About the Design School
Part of: Design School
The Design School helps people work together to create services that work well.
It connects and supports:
- the people who benefit from services, and
- the people who deliver them.
It helps these people work together to create services that work well, by helping them learn principles of service design.
Care experienced people must be involved in service design decisions
People who use public services – like schools or hospitals – should be involved in how they’re designed.
The Independent Care Review was clear:
- that if children, young people and families aren't involved in designing services, they won't get the support they need.
- that children, young people and families must be part of decision-making around how services work.
The Promise Scotland is committed to making sure care experienced people are decision makers.
That means the choices they make and the work they do will make a real difference to how services are designed. Doing this means that Scotland is far more likely to end up with services that #KeepThePromise.
So the Design School plays a part in making this happen. It will help Scotland to:
- make sense of what care experienced people say,
- act on the insights they have, and
- understand what gaps still exist in their services.
To make this happen, The Promise Scotland is working closely with the Scottish Government's Office of the Chief Designer.
Quick Design School Links
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3 Design School Pathways
Design Champions
In partnership with colleagues at Who Cares? Scotland, The Promise Scotland is currently developing a pathway that supports care-experienced people to become Design Champions.
Design Champions take part in a programme which offers a foundational knowledge of design thinking. It involves:
- interactive training,
- mentorship, and
- real world opportunities to take part in co-design.
Design School LIVE Change Projects
LIVE Change Projects are hosted by The Promise Scotland, and support people who are actively working on service redesign. The Projects help these people learn new design skills as they deliver change over 4-6 months.
As part of a Change Project, the Design School offers around 4 days of design training with mentoring throughout. This emphasises supporting the live co-design of services.
Design School Challenge
In all it does, The Design School is constantly listening to:
- care-experienced people, and
- people who redesign services.
There's always new information about what works, and where there are gaps in delivering change. Through listening to this, the School can respond quickly and creatively to issues where service design may be useful.
A Design School Challenge is a way of addressing issues like this. It can be initiated when a problem is identified, and it brings together design champions and the workforce to try and find a solution.
The Design School programme offers three pathways, depending on your starting point:
- Influencing change. For people who have experienced services and want to use this experience to change how things happen in the future.
- Embedding co-design. For people who want the services they lead to be co-designed.
- Fixing a specific problem. Sometimes it will be clear that not enough is being done to solve a specific problem. We can bring people together around an issue to think differently.
No matter which pathway you choose, you'll be able to:
- access training,
- develop skills, and
- receive mentoring.
This will help you understand service design better, and help you see how you can use it to bring about real change.
More about the Design School
Learning from the Design School will be available to everyone
By winter 2022, some of what the Design School and has created will be available to the public.
This will include:
- its guidance around service design,
- its tools around service design,
- the methods it uses when approaching service design, and
- the ideas that students have come up with while learning service design.
Joining the Design School
How to join the Promise Design School on one of its three design pathways.
Pinky Promise Design School
The Pinky Promise Design School will give care experienced children a way to help design services that work for them and their peers.
Design School
The Design School connects and supports people who benefit from services, and people who deliver them.