ThePublicOffice

Using video ethnography, ThePublicOffice workshops help participants to see with their own eyes how other citizens actually live their daily lives, understand how they feel, and crucially to understand how services are experienced. We use real stories of families’ engagements with public services. Typically, these families’ insights as service users tell a powerful story about:

• Poor collaboration between public services
• The struggle to get the right information at the right time
• Public services being poorly set up to deal with common life events
• Public services not responding to the needs of both individuals and their families
• Customers becoming ‘experts’ in order to make the system work for them

We have a series of specially commissioned films and are currently adding new stories, most of which cut across different public services and show the complexity of users’ interactions. Through our partnership with Naked Eye Research, experts in ethnographic research, we are able to produce films tailored to particular client needs. This may mean focusing on specific local issues or particular kinds of services.

Earlier this year, we spent time with five very different families. We wanted to find out how real people use and feel about public services. We talked to them about challenging episodes in their lives-their highs and their lows. We asked them what they considered important. We explored the gaps between their needs and the priorities of public services. And we asked them what they’d do to improve the public services they use.

• Exploring how public services could be different
• Collective problem-solving and designing solutions

“The videos are fantastic and moving – really bring public services debate to life and provide compelling reasons for change.”

National Consumer Council