Co-design Lab - Goodbye 2019 / Hello 2020

By The Lab Team

Kia ora! As 2019 wraps up we wanted to share a snapshot of what we’ve been working on over the past 12 months.

Design for Social Innovation conference, Nov 2019, Lab workshop

But first, thank you to our sponsors, partners, everyone we’ve worked with and people who have taken the time to share their stories and innovation journeys!

It was a great start to the year with our existing public sector sponsors agreeing to continue backing the Lab for the 2019-21 period. This group includes seven government agencies and Auckland Council with more hopefully joining soon. This model enables us to work across the public sector and explore issues that require collaboration and fresh thinking - working in the spaces in between and joining the dots.

Being part of The Southern Initiative also means we have a strong connection to place (South Auckland) and a team grappling with complexity.

In 2020 we will continue to evolve our lab practice, purpose and positioning. We’ll be sharing more on this in the New Year. We’re excited that it will enable us to effectively support public sector innovation in Aotearoa with a focus on wellbeing.

In the meantime, here are summaries of key ‘live lab’ activities we have been partnering on during 2019.

LIVE LAB #1 - TAMARIKI WELLBEING

The Lab has been embedded in Supporting the Early Years System initiative (SEYS) led by the Southern Initiative (TSI) and funded by NEXT. This builds on the initial Early Years Challenge project and report developed by TSI and the Lab.

SEYS works with whānau, community facilities, early child health services, government agencies and researchers in South Auckland, unlocking the opportunity for spaces, supports and services to promote the conditions that support whānau and tamariki to thrive. The lived experience of whānau is at the heart of the initiative which brings together tikanga, mātauranga and design with emerging western science about child and brain development. Responses are culturally grounded, place-based and led by whānau.

Penny from the Lab team has been supporting the development of the experimentation approach underpinning the work. Although early days, the initiative is surfacing learning and opportunities relevant to council and community services, as well as central government agencies such as MoE, Health, Oranga Tamariki, Housing, MSD, SIA and the Child and Wellbeing Strategy led by DPMC.

LIVE LAB #2 - MOE ATTENDANCE, ENGAGEMENT AND WELLBEING PROJECT

Over the past 8 months, Ali from the Lab team and Anne-Maire (TSI) have been working with the Ministry of Education (MoE) to explore how the ‘transition’ between intermediate and high school impacts on young people’s attendance, engagement and wellbeing.

With a place-based focus on Manurewa and years 7-10, we have interviewed over 85 young people, school staff and whānau and are currently working with schools to better understand their experiences. We are currently working with the same groups to develop prototypes to test during 2020.

We're also working with the Innovation Unit on a parallel project in Rotorua focused on attendance and whānau engagement.

The overall project is also an opportunity to explore a system-level perspective. Bringing together MoE staff from Wellington and Auckland to explore co-design in place, across schools and with young people has enabled the team to reframe the issues, identify structural barriers and shine a light on a rich seam of innovative practice in local schools.

In the new year we will continue working with young people, schools and MoE staff to develop a series of live prototypes. We will also be working with the MoE team in Wellington to deliver a co-design capability workshop and supporting a collaboration with Monash University to survey innovation capability across the ministry.

LIVE LAB #3: NIHO TANIWHA EVALUATIVE PRACTICE

Sketch of part of the Niho Taniwha (Teeth of the Taniwha), a three dimensional framework for evaluative learning and outcomes.

Evaluation practice is most effective in supporting social innovation outcomes when it is responsive to the dynamic and complex settings we are working in, helps us make good decisions as we are moving, and contributes to the development of new practice-based evidence. Since the beginning of the Lab, we’ve been grappling with how to integrate design and evaluative practice most effectively to support social innovation outcomes and learning.

This year with the help of our evaluation partners Rachael Trotman, Kate McKegg and Kataraina Pipi we have been working with TSI to develop, test and implement an evaluative learning and outcomes framework – the Niho Taniwha, specifically designed to support learning and track impact for dynamic and fast-moving teams working across multiple systems initiatives. Beginning with values and principles, the framework supports teams to embed reflection, gather relevant evidence, and work across different ‘sense making’ zones – allowing us to connect up outcomes and strategic learning from across different initiatives and TSI focus areas. We have been testing and sharing the approach and supporting tools with government and community partners here and in Australia, and will be sharing a more refined version of the approach with ANZEA in 2020.

LIVE LAB #4 - PACIFIC INNOVATION APPROACH

Pacific Business Trust (PBT) Talanoa Projects - PBT engaged TSI and the Lab to develop two projects focused on developing a trust-based model and exploring a Pacific perspective and approach to social enterprise.

The project provided an opportunity to grow a Pacific Innovation Approach (PIA). The PIA sets out the process and framework in the spirit and principles of Talanoa and the Kakala framework and acknowledges the value of co-design through the Pacific cultural lenses including reciprocity, identity and belonging, sharing and respect. Project participants told us that they valued and enjoyed this approach and the role it enabled them to play.

Battling (conscious/unconscious) biases is one of the challenges echoed in most of the Talanoa adding to the frustration for Pacific construction businesses. Pacific construction businesses are typically commissioned as sub-contractors, where the contracts are much smaller and margins very low. This also means limited opportunity to grow.

Both projects produced reports back to PBT making recommendations to look at the factors that create the current state of play; build capability; create resources that are responsive, and embed Pacific business values within mainstream business practices.

LIVE LAB #5 - HEALTHY FAMILIES SOUTH AUCKLAND

Baruk Jacob from the Lab team has been embedded in the Ministry of Health Healthy Families team, offering coaching support to the team on innovation practice and reflective learning using the Niho Taniwha toolkit.

Healthy Families is focused on ensuring South Aucklanders can enjoy health-promoting social and physical environments that enable healthy food and physical activity choices, increasing mental health resilience and wellbeing. Work has spanned healthy eating behaviour change and learning from the Papatoetoe Food Hub micro-enterprise, which uses supermarket-rescued food to produce healthy affordable meals.

Key practice learning has been the importance of not only innovation capability and conditions but also cognitive and emotional capability-building when working with complexity and closely with communities. 2020 will be about deepening reflective practice, building a network model of emotional capability, and embedding the evaluative practice in the teams. All this work will be available to reuse and adapt via our website.

OTHER KEY WORK…

DESIGN ETHICS

In 2019 the Lab continued its focus on the important area of design ethics. Some of the key issues relating to design, ethics and innovation that lab has been exploring are outlined in this December blog, Innovation as Ethical Practice.

This year we worked with MSD on best forms of ethical support for design and prototyping with Penny joining the MSD Ethics Committee which is also open to be used by other government agencies who don’t have their own ethics committees. A round table on current principles, practices and tools in design and co-design ethics in the public service – brought together representatives from Auckland Council, Auckland Libraries, TSI, Auckland DHB, Counties Manukau DHB, Oranga Tamariki, Ministry Social Development and the Social Wellbeing Board (South Auckland) to review what teams are currently using and identify patterns, gaps and leading practice.

The workshop showed the amount of work and practice already available across the public sector and the potential for sharing this more effectively, as well as to build stronger connections across practitioners and teams. We will be continuing to host forums in 2020 with our collaboration partners, with a priority being to share key resources on an open platform. Thanks to Lee Ryan for helping us gather and map this work.

WORKING WITH EVIDENCE

The Better evidence, Better Advice project (led by Rebekah Forman, on placement with the Lab from Auckland Council’s policy team) has created a landscape and toolkit to help teams explore how they conceptualise and work with ‘evidence’ to develop quality policy, practice and advice. A key focus for the cross-disciplinary project team has been understanding how staff currently source, generate and use data and insights (quantitative and qualitative) and integrate cultural knowledge including mātauranga Māori. The materials developed through the project will be available on the Lab’s website in February.

Supporting government teams and policymakers to take a critical and complexity-informed stance on evidence - where it comes from come from and who gets to decide what ‘counts’ - is a core part of the Lab’s work. This Evidence for Innovation blog covers some of our evolving thinking about practiced-based evidence and prototyping, written in collaboration with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute as part of a seven-part series on system and community change. As outlined in this recently published newsletter for States of Change, a critical and local approach to evidence also extends to how we think about ‘measures’ and outcomes, and experimenting with whānau-led, localised indicators .

Penny Hagen and Angie Tangaere (TSI) shared some of the emerging learning about this system change work with the Centre of Excellence for Child and Family Welfare in Melbourne this year. We will be doing the same in a webinar with the New Zealand-based Community Research in the new year.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2020

We’ve been planning for next year and will be prioritising:

A regular presence in Wellington and a monthly series of workshops, clinics and seminars.
Packaging and sharing the learning from our 2019 Live Lab projects.
Developing the next iteration of our Co-design Conditions and Capability toolkit

Reframing and repositioning the role of the including developing a new website
Continuing to publish Innovation Briefs that share key learnings around public sector innovation, like this first one from 2019.

...but first a restorative rest over the holiday period!

Ngā mihi

Lab team