How To Make a Thingy Thing

Since our last update we have mainly been working on the offering to schools to support maker activities. The product comes in three parts: ·          Package X – free, online access to lesson plans, curated articles, videos, communities of practice etc ·          Package Q – paid, borrowing of robots or 3D printers and laptops to support them ·          Package Z – paid, access to expert coaching via AUT Colab We have been working closely with Kootuitui trust in Papakura to test various aspects of the product. This involved some rapid learning as we took the technology into classrooms to run lessons. The testing has gone well and there have already been some positive stories coming out of the schools. However, we can see some challenges to getting effective programming especially since we can’t be in the classrooms all the time. Robots at Edmund Hilla...

A few weeks ago Baruk and I met with Rowan Yeoman from Akina foundation , primarily to talk about our makery support offering to schools. To progress with any sort of service development you need to make some assumptions and then test them with your customers. Because we’ve been talking to plenty of humans we thought we were doing a pretty good job of validating our assumptions but as Rowan pointed out some of our validations were assumptions themselves. We know that there are some schools that are unlikely to be interested in our service because they already make extensive use of technology and don’t need additional support. But, this doesn’t mean they are not of interest to us. You might be familiar with the Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve already. It categorises adopters of technology by the stage at which they adopt it. We have assumed that innovators will be unlikely to be interested in our service because the...

Thought I would do a blog post with a bit more detail about our project rather than just a reflective piece. Our initial work was around Auckland Libraries’ summer reading programme Kia Māia Te Whai. The plan was to expand the programme to other libraries in New Zealand but after a fair bit of discussion we realised that 1. We probably wouldn’t be able to deliver it an attractive price point and 2. It would require more development work than were able to commit to during our project timeframe. Other libraries clearly recognise the value of Kia Māia Te Whai (especially the Māori content) so expansion of Kia Māia Te Whai is not out of the question, it’s just it will be something we probably end up recommending rather than end up developing ourselves. During our conversations with other libraries about Kia Māia Te Whai we realised that there is a need for some sort of bicultural training offering for library staff. We realised that the training capacity within Auckland Libraries i...

Damn ethics! If it wasn’t for them we’d have cracked this revenue things ages ago.  I find myself spending quite a bit of time thinking about this project and my mind keeps trying to find parallels in the private sector. Who else gives away their product or service to heaps of diverse users and yet also generates revenue? Inevitably my mind turns to the like of facebook and google and their advertising revenue. On paper it seems like libraries’ golden goose. Someone requests a book and they get an advert in the hold pickup notice e.g. request a book on deck building get an advert for a hardware store. Great, except for one problem: ethics. The LIANZA code of conduct kinda rules it out without spending a lot of time seeking permission from various people* 11.4     Any information about identified clients and their individual interests obtained by librarians in the course of their professional duties is privileged and should not be used for any purpos...

Piss. Poos. Bugger. Damn. Hell. I've never done anything so   bloody   hard . Except, maybe, for Gary Sifu's exercises, and some of those made me lose my will to live. Thankfully I am not there with this project. Yet. And it isn't as if we are being particularly arrogant, either, though we are certainly pushing at the boundaries of what is currently being 'done'. The Lean Startup methodology was going to make this easier. We follow a scientific process, identify assumptions, test them, and make changes. The theory makes sense...I think we've just gone at it back-arse-wards, putting, as Alice and Philip have already pointed out, the product before the customer. We thought we spoke to potential customers *pretty early in the process...it turns out we should have spoken to them even earlier. Back to the beginning, then, to 'Customer Discovery' BEFORE 'Customer Development'. And while I am still a little (heh) irritated at lost time, this *is...

thoughts: service design as it has been generally explained to me rests on a clear understanding of what the problem is before getting down and thinking of the best way to resolve it I think this seems to suggest that you already have a person/group and problem in mind and the key thing is to resolve the problem What we currently seem to be doing more of is alighting on possible products, trying to quickly match these with a market and moving through seeing if we can actually make product before actually defining what the 'problem' of the customer is .... We seem to be starting from a solution and building backwards. could still work but feels more constrained though constraints can be good (get your mind out of the gutter) could just be a framing issue that's less of a problem with the work and more of a problem with how I'm thinking about it Problems (to design for) - How can a short-form training workshop deliver and support lasting attitude change towa...