The Interledger Community 🌱: Jemima Gibbons

Design Club: a hybrid model for teaching design thinking to children (Grant Report #2)

Jemima Gibbons — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 02:05:56 +0000

Project Update

Our Design Club: Reboot project came to an end in December, after 14 months. Starting in October 2020, the $15,000 funding we received from Grant for the Web has proved invaluable - it’s been crucial in helping us develop a hybrid model for inspiring the next generation of design thinkers.

The global pandemic forced us to question and reassess our entire operational model, from mentor onboarding and recruitment to club delivery and user experience. Design Club: Reboot has done exactly what it said on the tin - enabling us to redesign our resources, review our processes, re-engage with children and schools, and reinvigorate our mentor community.

The pandemic isn’t over, but Design Club feels fit for a hybrid future. We’re looking forward to building on everything we’ve learned in 2022.

Postcards written by children, November 2021

Progress on objectives

We had three objectives for the project:

1. Best-in-class design education: To enable more design clubs and activities for children by providing teachers, volunteers and parents with a wider range of projects and activities.

As mentioned in our first Grant Report last year, we realised that a wider range of projects and activities is not necessarily what our community wants. Mentors and potential mentors were often unsure of where to find the exact information they needed to get started, and asked for a clearer path and guidance through existing app design projects. So - in addition to creating new resources - we also tried to streamline our offerings, introducing separate Worksheets and Projects sections to our website, and adding specific slide decks and delivery guides for every project.

The new projects section on our website

2. Global reach: To create accessible video tutorials so we can engage a diverse, international group of mentors and children.

Creating video tutorials has been hard when things are so in flux. We've been reluctant to invest time - and especially volunteer time - in producing videos while our hybrid content and delivery strategy is still changing and developing. The past two years have been a time of experimentation and iteration. We're still prototyping!

Instead of video tutorials, we’ve found that - for now at least - the best way to improve our global reach is to open up our Meetups to an international audience. Since October 2020 we’ve run 6 Zoom Meetups with around 25 people attending each time. We’ve used these sessions to introduce Design Club, showcase latest experiments, walk through new materials and answer questions. It's been great to welcome participants based in the US, Nigeria, Brazil and Peru, as well as here in the UK.

We want to give everyone who engages with us the best possible user experience. We’ve learnt so much from every new person who's shown an interest in using our resources. The live “how to” sessions delivered over Zoom have given us the chance to chat with every person joining the call, learn more about their needs and find out how we might genuinely be able to help them.

Zoom Meetups proved a great way for mentors to share learnings with others

3. Web Monetization (for Design Club and others): To learn how Web Monetization could play a role in funding Design Club and share Web Monetization opportunities with our mentor community, supporters, and fellow online educators.

We implemented Coil on our website back in September 2020. Since then, we’ve been taking micropayments from Coil subscribers, but the income is minimal because very few Coil subscribers visit our site.

Our primary goal is to encourage people to volunteer to run design thinking activities with children - so it’s been tricky for us to “muddy” this key message with requests for people to join Coil (and pay a membership fee).

Web Monetization (through Coil) is definitely a revenue stream we’re happy to explore but, for now at least, our main sources of funding are donations and grants. This means our limited resources are still best focused on improving Design Club’s social impact rather than creating bonus elements for the tiny proportion of website visitors who are also Coil subscribers. We appreciate this may change with time!

Sharing Coil with our community on Twitter

Key activities

Here are the key activities for our project - and what we delivered.

1. Resource Hub
Refreshed existing content and added 16 new items.
Help 12 year old Richard to find good books - guide
Design a helpful mobile app mini project - guide
Design a helpful mobile app mini project - slides
Design a job that makes you happy - worksheet
Design a job that makes you happy - guide
Design a helpful mobile app remote delivery - worksheets
Design a helpful mobile app remote delivery - guide
Design a helpful mobile app remote delivery - slides
Special Award Certificates x 8

Created a brand new set of People and Challenge cards with diverse personas and topical social challenges.

Created a new Challenge generator.

Created an Explore how apps make money worksheet to help children think about different revenue models and the ethics of the products they're designing.

Children using new worksheets while joining Design Club online, March 2021

2. Video tutorials
As mentioned, we've found live tutorials best suited to the current environment. Instead of pre-packaged videos, we decided to deliver regular live online “how to” sessions, like this one. So far, we've run three sessions, using this slide deck as the basis (and updating each time). The sessions were open to all. We walked potential mentors through our resources, found out more about people’s motivations for running a club, and answered questions.

We recorded the first session but realised that people felt more comfortable without being recorded. Instead, we've decided to continue to run our "how tos" regularly, and try different times of day. This way, it will be easier for people to attend live if they wish - and join from different time zones.

We also hosted online video tutorials for Stem-mets in Nigeria and Tecky Brains in Peru, after their founders reached out to us. We're delighted that Tecky Brains has since joined us as a Reboot Supporter :)

Stem Mets summer camp with design thinking activities, July 2021

Tecky Brains design thinking course, advertised November 2021

3. Coil landing page and campaign
Created and ran a campaign to drive signups to Coil. This included a landing page on our website, a blog post (see below) explaining why we're working with Coil, and social media content.

We encouraged our community to signup to Coil as a way of supporting Design Club. In order to keep the messaging simple, we focused on inspiring and explaining the benefits of Coil Membership, rather than also encouraging people to become Coil Creators. This would have involved different explanatory content and an additional call to action.

Updates on Design Club's Instagram page, Autumn 2021

4. Redesigned website
Rebuilt our website using Webflow. And added a new Impact page.

Screenshots from the new website

5. Blog posts
Published 7 blog posts charting our Reboot and Web Monetization journey.
Design Club wins $15000 funding from Grant for the Web
Reboot: latest Meetup, idea definition and experimenting with teacher-led
How can we best market Coil to our distracted, busy, creative community?
Rebooting Design Club, rethinking plans and experimenting with Coil
Thinking about ethics and how apps make money
Introducing Coil - a new way to support Design Club
And this one!

6. Events
Ran 3 events about our reboot and Web Monetization, including two Meetups and a sector roundtable.
Design Club: Reboot - 28 Oct 2020
Remote delivery updates - 27 Jan 2021

We originally thought the roundtable would be an opportunity for Design Club (and potentially other grantees) to share learnings about Web Monetization with our peers in the EdTech for Good community - we were hoping to preach the Web Monetization gospel! But we realised we’re not quite at the evangelical stage yet. Even by the end of the project, we weren't ready to preach or teach - we were still curious and willing to learn.

So instead we hosted a design workshop, sharing our journey so far with other Coil users who’d been working on ways to explain and promote Coil to their own design-led audiences. It was brilliant to get together with like-minded folk and share the frustrations and positives of working with Coil. And it was fantastic to be joined by Uchi at Coil, who we know will replay our feedback to his team. See the Miro board for highlights of our discussion.
Coil for designers workshop - 30 Nov 2021
Coil for designers workshop Miro board

Coil for designers workshop (clockwise from top left: Noam and Jemima (Design Club), Veethika (GitLab / Launchpad), Uchi (Coil), Grame (Prototypr) and Leonie (Tink)

Communications and marketing

We published regular stories about Design Club: Reboot on our Medium blog (see links above) as well as frequent posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

We didn’t factor merchandising (lanyards and badges) into our original budget as we had a good supply at the onset of the project in October 2020. However after two project extensions we needed to replenish our stock!

Design Club lanyards and badges are a key part of our marketing (and the club experience). They've been essential to the success of Design Club: Reboot. We gave them to children and mentors at the handful of events and real life Design Clubs, and delivered them to children who engaged in Design Clubs remotely. These highly visible branded items reward children for their achievements and help raise awareness of Design Club with potential new participants and mentors.

What’s next?

Here in London, we’re in the midst of another wave of Covid. Yet again, there is talk of lockdowns. But this time we’re ready. We have added our online project to the website, and scheduled our next online “how to” event.

We’re excited to see a handful of new Design Clubs starting in the next few weeks. We have another online club in London, a one day immersive club in Manchester, and hopefully a regular real life club starting up again at Kingston University.

Internationally, we are expecting to see online Design Clubs in Peru, run by our new reboot supporter (and delivery partner), Tecky Brains. And we look forward to hearing about Stem-mets progress with design thinking projects in Nigeria.

What community support would benefit your project?

We've really enjoyed being part of the Grant for the Web community. We look forward to continuing to share our experiences of Web Monetisation and to learn from others experimenting with Coil and exploring the best ways to promote its benefits to our communities.

As we mentioned in our last report, we're very happy to follow and connect with other grantees, and hear about similar projects. Please do leave us a message if you’d like to connect or have any learnings to share that you think could be relevant to our mission of inspiring the next generation of design thinkers :)

Relevant links/resources

After School Design Club Retro - remote delivery - Miro board
Weekend Design Club - remote delivery - Miro board
An online design thinking course for apprentices
How to make remote learning fun
5 insights from running a Design Club remotely
Weeknotes on running an after school Design Club remotely
Running a remote Design Club at School21

We've launched our Coil campaign: starting the conversation with designers

Jemima Gibbons — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 14:24:02 +0000

We're close to wrapping up our project - Design Club: Reboot. Before we go, we're sharing some Coil love with our community.

Back in July, we asked How can we best market Coil to our distracted, busy, creative community? We still don't have the answer. But we do know that the people we connect with care about our mission (inspiring the next generation of design thinkers).

Free Coil codes

So a central part of our campaign is asking our community to support Design Club by joining Coil. And offering free codes as an incentive (thank you @chrislarry)! We've updated the Coil page on our website and written this blog about why we're using Coil. Please read and share if you can!

Coil is still new to us and although we've been blogging our journey, we don't have a major success story to share. But we can try to start a conversation.

Social media

We're sharing our "Support us with Coil" messages on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn and backing these up with insights from other design thinkers who are using Coil. We hope this social proof may help spark interest. If you know of any juicy, designer-y Coil stories we can share, let us know :)

Coil still isn't on the radar for most designers. And just because something is free, that doesn't mean you need to sign up to it. If people really want to support Design Club, they could volunteer their time as a mentor or give us a donation.

How might we encourage our audience to become Coil members?

Coil workshop

To try to answer this question, we're hosting a mini workshop with some Coil-friendly design thinkers next Tuesday 30 November. We've invited designers who are experimenting with Coil, or trying to talk about Coil to a design-focused community. We'll make the Miro board public and share insights in our final report.

Joining the wider debate

Our secondary messages are around creating a fairer and kinder web. We've experimented with introducing this issue to children at a Design Club, testing out a new Explore How Apps Make Money worksheet.

We know there's a wider discussion around ethics and sustainable business models - and Coil can be part of this. There's also a hot debate about how far designers should be involved in ethical decision-making.

We'll report back on how the campaign goes. In the meantime, if you've any ideas for good ways to encourage Coil signup in the design community, we'd love to hear from you!

Rebooting Design Club, rethinking plans and experimenting with Coil

Jemima Gibbons — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:33:58 +0000

We're nearing the end of “Design Club: Reboot”, our project funded by Grant for the Web. Here’s a progress report - originally published on the Design Club blog.

Last September we were thrilled to win $15,000 funding from Grant for the Web after the pandemic had forced us to pause clubs in early 2020.

Of course, we were keen to reboot Design Club and this new funding has been crucial in helping us explore hybrid delivery.

What we’ve done

Rebuilt the Design Club website using Webflow
Added new resources (under projects and worksheets)
Created a playful Design Challenge Maker
Installed Web Monetisation (Coil)
Added information about Coil to our website
Run two Meetups: the first one introducing our community to Grant for the Web and Coil (Oct’20) and the second one looking at remote delivery updates (Jan’21).
Published four blogs charting our web monetisation journey: Design club wins funding, Reboot: idea definition, How can we best market Coil to our distracted, busy, creative community? - and this one!
Written our first grant report: Design Club: experiments in teaching design thinking to children

What we haven’t done

We’ve also wanted to make mentor-led video tutorials, experiment with Web Monetisation through Coil and share our learnings with the community. But we realised these plans are very ambitious!

Best laid plans

Like most others, we’ve not spent the last 12 months firing on all cylinders. We’ve been very much in reflection mode: re-assessing, re-grouping and going back to basics.

In June, we asked Grant for the Web if we could extend our Reboot project until the end of November.

Here are our main reasons for requesting an extension:

1. It’s hard to expect more right now

Design Club mentors are wonderful industry volunteers who already give their time and expertise for free. It’s hard to expect more right now. Sharing their insights over video, being producer/ director/ sound recordist on their own work, and/ or taking out a subscription to pay for content (whether with us or elsewhere) has seemed like a few asks too many in the current climate.

2. We need time to rebuild

Our mentor community and delivery model were decimated by the pandemic. We need time to rebuild. All the momentum we gained and any word-of-mouth buzz was stopped dead in March 2020. Our outreach strategy has always been grassroots. Designers — like everybody — suddenly had a lot of other things to worry about.

3. Mentor onboarding is broken

Our mentor onboarding is best through shared, lived experience. This cycle was broken with schools and venues closed. We realised early on that peer-led Meetups work well. It’s great for mentors to share their stories when they’re currently running clubs. This works on a personal level: it’s good to talk through and reflect on things while you’re doing them, or as soon as possible after completion. And it works on an audience level too: when talks are fresh, passionate and insightful, more people are inspired to become mentors themselves, by starting or helping to run Design Clubs.

4. Planning is near impossible

The Covid-19 pandemic, and lack of clear government policies or timelines has made planning near impossible. It’s been very difficult for us to plan the re-introduction of Design Club activities to schools and other venues, when the venues themselves aren’t sure what’s happening. Staff and especially teachers are already super-stressed. Extra-curricular activities have been parked or sidelined in nearly all cases.

5. Our end goal is still IRL clubs

Remote delivery is okay. But we’ve realised it’s not what Design Club is for. Our mission is to take design thinking to as many children as possible, and to a diverse audience. While remote provides a great opportunity for busy mentors to get involved, it depends on existing real life relationships to work well. And digital exclusion means that one in five UK children do not have consistent access to a suitable device at home. Design Club IRL — in real life — is still best.

We’ve enjoyed the experimental nature of grantee hangouts — here I am (the sheepdog!) at one hosted by Skittish

Building an ecosystem

We’ve realised its very early days. Not just for us, but for the entire Grant for the Web community. As recipients of this funding, we’re contributing to a privacy-centric, open and accessible ecosystem which aims to create a viable alternative to the advertising-driven web. As everyone will be acutely aware, these ideas are still new and ways of working are still emerging.

Since June, Noam and I have joined two grantee hangouts. These have given us the chance to actively engage with other members of the Grant for the Web community (like Skittish — above) and start to leverage community support for our project. We’ve enjoyed the experimental nature of these hangouts and are learning from other members that everyone is iterating together. We’ve all yet to find definitive answers.

In particular, we realised that we need more time to continue conversations about how we might best communicate the benefits of Web Monetisation, and how to encourage people to sign up to Coil in ways that are empathetic and engaging.

We’re looking forward to continuing those conversations in more depth over the next couple of months. And sharing everything here, of course!

How can we best market Coil to our distracted, busy, creative community?

Jemima Gibbons — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 10:39:05 +0000

Design Club's mission is to help children learn design thinking as a life skill. To do this, we enlist the support of industry mentors (UX designers, service designers, user researchers and other professionals).

We already ask a lot of our community. Our mentors volunteer their time in the evenings or at weekends to run or help out at free Design Clubs in schools and public spaces.

Our community is awesome, but the past 18 months have been tough. Many schools and weekend venues have been closed. We've experimented with online delivery, but remote learning is never the same. It's hard to create the sparks and understanding that come through real life connections.

These difficulties are compounded by problems our volunteer mentors have been facing in their own lives due to Covid-19: job uncertainties, family issues, financial and health worries.

Where does Coil come in?

We know people are reassessing their lives and their values because of the pandemic. We hope this is bringing about a seismic shift. We're wondering how Design Club, and our mission, can help facilitate that process.

As I mentioned in our first grant report, many in our community are already engaged in the idea of a healthier internet. And we know they're values-driven because that's what motivated them to volunteer with Design Club in the first place.

Maybe it makes sense for us to tie the positive potential of Coil and Web Monetization into a broader campaign - something around designing a better future. But what's the best way to make this really resonate with our audience? Our community are tech-savvy but they're not necessarily technophiles.

Questions for other grantees

How are you promoting the benefits of Web Monetization and Coil to your communities?
If your community is creator-led, like ours, how have you convinced them to sign up as a Coil creator, when the benefits are still minimal?
Have you had any success with persuading people to subscribe to Coil for the "greater good"? If so, how?
What types of premium content are you offering to convince people that a Coil subscription is worth it?

We'd really value your help! Please share your experience here in the comments - or follow me to direct message.

Thank you!

Design Club: experiments in teaching design thinking to children (Grant Report #1)

Jemima Gibbons — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 10:40:57 +0000

Project Update

Like our fellow grantees, we were delighted to hear we'd won funding from Grant for the Web. Once we received our funding, we set to work on implementing the project delivery plan. The discovery phase was relatively straightforward but unfortunately the real world experience of Covid-19 has meant delays in the design and development of key deliverables.

At a Design Club, children draw and sketch from their own lived experiences, or those of people they know/ imagine. They upload these sketches to Marvel App to create digital prototypes. There's joy and wonder in both parts - offline and online.

As we said in our November blog post, Reboot: Latest Meetup, idea definition and experimenting with teacher-led, the GfTW funding creates a brilliant opportunity, but it's limited. Our online resources need facilitated delivery in the real world, but the real world has been turned upside down. We need to experiment with different models for remote delivery - see for example, Design Club at School 21, delivered by digital product agency, Elsewhen.

The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has mostly halted all but essential real world interactions. In the UK, where Design Club is based, changing social rules (from lockdown to tier restrictions and back again) and shifting government policies have put additional pressure on schools, children, teachers and parents. Introducing additional activities or new ways of working must be done with care and sensitivity.

Because of the difficult real world situation, we have applied for a time extension.

We now aim to finish this project by summer 2021.

Progress on objectives

Our main objectives for this project are:

1. Best-in-class design education: To enable more design clubs and activities for children by providing teachers, volunteers and parents with a wider range of projects and activities.

This is still our aim. We are working out the best strategy to get there! We ran a short series of Facebook Ads, using Facebook Forms, to find out what educators wanted. And one of our volunteers is speaking to mentors and parents to find out how remote and blended delivery might work best for them. We have created a second, more diverse set of People, along with further, more topical Challenges. We are producing more project handouts and an ethical design helpsheet. But we have also realised that wider range is not necessarily what our users want, they also need a clearer path through each app design project.

2. Global reach: To create accessible video tutorials so we can engage a diverse, international group of mentors and children.

This goal is particularly tough when so many children on our doorstep here in the UK are in crisis. We have had exploratory chats with a school in Kenya and a design educator in the USA. Once our video tutorials are up, they will be accessible to a global audience.

3. Web monetization (for Design Club and others): To learn how Web Monetization could play a role in funding Design Club and share Web Monetization opportunities with our mentor community, supporters, and fellow online educators.

We've implemented Coil and are taking micropayments. Once we work out the best delivery strategy for Design Club, we will be able to look at monetizing certain bonus elements.

Key activities

1. Resource Hub: We're in the process of refreshing existing content and adding new items; we've already created a new deck of People and Challenge cards with diverse personas and environmental and social challenges especially designed to resonate with children now. We've also created an interactive Challenge Generator.

2. Video tutorials: We plan to create a short series of "how to" tutorials for teachers and home-schoolers in February and March, to support delivery of Design Club activities in the summer term. Ten of our expert mentors have agreed to share their "pro tips" on delivering each stage.

3. Coil messages: Our campaign to drive signups to Coil has been pushed back until our new website and other resources are ready to be used.

4. Coil landing page: Likewise, our landing page to help onboard community members to Coil will be launched at the same time as our Coil campaign.

5. Redesigned website: We're in the process of rebuilding our website using Webflow, a best-in-class no-code development tool.

6. Blog posts: So far, we have published 2 out of at least 6 blog posts (both linked to above, in the project update), charting our Web Monetization journey. This report will be adapted and shared as blog post number 3!

7. Events: We've run 2 out of at least 3 promised events. Both events have been online Meetups:
Design Club: Reboot - 28 Oct 2020
Remote delivery updates - 27 Jan 2021

Communications and marketing

We've been posting public updates about this project on our Medium blog (specific posts cited above) as well as regular updates on our four social media channels:
Twitter @DesignClub
Facebook @DesignClubHQ
Instagram @DesignClubHQ
LinkedIn @DesignClubHQ

What’s next?

As mentioned above, we have applied for a time extension. We now aim to finish this project by summer 2021.

We have completed the discovery phase of our project, but design and development have been delayed. We still need to complete these phases, and start on live testing, evaluation and iteration.

We feel like we're just at the start of our journey, but a clear direction is beginning to evolve. Design Club's mission is to create the next generation of design thinkers. The past 12 months have shown that creative, empathetic design thinkers are needed now more than ever.

And this time has made us more determined than ever to build on our existing values, especially inclusivity and empathy. It seems to make sense to tie the positive potential of Coil and Web Monetization into some kind of campaign promoting a healthier internet in general, and identifying Design Club's role in that.

We're still thinking...!

What community support would benefit your project?

We’d love to speak to existing contacts in our London network who are already using Coil (Terence Eden, Cubic Garden, Newspeak House) and hear about their journeys so far.

We're keen to learn how others are promoting the benefits of Web Monetization to their communities, and how they are engaging new users. We have concerns about converting people to a new way of behaving online, especially one that costs them money up front!

We're super happy to follow and connect with other grantees, and support like-minded projects. Please leave a message here (or pop by and say hello on any of our socials)!

Relevant links/resources

Design Club website