Still regular, only just. When is one supposed to write a weeknote? Sunday, Monday, end of the week? Who knows, but as a new practice I’m finding it helpful to reflect back on the week that’s just gone.
Earth Percent/Sing Wild Seeds Project
TL:DR Stuart Candy wrote about the early project here.
I’m helping put together a prototype(s) of a scaled and unfacilitated experience of fusing world building and imagination practices with song writing/making to build hopeful narratives for the future (wow!)
We ran a series of experiments over the summer in the form of sessions with live artists and audiences, but now time for a different experiment. I spent time with Earth Percent talking through the difference of testing the ‘What’ and the ‘How’ of prototyping and experimenting.
To me, they are two very different things and we need to be cognisant of what we are testing/running experiments on to learn. For me, we’re very much in the what space.
The what is often more explorative, where as the how is often more refined repeatable prototyping or tests of how we deliver an ‘offer’.
Now, this brief is kind of wild (the sort of stuff I love) but in a basic service sense of explaining this mental model of testing and learning through.
WHAT (the offer/value proposition): You might want to help parents de-stress as an offering (because let’s be real, there’s a market opportunity right there). You could offer massages, meals on wheels, therapy, childminding. How you deliver that (the detailed service design) from how someone books it, to when they use it, to it’s steps and in what order is the how. I think all of it is service design, but you need to check yourself so you know what you’re trying to research and test at any given stage.
For Sing Wild Seeds, I’m using this mental model but in a far more abstract way as we’re designing a ‘methodology’ for participatory music making for world building.
We need to first openly experiment to learn with what happens with a range of methods (and there are so many ways to deliver this). The what might differ from placing people ‘in the future’ and writing a song. For example in one experiment we created a song for people to sign to the soil in 50 years. You can run the session as if you’re ‘in the future’ and there or sort of ‘time capsuling it’ for the future. Or you can write for the future, in an aspirational manner. And so on..
I can’t wait to get some down time when the first phase of this project closes to write and document a whole series of posts on it, but I want to do it justice and consider perhaps a more ‘micro-site’ publishing of the work. Anyway, for another time.
This week, I also threw a few people a sample from one of the songs that was made in public to see what would happen. All for fun, for bedroom music makers. If you want the sample let me know, I can send it to you and would love to see what you do with it. I’m planning a weekend music making retreat for myself this week to get to know my Polyend Tracker+ more so will be playing along too.
School of Good Services
I only teach three times a year with the school but boy do I love it. I had a great cohort for day one of my agile service design course, and it was nice to see the quote we use of Service Design is 10% design, 90% is creating the conditions for it to happen doing the rounds on Linkedin.
I feel like much of the time I’m de-schooling a little away from the over commoditised tool based service design approaches into much more of the how to pitch, influence, facilitate and convene. A sort of ‘drop the journey maps’ in favour of just having a conversation with folks, and no, service design does not culminate in a service blueprint only.
I don’t think service design is just organisational design or influencing though, it’s really about centering organisations around services (from seeing them to knowing what good looks like to committing to designing them) and applying the approach of design practice (using form to explore and test propositions).
So getting a balance in a mixed experience class of folks can be hard, but it’s a good challenge and I enjoy seeing people have some penny drop moments and build their confidence as the course goes on that, yes, they are doing the right thing already and yes, this work is hard everywhere. Two more sessions to go then, next year!
Narrative Consulting
So, I can’t really say what I’m doing but I’ll just say, I facilitated a workshop of senior stakeholders inside a prison.
Interesting experience, the person who has done this work is exceptionally talented and experienced and I hope I am being of help in narrowing down how they talk about this work.
That’s all there is to say at the moment on that! But the printed What If cards went down well, and I could see us repeating that exercise again with more time.
Renovations
Ok so less film this week, that’s this weeks job to get organised for our 2025 shoot. But boy are we moving the renovation forward.
We’re finally starting to see snippets of what the place will look and feel like now utilities are sorted and floor treatment and painting is being. This shot is of lime plastering we did, lime wash painting, new skirting and floor staining/sanding. Wait until I reveal my built in wardrobes, it’s been a tussle of Pythagoras and sloping floors but we’re getting there. I added the last wardrobe to find that, yes, the floor does slope UP the way at the end, but to my credit the rest are straight with a super clean line so I’m proud of that. Sure a whole weeknote will deep dive into that shortly.
Part of this is starting our new business (more on that further down the line) so whilst it’s nice to be homemaking, it’s also part of a larger plan for the site. What we realised is that we need to treat it as a job so next week we’re sitting down to plan in some proper DIY/sort the site days balanced with existing work.
This is a picture Lou sent their parents which always me smile when they point out things they are particularly proud of. This time, it was finding a way to close a ridiculous gap n the skirting, with, well more skirting. Looks not bad!
Listened
Went on The Streets renaissance tour
Read
"Simulations are a crucial interpretative tool for capturing reality in a shared context. In this way they resemble other cognitive framing technologies – distinct categories we might be tempted to rank in terms of usefulness. Our instinctive bias as carbon-based intelligences might lead us to privilege in vitro experimentation over in virtuo computer simulations, seeing one as “material” and the other less obviously so. But they are equivalent, even if different, and often complementary."
Infinity Mirror (via Benedict Singleton, my go to follow on interesting reads)
Moved
Bah, really down in the dumps about this. Going to go private for an x-ray for speed and sort this foot/hip/shoulder shebang out. Making an attempt at getting back to swimming as some form of gentle movement to stop my whole body from seizing up this week.
