Promise Design School
Part of: Supporting you to keep the promise
The Promise Design School helps you find solutions to challenges around keeping the promise.
Work to keep the promise is complex. For those working in the ‘care system,’ there can be a lot of difficulties or barriers when making the changes that are needed.
The Promise Design School is the place where you can take the challenges you come up against, in order to find a solution.
The Promise Design School has co-design at its heart
Co-design allows a wide range of people to contribute meaningfully to solving problems, as ‘experts’ in their own experience.
It helps make sure that solutions to these problems meet the needs of those involved.
Promise Design School Offers
The Promise Design School is flexible: there are a variety of different options available to help you in overcoming barriers. All the places at our Design School are fully funded, so budgets don’t have to get in the way of finding solutions to keeping the promise.
Applications to the September Design Sprint are currently open.
The Co-Design Café provides a bite-size, monthly opportunity for those working to keep the promise to come together and share wins, challenges, and learning from their co-design work.
It’s a space for collaboration, discussions, idea generation and peer learning.
The online events create supportive spaces for those who have taken part in Design School, are undertaking co-design projects, or just starting out with co-design for the first time.
The one-hour sessions aim to:
- Create a supportive space for discussion and peer learning
- Consolidate learning
- Problem-solve through shared experiences
- Build a strong, sustainable network of support across Scotland
- Give a space to work through re-occurring themes which cause people challenges
Visit our events page to search for upcoming Co-Design Café sessions.
Spotlight sessions and masterclasses are designed to equip individuals and teams with practical, problem-solving skills which can help them to understand how design process can help them to keep the promise.
The Spotlight Sessions feature different teams from across Scotland sharing their work to keep the promise and how they have overcome problems. They put a spotlight on stories of real change which others can learn from. They last from 90 minutes to two hours.
The masterclasses are a deep dive into an area where there is a specific problem, showing participants how design tools and techniques can help them to develop solutions. The Masterclasses last for three hours.
Visit our Events page to sign up to upcoming Sessions and Masterclasses.
Visit our Events page to sign up to upcoming Sessions and Masterclasses.
Design School Lite consists of a series of short, engaging sessions designed to introduce people to service design and co-design principles. They include:
- an initial tech orientation session (30 minutes)
- three learning sessions (2.5 hours each)— each scheduled 2 weeks apart with some homework in the middle!
They can help organisations and teams who want to engage with the people that problem affects— but are not sure where to start.
Anyone signing up must be able to attend all four sessions.
Visit our events page to search for upcoming Design School Lite sessions.
Our Co-Design Essentials series aims to provide facilitators with the skills, tools and confidence they need for successful co-design journeys. These three hour sessions are aimed at anyone who is thinking about starting a co-design process or wants a reflective space to consider their current practice.
The courses cover Planning, Facilitating and Creative Tools.
The Full Design Sprint is the core offer of the Design School. It gives people a chance to work through a problem with guided facilitation; challenge assumptions; step into other people shoes to see what the problem is like for them; and develop solutions that can work for those using services, and those working in them.
The sessions take place over two- three days, spread out over a month. They take real problems and implement a 'learn' and 'do' approach. This means that teams can learn new skills at the sessions, then in between sessions, put these into practice in their workplace, to lead authentic co-design spaces that are safe, inclusive and influential.
The sessions take place online, and are perfect for small teams of between 3-5 people.
Alongside the sessions we offer mentoring sessions for projects to access light touch support.
What do others say?
Thoroughly enjoyed being part of the cohort earlier in the year along with my colleagues from MCR Pathways to help us develop a co-design project with young people. We have now had our first cohort of young people take part across the country and are looking forward to engaging more young people in the new academic year. — Lauren Picken, Forth Valley Programme Manager, MCR Pathways
It was extremely supportive and exceeded my expectations.
I’m feeling very optimistic about embedding the promise into the practice of the school.
It was good to get the time to chat and work through problems. We came up with lots of ideas!
Upcoming Workshop
The next Workshop will take place on September 10 and September 24 2025.
Self Serve: Promise Design Tools
The Promise Design tools are free to download, for anyone to use to help to overcome problems they are facing to keeping the promise.
They are facilitation tools, adapted from those commonly used in product design, which can be printed off and used in design sessions.
There are 17 tools which help people to agree collective goals and get agreement from all people involved.
How do you use The Promise Design Tools?
Promise Design Tools Download Folder (Black and White)
All black and white Design Tools in a single folder for download.
Promise Design Tools Download Folder (Colour)
All colour Design Tools in a single folder for download.
Individual Design Tool Selector
When can these tools help you keep the promise?
The Design Tools can help you understand what’s feasible with the time and resources you have.
For example, teachers at a school might realise their ideas around improving education at their school require wider collaboration with schools in their community.
This can help them to think about whether collaboration is possible, or whether they need to come up with an idea they can do by themselves.
The Design Tools can help you think of solutions you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
It might not have occurred to the teachers that collaboration would work for them. But the tools can help them quickly think up lots of possibilities of how this might work, and to see if similar things are happening locally now.
The Design Tools can help you to work with the people you work for, to find the best solution that works for them.
If pupils in the teachers’ school are involved in the design process, they will be able to see that some solutions wouldn’t work in practice. They’ll be able to help work out a solution that keeps them at its centre.
Principles of The Promise Design School
The Promise Design School follows the Scottish Approach to Service Design, which is also used by the Scottish Government. It’s linked to the best practice in service design, and is used by numerous leading companies, the third sector and the public sector.
Service design uses proven tools and practices to create services which work better for people. Some of the principles of service design are that:
- the voice and needs of people are at the centre
- the process of design is collaborative and involves testing, re-doing and refining.