Thinkpublic: public service
and communication design

Congratulations are in order for Enabled by Design! For those that haven’t heard, they are a social startup that supports anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives through the use of assistive equipment, be it as a result of disability, injury or personal identified need. Their aim is to make independent living more accessible through the use of clever modern design.

Today they were chosen to work with the Innovation Exchange are part of their Next Practice programme on Independent Living. The programme gives them the opportunity to develop their work, taking them on to the next level. You can find out more about this announcement here.

We’ve been privileged to work with Denise and Dominic to identify ways they can grow their concept, engaging with a wider range of users and grow their community. We’re sure with the backing of the Innovation Exchange EbD will go from strength to strength.

In preparation for The Real Work Experience workshops later this month, last Thursday nine graduate and undergraduate designers took part in an engaging afternoon of workshop training!

Arriving at the thinkpublic studio from Bristol, Brighton, Bournemouth, Glasgow, London, Kent and Leeds our leading designers are each running workshops on Friday 21st November to explore what young designers need to enable them to use their skills for social causes.

After a fun ‘make a sound, pass it on’ icebreaker session, we asked the designers to draw a picture of their workshop (and then humorously offered the opportunity to analyse them). We then briefed the group through the stages of how to run their workshops and gave each of them informative toolkits to take away. Thanks to everyone who came along on Thursday, we hope you had as much fun as we did! There are plenty of photos of the training day here and we wish you all the best of luck for the 21st!

The “Design for Social Change” workshops will run simultaneously at the following institutions:

• Glasgow School of Art & Design [Jennifer Kay & Alice Tyler]
• Goldsmiths, University of London [Ernest Goh]
• Leeds College of Art and Design [Jen Ohlson]
• Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication [Megan Riera]
• The Arts Institute at Bournemouth [Rosie Isbell]
• University of the West of England, Bristol [Chris Clarke & Alex Ostrowski]
• University of Brighton [Adam Ellison]

If you are a young designer and would like to participate in any of the workshops, please email kate.andrews@therealworkexperience.com to book your place.

At thinkpublic we often develop prototypes to help visualise and test potential products or services with users. Its always interesting at the end of a project to look back and view the different versions next to each other and see how the designs, visuals and shapes have developed. I have noticed a couple of examples of this recently and thought I’d share them here.

As you can see by the prototypes in the picture, our ‘Clinic to Go’ project for the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement featured a number of product prototypes that were tested with users, tweaked and helped move the project from idea to fully working product in a short space of time. You can read the full case study here.

Other examples of interesting product developments:
Wired magazine have documented the history of Microsoft Windows

Creative review have also reported on the Nintendo DS and its numerous iterations this month.

I’ve started a Flickr! set to capture all of these, if you see any then make sure you add it to the group!

Netvibes is an RSS reader that houses all of your information feeds in one place. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, basically its a piece of web technology lets you know when something new happens on a website you read. To do this you need something called a reader, like Netvibes.

Once you have created an account you can personalise the page how you like and share it online. I have been using Netvibes for about a year now and have recently published some of my feeds on a public page: www.netvibes.com/paulthurston

Netvibes also allows for Facebook, Google Calender/Mail etc. to work within the application. If you are unfamiliar with RSS then this RSS in plain english video by commoncraft explains how it all works.

Back in July, I made the decision to invite my nan on a road trip around the UK, as you may have seen in a previous post. I cant believe that its nearly time to depart!

Thank you so much to everyone for their great recommendations of places for us to visit, we now have the first part of our itinery.

We will start on the 22nd November in Swindon, where my nan lives, where we are meeting to arrange food, packing and supplies. Due to the cold weather drawing in, my nan is knitting us matching red scarfs for the trip!

After meeting in Swindon, we will travel to the New Forest, our first place to visit. Lots of people recommended that we should include it on our trip. Once we are on the road, we’ll decide where next depending on other peoples ideas and where our thoughts take us!

There are only 4 days left to submit ideas to the next Social Innovation Camp. Social Innovation Camp is an organisation that runs unusual, participant-driven events aimed at bringing together software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social need: social innovators, entrepreneurs and those with direct experience of need themselves. The latter being something that thinkpublic is particularly supportive of.

thinkpublic has lots of connections with Social Innovation Camp. I attended their first weekend event back in April this year, participating in the team that won second prize, Prison Visits, looking at how you can improve the experience for people visiting loved ones in prison. The opportunity to meet with new and interesting people with very different skills, and to experience working towards something as a new team, against a tight deadline, for something that has real social meaning made the experience one I’d recommend in and of itself.

Since then, thinkpublic have also been working with the winners of the last camp, Enabled By Design who aim to make independent living more accessible through the use of clever modern design.

And most exciting of all, they have asked our very own Deborah Szebeko to be a judge at the weekend in December representing social innovation expertise on the panel.

SI Camp’s ‘call for ideas’ closes on 7th November. They’re looking for ideas that use technology to address real social challenges. Only 4 days to go – submit your idea here. It is a great opportunity to get your socially driven ideas off the ground, drawing on expertise that you may not usually have available to you, and done at a pace that things in the ‘ real’ world rarely happen!

The lovely people at We Are What We Do and 4,386 children (more or less) have just launched their 3rd book, Teach Your Granny to Text & Other Ways to Change the World. It’s packed with 30 actions that anyone can do to make a difference including: Action 20, Give lots of compliments. Action 22, Don’t charge your phone overnight and my favourite Action 18, Ask why?
I love that question, I ask it so much about lots of things. It’s a really simple question than can open up a whole conversation or debate. So ‘why’ not give it ago and ask some ‘why’ questions today?

Last night I was invited by  The Heart of the City to attend the Dragon Awards, which recognise business involvement within the Greater London Community. The whole experience of attending a black tie dinner at Mansion House was fascinating! I was first introduced to our hosts for the evening - the Lord Mayor and his wife - by a town crier, who called out everybody’s name out as you entered the room. This was followed by careful navigation of the largest table plan I have ever seen, having found my seat we remained standing for a few moments to observe the national anthem and then sat down for the awards and dinner.

thinkpubic were invited due to our current work within the community and the fact that this year we have started to develop our own CRS programme, to ensure our projects aim to involve local people and volunteers. Alice and Jodie have been doing an environmental audit of the thinkpublic studio and team, which will help us cut our carbon footprint. If you want to find out more about what thinkpublic are doing to be good, contact Jodie

Last Friday myself and Alice Osborne from the thinkpublic design team spoke at the London College of Communication (LCC) about our experiences of working outside of traditional design environments.

We were invited by Anna Gerber from LCC to speak to 150 second year design students from a variety of disciplines to ‘give them a flavour of what thinkpublic do without showing lots of pretty pictures’. A great brief as it gave us an opportunity to show ‘a week in the life of a designer at thinkpublic’.

We also ran a ’stand up sit down’ question activity, that got students to apply their minds to some questions we have been discussing recently, these were:

1: Should designers work in hospitals?
2: Can the general public be designers?
3: Would you prefer to work for public or private clients?

After calling on a few individuals and asking them to share their thoughts on their answers, a lively debate followed that generated some very interesting views. The biggest surprise outcome for us was that roughly 75% said they would prefer to work on private projects, comments included “I want to do good, public projects but want to work with private clients to pay for it” and “Working for the public is better because your aims and outcomes are for the benefit of everyone”.

It was exciting to hear the students approacing these questions with original views, I found the session really energising!

If your interested in someone from thinkpublic speaking at your university please email: paul.thurston@thinkpublic.com

Mydex is an innovative community interest company that helps you manage your personal data and share it with organisations in ways you feel comfortable with. thinkpublic have been working with the Mydex over the past few months, helping to design and brand their service offerings.
Last week we hosted a planning session with the mydex team, were also joined by Drummond Reed and John Bradley from Parity Inc. and Richard Adams, who gave their perspective on things. The feeling was of great excitement at the upcoming service pilot and we were on hand to lend our user-centered approach and insights to the pilot.

If you are interested in joining the pilot, and helping to shape this new platform, please register your interest here: www.mydex.org