The RSA Whole Person Recovery, Co-Design Learning Journeys, June / July 2013 – Some reflections…

As Lead Recovery Community Organiser within the WPR programme, one of my responsibilities is to ensure there is a quick and responsive capacity on the part of my team, to meet the emergent requirements of the community of c.600 service users within the west Kent region that we work in.  Earlier this summer in June, I had a seemingly random conversation with one of my colleagues from our principle partner organisation CRI - www.cri.org.uk about the prospect of somehow transforming the rather standard and corporate ‘social care facility’ non-aesthetic (that is a space designed and decorated, without any real design-sensibility informing the look, feel and function of the space) at the Tonbridge hub.

I jumped at this opportunity as I immediately saw it as a chance for us to work in a genuinely co-designed / co-produced approach with the service users in the programme. I was quickly able to speak with other colleagues within the Hub, specifically the key workers who are the principle formal point of contact between service users and the WPR programme. From these informal conversations, a meeting was scheduled to explore with service users that had expressed interest in what such a project might look like in terms of the process, timeframe and the outcome(s). The meeting was very dynamic, lively and really good fun. Many of the service users at the meeting commented on how exciting and positive it was to actually feel they were involved in shaping the direction of a real project that would have concrete outcomes and reflect their ideas and concerns. We explored quite a lot of possibilities as to how the design / build project could progress. Some of the ideas were pretty crazy, some of them were rather tame, but a lot of them were really creative and achievable – given the real constraints in terms of money (low thousands) and time (just three months) to get from first meeting to post-snagging of designed, built and installed solution…Heady stuff!

The agreed outcomes of this kick-off scoping meeting were to recruit a team of service users interested in continuing to contribute to the project (about 10) and agree a process – this consisted of a mood board workshop session and a number of visits to some (hopefully) inspiring working-spaces in London that demonstrated a pared-down fairly minimal ‘boot-strap’ / up-cycling aesthetic. It was also agreed that a good move on our part would be to find a partner organisation that could help us to take the project forward. Enter The Glass House Community Led Design! We were fortunate that Maja Luna Jorgensen, Strategic Projects Manager with the charity was able at very short notice to be available to help us with design and community engagement input. She helped to shape a schedule of appropriate buildings and locations around London that we could visit for inspiration and insight, into what makes a successfully designed creative working space, able to accommodate multiple uses, designed and built on a shoestring budget that works well and looks beautiful. Not only did she help shape a schedule, but she accompanied us on our first visits and provided us with the very capable input of her colleague Melissa Lacide for our second trip. The first  journey consisted of our co-design team visiting the following organisations / locations:

• The Arcola Theatre • Eastern Curve Garden • Global Generation•

Our second Learning Journey consisted of our team visiting:

• Camden Collective • Hub Westminster • Myatts Fields Park / Playground•

All of the organisations, buildings and environments we visited delivered! Where we were hosted by representatives of the organisations, they were friendly, open and generous in sharing their time and some of the backstory of how their projects had developed, and how they’d come to make the design choices they’d made. We were definitely inspired as a team by what we saw and we gained a real sense of the creative possibilities open to us through the diverse examples we got to see across the six sites, in terms of materials, scale, construction methods and feel.

The next stage for us in our design process is to get down to the actual designing bit of the project. We’re all very excited and I know that within the team we have some very creative and considered thinkers and makers. Check back in a month’s time for an update on how the project has developed. By then we should be a good way through the fabrication stage and maybe have even started installing the Pods too.

A big thank you to all the generous staff and volunteers form the six organisations / locations we visited. A big thank you too for the expertise and guidance we received from our colleagues Maja and Melissa from The Glass House.

ABW

Stuart