random acts of kindness

Yesterday I had the very uninspiring task of walking to uni to give in some work and coming back again straight away. It was lovely and sunny but the only thing I could think of when I was walking down the hill into Wycombe was the horrible walk back up again. But a tiny event happened that made my day...

As I walked around a corner I came across an old man standing at the end of his drive. When he saw me he held out his hand, offered me a flower and smiled. It was clearly a dandelion he had just pulled up from his immaculate path but nevertheless it was a wonderful gesture. I thanked him and went on my way with a 'spring in my step' as they say. Whoever 'they' are.

I practically skipped the rest of the way to uni and greeted everyone I passed with a smile or a 'Good afternoon!' if they looked friendly enough (a rare thing in this world it seems!)

I find the concept of 'friendliness' very interesting. You don't seem to be allowed to be friendly for no reason without being considered a complete weirdo. The South East of England seems to be a particularly unfriendly place sometimes. In the West Country it's OK to greet a stranger if you pass them in a park or relatively empty street. Here in the East, everyone keeps their head down and tries to pretend the other person doesn't exist. One little thing can have such an effect on the world that I think this is a shame. I know if someone I don't know says a cheerful 'Good afternoon' to me it makes me smile. In turn I might say it to the next person and so the happiness spreads.

Anyway, this all reminded me of a group called Join Me that I signed up to years ago in Sixth Form. Join Me, created by Danny Wallace (who, in fact, went to the same Sixth Form as me...not the same year though)  is a group of people encouraged to break social barriers and actually dare to be nice to people! They undertake R.A.O.Ks (Random Acts Of Kindness) whenever they can whether it's something as simple as holding a door open for someone or doing things like hiding book vouchers in the pages of books in the library.

www.join-me.co.uk

I've decided to put more effort into being nice to the world again!

In other news, I saw my first bee of the year today. Yay!

s.i.c day two

Sunday, the second day of Social Innovation Camp was much better than the first! Probably because I could start again and actually talk this time! I also found I could make myself useful by doing some of the little extra things that no-one else really had time for like quickly edit and export a video, check out the presentation venue, find out all the 'technical' information about how we could do the presentation and do a quick pdf to have up on screen etc.

The solution that was decided on was to create a website for people to rate their prison visits. Kind of a naming and shaming of poorly performing prisons that would hopefully create a feeling of competition amongst the prisons and encourage positive change.

Thankfully we had some very hard working coders in our group and they managed to get a working site up in less than a day! It still needs work but as a prototype I think its very impressive!

http://visits.sicamp.org

At 2pm everyone had to stop what they were doing, finished or not, and go across to the Bethnal Green Museum Of Childhood to pitch our ideas to a panel of judges. Thankfully my duty when I was there was to get all our work from my laptop onto another ready for the presentation and not to talk!

All the projects were pitched really well but despite having some hard questions thrown in by the judges we managed to come second. Yay! We got £1000 towards the project. 

There's a possibility our ideas might be piloted in Belmarsh prison but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, loads of thanks to Cassie, Huey, Marc, Peter, Mori, John, Dan, Julie, Patricia, Alison, Jeremy and Paul for putting up with me!

s.i.c day one

Imagine jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool and realising you're still wearing your clothes. You then remember you can't swim and there are bricks tied to your feet. You also then realise that the pool you're in is in fact a dark bottomless pit. The only things lighting the way are flourescent post-it notes that burn your eyes...

OK, it wasn't that bad but I felt seriously out of my depth on the first day of Social Innovation Camp! Everyone was really friendly but also very experienced and professional!

I didn't get much time to actually say what the whole thing was but it's probably easiest to steal some text from the website:

"What happens when you get a bunch of software developers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them?

We're going to find out.

In London between the 4th-6th April 2008, the Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe's web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems."

So everybody there was there for free, working on 6 projects that were chosen from a ton of other ideas submitted in a last few months. I think I was the only student there. Kind of. I was relieved to talk to one other and heard of others mentioned but then the letters P H and D were uttered!

The project I worked on was entitled 'Prison Visits': "To build a website or tool that creates greater access to prison visits and improves the experience of visiting someone in jail. It should provide better information about how the system works and what life is like for offenders inside."

Anyway, Saturday was all about getting into groups, quickly coming up with an idea that will work and actually getting something visual up and working. The group bashed out the ideas and it was finally formed into a do-able project. Less than 48 hours to get something done was very challenging!

The problem, I found, was all of my group had some kind of experience and confidence about a subject whether it was web coding, some kind of project management or web design. A good thing, yes, but intimidating at the same time! I didn't say a word the first day! At first it was OK because I had expected it. But you know when you talk to someone you know you've met before but you can't remember their name?...The conversation goes on and you realise it's too late to ask them what they're called without seeming really stupid. It was like that! By the time I felt I had something useful to say in relation to the project it was too late to suddenly speak up!

So that was a slight blip. Quite a big blip, I guess...But today was good! I'm too tired to write about that right now so I'll do that tomorrow!

In the meantime, see if you can spot me in the Guardian Blog (twice!) under the titles 'Social Innovation Camp: Show And Tell' and 'Social Innovation Camp: Inside Story'. Its a challenge but I'm there!

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent

social innovation camp

Adventure number one is fast approaching!

Tomorrow morning I'll be taking part in the Social Innovation Camp at the Young Foundation in London.

Since starting university I've slowly become less and less interested in the idea of designing packaging for sausages and adverts for the latest TV set. Design and images can have so much impact on the human mind. They can help us to trust or mistrust something, make us want things, believe things, change our opinions. Design can go from making something look pretty to controlling how we live our lives (ie. road signs) So why not use the ability to design for good things? Things that are socially helpful or environmentally responsible?

In the words of the website, the Social Innovation Camp is 'an experiment in using social technology for social change'. Designers will come together with web experts, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who wants to join in to work on projects that have a lot of potential social impact.

www.sicamp.org

I'm not quite sure how I'll get on because, by the looks of things, all the other people attending seem to be professionals already! I'll do an update after I get back on Sunday and we'll see how a mere student got on!

In the meantime, good ol' BBC iPlayer will save the day when I get to watch Doctor Who when I return :P

and in the end

64 days, 12 hours and 17 minutes until my last day at university and I still have no idea what my future holds. 

After 3 years of studying Graphic Design and Advertising at BNU I am apparently just about ready to enter the Big Bad World of work. This is possibly the scariest but most exciting time of my life! I've taken the decision to record my upcoming adventures so I can read back and remember them when I'm living in my little cottage by the sea when I'm 80 and it's raining and there's nothing better to do.

Also, this could sound very big-headed and self-important, but it could be a useful read for other 'designers-to-be' when they are just about to come up to this stage of adrenalin-fueled sleeplessness of uni work and job searches. The only things I've heard said (over and over again) about leaving uni and getting a job are along the lines of  "Send out loads of CVs and wait and see what happens". But how do you know who to send them to? What are the good and bad ways of going about it? What happens if someone actually says "Come in and show us your portfolio then"?...

...I'm about to find out.

                                                 ...I'm scared.