We (the royal;
professional) have just started holding formal evidence-gathering sessions for
an inquiry into the Redesign of Public Services. It sounds rather grand, but
essentially we just sit next to some very eminent individuals with far more
experience than us, and listen-in on fascinating conversations about how design
processes and practices could be brought to bear upon the policymaking process
and the delivery of public services (at some point in the future, @JocelynABailey will have to
write it all up into coherent argument, including recommendations to Government
– just to silence critics that perceive my job to involve a lot of talking and
whispering ‘mmm interesting’ through narrowed
eyes).
I’m not going to use this blog to explain
or sell our inquiry or its premise to you. If you’re so inclined you can have a
gander at our work here.
However, there is one strand of the work that I find particularly interesting,
so thought I’d share my thoughts with those who gave a damn.
With so many design industry bods involved
in the process, it’s no surprise that talk of ‘brand’ is quite prevalent.
Design, when spoken of in these terms, and in relation to the public sector,
too easily conjures images of very expensive refurbs of Government departments,
or Siobhan Sharpe (holy faak). Of course, on one level, we’re talking
about logos and fonts, but on a much deeper and more significant level, a
discussion of brand is the inevitable result of refocusing ideas about policy
development away from the institutions of governance – local authorities,
government departments, quangos – to the end-user or receiver of the policy
mechanism or service: the citizen. It’s worth saying that the inquiry process
began with extended discussions on how we should ‘brand’ the individual service
user across the work stream. We chose ‘citizen’, because it holds connotations
with democratic accountability, and most importantly places the end-user within
his or her local democratic context. This isn’t simply a consumer who has
exercised informed choice and decided to fly Virgin Atlantic; their
relationship to choice, payment and accountability is very different: they pay
taxes and vote.
Within the commercial world, we talk of
strong or weak brands, brand ‘buy-in’, and often how a brand permeates cultural
consciousness (for better or worse). My overriding impression from the opening
weeks of our inquiry has been that it is astounding just how contaminated the
brands of ‘Government’ or ‘Public sector’ have become within UK cultural
consciousness. I’m not simply talking about the general dislike for
politicians, or the widespread discontent resulting from massive budget cuts.
This is visceral negativity, cynicism, and distrust associated with the experience of engaging with the public sector, or
following a service from start to finish that has been designed and implemented
by Government (or via one of its outsourced providers). Just listen to my
colleague after a phonecall to HM Revenue and Customs, or my mother trying to
book a GP appointment, or read my tweets after a 90 minute trip to the Brent
Parking Shop.
An more subtle example: as part of part of
a Social Design Talks series we have co-organised with the
V&A and the Young Foundation, we examined a new Time Banking project called
‘Care4Care’. Time Banking is a way of encouraging greater civic engagement and
volunteering through a kind of monetisation of time. If you provide non-medical
care to an elderly person in your community, you are able to bank your hours in
a central nationwide database to go towards your own ‘Care Pension’. This can
then be redeemed when you need it, or transferred to a family member. Care4Care
is, of course, a way of rethinking the problem of elderly care that removes the
state completely. That doesn’t mean that professional care, when needed,
shouldn’t be provided by the NHS; it simply suggests that before such dramatic
interventions are necessary, there might be supporting mechanisms within the
community that could step in.
Those on the left might find this
problematic. Are you submitting to Adam Smith economics if you recognise that
waiting around for altruistic civic engagement isn’t particularly useful, and
that you have to make it worth citizens’ while to give up their time to visit
an elderly neighbour, do their shopping, help them with the ironing? It’s
remarkable that Care4Care doesn’t even seek to answer these questions. They
identified a potential solution to a number of social and budgetary problems, a solution that focused on the needs and behaviours of citizens.
They aren’t trying to attract volunteers away from schemes were they don’t
benefit directly; they are much keener to draw in existing, non-incentive
volunteering activity. Frankly, if the outcome of a scheme includes fewer
lonely citizens, increased civic engagement across generations, and high
quality non-medical care for more people in the face of remarkable state
retrenchment, I don’t really care whether human beings need an incentive to go
next door and keep someone company. Sorry chaps, but there isn’t enough time for
ideological soul-searching.
When talking about the scaling of
Care4Care, a room of (probably) left-leaning design and arty types in the
V&A were all passionately adamant that it must stay outside the
institutions of the state. The NHS mustn’t ‘get their hands on it’, people
said. The ideational discourse of the NHS, its internal cultural references,
all institutionalised, and the baggage of the word ‘care’ as it exists within
the bureaucratic structures of the NHS appeared at odds with the mutuality of Care4Care:
the NHS provides you, individual, self-contained ill person, with care.
Co-created, home-based, non-medical interventions seem antithetical to the
ideational structures that make up our public services in health. People
involved in the designing of user-centred public services want to keep them
away from the ideational structures and the institutions of the public sector
for fear of a) what might happen to services once subsumed, and b) of how
people will perceive them and perhaps be reluctant to use them. The brand,
perhaps, has become toxic.
So what does brand buy-in look like? The
example most frequently cited to our inquiry has been the London 2012 Olympics,
and particularly the Games Makers. This, of course, links to the voluntary
aspect of Care4Care, and would perhaps challenge notions that volunteering,
civic engagement and community spirit have been as absent in the UK as
rationing and bee-hive hairdos (Amy Winehouse aside). As civic society brands
seeking buy-in, where did the Games Makers succeed and the Big Society, for
example, fail? The Big Society is perhaps the strongest example of a public
sector brand becoming instantly toxic. First, and most obviously, 2012 was a
concentrated, international, vibrant one-off. Also, it somehow appeared
de-politicised; about citizens, not politicians and bureaucrats. By contrast,
the ‘Big Society’ brand seemed opportunistic, and became too-quickly associated
with austerity, seen as a way for politicians to justify the retrenchment of
the state rather than as a way of reinvigorating civil society and empowering
communities. But also, the Big Society was formulated and rolled out from
Government within the institutions of Whitehall, and the Games Maker brand was
carefully constructed through private sector brand consultants and in an office
space high in the sky next to Canary Wharf. The question remains: at what point
does the brand become toxic: when the institutions of Government get hold of
it, or when the public recognise it as an public sector brand, and so turn away
from it? Are we looking at a case of bad branding within Government, or would
any brand coming out for the public sector be instantly toxic and very
difficult to gain buy-in from citizens?
Through the process of redesigning public
services, Government must think about the rebranding of public services. Citizen engagement
and buy-in requires a strong focus on how a service brand sits with the
end-user. The current ‘public sector’ brand doesn’t do this, and we need to
work at re-framing how ‘the state’, ‘public services’, ‘the taxman’, ‘GP
surgery’, ‘jobcentre’ echo through the population. Some would argue that brand
consultants and service designers are those will the skill base to achieve
this. Let’s see what our inquiry decides when we launch in 2013.
