Designing for wellbeing

heart of any innovation and design process. The hesitation results from
the lack of experience and competence in managing creative collaboration
but is also due to an organisational culture that may not encourage exploration
and seeking innovative solutions. The urge to reach into the future
rather than just understand the present, and creating future visions with
people rather than for them, is also a new approach in the public sector. 8
Consequently, designers should remember that developing and applying
design-based processes in the public sector is an innovative development
and, as such, requires a change in culture and behaviour, which in turn
demands time, resources, and management support 9 .
Service design has a particular value to innovation processes by providing
tools to engage people, to visualise alternatives and develop service
prototypes for testing. The co-design workshops conducted during the project
had two purposes: Firstly, they were meant to invite people to raise issues
they found important and, hence, direct design processes. For example,
the team that designed the Honestly! campaign described the trigger for
their design as follows: “By doing research about the life of elderly people
in Kauniainen and in the whole of Finland, we saw their isolation from
younger generations as the biggest problem. When we spoke with people
in retirement homes across Helsinki, we saw their wish to talk with us, to
spend time with us, to tell us what they learned through hard times in their
lives, to give us advice. We immediately jumped on that idea. Wouldn’t it
be nice to create a platform where young people can learn from much older
and more experienced people?” Secondly, co-design workshops gave the
project participants and city employees first-hand experience of applying
design thinking and tools in practice.
8 Bason, C. (2010). Co-creation is key to innovation in government. In Ipsos MORI Understanding
Society/winter 2010, 14-17.
9 Bailey, S.G. (2012). Embedding service design: the long and the short of it: Developing an
organisation’s design capacity and capability to sustainably deliver services. In Third
Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation, ServDes 2012, Finland
68 · Co-design with the public sector