Socialheads
Tech that listens: Designing for relationships, not just workflows
A lot of technology in social care has been bought to manage data, not relationships. Yet research shows children engage better when workers have time and adapt to the child's way of communicating.
In social work, relationships are the work. Yet digital systems often reduce them to checklists.
The IRISS “Insights 34” review on communication in social work concluded that:
“The ability to communicate effectively is central to good practice, but digital tools can both help and hinder this.”
Research led by Shaping Our Lives and King’s College London found that disabled service users valued digital contact only when it supported trust and choice, not when it replaced human connection.
Socialheads is being designed around these findings. The aim is not to digitise care, but to make safe relationships easier to maintain when workloads are high and communication happens mostly online.
Key principles:
- Amplify care, don’t automate it.
- Support reflection: design for wellbeing, not constant alerts.
- Co-design with both sides: workers and young people shape every feature.
By listening to the people who actually use these systems, we can create technology that serves relationships instead of replacing them.
References
- IRISS. Insights 34: Communicating Effectively with Children and Young People. 2012.
- Shaping Our Lives et al. Social Work, Disabled Service Users and Digital Communication Technology: A Practice Guide. 2021.
About Socialheads: We're a UK social enterprise working to create purpose-built communication tools for social care. Our platform is being co-designed with practitioners, young people and organisations to address the real challenges discussed in this article.
Learn more about our work
Written by Jeremy