Innovation Labs

This post originally appeared at www.workingwithjoe.co.uk

Since I started out as a children’s advocate in 2002 I’ve been searching for effective ways of involving children & young people in service development. Not ways where young people are just consulted with, nor where they lead the process and make the decisions, but where they are actively involved as equals, developing ideas and making decisions in genuine partnership with adults.Last Saturday I experienced a great way:Innovation Labs.

Working with fifty designers, young people and youth professionals I watched us create feature lists, user journeys and pitches for seven digital ideas to support young people’s mental health.

Innovation Labs: a quick introduction

In October 2011 Comic Relief and partners commissioned the Cernis Partnership to run an Innovation Lab project for young people’s mental health. At Lab 1 we created 20 personi and generated 192 ideas. For two months we incubated the ideas within a social network, exploring and refining them down to a magnificent seven ideas. Then, last Saturday, at Lab 2 we subjected each idea to five intense hours of accelerated development before pitching them to each other and Comic Relief.

Lab 2 open for business...

Those four things

I learnt four things from Innovation Labs, all of which are definitely useful when thinking about involving young people not only in digital innovation but also in service development.

 

1. Business design tools work really well

In the world of designers and entrepreneurs tools like personas, storyboards, and rough prototyping are extremely common. Despite being easy and quick to implement they are used infrequently in the user participation world. Voluntary sector, listen up!

They work because they provide a structured set of activities for exploring issues through the eyes of service users and a route map for achieving really tangible outputs (e.g. cereal box pitches) that are more than just a symbol of people’s involvement. Outputs are a coproduced product, in micro simple format.

 

2. Developing personas and user journeys makes a huge difference to the end result

Personas are “not real people or average users but user models described in detail to have the key attributes, needs, values, lifestyle, culture and personal background of the group they represent” (Giulia Piu). Personas needn’t just be service users either – try using a persona of a parent and see what happens!

User journeys are storyboards of 1 or more frames that describe how a persona interacts with a service or app and how they benefit. Empathy mapping can be used to deepen the experience further.

Both of these tools work because they put service users and professionals in the shoes of how someone other than themselves experiences a service or application, both before and after it’s been developed. Using them results in a better understanding of what is important for service users when they interact with the product or service. This in turn leads to more well-rounded ideas for developing it.

User journey in storyboard form

3. Voluntary sector values exist within commercial digital agencies

Most voluntary sector agencies pride themselves on being passionate, championing users and being led by those they work with.  In general we’re less driven by institutional needs and more able to flex around individual needs.

Both the digital agencies we worked with on the Labs embodied these values in their approach, especially in their use of user centred design philosophy. Essentially user centred design tries to optimise a product or service around how users can, want, or need to use it, rather than forcing the users to change their behaviour to accommodate it. Mihealth, Neon Tribe and White October’s facilitators did the job of involving users better than many participation workers I know could have!

 

4. Initiatives like Innovation Labs can’t exist in big voluntary sector orgs

Cernis, like its digital partners, is a small organisation driven by smart and passionate people. We were commissioned to deliver the Labs through the Mental Health Foundation by Comic Relief, Nominet Trust and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. No one’s sure what form the Innovation Labs project will take next but it seems likely that any of the seven ideas that attract further funding will need organisational forms that include young people at their heart and can quickly grow them into sustainable start-ups.

 

Next steps for the Labs

Like most people who took part in the Labs I’m excited to see where the project goes next. However, I’m probably even more excited to do more exploring of where third sector values and digital design principles overlap, and how both sectors can come together to create shared missions and coexistences.

I’ll let you know how I get on!

 

Joe co-manages the Innovation Labs project for Cernis with Katie Brown and can be found here and on twitter @workingwithjoe

After an intense day, the teams are now ready to present their ideas to the rest of the Innovation Lab participants. Working in groups of around 4 to 6, each team has worked on one idea over the day.

They’ve brainstormed, created storyboards and used empathy mapping to fully flesh out their ideas before moving to the prototype stage. They’ve also created posters, illustrations and charts explaining the best points about each developed idea, and explaining why some features have been discarded or refined. Some teams have even written their thoughts ion the back of a cereal box!

All seven ideas have changed significantly since we began this morning. We can’t tell you anymore now, but they will hopefully be coming to a screen near you sometime soon.

The next step for us to to take the ideas and the prototypes to our funders, who are Comic Relief, Nominet Trust, Invictus Trust and Right Here. If the funders like the idea, they may decide to provide significant amounts of money so that the idea can be turned into reality.

The ideas that aren’t carried forward will eventually be released into the public domain so that if any young people want to carry on working on their project, they will be free to do so.

There are no guarantees they will like our ideas – they may fund all of them, they may fund none of them – but we think they’re brilliant so we have high hopes! In fact, some of the funders were here today and we already know how impressed they are.

Speaking at today’s closing session, Billy Dann, a funder from Comic Relief said, “We want to fund things that are interesting, that are innovative, that are exciting and that’s what you’ve given me. Some of the stuff that came out of today and the incubation phase will almost certainly be funded. I can’t say which ones, but we’ll try to move things as quickly as we can. In 6 months time, you might see something.”

Dan Sutch, a funder from the Nominet Trust agreed, “Some of these ideas will almost definitely happen. We just have to work out how and in what way that will happen. Thank you for your sheer brilliance”

Susan Blishen, the Project Manager from Right Here said, “We’ll be working very hard over the next few months to take things forward. You’ve done all the hard work and now the ball is in our court.”

It’s been a fantastic day and some amazing ideas have been developed. The young people involved will all be invited back in 6 months time to find out what progress has been made. We hope you’ve enjoyed our search to find out how young people want to use technology to help with their mental health and wellbeing. Thank you for participating, whether that’s by attending the labs, incubating with us, joining the conversation on Twitter or simply by reading this blog.

For more reports and pictures from Lab 1 click here

Written by Mei Leng Yew.

This is a guest post by Mark Brown of One in Four on his experience as an Innovator at last week’s first Innovation Lab. Mark is a prolific, vocal and valued UK Mental Health commentator via One in Four magazine and social media conversation. 

“If I said to you ‘I spent last Saturday in an innovation lab’ what would you picture? Would you imagine me in a white coat with goggles on, surrounded by bleeping machines and burbling test tubes in an underground research establishment hidden somewhere behind chain link fences? If I told you it was a mental health innovation lab, would you add lots of electrodes attached to heads and lots of machines scratching out brainwaves on rolls of paper?

Well, this weekend I was in an innovation lab and it wasn’t quite like that.

Saturday 10th December saw the first of two Innovation Labs in London funded by Comic Relief, Nominet Trust and Paul Hamlyn Foundation. A development of the young people’s mental health programme Right Here, the aim of the day was to get a load of young people together with some professionals to come up with ideas for ways that technology could be used to improve the lives of young people with mental health difficulties.

Innovation labs and camps have been a fixture of the technology world for a while now. They’re a way of getting people together, getting them thinking and getting them to find ways of taking ideas forwards. It’s a bit like locking a load of creative people in a room and saying ‘you’re not allowed to leave until you come up with something’. There are various techniques for structuring them, many of which seem to involve pizza. The aim is to get ideas flowing, get people involved in them and then to develop something that can be taken forward once the lab or camp ends.

The innovation labs that I was at on Saturday set out to marry the Silicon Valley ‘white heat of technology’ aspect of innovation labs to the solving of the problems that young people with mental health difficulties face. When I went to one of the initial discussion events for these labs there had been a degree of scepticism in the room (not from me I might add). There were concerns that the macho nature of a load of people battling for their own ideas might be too much for young people with mental health difficulties. There were concerns that young people wouldn’t come up with any ideas that could be taken forward. There were also concerns that the whole format disadvantaged people who weren’t natural creative innovators.

Fundamental to these concerns were the tensions between freewheeling creativity on one hand and the idea that solutions to social problems need evidence bases and research and planning, and that the creative response to problems comes at the end of the process of development, rather than at the beginning.

The day was quite tightly structured. After the obligatory warm ups, people attending were divided into four different ‘labs’, each with at least one facilitator and a mixture of young people or ‘younger innovators’ and people who were there in some sort of professional capacity – referred to quite flatteringly as ‘older innovators’. There were about, at most, ten to twelve people in any one lab.

The order of tasks set us was wonderfully sly, and in our lab worked extremely well. Firstly we split into little groups and were given the task of inventing characters based on photographs strewn on the table. I had a hand in inventing a five year old boy named Henry who was the unhappy child of a divorced couple and who had a closer relationship with the people who looked after him than he did with his affluent parents. I also had a hand in creating the character of Geoff, a late thirties deputy head teacher going through a midlife crisis, dying his hair and lusting after one of the cleaners at his school; disillusioned with his life and the loss of his dreams of changing the world, spending empty sleepless nights scouring dating websites after his wife has gone to bed.

Other characters created in our lab included Barbara, an ex sex worker who turned dinner lady and lollipop woman with a heart of gold, Babatunde, a sixteen year old gym addict on the edges of gang culture in London, a jack-the-lad drug using night club door man, a young physically disabled man starting university, and Roxy, a social drug using teen.

Once we’d made up these characters, we got into different groups then thought of scenarios or events that might apply to them. These included things like having an auditory hallucination, finding out a cousin had just been shot or even winning the lottery.

Once we’d done that, we re-jiggled our groups again and started to come up with things that might help the characters we’d created get through some of the challenges with which we’d saddled them. This was where we began to come up with ideas for applications, bits of technology and things that could exist to help people overcome problems.

So, instead of setting out with the task ‘think of a new website’ or ‘think of a phone application’ we came at things from a different angle. We began with people, then really got to know them and work out what made them tick, then we looked at some of the challenges they might face and only once we’d done that did we start to think about what things might help.

We were given about ten minutes in our groups to come up with five ideas. Then we changed groups and had to come up with another five ideas.

We came up with loads of ideas for things. Some of them were websites. Some of them were smartphone applications. Some of them were more tradition text or telephone line based services. A number of them were for additional functions to existing things or online platforms.

We then voted on our favourites which we shared with everyone else from the other three labs in little on-the-spot 30 second pitches.

The success of the format was shown by the fact that in our lab alone, there were a large proportion of ideas that could very easily reach the prototype stage of development with a little injection of cash and technical know-how.

One of the advantages of the innovation labs format is that they remove the gap between thinking and doing and they encourage the closing of the space between recognising a particular problem and arriving at a potential solution to solve it. Starting not from a big list of things that are wrong with the world, but looking at people and the challenges they face is an excellent way of short-circuiting the ‘someone should do something about this’ response.

One of the interesting aspects of innovation labs is their elective nature. People who get involved with them want to be there and want to take ideas forwards. They are as much about helping people to come together to work on things as they are about the ideas that come out of the process. This presents a stumbling block for people who are used to consultation projects. Innovation labs can and should be inclusive, but they can’t include everyone. They create a situation where people speak for their own ideas, and those ideas make friends with other ideas and as a result those ideas become stronger and find ways of growing and being put into action. Innovation labs, therefore, are focused on making stuff happen rather than establishing an overall consensus of the challenges faced.

Coming as they do from product design, innovation labs are weighted towards coming up with ‘things’ or actual practical projects. The aim of innovation is to find a need, find a solution or solutions then test that solution as quickly as possible before refining it or discarding it. It’s not about identifying the problem alone, it’s about identifying a solution to the problem that will work for the people who experience it. Our lab on Saturday didn’t have any difficulty moving to that method of thinking, but I do wonder how much a challenge this would be for other groups of people? The idea of going ahead and trying to work something out and make it happen, then modifying it as it goes along can seem dangerously risky to people; as does the idea of designing things around people rather than designing them and expecting people to arrange themselves around them.

It’s fascinating how similar the ideas behind innovation labs are to the ways in which the ‘new’ protest movements such as the Occupy movement are run. Both are elective, in that people choose to involve themselves. Both move quickly from idea to working party to action. Both are open to criticisms that the solutions reached by such elective action are not representative in a more traditional democratic sense in that neither seeks to ask ‘everyone’ what they think. Most importantly, both are measurable not by the success or perfection of the process but what comes into being after the process has taken place. They’re both places where the process does not set the end result. The ideas that came from the innovation labs last Saturday were not predefined by the structure set up by the team who ran them. The ideas came from the people who were brought together and supported by the structure of the day.

Looking at the ideas for ‘things that came from the Innovation Labs on last Saturday, I think we’re going to see some interesting results. I met some people with whom I’m really keen to work. I heard some ideas that I’d love to have a hand in making happen and I went away with a head full of ideas for other areas in mental health where we should be doing innovation camps too.”

It’s the end of the day! Lined up in front of me are some volunteers from each group, ready to present the ideas they have come up with today. Here are just three of our bright ideas for apps.

1) “How We Say It” – an app that functions as a language guide for professionals. This would include the vocabulary that young people who are transgendered say they find acceptable, and the history and usage of such words.

2) ‘Five Steps” – an app which lets users write five steps or tips to themselves that they can look over at times of stress.

3) “Panic Button” – an app which could be linked to your Google Calendar, or any other contact list or organisation programme, and which would automatically send out a message to friends or a select group of contacts. This message could range from “I’m inconvenienced and cannot make our meeting” or could more plainly state that you are unwell and would welcome some support from your friends.

As well as pitching some of the best ideas to the rest of the group, the team have put together an enormous Wall of Ideas, with ideas loosely grouped into the following categories: direct action, family support, engagement with communities, mentoring and shadowing, independence, communication, supporting others, early intervention, mobile services, web services, signposting, breaking the cycle, explaining your story, and many more!

It’s now 4pm and it’s been a long but productive 5 hour day. 26 characters with an average age of 30 (57% male, 43% female), 98 situations and 194 ideas have been generated today!

Now that Lab 1 is over, we’re going into the incubation stage. Everything generated today will go online into a special Innovation Labs network where participants will be able to provide feedback on each other’s ideas, throw in new ideas and help develop today’s ideas further. The best ones will then be developed further in February when we all come back together again for Lab 2!

Written by Mei Leng Yew.

Rob Bell, from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, offers some thoughts on why we’re running the Labs project

This is an unusual place for me to be on a Saturday. Normally around this time I’d be playing in a park somewhere with my two boys, having fun, not a care in the world.

The oldest is 4 years old and his brother has just turned 1 – according to the oldest, the little one is now officially “a number”. Both have fine mental health…I think. I hope they will always feel they can talk to me about the things going on in their lives, their hopes and fears.

I hope they will both be able to cope with the stress, strain and uncertainty of growing up, and becoming less dependent on us. They will have friends to support and guide them, they will be self aware, and able to express how they feel about things. But as I write this, I realise how many assumptions I am making and what a fine line most people tread between mental health that is ‘good’ and mental health that makes life a bit more tricky.

The reason I am here, and that the Paul Hamlyn Foundation has decided to work with the Mental Health Foundation in supporting young people, is that young people themselves ought to, and can, play a major role in shaping the future – shaping what services there are for those who need help with mental health, shaping how we all understand and talk about mental health, and shaping the way that a whole range of organisations (youth services, social services, schools, libraries) think much more creatively about what they can do to help young people become resilient, and seek help when they need it.

I really hope that as my boys grow up they are comfortable talking about their mental health: that there isn’t stigma in admitting you need help; that young people are open, and able to help one another; and above all, that all the services we pay for properly listen to young people and design ways of helping that really work.

Rob is the Social Justice Programme Manager at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation

After lots of hard work and preparation, Lab 1 is finally upon us. Today, 60 people have travelled from all over the country (from Hull, Portsmouth, Durham, Huddersfield and even from Scotland!) to gather in London for the first Innovation Lab.

We have brought together 28 young people aged 16-25 to share their innovative new ideas with the 4 not-so-young people who are eager to listen and a mix of 25 young people and adults as part of the project team who put the Innovation Lab together.

These ladults in the project team include Billy Dann (a funder from Comic Relief), Dan Sutch (Head of Development Research at The Nominet Trust), Elise Le Clerc (from Right Here), Alexandra Molano-Avilan (from Right Here), Rob (from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation), Chris O’Sullivan (from Mental Health Foundation Scotland), Mark Brown (from One in Four magazine), Patrick Doyle (from Person First Solutions) and lots of other exciting people – computer geeks, designers, youth workers and mental health workers.

We started the morning with an inspirational talk from Chris O’Sullivan, who talked about identity, courage, the value of lived experience. Billy Dann then urged us all to “Be big, bold, brave and innovative!”

The programme for the day has been built around innovation and thinking as creatively as possible. We’ve split the group up into four smaller Labs and they are now hard at work creating fictional characters.

So far, the labs have created Sebastian, Rhys and Clarke.

Sebastian is privately-educated, plays rugby, has anger problems and hates getting out of bed. Rhys is a cheeky chap who supports Cardiff City FC. He takes drugs and suffers from paranoia. He also wants to be a DJ. Clarke doesn’t have a proper job but he loves phone apps. He struggles to make friends.

There are sure to be plenty more characters in the works, and later, the lab participants will be creating fictional situations and challenges for their characters to deal with. All ideas are created equal, and these fictional worlds will hopefully trigger some great ideas for new apps and technologies that can help these characters (and some real life young people) look after their mental health.

In the meantime, the social reporters will be keeping you up-to-date so keep updated by following us on Twitter @InnovationLabsUK and using the hashtag #innovlabs

Written by Mei Leng Yew.