Experience-based design

The idea is that if you design something well enough, people will use it. After all no-one needs an iPod - they're expensive and require you to repurchase all your music and have a computer. But they are designed and offered to people superbly well, consequently they have become incredibly successful. These same design techniques, for delighting people and moving them to action, can be used in health service design. The techniques are simple, fun, practical and engaging, they can be used by a wide range of people, and they can be used either to improve existing services or to radically reinvent them.

The CD project explored some of these techniques as ways of gathering or using information to create new service ideas. You can find out more by going to the Links page.

Codesign

In a codesign you will have benefited from the participation of the people for whom you are designing; a significant number of the activities of design will have been done with, or maybe by, the stakeholders in this endeavour (which might be ordinary people, service users, carers, clinicians or others working in industry, health, social care or the voluntary sector).

In some places this would be called participative design, sometimes it is called coproduction but we reserve that term for situations in which the service users are also the service producers, or providers.

Coproduction

Most care is offered between ordinary people, every day, back & forth, with few professionals involved and no money, specifications or contracts. This is a powerful resource to tap into, especially for long term or ‘lifestyle' conditions; a resource that has depth and breadth and which, at its best, equals the knowledge of clinicians. A coproduction is a service that is offered, produced or provided, by the service users themselves.

Clearly for people to get involved to this extent they have to see the value of the service and feel capable and motivated to do what is required. This level of engagement usually arises best out of being involved in the design and development of the service, which is why experience-based design and codesign are so related to coproduction. If people feel that this is their service, they designed it, they are more likely to remain involved with it.

A good health example of coproduction is the Expert Patients Programme, but it also occurs in simple everyday ways, too. For example, when we sort our rubbish into paper, plastics and glass, we are helping to provide the recycling service offered by our local authority for our benefit, we are coproducing that service.

Coproduction turns consumers into producers, demand into supply, which is likely to be the only way we'll deal with future demands on the health and social care services.

You can find out more by looking at our Links & Resources page, but one of the best sources of information about this concept is the book by Edgar Cahn, "No more throw-away people".