Let’s use the lens of poverty: bringing people living in poverty into service design

Theme: Inclusive design

The UK government launched its Child Poverty Strategy in 2025, noting that 4.5 million children are living in poverty - and their parents are, too. People living in poverty have to use more government services, and those services have a bigger impact on their lives.

This session will describe how to apply a poverty lens to your service design and the value of designing with people living in poverty rather than for them.

This is a workshop, so expect to share your tips and ideas about how to support people living in poverty when they use your service and how you currently learn from them.

We will close with some inspiring thoughts about the joy and resilience that we have found in communities in deprived areas, and how we can all benefit from strengths-based approaches that focus on what people can do.

Participant takeaways:

• understand the context of users: deep entrenched poverty is highly likely for users of many government services, and some government services are only for people living in poverty
• apply a poverty lens: how does/might this hit differently for people living in poverty? Does poverty help to explain anything that’s happening here?
• design with us not for us: how are you involving people living in your work? Is there anyone on the team from a less-privileged background?
• find the joy and fun: people living in poverty are just as likely as anyone else to be intelligent, thoughtful, proud, humorous, kind … but they are also much more likely to have been denied opportunities, or have been unable to take up an opportunity for reasons outside of their control
• strengths-based approaches: stop saying what people can't do and focus on what they can