We co-design with the city.

The current model for delivering public services is grounded in underlying assumptions and is subject to changing demands from citizens. As a city we need to find new, creative and innovative ways to solve our challenges.

At the Centre for Civic Innovation (CCI) we can contribute by developing and inspiring a network of designers and solvers across the breadth of the city to enthuse and empower our citizens to co-design the city they want to live in.

The CCI combines design thinking, research and data science to understand and help solve complex societal problems that are difficult to articulate, challenging to solve and have no single or easy answer.

CCI is a pioneering citizen-centred design team within GCC, responsible for establishing a design-led approach to the understanding of societal shifts and civic experiences within the city. To help understand people’s values, attitudes and behaviours towards local and city-wide policy and services, the team use a range of innovation methods such as Design, Co-creation and digital and data science amongst others.

The CCI team lead new ways of working across the council; fostering a collaborative approach which involves citizens throughout their design process from initial research to co-designing solutions.

The team’s principles and approaches focus on embedding design and innovation across the city; empowering colleagues, citizens and communities to creatively solve the problems they face together.

As a creative collective, the team focus all of their professional expertise on making a difference to the people of Glasgow, working on projects in the city as well as pooling their resources on European and Global projects tackling anything from reducing child poverty in Glasgow, and ending homelessness in Europe, to co-designing innovative tools to support the most vulnerable citizens in society.

We create joint project teams with clients to enable the exchange of knowledge, ideas and skills throughout.

By working openly and collaboratively, we bring people, skills and knowledge together. Communicating creatively, we empower everyone to contribute and co-design new ideas to address our challenges.

We use design thinking, research and data science to look at things differently, understand the current challenges and imagine a different future in order to help solve complex and multi-faceted problems.

Our design led-methodology allows collaborative work across services and partners to draw on the wealth of knowledge and expertise that exists. We use our storytelling expertise throughout this process.

We are making a positive impact through looking at communities differently. Delivering better outcomes for local people by aligning city strategies and deliverables to local needs and co-designing solutions with them.

To support our approach we have a multi-disciplinary team of design thinkers, creative problem solvers, graphic, service and digital designers, data scientists, researchers, communication and storytelling experts and business change and innovation expertise.

The team and their collective professional network encompasses a vast range of expertise – the Innovation Lead is a founding member of Scottish Enterprise’s Open Innovation Cohort, and is a mentor on a range of national programmes and networks. The team’s Design Lead sits on the V&A Design for Business Advisory Group and regularly works with Glasgow School of Art Innovation School, the Service Design Academy and a wide network of design thinkers around the world.

Our data scientists lead on a number of ground-breaking research and development programmes, working with a range of data experts across the public and private sector. Our researchers and designers using the insights gained from the data to help the team create user-focused, accessible products and services. Throughout the life cycle of our projects our Communications and Storytelling experts use innovative methods of communication, always putting the audience at the forefront, not only to teach but to influence and inspire others.