Communitydialogue

Highfields Patch Walk, 6 Aug 08

Naim Razak took Delia and I around the delightful Highfields area of Leicester; some areas are reminiscent of London's Hampstead and the wealth that used to be in this quarter of the city.

We visited a number of small, succesful and well-run neighbourhood centres, all catering for a well-defined segment of the community. I couldn't better Delia's notes on this, so here they are...

"Community spirit - it amazed me how there was a different community project around every corner! Rarely have I seen a community with so much going on in such a small geographical space. I was also struck by how keen everyone was to invite us in and show us round the various centres. I think this enthusiasm may have been for a number of different reasons. Firstly, because Naim is obviously well respected and trusted in the area. Secondly, because the high density of projects leads to competition for funding and recognition and most importantly because of the pride that people have for their community's achievements.

"The wide rage of innovative projects also stood out for me. Such as, the solar panels used to power a centre and raise money, and the sewing workshop that reflected the area's hosiery heritage.

"Politics - It seemed a shame that a community that is so united in many ways is also divided by politics, (local, religious and council.) Although many of the places we visited seemed to have an inclusive approach and would welcome most members of the community, they were very clearly aimed at specific groups and their seemed to be little communication between them.

"The park - It seemed a waste that the park in the heart of highfields was not being utilised by the community.

"Hostels - It was interesting that Naim described Highfields as getting bail hostels etc "dumped" on it. There did seem to be a high density of these in the area.

"Architecture - There were some beautiful buildings and you could certainly see why people would want to live in the area as although it is practically in the city centre, it didn't feel like a city centre. It reminded me of Hyde Park where I live in Leeds (but with fewer students!)

"Diversity - I think the primary school where the children speak more than 50 languages is a perfect example of what a diverse community Highfields is. It did strike me that most of the projects were aimed at a specific ethnic or religious group rather than Highfields as a whole. The positive effect of that seemed to be that the services and activities offered are designed by people who clearly understand the needs and wants of the people who use them and therefore they are popular and well attended. However, part of me wonders if there are sections of the community who have been overlooked or felt excluded by this?"

Tues 12th August 2008 project update meeting

The Derby team at their weekly design meeting.

Saffron patch walk - extra

This is a photo of Tick Tock park as it is locally known, the whole estate was built around the design of a green lung in the centre of the estate, which is shown on aerial maps of the estate.   

This is photo of the railway bridge that connects the local secondary schools and the estate.  Although many people find graffiti offensive here it is hidden from public view unless you go under the bridge itself.    

This is the famous Porkpie library that is registered as grade two listed building and is conected to the porkpie island that learner drivers have for generations feared because of the amount of traffic that uses the roundabout.

Saffron patch walk, 23 July 08

Saffron is a tight little community hemmed in on one side by the train tracks to London and a main road on the other. A real mix of owner-occupied and council properties, overseen by a fair few CCTV cameras.

We walked the patch with Karen Pickering; from the vibrant Linwood centre through Tick Tock Park, past the railway line, through the school fields left totally unmanaged and back through quiet streets to the centre.  Along the way we met one of the local police officers on his bike; if it wasn't for his uniform and technology it would have seemed almost a scene from the 60's.

Modern health issues, however - high rates of drinking, smoking and teen pregnancy, cardiovascular diseases and mental health issues - and just one general practice within the area.

The challenge, it would seem, is to help Karen maintain and develop the things she's doing within the community; to mainstream that activity and assist the community to get more engaged in the PCT's work.

Ethnography and interviewing

In the project work in Derby we've already started to discuss the relevance of ethnography as a way of complementing the understanding we get from other, more traditional, sources.

But how to do it?

This video was created by students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), a design school that has a great reputation for innovating in user research methods. It uses 'high quality jeans' as the area of inquiry, but it discusses what ethnography is and is not, it describes how to do the fieldwork and looks in detail at one-on-one interviewing skills. If you can get access, it's well worth the 30 mins.

Also available here

Meeting notes, 24th June 2008

Sinfin has 10% more under 15's than the rest of Derby but very little available to soak up their energy, not surprising then that under-age drinking and anti-social behaviour is creeping up the agenda of the Community Safety Partnership.

Our discussion started here, we felt we wanted something that had broad appeal, that might create the right kind of "social energy" and could raise Sinfin's profile. Ten years ago was the heyday of the Sinfin Carnival, it doesn't exist now but the people are around that helped organise it, it exists (fondly) in people's memories and it's big and audacious.

We also talked about ASDA's role in the area, the way they were held to be at least partly responsible for the way the precinct is starting to feel under-developed. We believe that many of the shops there are owned by ASDA and we'd like to explore using one of them as a local hub - a place where we can engage with the community over a longer period.

Talk of ASDA made some of us think about the importance of brand. We speculated on what Sinfin's brand might be - what do people think of when they think of Sinfin? After a while we realised that the area is known for the number of young families, born out by the numbers of kids in the area that we mentioned earlier. Young families - the issues they face, their joys and sadnesses, starting out, learning and changing - all of these things are great aspects of early life and parenting. If we needed a theme for a carnival, and one that fitted with Sinfin now, well maybe this was it!

Meeting notes, 17th June 2008

We focused almost exclusively on the Roma project centred on Normanton. My fault, and apologies if anyone felt left out.

The focus of this project is ‘getting closer to the Roma’, some members of the group had been to an awareness-building session run by Adem Repesa from Derby City Council. This made an impact and much was still fresh in people’s minds; we discussed some of the surprises and the learnings about which we still had questions.

For me there were several things that came out of this discussion…

• The attributes of the people who had managed to get close to the Roma
• How will we maintain and develop this knowledge & understanding?
• How can we involve the Roma in what we’re doing?

Attributes
We realised that some people were being successful in getting close and that this was no accident – there were things they were doing, or not doing, that seem to be working. We spent a few minutes listing those things; they were…
Non judgemental
Approachable
Accessible
Visible
Interested
Personal
Agenda-less
Adaptable
Sensitive to their needs
Reliable & consistent
Friendly & warm
For me it is self-evident that services for the Roma should be all these things too. I think everyone agreed that these are important service aims; the parallel was drawn to the original values of the NHS and we reflected on the negative, blanding consequences of “the focus on outcomes”.

For more on this see the article on service design at the Design Council website.

Knowledge management
How do we maintain and ‘make actionable’ this knowledge and understanding? We didn’t talk for long about this, we’ll return to it again in another session. But we did note the importance of this information persisting, being spread and being used.

Going further
We talked about the need to go further, to develop our understanding, and Surinder reminded us that we need to involve the Roma in this work as much as possible. So we talked about the structures available for inclusion – the PCT health panel and the LINk, which is now up and running – also we covered some research techniques available to us…
Giving people video cameras, still cameras, voice recorders or diaries
Focus groups, action groups, encounter groups
Accompanied tours, living with the families

I outlined a tool I use to help me plan research and ensure I’m not missing something: Johari’s window. We’ll cover this in more detail in the more formal, cross-PCT sessions to be run soon.

A couple of interesting tensions surfaced during the session...

1. A sense in which everything has become very outcome focused, which means that activities with no immediately clear outcomes are difficult to prioritise.
2. That some of the techniques may be too invasive, resulting in us getting inappropriately close to the customer.

This prompted discussion of the “principles” that underlie design thinking and I’ve started to list them out. They work, but they will create tension in an ethical, caring organisation, especially in one that is risk-averse.

I’m certain that we will return to this issue and we’ll be pushing for people to explore doing the unthinkable – first thinking about what have I not done before, thinking through what’s the worst that can happen, then just doing it and assessing the value.

Future meetings will be similar in format – a project clinic, in which we discuss ways to deal with the issues that will crop up. Typically they will be every Tuesday afternoon and attendance discretionary; I will try to balance the time between the two Derby projects and, in due course, the Leicester projects, too.

Attending the meeting…
Julia Templeton
Sajda Kausar
Cheryl Elliot
Kay Moule
Sue McCrea
Surinder Mehan
Marlene Upchurch
Michelle Kendrick
Val Divers
John Topham
Rachel Gibson

Design Principles

maybe principles is too grand a word? But these are some of the attitudes that allow the creative industries to be creative, and in a user-centred way...

Just do it!

Don't ask permission, ask forgiveness

What's the worst that can happen?

If it's not working, stop

Make it visible

Fail early, succeed sooner

People inspire

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots

Get out more

Ideas can come from anywhere

Design thinking

CIHM's response to the Community Dialogue project request was to structure a programme of work around something we called "design-led coproduction". By this we mean several things...

• coproduction is a design activity - you're trying to get a broad group of people focused on an issue and together you'll solve the problem
• design is what designers do - on the other hand, we have to recognise that we are all designers, we're all try to shape the world we live in, to make it better for ourselves and those we support
• you can't design in a vacuum - to solve a problem you have to know what the problem is, when it's a problem and to whom; more than that, problems exist in a context or a system - you solve a patient's problem and you may create a problem for a nurse, solve the nurse's problem and you may create one for another patient - to make lasting change happen in a complex system like the NHS, you have to do it with the people who'll have to live with the change
• sometimes it's hard to know what the real problem is - particularly when we don't share the problem, sometimes we need to 'walk a mile in their shoes' and then we get it, sometimes that makes us realise we're dealing with the wrong problem and then we have to be able to "flex" the project
• design is basically a simple set of techniques - here's my old boss at design firm IDEO talking about "design thinking", which is what designers do when you strip away colour, form and material...

Design thinking is at the root of what we'll explore in the Community Dialogue project. We're all designers; some of this will help us to start thinking as designers.

Derby Kick-off meeting summary

Thank you all who participated in this meeting, held on the 14th May in the Village Street Health Centre in Derby; this mail is to summarise what we discussed and decided.

Evaluation

We very quickly built up a long list of measures at various levels of generality. Nene Ankrah has the detailed notes and he will review them and come up with a set of recommended measures that we can agree and follow through.

The tone around the room was that we have the balance about right; we have included within our proposal a number of ways in which we will capture “stories” and qualitative information, it is our practice to value these, and we will complement them with a small number of “hard” or quantitative measures.

As a start to this Martin Wells video recorded the introductions and summaries of the meeting. These are available on YouTube (just in case you thought it was only for youngsters) and are available elsewhere on this blog.

Sinfin

John Topham and Gill Collinson described a situation that they acknowledge is typical and at the heart of this project: the proposal for the Sinfin ‘lifestyle service’ has been written and is heading into the commissioning process but contains little or no firsthand information from the people of Sinfin.

We reiterated the importance of this project to the Derby City PCT 10 year strategy and also acknowledged the needs for better engagement, the desire for this to be seen to be a ‘local initiative’ and also how any service could develop into a social enterprise.

The timing of the project is complex – the commissioning process is lengthy and needs to start; this project will operate in parallel to that as much as possible, informing the commissioners and service specification and working with whatever style of procurement that emerges.

The Organisational Development perspective was that this is a great way to explore what it takes for the PCT to get behind this type of project and to keep on doing that; to make the type of engagement we envisage ‘normal’.

Normanton

Although the core issue in this project is engagement with the Roma, this is taken to be indicative of the way in which the PCT needs to operate with each community or group with which it must relate and enter into dialogue. It is clear there are a lot of anxieties centred on this ethnic group, some of which are likely to be the result of a lack of understanding.

A new director of performance and knowledge management has been hired; it is important we work alongside this function so that the understandings we produce are usable within and beyond the PCT.

We reiterated the value of using this project to position the PCT as ‘health leaders’, and to work with other agencies similarly interested in community dialogue (for example, Lincs PCT have expressed interest). The organisational development work will raise the issue of how Derby City creates and maintains its relationships with other agencies, although in the time we have together we’re likely only to start this discussion.

Other issues

The first meeting of the steering group of this project has been arranged for 28th May.

The next meeting of the EM Development Group (of which this project is a part) is tentatively scheduled for the 2nd June, this is being arranged by the SHA’s office of the PCTs.

Gill raised governance issues for this project; Rachel Gibson will be responsible for submitting monthly reports to the Office of the PCTs, these will include the project burn rate and progress towards goals.