The power of the people is the motive for green change

Twelve bored strangers sit in an airless room, their hearts racing on cheap coffee, and their only motivation a second chocolate Hobnob and the promise of a small cheque. It’s hardly the stuff of dreams. But for too long it’s been the source of inspiration, if such it can be called, for public sector research into sustainability challenges.

The days of focus groups and forms may be over, however. Pioneering councils are increasingly keen to know what we, the residents, actually do with the services they offer – and how they can be shaped to fit our lives, rather than the other way round. So they’re abandoning the comfort of familiar conference rooms, with locals cajoled into squeezing their lives into a tick-box or two. In the new model, they’re asking to be invited into our homes – to peer over our shoulder as we study the smart meter, and keep a respectful pace behind as we head for the bus. No more ‘one size fits all’. Armed with evidence of what we do on a daily basis – as opposed to what we might say we do if asked – they can brainstorm new prototypes to fit our lifestyles. It’s a nimble process, which has more in common with the commercial innovation world than public service delivery.

Social anthropology may not be innate to council workers, so Forum for the Future’s innovators have brought together a specialist team, the i-team, with international design consultancy IDEO, to train them up. Local authorities can also draw on the i-team’s expertise in both sustainable development and market-leading design practice to develop solutions that are both radical and practical.

In its first phase, the i-team worked with the councils of Kirklees, St Helens and Suffolk – each of them tasked with making it easier for local communities to manage carbon. St Helens worked with local Brownie groups to come up with a web game that encourages young people to find low-energy alternatives by linking their actions in real life to a parallel universe. Kirklees transformed a community centre into a zero-carbon showcase, and Suffolk came up with an elegant incentive scheme to reduce mileage in business travel.  

VOX POP
EZIO MANZINI Director, Emude and Professor of Sustainable Design, Politecnico di Milano

““In the last decades we have been witnessing a growing wave of social innovation. A multiplicity of institutions, enterprises, non-profit organisations, but also and most of all, individual citizens and their associations have been able to move outside the mainstream models of living and producing to invent new and sustainable ones.”

Bringing business into the mix

Now in phase two, the Forum and IDEO have stepped up the ambition of their project with a call for big business to join the action. The plan is to apply the resources and expertise of leaders in sectors like food and the built environment to help address problems in public services and roll out the solutions.

As Andrea Koerselman, Service Design Director IDEO, sees it, the scale of climate change is such that no organisation can find the answers alone. “By inviting business into the mix,” she says, “we increase the levers we can pull.”

Forum for the Future has a history of challenging its partners using people-centred research. Working with BP on its controversial and ambitious offset scheme, targetneutral, it advised the company’s leaders to raise carbon awareness among customers, rather than approaching converted ‘greenies’.

For Chris Sherwin, Head of Innovation at the Forum, targetneutral was “exciting because we pushed the company to talk to stakeholders who had no loyalty to BP. Extensive interviews and observations of customers told us that many people wanted to do something about carbon but were unclear how to go about it.”

“We’ll increasingly be looking at a process of co-design – working with a wide range of people, including both front-line staff and consumers, to deliver public services that respond to actual needs”

Back in the public sector, the use of people-centred research is spreading. The Design Council has cottoned on to its potential, too, adopting the technique for its ‘Public Services by Design’ programme. Marianne Guldbrandsen, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council, thinks it will be the start of something big: “We’ll increasingly be looking at a process of co-design – working with a wide range of people, including both front-line staff and consumers, to deliver public services that respond to actual needs”.

As we contemplate the imminent demise of the coffee urn, it’s comforting to know the power really could be with the people, after all.

17 December 2009

Alex Johnson