Overview
This scheme empowers local establishments like barber shops, cafés, and salons to act as touchpoints for mental health conversations. By creating safe spaces and fostering genuine discussions in places where people naturally gather, the Community of Care aims to address mental health problems before they reach the point of crisis.
My Role
Service Design, User Research, Prototyping and Testing, Visual Design, Pitching, Exhibition
Challenge
To provoke imaginations about alternative futures to help GDS and GOV.UK better prepare for scenarios that may arise tomorrow.
In the context of service design, Design Futures is an approach that explores multiple alternative futures. By observing signals, trends, and drivers to identify patterns in the current world and creating artefacts representing potential futures, Design Futures can spark conversations and assist in achieving potentially preferable futures (for specific groups.)
Our proposal aims to help government professionals critically and creatively reimagine possible futures, encouraging them to consider how to shape impactful and meaningful strategies from now on.
Process
Background Research: Horizon Scanning
The project began with horizon scanning, which included reviewing news articles, government policies, podcasts, and other materials. This process helped our team identify several weak signals; the borderless world, climate crisis, and digital democracy stood out. After further research and discussion, these three signals guided our attention towards government resource allocation and application. We collected more relevant information and formulated the following two 'What If' questions:
What if euthanasia was legalised and made available to the general public with physical and mental illnesses?
What The idea proposes whether the government should offer opportunities for individuals with terminal illnesses or severe mental illness to end their lives early, potentially saving the expense of providing long-term care.
What if the UK government abolished the police and reallocated funds for other social and support services?
The idea proposes whether the government should redirect part of their budget towards addressing the root causes of crime, such as poverty, mental health, and employment opportunities, amid increasing controversies within law enforcement agencies.
Research Through Design
The prototypes we developed enabled us to provoke conversations about the alternative scenarios presented by the above "What If" questions. However, many viewed them as too dystopian in the testing and questioned: For whom is this future preferable? What role should GOV.UK play in shaping this future? The comments gathered prompted us to revisit our alternative worlds and led to the following insights:
In these two concepts, 'Prevention' was an underlying value that tied everything together. Our objective was to intervene before problems, thereby reducing the burden on government resources and fundamentally altering the status quo.
To embody this principle, we established a fictional government department, the Department of Prevention (DoP). While prevention was theoretically a shared value across this proposal, feedback suggested that exploring two types of prevention simultaneously, crime and ill health, led to a lack of harmony, distracting the audience and hindering meaningful conversations. Consequently, we focused mainly on one initiative of prevention — the Community of Care — to settle our final service concept.
Team members and I were testing our prototypes with students in the LCC.
I was presenting our work-in-process to the professionals at GDS.
Outcome
Mental Health Thrives in 2040: the Community of Care
By 2040, the UK government has radically transformed, prioritising health and wellbeing across all policy domains. Resources have been reallocated towards proactive and preventive measures to ease the burden on the NHS. This concept is widely promoted across society, with the public recognising that supporting each other's mental health is a shared responsibility. Investment has been directed into community-based health initiatives, offering the public frontline support, care, and emotional wellbeing.
The government aims to cultivate a healthier and more resilient nation. By proactively tackling mental challenges and leveraging the power of local government and business, a focus on empathy and wellbeing will be gradually integrated into everyone's lives, fostering positive change.
Design Artefacts
Below are some design artefacts considering the perspectives of different stakeholders to communicate the final service proposition, including local governments, service providers, and users (from top to bottom.)
A set of posters promoting the program in local communities.
Service provider's handbook containing an introduction to the program, training, and application details.
A funding approval letter and employee certification sent to the service provider from the local council.
Shop recruitment poster with new skills requirements.
An accredited taxi with certified stickers seen on the road.
A supporting card showing Uber's new service and a referral card that could be put inside the accredited store.
Showcase in the GDS office
In June 2023, the outcomes were presented to the government professionals in GOV.UK and GDS offices. Another team member and I delivered our team's presentation and the final prototyping for the event.
Reflection
Engaging Stories Resonate Better
The goal of storytelling in Design Futures is to encourage the audience's conversation and discussion. Viewers can better understand and interact with future scenes by creating future scenarios and corresponding prototypes. Presenting the audience with 'who benefits' and 'who's excluded' gives participants more chances to take different perspectives and consider their positions. However, the setting of the story must align with the existing worldview. As we learned from our project, too many deviations can lead to confusion or prompt the audience to focus solely on repairing cracks, neglecting the core values we aimed to convey.
Prototyping and Iteration as Research Tools
Prototyping and gathering feedback early is worthwhile and needed, especially when exploring and building service experiences that still need to be formed. There is no need to obsess over whether the prototype is perfect. Unpolished prototypes are more welcome for criticism and iteration. What needs to be paid attention to is how to select and amplify the key points of each iteration rather than keeping every input. Also, selecting objects or situations related to people's daily lives will more effectively spark discussions and let the work speak for itself.
Service Design and Design Futures
Design Futures changed my preconceived notions of speculative design, allowing me to explore and extend conceptual possibilities in projects and challenge existing norms of service ideation and delivery. After this project, my imagination of the future is no longer just a technology-driven world but a world with countless possibilities. By imagining various future scenarios, societies, governments, businesses, and individuals can proactively prepare for what is to come and make strategies to move towards a preferable and inclusive future.