What WAS a design team doing inside a social services agency?
For many years, BACI’s design team worked within the agency and with our partners to rethink and redesign services, support our staff’s capacity to innovate, and work with folks with disabilities — to design with them and encourage them to be involved in design and advocacy projects.
What type of design?
Service design!
We continue to take a human-centred design approach to social innovation. Service design is about zooming in and out to see someone’s journey through life and designing whatever tool is needed to address issues or improve outcomes. We strive for an equity-centred approach to design and hope to build capacity in our organization and in the community for social design.
How do we work?
Facilitation and Design Thinking
Teams are encouraged to look at problems in new ways. We can do this by visualizing the journey people take through their services, or by doing some research and evaluation. Then we look at ways to understand the deeper problems and brainstorm new solutions.
Ideating and Testing
Once there are ideas for how to address issues, we use design methods to sketch and mock up different solutions. We test ideas out and learn as much as we can. Then we look and see if an idea is working and how we might implement it in existing routines.
Prototyping and Implementing
When we have big ideas and projects, we may spend a long time in the prototyping and implementation phase. This means we are designing as we go, learning from what is happening and making adjustments. We never see a project as fully complete and always want to find new ways to improve and enhance our services.
Some of our projects:
Rights Handbook
A communication and accessibility project to explore how to better inform and empower folks to understand their rights and responsibilities.
Pod Model
An in-progress project to design a new service model for group-based Community Inclusion, supporting the teams in development and research.
LSN Service Mapping
Supporting the Life Sharing team to visualize their team processes to better understand, document and address pain points in their service journey.
Wider Social Research and Development at BACI
Finding new and better ways of doing things has been part of the fabric of the organization since BACI was founded by families over 60 years ago.
Since then, BACI has been pushing boundaries, asking lots of questions, and knowing that there is always room to do things differently. BACI’s commitment to learning and growth has evolved over the years — from shifting towards community-based supports, exploring social enterprise, to new service models. Social Research and Development has always had a place at BACI. This timeline shows the evolution of Social R&D and the projects and initiatives that have come from that journey.
A Key Partnership
Degrees of Change
A partnership in Social Research and Development with InWithForward, Kinsight & posAbilities to create better lives for the people we serve and more engaging work for our staff.
Some Social Innovation Projects and Milestones
Community Connectors
A partnership between 4 agencies to build more caring communities and to connect people with natural supports.
buildingcaringcommunities.ca
The Starter Project
New partner InWithForward (IWF) moved into BACI housing in partnership with posAbilites and Kinsight.
Kudoz
From The Starter Project came Kudoz — an experience platform connecting people with and without disabilities to splendid things to do, together.
Kudoz.ca
5th Space
A project with agency partners and IWF to bring staff at all levels into the design and prototyping process.
More on 5th Space >
Real Talk
Coming from the 5th Space ‘Ask a Dude’ project, Real Talk is a sexual health initiative aimed at people with cognitive disabilities and their supporters. Our goal is to help people feel more comfortable with having honest conversations about dating, love, relationships and sex. Check out their website for educational videos and events.
real-talk.org
Stitched Services
Providing well-coordinated adaptable supports that help people to reach bigger goals. It’s a combination of BEST Employment Services, Community Connectors, Outreach Services and Kudoz. It’s a support that has collaboration and flexibility at its core. We expect the mix of supports to change over time as people learn and grow.
Grounded Space
A social innovation launchpad bringing in 3 Teams from BACI, posAbilities and Kinsight, along with IWF.
More on Grounded Space>
BACI Design Team
After finishing Grounded Space, a formal BACI Design Team is started to pursue new projects inside and outside the agency.
The Design Team doesn’t just work inside BACI — we’ve also supported projects with our partners at InWithForward, Kinsight and posAbilities, such as:
Meraki
This posAbilities prototype started during the Grounded Space project as a way to bring soul, creativity and heart to people. The Design Team has lightly supported testing efforts and coordination at BACI.
https://www.merakiboxes.com/
CURIKO
An initiative that sparks curiosity and grows connections. Everyone is invited to join this community of people with and without disabilities to access free online and in-person experiences.
https://www.curiko.ca/
Want to find out more about what we do?
Want to learn more about our embedded design practice?
Do you have an idea for a project?
Email [email protected]