Judith Midgley

In our third Pilotlight pathway we are working with a co-design team of people who deliver and access support in Moray to look at how self-directed support can be used for small business development. Right from the start, co-design team members have been eager to hear real stories from people who have pioneered using self-directed support in this way.  At our second workshop Alex, Barbara and Paul Zealand came to talk to us and to answer questions about how they had used self-directed support to set up and run Alex’s handyman business.

Pilotlight is a project about co-designing pathways to self-directed support for groups of people who have so far been less engaged with the self-directed support agenda.

Co-design can be defined as, “the process of designing with people that will use or deliver a product or service.” (UK Design Council). Co-design may be seen as the first step in co-production, “which means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.” (NESTA)

In our last blog we talked about how we intended working with the co-design teams in Moray and the Scottish Borders. We have now held workshops with both teams. We are nearing the end of our ‘Discover’ (research) phase of the pathway in Moray and part of the way through this phase in the Scottish Borders.