YAY! Vive la Jam!
Hi guys! Here cometh the new Month and so a new blogpost.
I was pretty busy lately, but forgetting about you folks is totally unforgivable. So, what was up with all my stuffs?
February and March were hell of a months, so little time and too many things to do, but the main dish was, nevertheless, the incredible and beautiful event that me and a bunch of friends (Federico, Chiara, Alessandro, Valeria and Francesco), have organized in Bologna, the Bologna Service Jam!
Ta-daaaaaan! a Jam?
A Jam it’s not like the one you spread on bread and butter, it’s a Jam in a Jazz sense: where people from around the world, with different instruments (in this case, skills and competences), gather in one place and start playing their own instruments to create something new together, spiced by a delightful improvisation swing.
A Design Jam is a event/workshop format invented by two consultants, Adam and Markus, which gained a lot of traction in the later years, because it is a very easy, fun and super satisfactory educational format. You can learn more about here on Planet Jam.
It’s not a competition nor a startup weekend, it’s a learning experience.
I’ve been involved in the organization of a Design Jam three times in the city of Rome, and some of my colleagues, in Milan. This year we decided altoghether to give birth to the first Design Jam hosted by the city of Bologna.
What’s all about?
Think about a coordinated event held in the same week end all around the world in more than 100 cities. One secret theme disclosed for all the sites at the same time (with a timezone embargo) and 48 hours to “save the world”.
Take some crazy people, put them in a room divided in teams and give ’em purpose, means and the right kind of knowledge. The target of a Service Jam is, guess what, to design Services not products and actually having fun from it, by using co-design and design thinking techniques.
Most of the times, inside our professional field of expertise, we have to relate with people who are deeply focused and wise about the things we use to do, but when you are so deep and involved into something, you inevitably narrow your vision, your openness and become blind to stimuli. It’s a very natural process and in order to avoid this your brain always needs “fresh air”.
In a jam you have to work with a variety of roles and professionals who know nothing about you or your field.
Multidisciplinary teams are able to create true innovation because they can suspend all the boundaries and the constraints (technological, political or whatever) of a particular task. The team, as a living being, actually doesn’t know anything about all those issues, so it is able to shift all its energies from a solution focus point of view, to a problem focus one… instead of thinking in terms of “We want to build this, make it feasible”, the creation model can be more like a “We found a need, here’s 1, 10, 100 solution to fulfill this need”.
Powerful stuff, it’s creation for the creation’s sake.
And it’s all working because, there are no hierarchy that can restraint your free speech (like in structured companies or organizations) and an environment of collaboration between peers is really fostered.
What was the purpose of all that?
To learn a new way of tackling problems and face discussion, by clearing your mind from misconceptions and open up your professional self into listening instead of just commanding or just following.
To meet people with amazing stories, people very different from you but armed with the same energy and will to change the world as you.
To believe that the world can still be your playground, even after a boring day of work or a life of unfortunate events. Never stop learning, gaining knowledge, playing, teaching… do whatever you can because it will always worth it.
Did You learn all these from the Jam?
No, of course. Not from the Jam itself, but from the people you will meet here. 🙂
When we started the organization of this event, we had no clue about how it could be ended up: we knew nothing about the potential participants, about their number and competences, we knew nothing about their expectations, desires, needs.
Every jam site in the world has a different schedule and program, so we tried to build our own, making a huge gamble.
What lies behind the curtains…
Let’s take a look to ours 48hrs Jam and the techniques and the principles we tried to enforce during the event.
The overall model of a creation process always follow the infamous “double diamond”.
As you can see it is a model shaped in a double diamond form and it is used by several companies and institutions to describe the four phases of a creative process: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver.
Since we are not able to do the reasoning all at once, following this model can give you structure, focusing on what matter most at the right time.
On friday we took care of the idea generation, then on saturday we tray to close in the concepts and define our requirements and constraints. Then, inside this space we delimited, we developed the ideas until, on sunday, a prototype is delivered.
Cool, huh? A whole process condensed into 48 hrs 🙂
You can find mode info about the Double Diamond and much more in this document here:
We started on friday evening in one location different from the one we will be using the following days. The reason is because “places” (loci) are important to frame your state of mind. Imagine your brain as a baby: babies always have a strong relationship between places and activities, for instance the bedroom is the place where you sleep and it has a color/material/scent association. The place where you play are usually bright colored, less comfortable and more “usable”.
The first day for you jammer is the “creation day” and in order to help you transition to the “define” phase without keeping you creating in an endless loop, a change of scenario is required.
In your Discover phase we start scribbling down ideas, without any kind of constraint. There were a lot of impractical, unfeasible ideas, but this doesn’t matter at all. The goal is to let your creativity flow.
Do you know the story about Disney creativity ceremony?
When Disney design team have to create a new concept they use a very strict 3 phase ceremony, called the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic.
In each phase they move the discussion room using three rooms with three different setups:
In the Dreamer they use a free flow room where you can jolt down ideas without restraints. The idea is placed in center of the room and everyone can take inspiration from it from any position. Pure creation.
In the Realist room, they put the idea in the center of a horseshoe setup, like the one you naturally create when you are all looking at the post-it wall. Here you start thinking about make it real.
The last room is the Critic room, where the idea is placed on a stage and all the people is position in line in front of it, like an execution army or a presentation stage. Here, and only here / then, critics are allowed.
To know more:
Can you see the analogy with the jam?
A lot of people complaint about the short pace of the generation phase.
Well it was planned and it was part of the “game”: time boxing is a powerful technique to help you focus on what matter most.
Our brain is very limited in many ways: we are not able to generate ideas and evaluate them at the same time, these two process just take two different route inside our brain. When we are young the creation path is like an highway, very easy to take, instead the evaluation path is no more than a dirt road. Growing up we slowly change: social imposition, culture, fear to be judged, and social conventions widen our evaluation path… they make it growing bigger, as an highway much easier to take, and suddenly our creation path becomes narrow, less appealing. “It’s not feasible”, “it doesn’t make sense” are just common thoughts that reflect this kind of state.
When we are adults, we always tend to overthinking, judging our ideas with our evaluation path even before completing the whole idea generation.
Timeboxing forced us to think straight to the target without leaving room to overthinking about anything. This cannot ensure the creation of better ideas, but it can push the chance of having true innovation.
We ended up on friday with very good ideas, to narrow them down to 3 or 4 wasn’t a practical task: in order to create affinity with the ideas to create the teams, each participants must be part of the selection process.
Avoiding the syndrome “Whatever, it’s not mine” is very crucial to establish a good working mood.
We used a variation of the Dot Voting: each of you had 5 dots to dish every round of voting. The Dot Voting technique is the fastest way to create consensus among peers when there are a large amount of option to considerate.
Here’s some info on the Dot Voting:
Fast Forward to Saturday
On saturday all the teams worked on defining their initial concepts and the main deliverables were the Elevator Pitch, the Empathy Map, a sketch of Personas and the Experience Map.
The term Persona always has a wide range of definitions depending on the field where it is used:
In our specific field, it has a more empathic and personal spin.
We started roughly and wrongly define our Personas as the “target of the service”, but this is how low professional define things… Since we are top notch professionals, we did a much cooler activity called… RESEARCH.
Personas cannot be designed upfront only because our services demands them (I know, this is how the market use to work), instead it must be all the way around: we have to design our services upon personas and personas MUST be created using real datas.
Our teams went out in Bologna, gathering insights with interviews to validate their assumptions. There were also some unexpected results and that’s what we always looking for.
“Do you know Dads don’t have vivid memories of the first year of their newborns?”
The organization and the collection of all the insights was done with an empathy map, a communication deliverable used to create empathy between the designer and the user.
The Empathy Map is a beautiful deliverable to make some cluster analysis on the data and distill some featured traits and characteristic to finally create the base of our Personas.
Since we were in shortage of time, I made the group create the personas directly on the Empathy Map and Valeria, my colleague, DID BASH me for taking the shortcut. So, note it down that the Personas creation step should be much more complex than what we did during the Jam 🙂
BTW, everything went smooth as butter, so far so good… until the Experience Map came.
The concept behind the Experience Map and all its variation (Customer Journey, Emotional Map, Service Blueprint etc) is to track down the “journey” of your user through out the service and its touch points.
Do you remember what a touch point is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchpoint
Accordingly to what aspect of our service we need to make it relevant to discuss, we can stress different kind of visualization: for instance the Emotional Map hilites the mood of the user and the Service Blueprint defines (on the organizational side) what resources are needed to implement the service from a front office and back office point of view.
- http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/the-anatomy-of-an-experience-map/
- http://www.servicedesigntools.org/tools/8
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_blueprint
Journeys and Maps are indeed difficult and long deliverables to understand and create. We streamlined the map in order to make it simpler to complete, however we made it harder to understand and we, as a staff, missed the point.
Lesson learned for the next time 🙂
And Finally Sunday
Sunday is the “Critic Day”.
After an awesome icebreaker with our actors team (5 dita nella presa) to loose up our improvisation skills, the whole day was devoted to critic and validate the ideas.
The teams started to work on their presentation with awesome results.
The Impro staff really helps with the enactment of the ideas to spot critical points the prototype creation and the second out of building to test with real users.
Conclusion
This Jam was totally a blast! I was blown up by the response of all the participants, the positive comments and the incredible load of fun I had with all of you.
The thing that really strikes me, is the huge amount of followups that we are having: teams are stayin in the loop with a facebook group, they keep meeting each other and probably one or two projects will really start in a couple of month.
Amazing!
You can find all the photos on the Jam Facebook Official Page and the videos on our Youtube Channel 🙂
If you are curious (and you ought to be!) about all the projects submitted around the world, don’t forget to check the international Global Service Jam Projects page!
Once a Jammer, Forever a Jammer
See you the next year!
I often lose myself into infinite activities where I can live, work, teach, learn on how people interact with the future.
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