Designing Resilience – A day of working together

Bringing different people together, with different skills, interests, knowledges and experiences is my day job.  Often there are 2 or 3, sometimes a few more and all of them are interested in the same topic – say social isolation.  A few weeks ago, I found myself in a room with 30 people, university students, academics, creative professionals, parents, community groups, young people, artists (I’m sure I’ve left some off the list here).  All these people were interested in the idea of ‘Resilience’ – a concept that has been worked on in Brighton between academics and community partners for the last couple of years working withchildren, young people, families & adults who experience social disadvantage.  Together we were looking at the Resilience Framework (RF), and seeing in what different ways we could ‘bring it to life’.  The key goal of the day was to co-design ‘things’ that could be made and taken away to be used in training sessions where different people are learning about resilience.  We were all going to give up a day of our time to hear about some of the ways people thought the RF could be developed – and match that with realistic ways to make it happen.

If you don’t fancy reading the rest of this blog right now – you can watch this awesome 2 minute video to get a feel of what we’ve been up to so far…! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrbg6ZjhJ4

So how did we all get here?  This day was planned a while back – when a smaller number of people gathered to test out how and explore how ‘designing’ and ‘resilience’ could work together (you can see how we came up with our snappy title).  At this session seven different themes were identified that people could do further work on.  These were ideas that people in practice were using or wanted to use or develop and I talk about them a bit more below.

Angie Hart started us all off by helping us find out who was in the room.  She asked us all to use language that everyone could understand as we had lots of different people in the room, and some of us had learning difficulties.  Some people who worked with arts approaches professionally wanted to be called ‘creatives’.  We agreed that most people in the room could call themselves ‘creatives’ if they wanted.  It was quite hard deciding what to call everyone!

Nick Gant then introduced what would happen next.  We were going to hear about 4 of the themes in the morning, and 3 more in the afternoon.  Each theme would have a ‘proposer’ who would spend five minutes outlining their ideas.  After we had heard all 4, we would go into groups, with a mixture of other people to discuss them.

I’ll just give you an example of one of these themes in detail – Suns & Clouds Game.

Anne Rathbone (a PhD student at the University of Brighton) and Mikey Reynolds and Laura McGowan from Arts Connect (http://www.cultureshift.org.uk/portfolio/arts-connect-in-east-susse…) introduced this theme with Connel Mclaughlin, a fine arts student who has been working with the group.  When the people from Arts Connect were playing the snakes and ladders game they thought that this was great and then they thought about developing their own version of the game called Suns and Clouds. The suns are good for you and the clouds are bad. The group wanted to make a big floor game that they could take around to different places and show people so that they could learn about resilience as they played the game.  The group asked people to think about how the game could be produced so that it was lightweight and easy to transport.

The other seven themes in brief were:

Talking Heads – using apps that allow you to imagine something from some else’s perspective

Photovoice – this is a process where someone takes a series of images that mean something to them, and then present them and reflect on them.  This could be a way to think about and empower people to use resilience ideas.

Badges – designing badges that can represent ideas of resilience.  It would be nice to give these to each other and can be prompts for people to remember and hold on to ideas about the resilience framework.

Resilience Tree – drawing ideas about resilience on leaves to create a whole picture

Resilience House (this may ring a bell if you saw our blog about going to Cardiff last year… check it out here for a reminder: http://cuppcop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/connected-communities-showca… ) – a physical space with different ‘rooms’ representing different parts of the resilience framework

One Step Forward Book – this was a book developed to help people have conversation with young people in the care system, it would be good to find ways to bring it to life/include more exercises

Everyone in the room was asked to think about which ‘theme team’ they wanted to be part of, and then we sat in these teams – usin the ‘6 hat’ thinking process: http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php  and got into discussions!

After a day or working together, people are now developing an ‘action plan’ for the themes we talked about in the day to devlop tools or outputs that can be showcased at an event on 6^th November.  This will be a great opportunity to show others how we have worked together and co-designed new tools and ideas for bringing resilience to life (and everyone needs a deadline!)

It’s a really innovative approach to be bringing together such a wide range of people to work in this way.  It challenges all of us to make ourselves and our ideas understood and benefit from someone else’s perspective.  I’ll be taking some of that learning back to my day job! And look forward to seeing where this exciting project – and energy and commitment, go next.

*Thanks to Scott Dennis from BoingBoing for sharing his notes and pictures of the day, some of which I included here*