Designing an alternative to custody - lessons

Since last June we ran an incredibly exciting, challenging and ambitious piece of service design in the area of criminal justice and substance misuse. I've already written two blog posts describing the project and the process we undertook with a range of partners. These included a local authority, probation, drug treatment specialists, user representatives, central government and our client, who is interested in scaling this model and delivering it through a payment-by-result framework.

The reason we are particularly excited about this project is that it enabled us to work to our strengths as an innovation organisation, merging design expertise with economic and social research capabilities. I remember speaking to a colleague from IDEO a couple of years ago about their realisation of the need to run service design projects in parallel tracks of user-service and system-organisation. This is a very similar story.

In our case, the two strands of activity were led by myelf (on the service design front) and Sarah (on system mapping and PbR modelling). What this created is a creative tension in our team whereby part of the team focused designing the service from the bottom-up, bringing together insights and expertise of users, families and experts, while the other focused on understanding the system, the flows of funding and accountability, the incentives and hidden interests that lie within it. Throughout the co-design process we tried to always integrate both sides, ensuring we not only get people excited about our emerging service proposition, but also to understand the financial implications and the changes to existing resource allocation and to accountability structures that would have to take place.

It was interesting to see how towards the end of the project, when thinking about growing the service, the system-level, economic strand of work took prominence, for obvious reasons. What was great was the level of integration we had achieved by then, ensuring that economic and system-level considerstaions were still driven by the vision of the user-led service blueprint.

We can't say much more about this project for a few months, while we go through a process of securing funding. We hope that during the summer we can share a lot more abou the process and the detail.