02. GM Weeknotes –30th July 21📅
Hello, Welcome! 👋
Last week was my first weeknotes — there’s lots of introduction and context which you can read over here. If this is your first time reading my weeknotes, welcome! If not thanks for coming back. I am still figuring out a style/content. I have been taking a lot of inspiration from this medium post, but for now I am just trying to jump straight in to my week. I think last week was probably a bit too long!
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This week’s context 📌
This week has been a shorter work week, last week (post weeknote post) I was stung by a swarm of bees from a hive — luckily I am OK. It was pretty terrifying and something I wouldn’t want to repeat. I have been recovering this week from the 30 stings and general shock I experienced. Towards the end of the week I gave myself permission to say, “it’s ok to take a few days to recover”. I am not usually good at not working, but I really felt I needed it.
So my weeknotes are less meaty!
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Food Project 🍎
Cultural Probes
Trying to take this a bit further this week, thinking about what this could look like. I have decided on the postcard format for my cultural probe and locations within the community — still waiting to hear back from them (holidays are really slowing this process down).
My work this week has been thinking about the questions / prompts to ask. Initially this project was about Food Stories and just finding out about experiences. However, in order to align with some more important data and to bring a bit of qualitative knowledge to the team I am looking at “barriers to food”.
Below are some of my brainstorming around the barriers to food, backed up by data that we have.
This is tricky for a few reasons (there’s a lot more!):
- How do you get people to want to actually write about this?
- How do you make people feel comfortable talking about this?
- How do you make this useful for the time people give you?
I am also thinking about accessibility and inclusivity, how do we make sure everyone is able to tell their story should they wish. I don’t think all stories need to be written, so I am working on ways people might be able to share stories through visuals / images.
(If anyone has any great examples / thoughts / ideas / feedback please feel free to comment!)
The questions I am currently asking myself in this process / research are:
- Why would people want to fill this in?
- How will people fill this information in?
- What information do we want to know?
- How do we get information on the barriers to food without it being direct?
- What indirect questions / prompts can we ask?
- How do we make this data useful for the community we are engaging with?
I really don’t want to swoop in with a cultural probe idea to find out more about Barriers to Food without it being of value to the community as well as the organisation. I have been thinking about ways this could be a delightful experience but also a resource for the community once the data is collected. I have always admired the work of Candy Chang and how her probes enabled the community to build on them. Particularly in “I wish this was”, people used this as almost a resource… as an example it sparked connections and conversations “I wish this was a bakery” “Well I know how to a bake cakes” “I would love to help you bake cakes” etc.
I would really like this project to feel the same, or set out to do something like this. This is my challenge at the moment, figuring out ways to ask questions that might lead to something like this and be of value.
I know I don’t have all the answers for this, so if anyone has ideas / thoughts I am super open to constructive feedback.
Next Steps for this is to develop some prototypes of different questions and get colleagues / others to fill them out and see the different types of responses. Will update next week on how that goes! 👍
Other Projects 💻
I have been working on pulling together some citizen journeys for the Bloomberg project I am working on, thinking about what new services might look like and how people move through them.
Part of that process has been checking out lots of types of service blueprints, I made one on a previous project for my university course — FoodCiti, but wanted to see what else people added to them.
I feel drawn to the ones that use customer thoughts / quotes and feelings to try and convey how they experience the service beyond just the touchpoints. From this we have developed our own template in Miro that we will use for further developing and prototyping.
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New this week 🤓
I actually tried this last week with my colleague and completely forgot to add it to my week notes, but I have been trying out Around.co. It came up on my sponsored posts and I usually ignore these types of ads “Fatigue free Zoom” etc. but then my Dense Discovery Newsletter — probably the only one I truly love and read — featured it too so I gave it a go!
Verdict: Loved it! Worked so well for collaborating on Miro and not staring at screens of faces. The floating faces actually stick around on your Miro board so you feel connected, but able to work. It wasn’t as distracting as zoom!
