Ideas running wild in Croydon
A bumper edition of news from your friends at Interrobang, plus several new ways to get involved.
We’re lucky enough to work with a bunch of really talented, skilled people who’ve worked on some of society’s biggest problems.
We all have tacit knowledge, opinions and ideas locked in our heads about how to solve these problems.
Last week, we hosted our first innovation day in beautiful Croydon, deliberately taking time to think about this stuff and connect our ideas up.
Interrobang’s mission is to make our communities more resilient to the interconnected crises of the coming decades.
The housing crisis and the future of the NHS are systemic problems. Climate change is the biggest of them all.
To solve systemic problems you need to look at the entire system of public, private, charity and community sectors, rather than any one organisation.
That’s tough when you’ve been commissioned by a single client.
We want to:
make partnerships with community groups with lived experience and who are doing interesting work
apply for funding to scale up what they’re doing, so we can start to affect those systemic problems.
This innovation day was step one, consolidating our thinking and figuring out where our expertise as an organisation is strongest.
To do all this in a less biased way, we invited as wide a profile of people as possible, especially those with subject matter expertise and relevant lived experience.
We ran the day like a design sprint, breaking it into four hour-long sessions:
The double diamond is a pretty nice way to structure a day like this.
Most of us come from a government background, where we normally cut work into discovery, alpha, beta and live phases, but the double-diamond can be useful because it doesn’t bring the connotations of a technological fix.
It can seem confusing to newbies, but the gist is:
using a diverging and converging pattern of thinking, to get past our first (normally worst) idea and fully explore the possibilities
doing that at least twice, first with the problem and second with possible solutions
You can have triple and even quadruple diamonds, zooming in and out repeatedly to keep refining your ideas.
We started the day with a list of four likely funders and the problem each was looking to support solutions to.
Some of the problems we looked at were very abstract, some lent themselves well to a technological solution, and some we binned because we just weren’t the right people to work on them.
Over the day, we took each problem in very different directions, ending up with:
“How might we…” problem statements
Crazy-8s and crazy-4s
Product and service visions
Research plans and to-do lists
We’ll keep refining these concepts over the coming weeks and months, doing user research to validate them and, eventually, looking for the right partners to help make some of them real.
If that could be you, chat to us: hello@interrobang.coop.
Special thanks are owed to Ruby and Juno, who provided a valuable outside perspective and fresh ideas we wouldn’t have thought of, and Anja Poehlmann, who helped us document the day.
Extra bits
It’s been a very busy week:
Our next big piece of work will be with Imperial War Museums, where we’ll be helping bring inclusive service design to their branches. We’re very pleased to be working with them.
We’re also now a member of CoTech, a group of ethical co-operatives providing technology, digital and creative services. When we need special skills that our members don’t have, we have a ready-made network to ask for help. Thanks to Chris from Go Free Range for helping bring us onboard.
We’re filling out our advisory board. If you have experience, contacts or a perspective you think we would benefit from, we want to hear from you.