What design research can learn from community development… (1/2)
For the past 6 months I've been mentoring a Community Development Worker in creative engagement methods. Our goal was 'to create a safe space and build a good relationship where shared learning encouraged personal development, increased confidence, and the setting of future goals related to participatory methods and creative engagement.' The process was also really beneficial for me, reflecting on how I've approached projects in the past and how I can learn from a community development approach.
Introducing Caroline, a Community Development Worker from Compassionate Sheffield. The Compassionate Sheffield mission is 'to collaborate with people, communities and organisations, enabling them to do the small things that make a big difference to our life and experience of death'.
We could talk about the incredible work the team are doing in Sheffield for days, but for now, we wanted to share some key reflections on what we have learnt from each other during our fortnightly conversations. My reflections will be found in this blogpost (1/2) and Carolines in the following blogpost (2/2).
Community engagement first
Put simply, the priorities of design research are to gather as much, rich information or data as possible to use to improve a product or service. We're always thinking, how can I best gather, analyse and communicate findings? But we know, in order to get deep, meaningful insights, we need to build relationships and safe spaces for people to talk, explore ideas, play and co-create.
Perhaps we should be taking a community engagement first approach.
Should community engagement more explicitly become the first phase of a project, before any research begins? During this phase, relationships are being built, an understanding of the community established, and a plan of how they want to work with us is co-produced. I'm seeing a lean towards this in recent projects but formalising this in bids and project plans would be really beneficial.
Collaboration with community development workers
It's clear that community development workers have the personable skills needed to engage different groups, they're often doing the work on a daily basis, building relationships and connections across communities. In past projects we've collaborated with care home activity workers, for example, up-skilling them in research methods to work with their connections as a form of 'lay researcher'. But I haven't had the opportunity to collaborate on a research project with a community development worker, yet!
It makes sense that one half of the duo focuses on building relationships, ensuring research activities are appropriate and beneficial for the community, with a long term view of supporting the community going forward, and the other half, focusing on designing the methods, gathering information, playing findings back to participants and communicating the voices of experts by experience to commissioners etc, in ways that work for them. Watch this space!
Untapped knowledge
Finally, I'm reflecting on all the untapped knowledge that community development workers have within them, that is perhaps rarely captured and used in ways to improve products and services. It might take a researcher to work with community development workers, to uncover key insights that they perhaps wouldn't naturally see the value in, as it's just part of their day-to-day experience, and then package this for different purposes and audiences.
It's clear that mentoring Caroline has got my brain ticking, too - and it's nice to document and share this here to refer back to when thinking about collaboration and project planning in the future.
Please see blogpost: (2/2) What community development can learn from design research… for the flip side of the coin - Carolines reflections.