Weeknotes S01 E02

This week I’ve been thinking about the role of a designer in an organisation — the privilege we have to be the voice of those who need the change and with it, we have a good amount of responsibility. I had a great conversation with a new member of the team last week and we spoke about provocative questions. They reignited this spark after highlighting that a designer's provocative questions are generally unpopular at first, they do however start to stretch the boundaries of what stakeholders thought was possible.

The project: Essex Local Offer
Our goal this sprint identify contact groups, plan and schedule recruitment and, conduct interviews with parents and carers.

Things we did this week:

• We kicked the week off with some planning as a team. It took us a while to get there but we’ve started to populate a growing backlog. It was a bit different to the way I’ve done planning in the past but we’ll get better at it as we do more of it throughout the project.
• The first two interviews with parents and carers took place and we’ve already started to learn a lot about where people go for support and the position the Local Offer website has in that.
• Desktop research is an ongoing task we’re all picking up when we learn something new. I’ve learned a fair amount about how smaller organisations have been instrumental in support families with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) throughout the pandemic.
• We spoke to the SEND team about some work that was conducted about 6 months ago that looked at mapping the services available in Essex.
• Our senior stakeholder for the work has been so engaging. We have an hour scheduled with her on Friday where we openly discuss the past week. She is open, honest and makes time for the team. We highlighted a few things and she is going to put us in touch with the right people so we can move the work forward.

Challenges this past week:

• Me — dealing with a few things on a personal front and it's tough to separate yourself from it when you’re working remotely from your personal space.

Coming up this week:

• We are so excited to have our first two sessions with the *interest group. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we have decided to use a combination of video call and Sli.do to engage with the group and gather information. Something we’ve learned along the way is that those within the SEND space are usually wearing multiple ‘hats’ within their roles so we’ve to do a fun icebreaker where we ask participants to draw a hat that describes how they’re feeling today.
• I am on leave from Thursday — not doing anything special other than travelling into London on Friday to pay an exorbitant amount of money to have my fingerprints taken for my South African passport application which is still all done on paper and includes the need for real-life inked fingerprints o.O

*The interest group is made up of representatives from charity groups and those within SEND services.