Valuing Design
Funder: AHRC
Team: Joyce Yee, Lindsay Lennon (Northumbria University); Hazel White (University of Dundee).
Website: http://valuingdesign.org/
Timeframe: 2014-2017
Identifying and Mapping Design Impact and Value was a 6-month project sponsored by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) aimed at understanding how and what stakeholders value in a design-led approach, specifically focused on public and third sector service innovation projects. The project aimed to identify which characteristics of design are perceived as valuable by different project stakeholders and what impact design-led approach has had on the organisations involved. The research insights have been derived from six co-created (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) case studies of service innovation conducted in UK-based public and third sector organizations. In total eighteen conditions were identified and the ten most important conditions were selected and ranked by the research participants through a workshop validation session. We further clustered these into three overarching themes: community building, capacity, and leadership based on the authors’ previous experiences with public service innovation projects. This research suggests that community building is valued above leadership and capacity as the most important condition for design to have the greatest impact in innovation and transformation projects.
------- CoCreate members working on this project:
------- Publications related to this project:
Yee, J., & White, H. (2016). “The Goldilocks Conundrum: The ‘Just Right’ Conditions for Design to Achieve Impact in Public and Third Sector Projects”. International Journal of Design, 10(1).
Yee, J. and Choukeir, J. (2016). From Capability Training to Capacity Building. Technical Report. Service Design Network, Köln, Germany.
Yee, J., White, H., & Lennon, L. (2015). Valuing design in public and third sector organisations. Paper presented at 11th European Academy of Design (EAD).
Yee, J., White, H. and Lennon, L. (2015). Valuing Design: Mapping design impact and value in six public & third sector projects. Project Report. Northumbria University, University of Dundee.