Connecting Families: Sprint Notes from Wrap-Up
Communications and Design Manager | @tweetssavepaper
WHAT WE’RE DOING…
As we approached the end of the final week of Connecting Families, the Dartington team came together to reflect on our experience over the last 10 weeks.
WHAT WE LEARNT:
The importance of understanding where everyone’s starting from. Our partners needed more support than we’d anticipated with being able to use the tools that made this process viable e.g. Miro. It’s important that any future projects in this vein are led with empathy and understanding for where organisations are at, rather than where we, as researchers and designers, assume they will be.
Time is a luxury. Sometimes we can’t just skim over things. The charities felt like they’d spent too much time with their heads down. They yearned for more time to reflect, to absorb and sit back, to help them see things from a different perspective or spot mistakes earlier. For us, we missed the opportunity to interrogate our research as much as we would’ve liked. Next time, we’ll try and build in more opportunities for us and partners to see things from a distance.
No one is perfect. From releasing draft versions of material to rushing activities in a workshop, we’ve all made mistakes over the last few months. Yet none of these had a lasting impact on the project. Our sprint notes have helped us reflect on our need for perfection and made us more accepting of the fact that sometimes, especially when you take risks and work quickly, mistakes happen.
WHAT WE YEARNED FOR:
More energy. Opportunities for change often come along when we’re least able to engage with them. Connecting Families had to fight with the pandemic and a lot of competing priorities for time and attention. Sometimes, that meant the energy that we and the charities brought to the project dipped. That being said, we’d like to thank the five charity partners for the considerable amount of thinking and doing that they were still able to do, despite the challenges they’ve faced over the last few months.
More human connection. For many of us, this was the first time working closely with a service designer, so it would’ve been great to see Rebecca do her thing in person. We managed to do a fantastic job of converting the sessions together online but that came with its own challenges and made us realise how much we miss human connection in the workplace.
WHAT WE’RE GRATEFUL FOR:
The team! This project gave us the opportunity to work with people we didn’t know very well, both internally and externally. After working intensely over three months,
we’ve all got a better understanding of what we each bring to the table. Opportunities to develop relationships with people have been few and far between over the last year, so we all really valued the rare chance that Connecting Families provided.Support. This year’s been hard for everyone. Throughout the project, we’ve always tried to remember that. By being flexible, having open channels of communication and checking in regularly along the way, we feel we’ve done a great job of supporting one another where possible.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
We’re launching a communications campaign to push our ‘9 steps for reaching families remotely’. We want to make sure as many children’s services can benefit from them as possible.
One of the aims of the launch is to get another round of feedback from the sector and get a sense of how the 9 steps could be best used in the service of early years organisations. We’ll pool feedback together and think about what life might look like for the 9 steps after April 2021.
To everyone we’ve worked with so far, we say…
