Scope 10 (SC-10) Card
DBD Cornucopia > Deck > Scope > 10
Card Details - Ten of Scope
Abbreviation
SC-10
Card's focus
The focus of this card is feature inadequacy
Threat to claimants
Stanley omits building in some necessary activities required of claimants while making/maintaining a claim (e.g. between service touchpoints, during touchpoints), and/or the activities are provided inadequately or only partially (e.g. do not span all the situations which can occur like separation from partner but still co-habiting, do not include all aspects of certain personal circumstances like mature student, self-employed)
Threat to claimants
Stanley omits building in some necessary activities required of claimants while making/maintaining a claim (e.g. between service touchpoints, during touchpoints), and/or the activities are provided inadequately or only partially (e.g. do not span all the situations which can occur like separation from partner but still co-habiting, do not include all aspects of certain personal circumstances like mature student, self-employed).
Some examples of how this threat could lead to harms (negative effects on claimants)
The design recommendations and implications relevant to the card are listed below in the next section, but even those can be somewhat abstract and difficult to think about during practical day-to-day implementation. Therefore, some example harms are provided to complement the more formal research outputs. These examples are unique per card, and are only published on these web pages (i.e. in no other project outputs).
- Claimants have to keep reporting null/zero earnings pointlessly (due to their employment status), requiring them to remember to do so every month
- Claimants themselves have to inform landlords that their claims have ended
The examples are to help understand the threat on the card, not to suppress thinking and innovation. Incorporating these examples exactly, or closely matching ones, should be scored down when playing DBD Cornucopia as a game.
Applicable design recommendations and implications
These are reproduced here from Research Briefing N
Support claimants’ own ecosystems
- Recognise how wider ecosystems contribute to social protection service delivery
For these systems, the 'service user' is rarely just one person and there should be provision for other actors in people's wider ecosystems. Facilitate and aid these existing assets by enabling, encouraging and promoting information sharing, additional user roles with different privileges, delegated access, real-time-integrations, and other ways to involve the assistance of others. - Generate structured data for visibility and re-use by claimants and other actors
Provide, signpost and explain functionalities to span the fullest range of claimant activities, so as to reduce the need for and use of messaging/chat interactions (like the UC Journal) which result in unstructured data. Ensure the structured data enables re-use to increase wider ecosystem efficiencies: provide for recording and keeping full records of every interaction by every channel (including files, form submissions, all communications), and provide methods to ensure information can be found and referred to, and easily exported or shared with others as required.
Reduce claimants’ interaction burdens with digital welfare
- Shift the burden of gathering evidence from claimants towards the state
Transfer effort from claimants to the state, to improve timeliness and reliability. Prioritise the implementation of dig- ital processes to gather or import, check and use necessary data from internal and external providers. Change claimants' role to verifying the data, rather than providing it, and ensure claimants have visibility and control over derived status attributes.
Embrace a wider ecosystem and fuller claimant activity viewpoint for digitised public services
- Legitimise extensibility and customisation of digital infrastructure
Deploy technology in ways that will permit, support and advocate integration with digital welfare by other actors. Provide timely, free and open access to system information, supporting content, and details of upcoming changes and updates to support these efforts. - Design for the needs of claimants’ lives covering their expansive activities
Recognise that service take-up requires more than direct interactions with the state. Ensure design is not restricted to service delivery between interaction points of claimants and the state within a 'user journey', and instead span all actors and mediating instruments that come together to achieve the claimant's goal.
Design systems which support the division of labour with claimants' ecosystems
- Recognise changing trust effects in design of digital systems
Claimants have different opinions about the trustworthiness and motivations of the state, unfamiliar claimants and other actors, which affect their tolerance to accept harms, requiring flexibility in choosing assistance and recognition how this trust can change over time: prior to making a claim, while maintaining a claim, and after ceasing to be a claimant.
Design to assist claimants across the full span of their own activities
- Provide capabilities for activities prior to, during and after direct public service interaction
Consider the temporal aspects of claimants' activities across the whole lifecycle from before making a claim to after ending an award. Acknowledge how earlier and repeated interventions can reduce later harms, empower claimants and increase the capabilities of claimants. - Accept, permit and encourage direct sole-use, shared-use, assisted use, and indirect intermediated use and proxy use of systems
The nature of activities requires flexibility in how claimants and other actors in ecosystems interact with each other and with state systems, and these can change over time.
General Notes
Card values (i.e. '10' for this card) are for game play and are not correlated with the severity of harm. This is because threats cannot be ranked directly since they can affect individuals in different ways due to situations and circumstances, or affect fewer or more claimants, or the harms can arise in claimants' support networks and wider society.
The threat description uses a person's name as the "attacker" (i.e. 'Stanley' for this card), which can be thought of someone involved with implementation. They could have any role which influence digitisation. So they could be a database administrator, or a copy writer, or a quality assurance specialist, etc, or all of these. Everyone could have some influence on the claimant threat described. The names were randomly selected from those currently most popular as given names for boys and girls (UK Office for National Statistics).
The example harms provided are drawn from the research data (which explored not only parts of existing services but also the effects of possible changes to those), from the author's own knowledge of web application development and testing, the author's own experience of helping citizens to claim Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and from suggestions submitted by other people (make a suggestion). The threats and example harms do not necessarily exist in the current UC or PIP deployments or in ecosystems around those services, but they might well do.
All the cards in this Scope suit are: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A
The other suits in the deck are: Architecture, Agency, Trust, Porosity and Cornucopia (plus Jokers).