Author: Dr Roberta Signori
For professional designers, a DesignLab might be a stroll in the park. But for non-designers — not to mention, police officers and staff — that is not the case. The amount of pre-conceptions, ingrained habits, knowledge, and thinking that you need to challenge in order to engage in a DesignLab is extensive.
The CCI DesignLab held in Salford in September 2019 — my first DesignLab after joining CCI — was without a doubt a baptism of fire. The sessions, which were spread across two days, were intense and strictly timed - with CCI partners acting as part of a giant machine working at full speed to transform their way of thinking about policing problems. We came out of the DesignLab mentally exhausted, overwhelmed but also excited because we had something new in our hands, which meant that the work (and fun) had only just started. I recall going home the night after the first day of the DesignLab, and realising I completely lost my ability to speak English, and the ability to master my mother tongue as well. I was that exhausted.
The CCI consortium is a multi-disciplinary team which supports six LEAs, including Greater Manchester Police (GMP), in developing toolkits in four key policing areas. Following the principles of the design approach, LEAs undertake ‘Requirements capture’, a process of research for understanding user needs, the context, and potential areas of conflict. In this process, DesignLabs play a pivotal role. A DesignLab brings together all CCI partners, promoting synergies between LEA partners and non-LEA stakeholders, with the aim to engage them in a creative idea development process. During the DesignLab held at the University of Salford in September 2019 the LEAs shared the findings of their requirements capture research with the other CCI Partners. By working in several multidisciplinary sub-teams, we took part in a series of sessions spread over two days. These sessions enabled LEAs to reframe the problems identified during their research, creatively challenge assumptions, and generate new insights, ideas and solutions.
At the time, I could not think of anything more different to GMP’s approach to the development of toolkits than a DesignLab. I joined GMP, one of the LEA partners of CCI, in April 2019, as a researcher working full-time on the CCI project. Since then I have seen several toolkits, operations, products being designed, implemented and evaluated within GMP. In a time of stringent cuts to public funding, evidence-based practices in policing have become fundamental, to ensure that resources are assigned to projects, operations and toolkits which actually work. Effectiveness in terms of costs and impact is fundamental. A board of senior managers based in the Head Quarters are responsible for filtering ideas, and ensuring that limited GMP resources only go to ideas, products and tools with an Evidence Based success mark. A success mark usually requires the collection of hard /quantitative measures of the impact of a toolkit, the preferred one being a reduction in the number of crimes.
Everything is decided at a central level, at GMP headquarters, by a selected group of uniformed and non-uniformed senior staff members. The process of developing a toolkit is usually quite linear: senior managers know the big agenda, they know the figures, and therefore assume they know the problem. They resort to their experience, their data and knowledge to analyse that problem and come up with a solution. That solution, which could be an operation, a tool, a new app, is usually trialled with the intent of collecting some (quantitative) evidence of impact. If the toolkit manages to get that evidence based success mark at the end of the trial, then it is rolled out force wide, meaning that every district, every police station, and every team will be asked to adopt it. It is a linear top-down approach and it does not always run smoothly, especially at the implementation stage, when police officers perceive “yet another task” falling on their head from GMP headquarters, and the only thing they know is that they’ve got to get on with it.
The design approach to innovation has a completely different way of designing toolkits, a bottom-up approach with an additional dimension. First, you start by understanding user needs and identifying potential areas of conflict and problems. Then you analyse this data with the intent of abstracting the original problem, redefining it to foster new perspectives and thinking about the original problem. This dimension of abstraction helps to generate new insight, concepts and options.
During the DesignLab sessions in Salford, LEAs and non-LEA partners were supported in abstracting and reframing the problems, and to creatively explore ideas and potential solutions arising from their requirements to capture research. Some of the LEAs partners I talked with felt uncomfortable, if not frustrated, with the DesignLab sessions, and with the whole requirement capture process in general. To begin with, they struggled to buy-in to the whole “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach. Some of the LEAs partners involved in the DesignLab started their career as police officers, served many years in the districts, and went through each step of the whole police promotion process. They had to prove countless times that, yes, they know their stuff. And that they have their priorities straight. Spending months on requirements capture research, “exploring” a problem they knew inside out, was simply perceived by some of them as a waste of time.
When LEA partners joined the DesignLab, they had to give away control over their narratives about the problems they had identified, and that made them feel uncomfortable. This probably happens to everybody, not just to police officers. I am not an officer and I am not senior, but after spending 4 months out in the districts of Greater Manchester talking to police officers, partners and citizens about issues surrounding Community Policing I started to become pretty sure of what I knew, I had my own narratives on the matter and I was confident that they were solid. During the DesignLab sessions, I felt vaguely uncomfortable when I was asked to put those narratives on the table and invite other people (not as expert as me on that matter) to reframe them. And that was me, after only 4 months “in the field”, with an open researcher mind and fresh eyes. Never mind a senior officer with two decades of experience under their belt.
For some LEA partners, the rules of interaction were challenging as well. Many of them are used to a military style interaction, according to which hierarchy always prevails. Countless times I heard police officers and senior managers address their line managers using the word “boss”, rather than their actual names. In a DesignLab situation, there is no hierarchical structure; no participant’s contribution is weighted on the basis of their rank, academic qualifications, or years of experience. The purpose of interaction is to encourage positive and constructive critique, it is to challenge and rethink the way we define problems and their solutions. During the DesignLab, some LEA partners were trying to re-enforce that hierarchical structure they were so used to in the interaction with other CCI partners. Again, LEA partners had to deconstruct their experience and mind-set in order to effectively engage with the whole process.
Another thing we should consider is that thinking creatively does not come easy, and that is not necessarily due to a lack of creativity per se. LEAs are faced with complex problems and sometimes the awareness of such complexity can be overwhelming. In a recent email conversation about the DesignLab in Salford, a LEA partner told me that the fact that he did not have detailed, exhaustive information about the other LEAs involved and the context in which they operate, actually helped him to release creativity and engage in the sessions with fresh eyes. LEAs were told to be “quick and dirty” when researching and presenting the issues they wanted to address, as opposed to providing a surgical analysis of the problem in the way they were probably used to in their police job. An excessive amount of information tends to frame thinking within overly rigid boundaries, which rarely works in favour of creativity.
So, yes, for all these reasons the DesignLab was hard. Yet, during the sessions, you looked around the tables where the CCI partners were working their socks off and you did not see long faces; nobody was banging their head against the wall, or burning their police badges or showing any other symptoms of an imminent breakdown. In fact, conversations were buzzing; the participants were engaging with enthusiasm and they were actually enjoying themselves. That’s because, despite the challenges, the DesignLab offered to them a unique opportunity, which was like a breath of fresh air.
The police is a fast-paced environment; when you have a problem you need to find a quick and effective solution, and you don’t have the luxury of time. You have citizens, the media, politicians, and regulatory bodies breathing down your neck — each of them with their own demands, interests and priorities, and the police have to address them. All of this against a backdrop of very stretched resources. Imagine the opportunity the CCI project and particularly the DesignLabs gave to LEAs partners: a dedicated space to clear your mind, a multi-disciplinary team, the support of expert designers, funding, and time. Jackpot! During the DesignLab in Salford, once LEA partners managed to overcome the initial frustration and the challenges of having to deconstruct their mind-set, they started to realise that this was an opportunity like no other. And that is when the fun started.
