Taylor Haig

06 Feb Taylor Haig

Late last year, along with three other DJCAD Masters of Design graduates, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the initial stages of a project being managed by Taylor Haig. Taylor Haig specialise in Service Design and have led several key service redesign projects for local authorities across the UK. Lucy Kimbell (now of The Young Foundation) was their lead ‘design thinker’ and the DJCAD team worked closely with her in person and via Skype over several weeks.
The ongoing project is aimed at ‘children’s’ services within Dundee City. From the Taylor Haig blog:

Taylor Haig is advising the Dundee Partnership (Dundee City Council and its partners) who are using a Total Place approach to redesigning services. The aims include understanding more about local citizens’ lived experiences and looking to co-design services.

Gaining access to young people in the system to get a handle on the issues that face services and their clients daily can present challenges but the service workers and young people that we spoke to were incredibly generous with their time, willing to talk openly and frankly about their circumstances, their experiences and how the ‘system’ was supporting or failing them.  Part of my role in all of this was as documentarian, in video and stills, of the processes and outcomes of collecting and sorting of data and facilitation of workshops. Below is an initial rough-cut of early research carried out on Lochee High street. For obvious reasons I can’t/don’t want to show the faces of our interviewees but I did want to capture something of the people and their environment, their story. Primarily I achieved this through footage of hands and feet as well as the audio of the interviews. The audio, for now, has been removed, but hopefully you’ll get a sense of how, visually, the theme could be developed.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60au3dGU6Ok]
Additionally I was able to put my graphics background to good use by putting together an identity for the project – entitled, ‘Be The One’ – which would be included our clipboard sheets, posters, badges and icons for Twitter and Facebook.
The object of the badges was to have two designs; one stating ‘Be The One’, (a call, a challenge, to make a significant difference in someone’s life); the second design proclaims ‘I’m the One’. This badge was to be hand delivered by our young people to those who HAD made a significant impact on their life… who were those people?

As part of our on street research we asked that very question, ‘Who’s the one?’ in your life… the answers varied: “Mum”, “Steve at…” , “No one!”
But as if to illustrate to us the potential and the urgency in getting these services ‘exactly right’, we witnessed, first hand, a genuine success. At our first workshop with representatives from services involved with youth work in Dundee, one of the participants present was in fact one of the ‘names’ written down by an on street interviewee. It was a powerful and genuinely moving moment as we handed out our first ‘I’m the One’ badge to “Lorna from Careers Scotland, Dundee”. (Below is the photo taken of our interviewee and her hand written answer to “Who’s The One?’ several weeks earlier)

It was a great opportunity to be invited to witness experienced Service Designers work. It was especially encouraging to see that the tools and methods we had developed during our Masters projects were so compatible to Taylor Haig’s ‘tried and tested’ methods and that our team was a truly collaborative partner in the process. So thank you to Lucy, Lynne and Richard of Taylor Haig.
Work on the project will continue during 2012 so keep an eye out for updates.