Virtual spaces for meaningful interactions
Why we built a house for Buenos Aires’ service design community
When the COVID-19 lockdown started in Argentina we were left wondering how we could best serve the service design community in Buenos Aires. We quickly realized that our main priority was to help people in our community cope with a global pandemic. Since we all had to stay at home we decided it made sense to build a house, albeit a virtual one, to host us on biweekly gatherings to share experiences, catch up and have a beer together.
At BA Service Jams we love hosting community events for people from diverse backgrounds to get together around the love and interest for service design. Whether we are organizing the local edition of the Global Service Jam, the GovJam, our very own GenderJam or DXS (Argentina’s first service design conference), our focus lies on enabling meaningful conversations.
From physical to digital, time to iterate
Like it happened to virtually any community, company, or family on 2020’s Earth, COVID-19 arrived like thunder and disrupted our vision for this year. In our case it affected our plans in many ways:
- We were forced to stop the execution of our first Service Jam of the year, that had everything already planned, 2 days before its due date.
- We had to suspend all our other events plans and every ongoing process for their execution (agreements to get spaces, talks with possible sponsors, invitations for international speakers, and others).
In the beginning, we were as confused as anyone else, we didn’t know what to do or how to best serve the community. We were all exhausted with the amount of work-related video calls ourselves and we thought people were needing something different. Watching and talking to each other is a crucial component of the social connection, it’s the interaction that makes us aware of others. But at the same time, it didn’t really feel like the experience of a community, not in our team meetings, nor in many webinars or conferences, we assisted during the first months of the lockdown.
Our strength comes from the value of the connections that take place during the events we host. This same strength lies within the team, we are friends and almost all the -physical- meetings we have used to end up in a bar. And our identity as a team is deeply intertwined with the physical experiences we create for participants. We aim to deliver meaningful experiences so we design the “what, how, and why” for each step, from the moment you get in up to the after-event drinks. We put special attention to the moments that enable participants to connect with each other, regardless of how much they know about service design or whether they are introverts or extroverts. It is great to see how the spaces are intervened by the people who take part in each event. When thinking about bringing these experiences to the digital world there was one thing we knew for sure: we weren’t going to make just another online webinar.
But, how could we help the community to have a break from the digital exhaustion while getting together using digital platforms? Can we offer a vivid experience for our participants during lockdown?
We sought inspiration elsewhere and discovered amazing and inspiring ideas from different communities around the world. We particularly loved how Service Design Scotland had organized distanced gatherings to stay in touch during lockdown.
“What struck me about the other online events I had participated in was that few had any of the qualities or touchpoint equivalents of real-life gatherings”. Mike Press on Developing distanced gatherings
We also looked for insights on how others have worked to translate physical event experiences to digital channels. We were inspired by the work done by the UK’s Design Council. We had all used digital collaboration tools such as Mural but we found the way they hinted to physical elements and spaces in their workshops refreshing. We knew right then that we wanted to create an experience that could transport our attendees outside of their homes into a different, virtual place.
Come in, take off your shoes
That’s why we built La Casa de la Jam (The Jam House), a Mural workspace accessible to everyone, and open 24/7. The House serves both as a virtual space activated during biweekly events and as an online repository of relevant service design content. It’s a place where you can get anything from a book or toolkit recommendation to even a drink in the backyard while meeting the event speakers.
The House features -as of July 2020- a set of 6 rooms:
- At the Lobby, you can find a little bit of the history of BAServiceJams and a shout out to our current and past sponsors.
- The Auditorium is the place where most of the talks with all our guest speakers happen
- One of the most active places is the Workshop Room, where all the practical activities and warmups take place.
- The Library holds a comprehensive list of book recommendations, videos, music, and other resources that everyone can contribute to, we’ve even hosted a live book presentation, the strategic foresight open source book by Extendidos.
- Everyone can add stickers, event posters, or share anything relevant for the community in The Jammers Room.
- Our after event networking sessions are held at The Bar. Powered by the Spatial Chat application, they have become an amazing closure experience.
While the House can be visited at any given time, the cherry on the cake is the “Sesiones en la Casa” (Gatherings at the House) happening every other Friday. They feature a wide variety of short talks and workshops that go from behavioral science to futures design, visual storytelling, and others, mixing insightful talks with laid back conversations in smaller groups.
The gatherings are held over a video conference software and Mural at the same time and participants are encouraged, though not required, to join in both of them to enjoy the most complete experience.
It all starts with a reception in a video conference call where attendants get to see a screen share of one particular room of the house (generally the Workshops Room) prepared with a micro ice breaker. From leaving photos of their slippers in a virtual skeuomorphic shoe rack to composing a cartoon version of themselves, these icebreakers are a bridge for newcomers to discover the House while at the same time getting to know each other in a space with open mics and some background music.
We know how tiresome it can be to attend another video call on a Friday night, so no two-hour masterclass lecture is going to happen at the House. Overall, most gatherings consist of a short talk at the Auditorium that serves as an introduction to the subject, that quickly moves to the Workshops Room for a light exercise or a semi-structured conversation that ends with a roundtable where everyone gets to reflect and share their thoughts in a way that feels accessible and democratic. We adapted a version of Liberating Structures’ 1–2–4-All where participants get to speak in small groups before debating in larger settings. The speakers also get to participate in the groups as any other attendant.
Without losing sight of the content quality, we’re always thinking about how to bring our gatherings an approachable and relaxed mood. We encourage non-traditional presentations and every speaker we’ve invited has made use of the different parts of our House at their will. For example, we’ve adopted a pet and planted a tree to help one of our speakers make a point when explaining how behavioral design can help us defeat dog poop on the sidewalk.
This evidences the flexibility of a space that exists beyond the events themselves, because the place is still going to be there in the next gathering, but changed, evolved, iterated, based on the things that happened before. We’ve even left some rooms as a blank canvas for upcoming extensions!
The event is never finished without our signature after-session drinks, where everyone moves to the Spatial Chat room we’ve prepared with a starred night replica of the House for people to network, meet the speakers, and continue any debate that might’ve been interrupted during the event. Of all the moments and activities we’ve proposed, the after-session drinks have been by far one of the most spontaneous and engaging. People get together and rearrange as they would do in real-life physical meetups. Anything could happen from private talks in the balcony to digital moshing to the rhythm of Argentinian punk-rock bands
The whole orchestra of micro-moments happening during our sessions is aimed to serve as a strong injection of what we call “Manija”, an Argentinian slang that stands for a combination of enthusiasm and excitement that is, at the end of the day, our trademark.
A bigger house for all
Attendees that take part in our sessions are not just practitioners and enthusiasts looking for new tools and methodologies or to expand their network, they are also people sheltering in their homes during a global pandemic. We are all going through experiences for which we have never been prepared for.
“It’s the first time I feel close to other people during lockdown”
“For a while I forgot we were on a video call”
“It feels like we are hanging out as we did before”
Hosting events at the house has allowed us to reach people that would otherwise never be able to attend community events in our city. Having meaningful connections with peers from Europe, other countries in South America, or regions in Argentina that are thousands of kilometers away from Buenos Aires is something we would love to keep moving forward.
There are many challenges ahead for us, like how to create stronger bridges with communities around the globe or how to bring a full-size conference like DXS to the virtual world. We have no idea what the future holds for the House, but we’re thrilled to see it grow and evolve. Hopefully, some of the lessons we learned can help others to host more meaningful conversations, create a sense of belonging, and be there for each other.
We are Buenos Aires Service Design, a group of practitioners from different companies and organizations focused on expanding the conversation around service design in Argentina and the region.
We’ve hosted jams, meetups, unconferences, discussion panels since 2018, and last year we held Argentina’s first service design conference: #DXSconf.
La Casa de la Jam is sponsored by Balsamiq and Mural and you can find it here.
Build your own house!
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
