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Sidekick School: TakeCare (now Jointly) weeknotes #2

Posted on 15th May 2012 by Asi Sharabi -

[co-written with Nikki (design lead) and Ian(technology lead)] 

We’re now just over 4 weeks into the CarersUK-Sidekick School project so we thought it’s a good time for an update. In the past few weeks we focused on user research. As suspected, it is hugely challenging to find 'typical' instances of caring. This is due to the fact that there are so many variables that come into play (as we outlined in our first weeknotes). We now know that creating a product that will answer all of carers needs is practically impossible. We have to make some decisions.

Don’t call me a carer

One really interesting theme that emerged from talking to people caring for a loved one while working full time is the fact that none of them considered or identified themselves as carers. This is due to myriad of reasons but predominantly the resistance (one would argue a denial) to label oneself as a carer. No matter how much disruptive to their everyday lives, “I’m just looking after mum”, “this is what I signed for when I got married”, “this is just part of life” where quite common reactions. Additionally, the reluctance to accept oneself as carer was even more common where some form of formal/professional care was in place. The main implication for us is for customer development, comms and marketing - how to market a product designed for working carers who don’t identify themselves as such? We are looking more into this and made a decision to treat caring as a verb rather as a title - something that you do, not something you are. The first thing we did when we realised that people don't identify themselves as carers was to change the codename of this project from TakeCare to 'Jointly' to reflect our focus on caring coordination.

What (working) carers need/want?

The fact that 1 in 6 of working carers end up leaving work because they cannot keep juggling between these two demanding worlds. When we tried to understand the reasons it is wonder that this figure isn’t higher. 

• Lack of awareness and support at work

While pretty much every one of us will find him/herself looking after a loved one at some stage (most probably caring an elderly parent), there is still lack of employers’ awareness and support. Working carers tend to ‘hide’ the fact that they juggle work and care, and take sick leave as a default.  

• Lack of support outside of work

We’re starting to understand what CarersUK mean by the social care time-bomb. Social care seriously lacks the awareness, policy and resource to support working carers even though they save over 100 billion(!) pounds in providing care for their family and friends. Caring can take its toll on your finances, your health and your career and your social life. Carers can fall out of paid work and many rely on low-level benefits, forcing them into poverty. 

Making caring a bit easier by making it a lot more organised

In order to have a starting point from which we could make assumptions, ask questions and develop hypothesis for testing we talked in-depth with lots of people who care for a loved one while juggling a full-time job. Some interesting and 'fuzzier' themes began to emerge from these conversations:

- how the dynamics between family members impact on the circumstances of looking after a loved one and how it affects juggling work/care.

- the involvement of neighbours and friends in a wider circle of care 

- gender-driven attitudes to divisions of labour

- the varying number of formal care givers involved and the impact this has on the caring experience 

- the impact of the relationship and consistency of interaction (if any) with formal care giving individuals 

We are currently sticking to our focus on ‘circles of caring’, i.e. looking at caring as a group activity and therefore as a communicative and emotional context. In a recent survey by Carers UK, 77% of working carers reported that they receive some kind of help, support from relatives, friends or neighbours was the most common form reported. Very rarely does one individual acts as a sole caregiver while working full time - this is admittedly an impossible situation. We found that sometimes being completely on your own is a less a lack of circle and more a uneven division of responsibility that contributes to the sense of having no help at all. 

Our hypothesis is that still that where a group of people involved, co-ordination of care through better communication can make a big difference to the stressful life of working/caring. 

Circle Personas 

Based on everything we had heard we invented some circle-personas. We chose to illustrate 3 different scenarios: 

The first looked at the very hands on 'heavy end' caring duties, e.g. feeding, dressing, maintaining personal hygiene.

The second looked at the lighter end of caring duties e.g. emotional support, picking up shopping etc.

 

The third looked at a crisis situation whereby someone finds themselves in a situation of caring overnight due to something unexpected and often traumatic like an accident injury or sudden illness.

These have helped us more clearly define and visualise what we mean by terms like 'circle of care' and 'caring duties' and they give us a useful reference point for conversations with external parties as well as among ourselves.

Next - we’re starting to build something. We aim to have a working MVP in 6 weeks and start validate our hypotheses with a working prototype as soon as possible. 

 

To be continued...

League of Meals: weeknotes #4 - Getting the message right

Posted on 26th April 2012 by Johanna Kollmann -

Last time, I left off just before our 'vision check and lessons learned' workshop. Since then, we worked on our mission statement and messaging, got feedback (and their life stories) from our cooks over coffee, ran another cooking session, met with other organisations such as Shoreditch Spa, the Best Before Project and Waste Watch, and talked to a range of people, from campaigners and food tech startup founders to older people at the Sundial Centre. With help from Stephen, an update to our website is in progress.

We're hosting another fundraising dinner next Friday, May 4th. You can find details and tickets here. You are cordially invited to come along, and if you are extra-nice, please help us spread the word.

Finding our voice: "What makes the story worth telling?"

Explaining League of Meals to someone is an opportunity to get feedback and test our messaging. A key objective over the past few weeks was to focus, and state what we do more clearly. We are passionate about reducing food waste in the household, and our cooks have ideas and knowledge about how to use ingredients efficiently. How do we talk about this in a fun way? "Cook better, waste less!"?  "Use your loaf!"? 

We discussed our tone of voice, words and phrases we want to be associated with, and what reaction we want to evoke. We tested our first draft copy with a few people, and, well, we still sounded a bit dry and not fun enough. Applying these lessons learned, we are experimenting with the copy on our homepage, and in conversations. 

Work in progress on our mission statement. The tagline that came out of it tested badly!

Brainstorming keywords. After testing our messaging, we wanted to come up with more fun, down-to-earth language.

The values we bring to our work

Working on the brand and messaging led to a discussion about the values we want to communicate, but also the values we bring to our work. Your passion for a problem worth solving, your vision, are based on your underlying values. Human beings are driven by intrinsic values such as freedom, equality and creativity, and extrinsic values like power or preservation of public image. Everybody experiences tension between these two. (Read more about this topic over here).

We found it helpful to reflect on our motivations when planning our next steps, and even though the two of us collaborate all the time, taking time out to share why we care has been important to make sure we're still aligned. Going forward, we're applying values to how we frame our communication, and to how we can engage people in a positive way. 

Iterating the "prototype"

The cooking sessions are our prototype, and we are getting better with each one. We have seen an increase in collaboration and team spirit amongst our cooks. We are changing a few things each time, with the goal to facilitate working creatively together rather than cooking on your own. Together, all of us are coming up with more and more ideas for using the ingredients as best as we can - leftover bread is turned into breadcrumbs, cauliflower stalks can make a warm salad or pesto, and our cooks share tips for storing leftovers with each other.

Part of the team in the kitchen

Their sense of achievement is so motivating - "what we're doing with these vegetables is like turning straw into gold", says Paula. Listen to her telling the story of Rumpelstiltksin. 

So, what's next?

Community engagement needs time. If we want to get more people engaged locally, we have to spend a lot more time getting to know people at Fellows Court, and winning their trust. To make League of Meals more visible to the local community, we are currently planning an event for the 19th of May, the date of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Day. We are talking to potential partner organisations at the moment, so expect news on this in our next week notes!

Talking as Designing

Posted on 26th April 2012 by Nick Marsh -

I did a talk at London IA on Tuesday about the idea of talking as designing. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I've embedded the presentation below, and the accompanying notes. As I say in the notes, this is the first thing I've done about this idea, not the last, and I'd love to get feedback from people about the idea. Think of it as a Minimum Viable Talk As I also said during the presentation, this is pretty rambly, as you'd expect from a first talk, and the notes reflect that!

Slide 1

I'm here to talk about talking as designing.

I've decided to do a talk about this as the first thing, so you are all guinea pigs. Sorry. And also, its not lie I've been doing a pHD into this and these are my findings. This is the first step, not the last, so if you are hoping for a big answer or something, sorry. 

Its basically something I'd been thinking about for a while - and as I'll talk about, talking is often the first thing you do when you have an idea, after thinking about it.

Slide 3

Anyone who knows me will know that I talk a lot. In part, yes, its because I like the sound of my own voice, but also, I've realised that its also because its a really important part of designing stuff, and I really don't think is been talked about much. Which is weird, because the more I tell people about the idea, the more people give me more ideas and say 'yeah, I haven't really heard much about that idea'. So it seems important. And to be clear, although I'm not overly defining anything I'm generally talking about talking in a verbal sense, not 'talking to people through writing', and obviously in talking about talking I’m also talking a lot about listening. 

Slide 4

In fact, I think in the design and software community we're actually very blinkered about the importance of talking well as part of designing things, to the point where we're actually saying to ourselves that talking is a bad thing. 

I use the example of good for nothing not to pick on them (they're great) but just as an example of how shallow our discourse is around the role of talking. Talking here is positioned as the opposite of doing. Which is stupid. I think they really mean talking about doing stuff and the NOT doing it. Which is totally different.

Slide 6

Another thought I had is that the design and software community don't like talking about talking much because we're generally quite introverted. Which is a good thing by the way.

I went to a talk the other day with a woman called Susan Cain who has had another one of these 'd'uh' ideas, that introversion is under-rewarded in creative processes. Its fascinating. You should watch her TED talk. 

However, being naturally introverted means we've self-selectedly decided that we're better at communicating through drawing or code than through verbal means. 

Unfortunately, however amazing you are, or however introverted, Talking is a really, really important part of doing stuff with other people, which in my experience is pretty much the only way to do good stuff, so we should talk about it more.

Slide 7

In fact. of all the ways of 'doing stuff' talking is the one that emphasises collaboration the most (although talking to yourself is actually quite useful as well).

• Thinking
• Talking
• Drawing
• Hacking/Prototyping
• Proper Making

So to say that talking isn't doing is silly. Talking is absolutely essential to doing anything, and I'm surprised that we don't talk about it more, in try and teach it at design school or anywhere. 

Hands up who got taught anything formal at school about conversation? Did anyone have any lessons in rhetoric? Who took part in formal debates?

Ok, now, hands up who has to have conversations as part of their daily job? And hands up who has to persuade other people of stuff in their daily job? Hands up who hates it when the bossiest loudest person makes all the decisions? OK.

Basically, when you start thinking about it this feels like quite an important topic. Getting good at understanding when talking is important to designing things will help us design better things. 

Slide 8

OK, so what am I going to talk about today. Here's a slide. 

Its going to be rambly. Sorry. And please interrupt me if you have ideas etc. I'd like this to be the start of something rather than the end. 

Slide 9

OK. so the first thing I'd say is that in order to understand how to be a good talker in designing you have to think about why people talk to each other during design processes. 

I'd say there's two high level reasons:

1. Deciding something

2. Having more ideas

Slide 10

Most formal stuff about talking sits on the left. 

• Rhetoric - persuading people
• Debate - deciding something
• Discourse - explaining stuff
• Dialectic - also deciding something (often called logic)
• Conversation - this is different, and is often not about deciding, but building or exploring

Slide 11

As we all know, deciding stuff and then having more ideas goes together, and I find the design process is often like a fractal, where at any point you get these convergent and divergent points. 

Slide 12

Or one of my favourite ideas, the concept of the wobbly line shows this really well. You draw a line to decide, but leave it wobbly so there's room for more ideas.  

BIll Buxton talked about this in his amazing book Sketching user experiences, and I also found it in this book 101 things I learned at Architecture school.

I find the process of talking is often the moment of inflection from convergent to divergent thinking - ts the point where ideas have the most potential, and the way in which the most people can participate in their production. 

Good creative talking is full of wobbly lines - ums, ahs, pauses, strange structures - that help you have more ideas within a framework.

So to go back to our formal approaches to talking, 

Slide 13

The bit of talking as designing that I think is probably the most interesting to ficus on is 'conversation' because I think this is the thing that is the hardest to think about is its the most natural, and the least studied in formal creativity. 

Slide 14

At this point I'd like to bring in the dreaded design thinking. NOt sure who here is still interested in this, but for me the big standout idea from the past 10 years of 'design thinking' thinking has been the idea of 'abductive reasoning', or a logical approach to finding answers that emphasises thinking of completely new solutions, as compared to infering solutions from existing phenomena. 

Basically what it means is the idea that designers and associated types are good at coming up with new ideas. 

BUt in doing my (very sketchy) research for this talk I couldn't really find any formal theories of talking that seem like a theory of 'abductive discourse' - i.e. talking styles specifically engineered to help you have more good ideas. Maybe they do exist, perhaps in the worlds of improv and acting. Not sure. 

When you think about it, talking is very very related to your person, so probably we should look to acting and the stage for some ideas.

Slide 15

So, if you start reading around conversation, you find loads of books about it. Which is great, but they are mostly about manners and etiquette, not making stuff together. 

However, I found one book that had a really god summary that I thought I'd share at length. Its called the art of conversation, and it has four main points that to me are absolutely on the money in terms of how to talk well in the design studio, or, talking as designing.

Slide 16

"Don't talk too long without pausing for a reaction. more than a minute is too long. Forty seconds is ideal."

Slide 17

"Never flatly disagree with the other person. It is an implied insult."

Slide 18

"Don't be too forceful or emphatic in stating your opinions until you learn the other persons attitude." 

Slide 19

"Give the other person intellectual freedom and cooperation and claim them for yourself." 

The thing that is missing a bit I think is passion. In 'normal' conversation its great to have a bit of passion, but if you are just chatting its kind of weird if people are really really passionate. But that is actually something you do want in a design conversation - a passion for the idea.

If you sum this lot up, you get the thing that everyone knows is the most important characteristic in the world of design and making things and making new things - strong ideas, weakly held. That's the best kind of person, and thats the best kind of talking.

Slide 20

So, building on the idea that conversation is important, I've come up with a list of talking / conversation styles that I think are useful in having more ideas, rather than deciding things. I'm just going to go through them with some sort of examples, and then that will be the end of my talk and we can have a bit of a conversation about it.

• Surfing
• Sparing
• Bulldozing
• On the tabling
• Deluding
• Mono-conversating
• Throat punching

Slide 21

OK so what’s next?

Personally, I’d like to expand the catalogue a bit. I’d like to find out more about other disciplines use of talking to help with creativity, maybe acting. Id also like to try out some more practical stuff to aid better designing. Here’s some ides to think about.

Slide 22

Pair programming. Programmers, of all people, are starting to really get into conversation! What can designers and other creative professionals learn from pairing?

Slide 23

Johanna Kollmann pointed this out to me, but the school of life has conversation menus during its dinners, designed to prompt more conversation and thinking. 

Surely there’s a little big idea in here about getting people to do more talking for the sake of it. I’d ike to do an exercise to design something just using talking, no writing or drawing. what would happen?!

Slide 24

There’s also something big about context, and creating the right atmosphere for talking. 

Steve Jobs used to always have his important meetings whilst walking. 

I think that’s great.

Slide 25

Here’s some more stuff that people said after I did my rehearsal at work

• learning to talk happens when you are a baby and is used in all subsequent learning so its hard to formalise
• secondary orality
• influence of job/education on talking style - e.g maths
• neuro-linguistic programming
• ‘brainstorming’ is often a form of structured conversation
• papenak
• de-bono
• roles in conversation - personality types and group dynamics
• digital mediation e.g skype
• body language

 

We Shipped This #1

Posted on 25th April 2012 by Asi Sharabi -

Last Friday we had our very first We Shipped This meeting. Unlike every end-of-week-catch-up-over-beers meetings, the idea of WST is to dedicate a special ocassion to celebrate making and makers; the launch of new products or succesful itteration and further development of existing ones. We're hoping to make this a tradition and run these delivery focused meetings every quarter or so.

We had the legendary Michael Norton (who is working with us on our social interns program) guest-talking about ideas that change the world, the fine line beweeen the crazy and the practical, and how persistence in the beginning of your journey and working through hurdels can only get you stronger. #inspiring

Ian had some facinating learnings from the making of Flamingo's Field Notes which recently went global. We then had Emily our League of Meals dudette telling us about her analouge-status-paper-robots design project. And finally Jonny talked about the making of Buddy's new website and film and how tricking yourself into making stuff but not formaly designing can unlock some designer-blocks and freeing up the creative process.

But the star of the meeting was no doubt the one and only Darren Riley AKA Bugle Major

 

Sidekick School: TakeCare weeknotes #1

Posted on 16th April 2012 by Asi Sharabi -

A problem that matter

How can we look after those who are losing the ability to look after themselves, and how much will it impact our lives?

3 million people in the UK juggle unpaid care with a paid job. They can find it hard to get help, both in and outside the workplace, and 1 in 5 ends up leaving work to care. This simply doesn’t add up, either for the social economy – which needs families and communities to keep caring as we live longer – or for the economy – which needs people to work longer to pay growing health, care and pensions bills.

Most of past years disruptive innovation around care is understandably focused on the cared for. There is a surge of innovation in so-called 'Assistive Technologies' (sometimes called mHealth), caregiving gizmos that cover personal health record tracking, remote patient monitoring that assist in remote wellness checking, medication management and more. 

 

 

 

The focus for this project is very different. It is trying to put the wellbeing of the caregiver rather than the cared-for at the center of the design process and to create a tool that helps with the unique challenges of juggling work and care.

Cargiving varies significantly:

The first thing you notice when looking at caregiving is how significantly caring for a loved one can vary. You could possibly (badly) paraphrase Tolstoy and argue that “every non-caring families are all alike; every caring family, cares in it’s own way”. 

There are at least 7 different variable with minimum of 3 options in both giving you over 2000 cases of care. Designing a digital product that can cater and support all or most of these cases is going to be hugely changeling:

1. Aged and condition of the cared for. This can be an elderly/frail parent, a child with long term condition or disability, a partner suffering from mental illness, a closed friend who found herself recovering from a stroke at 55 to name but a few

2. Relationship to the cared for. See previous point. A husband, a parent, a child, a friend, other closed relative

3. Caregiving tasks involved. The spectrum here is vast - from keeping a company, to GP appointments, cooking, feeding, shopping, cleaning, medication management

4. Time and frequency. On a daily basis, weekly shifts, any free moment, weekends only etc.

5.Distance from cared for. From living in the same house to living on different continents and everything in between 

6. Nature of work the carers is engaged in. Full time, part time, shifts, 9am-6pm, from home, and of course how aware, accommodating and supportive is your workplace

7. Share of care. How any individuals sharing the care - family, friends, paid-for care. Couple of siblings taking care of mum, one partner who is the primary caregiver for a partner in need, a neighbour who chips in with the rest of the family,   

Sifting through these different combinations to try to arrive to a reasonable number of cases or ‘caring personas’ is what we plan to do next as soon as we do some research. For now, we tried to narrow it down and design a product with the following users/customers in mind:

1. Working carers - people who juggle paid work and caring for a loved one (that excludes paid-for carers, or non-working carers who left work to become ‘full time’ carers.
2. They are part of a ‘circle of care’ - meaning they share the responsibilities with at least one more individual  

In search for an insight.

Caring as a project management

The one obvious thing about caring for a loved one in whichever context you look at, is that there are a lot of things to take care of, manage and coordinate. So the first and obvious step for us was looking at ‘cargiving’ through the prism of project management: appointments, shopping, medications, cleaning, helping, shifts etc. 

One of our early and basic hypethesis is that people who are part of a so called ‘circle of care’, i.e. part of a small group of family members and friends who share caring for a loved one could benefit from a ‘care management and coordination’ product. Something that will make juggling between working and caring a bit easier by making it a lot more organised. 

Caring as an emotional context or horizontal vs. vertical

Looking at caring through the lenses of project management with the aim of making caregiving easier logistically wouldn’t be sufficient for the design of an amazing product that carers will adopt and be willing to pay for. There are dozens of project management tools and apps out there from google cal. to Trello, AceProject, Asana to name just a very few. Designing another ‘horizontal’ tool that facilitates collaboration, manages tasks and appointments isn’t going to work. As we start our intensive user research we will be looking for an insight that will help us design a vertical product - a product that has been specifically designed for the context of care rather than a generic project management tool. An insight that will ultimately lead to a magical feature or other UX idea.

We believe that this insight will come from better and deeper understanding of the unique communicative and emotional context that is caring for a loved one and the unique interpersonal dynamics taking place within a ‘circle of care’.  

Here is a very partial list of what we now want to know/learn before we start sketching anything:

• ‘Juggling strategies’ (how people are coping with juggling work and care)
• What kind of emotions and behaviours are unique to ‘circle of care’?
• What are the dominant triggers of stress for a working carer?   
• What pushes an individual to take a radical step and leave work? 
• Is there always someone ‘in charge’ within a circle of care?
• What are the triggers of negative/positive emotions within a circle of care?
• How do people organise and keep track of the share of care?

We’ll report more soon. If you or anyone you know is juggling work and care and is part of a circle of care please get in touch we would love to hear from you.