Unfortunately, there is no real way (yet) for this to be measured.  However, what we can do is look at the different conditions that our participants have to deal with, and how, rather what, Buddy could mean in these terms.

We didn’t think Buddy would be appropriate for patients with schizophrenia, at least not for this co-design stage (a radio transmitting their moods to different people and computers may cause undue stress, and possibly add to their hallucinations).  The people in our trial suffer with – bi-polar disorder, depression and depersonalization.

Bi-polar disorder (or manic-depressive disorder) is a psychiatric diagnosis describing a category of mood disorders that are characterized by one or more episodes of elevated energy levels, cognition and mood, with or without one or more depressive episodes.  The elevated mood stages are called ‘mania’, and the two stages are commonly referred to as highs and lows.  There is also a possibility of psychotic symptoms in bi-polar, such as hallucinations and delusions.

Depression (major depressive disorder) is characterized by severe, highly persistent depression, and a loss of interest or pleasure in everyday activities, which is often manifested by lack of appetite, chronic fatigue, and disturbance to sleep.  The patient may contemplate suicide, and indeed an increased risk of actual suicide is present.  The person may also suffer loss of concentration, self worth/esteem and motor activity.

Depersonalization is a disassociative disorder in which the sufferer is persistently affected by feelings of derealization.  It is diagnostically characterized by recurrent feelings of being detached from ones mental processes or body.  The symptoms include a sense of automation, moving through life but not experiencing it, feeling as if one is in a movie or dream and/or feeling disconnected from ones body.  Patients could go through out of body experiences, detachment from themselves, the environment and can have difficulty relating to reality.  Sufferers are able to differentiate between reality and fantasy and do not have psychotic symptoms.

So how does this affect Buddy? Most obviously, it means that ratings by people with different disorders will mean different things.  For example, if someone with depression started rating their moods more and more positively, we would see this as a good thing.  Also, looking at the information Buddy provides in conjunction with daily events in peoples lives may help to identify mood ‘triggers’.  For example, a conversation with a certain person could lead to someone feeling loved, while another could leave you feeling terrible.  And knowing whats good, and bad, for you can be extremely useful.

For people with bi-polar disorder, however, we have to watch their moods very closely.  This is because it may be a good thing if there mood is slightly elevated, but it may also be a cause for concern, as this could be an indication that they are going into a manic episode.  For people with depression, elevated mood is a good sign.  In terms of negative changes in either condition, Buddy will be able to provide ‘talking points’.  For example, if a patients mood is elevated, and suddenly takes a negative turn, professionals can annotate the graph, make a phone call, basically start conversations with the person.    At least, this is what we are hoping for.

It turns out that Young Rewired State guys had come up with a slightly different solution to the same problem. They were also looking at the declining numbers of library visitors but had come up with an idea of aggregating all library catalogues around the country so people could see what was available more easily. They wanted to make the library catalogues a little more user friendly by making them more visually-led and accessible. Lots of libraries already have their catalogues available for searching online, but they are buried within the library and archives sections of a local authority website.

The ’social’ bit of the #YRS2010 concept was less about creating offline conversation about books and more about integrating social media into a central catalogue website. For example, they’d thought of plugging in a Twitter tag and Facebook notifications so that users of the social library could see what books their friends were reading. The thinking was that this would inspire more readers.

Here’s a quick peek at the wireframes the guys had created to demonstrate what the site would look like and the functions it could have.

I asked the team for suggestions on our ‘work in progress’ wireframes and here are their top ideas:

Use the Facebook Connects API

As soon as someone signs up to The Social Library they should get an option that allows them to invite friends to sign up through Facebook. This should also integrate any updates to their Social Library profile and push any news like the fact they’ve uploaded or borrowed new items through the Facebook news feed. The API could also be used for feeding profile information from Facebook into their Social Library profile which could help us suggest content they may like.

A simple rating system

Damon and Lawrence thought that rather than using a star rating system, there should be a more simple way of showing how you felt about the book you’d just read. This would take the form of a three-tiered emoticon system. i.e. I enjoyed it, I was pretty indifferent to it, I hated it.

Full-on swaps

They thought it would be a good idea to allow people to fully swap books, so if the lender wasn’t fussed about whether they got the book back they could just offer the borrower to keep it half way through the loan. Online this would simply allow the lender to permanently remove it from their virtual shelf and the borrower would have the option to add it to their own once they had read it.

Comment don’t review

Rather than asking people to review books or DVDs and computer games, we should just work with an existing site like Amazon that hosts reviews and draw these into The Social Library site. They couldn’t imagine that many people of their age would be bothered to review a book.

One idea they liked was that users would be asked to complete a simple sentence like, ‘I thought this book was….’ and then the user could choose if they wanted to write an extended review or just a one word descriptor. They suggested that these sentences should be used to create tags for the books so people could stumble upon the book based on popular descriptive words.

The importance of tags

Books should be tagged as much as possible to create different ways of searching for content to borrow.
At the moment we’re thinking there would be two main search functions on the Social Library website. One which allows the user to browse lender profiles by location and one which allows users to search for specific book titles by location. It makes sense that we should broaden the search possibilities to include genre, subject, publisher and author etc.

Active users come first

They suggested that perhaps the search results of people in a particular area should show results by the members who are closest but also by people who were most recently active on the site. Otherwise our users could find lenders who are no longer actively using The Social Library.

Incentives to lend

The general consensus was that kids (teenagers) would probably be less interested in lending books. Not only because they are unlikely to want to go through the process of meeting up with people (too time consuming) but also because they are unlikely to trust other people of their age with their stuff. There were also concerns over young people meeting ‘strangers’ off the internet. We talked about the possibility of users earning points for lending more books and that these points could qualify them for a prize or some kind of incentive like vouchers or gig tickets.

Premium membership services

It was recommended that if we offer a premium service for paying subscribers we should do it from the beginning, so as not to make non-paying users feel like they are missing out on anything further down the line. A premium service would be for people who wanted to pay for a pro membership so they could charge for lending books and maybe make some money out of The Social Library.

Great suggestions, no? I love the way the potential barriers to use and problems to solve suddenly become a new feature or bit of functionality on the site.

We want to keep the Young Rewired State team involved, so it’s great they have agreed to test out our beta site and tease out some of these new issues early. Good stuff.

We’ve been thinking for a while for a useful analogy for this new approach. We toyed with the idea that we’re putting the social in social care – which has a nice ring to it, but seems a bit advertising slogan-y.

Decentralising care is another term we could use to describe how Buddy works. Traditional models of care tend to be quite centralised, in the sense that care flows from a ‘commissioned’ central provider, to the individual care recipient. Centralising care, theoretically offers control, monitoring and basic standards, but too often it means ‘one size fits all’ solutions, organisational inefficiencies, and a system-centric, as opposed to user-centric approach. With Buddy, we’re curious to see how by bringing patients, professionals, peers, family and friends all together in a single, collaborative system, we can decentralise care, and change the nature of the relationships and human interactions which impact human health.

Decentralising care however doesn’t seem to adequately capture Buddy. Decentralising could be seen as the centre liberating itself of its responsibility. It also seems like something you do, rather than something you offer. It’s semantics, but I feel we’re looking for something which speaks more to the benefits of Buddy.

We’ve been thinking on this and are wondering aloud whether the notion of distributed computing makes for a useful analogy. A quick look through wikipedia later and Distributed Care seems like a fairly apt phrase to describe what we’re doing i.e.

1) Distributed computing is a network of computers, made up of individual nodes, but with a common goal. Distributed care is a network of people, made up of individuals, with a common goal to care for someone.

2) Distributed computing is a system where the problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by a single computer. Distributed care is a system where the macro needs and demands of an individual are divided by many people, and resolved by an individual.

3) The purpose of a distributed system is to co-ordinate the use of shared resources. The purpose of distributed care is the use of web technologies to co-ordinate the limited human resource available.

4) A distributed system is more reliable because there is no single point of failure. Distributed care – by facilitating networks of people around a user – means there is less reliance on either a centralised service, and / or on any one node.

5) Distributed computing is a more cost efficient way of obtaining the desired level of performance by using a cluster of several low-end computers to do what it would alternatively take one super-computer to do. Distributed care can be a cost effective way of delivering care, through the use of clustered, cheaper resource in the form of family, friends and Big Society.

It’s tentative still, but feels like there is something in it. If the NHS could move to a more distributed model of care, can we divide up tasks better? Coordinate resources better? Build in greater tolerance for failure? And provide this all, for much cheaper?

It seems like its worth exploring, but already questions come to mind. Each computer in a distributed model has only a limited, incomplete view of the system, so what does this mean – do tasks slip through the net? Who is ultimately responsible? What are the respective roles of the different players – are they all the same? How do the nodes interact with each other? Do they at all?

Hmmm. Questions, questions, questions, just when we thought we had some answers, answers, answers.

Although armed with a nice working paper prototype, we soon discovered that it wasn’t such a trivial task to take it to the next stage.

It was a combination of adjusting millimeters after seeing how the parts fit inside the acrylic box, and some creative fastenings to ensure our prototypes can last 3 weeks of usage between different users. One of our challenges was that the strips of lights on the circuit board lies slightly to far back from the front, therefore preventing an accurate reading of mood levels from other angles. This was in the end solved by clear rods which effectively act as a bulb for each led.

During this process, one end of our table transformed into a temporary workshop, and me into a temporary power tool terrorist (albeit one who wears floral dresses). It’s brought back fond memories of being a student and I’m certainly going to miss all the drilling and sawing when our tools retreat back into our store cupboard.

I’m supposed to blog about what it’s like for someone from the NHS (me) to work with a 3^rd sector social innovation studio (Sidekick).  I thought I’d start with the interesting – the work space, and then move into the more mundane things, like work ethic, planning, and two very different ways of doing things.

Nick invited me to come and work down at the studio for at least one day a week so that I could be a little more involved and in the loop with the progression on Buddy.  I had been to the studio before so I had a little bit of an idea of what to expect.

The CMHT in Streatham was my base line, exactly what you would expect from an NHS building.  Spread over 3 floors, very much a concrete block right next to Streatham High Road station.  All keypads and cameras, filled with lovely people.  The atmosphere at 380 is very professional, the people very friendly but the levels of stress and workload are always high.  So working at a design studio in what looks like a converted warehouse building in London Bridge (two stops from home) one day a week doesn’t seem too bad.

The Sidekick work space big and open, with a garden out the back.  It still has old wooden beams and brick sections, juxtaposed with the very modern 27’’ iMacs, MacBooks and various pieces of tech.  The space and the atmosphere are very creative (to be expected from a studio I guess).  There’s music playing, walls covered in post-it notes, a garden out back.  All conducive to the work done here, in the same way the CMHT setting is conducive to the work done there.

So these are the two worlds I move between now.  Breaching the membrane between the public sector and a 3^rd sector design firm allows me to see some of the differences between the two organizations and the way they work.  These differences are going to be the topic of my first couple of posts.

The first insight I gained was to do with something I noticed about the NHS since I first started working there.  There is a rigid structure and set of rules on how to deal with..well almost everything.  For example with new interventions – we go from an idea, to a pilot, to a clinical trial and ideally finally to a publication.  And this is a system that works – it meets the needs we present, and demonstrates the value and validity of the intervention or idea.

Working with Buddy is extremely different, as we were taking an idea for a product, and actually creating it.  Adil approached us with the idea last November and since then we have submitted a successful bid, gotten funding, and I can now see the working prototype sitting right in front of me – and we are about to give it to people.  The way we’ve moved through this is by using the AGILE project management style – sort of.  Sort of because there is no documentation and everyone talks to each other about it rather than producing lots of paperwork – there is a lot of interaction.  We’re not, however, using ‘sprints’, but we do work efficiently, in small teams and respond quickly to feedback.  Its…vague.  Which is something, coming from the NHS, I’m really not used to. But, it works, and I think I’m going to learn a lot (more) from working with the Sidekick team.

Co-design process

As of next week (provided there’s no last minute technical issues) we’re going to give our first set of Buddy device prototypes to four different service-user co-designers to use in their homes for three weeks. We’ve already visited these people at their homes in order to get to know them better and lightly inform the first iteration of the software, hardware and service design.

During the three week prototype we’re going to get each user to use three different interfaces (see the hardware section below to see one of them) for a week each. This means that the co-designers will get to experience different options, but none of them get to experience all the options.

We’re hoping that this leads to better conversation and reflection during the subsequent co-design workshops once the three weeks are up, as everyone is forced to compare and contrast their experiences, rather than picking a winner.

During this co-design period we’re going to go back to basics with the service users, and a range of professionals from SLaM, to revisit the Buddy concept, and re-design it from first principles. The thing that gets the design-process geek in me excited is that the people who’ll be helping us co-design this Buddy v2 solution will of course be much better informed about the possibilities that social technologies present them.

For us, this methodological innovation – what we’re calling ‘informed co-design’ – is as important as the technical innovation behind the Buddy concept.

A lot of co-design work that I’ve seen (and done) led by service design agencies and other groups working with design-led methods in the public sector is really just a very creative way of asking people what they want (which, admittedly, is quite a step forward from how most public sector services are designed.)

Regardless, co-design 1.0, or asking people what the want, still has serious limitations, the most important being that people can only tell you what they want from their own experience of what’s possible. And most people aren’t aware of the potential of internet technologies to do amazing things.

What we’re doing with the Buddy ‘informed co-design’ process is taking the best and most sensible bits of the co-design method (collaborative working, deep user involvement) and plugging it into some enforced eye-opening prior to asking people what they want. Hopefully its going to lead to some surprising results.

Hardware design

Our amazing I-do-everything intern Tracy has been hacking away at radios and creating various boxes to stick them in, whilst our equally amazing electronics genius Charles has been etching, soldering and fiddling with a range of technologies to create the mood monitoring components on the end of the radio.

As you can see from the photo above, we’ve very deliberately tried not to ‘design’ the hardware at this stage. Instead, we’ve tried to create a device that looks like a functional prototype (er, mainly because that’s what it is), and that our co-design team will feel they can really help to re-design. Having said that, I actually really love this lo-tech aesthetic. We’ll see. Developing a proper design language and a specific Buddy form factor (if it remains a radio after the co-design work) will be a big part of the next iteration.

During the prototype we’re going to explore four different mood monitoring concepts that will give us insight into different interactions and behaviours around the physical user interface. Essentially we’re exploring two questions – firstly, do users prefer a single scale of generic mood, or a three part scale of specific moods with words attached, and secondly, is it better for users to actively submit their mood (via a button) or should the UI be more ambient (and update automatically)?

This submit vs ambient update interfaces will create quite different user experiences, as the active submit interface means that the user is always returning to an interface set to zero, whereas the ambient submit interface means the user returns to the last mood reading they gave. This is the difference between asking ‘how do you feel now’ vs ‘how do feel now compared to last time you told me how you feel’. It will be interesting to see what the users think about this, and the health professionals.

Software design

Alongside the development of the Buddy radio hardware, Nathan, Matthew and Mat have been working away on the meat of the Buddy system – the software platform that collects and presents the data back to health professionals, and allows users and their various communities of carers to view, analyse, comment and share their mood data.

Our various patents (pending) around Buddy mainly relate to the software, so we can’t go into too much detail at this stage. We’re using a relatively loose agile development process to produce the software and hardware touchpoints, which means we’re already into a major redesign of the initial software iteration following feedback from the professionals in our co-design team.

(As an aside its really interesting, for a design process geek, to see agile principles rubbing up against our informed co-design methods, but that’s another blog post.)

For now, the design and art direction, much like the hardware aesthetics, have been driven by the functional requirements. The software is in early prototype stage, and that’s reflected in the user interface. Again, as with the hardware, developing an integrated design language and brand will be an important part of the next iteration, once we’ve worked through the co-design activity with the users and have a clearer view of the overall service design. Which leads us onto…

Service design

For now, we’re very much prototyping the service design through the co-design trial activity. In the future, Buddy users will assessed for suitability, be introduced to the service through their care coordinators, be signed up to the system, receive a device or input mechanism of some sorts, use it for a while and then eventually give it back. Which is sort of what is happening with our three week prototype.

However, there’s clearly a lot more detail and depth to add to the final service design, in terms of the overall user experience of joining, using and leaving the service, but also in terms of the ‘back of house’ system integration aspect of the service design. We’re coming round to the point of view that it is Buddy’s close integration with existing care pathways and professional care services that will make it most valuable, and we’ve got some good ideas about how to integrate it into existing clinical procedures that we want to explore with the service users and professionals.

Evaluation and outcomes

Beyond the design-led challenges of creating a good user experience across the hardware, software and wider service, there’s two issues that we’re thinking about, that we haven’t discussed here yet and that all this work is being done for – how will Buddy deliver a cheaper, better health service for people with long term conditions?

Firstly, what is the clinical value of Buddy to the service users? Will it make them better, quicker? Which conditions (e.g schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar disorders) will it work best for? How will use vary across these conditions? At this point, we don’t have answers to these questions, but of course that’s why we’re doing the prototype and co-design.

Secondly, what is the business case for Buddy in terms of financial savings for the NHS? This is a big question, and there are a range of assumptions and ideas we have at the moment that we will need much more than a three week co-design prototype to find answers to.

There are two obvious places to look for demonstrations of potential savings. If we can help people get better quicker, and stay better for longer we’ll be saving money, and if we can demonstrate that Buddy actually prevents people from using acute care services (i.e being admitted to hospital) we’ll be saving a lot of money. Demonstrating either of these is going to be difficult, and will take a long time.

However, these are challenges that can wait for the second iteration of all the touchpoints – for now, we’ve got a hectic prototyping/co-design process to manage over the next three weeks. We’ll keep you updated with how we get on, and we’d love to get your comments and questions below! What have we missed out? What should we be watching out for? Let us know…

They make remote controls completely unfathomable.

They design interfaces that are shocking.

They make ugly things. With even uglier product names like this LaserJet CM1312nfi.

The problem with tech companies is that they are well, tech companies. And we don’t want to be that. If Buddy was designed by a tech company then it would do so much more than it does currently. It would let the community of carers send digital messages back. But because they are sending messages back, there’d need to be a bigger screen which tells you where the message is from. It’d probably have some way of letting people talk to each other in person too. Maybe it’d incorporate a telephone. Which will need some buttons so you can phone out from it. In fact, it’d be better to have video, that’s easy enough nowadays. So let’s have an even bigger screen, with a camera, and we’ll need some buttons to make the camera work. And given we’ve got all these buttons, maybe we should add a keyboard. We could integrate that on an alpha numerical keypad. That will save buttons.

Now we’ve got all this tech, we’re going to need a better internet connection. So let’s put an ethernet port on there, so people can connect it to their wired connection. Actually, lots of people have a wifi connection nowadays, so we probably need a wifi card. Hmmm. This stuff is quite difficult to set up especially for people with health conditions. What we need is another button that people can press and that summons the IT man who lives next door. Job done. It could look something like this…

Buddy Radio Re-Imagined By Technology FanBoys

…or maybe we should just use a computer. Except you need to buy expensive kit, figure out how to turn it on, know what a desktop is, know what software is, know what these funny symbols around the keyboard mean, know how to get an internet connection….you get the picture.

For Buddy, we adopted the principle of just enough technology – which is a phrase someone said to me in conversation the other day that I loved and stole. See, we could incorporate audio and video into Buddy. We could let people message back. We could forget plug ‘n’ play and pay-as-you-go SIM cards and instead hook into the internet mainline.

But all of this seems to desperately miss the point. The solution isn’t tech. Or more tech. The solution to tackling social isolation is human contact. Genuine, real human contact. By incorporating all this tech, the threat is that we just create a digital conversation, which in some ways becomes even more isolating. And we make things more expensive, less accessible, and less good, all at the same time.

For us, the principle of just enough technology means a message is sent from the Buddy radio to someone in your care community, but then it is their responsibility to either phone back, or dare we suggest it, pop round. Not only is this easier to design, cheaper to buy, simpler to use, but it helps us keep us focused on our goal which is more human contact.

The reason why I balk at the idea of being a tech company is because tech companies see tech as the answer to all the problems. We love tech, but just enough technology please.

The word ‘trial’ is probably the wrong word too. We’re calling it ‘action prototyping’ (at least until we come up with another term). The point of the trial is not to see whether it has any impact but to gather feedback which you can only get by putting the invention in people’s hands, in the real world, and using that learning to help us develop a better design. The tendency, especially it seems in the NHS, is to take a concept and turn it into a pilot scheme, whereby everything is measured, controlled, and scientifically evaluated, before there’s even a chance for the innovation to breathe. At some point, we think we’ll need to do that Buddy, but the purpose of this action prototype is just more learning.

The other benefit is that we’ll recruit the service users we are working with into our co-design team, which will mean that when they come to feedback and help us re-design the system, they’re have lived with it for four weeks and will be in a much better place to provide useful insight. We think this is especially important in technology innovation, when so much of the use of a service is only found once it finds its way into the hands of real people, in real contexts.

All of which preamble brings us to these two mega geek-out electronic videos. Enjoy.

Buddy Production Version from Solexious on Vimeo.

Buddy Front Encoder PCB from Solexious on Vimeo.

John Humphrys (who didn't interview us this morning)

Adil was on The Today Programme this morning talking Peak State, making the point that we’re not ideologically against The State, but it may not be the most efficient way to deliver some public services. You can listen again here.

still looking good at 60

Have you read the BBC’s 15 web principles? They were written years ago and most of them still stand true. One principle always stayed with me:

Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

It’s a classic. And you hear it everywhere in the internet world. Start small. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Grow organically. Light many fires. It’s all good stuff. And I completely believed in it. Until we came up against the NHS.

Now I’m wondering whether we should be the opposite. I’m thinking being ’small isn’t good’. I’m getting the impression from the conversations that we’re having that ’scale is good’. That ‘big is best’. That if nothing else, ‘let just one flower bloom’. I’m struggling with it a little because all of these principles seem like an anathema to the culture of web, but it seems like it’s the culture of the NHS. Here’s why,

1) Money. Small bet normally means small budget. What we’ve found however is that making change happen in large public services isn’t easy. Buddy started out as an internet-connected bit of hardware, it then became a big bit of software design to make it useful to professionals, and now increasingly it’s a massive piece of service design, with huge implications for care pathways, commissioning, personal care plans, and so on and so on. All of this is very exciting and interesting, but it also means lots more to think about and lots more work. If this is a small bet, it feels like we’ve turned up at Vegas with a £1 in our pocket.

2) Staff engagement. Money is useful to pay to fix problems that get vexed. Money is actually more important to get people interested in the project. One issue we’ve found is that whilst our immediate champions at SLaM have been putting in the time well above the call of duty, the sheer smallness of the project is making it difficult to get everyone else’s attention, be it the nurses, social workers, and most of all the finance people. There is something about big projects, that get everyone all in a tizz. If there’s less scale, then the small operational things that these projects need, tend to slip.

3) Making the case for change. Ultimately, if we’re trying to do something innovative, we’re trying to change things significantly. If we’re trying to change things significantly, we’d better have a good argument and evidence base. If we need a good evidence base, we need, you guessed it, scale. Our approach in co-designing Buddy is to work really, really closely with small numbers of users and stakeholders, and try to get to the right solution as quickly as possible. This isn’t or has never been a clinical trial, but there always seems to be the pressure to come up with the big number that will persuade everyone else that the work we’re doing over here in this little corner of Lambeth is worth paying attention to.

4) The culture loves big. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the ideas of building big hospitals. Or big wonder drugs. Or big life-changing inventions. Whatever it is, but deep inside the NHS psyche is the love of big. After all, it’s a £120bn enterprise. Being concerned with the little things just doesn’t seem to be in the DNA of the organisation.

All of which brings me to the conclusion that if we want to get taken seriously, then we need to get pumped. We need bulging muscles. We need a neck the size of Mike Tyson’s. We need pecs of steel. In short, we need to get ripped like Stallone!

[and on that note, here are the best 5 montages ever committed to film.  They are amazing. Watch them all. Rocky V was rubbish, so we're not including that]

I found this awesome project from Kent County Council. I’m not sure if it’s strictly Big Society, but it’s about designing different types of public services, it’s about putting people at the heart of the system and it’s about saving the State money, all of which seems a pretty good definition of what the Big Society should be about. Plus, it’s something concrete that people have done and measured, which I felt was better than more pontificating.

Anyway, the premise is simple. Young people don’t get excited by public health messages or services. They just don’t. If your job is to get young people to eat less, drink less, get high less and copulate less, my advice would be to avoid payment by results. Young people are as adept at screening out health messages, as they are at texting really really quick. And I don’t remember many of my friends when I was a wee lad, attending smoking cessation workshops.

House turns service delivery on its head. It put people and what they want first. Over a number of weeks, the Council and its partners took over abandoned high street shops, kitted them out to look like er, houses, and then let the young people wander in, play on the dance machine, sit on the sofa, hang out with their friends, take part in music workshops, and if they want, and only if they want, strike up conversations with various folk from the PCT, listen in on talks about alcohol or drugs, and sign up for sexual health tests. Even as I write that, it sounds like there were creepy adults hanging around, but judging by the results, the project was a huge success. 1200 young people used sexual health services. 1700 listened to a talk on drugs and alcohol. And the vast majority said the space had affected a positive change in their lifestyle. All for a lot less investment than a traditional radio advertising campaign.

Bringing this back to the Big Society, there seem to be a few lessons here:

1) House worked because it was ‘their’ space. The young people felt ownership of it. There were no uniforms. No local NHS or Kent County Council signage. No rubbish posters. It was a neutral space. This sense of ownership feels really important if we are going to devolve responsibility to communities. Whether it be a school, a care home, a leisure space, if we want people to embrace services in different ways, it needs to feel like it’s theirs.

2) House was designed with young people. Not for young people. Or by young people. An ad agency was involved. Various service professionals were involved. And so were the user groups. The insight came from young people, but the idea came from outside traditional sources. But then it was developed further with young people again. This principle of co-design seems fairly important, whether we’re designing public health services, or young offending services.

3) House avoided the temptation of being a one-stop-shop or a hub for health services. In fact, the services were incidental to the thing that people wanted – which was a space for them and their friends. I think this is crucial. Most people don’t spend their times thinking about public services, nevermind wanting to re-design them, co-create them, co-produce them or co-whatever this month’s buzzword is. They want to do simple things. Like be with their friends. When it comes to designing the Big Society, I think it’s worth remembering this common sense principle. Or, you could call it a selfish gene. Services should fit around our lives, rather than we have to fit them around ours.

4) House if nothing else, was positive. So much of service delivery is so serious (and maybe i’m being a bit flippant here), but House just feels like a good thing to do. I bet it was seen as enormously risky at the time. And I’ve read the evaluation and there were things that could have worked better. But the fact remains, it reached a hard to reach audience, it got real impacts in terms of public health awareness, and it did it at a fraction of the cost of traditional outreach. And that’s because it is clever. It is simple. And it’s good. In the wholesome sense. And I reckon if you do things that are well, good, then people respond in good ways.

5) A dance machine. Everyone loves dance machines. The Big Society needs more dance machines.

If you want to find out more about this amazing project, contact the public health team at Kent County Council.

We want to investigate the relationship artists and art professionals currently have with the Axis site and any other resources they use to run their arts practice.  Through this work we hope to identify some gaps and opportunities for Axis to fulfill, which will give them an edge over other organizations or simply add value to their current offering.

We don’t have a huge budget, so doing home visits and really immersing ourselves in the worlds of these artists isn’t a possibility.  So Nick and I put our heads together and came up with the next best thing – auto-ethnographic journals!  We’ve designed work books, which feel a bit like the kind of thing you might have been given as a child to keep you amused during the summer holidays.  Lots of colouring in and opportunities for drawing and using stickers.  Each day over the course of a week our particpants will be set a different practical challenge to share an aspect of their professional lives.

We’ve split the week into a number of different sections: Career (achievements & goals), Work (successes & challenges), Time (tasks & priorities), Networks (people & places), Resources (online & real world), Visions of Success (which involves writing their dream obituary) and a reflection of the week’s activity and how productive it has been.

But the best bit of all is the sexy stationary kit we’ve put together to help our participants complete their work books and keep it visual.  We’re not sure if it’s just us and our slightly unhealthy love of stationary, but we’d be really happy to get this in the post!

The bit that really stuck for me is:

“Money fuels the engine of social good… philanthropy isn’t going to save the world alone…create businesses that help society but pay for themselves while they’re doing it.”

For The Social Library, building in a business model is pretty difficult because there’s not an obvious way to make money from it.  Particularly because I believe the service should be free for the user – not only to encourage more people to get involved but also to make it accessible to the most amount of people.  It’s all about being inclusive isn’t it?  Particularly when you’re applying for grant funding.

In theory once The Social Library website and service has been designed, built and put up on the internet, that’s it.  It will then be open and free to the user.  Any local community that decides to use it, can.  But then we have to think about launching the service and how to promote it.  Someone once told me you should always put 40% of your total budget to one side to spend on marketing materials, PR and advertising.  In this case, I’m not sure if this will be possible.  But it’s not the end of the world, things can be done on a shoe string, in fact I’m a believer that the best creativity often comes from being forced to be imaginative with a small budget.  But The Social Library still needs to build the database of books and users quickly to make the service really useful.

There’s other ongoing costs that need to be thought about too, not least my own project management time.  There’s also the ongoing web management and development costs,  as people use the site and give us feedback we’ll learn what is and isn’t working and we’ll have to fix these bits as we go.  We will need staff to moderate the website and any community outreach work and ongoing marketing costs need to be fronted too.  Without a fee for the users, the BIG question is who ‘will’ pay for it?

One of the most useful things I’ve done whilst trying to work out how to make The Social Library self-sustaining is look at how other, similar initiatives make money.  I’ve been thinking hard about how I can use some of these revenue streams to suit our needs and values.

Here’s a few…

Share Some Sugar

A US based project which is still in a beta phase, the service enables users to find people in their neighbourhoods to borrow anything from an axe to a cup of sugar.  It’s currently free to join and list items, the only costs are the rental fees and these prices are set by the lenders.  But if you read the T&Cs, it looks like post-beta there will be charges attached to almost everything.  Undoubtedly a good way to make a profit, but it could end up being costly for users and potentially off-putting for people with less money (who are the most likely to benefit from not needing to buy more stuff!).

Ecomodo

A newly launched UK based neighbourhood lending service which seems to have thought of everything (including insurance)!  Lenders earn money through rental fees but can also opt to donate the rental fee to charity if they’re feeling really philanthropic.  Ecomodo manage holding deposits but don’t gain interest on these funds while they’re holding them, which feels like a nice bit of transparency and makes me like them more.

It’s a really simple to use website, the only downside is that it seems like there are a lot of costs directed back to the users.  Again potentially off-putting.

Neighborhoods

Another US based lending initiative, who seem to be slightly more ‘just in it for the love of it’.  They are seeking donations from the community that use the site and sponsorship, though they don’t to appear to have any yet.  It’s not clear if they make anything from the verification tool they say they’ve created to give their community ‘peace of mind’ as this just seems to use PayPal’s existing verification system.  It seems a shame that PayPal are probably making more money out of the service than the site owners.

City Socialising

This is geared towards helping people in cities around the UK find other people who they may have things in common with.  This is a hard and fast subscription model.  Users pay a monthly fee to send messages to other community members, join interest groups and create events.  There is a tiered fee so you get access to more features the more you pay each month.

Users can accumulated ‘points’ which give them access to more community features for free simply by being a more active on the site, rating gatherings, uploading photos and inviting other people to join etc.  This seems like a good incentive to get people using the site.

The Big Lunch

These guys are reliant on winning large amounts of grant funding and corporate sponsorship for running The Big Lunch as a national campaign,  supporting communities so they can do it for themselves.  They also benefit from donations of time and services in kind from other supporters and partners.  The tricky bit with using funding as the main revenue stream is that they have to prove the ongoing demand for their initiative and demonstrate the positive social impact of their activities.

It’s still early days for all of these examples, so its hard to say if any of them can exist long term using these revenue streams.  I like them all immensely, so fingers crossed it’ll work out!

Although it’s a bit short-sighted I like the way Neighborgoods first priority appears to be providing a useful service and that making money, is almost an after thought.  It’s risky but if they can keep a genuine voice on the site, build a loyal following and stay transparent, it could work.  There’s something really sweet and democratic about the community donating to fund a platform they like and use.  This really pushes ownership back out to the users.  The trade off for this kind of arrangement I imagine is that users feel like they ought to have power to influence the service, as they are effectively paying for it.  This isn’t necessarily bad but it can be difficult to manage.

My favourite set-up is Ecomodo, simply for the level of thought that’s gone into catering for different customer segments.  It works for those who want to earn some money, those that want to do something for charity and those who simply want to do a favour for someone who lives near them.  I think they’re doing a good job at trying to be all things, to all people, but I do wonder if the majority of users will just get involved to earn extra cash.  For me, the danger in this is that it will limit the opportunities for people to borrow items for free and I think there’s a huge social value in giving people who really need it access to more ’stuff’ for free.

I went to a chat about Big Society last week. There was just that, a lot of chat. There’s something about the term that gets people all in a froth, with a bit of intellectualising here, and a bit of pontificating there. Trying to decode it is all very seductive, I know I do it myself. But more and more, I feel we’re asking the wrong question when we wonder ‘what does it mean?’

For me, there’s a broad vision of less centralised State control, and more decentralised people power. Most of us can agree with that. Of course, the devil is in the [policy) detail. Which means the better question for me is 'How are we going to get there?'

Which in turn brings me to think we could do worse than learn from the example of Apple's business turnaround in the late 1990s.

I went to a talk at Apple HQ recently, and what struck me was for all the i-media i-frenzy i-pad i-everything, it's easy to forget that Apple Corp wasn't doing so well at the end of the last century. From 1995 to 1998, revenue had fallen from $11billion to $5.9billion - almost half the turnover in 3 short years. There was a lot of dead wood. Flab. Failures. All the rest of it.

They seemed to have a two part strategy. As this video shows part one was Steve Job's elegant policy of 'cutting out the crappy stuff'.

Focus on the stuff you're good at, and forget the rest. Clearly, there's a truth in the power of being single-minded.

What's probably more interesting is that they chose precisely this time to invest in R&D. in 2000, there was a 32% drop in revenue, but a 13% increase in innovation. Similar increases - which I failed to scribble down - were put into innovation the years before and the years after that. It must have been carnage inside Apple at that time, but what followed was a period of reflection in terms of what they were best equipped to do differently and better, and those decisions were matched with investment.

Much of the innovation that followed flowed into new products like the new iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes etc etc - and now we see a company that has recently been valued at more than Microsoft.  A remarkable turnaround.

To get back to Britain, cuts seem to be the order of the day. I have no expertise in saying whether they go too far, or not far enough. Whether we'll end up cutting the crappy stuff, or the good stuff we thought was crappy stuff. Change is happening, and we've got to make change work in our favour. If we do want new solutions to emerge, I'd say backing innovation is the key way to get there.

It won't pay dividends today, tomorrow or even next year. But it will the year after that, and the year after that, and the decade after that. This is based on the example of real organisations around the world. Hell, it was what powered Britain through the industrial age into the modern era. Innovation now will accelerate the positive changes tomorrow. That means supporting the social enterprise sector. It means investing in new ways of doing things. It means experimenting and it means accepting the cost of failure. It means backing transformative ideas in a substantial way.

If we want to come out of this period stronger and better, then yes, let's cut the crappy stuff, but let's get behind the awesome stuff too.

[couple of disclosures. I do run a social innovation company, so i would say all of the above. And i do have a Macbook but i'm not an Apple fanboy. Honest.]

Thanks to Jenny for the video.