What community development can learn from design research… (2/2)
This blog post is brought to you by Caroline Plenty from Compassionate Sheffield. I’ve been mentoring Caroline in creative engagement methods.
Caroline has a masters in public health, has experience in working creatively with people living with dementia and has an interest in arts based approaches but felt she lacked experience in using creative methods to enable deep thinking to gather peoples experiences and insights. There were creative methods that she wanted to try with the aim of developing her own approach to facilitating community conversations about life, loss and death, and we did just that.
The previous blogpost captures my reflections on ‘what design research can learn from community development’ broken down into three themes; community engagement first, collaboration with community development workers and untapped knowledge. In this blogpost I hand over to Caroline for reflections on the flip side - what community development can learn from design research…
Exploring and unpicking language
Helen started our mentoring by encouraging us both to define creativity, a concept which we each had preconceived ideas of. By exploring what we meant by creativity we had a richer understanding of where each of us were coming from and our perceptions of creativity.
I’ve carried out this process of unpicking language and exploring definitions into my community development work. For instance, asking “what does loss mean to you”, allows people to expand into a broader range of causes of grief, such as the loss of relationships, one’s health or home country, whatever at that time feels most pertinent to them. Similarly exploring the words, and their meanings, used in different languages to talk about death, dying or bereavement has allowed me to gain a richer understanding into someone’s starting point and experiences. This continuously challenges my assumptions, something which I believe is integral to good community development work.
The art of capturing stories and experiences
At the heart of community development are participatory processes which bring people together to approach an issue collectively, uncovering stories, experiences, skills and knowledge is key to starting the work of community development. As Helen articulates in her reflections, capturing in-depth information and data is integral to design research. Throughout our mentoring Helen has shared with me approaches used in design research, which support the capturing of stories, experiences and information, and could be applied to community development.
We’ve explored synthesising themes which have emerged with a community during the session itself, reflecting these back to the group in order to work out next steps, and using verbal feedback, photos and artworks created during a session to complement written feedback. All of these have added to my toolbox of ways to uncover stories and experiences, important building blocks in community development work.
The importance of reflection, evaluation and iterative learning
The design research process used by Helen on projects, such as the Life Café, is at it’s core an iterative process; trialling something, seeking feedback and then refining the product based on this, repeatedly. Then, sharing these findings and final products with others so they can be used on a wider scale.
Taking an iterative approach is also essential to community development, and reflection and evaluation can support this. As well as exploring the importance of reflection, Helen has helped me develop and use analytical skills used in research, and apply them to evaluation. For instance, undertaking thematic analysis of feedback from attendees and facilitators at the Life, Loss and Death Festival 2024 helped identify learning that can now be shared amongst the team, and with co-facilitators at next year’s Festival.
Helen's mentoring has definitely catalysed my interest in evaluation. Not just to explore the impact of programmes such as Compassionate Sheffield, but also to consider how we can improve and develop our work, and share with others what processes potentially led to something working, or not working, with a particular community or setting.
It’s been really beneficial for us both to reflect on the value of learning from different fields and the potential for collaboration between design researchers and community development to harness both sets of skills. In fact, it’s been interesting to recognise our overlap in skills, values and interests the more we spent interrogating our roles, projects and processes. Perhaps there isn’t a vast difference between the two disciplines at all!