Direct Action reborn

ThinkPublic did a session at the MPS09 meeting– they are one of the organisers – about their work using the kind of 2-way participative interactions the web has created, to re-design services. It’s not necessarily a question of using the web – just of modelling its kind of conversations. Sometimes you see the principles of web 2.0 projected back into face to face situations.

Their take is that re-design by participation is more powerful than re-design through reports, consultation, analysis, synthesis and any kind of management planning. Looks convincing when you see projects like early-stage Alzheimer patients working with late-stage patients to re-design dementia services. Interesting that in general this kind of participative planning has little place for written word, and works better through video communication or direct action. When they had the brief to redesign hospital waiting areas, they got the patients to do it themselves even down to shifting the chairs around.




The ThinkPublic spin is that this approach not only delivers better service designs, but (more significantly) changes us from consumers of public services to owners. Transactions with a service like Health, in this approach, are not moments when we take goods and deplete the cupboard. They are moments when we share the benefit of our experience and re-invest it. This puts the direct action back into the internet in a more fundamental and creative way than say Carrotmob, which is simply using the web as a better mailing system to trigger real world direct actions.