This week I am…

…mostly on a course.  You know, like the Old Days when people went on training courses.

One day, not so long ago, I had to design a workshop for a group of people in which I needed them to think creatively so they could come up with exciting ways to completely re-think public services.  All I could think of was to get them to write some things on post-it notes and stick them up on the wall.  BORING.  I bored myself just thinking about it.

So I decided I need to wake up my Right Brain.  It’s clearly not pulling its weight, leaving my Left Brain to run rampant around the playground of my mind with its metaphorical health and safety checks and age restrictions and conditions of use.

Idly browsing this amazing thing called the internet I chanced upon some interesting sounding short courses at Central St Martins and signed up.  In particular, a course called ’100 Design Projects in a Week’ caught my eye.  What fun!

Despite my early morning nerves on the first day, it’s super cool.  I’m thinking I’ll try and post what I’ve done each day by way of sort of archiving as well as sharing with both my readers (thanks Mum and Lizzie!)

So as soon as we arrived the teacher Rod got us to copy some typography (that’s design speak for letters) out on a big sheet of paper.  He gave us example letters all in different fonts and we had to choose a different font for each letter and think hard about where we were putting the letters on the page.  Here’s what I did:

Apparently there’s implicit tension in what I’ve done here as I’ve left a lot of blank space on the left hand side.  Either that or I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to leave space for other things…  It’s smudgy because we used charcoal, which I somehow managed to get all over my clean jumper.  Some people really went for it with this exercise and took up the whole page with huge letters, or made little logos out of arranging the letters.  The eagle eyed among you will notice that the letters spell ‘chaos’ but in a funny order.  See what he did there?

That was really a warm-up and the next task was to use words to map out our morning so far.  You weren’t allowed any pictures, only words.  I cheated a bit:

The kiss was a bit of a diversion

Next thing was to make up a masthead for a fictional magazine called ‘Typography Monthly’.  I was a bit indecisive on this one and ended up thinking that short of being able to recreate comic sans just to irritate them there was nothing that would impress a typographer so I left it blank for them to draw their own header:

Quickly on from that we had to invent our own typography using only two shapes (you could choose between square, triangle, rectangle, diamond, and circle).  Mine ended up feeling like a sort of secret code towards the end and you couldn’t really tell it was a type face but that sort of made it more fun:

Continuing on the alphabetical theme we then had to make up our own characters as additions to the alphabet.  They were supposed to represent sounds (e.g. ‘ch’ or ‘sh’).  I went for ‘hmm’ and ‘ugh’, which summed up my relationship with the medium of pencil:

Following the ‘chaos’ theme from earlier, we designed a cover for a fictional CD which would contain ‘the sound of chaos’.  My mind was instantly drawn to JLS pre-cursors Ultimate Kaos, but I decided against an obscure 90s pop reference and went for this:

I had fun scribbling on the back.

After lunch the theme changed and was supposed to be about ‘value in a capitalist society’.  There are a few lefties in the class so this made me groan inwardly but it was pretty good in the end.  The first task was to ‘subvert’ a photocopy of a £10 note.  Most people drew a moustache on Her Maj and that was really my first thought to but I decided that would be a little obvious and I was a bit bored of drawing so I painted it green and made it into a bow tie, of course.

Continuing the theme, we were asked to design a credit card.  I got a bit carried away with this one because as we nerds know, credit cards are on their way to the bin that also contains mini-discs and fax machines.  So I wireframed a contactless payment app.

I know, I know!  Of course I got so involved in that I sort of didn’t start the next project until I only had a few seconds left so it’s not my favourite thing.  We had to design our own bank note.  Not sure if the picture is clear enough, but it’s got lots of sayings on it like ‘one for me, one for you’:

At this point I realise I’ve moved back to using pencil because it’s the medium I’m most familiar with, but really I’ve decided that I actually don’t like pencil.  It’s not very decisive and it’s too easy to keep correcting yourself, which is fine if you’ve got ages but not really if you’re being pelted with design briefs* every five minutes.  It wouldn’t hurt me to be more decisive in this or in life generally.  Nonetheless I pressed on with the next job of re-designing the sign for Las Vegas.  N.B. the result is a slightly more ‘HBO’ design if you know what I mean.

There’s a story behind this, which is that when I went travelling around the USA with my other half after university we stayed in a hostel in down town Las Vegas, which is the bit no one actually goes to.  Even taxi drivers refused to take us there.  Sure enough, we were woken one night by four gunshots and screaming.  A guy was shot literally outside the hostel and as our room overlooked the street we could see the whole thing.  As you can imagine, Vegas has never really held any charm for us and we couldn’t wait to get out of there.  *Shudder*

A feature of downtown Vegas was homelessness and so the next brief wasn’t really a surprise – we were asked to design a sign that a homeless person might hold that might actually convince people to give them money, rather than the usual wonky cardboard signs you see.  I was inspired by a homeless person who accosted me on the street recently and told me a series of silly yet hilarious jokes before asking for some money.  I gave him some cash gladly because he made me properly LOL (Q: Why couldn’t the drummer get through the door?  A: Because of his hi-hat!)

At the same time there’s nothing funny about homelessness and the ‘knock knock’ thing makes me slightly uncomfortable as well.

The last brief of the day was a bit random but gave us a chance to work with something other than paper and pen.  We were told to design AND MAKE some jewelry for Fidel Castro.  I made him a crown/tiara which has sort of barbed wirey bits on it.  I thought a) he needs to get in touch with his feminine side; b) he’s got this sort of messianic thing going on about him and c) he’s into military stuff like barbed wire.

One girl did this amazing thing of making a ring with another ring rigidly attached.  One ring was for his finger and the other was for his cigar to go through.  There really are some amazingly talented people on the course.

Phew.  And that was day one.  I was tired but happy at the end – I learned a bit about my style and have tried to be a bit more decisive.  There are also some really cool things in there that I will totally ask people to do in workshops as a way of freeing their mind a bit more, so watch out for jewelry-making for dictators at a workshop near you!

Education, Education, Education

I’ve blogged before about schools and how we teach young people, and recently I came across this fantastic blog post by Alberto Cottica.

I love this bit:

As for socializing children, school does an excellent job: it teaches them not to raise their voice, to arrive on time and so on. However, in this area too school encodes a model of a nineteenth century hierarchical society: its values are obedience, predictability, conformity.

Co-incidentally I discovered this RSA Animated video separately and I’m such a fan that I’m embedding it here as well. Aside from being a great talk that is beautifully articulated verbally, the animation just makes it even better.  As someone who thinks best in pictures this really helped me get more out of the talk.  If only school had used tricks like that too…

 

Social Innovation Camp

We totally won!!!

When I last posted we were frantically trying to develop the site and pull together a presentation on our ideas, and fewer than 24 hours later it was all over and Mypolice.org was declared the winning idea at Social Innovation Camp 2009.

There’s a sort of overview available on the blog we’ve set up and if you want to be kept updated on how the project progresses over the next few months you can sign up on the website.  Oh, and it’s @mypolice on Twitter.   Notwithstanding some technical hitches on the day, our presentation was ace as we had some video clips from some actual real Glaswegians talking about their attitudes towards the police.  When they’re ready I’ll link to them as they’re really worth a look/laugh.

The prize is some money, plus some free developer days, plus some business mentoring and a strong network of people who are in the know.  The idea is quite simple so I don’t think it will take huge amounts of energy to get it up and running nicely, it’s just the inevitable struggle of getting the police to dabble with the site that will need all our patience/tenacity.  Let me know if you know any friendly bobbys who might be interested in having a chat about it.

The limits of geography are annoying me – most of the others on the team are based in Glasgow so being down in London while meetings are going on is a bit frustrating.  Hopefully I’ll stay involved, perhaps working with the police down here as  I get the impression that the Met is a whole other kettle of coppers…

Sicamp update

This weekend I’m at Social Innovation Camp in Glasgow (actual Scotland).

I’m working on MyPolice.org – a website where people can tell each other about their experiences of the police.  The idea is that public feedback will help the police to give a better service.  Although the idea isn’t exactly social innovation (something similar has worked for PatientOpinion and the NHS) it’s still a really nifty idea that’s fairly simple but potentially powerful.

So far we’ve gone nuts with the flipchart, post-its and whiteboard:

The group I’m in totally rocks – no egos and everyone working well together.  Yes, really.  The team (8 of us) is really strong on the design side, with about 4 service designers in our midst, so the site has been designed and mocked-up already.  It’s being coded as I type, though I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to show at tomorrow’s presentation.

The main thing is going to be showing how we’ll work with the police to help them use the site to improve services.  No one thinks the police are going to jump at the idea, but maybe we’ll find a few coppers who are willing to give it a try and get involved.  If that does happen it will probably at a local level (Police Community Support Officers etc), though we have chatted it through with Nick Keane from the National Police Improvement Agency.

I’ll post here if we win, but even if we don’t I think the idea is still totally viable.  Wish us luck!

12 Steps to changing the world

I have this addiction to trying to change things, as you can gather from this blog, and it’s a bane theme of my life that I find myself dissatisfied with The World and feel compelled to do something about it.  By ‘The World’ I probably mean social injustice.  Why can’t I be one of those people who just mind their own business?

Anyway, as part of this quest to make some sort of impact I went along to The School of Life‘s event How to Make a Difference last week with Dominic Campbell.  He tweeted from the event so you can check out some of his tweets here, here and here.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but the whole thing was brilliant.  I came away with a step-by-step practical guide on how to change the world, complete with theory and case studies.  Amazing.

Maurice Glasman spoke about the Alinsky approach to community organising and showed how slavishly following the 12 rules Alinsky set out can actually work.  How does he know?  because that’s exactly what Obama did.  And whatever you think of Obama, you can’t deny that his campaign worked.  Glasman also gave us some personal examples of how it works from his experience of working with the London Living Wage campaign.

There are a few hang-ups I have to get over before I can totally make this approach work – for one I’m rubbish at conflict and have a tendency to want everyone to play nicely.  This is completely unrealistic but undoubtedly a product of my upbringing.  I can think of worse hang-ups to have, but the fact is that social change requires conflict.  So from now on I’ll be saying: Suck it up, Nerd.

As long as you can get over the discomfort of conflict and accept that there needs to be a leader, I think these 12 rules will do very nicely.  Alinsky is my new hero:

The Rulez

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have
2. Never go outside the expertise of your people
3. Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your enemy
4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon
6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag
8. Keep the pressure on.  Never let up.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself
10. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive
11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative
12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it

Lots of these need more explanation than I’ve got space to give, but happily Alynski wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, which I’ve already ordered Social change: sorted.

Social Innovation Camp nerdiness

I’ve chucked in a couple of ideas for Social Innovation Camp next month, which takes place in Scotland.  I’ll be going there regardless of whether my ideas get picked but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.  Here they are:

Jumb.le and Knowyourmind (which I think is actually not dissimilar to this idea:  DebateWise)

I totally recommend having a look at the list of ideas submitted this time – there’s absolutely loads of cool ideas there.

Why participatory budgeting is like the Eurovision Song Contest

I just saw this link posted on Twitter about how American gargantuan chain store Target is using a Facebook application to get its customers to vote for which of 10 charities they would like Target to donate some of their profits to.

The link came from a couple of public sector types I follow (like this dude and this fella) with the following question:  could we have a Facebook application like this for government (specifically local councils I imagine) to get people involved in ‘participatory budgeting’?  Presumably the idea being that the council puts forward a bunch of departments/initiatives (children, community safety, recession help, road repairs etc etc) and we all have a chance to say which of these we’d prefer them to spend our money on and in what proportion.  Democracy in action, right?

Wrong.  Participatory budgeting is a complete sham, just like the Eurovision Song Contest.

Here’s why:

1. You don’t get to choose who represents the UK in Europe.  You think you do because they’ve got that rip-off tele-voting thing but actually you only get to choose between a few acts that have been pre-selected by the production company to spend your money on and they’re all crap.  Just like in participatory budgeting in which the council sets the policy areas you can choose to fund with your hard earned money – no space for innovation or alternative services and you have to just pick the least worst option all with the illusion of democracy.

2. You don’t get to pick whether the UK sends an act to the contest or not and you’ll have the same conversation in your living room every year about how we shouldn’t bother taking part in the contest because it’s a fix anyway and what a waste of money it is. But there’s nothing you can do about it, just like you don’t get to pick whether you pay tax or not and you have the same conversation over and over about how your hard earned money is squandered by the government.  Thing is, if we were allowed a national debate about whether it’s worth putting some poor sucker up for Eurovision each year we might decide it is worth it because Eurovision is a beloved institution.  At least we would have made a positive choice.  If we could have an open debate about whether it’s worth paying tax and having a local authority coordinate some of the things we can’t be bothered to do I think a lot of people would decide that on balance it’s worth it, provided we get better value for money.

3. You get blamed if we don’t win.  While we’re in our living rooms shouting at the TV about the tactical voting, the official Eurovision position is ‘well you selected your country’s song, so you’ve got no one to blame but yourselves if you picked a dud’.  While we’re all saying ‘but we didn’t pick it!  We were given a false choice between a bunch of rubbish options – this is not an expression of our collective will!’  So it is with participatory budgeting – say if you pick ‘Children’ as deserving of the larger proportion of your cash, it’s your fault that the pavement outside your house didn’t get fixed – after all they asked you what you wanted and you told them children were more important than pavements.  This, we are told, is a ‘policy trade-off’ and it needs to be explained to us that we can’t have our cake and eat it.

Participatory budgeting makes the government feel better about its decisions.  It adds a perceived level of accountability and it educates people about the ‘tough choices’ that government has to make so we pity the hard job of councils.  Balancing a shrinking budget is undeniably hard, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to trade off essential services, it should be a challenge to introduce innovation.  Redesigning (and co-designing) services so that they meet the needs of the people who really need them, letting those who can fix problems themselves get on with it by freeing up data and removing bureaucracy, having an open debate about the value of public services, letting institutions become porous so that good ideas can easily be introduced, giving back individuals’ data so they can become better informed – these are all things the public sector can do today to make sure that we don’t end up with the policy equivalent of this:

Let’s get rid of schools

I was totally excited to read this post on ‘Hacking Education’, which I found referenced on Johnnie Moore’s blog while I was catching up with my out-of-control Google Reader subscriptions.

People who know me have heard me rant about education for a while.  In summary, I hated school and it wasn’t the right place for me to learn.  I did OK at it, but it wasn’t because of school, it was in spite of it.  I mean does this look like an inspiring place to learn?

The world of social care is going through some pretty fundamental shifts – one of the coolest things is the idea of personal budgets which allow people to have a bit more control over what care they get.  In my view it doesn’t go far enough, but that’s for another day.

What does this have to do with schools?  Well, nothing at the moment.  But imagine if, instead of being shoved in a school, you had a personal education budget that would give you more control over how you learned.  Instead of sitting in maths lessons (my personal nadir) I would have used a bit of cash to go travelling.

That might sound like a bit of a doss but think about the far more useful skills I could have gained at a younger age:  Languages and communication skills, resourcefulness, confidence, general knowledge, budgeting – the list goes on.

Backpacking round Europe wouldn’t be for everyone, but the sheer wealth of ways there are to learn should be opened up to young people.  Of course, some people love school; it provides structure, routine, discipline, social interaction and much more, so maybe the title of this post is a little bit sensationalist   Perhaps it would be better to say that everyone should be entitled to the freedom to learn in the way that best suits them.

Sure, the implementation would need a bit of thinking about, but in principle that would be how I would hack education.