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.
We're currently looking at ways in which our Design School resources can work better for you. We'll have more to share about what we're working on soon.
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.
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 the Design 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 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.
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.
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.
Design School Lite
A Design School Lite is made up of an initial 30-minute tech orientation session, followed by three 2.5-hour learning sessions— each scheduled two weeks apart.
The sessions give an insight into design thinking and the co-design process, to allow participants to start scoping their own promise-related design project.
By the end of the programme, participants will:
- Have an understanding of co-design
- Be confident in accessing and utilising a range of tools to support the co-design process
- Be ready to start assembling a co-design team.
During the sessions, you will work with others from a range of settings who are united by the ambition to solve ‘promise’ problems. This will make for rich discussions with differing approaches and points of view.
Upcoming Sessions
The next Design School Lite will take place online on the following four dates. Attendees must be able to attend all four sessions.
- Tech Orientation: Thursday 10th September, 9:30–10:00am (30 minutes)
- Session 1: Thursday 17th September, 10:00am–12:30pm (2.5 hours)
- Session 2: Thursday 1st October, 10:00am–12:30pm (2.5 hours)
- Session 3: Thursday 15th October, 10:00am–12:30pm (2.5 hours)
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.
Spotlight Sessions feature different teams from across Scotland sharing their work to keep the promise and how they have overcome problems. They last from 90 minutes to two hours.
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. They last for three hours.
Visit our Events page to sign up to upcoming Sessions and Masterclasses.
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 to 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.
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.