Centre for Innovative Justice Perpetrator Service Mapping

In response to recommendation 85 of the 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria, the Centre of Innovative Justice at RMIT embarked upon a challenging process on behalf of the Victorian Government to map the roles and responsibilities of 92 individual government and non-government agencies and service providers. ThinkPlace were engaged to assist the Centre of Innovative Justice with transforming their resultant dataset into a highly accessible and compelling set of information maps that clearly identify the gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies in the perpetrator intervention and prevention service offering in Victoria.

ThinkPlace demonstrated real design innovation in this project by proposing to transform a dataset containing the multiple roles and responsibilities of 92 service providers into a clear and compelling set of information maps. While it is not usual practice to map service provision visually, we successfully distilled a vast and complex dataset into a simple and accessible visual format that highlights gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies in the perpetrator intervention and prevention service offering in Victoria. By proposing this solution, ThinkPlace took a largely inaccessible Excel spreadsheet and transformed it into a highly visual artefact that all stakeholders can successfully utilise.

By making sense of a complex system in an accessible and useful way we were able to stimulate conversation between the agencies and service providers who are regularly in contact with perpetrators. They also helped locate potential opportunities for development of consistent practices and principles across the ecosystem. The resulting report has been used by the Centre for Innovative Justice and the Victorian Government as a canvas to reimagine the roles of different agents in the system and to prompt discussion regarding roles and responsibilities between organisations who deal with perpetrators.

This highly-collaborative project made use of ThinkPlace’s experience with co-design in the family violence research domain. It tackled the difficult task of visualising an extremely complex network of social systems and then successfully synthesised that information into coherent and communicable messages for a wide variety of audiences. The resultant visualisations served as supplementary to the main report by the Victorian Government in response to Recommendation 85 of the Royal Commission and will now allow for a much wider range of stakeholders to access and understand this information.