Building with Butterflies: The Role of Design and Art in Co-creating New Identities for Services

The workshop will build upon and explore the design approach that was developed through a collaboration between Trindlemoss Day Opportunities for people with learning disabilities and two interns from the Glasgow School of Art (GSA). It will involve the interns and the service delivery team sharing their process and learnings and demonstrating some of the key engagement methods from their work, and encourage reflection on the role of art and design in reshaping services.

In North Ayrshire, our learning disability day services underwent a situational change, involving a merging of 2 separate building-based services within a new site. Along with this physical change, we recognised a need for a change in practice and ethos, moving away from a rigid, building based, model of provision, to a much more community oriented/distributed model, integrated with a variety of service and third sector partners. For individuals and staff who had been accessing and working within the services for a long time, this presented a profound shift in thinking and practice. 

Engaging customers, their families, and staff in an ongoing conversation about this process was critical but we tended to default to traditional methods of doing this. Working with interns from GSA provided an opportunity to take a creative, design led co-creation approach to engage with customers and staff. The brief was to deliver artefacts which captured the journey so far and hopes for the future, in a form shaped by the conversations they had, and thereby create a foundation for change. Recognising the need for flexibility to support engagement with customers with a wide range of abilities and communication preferences, the interns developed a variety of approaches including gamifying conversations through the use of physical board games. These are approaches which are best experienced, rather than described.

The work led to a variety of outputs, including a visual identity for the centre to be used in branding; on-site art installations which reflected themes of growth and empowerment; and value and vision statements which underpin all aspects of the work, and which will be core to the identity of the service going forward.

As a hands-on exploration of design-led approaches to co-creation, the workshop will have relevance for anyone seeking to engage service users from marginalised (and other) communities in ways that amplify their voice in an authentic and joyful manner.  The theme of integration will be central to the workshop: pursuing integration with new collaborators; integrating customers and staff in shared conversations; integrating notions of external community identity, reversing the frequently inward facing service discussions; and integrating the personal and collective resources of individuals within creative activity.

Workshop structure:

Presentation: Introduction to Trindlemoss Day Opportunities: our change journey – 5 minutes

Presentation: The work of the GSA interns: new perspectives, new tools – 15 minutes

Activity: Using design based tools – small group activity for workshop participants – 20/30 minutes

Open discussion: Design based thinking and practice as a lever for equity and integration – 15 minutes

Summary and close – 5 minutes