Give&Take (G&T) 2014-2017

I took part in the third project Give&Take (G&T) between 2014 and 2017, and it has indeed influenced my perception of public-private partnerships and the possible roles of co-designing and co-producing within such constellations. Many of the lessons from the SI project were also transferred to the G&T project, but I do not draw directly on empirical examples from this engagement in this thesis.

The Give&Take project aims to co-design an innovative digital platform that enables senior citizens and possible third parties such as professional ‘care providers’ to support and create reciprocal exchange services, creating new opportunities for senior citizens to contribute to society as both volunteers and caregivers within their local communities. The Give&Take project is funded under the EU Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) program, and the project partners are ITU, TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), KADK, Frederiksberg Municipality and the private technology partners Danish Socialsquare and Portuguese TakeTheWind.

Through the co-design of social and digital media innovation the Give&Take project aims to:

• Strengthen the quality of life of senior citizens through occupation and social engagement as a key to mental, social and physical fitness

• Explore the societal potential of informal community support and civic engagement for tasks currently supported by the public sector

• Improve the ability of senior citizens to live as independently as possible.

Similar to SI the focus intends to shift from public care services to more peer-supported civil engagement and informal community support that not only empowers seniors but also reduces dependencies and increased public consumption. Several projects have demonstrated how volunteering networks are defining new learning opportunities and ways to contribute to society. Senior citizens have knowledge, experience, time and energy to contribute as citizens, volunteers, and particularly as workers and consumers. Some senior citizens desire an engagement in society, and the public sector needs to engage civic society in order for the welfare system to last. The Give&Take platform solution is intended to interface with the public elderly care system as well as with independent local senior organizations.

The G&T project co-designs with users such as senior citizens and professional ‘care providers’ in Austria and Denmark. The initial exploration of current experiences of service exchange and of needs, values, and criteria for an effective service exchange is done in co-design workshops with groups of 20-25 senior citizens. The project uses a mixed-methods approach based on design laboratories thinking, including dialogue meetings, workshops and public events.

The second project phase works with a Living Lab-based approach with both ‘interest based’ and

‘location-based’ communities of smaller groups of citizens. Through these Living Labs new sharing practices are rehearsed and adapted within the Give&Take platform. In the final phase the revised prototype is explored by both the professional care providers and citizens in an ‘Open Community’ mode within a few selected communities in Austria and Denmark.

To ensure a sustainable business model and societal integration of the G&T solution the project strives to engage professionals representing local neighbourhoods, senior organizations, care organizations and public care units, since private or public elderly care organisations who might enable or pay for the service have an interest in measuring an economic advantage or increased efficiency through the G&T service.

Ill. 1.3.3 Timeline of the three years of G&T

First year: Co-design workshop. Second year: Living Lab mode and third year: Open Community mode

1.3.4 Accountability and trails between the research projects and the thesis program In this last section describing my empirical foundation I wish to briefly look at the three projects in order to highlight the different project set-ups as the foundation for discussing the roles of co-design within public and social innovation projects. All projects are related to developing new practices within and towards three different ‘interfaces’ of different SME industries, design academia and developing new municipal and societal practices towards ‘society at large’ (Fallman 2008), ranging from recycling to promoting social well-being by community building and welfare technology for sharing everyday practices.

Ill. 1.3.4 Overview of interrelations and trajectories of the three projects DAIM

Design Anthropological Innovation Model; bringing together ethnographic explorations and design interventions with user engagement in user-driven innovation

SI

SeniorInteraktion; Welfare technology for social interaction

G&T

Give&Take; Empowering volunteers and members of communities with better digital tools

Funded by the Danish Enterprise and companies³⁴, and five private design companies.

Funded by the EBST program for user-driven innovation, placing the user at the centre of innovation of citizen-centred services.³⁵

The project collaboration consists of one municipal organisation SUF:

servicing 10% of all elderly care in DK, with about 10,000 employees³⁶, two research organizations, one NGO, and eight companies providing services, technology and products targeted senior citizens.

Funded by the EU program for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL).

The project consortium consists of three research organizations, two SME technology providers and one municipal organisation.

The DAIM Book and Box with inspiration materials e.g. three Some of the activities following one

Living Lab are still on-going and a group of seniors still meet in the Valbypark Friday at 10 o’clock.

The G&T magazines

Some activities following one Living Lab are still on-going and a group of seniors still make use of the Give &

Take platform to communicate and report from the walking tours.

The close collaboration with five commercial design companies, the SPIRE centre and the organization Vestforbrænding framed the DAIM collaboration in the direction of ‘design practice’ in order to suggest and develop applicable strategies, principles and ‘tools’ that designers could take as an inspiration and apply within their practices. The partner setup in SI seemed to have another focus. Here the municipality was project owners and the initial nine private companies, for different reasons reduced to four more or less active partners collaborating with the two research institutions. The SI partners from different sectors and areas did not seem

34 https://www.vestfor.dk/Om-Vestforbraending/Ejerkreds (10/08 2018)

35 Danish: Den strategiske indsats: Brugeren i centrum for innovation af borgernære velfærdsydelser

36 https://www.kk.dk/artikel/arbejdspladsen (10/08 2018)

interested in reflecting on or developing innovation models, tools and approaches in a broader sense, but were more concerned with expanding their respective business areas or products towards the group of seniors. Nonetheless their respective product areas e.g. a shopping centre, healthcare technology, mobile phones and a bag-rollator did influence the initial direction of the project. These stakes also framed the directions, technologies and innovation areas, rather than the interests and concerns of senior citizens, who were not yet seen as ‘partners’ within the initial part of the process.

Therefore, accounting and reporting to ‘design practice’ during the SI project seemed less obvious than the DAIM project. The final publication, SeniorInteraktion – Innovation Gennem Dialog, was written in Danish to reach the broader community of civil servants working with social healthcare and welfare services. I am still uncertain whether the municipality perceived their role within the project as also learning and reflecting on their own internal practices. My guess is that they did not prioritize this part of the project as much as some of the academic partners had intended, and the politics (such as a new Mayor within the Health and Care Administration after the project began) also changed the priorities of the themes during the project.

But my PhD program, enrolled within these three larger research projects, also shifted.

From collaborating and engaging within the DAIM arenas of ‘design practice’ I drifted towards

‘design exploration’ interfacing with the ‘society at large’ exploring the boundaries of Living Labs within the public space and ad hoc participation of citizens. The long-term Living Lab approach was established without known methods to build from. The SI project from my perspective did not have much anchoring within existing ‘design practice’ but was rather investigating the explorative intersections between public services and new private initiatives supporting

communities of senior citizens. But as one third of my PhD position was funded by my practical engagement with the SI project, one third by the Centre for Design Research and the last third from teaching at KADK, my PhD program also more naturally looped towards the academic interface of ‘design studies’, and I now had some time to enter the academic landscape of

Anthropology and Performance Studies. In addition I was teaching and exploring this intersection with design students in a more explorative manner than with the design practitioners from DAIM.

The trajectory and last transition from the SI project to G&T again led to other shifts as this collaboration had an international focus and similar to the ‘Tour-de-Action’ workshops in the US, we learnt a lot about the international and local differences by being reminded of the great variations of how to best mobilize and support the differences between municipal vs. faith-based communities of elderly care. Such differences seemed to alter how to mobilize but also engage with networks around care supporters. There were many differences between engaging the Austrian vs. the Danish civil and public context, but there were also smaller differences between

the context of working with the municipality of Copenhagen and later with Frederiksberg.

Copenhagen being a larger municipality they might have more experience in innovation projects, whereas Frederiksberg, being aware of their minor scale, often chooses already existing and tested solutions and is generally not taking the lead in the development of new innovation.³⁷ The organisational dissimilarities working with the Municipality of Frederiksberg as opposed to Copenhagen also made a difference since the anchoring of the project seemed to rely mainly on one person (and a few colleagues), whereas the SI project was naturally more solidly anchored within the SUF department, as they were the project leads and owners. That SUF were project leaders during the SI meant that some processes were led internally without much engagement of other partners, and these long internal durations without considerable interaction among partners seemed to conflict with the faster pace of working that private partners were accustomed to. Also, the internal processes within the municipal organisation were not as transparent as design researchers might have wished for. But many of the same issues of mobilizing and engaging the civil servants – working closely with the citizens³⁸ – seemed to be somewhat similar throughout SI and G&T. However, alternative ways of funding civil servants’ hours of participation were improvised on the fly within the G&T project.

The private technology partners of G&T were more interested in exploring the business potentials and use barriers of applying the platform as a commercial product in itself than the partnering design bureaus in DAIM who were interested in exploring co-design and user-driven innovation models, tools and the inherent design processes. But the overall project group of G&T seemed to work a bit more aligned, gathering all partners ‘regularly’ despite the long distance, compared to the final years of the SI project.

My PhD project started with a strong accountability towards design practice and design communities (due to the many active ‘practicing’ design partners in DAIM and my own ‘applied’

design focus). However, it has drifted slightly towards the fields of Design Exploration and Design Studies during the SI project, as I myself also engaged in the more ‘theoretical

investigations’ and an exploratory mode of applying Performance Studies. Where the academic DAIM partners shared a strong interest in the fields of Anthropology and Theatre due to the collaboration with SPIRE (working closely with the theatre troupe DACAPO) and the overall framing of DAIM, the SI project did not seem to share one main academic ‘field’ of interest beside Co-Design. The SI project covered both HCI domains of technologies and social media designed to support everyday social interaction, such as ‘tickets-to-talk’, ‘twittering about

37 From personal conversation with a partner from Frederiksberg Municipality.

38 Danish: fagprofessionelle

activities’ and technology of everyday innovation ‘to notice and be noticed as part of everyday activities’. As well as ‘mobile and scalable platforms’ that is suggested to ‘grow with the senior’

when the senior citizen needs more support from the health system, due to the technological interests from the academic partners from ITU, but also domain and technology partners as HTC mobile phones, Falck, Abilia, and Inuse. Personally, I continued within the theoretical studies of Anthropology, Theatre and Performance Studies. I have further engaged with the interface of

‘Design Explorations’ towards the interests of the ‘society at large’ trailing the well-known approaches of ‘design labs’ to the younger cousins ‘Living Labs’. Living Labs within SI and G&T both aimed to initiate and support senior communities bridging the interests of slight public backing from public Health Centres and private or NGO organisations such as Humankoncept, Ældresagen, Samvirkende Menighedsplejer³⁹ and AKB København⁴⁰

A personal focus of this PhD thesis within the SI project has been on how to invite possible partners into the design and Living Labs and further how to best depart from the labs, considering that professional designers need to step aside and step out as more distanced reflection partners for the remaining partners, in order to make others engage and establish their own living practices within or without labs. We must both support a continuing implementation of practices within others’ work lives and everyday lives (without designers being on board all time), but also reflect on how we best assist others in reaching some sense of ‘completion or closure’ as a rounding off of project collaborations even while some partners continue to engage in further developments.

Until now I have described how design is in transition towards ‘the social’ by pointing to how a few design authors have been describing this shift through the last three decades

transitioning design for post-industrial production – from Branzi’s Design and the Second Modernity to Manzini’s Design when Everybody Designs. The authors’ voices have been woven into a few examples from my own journey entering different design arenas of educational institutions such as KADK in Copenhagen, DAE in Eindhoven and POLIMI in Milano, within transitional and liminal positions such as entering as a design student leaping to exchanges within other environments, to where I stand today as a co-design researcher. I have also briefly given a more present overview of how I encountered some events of social design ‘out there’ within

international environments of design communities and their peer networks e.g. Medea at K3 and

39 A faith-based NGO (folkekirkelig/sognediakonal) parish for the diaconal obligation and service to act for people who are vulnerable or in a severe life situation, where we worked to support civil servants in developing a concept of ‘Elderly Men’s cooking & dining’ (Mandemad).

40 A non-profit housing organization owned by the tenants, with more than 8,000 homes all over Copenhagen, where we worked with a local civic counsellor (boligsocial rådgiver) in the social housing complex Stjernen to support some of her communities of both a senior community (Hyggeklubben) and an ethnic women’s group (Jasmin).

their Malmö Living Labs; Northwestern University’s ABCD communities near Lake/Pulaski and the district of Pilsen; IIT in Chicago; the University of Washington in Seattle and their

collaboration with the IDEA Space, and finally Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons in New York.

All encounters took place about five years ago when ‘swamp-diving’, touring and rambling in Salone Satellites. Acting as the empirical foundation for this thesis I have further presented the project journey of the three innovation projects I have been part of, and I have introduced the peers who have intersected the performative spheres of Design Anthropology, co-designing Design & the Social and ‘swamp-diving’ the design research environments within the Oresund region.

But now it is time for a more current invitation: This is a call for action for attentive social designers to follow my invitation to embark on a current programmatic vision of co-design as Everyday Theatre.