Designing public services from strengths, not deficits

Theme: Strengths-based design

Public services are often designed by identifying what is missing - vulnerable users, service gaps, unmet needs. But what changes when we start from strengths instead?

This session introduces a strengths-based approach to design in the public sector. Drawing from case studies with unpaid carers, veterans in care homes and community health networks, the session explores how language, facilitation and research practice shape participation.

Through interactive exercises, participants will learn how to identify community assets, rethink deficit-based briefs, and design conversations that bring forward local knowledge and lived expertise.

Participant takeaways:

• a clearer understanding of how starting from strengths rather than problems changes the way we conduct research, design public services and facilitate co-design workshops
• practical insight into the idea that strengths are relational and situational, how to identify the conditions that allow strengths to surface and how to design services and conversations that support those conditions
• greater awareness of how everyday institutional language (such as ‘vulnerable’, ‘hard to reach’ or ‘service user’) can influence confidence, identity and participation
• a simple toolkit you can apply immediately in your own work
• greater confidence in working with lived experience in a way that is respectful, grounded and supportive of meaningful participation

This session: 

• includes interaction

• has a number cap: 30 participants