Weeknote 5:2019
Usual disclaimers about experiments, waning commitment and allowance for — ahem — ‘fallow’ periods apply.
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service
We did our first Show the Thing in the Studio this week. At the moment we are a tiny, barely forming team. If we’re able to deliver value in the next couple of months, we can make a business case to become a slightly more formalised outfit. So — the purpose of our STT was not only to show our way of working and therefore legitimising it but setting out our stall and success measures.
We spoke about what we’d done — user research, synthesis from the new UR and previous research discoveries — and how we plan to work. We’re looking at the reception and induction process for prisons as part of their journey through the various juggernauts of the criminal justice system. It’s potentially enormous. We can’t even pretend to boil the ocean with a part-time team, so we’ve decided to take the approach of doing some rapid prototyping with other teams working in that space, and then testing what we make in a prison environment with staff as well as people in custody. Whilst we may not end up owning any products that result from that — that’s okay — its more about how we can deliver for the user quickly.
Working across existing teams is a necessity for this kind of work. There are no greenfields, real or metaphorical, in prison. And transformation is tricky — even established services are not made of inert material, just trucking along. Whilst one team will be under pressure to deliver a sticking plaster, another will be saying the sticking plaster is not right. I’m reminded as always that we are charged with doing the right thing, which is definitely often the easy thing.
Maintenance Festival
The programme is up! And glorious! And we’ve been PRing the hell out of it this week.
However, it’s a beauty — details here. Inter-disciplinary in the extreme, the festival will be of interest to right to repair communities, those interested in skills supply and policy, STS fans, housing and built environment practitioners and open data / emerging technology and ethics enthusiasts.
We’ve put together some nice tweets and images according to the session sub-themes:
Theme: EMERGING TECHNOLOGY, ANXIOUS MAINTENANCE
Theme: CARE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
What are you waiting for? Tix £15
Other stuff
I went for a big walk for my birthday last weekend, and have been a bit sad at not walking 16 miles every day this week.
Went to see an arty film (OUR TIME) which was so ludicrously sexist that I just can’t deal. Also went to see PROPHECY about the painter Peter Howson which was A++. Decided I need more art in my life. A Strange Weave of Space and Time at Site Gallery is decent if a little too uncomfortably reminiscent of the many, many essays that have been written about the auratic.
