What is a design team doing inside a social services agency?
BACI’s design team works 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 are taking 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
We support teams 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 will 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:
Stitched Services
Developing a new co-pilot role and service model to ‘stitch’ together existing services, like BEST Employment, Community Connnectors, Outreach and Kudoz, using a library of new tools.
NewBE
Testing different ways to welcome new staff, introducing new kinds of opportunities and information into the process. NewBE didn’t stick around but our lessons learned still do.
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.
Some Social Innovation Projects and Milestones
The Design Team doesn’t just work inside BACI — we’ve also supported projects with our partners at InWithForward, Kinsight and posAbilities, such as:
Kinsight LIFE-Based Service Pilot
The Design Team supported the design of tools and the start of a new model at Kinsight which is similar to our Stitched Services.
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/
CoMakeDo
A digital platform for experiences started in response to the pandemic. Run by the Kudoz IWF team, BACI’s Design Team supported the startup phase and did some research with people who joined calls.
https://www.comakedo.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 design@gobaci.com