Supporting Communities Through Social Work

Project: Mi Liverpool

Client: PSS

Sector: Social Care | Health & Wellbeing

Role: Service Designer

Design Brief: This project was undertaken in partnership with PSS and Edge Hill University. The design brief was to provide Social Care students with the guidance and tools they needed to work analytically and creatively with communities in Liverpool – creating and testing new and exciting ways of supporting communities through social work.

What I did: My colleague and I took on a joint design role facilitating a design process that allowed students to form radical and innovative ideas to tackle social care issues. The project was design-led with a clear user-centred focus ensuring that the students always considered what would work for the communities and those who would have to deliver the new services. Through the use of ethnographic-style research techniques, as well as tools such as customer journey mapping, storyboarding and persona creation, we helped the students to understand the real lives of the people we spoke to. As working with partners and community members can be difficult to plan and schedule we adopted a flexible approach to project management and delivery, whilst also planning ahead in order to make it as easy as possible for participants in terms of locations, timings, activities and accessibility. Throughout the project, we helped the students to think about the use of technology in social care as well as introducing them to the wider concepts of social innovation. Our approach helped the students to change their thinking and prototype new ways of working.

Outcomes: Following the work we were able to provide the client with a service proposal which described what a new social work offering could look like, along with suggestions on how the programme could be scaled and delivered.