This week shifted the focus toward ideation but opened with a set of important cautions about how not to approach it. The instinct when faced with a problem is to jump straight to a solution and this is one of the most common mistakes in design. Jumping to solutions before the problem is properly understood means you end up designing something that addresses the symptom rather than the cause. The emphasis this week was on resisting that instinct and staying in the problem space long enough to actually understand it.
A related point was the importance of focusing on structural changes rather than purely communication ones. In the context of a project like ours this felt particularly relevant. A lot of proposed solutions to problems within the prison system involve better communication, more leaflets, more signage, more information given to prisoners on release. But communication fixes rarely solve structural failures. If the system is broken, telling people about it more clearly does not fix it. The structure itself needs to change.
The third consideration was not to avoid system constraints. It is tempting in a design exercise to imagine an ideal world where budgets are unlimited, organisations cooperate perfectly and legislation is no barrier. But designing within that fiction produces solutions that cannot survive contact with reality. Constraints are not obstacles to good design, they are part of the brief. Working within them honestly is what produces something that could actually be implemented.
Finally the session flagged the importance of not designing for the ideal user. In the context of digital exclusion this meant not assuming a level of digital confidence, literacy or access that many users simply do not have. Designing for the most capable version of your user and hoping everyone else keeps up is one of the most common ways a service fails the people who need it most.
The session asked us to consider what makes major life transitions fail. This felt directly connected to the subject matter of our project given that release from prison is one of the most significant and poorly supported transitions a person can go through.
The three reasons I identified were as follows.
The first is the absence of a bridge. Transitions fail when there is nothing connecting one state to the next. The person goes from a highly structured environment to complete autonomy overnight with no gradual handover, no preparation and no support in the gap between. That cliff edge is where most of the damage happens.
The second is unresolved baggage. Transitions fail when unresolved problems from the previous state follow the person into the new one. In the context of our project that is exactly what debt does. It is a problem that accumulates during the sentence and arrives at the door on release day, making the transition harder before it has even begun.
The third is a lack of agency. Transitions fail when the person has no sense of ownership over what is happening to them. If everything is done to them rather than with them or by them, they arrive at the other side without the confidence or the habits needed to function independently. This connects directly to what Barry told us about how prison routines breed dependence rather than resilience.
The session introduced rapid empathy mapping as a quick ideation tool. Unlike a full empathy map which is built up carefully from research, a rapid empathy map is produced under time pressure to force instinctive thinking about a user's experience. The speed is the point. It stops you overthinking and pushes you to draw on what you already know about the person you are designing for.
The four quadrants of says, thinks, does and feels remained the same structure but the exercise was about speed and gut reaction rather than precision. It is a useful tool at the start of an ideation session to get the group thinking from the user's perspective before jumping into solution mode.
For our project this method would later feed directly into the empathy map I produced for Dean as part of the user and design research phase, which was a more developed and evidence grounded version of the same exercise.