In 2016/17 I undertook a service design assignment at Iriss where I was associate service designer working with Rhiann McLean a project manager, and the Glen Isla project, a women’s criminal justice centre based in Arbroath, to enhance relational approaches.

Buddy was co-designed by women and practitioners from the Glen Isla project, it was developed based on evidence from across women’s criminal justice services, including Glen Isla, that beginning the journey into the criminal justice system can be very challenging. However, we know that this is not an issue that is unique to women’s criminal justice. New beginnings can be hard no matter the setting, so we hope that people from across health and social care services can benefit from using Buddy.

Over the course of the project I facilitated three workshops to co-design a tool to support relationships, focusing on the aforementioned issue of new beginnings. The co-design workshops helped to define areas in the service provision where there could be opportunities for future innovation and ideation.

Using workshop tools like persona profiles, journey mapping and collages etc. helped steer the creation of a design intervention – the Buddy support tool along with the creation of user experience scenarios which we were able to prototype for user feedback.  We were also able to draw on the women’s unique experience of the service which they saw as different to the practitioner expertise and it made them reflect on their own personal journeys and how far they had come.