Olivia Friend-Spencer
(She/Her)
I am a service designer with a research background in critical gender and critical disability studies, with an interest in health. I work in social research for health and social care in the third sector, looking to put lived experience at the heart of service design. My interest lies in the transformation of culture and practice to find systemic, fair solutions for those that work for and interact with core services in public life.
Complaint Collective
With over 60% of employees in the UK experiencing discrimination in the workplace, it is no surprise that workplace complaints are on the rise. Current systems discourage complaining through systemic issues, creating instances of administrative violence, delivering subpar resolutions, and creating a hostile environment for a potentially transformative process to happen.
By treating complaints as singular issues, organisations ignore the innovative potential of a complaint to provide a foundation for systemic change.
Sara Ahmed claims complaining is a way of “modelling the world you wish for”, and this project attempts to harness that potential. Co-designing with stakeholders at Young Women’s Movement Scotland resulted in modelling the Complaints Collective – a horizontally managed, democratic complaint administration board.
The Collective take shared responsibility for the complaint and complainant, focussing on delivering a transparent, fair, kind, process which produces recommendations for future change within an organisation, through the creation of a toolkit to aid the Collective in supporting collective decision making putting the complainant at the heart of the process.
