Thriving too

Mobile & Mint - free workshops around East London

Mobile & Mint is hitting the streets...

Offering free community workshops around East London - to spread new ideas, and inspire collaborative action. Click to book!

Available for community groups, networks of interest, residents associations, voluntary organisations, groups of friends, anyone interested in positive change... Around Hackney and Tower Hamlets - cycle lanes permitting!

Based on the Travelling Pantry project, Mobile & Mint shares new ideas from community practise around the world (collected through collaborative books Hand Made and The Community Lover's Guide to the Universe); plus a series of tried and tested methods to encourage the co-design of new types of community projects.

+ learn about new types of community activities from around the world
+ design new collaborative projects
+ apply strategic planning and positively re-assess available resources

Click to book!

Launching 19 April with a class at Trade School London, with special guest Maurice. 
Thu 19 Apr, 8pm. FARM:shop, 20 Dalston Lane. More on the Trade School London site.

And fitting in as many workshops as possible from then.

Thank you to...
Lindsay Noble for her inspired design
Christian from East London Furniture for the custom built fruit crate
The Hackney Bike Workshop, Bikeworks, and Paul Gleeson for joint effort helping me to get the wheels on straight.
More pics here 

Social Spaces: Business in Beta

I tell this story about how Social Spaces started at nearly every workshop - people seem to like the unexpected sense of joie de vivre it introduces.  David Gauntlett and I had been working on this idea for several months - it went something like this "people are doing things differently, they are showing us that the traditional ways of doing things in communities needs to change".  We spoke to funders, considered a research bid... etc.  Then one day, inspired, infected almost, by the stories of the projects I was getting in for Hand Made, I had an idea while doing laps in the pool.  I wasn't going to wait around any longer, I was going to take these ideas on to the road, in a mini, and see how people responded to these new ideas ... see what happened...what could be learned ... and that's what I did for 6 months, travelling 20,000 miles, in 40 workshops with about 1000 people. I had no funding at all.  The communities that requested free workshops helped to cover petrol ... and they kindly put me up over night.  I found myself in student digs, sofas, *terrible* hotels ... and beautiful guests rooms. It was an incredible experience ... and didn't feel very much like prototyping new concepts ... which is what it was all about.

Time goes on and we are always looking forward.  But yesterday I was emailing this very nice lady at IDEO Patterns about Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam  launch and I had reason to look over the list of patterns they have been highighting.  The very first edition was in 2009 called Business in Beta - Don't wait for perfect, launch and learn - by Colin Raney- and I had forgotten all about it.  Looking back I think that this issue was one of the single biggest influences on taking the ideas on the road in the Travelling Pantry in 2010... and reading it over yesterday made me think how much of this attitude is now in everthing we do ... and everything we encourage for community projects to do as well ... sort of in our DNA now...And it is really adictive working in this unbounded way.

Here were their suggestions on taking action:

1. Go early, go often

Building experimentation into your business is harder than you think. Start small and stay focused. Try everything, but don’t try it all in one prototype.

2. Learning by doing

Build value for the business as you prototype. If you fail, what will you have learned? What will you salvage?

3. Inspiration through constraint

Don’t exhaust yourself searching for money and resources. The tighter your constraints, the more creative your prototypes will be.

4. Open to opportunity

Look for unanticipated ways customers are using your offering. Their improvisations may be the future of your business.

So, just wanted to say a big thank you to IDEO for Patterns... and giving this project the inspiration it needed at exactly the right moment it needed it!  And it has turned this project into a open, collaborative adventure... 

And if you are intested in news ways of developing business and ideas the Design the new Business film released this week (and embedded below) is really fascinating. 

Social Spaces: In Praise of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY

David Gauntlett, professor of Media at Westminster University, and co-founder of Social Spaces, introduced me to LEGO SERIOUS PLAY as a tool for helping people share their ideas through making. David has been working professionally with LEGO for some time, using LEGO for research and engagement and in helping to think around many of the concepts he wrote about in his important book Making is Connecting published earlier this year.

Thanks to David a year ago LEGO SERIOUS PLAY donated several boxes of LEGO to the Travelling Pantry.   The Travelling Pantry worked for 6 months giving free workshops to people in communities around the country…. Travelling 20,000 miles and working with well over a 1,000 people.  Since the Travelling Pantry project has been completed we have continued to use LEGO in a variety of contexts and settings to a further 800 people (approx) and wanted to feed back some of our experiences.

What is LEGO SERIOUSPLAY?

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a methodology that LEGO have developed to use ‘making’ as a way of co-developing business strategies.  From their website:

“The underlying values of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY include the belief in the potential of people, and also the belief that everyone within an organization can contribute to the discussion, solutions, and outcomes…. It is a language, a communication tool and a problem solving methodology”

How we use it at Social Spaces

The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology is well developed in business settings and they have made their work and ideas open source (you can download their paper here). However, with the Travelling Pantry we wanted to take the simplest version of this methodology into communities to see how it would work in this new setting, to share ideas and create a collective vision for communities.  We wanted to see if it worked as part of a set of new activities we had designed which used tangible objects to collaborate and co-design.

We usually do the lego activity early in the workshops. Participants are asked to make a small model of ‘something they would like to see more of in the community’.  This usually takes about 10 minutes.  Participants are asked to share their idea with the group in turn.

What we have noticed during these workshops

• Often people are surprised by the request to make something with what they think of as toys. This usually leads quickly to delight and conversations and joking follows while people make their models.  This isn’t just about being offered LEGO, but about being offered any sort of materials to make something with.  Most communities are usually offered only verbal and written tools to communicate their ideas.

• Community meetings often favour boldness – sometimes leaving shyer people at the edges – which is both unhelpful and a waste of creativity and ideas. With the LEGO activity all members have an opportunity to share their ideas, with a visual prop to help them communicate what they mean.

• While people share their ideas, other participants are often surprised at the warmth and optimism of these ideas, which frequently ask for more neighbourliness and beauty in their neighbourhood. People get to know each other at quite a deep level through this sharing process.

• Once the models have been shared participants are asked to place their model on a single table in order to start to build up a collective vision of what they would like to see more of in their communities. This is a very important and positive step.

• Taking photos of individual models with their description cards and loading them onto a spaces on the internet gives the opportunity to share with others not at the workshop some of the ideas in a very visual way.

• Making a model really does reach parts of the brain that other activities don’t. We have also found that doing the LEGO after a short talk on inspiring case studies stimulates the creative process and helps people think about their communities in a different way.

• We have researched and  thought long and hard but haven’t been able to find any other materials which offer such quick access to 3D model making as LEGO, particularly in this community setting.

Most common themes....

So many original, unusual and interesting ideas.... And also tons of wonderful gardens, bridges and community created new spaces! 

You can see all the Travelling Pantry models here.

Points to note 

Respect

Respectful framing of this activity if very important. Communities are often dealing with difficult, complex or emotional situations so it is vitally important that this activity be framed to ensure that the fun ‘methodology’ not be confused with not taking people and their concerns seriously, in effect be seen to be taking them too lightly....

Taping into people’s imaginations

While being respectful of difficulties and concerns we are normally very clear also about the purpose of the activity being to tap into their imaginations and build a positive collaborative vision of the future, rather than cataloguing issues.

Different contexts need different framing

If you are using the activity as a rich research tool  in a consultation, in a focus group … or using it to stimulate ideas and problem solving, we have found that some careful framing is needed in these different contexts.

One example of different context is that following a workshop I did for Forever Manchester, they have been using the activity in their Focus Groups with good effect!  More pictures of their focus groups can be seen here.

If you are a community that thinks they might like to use LEGO to develop their ideas I would suggest coming to one of our workshops to see how it works in practice.  If you haven’t been to one of our workshops but are keen to try it straight away please contact me and I can send you some notes that might be useful. If you are introducing this activity into an an existing group where you are a member yourself, can require some confidence, and having a sound understanding of why you want to introduce it, possible reactions and planned outcomes can be helpful.

And if you are using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY thinking and methods please do give them credit in your activities – it has taken them years to develop this important methodology, they have generously made it open source … and I am sure that they will be delighted to see it used for social good … as well as see it continue to be tested so widely and thoroughly in communities through Social Spaces.

BIG THANK YOU! 

I would like to offer a huge thank you to LEGO and David Gauntlett on behalf of Social Spaces for supporting us and for helping us and the communities we have been working with to get inspired and active in making our communities better places to live!

Travelling Pantry Starts in Sheffield!

What a brilliant start to the Travelling Pantry project! The first workshop was yesterday in St Mary’s community Centre in Sheffield – kindly arranged by Graham Duncan.

The group was totally wonderful – full of ideas and enthusiasm and good humour.  They worked so hard the whole afternoon and produced some fantastic models and asset maps.  You can see the full set on flickr…..

I went for a little ‘asset’ walk in the morning before the workshop and spoke to these lovely people from Sheffield (pics below).  They agreed with me… ‘yes, we do rather think we are the assets around here’.

The strongest message from yesterday was how strong the desire is for communal space.  Spaces that belong to the community... and it isn't always the current incarnation of the typical 'community centre' in many cases (St Mary's is the exception rather than the rule). Sometimes its the pub or the coffee shop but not always or for everyone.

Schools and other places have 'common rooms'... what is the community equivalent that the community could develop and own... what would that look like? Where are our new types of Social Spaces?

Tomorrow Stoke-on-Trent with The Burslem, Middleport & Etruria Valley Local Forum and the RSA!

 

Big Society: Travelling Pantry and The Problem With The Grass

Nothing makes my inner geeky garden designer sigh quite as much as the sight of a well manicured patch of grass.  It speaks to a sense of both order and beauty.  I tell you this only to emphasise now much I appreciate grass and how important it is having it cut well and regularly in order to make a neighbourhood look and feel well cared for. (Except in the US where the water used to irrigate lawns is unsustainable.  In soggy Britain this isn’t quite such an issue)

Grass cutting is also beginning to develop as a discussion example on issues of Big Society and citizen participation at local level… wrapped up in the question ‘who is going to cut the grass?’

I have been thinking about grass in the context of the first Travelling Pantry workshop to be held tomorrow in Sheffield. I have been putting the finishing touches to the planning and thinking about the best way to talk about why we have chosen an ‘asset-based’ approach for this project.  And thinking about the grass problem has been helpful.

If we broadly say that Big Society Thinking is about helping people make their communities and their environment their own - becoming more responsible for how their community functions, looks and feels – where does grass cutting fit?

The Travelling Pantry project is trying to help people develop creative community projects, make new things from local people’s enthusiasms and skills and use the material resources already available in the community. What we are doing differently from many community based workshops is that we not going to be creating a ‘snagging’ list for the community. There is nothing wrong with snagging lists of course – it just isn’t what we think we have time for at this particular stage.

There are a number of really very inspiring community projects which focus on maintaining (or even better refurbishing) the community  - and making your environment beautiful for the community is a wonderful and creative thing in itself.  The difficulty with the problem-solving format in a workshop situation in my experience, particularly if you start with grass cutting, is that typically, at community level at least, all these roads lead to ‘maintenance thinking’.  Once you have started, it becomes a list of pot-holes and dog mess, road works and graffiti and litter … and half an hour later you are talking about ‘hoodies’ being loud and rude and how lonely elderly people are and how bad the NHS is, and why aren’t trains on time, or the leaves collected quicker … and before you know it you are a sad heap of exhaustion and frustration just thinking about the terribleness of it all.

So we didn’t think we would do that.  At least not for the first couple anyway.

What we are planning on doing is thinking less about maintenance issues and thinking more about creating new things, new ways of doing things with new ideas and people – with an strong eye for how young people and older people and other people with less social capital, but loads of talents, can be properly included.

Maintenance after all can be pretty boring.  There is a lot of satisfaction in a clean house, and stacks of clean laundry are nearly as breathtaking to me as a manicured lawn but it really isn’t that exciting to the average person … is it? At least not to start with.

We know that people will come to the TP workshops with an open mind.  We are hoping to take them through a highly researched – but still experimental and innovative - process of asset-based community development: mapping assets and co-creating new ways of approaching community projects.

All this thinking in the car reminded me of the meetings I am lucky enough to have with Louise Macdonald from time to time.  Louise is Chief Executive of Young Scot (this fact helps me sleep at night)… and whenever I meet with her I feel that the world expands through her influence – possibilities open up before your eyes – things you never thought of before seem possible and exciting.  And she has never once talked about cutting the grass.

So there it is – my rationale for the Travelling Pantry workshops being asset-based, and why the intention is that participants will hopefully leave with a practical asset map of their community, a pipe to a whole host of tools and skills they can explore after the workshop and head full of possibilities. Rather than leaving with a list of chores... important as they are!

While the conversation on Big Society remains focused on services and 'fixing' issues in general, perhaps we are wasting precious time ... that we would be better spent talking about how citizens can be supported to re-configure their community in truly transformative, exciting and original ways. And to do that you need to know what's in them already.