Making it Count

Now that Dott Cornwall has finished, our evaluation has been completed and our people have moved on to pastures new, it seems a good time to look back on the last two years and see what difference we have made.

Highlights for me have to include:

1) The amazing spirit, intelligence and wit of young people presenting their ideas in the Eco Design challenge - and of course Will Coleman's magical prose and Leap Media's energy and passion for education and sustainability.
2) My first visit to Pengegon, meeting Clare Arymar and our trip to the House of Lords to meet Lord Wei.
3) Winning the Media Innovation Awards with the fantastic Dott Shot campaign with design and strategy from SEA Communications and Gendall.
4) The Mirrored Dinner at Rustlers Yachts with the mouthwatering Cornish Produce and fantastic dinner guests.
5) Building a Shelterbox hotel in a night with the brilliant team from Expedition and Pete Kirby's vision, plus loads of goodwill and raising £1,900.
6) Feeling the vibe at the Eden Project for Intersections 2011 conference and putting together 'Common Sense' with Design Week.
7) The audacious and beautiful Cornwall Design Season and the thousands of volunteer hours.
8) The winning student submission for the RSA student prize looking at children in Care and UCF's brilliant workshop for New Designers Show.
9) The Talkaoke at the Royal Cornwall Show and the Energy Playground that was tested to near destruction by about 1,000 kids.
10) Meeting and working with the amazing people of Cornwall in all of our projects, but of course most recently in the big design challenge working with SEA commuications and Two Design on our wonderful Cornwall post it note map.

There are so many hightlights, its isn't fair to choose some above others. We are really proud of our efforts together with Cornwall that have (we hope) shown it is important to think big, but act small - as we tried to describe more eloquently in our Dott Review 'Big Society by Design'.

And a final word to our advisory board and the late Blair Thomson and all who have given us support, challenge and inspiration in all our work.

Dott Cornwall Summer Review

If Dott Cornwall's March event was a Think Tank, then its summer review event was definitely a Do Tank. Held in July at Viners in the grounds of Carvynck, the event saw all the project teams come together for a day to share their methods and processes – and their successes and failures.

Since the teams had last all met together there had been a change of government, so Programme Director Andrea Siodmok kicked off the day with a context setting presentation about the policy context of Dott Cornwall, and outlined how it could be seen as one of the earliest demonstrations of Big Society thinking.

David Cameron has described 'building the Big Society' as giving 'citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.'

'citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.'

The ten Dott Cornwall projects draw on the skills and expertise of professional designers, and bring those designers together with communities, to work together and follow a creative, collaborative design process. The way that these projects draw on the expertise that is inherent within communities, Andrea added, is more like acupuncture – in its ability to tap into energy points – than the traditionally more 'orthopaedic' methods for embedding change in public sector services.

More than simply the on-the-ground or local delivery of national policy, Dott Cornwall works in a way that is both top-down and bottom-up. It's informed by national policy, such as the Big Society, but it also feeds into it by demonstrating the effectiveness of particular design-led approaches. It takes national issues and pilots solutions to them at a local level, involving local people not only in defining the challenges they face but also by engaging them throughout the creative process.

The rest of the day was devoted to exploring exactly how this is done. After each of the project teams had presented their projects PechaKucha style – with the audience very forgiving of those who didn't quite manage to stick to the time limit – all the participants got stuck into a working lunch mapping the design journey of each project.

The afternoon saw more of this hands-on activity, with teams capturing their project methods and sharing with each other their most and least successful approaches and techniques. This was a fascinating insight into the day-to-day realities, joys and frustrations of a Dott project, with diverse methods being used to fulfil a wide range of design and innovation activities:

Engaging communities
From YouTube films to fun at the fair, Community Reporters to kids' design workshops, the teams shared their methods for gathering first hand opinions and experiences from communities and stakeholders.

Raising awareness
A Christmas Tree in Redruth town centre for the first time in years and a dinner party in two venues 300 miles apart were just two of the innovative methods used by teams to make communities and groups aware of their projects.

Mapping and visualising
Teams shared their ideas for mapping service provision across local areas, constructing service blueprints and using storyboards to gain consensus.

Designing together
A giant paper fruit machine, a deck of cards describing different industries and a pile of buckets, pipes and levers were among the resources drawn on, and drawn up, by the design teams in order to help the process of co-design. They also learned that if you are going to design a building using cake you have to be pretty quick to photograph it before it gets eaten...

Testing and refining
These methods were all about making prototypes and getting feedback, whether this meant watching children destroying pieces of playground equipment or piloting a service with a hairdresser and a cafe owner.

After a final session debating design education, the legacy of Dott Cornwall and the lessons learned so far, the teams and other participants headed out into the evening for a barbecue.

You can read more about the design methods used in Dott Cornwall here.

Behind the scenes at the Dott thinktank and masterclass

After a week of storms and horizontal rain, the sun broke through on the morning of our think tank on ‘emerging design practice’ as a welcome respite.

We started to get excited some time before everyone arrived, as the expertly designed delegate packs created by Two came, hot off the press, by courier, in the rain. There was already a palpable sense of anticipation and expectation at the Dott Office.

Our premise for the event was simple; create an event that we would like to attend. Or if Heineken did a design conference...

Technically this involved:
- An inspiring setting on the cliffs of Mawgan Porth, showcasing the best of Cornwall’s sustainable hospitality at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel
- A passionate interdisciplinary group of people with both deep expertise and broad knowledge and expansive interests
- Time for ideas to percolate over two days
- Long lunches and late starts interspersed with intense periods of activity, thought and provocations.
- Personalised design of the ‘touch points’
- An overarching ethos namely ‘going old school’
- An unlimited audience, digitally
- A format that enabled ideas to emerge (see below)

We deliberately created an event that was in itself emergent, based on the idea of open space technology a format, which put simply, is based on the concept that the really important conversations at conferences tend to happen in the coffee breaks and over lunch. This combined with the principle of butterflies or bumblebees, where ‘the law of two feet’ ensures that people move from place to place of interest. This left everything to chance, circumstance and participation.

So we accepted in our format that ideas ‘emerge’ dynamically during conferences based on conversations, rather than captured in pre-prepared powerpoints. This builds on the idea of the charrett. Thought to originate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century. "In the 16th, 17th, and 18th century when travel took long periods, a Charette referred to long carriage rides in which politicians and policy makers would be sequestered together in order to collaborate in solving a set problem over the duration of their journey." And what a journey! Andy Polaine probably travelled the furthest, from Germany, by train.

So we set about to create an unconference such as those created by Wenovski’s design thinkers for day one, where everyone is a speaker and there is no audience.

We asked Lauren Tan, PhD researcher from Dott07 and currently working with University College Falmouth on Dott Cornwall, to scribe the event.

The question we asked was ‘what is emerging design practice’ or ‘what is design in our times’. In many ways we were looking for the key questions rather than solutions. And in many ways this is what emerged.

A shot in the dark

This week we were thrilled to hear that Dott's initial website has been nominated for Media Innovation Award within the Community Web Use category.

We are delighted, both for SEA and for Gendall who did an amazing job bringing the site to life.
From the start it was experimental. We deliberately created a blank canvas and hoped that people would be willing to share with us their thoughts on design in Cornwall. The website, now Dott Shot allows people to upload an image (or a few) of design in Cornwall.

The premise was simple, rather than tell people what design is in a 'top down' way, we wanted to create a space for people to show us design in the real world.

And so you have.

What emerged has been sometimes a traditional view of design such as furniture from Sam Boex or Jethrow Macey's tables. Beautifully constructed pieces that are using innovative new methods of construction.

In places I must say we have wondered about the design story, I didn't expect a dead rabbit from Oliver Udy, but then again I also didn't expect a wave the size of four houses at Porthleven by Jon Penn.

It has been great to see the quality of work promoting sustainable design such as Neil Tinson's fresh take on the branding of 'Colin & Me' using reclaimed materials. Or Matt Hocking's 'Do not disturb' Door Notices made from reclaimed rubber for the Scarlet Hotel.

Sam Lanyon's Chair from Concept Shed caught our imagination so much we have commissioned him to make one for us. As part of our 50+ cares project we will be capturing peoples stories and advice about work using a special prototype chair.

Dott Shot has been a window on Cornwall through the eyes of those who know it well. And as I have spent weekends around the county I have been delighted to find the designed objects in everyday life such as my visit to Coronation Park at Helston the other weekend where I stumbled with joy over Sarah Williams' shot of tessellated tiles

So what next? We are revisiting Dott shot to take it to the next stage. Our images go on show at the Royal Cornwall Museum and we are planning to broaden its reach as planned earlier in the year with the Dott advisory board and Emily Campbell. We are hoping to get lots more people involved, to print some postcards of the best shots and to showcase the best of Cornwall's creativity and ingenuity.

A big thank you to everyone who has spent time giving us your images so far, we love seeing design through your eyes, so keep them coming.