Co-designing with residents in a pandemic

Southwark Council is one of London’s largest local authorities. Its Great Estates programme invests in the estates where thousands of residents live.

Support the Great Estates programme with resident research and design during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the usual ways of meeting people on estates were not possible. The original brief was to build one prototype.

Early on, senior staff showed us a long list of ideas that had not been tested with residents. One prototype would only have tested one of them. We recommended a toolkit showing council teams how to research and test ideas themselves, and the council agreed.

We worked in four steps. We met a first group of residents to talk about belonging, their relationship with the council, young people, green space, cleanliness and safety. Residents then photographed places that mattered to them, filmed places that needed work, and invited friends and family to a round table.

We trained the first group as community advocates in a short introduction to user research. They then led hour-long group discussions with people on their estates, producing more than 10 hours of recordings. In all, 45 residents across seven estates took part.

I was delivery lead and account lead. I led the work from scoping through research and co-design to the toolkit handover, agreed the change of brief with the council, and managed the delivery process so the final materials were ready for the council team to use.