by the actors involved than by specialist. For product designers this may require a re-emphasis of focus. Systems as well as objects need to be addressed in the design process, and can be part of its delivery i.e. “Systems thinking is an essential part of schooling for sustainability. A systems approach helps … people understand the complexity of the world around them and encourages them to think in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context”
Emerging Sustainable Ways of Living
Over the past decade social innovation has spread: a variety of social actors throughout the world (institutions, enterprises, non-profit organizations and, most of all, networks of collaborative people) have moved outside mainstream models of thinking and in so doing, are generating a variety of promising initiatives such as community-supported agriculture, co-housing, car-pooling, community gardens, neighborhood care, talent
exchange and time banks. See case studies discussed in the book “What’s Mine is Yours”. Also see the DESIS website http://www.desis-network.org/ and/ or those case studies included in the Socially Responsive Design, special edition of Co Design (2011) Journal edited by Lorraine Gamman and Adam Thorpe, These initiatives propose viable solutions to complex problems of the present (e.g. social cohesion,
urban regeneration, healthy food accessibility, water and sustainable energy management). Some of your projects may end up encouraging use of shared assets or promoting collaborations that figure out new ways to create products, services, environments, and experiences that promote the idea of, or are at least conducive to, sharing. There are many examples of such approaches that have already been generated by design. For example, commercial service design solutions such as Street Car – now merged with Zip car (http://www.zipcar.com/), and Zimride (http://public.zimride.com/) which aim to get more people to share cars
to help reduce carbon emissions has been successful. Or there are those architectural projects, listed by RIBA who are concerned with longevity, and deliver buildings that can
have a longer lifespan so that they can better withstand chronic use. Some services, like neighbourgoods, (http://www.neighborgoods.net/), take advantage of technology to enable people to efficiently and effectively share tangible products, spaces and services in real-time in the communities where they are. These are the sort of examples of social innovation we have in mind.
Sharing by many people of the same product, space or environment means a long-term effect of less production and therefore less waste. In addition, sharing is more cost effective than buying something for one use or occasion. Many people in urban areas find sharing increasingly attractive where neighbors are plentiful and storage space is scarce. Maybe such ideas can inform your project for Camden, you will need to consult to know if your ideas are viable for the communities you work with. Certainly, many design agencies are now engaged in delivering these sorts of design services from IDEO to Participle, from Think Public to Engine, from the Helen Hamlyn Centre to Socially Responsive Design and Innovation Hub and Design Against Crime Research Centre, from the Design Council to Livework, designers are co designing their ideas with the community and leading and generating design led social responses. These projects appear as part of a paradigm shift in terms of socially responsive design. They provide new tangible models of design that product designers can engage with, services that enable new more sustainable ways of living including collaborative consumption.
Design for Social Innovation
Today, social innovation is generating a constellation of small initiatives, some design led, all trying to make the world a better more sustainable place. If favorable conditions are created, these small, local social inventions and their working prototypes can spread. They can be scaled-up, consolidated, replicated and integrated with larger programmes to generate large-scale sustainable changes. To do that, new design competencies are needed, and this is where you come in. Indeed, social innovation processes require visions, strategies and co-design tools and approaches to move from ideas to mature solutions and viable programmes. These new design capabilities, as a whole, can be defined as design for social innovation.
Public and Collaborative Services
An interesting phenomenon is emerging worldwide: more and more people are choosing to behave actively and collaboratively (see bibliography). These new attitudes are driven by several social and economic factors and often leverage access to new technologies to enable a higher level of connectivity. In this new context, people are enabled to establish direct links between interested peers. This connectivity opens new opportunities for meaningful activism and effective collaborations.
Given this new social and technological environment, and given the growth of problems people are facing in their everyday lives, new solutions are being invented and enhanced. Within these solutions those who have traditionally been individual end-users tend to become collaborative co-producers of the services and organisations that facilitate their everyday lives, as people who traditionally had been considered as “parts of the problem” become agents of the solution. In these scenarios the services that these social innovations generate, are “co-designed” and co-delivered with the involvement of the final users: their knowledge and creativity, in conceiving them, and their time, energy and expertise, in delivering them. This project will require you to engage with such processes, that are already being used by DACRC/SRVDI team and will be taught to you not just in theory but through practice.
When they appear, these everyday life (or ‘bottom up’) social innovations are rather fragile and highly localized entities. To last in time (i.e. be sustainable) and spread to involve larger numbers of people and other geographic
locations their value must be recognized and supported. To do this a new generation of public services are needed.
Public services capable of supporting local, collaboratively produced and delivered innovations, to make them more effective and to promote their diffusion in other contexts.
The idea that, facing the current economic and social challenges, the public sector in general and public services in particular should be radically reshaped is widely diffused, the governments big society agenda is an example of this sort of thinking. However, what is less well defined and diffused are the strategies and means with which to do it.
This project will provide tools and techniques to deliver social innovation. It will seek local and collaborative strategies for reducing carbon emissions in the London Borough of Camden. It asks you, the designer, to work with Camden Council’s sustainability team and Camden residents to collaboratively design innovations and/or services that themselves are locally and collaboratively delivered to facilitate behaviors and ways of living that reduce carbon emissions and contribute to achievement of a new vision for a sustainable, low carbon Camden. And, in so doing, to explore what public services could become if, instead of offering final services to individual, passive end-users, they would be conceived as platforms to trigger, enable and support citizens’ active and collaborative behaviors.
THE CLIENT
The Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC) and its Socially Responsive Design and Innovation hub (SRvDI) are working with Camden Council and student groups to develop ideas with residents and community groups to co design sustainable change. Camden’s Green Camden campaign is already moving in the right direction, and our job is to use design to make such initiatives more effective. To make it clearer and easier for residents to take green action linked to social innovation. As part of its Green Camden programme the Council has created and delivered a number of engagement streams, a user friendly website, a green directory of local businesses, a green map of resources and services, face to face workshops and stalls, a free phone helpline and a Green Camden Zones programme, so there are already resources available for students to use.
The client team will include Adam Thorpe (project lead) and Professor Lorraine Gamman (SRvDI @ CSM) and Anna Ware, Ines Carvalho and Katy Mann (Green Camden),
This project asks you, the designer, to choose an issue that you can or could feel passionately about. Then to work with us (DACRC/SRVDI/Camden Council) as the client to approach the residents and community groups within a Green Camden Zone to co-design new ways to achieve carbon reduction through collective action to make such change easier and more effective.
Brief
The programme has 5 overarching aims:
• Reduce their carbon emissions
• Adapt to a changing climate
• Reduce, reuse and recycle perhaps linked to collaborative/shared assets
• Improve air quality
• Improve biodiversity.
The Council has identified 27 actions with 73 sub-actions that people can take to help to achieve these aims.
The Green Camden Zones programme encourages residents to engage with their neighbors to take these actions collectively. Each zone is focussing on at least one of the 27 actions (such as cycling or food growing), and is creating an action plan to achieve their goals. Your job is to think about what can you do, after consulting with residents, to help us and them make effective change happen, through co design.
Stage 1. Sustainable actions and promising cases: Green Week events and briefing on 8th February
The project will have been introduced to you by tutors on 30th January – when you will be asked to start reading from the bibliography. The first week of activities will occur during CSM’s “Green Week”, and you will be expected to attend a briefing with us on 8th February at 1.15 and then Jonathan Chapman’s lecture that has been organised for all students in the afternoon. During these early weeks of the project we will require students to familiarise themselves with Green Camden’s sustainable actions. Also to listen to a number of presentations from us and during Green Week that will introduce the ideas and approaches, processes and methods that have been proven to be effective in collaborative design of social innovations, to form a student group, chose a set of actions to engage with and then find and research precedent case studies of collaborative innovations that have been used to address these actions and/or their objectives. Students will then create a first research presentation that will communicate the meaningful case studies that groups have found, and thus begin to collate a ‘innovations pool’ comprising examples of innovations and services that the group feel have potential to facilitate effective collaborative achievement of Green Camden action objectives. These findings will be presented to class and project partners, as indicated below, when students will be required to identify the actions they wish to and/or action themes they wish to explore with Camden Green Zone residents and community groups.
Stage 2. Community engagement and collaborative research: 14th February, 21st February and 20th February (RSA brief launched)
Each student group will be matched with one of the Camden Green Zones. Students will work with the residents and community groups within the Green Zone to collaboratively explore the diverse demography of residents within the zones and their ‘assets’ and ‘needs’ in relation to sustainable objectives, Also, the actions already being taken by residents to address Green Camden and other community sustainability objectives and the potential for further collaborative achievement of the Green Camden actions and other community sustainability objectives. The groups will also identify the existing and potential barriers to achievement of the actions and objectives, and try and generate first concepts in responding to these challenges. Students will visualise their findings and feedback to the class, the Green Zone residents and other project partners.
NB Further concept work and development will occur during the Easter Vacation (15th March – 15h April). By 20 February, when entry forms will be available students may consider entering the RSA “Shared Assets” competition whose final deadline for submission is 27 March, 2012
Stage 3. Co-design of collaborative innovations and services: 17th April – 30th April – co-design/organise workshops 1st May – workshop day
Using the case studies they have collected, as well as initial design concepts that have been generated as a starting point for discussion students will deliver co-design workshops with Green Zone resident groups to explore ways that design may i) facilitate further achievement of existing actions and ii) catalyse and facilitate achievement of newly identified actions objectives and concepts. Students will visualise the results of these workshops and iteratively co-develop proposals (with residents) for innovations and services that Green Camden Zone residents and community groups consider to be viable and desirable strategies (innovations and services) for achievement of Green Camden actions via collaboration.
Stage 4. Public service facilitation and integration: 2nd May – 14th May and final hand in on 15th May with presentations Final proposals will be presented to Camden Council and project partners to explore how the Council might enable and support the residents’ active and collaborative proposals.
METHOD
Many design agencies use a model of the design process to help them struture their activities. We think our adaption of the Design Council’s Double Diamond model (http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/designprocess) can help you structure your thinking too. So we ask you to follow these stages:
Diagnose
The diagnose phase will deliver research to inform the appropriate set up and study area of the project. It will also scope the key challenges of the project. The diagnose phase will include the following tasks:
• Familiarisation and investigation of geographic and demographic study area(s) (Green Camden Zones) and high carbon and low carbon behaviors (Green Camden actions).
Discover
The students learn about the needs and aspirations of their Green Zone Residents by studying their background, interests and routines, and by charting their activities of daily living. This may involve documenting journeys or tasks undertaken by the residents.
• ‘Discovery mapping’ of the geographic study area(s):
• Journey/scenario mapping (activities of daily living)
• Stakeholder mapping
• Agenda/driver mapping
• Resource mapping
These insights are visualised and used to aid communication/understanding between diverse stakeholders and also to locate specific opportunities for design intervention or further, more detailed, exploration.
• User centred design research methods:
• Observation
• Shadowing
• Design probes/video diaries
Define
The define phase of research will review the findings of the discover phase activities to define the sustainable behaviors to be focused upon and design of the co-design workshops to follow. Students may also create
‘personas’ that define the diverse demography and characteristics of the residents they are working with and visualise their user centred research findings so that they can be shared with the group within the co-design workshop activities.
Develop
Student design teams, assisted by the SRvDI Hub team and BAPD tutors, will work with the resident groups to deliver workshops to co-design proposals for innovations and services that are appropriate and effective for promoting sustainable lifestyles among residents.
• Co-design workshop – date to be agreed with client
• Co-designed prototypes developed by student groups (Iteration 1)
Student researchers, facilitated by SRvDI Hub researchers and BAPD tutors, will develop outcomes of co-design workshops as agreed with residents.
• Feedback workshop 1
Developed proposals will be presented back to the residents for review and further collaborative development.
• Co-designed prototypes developed by student groups (Iteration 2)