Co-designing Out of Home Care Reform

The Roadmap for Reform: Strong families, safe children, is a key reform being driven by the Victorian Government. One of its aims is strengthening the system response and improving outcomes for children in Out of Home Care (OOHC). Identifying that the industry’s participation was critical to the success of the reform agenda, the Department of Health and Human Services decided to take a co-design approach to creating a future vision of the OOHC system. ThinkPlace was engaged to lead this process and produced a powerful visualisation that is also a platform for change-enabling conversation.

ThinkPlace developed a co-design approach to collaboratively build the desired future state of the OOHC system with industry and the people who use it. Instead of writing a report and finalising the project at this stage, ThinkPlace showed real innovation by using the research artefacts as the basis for a further 2-day intensive workshop with stakeholders from across the sector. Participants were invited to tell narratives of the future that were then combined into an innovative visualisation telling the collective story of the child/young person and their family and carers represented at the centre of all OOHC interactions.

The co-design methods utilised to achieve this powerful future state visualisation provided a platform for the most significant cross-sector collaboration many stakeholders had experienced in their years of engagement in OOHC. The project has since resulted in significant policy change for Kinship Care in Victoria. The following media release provides further detail on the impact delivered through this project: https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/a-new-model-of-kinship-care-across-victoria/.

There are two key design features that are relevant to this entry: 1. ThinkPlace’s unique co-design approach The co-design approach designed for this project utilises the ThinkPlace Design System™, our trademarked approach to generating co-created innovation and design. The Design System is expressed as three diamonds, which emphasise divergent and convergent thinking across three distinct phases. This methodology is significant because it allowed for service design to occur with and for the people who will use the service. Just as importantly it also provided a previously-absent platform for the most significant cross-sector collaboration many stakeholders had experienced in their years of engagement in OOHC. 2. ThinkPlace’s powerful communication design piece ‘the future state visualisation’ Another key example of design innovation on this project is the decision to test and prototype the report and visualisation produced for the research phase of this project with key industry stakeholders. Not only did this create an opportunity for genuine validation of the content it also catalysed sector ownership of the design. Participants were invited to tell narratives of the future during a two-day co-design workshop. Following this, ThinkPlace combined these into a final future state visualisation.