Unicorn Island

Adventures on Design and Creativity

[hyperislandunicorn]

WHAT ARE DIS???? I just started using Sketch. Yes, I am late to the party. But the most important thing here is - are YOU in the party? OMG. Change your life sister. Get on it now. GOD. I’m in love.

Get on it: https://www.switchtosketchapp.com/switch-to-sketch

...GOD.

[hyperislandunicorn]

Emotions post Service Design Jam ‘17

Sweetbabyjesusthatwasamazing. I’m left with all the feels after my first Service Design Jam and I MUST reflect. I can only think of the word ‘connection’... that’s what I think the Jam’s outcome was. Connection between people and topics. Regardless of background or day job. For my own sanity, I must break it down... What did I just do?

1. Fiona, Radina and I did a workshop on Behavioural Personas

We volunteered, as Common Good, to prepare a workshop and facilitate in this year’s Service Jam in Manchester - an event that is part of the Design Festival and sponsored by the Coop. It was brilliantly organised by Kathryn Grace, a wonderful woman, full of drive. My responsibilities here were to: 

Show up at 9am on a Saturday

Design a 40min workshop about behavioural personas and deliver it 4 times to different participants

Answer questions about design methods and processes

I came back home after that first Saturday on a high. I had to go for a run.

2. I spoke in a panel discussion about the capabilities Manchester needs in order to design 21st century services

I was lucky enough to sit next to Dan Hill (Head of Arup Digital Studio), Emma Collingridge (Digital by Design Programme Manager, Stockport Council), Emer Coleman (Technology Engagement Lead, Co-op Digital) and Ben Terrett (Design Director, Co-op Group) who was hosting the discussion and talk design, cities and ideas. I read about 3 books in preparation for it and bothered all of my close friends to discuss the topic in advance, to understand it better. It was less stressful than I thought it would be (hyperventilations aside)... probably because everyone was lovely around me. I felt I could decently be part of a conversation about Manchester and human centered design... me! An ex advertiser! Fantastic feeling.

3. I was a facilitator at the Service Jam Day 2

I volunteered to be a facilitator and help attendees respond to an almost self generated brief. They didn’t know the topic or what to expect but my god did they enjoy themselves. I ended up doing the following:

Wore my unicorn hoodie, always exciting...

I picked a team to facilitate and helped them through

Got them to be the first team out of the building

Shared loads of techniques like the ‘tap me in the shoulder’, how to define users, super quick service mapping, crazy eights, dot voting...etc

Suggested to role play the service and let them go at it

The role playing solidified the concept and helped them iron out the details of the service

Panicked when they picked up and went to a train station to show the role-playing to strangers

Pretended to be a cat for the sake of the prototype

Quickly shuffled to the team next to us to get them off their chairs and onto making something - which they did

Walked around the space to see if I could bother anyone who wasn’t feeling it... only to discover everyone was high on collaboration 

Winning the facilitator-of-the-day award! I got an emoji coin thing! I don’t know how to use it but it’s lovely!

What do I take away from this experience...

As an extrovert with facilitation experience I know I get my energy from people. I know that putting myself and others outside of our comfort zones (as best I can) is an instant bond-maker. Vulnerability (i.e. showing yourself as you are, no masks) creates connection. A service jam is the perfect place for vulnerability. In it, people are welcomed to squeeze rubber chickens, learn by doing and decide whether or not putting a paper bag on their heads is a good idea... or not. It doesn’t matter - but the option is there.

Unlike any other activity in the recent months, I found myself play-making again, no strings attached. My team in particular was designing a solution for commuters who suffer delays - using live data. Complex. This was much more than paper bags and cats. This groups of people had just met and they spent only a couple of hours to design a feasible, viable and desirable system that connects people in and outside a train when a delay occurs. They key is that they spoke to people in the tram, train and bus stops...to get their insights. No real users, no point.

My key takeaway from all of this is that I can enable some serious play-making. I knew that before, but the difference after the Service Jam is that I now want to use it immediately and locally. Having met awesome humans that live here now, and having spoken to eminencies about this city... I feel the plan is clear. I should figure out:

How might I use what I know (and the spare time I have) to enable unicorn play making towards positive change around me?

Full of feels and purpose, I leave you now. If you want to help me, please get in touch. Thank you everyone involved! 

[hyperislandunicorn]

Wrap Up Day

I just finished a 6 week project with Radina, John and Fiona. We collaborated with the client and their teams as best we could. We just had a two hour team termination session, with post its, the above video and a lot of truths!

What we delivered:

Phone call customer journey

Tablet customer journey

Desktop customer journey

iPhone customer journey

Qualitative reviews online

Lab session - 5 customers

8 customer interviews

17 member interviews

Lab session - 5 customers/members

Stakeholder interviews

Shadow customer service centre

Research synthesis

Service blueprint

Service map

Warehouse visit

Stakeholder interviews

What I learnt:

Coming out the other end, I think my biggest learnings are:

It’s all about working with caring, healthy humans

As Joi Ito says... Culture is the one success defining factor for teams working in uncertain problems

I’ve never enjoyed what I do more than at Common Good

Psychological safety (and its absence) is as tangible as a slap in the face

Rita. Out.

[hyperislandunicorn]

Que no sea por pedir... 

#welovemcr #checkingin #afterhyper #manchester 

[hyperislandunicorn]

Today I made a video and this illustration. I’m about to start a super exciting project with a super exciting team next Monday. It’s AWESOME. I’m signed up as a designer, but I’m going to play facilitator too where possible since its a 2 company-team with 2 different locations.

Principles I’m gonna try and follow:

- Create non-polished communicational assets (like a dodgy video...)

- Document as I go (CREATE and USE the team’s tumblr from day 1. It’ll make retrospectives and case study making a BREEZE

- Facilitate common understanding anyway possible

Woo! Excited!

[hyperislandunicorn]

Delaying the gratification of answering and pushing boundaries of a groups thought is tiring. But can be so rewarding when they jump on the flow and get going!

@EarlofSteve on facilitation

[hyperislandunicorn]

Culture Design in Practice

This was a very very long blog post about how I incorporated culture design into the NHSBT blood donation centre of the future, but... my computer died on me and TUMBLR DOESN’T SAFE YOUR WORK IN PROGRESS BLOGS. FFS.

So to recap. If you want to design a healthy happy culture in your next project:

1. Frame the project as a learning opportunity. To yourself and others. This is backed up by theory around: psychological safety, vulnerability, growth mindset and uncertainty acceptance. Speak to as many team members as possible and ask for their input, even if you’re the lead on the project, you don’t know everything.

2. Bring emotional intelligence through facilitation & the project planning. Don’t make an agenda that doesn’t allow people to take a break, have a laugh or enjoy what they’re doing. Productivity in excess drives frustration and withdrawal. Ask if you’re making an assumption. Use non-violent communication techniques such as giving empathy to connect with what’s wrong when someone seem’s frustrated. Especially give yourself empathy when you feel something’s wrong.

Just do what the infographic says ok.

AND WRITE YOUR BLOGS ON EVERNOTE. TUMBLR SUCKS.

[hyperislandunicorn]

On Slide decks

I’ve been making and visually tweaking presentations for years now and I feel I need to clarify some things. More for myself than anyone else really, since it seems its part of my role as a designer as I travel and meet more and more people with things to say.

Conventions

I think having a shared understanding within a team about what decks are, what role they play and how they should be created would make everyone happier.

At Common Good, I hope to arrive at the agreement that slides are a "last resource when we cannot talk or print or draw” to explain ourselves. I also hope we agree that "when they are used they should be visual and pleasing to look at” and only be hinted at, ‘never read’ from unless absolutely necessary.

In the past, not having these agreements or conventions has led me and others to having paragraphs and bulletpoints that never end, screenshots that nobody can read and a never-ending slide deck that makes me want to kill myself.

Keynote doesn’t matter

In my opinion, slides matter as much as any other support element can. Keynote, the tool I use to create them, doesn’t matter at all if I have nothing useful to say.

Keynote is only good when it helps me create visual aids for a presenter who knows what she’s talking about - or when I know I’m just rounding up gaps in a subject matter that is pretty clear already.

Paper first

Slides are only relevant after a story has been crafted. How can a deck support something that doesn’t exist otherwise? The following is how I prepare for a presentation, just to illustrate my point. Notice how making a deck only comes at the end. Thinking about what the flow and story is takes most of my time:

Download my story on a storyboard (on paper)

Spot and simplify any key messages on the storyboard

Define what visuals I’ll need for which key messages

Tweak the flow of the storyboard until I’m happy with it

Learn the story by heart, where I can tell it to someone without looking at the storyboard

Open the computer and turn my storyboard into slides

Team before paper

Considering most decks are now created through collaboration, we all need to get together before a presentation to print things out, make notes, learn the story and keep tweaking the flow until it’s right. There’s not going around it.

We did this for the UN presentation at Common Good and in a matter of hours pulled together a story that blew the client’s mind.

Conclusions

I wish everyone crafted their story on paper first

I’d be happy to turn those paper prototypes into slides

Good visual design is not a substitute for a well crafted story

Interesting links

Great simple deck 

http://www.slideshare.net/aweyenberg/all-handspreparingtofail/11-CODEHENRY_FORDThe_only_real_mistake Book on slide makin' 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Resonate-Present-Stories-Transform-Audiences/dp/0470632011/ref=sr_1_1?tag=teco0a-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1405438753&sr=8-1&keywords=resonate Presentation principles

https://visage.co/11-design-tips-beautiful-presentations/ https://blog.slideshare.net/2015/03/27/3-legendary-design-decks-every-presenter-should-read

Visage: service (agency?) that makes pretty presentations https://visage.co/services/

[hyperislandunicorn]

How we organised every visual asset at Common Good in 7 hours

Being the violently-action-oriented person I am, I’ve learnt that I have to document my process as much as possible. Because:

I forget

I want to repeat things that went well

So here’s how we started the day with a big fat mess and ended up with a neat and thought through plan... AND an output.

The Challenge (a.k.a the mess)

Imagine a big drawer of stationary you’ve been using and filling up for about 4 years and which you refuse to organise. Well... this drawer is the visual assets at the wonderful Common Good (place I love and happen to work in) and organising it is my job.

The challenge is that there are innumerable documents: wall posters (of a million sizes), workshop assets (to write on, to print, to draw on and again, of a million possible sizes) and other things like keynotes, legal documents, google docs, google sheets...etc 

It wouldn’t be a problem to continue digging on the drawer to find what you’re looking for... but when I’m the only one who knows where things are or how to make them I becomes a big ‘blockage’ to the flow of the team’s work. The idea or organising the drawer is to make it accesible to anyone in the team: old, new, artsy, excel-sy... anyone!

The Approach

In my head the best thing to do was to visualize everything there is to organise and have it in front of me. Give everything a name. Go through the tedious task of taking each item from the drawer and giving it a name. This is because that’s how my brain works: if I don’t actually ‘see’ it... it doesn’t exist. Visual creature.

After understanding (which meant digging out the name of every possible document and writing it on a post-it) would come sorting. Mindy jumped to the task and created an axis of extremes (pictured) where the extremes were ‘playful vs serious’ and ‘internal vs external’. 

Playful = using all 4 colours of the Common Good brand and plenty of illustrations both made by the artist we hired and myself. The format becomes the main piece of engagement.

Serious = using one or no colour at all and keeping layouts black and white. Illustrations are switched for typography and if necessary one of our 2 blue hues can be used. The content is the centre piece of attention (which is mostly our case since we are constantly framing work around our brand and the work itself is always different and created for the client anew)

Internal = documents only the team see’s

External = documents anyone can see (which is mostly our case due to our ‘transparency’ value)

On it we plotted out every single item and observed that most assets are external and serious - except for special bespoke objects and documents with plenty of illustrations. 

Aimee was lovely enough to take a look at the completed axis and help us take each item from that axis onto a less visual design organisation mode. She suggested we organised each item under a group: ‘workshop’, ‘wall’ or ‘other’. On the picture above you can see the three columns. It was pretty cool because while Aimee read out each post it from the axis of extremes, Mindy and I wrote down what she said on post its (taking turns). It took 5 minutes to complete. Genius implicit team work. 

The organisation helped immensely.

Output

We started a google document that would hold the font sizes, colours and any ‘rules’ we established as each template was created. 

However we hit a problem: the document was hard to browse, read and edit quickly. For this reason we transferred the information (or ‘guidelines’) of each document onto a google sheet.

The idea is that anyone in the Common Good team can open the template guideline google sheet and look for the deets, or birth certificate to put it metaphorically, of any branded asset in existence. 

Not only that but team mates will feel empowered to change documents knowing what the ‘right’ size/colour/format is... or even create their own variation of a document taking the guidelines in! 

Mindy, Charlie, Aimee or myself will one day explain to the whole team (on some sort of ‘visual asset induction session’) how to use the google sheet (which is still being filled in by Mindy and myself).

It will be as easy to use as:

Choose between the following three categories: wall, workshop or other.

Find the item you need

Imagine you need the wall asset called ‘A3 frame’ template... because you’re pitching to a client and printing an A3 poster.

If you read the line item ‘A3 template’ you’ll learn what margin size, title font, body font, footer font to use.

You’ll also have a link to the template on the drive to download and further notes in case there are any exceptions or tips. 

EVEN IF IT ALL GOES WELL... I don’t know if people will like it or understand it. Nothing is set in stone! This post might be a waste of time! Kidding.

Learnings

Working as a team is priceless

It’s always better to understand the problem, download all the information somewhere, look at it and think - before doing ANYTHING.

Tools (like the axis and using post its and titles) are there to help sort my brain out

Mindy and Aimee are the queens of everything

I’m an eager maker and need to remind myself of all of the above #red

Yay! Organisation!

[hyperislandunicorn]

Project: Figuring my Interests Out

Having taken a step aside (not back) from a team and personal project that’s very close to my heart (shout-out Dom, Q & Trish) around culture design, I want to figure my interests out before I get into anything else. Below is why I’m doing it and what I need from you. 

I want to explore my interests through research/synthesis but without an agenda this time: no thesis deadline, no product launch in the horizon, no trello board...hopefully, no team, no rush. Just a light on the other side shining bright asking me to investigate it. Oh and an Evernote notebook obviously to organise myself.

Key Drivers

People around me could benefit from this

A bunch of wonderful people have reached out to me personally for support in the last week and I’ve noticed only because it happened in a very short period of time. Upon reflection, it turns out I really enjoy giving my time to people who need someone to talk to. The challenge is to support them in the best way possible - the current reality is I don’t know how and I want to learn.

I’m hopeful. An awesome human working at Common Good mentioned coaching to me months ago asking me if it’s something I’d be interested in becoming one day. He said there are coaches in big design companies (made by many, huge, ustwo...etc) and that I should look into it. I want to look into it. Into the whole thing. Not life coaching - ‘holistic’ coaching if that’s a thing? Coaching that helps teams go through Susan Wheelan’s stages of team development together or helps people feel fully capable when insecurity kicks in and ruins EVERYTHING. Maybe for myself, not necessarily to do it for others just yet.

3. The World sucks

I’m not even kidding. Leaving the house is hard in the morning knowing about the things that are going on. Displaced families, hate crimes, white men thinking they’re the shit, just hate and fear everywhere. I want to do something about it and I want to stop feeling stupid for saying that without having actually done anything about it. I want to help those I can by building on my accumulated-to-date (little) knowledge. Can I somehow wake people up? Would that help them be more in touch with themselves? Would this in turn help them be more in touch with the world around them? #empathy #emotionalintelligence 

4. Stress sucks

Stressed-out creatures around me have ran me over without me or them knowing what exactly happened. They were buried deep in their personal experience (as was I) and let the overwhelming anger, or whatever the hell was going on inside, take control of the situation. 

I’m done with that, I don’t want it to happen again. 

I don’t want to do that to anyone again. Plus, I want to be able to call out those who act from fear. I want to research (properly, for me) what stress does to living things beyond the survival factor. I’m reading Alan Watts at the moment and I’m all like: FML! is stress anxiety?!? Is anxiety the outcome of stress? What the hell is stress?! How is it impacting my mental health? Or is it the other way around? Am I aware of it? Am I getting stressed by stress? lol. No, seriously. Is it killing us? Who’s benefiting from it?

The Objective

Aside from continuing the work I started in October 2015, the objective is to properly understand what are my interests and how to address them better (second phase obviously). 

Back in October last year, I was doing loads of reading and field research for my thesis at Hyper Island. I wrote 17,000 words on ‘How employees can contribute to designing the company culture themselves’. I stopped the work in February 2016. It’s been 9 months of zero involvement in this topic... until now. During these 9 months I moved cities twice and worked in two very different environments. My interests have narrowed down from ‘culture design at work’ to:

A) Emotional Intelligence (because without it nothing can be done to design culture)

B) Stress (because it’s everywhere)

C) How our bodies are impacted by stress (mainly because my culture design efforts cannot exist forever only in the ‘Design’ ‘industry’ bubble. I would like to go broad and wide into other industries. Now.)

What I need from you

Please share with me links, ideas and thoughts on the above topics. 

I’ll be giving myself until May to put something out in the world, be it another post like this with findings or something more. Think a 6 month window to get a clear objective down is good enough time... isn’t it?

Let’s find out.

[hyperislandunicorn]

A day of learning with @BuckleyWilliams 

Dan and Nat from Buckley Williams came in this Tuesday, to give Lisa B. and myself a full day workshop on JavaScript. We kicked off with the base that we knew HTML and CSS - thanks to our weekly ‘coding club’ sessions on Wednesday mornings. Power to the nerds. Here are the things we learnt during this workshop:

Dan and Nat are full of giggles, magic & unicorns

Makers will always click, no matter if they just met that morning. Makers all want the same thing anyway: to make magical things! #yay

JavaScript(JS) is amazing

JavaScript and simple, even a cat can learn it: http://jsforcats.com/

Learnt about the console, strings, numbers, functions, built-in functions, downloadable functions, the world of functions that Mozilla’s resource has (thank god for Mozilla’s organisation yo, otherwise who knows what is what!), how to pull live data from Flickr using Flickr’s API and some good old JS.

Never to leave your gym bag in the office with your home keys

Makers like sushi

Lisa and I want to build a thing together and call Dan and Nat in for feedback

There are amazing resources out there to help you build things with JS, it all start with a paper and pen sketch. Nat explained we should draw out our idea and then think about ‘how’ we’re going to build each bit of the idea. Write down a plan of what you want your JS to do, maybe write it in Atom as a comment and then work through each step of the plan.

Manchester is nicer than London, confirmed.

I love my job. www.common-good.co FTW

[hyperislandunicorn]

Making Data More Exciting

So we did loads of survey work in three countries and ended up with even more loads of paper on the floor. It was a LOT of paper.

Fiona and I grabbed the diagrams, a stack of A4 and a couple Sharpies. Drew them out and highlighted what mattered from them.

I have never done an infographic from raw data created in-house. I think this is a first attempt at doing so. What i found was:

- Us vectors. Creating vector images for data makes you flexible: now these artworks can become a colourful inforgraphic, a poster or a slide

- Make everyone in the team draw. Working with Fiona to draw brought us to the same page, to agree on what I was going to design on Illustrator. She was behind the raw data, I was behind the final artwork, but we were together drawing the concept out.

- It’s easy to get a designer bias with data. It’s hard for me to remove myself from the designer role and analyze the data with Fiona. It took me two or three goes to understand which part of the graphic was the most important and where the insight was. I kept thinking about what looks better instead of focusing on what the data was saying and how to correctly visualize it.

Yay! I'd love to have time to do the infographic... fingers crossed.

R

[hyperislandunicorn]

Mind Blown

So, Common Good opened up the new business exercise to the wider team and has handed over tools and SMART objectives to work against to everyone. I mean EVERYONE. I’m on a team exploring Travel. This means I get to travel for the next 9 days and work against a list of research/strategic “deliverables” (if you wish). Yes. Airplanes, trains, buses... anything.

The way I understand it is, it’s silly for a company not to use the power of all its staff (12 minds) when we’re all fully capable of going out for new business if we have to. With all of our personal interests in mind, four topics were chosen and teams were created. Deadline is in three weeks and time and budget has been put aside for us to make it happen. 

The Outcome?

That in only 9 days we will have months worth of real world research done (experiencing the service, surveys, interviews, photos, desktop research... you name it...). Our CEO then, with this information in hand and documentation of how we did it, can approach these brands, with our homework done and knowing how we can add value to their business.

Damn. 

[hyperislandunicorn]

Check-in

So, we checked-in this morning and asked ourselves what the challenge or question of the day is for you. It was a puzzling question that came out of asking each other what the question should be! Fiona, Lisa, Phil, Radina, Lucy and myself all shared our questions of the day. Some more abstract than others, all really challenging!

Latest Update: I’m working on finishing things I start

Things are amazing. My goal of the coming months... or years is ‘to finish things I start, to try them again in different ways, to find a way that really works for me and to share it’. Finishing things is hard. The picture above is of a medium blog post I recently finished (I struggled to finish it for weeks, having written 15 pages of crap). There’s also super positive feedback on the post.

The slides are for a deck I’m creating using brand new branding we’ve created for Common Good. It’s amazing to be able to shape something from scratch on my own, so close to a very important meeting with the client. I feel trusted and that is important.

Life is well in the Island.

Regrets about leaving a fancy life in Dubai: 0%

[hyperislandunicorn]

United Nations is getting me down

I was involved in a refugee ideation sprint this week. It made me react in ways I’m still trying to understand. All I can do is describe the current situation:

Emotions: All over the place. Not depressed, but very sombre.

Thoughts: Like a bunch of flies trying to sit on something.

Actions: Read and write, cry, pick fights.

Ideal environment at the moment: A room! 

I refused to do a refugee project same time last year because I noticed I was not emotionally prepared to take on a project so sensitive (impact, user, issues involved...).  Why does this keep happening!

* SIGH *

[hyperislandunicorn]

Gibbs Model for Reflection

Phil, a fellow Hyper, wrote a super cool article about the future of designers. In it he included Gibbs model for reflection as you can see above.

Learning

I found it useful because its a little more thorough than other models I’ve used before. It really forces you to evaluate a situation and go through all the phases of reflective learning.

About the reflection itself, turns out I had a moment today during a Skype call today with other Hypers. It was about working on a UN project together to try and give jobs to refugees in Africa. It was a shocking moment of realization: I am actually doing something that matters right now - while enjoying it.

[hyperislandunicorn]

"I aaaalways have to carry The Tube with the presentation in it..." #foundanalternative #notube #drinkingtube #whattube http://ift.tt/2acWhvb