Day 3: Take that bucket list!
It’s not everyday that you get to cross something off your bucket list, but today I did. A piece I wrote about this experiment you are all joining me on is going to be published in the Huffington Post in Australia. I don’t have the link yet but will post it on the Facebook page as soon as I do. A big thank you to Emily, Hilary, and the boyfriend.
So after the early morning excitement and a boost of confidence from surviving my first night of crowd surfing I decided to take the bull by the horns and try to make some serious money by becoming a tour guide. Through sharing economy platform Vayable anyone can create a tour which people can pay to go on. All you need to do is plan your route take some photos and voila people can book a tour with you. Being an Australian I needed an edge so I thought of using my movie knowledge (and the kindness of all my filmy friends) to create a tour of London Movie Locations.
So today I hit the streets with my trusty iPhone (and a battery pack because those batteries run down quick) and visited iconic london movie locations taking photos and planning a route for my tour (it was also a fun excuse to go sight seeing while the weather was nice). If you were playing along with the ‘guess which movie was shot here’ game on Instagram or Facebook today thank you! It wa fun to have the company. If you want to go still play you can search for #londonmovielocations and you should find them. I’ll post the answers on the facebook page Share Stories tomorrow morning.
By 4pm my phone had died, so had my battery charger and so had my feet. So after taking refuge in a pub and charging my phone for an hour I practically had to drag myself to Euston to the Learn Do Share London meet up. But I am so glad that I did.
Before I get into what Learn Do Share is (and I had to talk about it at some point) I want to quickly just mention meet ups. Seriously if you are single go to meet ups. Stops messing around with Tinder where everyone is just judging you on your looks and go and find some cool people who like things that you like.
Ok Learn Do Share. Learn Do Share is a grassroots innovation engine; a combination of events, labs and peer production. It is a community for open collaboration, design fiction and social innovation. It creates a lot of amazing things, all while operating under a creative commons license — yep that’s right — it’s all free folks, so please go and take. Coming from TV development the idea that your hard fought ideas could be given away for free is slightly unnerving to say the least, but then you start to wonder why? Why are we so protective of the amazing things we think of? Why don’t we want to share them with the world for free? The only reason is because we have been told that they are valuable, that we should be paid for them.
And guess what — they are valuable and in Learn Do Share we do get paid for them just not in the way that we are used to. I have been part of Learn Do Share of the last 3 years and mostly working with Dr Ele Jansen on a creative collaboration game that overlays design thinking with story-telling. Ele is perhaps one of the most brilliant people I have met and I also really like just hanging out with her (which is vital when you are going to design something that is such a head spin). Now in the last 3 years I haven’t been paid a cent ,except when Google paid us to facilitate playing the game with them, but I have been invited to speak at conferences around the world, I have met people I have admired for years , I have made contacts and friends, I have received work opportunities, I have added some amazing things to my CV and best of all I have been part of making something that is great — and that people can benefit from without strings which makes me feel great.
If I was to put a price on what I have gained from developing the game with Ele in would be in the hundreds of thousands. It has changed my life significantly and it cost me nothing more than my time, perseverance and good will.
And here is the thing. I don’t think this is an anomaly. I think every time or almost every time we give of ourselves for others we get rewarded. Obviously there are caveats for this. People shouldn’t be exploited but when money is taken out of the equation often more admirable goals arise.
Which leads me nicely to couch surfing. Tonight I came home to Chinese take out, popcorn and Wine (my contribution). Vlasta and I talked for 3 hours before exhausted we had to go to bed, so I could write this for you. She is wonderful. Funny, kind, brave and beautiful. I think she believed we would be friends before we met and she was right (I think I might even stay an extra night). She put herself out there for no reason other than she wanted to meet new people and help someone out the way that she would like to be helped out. Was my company and friendship reward enough? Well that is up to her but I think so.
In a town like London where it seems that people try so hard to remain in their little cocoons of isolation, maybe all it takes is a tiny bit of bravery and goodwill to turn strangers into friends and come out richer.
PS. If you are interested in the game below is a bit about it. If you are looking for a unique way to solve complex problems in your office, or a way to get team members to bond together this could be great for you. Let me know and I can send you more details and even arrange for a facilitated workshop.
The Wish Game Workshop is a 90 minute collaborative authoring and problem solving experience which has been run with Google Labs, the UN and World Economic Forum and UNICEF in New York.
The narrative design of the workshop is modelled after Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Both the story’s protagonist and each participant are heroes and heroines. Their paths become entwined as they tell their story while working out a solution to their shared problem. At the same time the participants are guided through a typical design process. This involves user-centric methods, such as formulating a problem statement, investigating stakeholders and context, brainstorming and rapidly prototyping ideas. Following a narrative, the Wish Game Workshop resembles a typical design process, which works because story and design draw on the same principles to create meaning. A story follows four steps: challenge, conquer, change and prevail. A design process follows four similar steps: analyze, ideate, develop, test. The Wish Game Workshop is unique as it brings these two ways of thinking together.
