Ireland's got the User-Factor

On Wednesday, October 10th, the second USER-FACTOR knowledge exchange workshop; developing design pilots, took place at the Aviva Stadium; Ireland’s national rugby and football stadium. The workshop aimed to frame each of the partners' design pilots.

In the lead up to the workshop, each partner developed a case study of design support from their region. These case studies will form part of a handbook of good practices ready for publication in December. Together, we explored the value that design offers the existing support landscape and developed a list of good practices and potential pitfalls to guide the development of our pilots.

After a project recap and discussing the research undertaken to date. Partners then framed their design support pilots in Activity 1 facilitated by questions in the following areas;

Design support objective;
Regional challenges and policy drivers;
Project managers;
Target audience;
Designers and mentors;
Desired impact.

Activity 2 focused on strategies needed to engage and recruit the stakeholders identified in Activity 1, and explored the structure of the pilots at a conceptual level. The framed design supports had nuanced objectives, but fell into two main categories:

Developing a tailor-made design support intervention for SMEs in collaboration with existing support services;

Evaluating current support offering/s and supporting SMEs in the journey of application to engagement.

Similarities that emerged across all framed pilots included:
The need to promote the value of design internally and externally;
A strong focus on collaboration in developing and delivering the pilots.

Partners will begin to engage with stakeholders in the coming months to finalise the development of their pilot and to start to recruit their target audience and mentors. At the next meeting in March in Santiago Del Compostela, pilot implementation plans will be presented.