Scope J (SC-J) Card

Card Details - Jack of Scope

Abbreviation

SC-J

Card's focus

The focus of this card is mismatches

Threat to claimants

Elliot perpetrates simplistic assumptions about the realities of claimants' everyday lives which makes the calculation and checking of award payments difficult, and/or payments are unstable and difficult to predict

Threat to claimants

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).

Award payment amounts are forever being adjusted and corrected, which means the system is incomprehensible to claimants, making them feel disempowered and helpless
Claimants have a low opinion of the service because the activities for reporting changes resulting from normal life events are clunky and slow, and this view of the service spreads causing some eligible citizens not to claim
Claimants discover that payments are out of step with things like rent and childcare costs, necessitating getting into debt

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 NO2. Multiple cards reference each design implication.

Acknowledge claimants as people in digital design

Prioritise claimants' interests over system efficiencies
All digital welfare design processes, methods and decision-making should prioritise claimants' needs to achieve best outcomes for individuals rather than system efficiencies. Organisational knowledge and resources should be utilised to this respect including intervening in advance to identify matters that affect claims or what claimants may have forgotten about.

Embrace a wider ecosystem and fuller claimant activity viewpoint for digitised public services

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 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.

General Notes

Card values (i.e. 'Jack' 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. 'Elliot' 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).