Participle

Participle creates future services with and for the public. Most attempts at innovation and service improvement start within existing institutions and ask how they can be reformed.  Participle starts from the individual and their community, unlocking a unique set of insights and motivations, which are then applied to the problems that need to be addressed.

This bottom up process of learning from and understanding individuals, and the life they want to lead, is simultaneously combined with a top down process of institutional and financial analysis which draws on our broad networks of academic and professional knowledge.  A typical team on a health project, for example, would include residents of a particular community, doctors, nurses and a wide range of advisors from different walks of life, different locations, all with their sleeves rolled up working alongside each other.

The Participle team is inter-disciplinary.  Our team includes designers, social anthropologists, researchers, policy analysts, economists, domain experts, business people, organisational change people… to name just a few. Each project draws on these skills and a wider networks of expertise and knowledge.  All have different ways of working, different processes that feed into a collective effort of demonstrating how the relationship between the state and citizen can take new forms.  The way we run projects is an evolution of a previously developed Transformation Design process, and provides the common language in the approach that we use.

At its simplest, the design process is a visual, problem solving process.  It helps us look at complicated issues from new angles and work together to develop new solutions. Getting there involves observation of people and places, analysing research carried out by others and ourselves, gathering new insights and developing ideas from those insights, building a business case (making sure our solutions are affordable, desirable and work in practice).  Because it is a visual process, we rapidly test ideas over and over again, rejecting, building and synthesising, emerging with a tested new public service that is a clear solution to an emerging social need. This process is a product of working in this field for over ten years.

The manner in which we approach developing new public services is guided by the following 4 fundamental principles:

• Collaboration - Participle works closely with our partner organisations (who bring knowledge and funding), and we have developed workshops and communication processes that address the issue of getting involvement from a wide variety of individuals within these organisations. Historically, this has been a key issue in project success with private, central and local government partners;
• User Led - Our design led process specifically allows both potential end users and existing front line staff, amongst other specialists, to be a driving force in the design of new services. Participle is not an organisation that simply sits in our offices and comes up with ideas. Rather, we form ideas with new untapped specialists - end users and front line workers;
• Highly Iterative - Our approach also means we test and scale in a different way.  We rapidly apply our thinking and insights to the development of ‘prototypes’.  These prototypes involve early service models developed in situ, which are then tested and improved in rapid cycles;
• End Result focused - By using user-centred design techniques that source untapped specialists, we design services that we know people want, and that people will use. Once these have been designed, we are very focused on prototyping, beta testing and rolling out services. We are not an organisation that has a history of good ideas never implemented. We exist to design new services that are implemented by our partners, or independently.

These principles run through all the work carried out at Participle.

Working with us

‘Participle have been great to work with. Talent and commitment in abundance and an approach to problem solving that challenges current thinking’.
Annie Shepperd, Chief Executive, London Borough of Southwark

We tend to run projects that last between 9 and 12 months, some needing deeper and broader analysis in a subject area, some that use existing knowledge and experience in a more focused manner. Different situations demand different approaches. Projects can also extend into longer prototyping and piloting stages.

All our projects are run by a Project Lead, who will lead a core team to work within the local area of focus. The core team includes experts from the core Participle team, individuals with sector expertise in the area of focus, economic and business specialists, as well as Participle associates, all of whom ensure the project can draw on the necessary skills, combining local and external knowledge.

In our experience, every time we develop a project, our process needs to be slightly tailored. However, all processes typically run over five stages.

1. Scoping - The scoping stage starts with an examination of the environments we will be working within, with a specific view to evaluating the ability to adapt and change. We will examine the marketplace, the key organisations, the key experts, the physical locations and existing services, as well as building a unique approach to understanding the end users. We typically start with a key question. This might be broad, like ‘How can we enhance youth-adult relationships?’, or more focused like ‘Why are there so many socially isolated individuals in a specific area?’ We will examine the question as a starting point, exploring the issues around it, and examine the problems and the blocks. Through this process we will refine the general question to one that can be solved. These enquiries will develop the foundation stone of our project. The result will be a robust project hypothesis, for example - ‘Working with the personal motivations of isolated older people and nurturing relationships will lead to increased participation in the community.’

2. Research - At the heart of our approach, Participle captures and uses the expert views of end users. We tend to carry out two strands of research. First, we carry out direct user research. Designers are very good at capturing the rational and emotional balance of life. We use bespoke user research techniques that range from deep involvement (eg. living with individuals for long periods of time), using tools that enable individuals to capture their lives (eg. innovative diary, lifestyle and social network capturing techniques), group work (eg. empowering disengaged young men to make their own film), to rapidly experimenting with some potential solutions (eg. if you become an older person’s chauffeur for a week, what changes, what do you learn?) to name just a few. We develop new approaches for all our projects. Second, we carry out indirect research. This can involve observations of people and places, relevant literature reviews, a policy review, a look at innovations in this area, as well as both an organisational and business examination of the delivery of existing services. Simultaneously we begin the ‘top down’ part of the process, looking at the economics of service provision, institutional incentives, experience from other parts of the country and the world.

3. Idea Generation - In this stage, we narrow things down and a series of service solution ideas around a particular avenue are explored. A number of solutions and elements of an emerging new public service concept are quickly visualised and discussed from all the insights gathered in the research stage.

4. Prototyping - This stage looks to build the different elements of the new service idea, with a view to re-introducing the end user and frontline staff to gain feedback. The concepts are developed into stories and scenarios that are then rapidly tested with target users and front-line service providers, the existing concepts will be challenged and are developed into more detailed workable propositions. The prototype is then ‘mocked-up’ into believable service components or products, or instructions for new ways of doing things. This may include online, telephone, or people delivered elements. We develop the service well enough for the users to ‘believe in’ and experience it. Again, this is trialed with real users, who feed back allowing an iterative process of improvement and refinement to the proposition. This continual refinement through user feedback is key to producing usable quality products and services, and is fundamentally different from a pilot project in which the emphasis would be on measuring effectiveness of a pre-designed service.  At the same time, at this stage we develop an actual business plan, a document that makes sure our solutions are affordable, desirable and work in practice. We ask fundamental questions such as - How will it be funded? Who will run it?

5. Delivery - At this point we review what is likely to be launched at the end of the project. This can vary, but we usually launch a new social enterprises around the new service idea. This new enterprise needs to be developed as a business, including all planning processes, financing structures, piloting and testing the service, before it is launched as a fully operational service.

To see the past outputs of the above process, please visit Our Projects.