A Design Programme for Communities
Climate change is affecting us all – our cities are getting wetter and everyday items more expensive as the impact unfolds across the world.
To try and understand how the city might support people in Glasgow to better respond to climate change, the Centre for Civic Innovation, Glasgow City Council’s Sustainability team and C40 Cities developed the City Change Makers Programme.
City Change Makers is an innovative programme that tackles climate change and improves wellbeing by working with two community organisations and members of their respective communities to respond to a local challenge, developing an idea and turning it into a reality. We have been listening to, and learning from, people across Glasgow’s neighbourhoods to better understand the challenges they face today. We work with people and learn from their experiences to help co-design a future Glasgow where communities can thrive and people can be proud. We believe that creating positive change requires ground-up solutions, especially when it comes to complex issues like climate change, that impact people’s everyday lives.
Getting Started
For the inaugural programme, we would work with two organisations that had an initial idea of how to tackle climate change at a local level, the groups would have ten people participate in each of the five sessions to bring the ideas to life. The two groups would include members of their own team as well as local residents to ensure the idea has a positive impact for the whole community.
Community organisations from Calton, Govan and Southside Central were invited to apply to the programme to develop ideas with citizens, test them out and implement them for the benefit of their respective neighbourhoods, we assessed applications with a selection panel including climate and community action experts to consider the strength of each category within the application. Govanhill Housing Association and Make Do and Grow demonstrated their potential to create change through the City Change Makers from their experience, ideas and impact they could make locally.
The Groups and Their Ideas
Make Do & Grow
Make Do and Grow is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in Govan that exists to support local families, develop creativity and encourage reuse practices. During the pandemic, the team started a toy swap service, which has since evolved into a service used by hundreds of children. The team joined the programme to understand how they can better serve their community in Govan and promote the environmental and ecological benefits of second-hand toys. The group brought along full-time employees, volunteers and users of the service to City Change Makers.
Govanhill Community Development Trust
A wholly owned subsidiary of Govanhill Housing Association, GCDT’s commercial activities support community development initiatives for the benefit of local people. The group focused on their local area and how they could create a clean, healthy & positive environment, as well as looking at ways to bring the community together and celebrate the area’s diversity. In aid of this, the group also brought full-time employees and invited tenants and local residents to join the group.
The City Change Makers Programme consisted of five design-led sessions created by the Centre for Civic Innovation which guided the teams through the design process.
Over the programme, the two teams defined the challenges they faced, tested potential solutions to this challenge and eventually produced an idea that could benefit the local area.
Each session consisted of exercises which encouraged the teams to collaborate and have deep conversations about the challenges they faced and how they could overcome them. In addition to this, both teams developed skills in creative problem-solving, research, and communication that helped them reach their end goal.
Our Neighbourhood Designers crafted sessions that looked at the different challenges they currently face and could potentially face in the future, equipped the teams with research skills to gather feedback from people in their area, prototyped and refined different ideas before selecting an eventual idea to progress with that can be implemented for their local community.
Process Overview
Framing the Challenge
Our designers guided Govanhill Housing Association and Make Do & Grow through conversations with their respective groups to unpack the initial challenges they presented during the application process to understand what that actually consists of. After this the groups explored the motivations for what they are looking to achieve and who would need to be involved.
Undertaking Research
While the ideas were gathering pace during the sessions, our designers emphasised the importance of gathering research from people in their area. Each team brought a range of people together to collaborate with the ambition of delivering an outcome that serves the community and while significant progress was made in the room it’s important to ask people who will be impacted by this what they think of it. This helps us to identify unforeseen challenges or barriers or could open us up to potential new opportunities.
The design process is A LOT and it's a system I haven't used before, which I'm enjoying because it's helping me to think about things differently.
It's so complex a question that we're asking but the passion at the table is really good to see. It shows that people care.
Ideation and Prototyping
After undertaking research to understand what their communities care about the groups came up with lots of initial ideas to tackle the challenge they identified. After this, the groups prioritised the ideas and prototyped them to see how they played out. The groups then focused on developing concepts to present to the wider team to get feedback on what they’d created.
Test, Learn & Refine
Between sessions, the teams once again conducted research to progress their concepts based on the opinions of residents, to ground the ideas and discuss how they could be delivered. The ideas were then refined and prepared a presentation to share the impact their work could have an how it can be delivered.
This was a lot of work squeezed into five sessions. The teams worked incredibly hard to make the journey from identifying a challenge, identifying an opportunity, creating a concept and delivering an idea that will reduce climate impact and improve wellbeing at a local level.
The teams had to navigate their way through several exercises in each session and had to have challenging conversations to reach their end goal. At times the end goal might not have been clear but every member of both teams was enthusiastic about taking part in the design process and passionate about improving their area.
Final Ideas and Opportunities Moving Forward
The two teams made their way through the process, turning their initial challenges which they brought to the programme, into solutions which will be implemented with funding from the City Change Makers programme. Each solution can combat their initial challenge but also has potential to be expanded on moving forward.
Make Do & Grow have created a system to reach more families and grow our customer base in the city through communications, space solutions and accessibility mechanisms.
Govanhill Housing Association’s solution is a system to embed local people in shaping communications around waste disposal, transforming back courts and re-designing bin sheds.
After the conclusion of the design programme, the groups presented their ideas to a group of experts who shared their support for both ideas to move into the delivery phase. Moving forward, the two teams will receive £20,000 to implement the ideas they have crafted over the sessions.
Having been introduced to the design process, both teams have since attended a credited course in Service Design, so that they can continue to use the skills they have learned throughout the process as they implement their ideas.
The session with the City Change Makers will cover the process we use to design services, our relationship to the services we use and provide and practically apply a range of service design tools to contextualise our learning by doing.
Over the course of the day, participants will build an awareness of the mindset, approach, and principles of service design and learn how to engage with people, solve problems, and bring ideas into reality.
Service Design Educator, Service Design Academy
The City Change Makers programme has allowed us to tackle some of the city’s biggest challenges innovatively. Through working with different people in local communities, we have identified resolutions that tackle climate change and improve well-being at a local level. By engaging with communities, understanding their experience and working in collaboration to understand what changes could have a positive impact we can make meaningful improvements across the city and for the planet.
The Centre for Civic Innovation is leading the way in using design to convene multiple stakeholders in the civic space, creating programmes that ensure solutions work for everyone: the people, local authorities, and organisations within communities in the city.
City Change Makers is a multi-layered project which touches on climate solutions, social impact, building stronger community connections, and empowering individuals. This is a model that other cities in Scotland can learn so much from.
Strategic Lead for Design and Innovation, V&A Dundee
