4 July 2012 - In partnership with the Heritage Lottery Fund and Big Lottery Fund, Nesta brought together park practitioners, civic innovators, local authorities, community entrepreneurs and those in associated sectors to discuss pressing areas for innovation.
Lots of people think innovation is just ideas… in fact it is a process of finding those ideas, developing ideas that arent new and applying those ideas – failing, amending, reapplying until you achieve the desired impact.
One of the most famous examples of prototyping is James Dyson’s vacuum cleaner – it took five years and 5,126 prototypes to perfect the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson’s engineers make a lot of prototypes, quickly and cheaply from card and foam. Later they make cheap working models from plastic moulds. Each prototype uncovers small design flaws, and leads to an improved version.
Service designers follow similar design processes in the creation of services. Lots of activities happen through the development and testing of products and services, including visualising user personas, mapping customer journeys and touch-points, and testing with end users and customers.
Usually this work is done best with the close involvement of users or frontline staff to develop and refine the idea in practice.
There are lots of tools for turning a promising idea into something which can be tested in reality. In the private and public sectors, these processes are often undertaken by design professionals, but some of these development methods are easy to learn how to do. Nesta has developed a range of practical resources for helping people to develop and test ideas. These draw on our experience of working with service designers and practitioners in the development of public services.