ALEKSANDRA KOZAWSKA
PERSONAL PROJECT JOURNAL
ALEKSANDRA KOZAWSKA
PERSONAL PROJECT JOURNAL
Special thanks to Adela, Ross and Tommy from the Garnethill Multicultural Center for their great support.
GLASGOW 2015
INTRODUCTION The book is a record of my personal journey during a three month long project at the Glasgow School of Art in collaboration with the Scottish Government. This term, the emphasis was put on the social/political role of design. The aim was to explore ways to bring people’s skills and assets together in order to develop a sustainable partnership for a “creative collective”. Our focus laid on developing a creative collective for families for their mutual benefit. The work was concluded with the final presentation with the Scottish government on the 7th of April. The Personal Project Journal is a record of the process from my reflective perspective. It points out my role in the particular parts of the projects and comments on the ups and downs of the design process and decisions that have been taken. It focuses more on the “backstage” process of the project, final result of which is presented in the project book.
ABOUT ME Hi, my name is Aleksandra Kozawska. I come from Product Design background (BA Italian and Design, University College London/Politecnico di Milano), but I have also experience as a graphic designer, writer and translator. I came to Glasgow School of Arts to study MDes Design Innovation and Service Design. This is the second group project realised together with a great Service Design team: Fiona McAra InĂŞs Seixas Yi-Haur Lin Shiyu Ji It has been a pleasure to work with you!
CONTENTS
Group Process My Process Representation
8 9
BRIEF REFINEMENT Labyrinth 2
16 17
BUILD UNDERSTANDING Labyrinth 1
10 11
General Brief First Approaches Case Studies
12 13 14
Identify Collective Our Brief First Reflections Stakeholders
18 19 19 20
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CONTENTS
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY Labyrinth 3
22 23
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT Labyrinth 4
42 43
Focus Questions “It takes a village..” Engagement Tools Field Research Interviews Cost vs Trust Midterm Presentation Crisis Iain’s Workshop The Power of Co-Design Family Design Jam Insights Extended Family First Concept Feedback
24 25 26 27 28 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 40
Prototype Event The Folks’ Insights Your Glasgow Map Feedback Mock Up & Final Presentation Role of Design General Reflections Motivation Line References
44 45 46 48 49 50 51 52 54 56
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GROUP PROCESS
We were asked to move away from standard design process representation as a double diamond (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver) and create our own terminology and process description. As a group, we felt that the process that we went through can be still divided into four main phases: two when we tried to understand what the brief is about and how can we narrow it down to a more specific topic, and the two phases of developing the project and the final design of a collective.
Secondly, we refined our brief that focused on families with children to help them come together. We started this project phase with several personal assumptions about what families need which were later informed by interviews with families and organizations. In the Design Opportunity phase we got our first ideas on how the collective could work in reality. We also asked for first feedback from parents about these initial ideas. This was also the phase when we tried to identify people who could form our collective.
In the first phase, we Build Understanding of the general brief by analyzing the case studies of collective around the world and in Scotland to learn their mechanisms and motivations that bring people together.
In the last Design Development phase we developed the final concept and managed to hold a prototype event which informed the final shape of our design.
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THE LABYRINTH My Process Representation
Thinking about the process now from the personal perspective, I realized that it reminds me of a maze that we needed to walk through. Social design was a quite new area for the most of our group members. We started the project with quite naïve assumptions about people’s motivations or our role in this project that later slowed down our progress, almost like being blind-folded and hitting a wall while trying to find the exit from a room. Hence, the idea of a design process as a maze that you need to find a way out (and usually there is not only one way out) came to my mind and had a chance to be realized here in a simplified version. Each design phase is a layer in the maze, each wall hit is an obstacle that we encountered and each passage is the way we took to proceed in order to get closer to our final design. I hope you will enjoy the story of our project represented in this way!
LITTLE PREACHER Useful Tips and Lessons Learnt
To share some useful tips that I learnt during the process, I also introduced a comic character inspired by Polish writer and cartoonist Sławomir Mrożek. His work “Preaching on a Little Hill” is a series of satiric comics commenting on people, politics and reality.
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BUILD UNDERSTANDING First Phase
The first phase of the project is always primarly about getting to know each other as a team, and discover each others’ capabilities and skills. Secondly, it is marked by countless brainstorming sessions in order to build our understanding of brief, explore the topic in the desk research phase through various case studies and literature. Taken very general topic of the brief, this was a time when we explored what actually a “creative collective” means and what are the directions that this project could take.
How to choose a topic?
How can we build a “sustainable collective” in just three months? Is that even possible?
How to find the people who would like to work with us?
THE LABYRINTH My Process Representation
In my personal experience, that was the first time I had to approach the topic in such social way. As a trained product designer, I struggled with the “intangible” side of the project. Whereas working with people is not new to me, the visions of creating a collective, finding ways to motivate people to come together and keep them motivated, seemed a quite abstract task since I have always considered myself quite an individualist person rather than a social activist.
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Develop a sustainable partnership for a “creative collective”, to enable individuals to come together to identify a common cause, and enable them to locate and capitalise on assets and partnerships. - General Brief
GENRAL BRIEF Shifting Design Practice Having been given the general brief, we faced a totally new area for us as designers – social design. Whereas I am familiar with user-led design approach and the techniques it implies when designing products or services, designing a sustainable collective in three months seemed a rather big task. I took it as a challenge and another lesson to learn. It became clear that this project will depend pretty much on people that we choose to work with, exposing new questions about our role in creating the collective as designers. How do we indentify the people who would like to work with us? How do we make it sustainable if it’s just a threemonth student project with no budget? There were many doubts in my head throughout the whole project. But we made it. And the quote from the excellent book “Designing Transitions” became more real to me:
Climate change, depleting global resources, global financial crisis, the rapid pace of technological change and emerging social activism are forcing us to reconsider the way we live. Businesses […] are increasingly turning to design in search of fresh approaches that will help them to face the unforeseeable future. A new generation of designers are taking the lead in addressing these challenges, moving away from the design of objects and into the design of services and experiences, in the process expanding their sphere of professional responsibility to include leadership, policy, strategy and the shaping of positive social change. Designing Transitions, Joyce Yee et al.
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FIRST APPROACHES The biggest difficulty at the beginning was a topic choice. We looked at the brief from different angles and each of us had a different idea on what could be our focus. In this initial stage, we were considering the following four ideas:
> Post-independence referendum groups in Scotland: Taken that the brief was commissioned by the Scottish government in other to find “emphatic ways to bring skills and assets together for a flourishing Scotland”, that was one of our very first ideas. We discovered that there were many great creative collectives that formed to promote the independence. Sadly, later they literally vanished from the scene after the referendum. We were curious on what are these people doing now and how this pre-referendum energy might be translated into post-referendum collectives “for the flourishing Scotland”. One of the reasons we did not choose this topic was the very first feedback that we got from out tutor that we should allow ourselves for more general explorations at the beginning instead of focusing on a topic straight away. Moreover, taken that my first term project was about technology and politics, I researched the Scottish referendum grassroots movement already so there was a risk that this could be in a way a similar project.
> Sharing economy and resource-sharing collectives: Having withdrawn from the post-referendum and cycling ideas, we stepped back and started to look at other existing creative collectives around the world and locally. What caught our attention was the increasingly popular trend of resource sharing within the communities, e.g. borrowing shops or swapping events. > Inflection points: When we proceeded in that direction, we realized that people are more eager to look for support or to share when there is a change in their life, so called inflection point. We decided to follow this direction and presented our first idea for a brief in this spirit during Emma Murphy’s research workshop.
> Cycling collective: Cycling is a topic close to Ines’ and my heart, and we knew that Glasgow has many problems with the cycling culture. Unfortunately, we did not manage to convince the rest of the group about a need for such collective. Moreover, as it proved later, there was already a very successful design intervention for cyclist in Glasgow several years ago by Snook (Cycling Hack), so that could be something we will be probably judged against while contacting any potentially interested parties.
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CASE STUDIES We analysed the global and local case studies in order to find out answers to the general questions about the nature of creative collectives: - What makes these groups special/ unusual/ exemplary? - What brought them together? - What are the group aesthetics (e.g. skills, assets, resources, buildings ,motivation, etc.) Based on these questions, we build a template that each of us needed to fill with the information about the collectives that caught our attention. Then, using online brainstorming platform mura.ly we mapped and hashtagged key points for each case study in order to make it easier to navigate later. Amongst the examples that we analysed there was a wide choice of organizational types, ranging from charities, social enterprise to regular business models. This exercise helped us to visualize and understand the potential shape our collective could take since it was a rather abstract idea to us by that time.
Tip 1: A general overview is enough! Making a general research of existing creative collectives was helped us see what form our collective could take. However, I would recommend keeping the time spend in this kinds of exercise to minimum needed to get a general overview of what is happening around the world since it is very easy to lose yourself in the immense sea of fascinating examples and the times is passing by rapidly‌
Tip 2: First ideas are good! Having done this work, we forgot about it until the very last weeks of our project when it turned out, not for the first time, that what we have discovered and got excited about at the beginning, came back to us in the final designing phase. It was just a matter of connecting the dots in our minds... It helps if you keep track of your process and initial ideas to come back to it when you get stuck.
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CASE STUDIES
We analysed and synthesized the information from case studies in a form of two maps:
> Map of organizational models: here credits go to Yi-Haur who made an interesting map of the organizations we have analysed according to their financial independence and scale that they operate. It also helped us to visualize how our collective can position itself in the current landscape and which models are more sustainable than others.
> Four foundations of the collectives: analyzing various case studies, we discovered that there is usually one of the four element present that brings people together: belief (e.g. religious or political collectives), location (e.g. neighborhood communities), shared experience (e.g. support groups or hobby) or need (people getting together to achieve something or to solve a problem). We realized that our collective should ideally meet all of these elements. 15
BRIEF REFINEMENT Second Phase
Second phase of the project focused on narrowing down the general brief into a more specific topic with a particular group of people who can form our collective in mind. After a few brainstorming sessions we chose to focus on families with children. With this more specific, but still quite broad target group in mind, we started our research towards the needs and current collectives and groups formed by and for families. We also started to establish relationships with the parents and organizations working with families.
How to reach parents?
What are family problems?
What is family?
LABYRINTH
My Process Representation Even after defining the target group, we still felt the brief is somehow too general. Moreover, again we started the project with our assumptions what might be the problems of modern families. Although there might be nothing wrong with that, since actually many of our initial desk research findings and assumptions based on our own experiences proved to be true, still it felt a bit na誰ve for a group of students to intervene in the families affairs.
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Fig. Inflection points graph.
IDENTIFY COLLECTIVE Starting with the idea of an inflection points in one’s life, we decided to narrow down the target group even further by mapping potential inflection points that can make people come together and share things or experiences. We mapped them against the impact that it would take to help these groups and effort that it would take for us to reach them. The two main groups that seemed the most accessible but at the same time that would need most support proved to be students and families.
often do not use completely. This was a very tempting idea, very likely to work and be sustainable, coming from the need that we can see in our everyday lives. However, again after group discussion, we decided that the project requires more challenging standpoint than the one that we already have in our familiar environment. We finally decided to proceed with creating a collective for families.
Inflection point: in psychology a turning point after which a dramatic change, with either positive or negative results, is expected to result.
Students, we thought, move in and out pretty often. They constantly need to buy new supplies only to leave them several months after. We saw a big potential for a sharing community here, at the arts school, also in terms of art equipment that students have to buy but 18
To develop a sustainable creative collective in Glasgow which enables families to form mutually beneficial relationships.
OUR BRIEF
FIRST REFLECTIONS
We redefined our brief taking as an aim to create a collective for families to facilitate creating relationships between them. In order to keep the brief relatively open, we did not mention any specific kind of relationship of benefit that the families could take from joining our collective. We knew that the answers will come from the parents themselves. However, from our desk research we thought we already can have an idea what can we expect.
> Swapping: The idea for choosing the families came as the result of our brainstorming discussion about the inflection points and sharing. Following this logic, one of the first activities that we imagined the collective might undertake are swapping events. Browsing through parents forums and websites, as well as recalling my personal experiences (my brother has two young children himself), it seemed a common practice for parents to pass on child’s items since kids are growing very fast and expenses are high. > Parents self-development: Multiple reports said that relationships between families and communities have a strong impact on the child and family development. Also, in a very interesting report researching needs of young parents in Newham, the main finding suggested that parents lack time for themselves and for self-development. > Childcare: Connecting the two above with the high costs of childcare as well as childcare options not being flexible enough to support parents whenever they need, childcare became another anchor for our project. However, we were aware this is potentially a tricky one because of the multiple legislation issues around it. 19
STAKEHOLDERS As designers, the first thing that we should do is to deconstruct the basic concept that we working on – the family. What is a family? Who forms it? What are the connections that a family can have? It turns out that the answer is not always so simple. To help us visualize potential scenarios of families and any stakeholders that might surround them, I created a circular tool with a child in the middle. The outer rings showed several possibilities of a family situation
– both parents, single parents, other caretakers, any family situation and environment that they might find themselves in. By rotating the rings, we could check different configurations. This was a very first exercise trying to understand the stakeholders that this project might involve. Although in the end we did not use the tool so much, since many scenarios were actually rather extreme, it was definitely a useful exercise towards creating the final stakeholder map that we worked with after.
Tip 3: Create Your Own Tools Inventing your own design tools is an enriching and useful exercise that not only helps you to understand more the project, but also gives it a more personal character. Making the tools physical and interactive gives a lot more satisfaction (even if the tool was not used so much in this particular case, everyone got fairly excited about it and it helped to move forward).
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STAKEHOLDERS
Who can form our collective? There were two ways we could approach the topic of identifying who can form our collective. The first one that we followed is to choose a topic, problem or a general target and then try to form a collective around it. However, now it seems a more challenging option given the time constrains of the project. The second option was to choose an already existing group and help them flourish by identifying their hidden assets and helping them with their development. This options seems more feasible. In the end we planned to do both by contacting parenting or toddler groups.
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY Third Phase
The third phase was marked by contacting organizations and families to find out more about their needs. We contacted also the experts in the research about families and relationships as well responsible officers from the council to find out more about the theory of relationships and child raising. We contacted the organizations with a hope to establish a relationship with them in order to hold a research workshop with their groups or for general support and access to the families.
Organisations not answering.
Five weeks of idle time.
People = uncertainity
LABYRINTH
My Process Representation Our attempts to establish relationships with the organizations proved again that in social innovation people are both the most unpredictable element of the project. Taken the fact, that during this phase there was an academic three-week spring break combined with two-week general holiday after Easter for schools in Glasgow, it made us facing five weeks of idle time that put us out of the rhythm and forced to look for alternative solutions to reach parents.
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FOCUS QUESTIONS We planned to contact parents both independently in places like parks or playgrounds, as well through the organizations that work with families for a more indepth insights. We believed that we can observe and learn from the currently existing organizations about their assets and the ways they operate and motivate people. We formulated two sets of research questions – for parents and for organizations. We understood that there has to be some kind of a relationship between the parents and organizations which should answer their needs .
From parents, we would like to know how dos their daily life look like and what are their biggest challenges and wishes. How is the life with a child different? And finally, what kind of support would they wish to get and why would they join any group/community? From the organizations, we would like to ask about their services offered and the way they operate. Also, how do they see their role in the community.
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“It takes a village to raise a child”
This traditional African proverb summarizes well the direction of the discussions that we were having as a group. What is the role of the community in raising a child? There have been a lot of discussion about the impact of individuals and groups outside of the family on child’s wellbeing, starting from scientific report by the Centre of Research on Families and Relationships, ending on a popular articles and books, the most famous perhaps “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us” by First Lady Hillary Clinton. In our group we had an interesting discussion recalling childcare when we were kids ourselves. Coming from five different countries, we surprisingly had similar experiences – 15-20 years ago it was a common practice to rely not only on family, but also neighbours or friends to take care of a child while parents were busy.
Nowadays, many families live miles away from each other and these connections and types of relationship where you can trust your neighbour with your child seem to rarely exist. We were wondering why and if it is possible to restore this level of trust in the neighbourhood or community where the family lives. We hoped to find answers to these and the other questions by talking to the families themselves.
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ENGAGEMENT TOOLS In order facilitate the discussion with parents and oganisations, we created a set of simple engagement tools which helped to us to find answers to the questions we would like to ask: > Parents For parents we prepared a set of four engagement tools. Initially, we prepared them on a single sheet, but after first trials we realized that it is too much to give to parents and might “scare them away” with such amount fields to fill in, even if they are beautifully designed. Therefore, we decided to split the tools into three sheets and give them to parents together or separately, depending on the situation. It gave us more flexibility and served the purpose more, since engagement tools should be a conversation prompt and not repellent after all.
> Organisations Yi-Haur attempted to create a business model canvas. It proved to be useful way of summarizing and comparing the insights we got from the organizer. However, the tool proved to be too complex to use during the interviews. In most of the cases, a very natural talk over coffee was perfectly enough and the canvas was filled later by us a sum up of the conversation.
Tip 4: Keep the engagement tools simple.
Very often is turned out that it was just a prompt for a conversation and the tool itself was not used so much or that the instructions are not clear enough. It is important to create a simple engagement tools that fist can be tested in the field before concentrating on the details.
Tip 5: Clear division of tasks = greater efficiency.
Production of engagement tool in our case took place over one day of intense work. During the same day we create a logo for our project and started to define the graphical identity. This amount of work done in few hours would be impossible without clear division of tasks and respecting the “get together” moments to discuss the progress. 26
FIELD RESEARCH
Map of the contacted organisations working directly with families.
We contacted a rage of organization around Glasgow which work with the families. Similarly to last term, I created a Google Spreadsheet where we inserted all the information about the people we contacted and their answers. On 26 contacted organizations, in total 16 answered us and were happy to help. That is a great result and improvement from last term project. We were looking forward to talk to them. This task was divided between Fiona, Yi-Haur and Ines.
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INTERVIEWS My task was to contact the experts in the field on family research. I managed to interview the following experts: • Prof. Kay Tisdall Childhood Policy Edinburgh University, Centre for Research on Families and Relationships • Kirsten Thomlinson project coordinator, Centre for Research on Families and Relationships • Ann-Marie Burns Early-Years project, Glasgow Council
As it usually happens in case of the experts, they prefer to be interviewed on skype or via telephone. Having spoke to the experts now and in the previous project, I realized that I actually feel quite uncomfortable interviewing them from a position of a student who has just started exploring the topic that they are experts in. The choice of right questions, especially the first one, is crucial here. Moreover, I realized that, unlike in the first term project, now more crucial were direct meetings with the groups and communities than with the experts who gave rather general comments.
I also assisted Fiona during an interview with Lee Anthony from the Glasgow Lone Parent Hub. This interview was different, since it was the only one that I attended face to face with the interviewee from an organization. This was also a more personal and informal interview. Lee is directly involved in working with parents and she is a lone parent herself. This conversation was really eye-opening on the needs of that particular group of parents which could become our extreme user.
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TIP 6: Interviews – lessons learnt from experience 1. Send the general questions to the interviewee before the interview – it will let them reflect on the topic before and give you more valuable answers. 2. You need interviewee’s permission to record them and use their quotes later. It seems daunting to ask about that straight away. The best way is ask at the beginning if it’s ok to record the interview to support your notes and then, only at the end of the conversation, ask if they feel happy to use some of the quotes they have just said in the project (suggest to keep them anonymous if they hesitate). 3. Let your interviewee speak, don’t suggest the answers. At the beginning ask about their organization or profession to get into the interview mood. 4. Open but not too naive questions are good to stimulate the conversation further. Don’t hesitate to ask for any clarification or details. 5. Send a thank you email after the interview and keep the interviewee updated about the progress of the project (even if it’s just a matter of sending the last results). 6. While transcribing the interview afterwards, use supporting programs such as e.g. Otranscribe which speeds up the transcription process. If time is an issue, focus just on the key points and quotes.
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COST VS TRUST While continuing the research, it stroke me that we didn’t actually anaylse current types of childcare in the UK so far. Therefore, I took responsibility for this task and created a table summarizing current options available in the market and map them against cost and trust. After reflecting on the nature of trust in the analysed types childcare, it became clear that in case of informal type of childcare the degree of familiarity and time together plays a great role, whereas with the formal, paid childcare it is pretty much about the experience and qualification (including disclosure checks). This graph turned out to be crucial to illustrate where do we want to position our collective and how can we achieve that.
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MIDTERM PRESENTATION Midterm presentation in front of the tutors and the Scottish Government was the first test of our new brief and our way of thinking. At that point we still did not know who will form out collective. We just had contacts to the organizations we spoke to and that expressed interest in our project. We also started to contact the parents, but this was done on a rather random basis in places such as parks and playgrounds. We also presented our project as focused on a childcare. Indeed, from our desk and primary research so far, it became clear that childcare is the thing that most of the parents are struggling with. This was a challenging bit, but we saw an opportunity there in connecting either a) the parents together, b) parents with lonely people who might be happy to help. When it comes to the presentation itself, we lacked analyzing the insights that we gathered so far in a concise map. We were aware this was not the end of our primary research but little we knew that the most important evidence is still to come. 31
CRISIS The time was passing by and despite of the initial enthusiasm of the organizations that we contacted, agreeing on the dates of any potential research workshop with them took ages. And so, the correspondence with the Lone Parent Hub which we hope so much to cooperate with, was very irregular to finally find ourselves in the position, when the holidays came and the correspondence basically stopped. Similar was the situation with the other organizations we were in touch with. Nor emails, nor gentle phone reminders were successful and we did not want to push it too much. We felt upset and started to get demotivated. We realized we need a plan B to reach the parents in a more constructed way.
TIP 7: Parachuted Designers We felt daunted because we felt like we are parachuting ourselves to the organizations and offer help while they might not even need or want it. It did not feel right, it felt too patronizing in way. We did not want to approach the parents from such top-down perspective, coming through the organization. It would feel more appropriate if the need came from the organization or a group themselves and we, as designer, would facilitate and support that to happen.
TIP 8: Wrong approach We adopted a wrong approach in waiting for answers from the people. We relied on the organizations too much. Plus, working with the organization requires understanding and following their aims and mechanisms first before approaching the users. Always have plan A and plan B, especially when you work with people.
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IAIN’S WORKSHOP Last term, the workshop with Iain Aitchison from Plan, London, was a breakthrough in our project. It allowed us to sum up all our research into three insights and formulate plan for the next course of actions. It was a smooth transitions between discovery and define phases of the project. This time, the workshop with Iain was basically our breakdown. We were asked to design the meeting format for our collective, with a kick-off event and a plan of sustainable meetings. Whereas this for sure might have been a useful exercise in general, it was just too early for us to consider details of the collective at the point where we still did not have people who could form it. It made us feel pretty daunted. Because we were still waiting for the answers from the groups to cooperate with, at the end of the workshop we designed a flexible kick-off plan that could be modified and used depending on which group will be able to work with us. It was a difficult exercise, but it definitely helped us to realize that we should probably change our approach and start acting with more initiative ourselves.
The workshop gave us a taste of how to identify and design a collective and what is important to consider:
And finally, the four flows that should be taken care during the meetings:
• • • •
• • •
Goals of the group, Resources needed, Issues or sensitive areas that need to be respected, Procedures that might work.
Things to consider while designing a meeting format: •
•
Outcome, Agenda, Roles, Rules
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Attention – keep the group focused, Energy – build trust and respect in the group Information - capture important information in a clear, visual way Operations – support clear decision making protocol.
THE POWER OF CO-DESIGN Then a sudden breakthrough came. Facing lack of responses from the groups as well as three-week spring break, we decided to act ourselves. The breakthrough moment proved to be a lecture by Sarah Drummond from Snook about co-design. We were inspired by her experience and her story of a cycle hack – an event organized for everyone who cares about the cycling culture in Glasgow. From a local event it became a movement that spread throughout the world. Inspired by this work, we decided not to wait further for the organizations to answer us. We decided to organize and event for families ourselves. That’s how the idea for a Family Design Jam was born.
We sat down and brainstormed. Within a day we created a plan of an event, graphical identity of the event, template for posters, leaflets and a facebook page. We also created a plan of action for over the spring break which meant three weeks of separation for the group, hence the clear division of tasks was crucial. We sent email to all the organizations we worked with and invited them to the event and posted information on several Facebook groups for families in Glasgow. Everything seemed to be working again and we full of energy.
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FAMILY DESIGN JAM
Reflection
11th April 2015 Family Design Jam, Glasgow School of Art
How to organize a successful event with low attendance?
Back from the spring break, we sat down to the last preparation works for the event. Facebook page was not so popular, but we also asked around GSA staff who have families to join us on the day. We did not lose hope. In fact, we decided to organize two sessions: morning and an afternoon one for the convenience of parents.
The event was an important moment for our group development and for gathering important insights. However, at the beginning we felt it was not so successful as we hoped. We did not predict that right after our holidays at GSA, there will be another two weeks of general holidays for schools in the area and even the organizations we partnered with did not run activities at that time either.
For the activities, we divided the 2 hour session into 15 minute blocks. We prepared a creative corner for kids with homemade snacks and arts and crafts activities led by Ines whereas Fiona and myself led the workshop for parents. Our aim was to get to know the families with a short introduction, then ask them to draw or describe a day in a life of their family. Next exercise focused on identifying the nicest and the most challenging or problematic parts of the day. After a short break, we brainstormed potential scenarios that could help solve these problems with a “What if?” questions technique and end with the pre-prepared design canvas (in reality, we run out of time till that point, finishing on “What if” scenarios).
As a result, the morning session did not run due to lack of participants. The afternoon session gathered two families. We still were lucky enough to have two parents with extreme parenting experiences: one lone mother who used to have very little support network in the past. She came because of the kids’ arts and crafts part of the event. We had also a working father who is lucky to have a support of a full extended family. When reflecting about it now, I am sure that actually having just two parents created an intimate environment where they were able to open more and share with us their stories and experiences, so different from each other.
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Our brainstorming space.
INSIGHTS After the Family Design Jam, we had a physical evidence of insights that we gathered. First of all, we had examples of two days of two extreme families scenarios: lone parent and a family with extended support. Secondly, we had ready “What if� scenarios co-created with the families during the Jam. Now, the only thing we had to do was connecting the dots of all our research and formulate the main insights to sum up the research phase and move forward.
TIP 9: Find your space
Having accommodated ourselves in our brainstorming corner, we managed to narrow down the research to four main insights.
Separate brainstorming and working areas. We realized that as a group is works better for us if we have a clear separation of working area and a more informal, brainstorming place. Changing physical space for these two activities also helps to change the mindset from individual work in front of a computer to a group brainstorming.
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EXTENDED FAMILY Talking to the parents coming from two distinct environments, we realized that the main thing that distinguishes them is the type of support network they have. Most of the problems of the lone mother was lack of family around that could help her with everyday duties. She had to learn living with a baby, managing family money and time on her own. Her sigh “It’s very lucky to have an extended family” said during the workshop inspired us to create an Extended Family model for our collective that could help parents like her find peer support that they need so much when raising a child. We saw it as an opportunity to create a collective around this notion of Extended Family that would include not only network of other parents, but also other organizations support families but who often are not cooperating with each other. Extended Family had a potential to answer parents needs not only for peer support, but most importantly for an informal childcare that they can trust. Four main insights.
Stakeholder map with an identified gap.
Extended Family concept.
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FIRST CONCEPT
In order to achieve this “Extended Family� ideal, there were several challenges we would need to take into consideration: Legislation One of the biggest challenges in this project was understanding childcare legislation in Scotland. Having a former law student in our group, Fiona, that still was not an easy task. Requirements for a discourse check are not always clear, for example, we found out that disclosure is required to be with a child for longer than two hours. On the other hand, babysitting was stated as a form of childcare that does not require disclosure. However, there was no clear legal definition of babysitting that we could find. If after all the research we still felt confused, what about the parents? We thought that our collective, which actually at that point was taking a rather serious organizational shape, could deal also with that by providing volunteers with disclosure checks.
Trust & Childcare Level of trust when you feel comfortable leaving your child with another person is not easy to achieve. During the Jam, we got a clear statement about building trust: To gain trust I need see how other parents behave with their kids. We understood that we can build that relationship only over time and continuous, regular contact of parents. Other benefits If gaining trust takes time, how can we facilitate that and keep the collective sustainable? Looking at the insights, we realized that taking advantage of a collective being a group of people with similar needs can bring new benefits and answer other insights we gathered. We created a graph illustrating hierarchical levels of all the potential functions offered by the collective to show different levels of involvement possible: from solely participating in the events, through opportunities to swap things till the ultimate aim – increasing the social network and childcare opportunities.
Levels of involvment: the ultimate level is childcare.
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FIRST CONCEPT How?
Hub and spoke model We saw our collective as a hub for parents from different organizations who can have additional benefits by joining a bigger group. As in the hub and spoke model, groups that form in their local area would join a network of other similar groups under the umbrella of “Extended Family” collective. The collective could then cooperate with external organizations to promote free events and group deals which would make the collective sustainable and worth participating. At least, that was the theory…
TIP 10: Avoid going in circles. We got lost in size and complexity of our first idea. We were going in circles about the structure of the collective. Who will form the local collectives? Who will run the whole organization? Even if there is some kind of committee, should they be paid or work on a volunteer basis? If volunteering, why would they do that? It was difficult to get our heads around that, partially again for the reason that we did not have a set group of people with whom we could test the idea. It was simply too abstract for the most of the group, including myself, who had not much experience in working with such issues before.
Toolkit As a fruit of one of our discussions about how to facilitate forming the “Extended Family” microcollectives, we came with an idea for a toolkit. We imagined that we could create a physical artefact in form of a downloadable and printable toolkit with a set of suggested family activities that parents should follow to form and build trust in a collective of fellow parents, for example in the local area. The toolkit would not only suggest the activities, which might inspire parents, but also advice on how to reach local parents and local organizations which parents might not be even aware of, like the Community Centers. The toolkit would include also a general timeline and sequence in which the activities should be followed which, as a result, would allow a group to join the “Extended Family” network with all its benefits. We imagined the toolkit as a tangible thing that could be passed on to a different family on each event – as a symbol of shared responsibility and rotational character of the collective.
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FIRST CONCEPT
Feedback
With our first idea in mind and the four provisional functions of the collective, we went back to the parents and asked them for their thoughts about that. We split in two groups – one group went to the Queen’s Park soft play during the weekend, and Yi-Haur and myself went to the Garnethill Multicultural Centre that was very supportive with our project so far too. Taken, that it was still the school holiday time, we met only one family there although usually the centre is pretty crowded during the weekend activities. We had a good chat with the parents about the service which they
genuinely liked. They pointed out that many things like this are happening locally, but it is difficult to find out about them and our collective could help with that. The other group in the Queen’s Park managed to talk to a larger number of parents. The most enthusiastic parents seemed about the swapping idea and the free events that they could join as a group, with some tools to help them coordinate better, for example route planner to pick up kids or parents along the way.
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“We used to have regular meetings with other mums. Now everyone has their own lives. We are losing contact because it’s us who have to take the initiative to organise a meeting. It would be easier if someone would do that for us.” Quote that made us move away from the voluntarily run big organisation idea.
FIRST CONCEPT Feedback
TIP 11: Fail early! It is a good practice in live projects to get some feedback about your first ideas as soon as possible. Use rough hand sketches – they make it more personal and illustrate better what you want to offer.
Richer with the feedback, we came back to studio to rethink our ideas. At that moment, we also started to plan our kick-off event. In the spirit of the hub and spoke model, we planned to arrange it in cooperation with an institution that is already free for families. The idea is to plan “a free afternoon out” for a group of families, using Glasgow city free assets. Our thoughts went towards the Riverside Museum which is a great choice for families and has an open dining space that we could potentially use. We tried to contact them, but again, we faced a wall created by the museum staff who was not able to say if it possible to hold an event like this and to whom we should speak about that. We also slowly started to give up on the idea of the toolkit and a big organization. From the parents’ feedback we understood, that they are very busy and it seemed almost improbable to think that they would voluntarily run such a big organization or find and use the toolkit. One of the biggest discussion in our group was about the sustainability of the service. If it has to function as a sustainable initiative, there should be some paid staff taking care of the logistics – most of us thought. That’s how the idea of a social enterprise came about.
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DESIGN DEVELOPMENT Fourth Phase
The final phase in our case started quite late, only in the 11th week of the project, so just over one week before the final presentation. At that time, we have already planned the prototype event in cooperation with the Multicultural Center. The change of the concept required slight modifications of the event format and worked really well, allowing us to test basic aspects of the parents’ cafÊ model.
Presentation
Need to adapt the final event
Time pressure
Doubts about the initial concept Sudden change of concept
LABYRINTH
My Process Representation Last minute concept modifications and little time for the final event preparation was the main stress. The last two weeks were busy, but rich in insights and experiences. The project finally took shape and direction that the whole group felt confident about and we managed to reach right, locally active people to support us.
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PROTOTYPE EVENT TIP 12: First ideas are good!
Before our final concept, we planned the prototype event in cooperation with the Garnethill Multicultural Centre as a kick-off and the first event presented in the toolkit for parents.
When you get stuck in your project, come back to your initial research findings and first ideas, get surrounded by them. They will help you find the track again, join the dots and catch some distance. For example, in our early case studies research, we were fascinated with the social enterprise model and now, we subconsciously came back to it.
We intended the event to be a prompt for parents to exchange the information about their favourite Glasgow family places. At the same time, we wanted to provide a creative space for children and thus lead to a closer integration of the families. That is how the idea of Your Glasgow Map was born. We invited parents and kids to bring any empty cereal boxes, jars or junk that can be turned into small-scale buildings and create a big map of Glasgow with their favourite places created during the family arts and crafts workshop.
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Origin Of The Name It took us a while to figure out the name for our project. We existed in our minds as a café, but in fact, it was a space far beyond that. We decided to use a wordplay to express the familiar and informal character of the place where parents can feel like home as well as the fact that they could take an ownership over it as volunteers.
• • •
The Folks – your people / parents The Folk’s – belonging to the people The Folks’ – belonging to your parents
THE FOLKS’ When discussing our model of the hub and spoke organization, we realized that we miss an element that will be a focus point, a base where all the members of the collective can have equal access. Initially, that was a website. This posted further questions: how can parents find out about the website? How sustainable that can be? We needed something else…and that element came to us during one of the tutorials – we needed a physical space where parents can feel comfortable and safe, where they and their children can be themselves and do what they like together, or separately if there is a need. We called the space “Parents’ Café” which later changed into “The Folks’”. Having a physical space solved all the problems that we had with the more abstract initial model. It could provide space for free events, space for kids where an informal type of childcare can be provided by a qualified
volunteer or fellow parents, space for parents to work or talk. It can incorporate a permanent swap shop and hold swapping events. It can be a hub for local families and groups where they can volunteer, create a community and be self-sustainable as a social enterprise model. It our minds it became like a modern, self-sustained and open family centre. Test the idea Once confident about that idea, we still had to hold the event that we have already started to advertise. We thought that this could actually be a perfect opportunity to prototype such environment. Therefore, even if we changed the collective idea, the event formula stayed similar – we just put more emphasis on creating a space for kids to get creative together and for parents to socialize or rest.
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Many parents feel isolated
Kid-centered schedule
Barriers to childcare
INSIGHTS We designed The Folks’ to meet all the insights that we gathered from parents. This is a difficult challenge to be consistent, but having a physical space made it more real. Still, one of the main functions of the café was the informal childcare that it can provide. Taken from our experience throughout the research, we knew that substituting formal childcare is not an easy task, however, we saw the café as a supplementary type of childcare, where one qualified member of staff can lead creative activities for children for two hours (legal limitation of informal childcare) at the time when most parents are struggling with taking care of their kids, e.g. right after school which finished before parents finish their work. Outside of these hours, the childcare would take place on a rotational basis – with parents acting as volunteers and looking after each others’ kids. The volunteering and childcare times could be coordinated amongst the parents using the café’s website. 46
Family budgeting
Collective Foundation The café is satisfying all four elements of a collective that we created as a result of our case studies analysis. Location is one of them, taken that the café could exist as a pop-up or permanent space in the community centers or become a new landmark of the local areas by taking the unused spaces in the community.
TIP 13: Legal issues
Legal childcare limitation were an important case here. Time limitation of informal childcare without registration of the place is two hours. This could be one of the points we could highlight more in our final presentation – that the law could be changed to help parents organize childcare between themselves (which they have been doing informally anyway) without facing potential, quite absurd high financial fines . 47
YOUR GLASGOW MAP Your Glasgow Map prototype event proved to be even more successful than we expected. Designed as a drop-in session, it was attended by 20 children in the peak moments which was actually quite challenging to control. Surprisingly to ourselves, many parents actually decided to leave their kids with us for two hours, even if they did not know us at all. The effect of a save, familiar, local community place proved to be working to gain trust of parents. Other parents joined the activities and together with the kids created the buildings or sat in the café area and chatted for a while. Our team acted as volunteers running the café and facilitating the activities in our prototype “pop up family café”.
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FEEDBACK Despite of the moments that seemed a bit more chaotic and difficult to control (e.g. when a group of Chinese children heading to a Taekwondo class upstairs joined us for 20-30 minutes), we got some really positive feedback from both parents and kids. The event was also attended by a local activist from the Garnethill Intergrational Network as well as the Garnethill Community Councillor, Sean Mackay.
I spoke to Sean who expressed a wish to cooperate more with the GSA and run more events like that, taking advantage of the local assets. He very positively reacted to our “The Folks’” concept and at the end of our talk was happy to join the activity too. All of this proved that we have discovered a big opportunity for such spaces in the community and that the concept of “The Folks’” has an actual potential to exist.
TIP 14: How to organize a successful event? Contact the right people. In our case, the very place that we had already cooperated with and that is just around the corner proved to be the best partner. We looked far and ambitious, but it proved that local, familiar community is the one that supported us and that we could help the most.
Sean Mackay
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MOCK UP The event took place on the day of the mock-up presentations. Taken the tight schedule, recent change of the concept and the upcoming final event, we did not have much time for preparation. The mock up, however, was a very useful confrontation of what we have already got and what we are planning to do. Honest feedback is what we really appreciated throughout all this project.
FINAL PRESENTATION The most tense moment of these weeks was probably the evening before the final presentation. The prototype event was very successful and I felt we need to put more emphasis on the ideas we tested with that and the feedback. However, in order to do that, we needed to greatly shorten the research and insight part which contained a lot of information that informed our later choices, for example, the feedback from parents about the initial idea. That was a painful evening of discussions, cutting, mapping, topped with a doubts about the best way to present the collective itself. The next morning, however, the efforts were rewarded and we were confident and proud of what we were presenting.
TIP 15: Know when to say stop. Design, arts and humanistic subjects have this particular property of countless solutions possible and never ending possibility to improve things even further. Working in any project, especially team ones, requires this difficult ability of saying stop to constant iterations in which one can easily lose the purpose of what they are actually doing (which this PPJ is also an example of ;)
ROLE OF DESIGN
Perhaps the most interesting creative opportunity for design today is to redesign the very nature of design itself. Tim Brown, IDEO
The experience of social design that this project gave to me proved that social design is a difficult art. It requires a whole set of soft skills from a range of disciplines like psychology, ethnography, sociology… Sometimes I felt like the project that we are doing is probably more in a role of social or community worker which made me wonder about my qualifications to undertake such project and the ethics of that. This again posed a questions about the role of designer in socially oriented projects that I have asked at the beginning. Some of the answers I found in a brilliant interview with Banny Banerjee, Director of Stanford ChangeLabs, who talks about identity crisis of design as a widely democratized and diffused discipline: The expansion of design beyond the creation of artefacts means that expertise is harder to achieve, while being easier to claim. Still, as in any discipline, the expertise comes with training and experience which allows to tackle increasingly complex problems that our civilization is facing now. During Iain Aitchison’s workshop, we touched on a notion of designer being “a facilitator” that assists a group to discover their assets and motivate to come together. In this particular case, since we did not work with any pre-formed group, I would suggest that we came from a rather “organizer-like” perspective to touch on the facilitating part towards the very end of the project. We planted the seed that parents seemed happy to carry on if there was such possibility, moving from “push” to “pull” attitude where we as designers can step back and let the parents take the initiative further.
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GENERAL REFLECTIONS Multicultural Centre to promote the event, we also extended our network with local groups such as Maryhill Integration Network and met Adela, a local school teacher and community volunteer who greatly helped us to spread the word around the families she works with. This became the key to a successful event and the first seed for our collective – to have onboard someone who is a local leader, who people know and trust. I believe that this a basis of any sustainable community – the right motivated people.
Second term project certainly felt more independent than the first one. Armed with design methods tools, we had to go out and actually invite people to cooperate. This was a challenge for me as this is the main difference from my previous design education. I had to overcome a lot of personal assumptions and limitations since, to be honest, I have never considered myself to as a social activist or community leader, which this project actually required us to become.
Third lesson is to embrace uncertainty. Working with people is great but unpredictable. Leaving aside the holiday break, early on we contacted many organizations who were happy to work with us, but along the way most of them dropped on the idea due to lack of time or because we had to move forward and it took too long to coordinate the dates. This more than ever made me realize that we always need a plan B and be ready to take the initiative ourselves.
The first lesson I learnt is that social innovation projects take time and patience. We were given a very general brief and it took good several weeks to actually figure out what we want to do and which groups do we need to approach. Given the project short dates, that was a lot of time. However, I treat it more as an exercise that helped me understand the overall landscape of social design now, especially when we analysed general case studies from all around the world. The second lesson is that social innovation projects depend on people, however banal it might sound. For several weeks we struggled to reach the parents, probably partially because of our own lack of confidence and consistency, but also for reasons independent from us like the unfortunate timing and lack of coordination between the GSA and school holidays here in Glasgow. We managed to mobilize all our forces in the last two weeks of the project, right after the holidays with a great result and feedback, but there is still a feeling that we lost these several weeks before. Moreover, it proved so much true that the success of the project depends on the people who work with you. It became so evident in our case when for the first time we organized Family Design Jam, we relied mainly on our networks and some Facebook advertising campaign to invite families to the event. With our second event, the strategy was different. We teamed with the
This project was a new adventure for me. I realized that I feel the most comfortable in the initial, research part of the process when a good analytic and mapping skills are necessary to make sense out of huge amount of information that we were gathering. I also found myself a bit in a position of a project manager, since I kept the track of the process and usually the team relied on me to plan the next tasks and activities which came out rather naturally. This was a very multidisciplinary project that brought many reflections about the changing design position and profession as such. It proves again that there is no single recipe for a good design, apart from common sense and intuition. The confidence and expertise indeed come with practice and hopefully allow to face complex challenges of the changing world.
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MOTIVATION LINE I created my personal motivational line throughout the project to sum up the progress and the flow of the process. It is influenced by many factors: psychological, workload, team dynamics, feedback received, rewards and mistakes. It is a subjective overview of the process and of the positive and negative aspects that affected the performance. Snook presentation
Case Studies
Identifying Collective
Field Research Interviews
Iain’s workshop
Reading Week
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
BUILD UNDERSTANDING General Brief
WEEK 3
WEEK 5
BRIEF REFIN.
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY
First Approaches
Identify Collective
Focus Questions
Engagement Tools Crisis
Case Studies
Our Brief
“It takes a village..” Field Research
Iain’s Workshop
First Reflections
Interviews
The Power
Stakeholders
Cost vs Trust
of Co-Design
Midterm Pres.
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Your Glasgow Map Event Family Design Jam
Final Presentation
GSA Break
First concept doubts
BREAK
WEEK 8
WEEK 9
WEEK 10
Insights
WEEK 11
WEEK 12
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY Family Design Jam
Night before the presentation
First Concept
Extended Family Feedback
Prototype Event The Folks’ Insights Your Glasgow Map Feedback Mock Up
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Final Presentation
REFERENCES Botsman R., Rogers R. (2011) What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. HarperCollins Business Clinton H. (2006) It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. Lee J., Jefferies E., Tan L. (2013) Design Transitions Mrożek, S., Kazania na górce. Rzeczpospolita. Available on: http:// otwartaszuflada.republika.pl/kazanie.htm (in Polish) What Young Parents Really Want. Innovative Ideas for Service Providers. Community Links Project report. Available on: http://www.communitylinks.org/images/uploads/YoungParents.pdf Why Relationships Matter. Research evidence from the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (2010) CRFR briefing, Available online: http:// www.crfr.ac.uk/assets/CRFR_relationshipsmatter.pdf
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