From Wifi Connections to Human Connections
Our journey with Deepr to design for remote interactions with young people
In June 2020 The Children’s Society were approached by a design agency, called Deepr, to collaborate on a project. Funded by Catalyst, the project aimed at supporting charities through the sudden transition to digital ways of working following the Covid19 crisis (more about Deepr’s amazing work here).
The project would build on expertise Deepr had developed over the years on how services can be designed to build and nurture relationships between people. It would also be based on lessons The Children’s Society had learned. After an entire workforce was suddenly required to work from home, our services had needed to rapidly transition to socially distanced and digital delivery.
Ignoring the technology and opening the heart
What made this project feel unique and exciting was that its focus was not on all the ways in which technology can be used to connect to the young people we support. We hardly even spoke about technology! Instead, we talked about how to design for trusting relationships in turbulent times when meeting face to face was no longer possible. That felt both refreshing and necessary in the context. Practitioners were already getting their heads around all the hardware and software changes, but they knew better than anyone that getting all the infrastructure in place was only step one.
During the Covid19 crisis it had suddenly become a lot more difficult to reach the young people we supported, while it also had become even less likely they were able to access support. In addition to establishing contact, it became that crucial staff were able to make an actual connection required to support the young people they worked with.
In a blog that elaborated on this challenge beautifully, Jim Davis captures this by noticing such a connection requires ‘moments to just be together’, but this ability to just be together is exactly what was lost as a result of Covid19 restrictions. We needed ways, as he writes, of ‘investing in nothing’ and enable moments of casual and informal interactions with young people that are free of expectations. You can read his full blog here.
Creating such space to just be together is a skill we do not often talk about. A practitioner from The Children’s Society’s ‘SCARPA’ service, who generously gave her time to support this work, explains how not being able to pull on these skills any more, deeply impacted her work and her confidence:
When lockdown was announced and face-to-face work was cancelled for the foreseeable future, my feeling of being deskilled as a practitioner was palpable. Sure, I could communicate effectively and have useful conversations over the phone, but as a one-off, not as the bread and butter of my work. Most of my young people panicked at the thought of video calls. (…) It felt like the connection that is so important to effective direct work was being lost. — Sophie Dowle, Project Worker at SCARPA (The Children’s Society).
Shifting the conversation away from technology and toward human connection in this project enabled practitioners to explore how to access these moments again with the young people they worked with.
A passionate team and meaningful collaboration
We organised a kick off workshop with Deepr and SCARPA, which is one of our services, based in Newcastle that reaches out and supports young people who go missing from home. During the workshop we took time to reflect on what pre-Covid19 human connection looked like for the service — and compared this with what was possible during Covid19.
It turns out, the team were able to do a lot more than they thought!
The workshop generated a lot of excitement and inspiration for the development of a set of cards that would enable practitioners to support young people remotely, based on the Human Connection Framework Deepr developed and shared with us. The purpose of the cards was to enable front-line workers to invite young people to join them in simple activities that would generate feelings known to contribute toward greater connections.
We did not start from scratch: Deepr already had method cards they developed based on their work with Catalyst and other charities (see their full pack here). Yet, during our work with SCARPA we realised it would be valuable to develop a deck of The Children’s Society cards that incorporated some of these methods, but also included new ones tailored to supporting vulnerable young people. It was essential that any conversation prompt cards could be easily used on the phone, as not all the young people we work with have access to other digital platforms or want to engage with us in this way.
We all left the workshop feeling part of one multi-disciplinary team of designers (and one that was even operating internationally as I was stuck in the Netherlands after a holiday break!). With lots of ideas and templates Deepr had given us, we encouraged practitioners to play around with the methods in their teams. This was really valuable to help the team understand how they might bring the cards into conversations with young people, and was also a lot of fun!
In our development of [the cards] we were able to realise that many of the ways we engaged young people and many of the conversations we had prior to lockdown were transferable and adaptable to the digital world. We also came up with creative bookends that foster a connection over digital space, and embrace this transition. In creating these cards, I re-found my confidence in my practice and the young people I work with have been able to use creative new ways to communicate their worries, successes and hopes — Sophie Dowle, Project Worker at SCARPA (The Children’s Society).
Armed with new insights gathered from this testing phase we refined the cards further with the SCARPA team. Two enthusiastic frontline practitioners then set off to test the cards with young people. When we reviewed their progress, not only had they tested them with young people across their services, but they also had used them in ways we had not even imagined! Finally, the deck of connection cards was designed by our creative team, who did an amazing job at translating the prototype developed with Deepr into visuals that matched our new brand and looked attractive to our young audience.
Using the cards to connect with each other…. and with us!
We are excited to launch these cards across all 50+ of The Children’s Society services last week. It is our aim for these methods to be used by a wide variety of frontline workers and services to further build the human connections that we have. Our intention is for the cards to be used in ways that give both young people and those supporting them new and creative methods to communicate their wants and wishes in ways that are fun, caring, gentle, serious and light hearted. But more so, in ways that help both forget the screen or the phone for a moment and build trust and confidence to meaningfully connect.
The beauty of the human connection cards is in the way they enable and promote creativity, by enhancing and developing our own unique way of engaging children and young people, where face to face interaction may not be possible. As practitioners, we all use different engagement techniques that are personal to us as individuals, the cards provide you with the freedom to be creative within their framework. — Katy Horne, Service Manager at SCARPA (The Children’s Society).
It is really exciting that they are now ready to be shared, and we are looking forward to the conversations this project has already started in various places in the organisation about how we can continue to learn from this important work.
Want to join in or stay in the loop? Contact me here
For more information about SCARPA, please email sca@childrenssoceity.org.uk
Thanks are extended to the teams at SCARPA, Deepr, Catalyst, Helen Dudzinska and Nerys Anthony for their comments on the drafts.
