one - Introduction: design as a vehicle for exploration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2022
Summary
To see that a situation requires inquiry is the first step in inquiry. (John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, p 111)
Carolyn Curtis is a public manager in Adelaide, South Australia. She has been seconded for nearly eight months to a project on how to redesign services for ‘chaotic families’. These are families that are typically characterised by high levels of alcohol abuse, violence, unemployment and dysfunction. For the past eight months Carolyn has no longer acted formally as a manager, but has participated with a small team consisting of a designer and a sociologist in exploring how such families live their lives, with the aim of finding new opportunities for helping them to become ‘thriving families’. Carolyn says:
“I was trained as a social worker to assess and categorise various social events. Throughout this project I have needed to undo all that. And that is difficult. I have been given the space, time and resources to really reflect on what we have been doing in our agency. We have handled these problematic families as a pre-designed ‘programme’, with fixed criteria and no end-user involvement.”
Carolyn describes the new families project as a ‘resourcing model’, which is radically different from how she has worked during her 10-year career as a manager. She says that by taking an end-user (family) perspective she has been able to critically reflect on the results of her agency's work:
“It is bottom-up, it has end-user focus, and there is no fixed structure, criteria or categories. The work has been extremely intensive. We have focused on motivation and on strengths within the families – identifying the ‘positive deviances’ where some families are actually thriving, even though they shouldn't be, according to the government's expectations. We have focused on finding entry points and opportunities, rather than just trying to mediate risk. It is a co-design, or co-creation approach, and it has been entirely new to me. We are ourselves experiencing the actual interactions within and amongst the families, and breaking them down to examine in detail how they might look different. It is very concrete, capturing what words they use (…) It all looks, feels and sounds different than what I did before.
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- Leading Public DesignDiscovering Human-Centred Governance, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2017
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