Horeb International

I attended the Leeds Service Jam last weekend and it was great. This was part of the Global Service Jam event held in over eighty cities across the world. I spent 48 hours Jamming (collaborating) with a team to tackle a challenge using service design principles and methods.

Here are my five takeaways from the Jam:

(1) Embrace ambiguity

The 2018 Global Service Jam challenge was “Yes, No, Maybe.” Each team had to make something that will address a service problem using this as a starting point. Imagine a group of strangers who just met each other for the first time on a Friday evening trying to make sense of a “Yes, No, Maybe” challenge. We had to get comfortable with ambiguity really quickly and work together as a team. We brainstormed convergent and divergent ideas using post-it-notes and ‘homelessness’ emerged as a central theme.

This is my first user experience (UX) review of a mobile site and I plan to do more in the future.

I came across the NHS Digital Transformation blog recently, liked the content and wanted to subscribe to it to get more information because of my interest in Service UX design/research.

I quickly realised that the only way to get new NHS DT posts was to make a comment on a blog post which I didn’t want to do. There was simply no alternative subscription option. Here is a short video demonstrating the challenge of trying to subscribe on the site.

I have been thinking about ‘change’ the last few weeks – individual and organisational change.  The diagram above is the first visual draft of this thinking and I am sure that as my thinking on the subject evolves so will the diagram. I will appreciate feedback from you about it as this will help refine my thinking. Please use the comment section below.

Some of the best things I watched, listened to and read in 2017.

Movies/Documentaries:

I called him Morgan (Doc)
13th (Doc)
I am not your negro (Doc)
Everything is copy (Doc)
Persepolis
The disappearance of Alice Creed
Nocturnal Animals
The sense of an ending
Hell or high water
Baby Driver

TV:

Game of Thrones – Season 7
Power – Season 4
Fargo – Season 3
Shots Fired
Quarry
Silicon Valley
The Defiant Ones

I posted these two doodles (above) a few days ago on my Instagram page and decided to share it here today with you. We are all looking for the ‘right opportunity’. The opportunity that matches our talents, abilities, passions, interests, skills and experiences. The opportunity that opens the door to other opportunities. Benjamin Disraeli once said that the “one secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.” Disraeli was British Prime Minister twice in the 1800s.

Listen to the latest ‘We’re Town’ episode (below). This is the sixth episode in the audio series. It is four minutes long and it features Andrea who has been a Huddersfield Town fan for over thirty years. I have tried to capture the essence of her 45 minute interview in this four minute episode. She is happy with the final cut and I hope you like it as well. If you haven’t listened to the other previous five episodes then I will encourage you to listen to them (see link below).

I am working on two creative side projects. Both are audio projects. I started working on ‘We’re Town’ audio series in the summer of last year. This was my first foray into audio storytelling. I wanted to capture and share stories of Huddersfield Town female fans. There is a lot of academic research and media attention on male football fans while female fans have been largely ignored. I am interested in how female football supporters become fans of the club, why they become fans, what does it mean to be a female fan of your local club? etc.

My favourite five podcasts, TV shows, books and movies of 2016.

On February 12, 1976, John Darnton arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, to take up his post as Nigerian foreign correspondent for the New York Times. The following day, he woke up to martial music on the radio and Lieutenant Colonel Buka Dimka’s announcement that he has seized power and assassinated the Head of State – General Murtala Muhammed.

13 months later, Darnton was arrested, jailed and kicked out of Nigeria with his wife and two young daughters by the Federal Military Government of General Olusegun Obasanjo. No official explanation was provided for his deportation but it was believed that his New York Times’ stories about the country displeased the government.

During his short stay in Nigeria, Darnton wrote some interesting observational pieces for the New York Times about the country and its people. I got the opportunity to read most of these pieces earlier this year and it was fascinating to see some similarities between 1976 Nigeria and 2016 Nigeria. A key difference between past and present Nigeria is that the 1976 Nigeria was in the midst of a prosperous oil boom while 2016 Nigeria is in a recession with stagnating oil prices.

Some of the key issues in Darnton’s articles include foreign-trained Nigerians, housing rents, the 70’s cement scandal and Lagos’ notorious traffic jams.

October is Black History Month (BHM) in the UK and I have always wanted to do something to celebrate BHM for years. So on 18 July, I made a phone call to the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent and that call led to several other phone calls and over 100 emails mostly about acquiring cartoon copyright permissions. About 3 months later after that initial phone call, on Saturday 15 October, I had a Black History Month cartoon exhibition at the University of Huddersfield’s Heritage Quay. I was encouraged by ROTOЯ colleagues to extend the exhibition beyond October 15 for an extra week (October 17-21) at the University of Huddersfield’s Creative Arts Building atrium. This was to enable more university staff and students to see and engage with the cartoons.