Designing New Types of Public Services: Prototyping in Practice

Date: 10.11.2011 10:00 - 12:30

Location: NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

Designing a new public service? Want to redesign a service? Have an innovation service idea and want to test it? Want new ways to engage your service users? Looking to learn about new and innovative methods?

NESTA would like to invite you to a free Prototyping Masterclass where you can learn about what prototyping is and how you might go about putting it into practice with service users. You will hear from 3 Councils who have tried out prototyping in practice over the last year and will share the benefits and challenges of working in this new and innovative way. These exciting projects relate to the challenging task of working with communities and families to tackle severe disadvantage and designing services that meet the needs of communities in different ways. The learning about prototyping new types of services can be applied to all areas of your organisation's work.

Prototyping is a way of testing ideas and concepts for new products and services. A prototype is a small scale mock-up of a product, or a test run of a service, created to explore its viability as part of research and development. During prototyping, an idea is developed, tested, improved and refined. Attend this event to find out more about how to use it and how 3 Councils are putting it into practice.

About the Councils presenting
Parents 1^st, a social enterprise specialising in volunteer parent peer support programmes in Essex, and One Plus One, a charity that strengthens couple and family relationships have been working on joint project to transfer the emphasis of support for parents to earlier intervention during pregnancy. They have been prototyping the use of specially trained peer supporters, drawn from the heart of the communities served, and have been exploring different methods of engaging with the most vulnerable parents as early as possible during pregnancy.

The London Borough of Barnet developed a prototyping methodology as part of its nationally recognised 'One Barnet' programme.　This methodology was initially used to develop a 'Community Coaching' service, in which volunteers coached families in their community experiencing multiple disadvantage.　Prototyping showed that this low-cost approach could benefit both the coaches and the people they support.　 Barnet is now conducting a larger test of the coaching model, and invites interested local authorities to join them in this.

Reading Borough Council have been working to radically transform their early years service to deliver better outcomes at less cost, based on what families told them through their research. The new service Parents Supporting Parents was prototyped with families at all stages of its design and implementation. The prototyping approach has led to a complete re-think to the children's centre model so that they become community led hubs, meeting needs more effectively and putting families in the driving seat.

Register for this event

Registration opens at 09:30 and lunch will be served after the event at 12:30