Where do we go from here?

There’s a real possibility that I, and maybe we, will go home from here.

There’s the literal sense, I return home, I return to what I know, to doing what I always do, because it’s not so bad in  my world.  There’s rest and recuperation to be found at home, sometimes.   And safety, if we’re lucky.

And there’s a more metaphorical sense, I return to an intellectual home, with familiar processes and practices that have fuelled my personal and professional achievements thus far.

But co-production isn’t central to that professional world.

So how do I decide to go somewhere else other than “home”?  Or, how do I bring what I’ve learnt about co-production into my “home”?

If I decide to go somewhere else, then there have got to be “pull” factors, something that makes the new place more appealing than the home I know, because there aren’t many “push” factors that mean home’s not a comfortable place to be and making me want to move on.  What is it about co-production that makes my research and practice better?  Well, the people I work with would be interesting, and often fun, certainly different!  And maybe the impact of what I do would be increased because others and other perspectives were involved in it.  But also, my personal contribution might not be as delineated and clear, so how would I get the recognition that I’ve contributed?  Moving to co-production might also make the place where I work brighter, more interesting, more stimulating.  Will I still feel at home there?  Will it be a safe place?

Dr Alice Owen

Programme Leader – MSc Sustainability (Environmental Consultancy & Project Management)

Lecturer in Business,  Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement

Sustainability Research Institute

School of Earth and Environment

University of Leeds

Leeds LS2 9JT

a.m.owen@leeds.ac.uk

15 July 2015

Collaborative Ethnography: Creating an online resource

In this post, Dr. Abigail Hackett, University of Sheffield, Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth, and Joanna Magagula, research associate, discuss the process of creating online resource http://www.collaborativeethnography.wordpress.com designed to support post-graduate students interested in doing collaborative ethnography. The website was developed with the input of community collaborators from the Clifton area of Rotherham, and we describe this process in the blog.

Background:

This project was borne out of the success of a previous project titled “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Engagement” (funded by the University of Sheffield Enterprise Innovation Fund) which involved mini research projects, seminars and a conference for post-graduate students. This resulted in learning resources for post graduate students, and we wanted to build on the outcomes of that initial project by further developing and making the resources available online, and investigating how community collaborators could contribute to the making of these resources. This work was funded by a University of Sheffield ESRC IAA Methodological Innovations grant.

The project began with the creation of the website (https://collaborativeethnography.wordpress.com/) which, in addition to introducing the idea of collaborative ethnography, was intended to be an interactive resource for students. One of the aims was to encourage students to reflect on their own attitudes towards research and to help them identify the type of researcher that they are.

The workings, and inherent benefits of collaborativeethnography are illustrated to the students via a series of case studies, each elaborating on this method of research. The case studies detailed research conducted in four different communities, with each coming to the conclusion that more value is added to research where community members are treated as collaborators as opposed to “subjects”.

The website introduces the theory, literature and practice of collaborative ethnography, and contains reflective activities and exercises which users are invited to complete. These aim to consolidate their understanding of collaborative ethnography and enable them to analyse their own research and establish whether it can be classified as such. The website also signposts to extensive resources and further reading guides which are geared at building on the basic information provided on the website and thus allowing students to broaden their understanding of this area.

Workshop

A workshop was conducted in March 2015 in Rotherham with local families and their children. This community has been involved in collaborative and coproduced research with University of Sheffield for several years. We wanted to consult community participants on the content of the website, and also understand the potential for community participants to mentor students and early career researchers on how to engage with communities. We asked people; what advice would you give to students who were interested in doing research with communities, but had never done it before?

We also wanted to try to visualise what it means to do research in collaboration with communities. Working with artist Rachael Hand, we asked participants to bring their favourite objects – things that held deep meaning for them. During this workshop, photographs were taken of the items for use on the website to further emphasize the collaboration. Other photographs taken during this project included people’s hands as they wrote down their advice on working with communities. Rachael also took a series of images of a tree outside the community centre over a series of months, intended to convey the importance of committing time and returning to the communities for the long term.

Feedback from community workshop participants

1. Participants felt that researchers should first get to know the community before embarking on the research project. This includes getting to know the area, the people and the support groups running. They suggested that one way of accomplishing this was by volunteering within the community.
2. They urged researchers to interact with the community and to understand them before making any interventions. This involves listening to what people are saying, learning and exchanging ideas

 

Reflections

The website doesn’t offer any quick fixes to collaborative ethnography, but rather aims to give early career researchers reassurance that committing time, energy and emotional involvement to local communities is an ethical and engaged way for researchers to attempt to understand and connect with the lives of others.

 

Designing Research Agendas that Matter for a Post-2015 World[1]

Lorenza B. Fontana

SIID, University of Sheffield

In 2000, the international community agreed on a list of eight anti-poverty targets to be achieving by 2015, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With the deadline approaching, their periodic evaluation has been showing mixed results. While poverty and hunger have not been ended for all, important progress has been made towards the goals, showing the value of a unifying international agenda underpinned by goals and targets. Since 2010, international organizations, governments and civil society have been reflecting on the successes and failures of the MDGs agenda, and establishing future priorities in the form of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This process will lead to the definition of a new ‘post-2015’ agenda for international development.

The post-2015 discussions on what framework should succeed the Millennium Development Goals are grappling with a myriad of issues. Fast globalization, increasing environmental fragilities and new forms of inequalities and marginalization pose new challenges for international development and the people working in it, questioning even the concept of development itself. At the same time, spaces and opportunities have opened up where new ideas can be tested and evidence gathered to support new processes of change. How can practitioners and academics work together in designing research that is ‘useful’ in this context?

A number of initiatives have recently flourished especially in the framework of the post-2015 discussion to establish new priorities for international development that provides platforms of interaction, exchange and co-production between academics and practitioners. The Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD) for example launched the initiative 100 voices, which engaged 106 partners in conversations about the value of the MDGs. CAFOD has also been heavily involved in Beyond 2015, a global civil society campaign seeking to influence the post-2015 negotiations.

These processes provide an opportunity to build a bridge between academic research and political processes and advocacy. But how can insights from discussions like Beyond 2015 be incorporated into an academic research agenda, so the new research produced can be directly relevant for the work of NGOs, international organizations and practitioners for a more inclusive, socially just world?

The Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID) at the University of Sheffield decided to give it a go. In 2014, we led a project called ‘ID100: The Hundred Most Important Questions in International Development’. The initiative invited contributions from both academics and practitioners worldwide in order to identify key research questions, which can inform the new post-2015 international development agenda. The challenge launched by SIID was to develop through a participative exercise of knowledge coproduction including a variety of stakeholders, timely results that might inform the policy discussion as well as help practitioners and academics to work together and harmonize their priorities in the framework of the discussions towards the definition of the SDGs.

Efforts by academics and practitioners to co-produce knowledge are not without challenges. Some argue that the challenges of collaboration are insurmountable: NGOs may not have the capacity, skill set or incentive to inform academic research agendas, while academics’ professional requirements and training often means their research outputs that are not of direct relevance to NGO practice. On the other hand, many NGOs employ researchers internally and many academics have experience working in or for NGOs.

Notwithstanding the challenges, closer and more effective collaboration between researchers and development practitioners can strengthen the social value and practical implications of academic research, while bringing important critical insight to development practice. What is needed are safe spaces in which academics and NGO practitioners can meet to explore and build on existing overlaps in their agendas. The ID100 initiative showed that there is enough common ground at least for a conversation about research priorities in a post-2015 world. The questions gathered and selected through ID100 have recently been published as a joint SIID-UNRISD paper within the UNRISD section on post-2015 debates.

Collaborations in the implementation phase of development interventions are relatively common, but not many practitioners and academics have engaged in articulating research questions and co-designing research projects. Yet, when the opportunity arises, practitioners seem very keen to get involved and strengthen their dialogue with academia. At the ID100 workshop for instance more than half of the participants came from NGOs or international organizations. This is indeed an encouraging indicator that there is value in creating new and innovative spaces of interaction, moving away from the traditional transactional ‘expert-to-practitioner’ exchanges.

In a context in which research councils are encouraged to fund research that has ‘commercialisable’ and impact potentials, the institutional incentives for academics to collaborate with NGOs that come from the ‘impact-based research’ agenda should not be underestimated. While impact is a key requirement in the new Research Excellence Framework (REF), the logical pathway to impact in international development is increasingly via NGOs and engagement with practitioners. The ELRHA guide to constructing effective partnerships between academics and NGOs addresses some of the challenges embedded in this relationship. At the same time, similar pressures are concerning NGOs too under new donor frameworks (such as Payment by Results). Although result-driven frameworks constitute important incentives to encourage new and more effective collaboration between academics and practitioners, they have also raised new concerns. On the one side, a demand-side model for the generation of academic knowledge can undermine innovation, a crucial aspect of research, and convert researchers in ‘problem solvers’. On the other side, effectiveness of action is often perceived as incompatible with the long times and uncertain research outcomes.

As in any relationship, academics and practitioners are encountering problems linked to expectations’ management and communication and language mismatching. Academics often produce papers focused towards limited, ultra-specialized audiences and NGOs struggle to keep up to date with research production, eventually posing questions on which researchers have been working for decades. Timeframes are also an issue as advocacy agendas are often beyond an NGO’s control, whereas academic timeframes can be much more long-term to develop legitimacy. At the same time, debunking the myth of language barriers can be the first step towards change. Unless a space is designed to reach across existing barriers and divides, innovative and open conversations cannot take place.

Finally, dealing with international development, the politics of knowledge creation shouldn’t been underestimated: northern countries (their academics and practitioners) are often perceived as unidirectional ‘knowledge generators’ and there is a need to rework current extractive approach to a model that involves local research institutions and practitioner endeavors across the global North and South. A new initiative recently launched by SIID, with the support of the ESRC, is going in that direction working with partners in the Global South to launch regional consultations to identify what kind of new priorities, barriers and opportunities the new post-2015 framework opens up in different regional contexts (Africa, Asia and Latin America). Drawing from the ID100 experience, these consultations will include both academics and practitioners and will promote multidisciplinary spaces of dialogue on the new development agenda at a regional scale. The aim is to produce policy-oriented recommendations on the priorities, barriers and opportunities that the SDGs represent for different contexts at regional and sub-regional levels. At the same time, SIID is working with academic and non-academic partners to select questions among those identified through the ID100 project and generate further research on topics that have been highlighted as priorities within the new development framework.

 

 

For a video and infographics of the project and to download the paper, see http://id100.group.shef.ac.uk

For further information on the project, see http://siid.group.shef.ac.uk/project/id100

[1] This blog was inspired by the roundtable “The role of development practitioners in identifying priorities for international development research” that was held at the 2014 Development Studies Association Conference (1 November, London). I would like to thank the chair – Halina Ward, Head of Development Futures, Bond UK -, the panellists – Sonia Roschnik, Director, The Humanitarian Centre; Kate Gooding, PhD, Leeds Institute of Health Sciences; Neva Frecheville, Lead Analyst Post-2015, CAFOD – and the audience that attended the panel and contributed to the lively discussion. Also thanks to Julia Oertli with whom I convened the panel and that provided useful comments to this blog.

 

 

 

Co-Production of a Beginning

What’s co-production research trying to do?

I’ve been thinking about this question, prompted by a really interesting conversation with the project team in Leeds yesterday. For the first time I crystallised in my own mind three quite different types of impact from co-production research.

What we seem to talk about most is finding ways of doing co-production as a means to generating new knowledge, after all, what’s what production implies. And that new knowledge has a purpose. We want ne knowledge so that we can identify new designs, solutions.

Underpinning this is the idea that by involving others, more than the usual suspects, in generating new insights, we will get better design. Solutions which have the engagement and input from people who have a stake in the solution will be more effective solutions, right? This is why co-production makes such great sense to people working in service delivery.   Getting away from the idea that services are done “to” one group of people, by another group of people, is really important.

But I realised that my own “use” for co-production, my aspiration for what co-production can achieve, isn’t quite that focussed on outputs or solutions. Rather, I’m interested in getting access to different view points, and then finding ways to giving voice to those viewpoints, almost as an end in itself. Almost, but not quite, as I do hope that by giving voice to different world views we can innovate our way out of some of the predicaments we are in, I just don’t have a fixed view on what form that innovation might take..

One colleague built on this by saying that co-production also provided the means to valorise the views and opinion of minority or unheard voices. I’m not 100% sure what valorise means, but recognising, acknowledging and weighing new viewpoints all seem to me to be good things to do.

Dr Alice Owen

Lecturer in Business,  Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement

Coproduction: between bureaucracy and anarchy

As the lead researcher for the ‘Leeds coproduction lab’ project and the person who applied for the grant and assembled the partnership that makes up the project, I find myself in a strange position. The first month was filled with management tasks and red tape. Research contracts had to be finalised and signed. Budgets had to be verified, invoices and purchase orders had to be made, money had to be paid, intellectual property agreements, data management plans and ethical reviews had to be completed, contracts had to be signed, meetings had to be organised, food had to be arranged. As a result of bringing together a partnership of people who worked across the public, university, private and third sectors, I encountered a real patchwork of different practices and protocols for dealing with all this. For example, organisations in different sectors have really different ways of handling flows of money and people! VAT is applied in different ways, purchase orders are issued with widely different levels of complexity, institutional sign off comes from different levels of authority, assumptions vary about ethics and ownership, different norms apply for employing people. It was very difficult to even think about the substance of the research in the first few weeks.

I am no lover of being overly distracted by form filling or red tape. I have always felt a deep kinship with the idea of anarchy as a philosophical tradition and practical application concerning how people can lead freer and more fulfilling lives. I don’t mean the kind of free market anarchism that promotes a ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ world, nor the sensationalist, and usually unhelpful, association of anarchism with Molotov throwing marauding mods. Rather, I am referring to unleashing the creative potential when free individuals choose to voluntarily co-operate, associate and federate, leaving behind as much as possible egoism and individualism for the greater good.

So how does one navigate between the seemingly necessity of complex bureaucracies (much of which exists for good reasons such as safeguarding) and the possibility of freedom embedded in the impulse towards anarchy? The solution no doubt lies in acknowledging and embracing both. I recently came across the idea of the fifth organisational paradigm which is summed up in the following way:

‘The fifth organizational pattern is a combination of the circle or council for collective clarity, the triangle or project team (hierarchy) for action and the square or bureaucracy for accountability, structure, and stability and the network for rapid sharing of information, inspiration and linking all the parts together.’

What I take from this is that we all simultaneously hold many tendencies, and the most creative people and organisations recognise this and use it to their advantage. Sometimes, we need to rely on bureaucracy to make sure things are done well and clearly, at other times we need to free ourselves up to explore new and possibly uncomfortable areas, or go beyond our institutional selves and be more nurturing, vulnerable and open. Recognising and shifting between these modes can be powerful and productive. We also face the dilemma of being open and closed. Being too free and tasks get left undone and partnerships degrade. Being too closed stifles creativity. An illuminating discussion from the anti-globalisation movement (How do you institutionalise a swarm?) explores how diverse civil society groups at some point need to come together and put structures in place to build power for effective change to happen.

So, while there seems no avoiding navigating the complexities that mark our modern working world, what lessons can I draw for the practices of coproduction? For a start, management and red tape can be streamlined and kept to a minimum wherever possible! For coproduction to work effectively and smoothly, understandings and assumptions about the ‘work behind the scenes’ need meshing. Quick and transparent learning and navigating the different protocols and practices across partnerships is useful so that people can get on with the business of coproduction. Tasks can be shared out so that certain individuals don’t become overly burdened or identified with bureaucratic roles. But at some point, productive coproduction requires seeing the bureaucrat and anarchist in all of us! Not an easy view, but an essential one.

Leeds City Lab – Co-production of a Beginning – Professor Irena Bauman

In this post Irena Bauman, Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at the University of Sheffield, discusses initial challenges to the creation of a co-produced project with regards to the logistics of sharing work, things getting personal and ownership of ideas.

 

Learning from Line Dancing

The word Co-production consistently conjures up an image that carries with it a surge of sheer joy and of warm feelings: the sheer joy is a response to the power of a coordinated effort, and the warm feelings arise from the realisation that this coordinated effort cuts across all differences of gender, age, ethnicity, body shapes, personal skills and stories. It also cuts across many dance forms: pop, swing, rock and roll, disco, Latin rhythm, blues and jazz, waltz, polka and swing and is hosted in a great range of venues: dance bars, social clubs, dance clubs and ballrooms. (have a peep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYyWCbRqPxA )

At the beginning of choreographing a line dance there is always an intention to co-produce but rules have to be agreed one by one and the ability to contribute to the co-production (the steps, the turns, the rhythm) has to be acquired by each participant.

So it is with every process of co-production: even when the rules are already known and even when we have signed up to the process, each and every group has to go through a collective learning stage to establish the ground rules, and each and every individual has to reflect on what needs to change in their own mode of operation, and what it is that they can bring to the collective table, before they can make a good contribution and productive co-working can begin.

It is in this context that I paid some attention to the collective and individual behaviours and to the individual contributions made to co-production of the beginning of our small research project testing the potential for a CityLab in Leeds. They are presented conceptually as potential Red Lights to co-production and I offer reasons why it is worth fighting to make them go Green.

Co-Production Red Light 1 : 80% of work is done by 20% of the partners.

Co production started when writing the bid.

It was a typical process of 20% of the partners doing 80 % of the work. This is a key issue for all co-production and often the reason for initiatives failing.

Nevertheless the benefits of different institutions and cultures (University, Council, Third Sector, SMEs) working together became instantly evident and very exciting: the exponential breadth of knowledge made available by pooling resources, the ability of academics to write quickly and within a theoretical framework, the capacity of the council to make things happen (when the will is there) through activating their extensive network of departments and initiatives , and the agility and the practical knowledge of the Third Sector and SME’s that have specialist knowledge, grass roots grounding and are entrepreneurial, skilled project managers and free to be creative. On paper we should make a fantastically able team.

Co-Production Red Light 2: Personal agendas.

It is difficult for personal agendas not to encroach on the process of co-production. Some of this creates unpleasant logistic problem such as coping with partners flying around the world and communicating in sound bites, (with difficult to decipher spelling mistakes) at various times of the night as well as out of sequence as they have not read the e-ma trail properly. The reason it is worth tolerating this is that they are keen to stay in the conversation and tend to make good points.

But personal agendas can also disrupt the principle of co-production. We already had an example of one partner taking the opportunity of a co-production workshop to promote the services of their company. Personal agendas need to be accommodated rather than banned as all of us are driven by our own personal agendas and often it is a positive drive. But the personal should be kept to the ‘social networking’ part of the co-production process. This is something that maybe should be agreed from the outset.

Co-production Red Light 3: Ownership of collective ideas.

The issue of IP crops up as soon as a research project starts: in- equality of effort creates inequality of ownership; hierarchy of command is embedded in the project; money flows in a certain way and the accountability rests with one partner only. How does all of this sit with the ambitions of co-production? How can equal ownership of ideas be secured?

It is worth co-producing the answer to these gritty problem so that we can give co-production a chance – the line dancing belongs to all dancers whether perfectly synchronised or not- so we don’t have to go for the perfection but we do need to aim at the principle.

Leeds City Lab – Co-production of a Beginning – Dr Alice Owen

In the first post by a participant from the Leeds City Lab Dr Alice Owen, Lecturer in business sustainability and stakeholder engagement at Leeds University, discusses the challenges of beginning a co-produced project in terms of the issues concerning work/life balance that project work raises and wider concerns with sustainability.

This post is a response to the following provocation from Leeds City Lab:

“Provocation #1: Co-Production of a Beginning: We’d like to invite our Leeds City Lab Partners to respond to this first provocation by reflecting on what it’s been like to be invited to this particular project. For example, you could think about what opportunities and challenges are already becoming apparent and any concerns and anxieties you have at this stage. You can also use this as an opportunity to unload any ‘baggage’ you may have from previous experiences of co-production”

Fridays…

The challenges to how I do things, how I contribute start with the very first email. Quite rightly, the project leaders need to have an outline structure, a shape of activities with some key milestones put in the diary.

Four out of the five key dates that we co-producers need to lock in, are Fridays.

Fridays are the day when I live other bits my life. I take my son to school and support his primary school orchestra, after school I take him swimming, and I have my own swimming training, during the day I get bits of life and bills on track, I tend to the garden, or the allotment. If the weather’s foul I tend to other interests, knitting or quilting. Sure, I could do all these things at weekends, but I’ve deliberately chosen, after 25 years in the workplace, to try and reduce the dominance of paid employment in my life and make space for all these other things as activities which support me, and my family, and sometimes my community, to flourish.

I could also get childcare “cover” for these Fridays, but this is not the point. I want to do these other things with my time, I don’t want to manage them away so that I can work more.

This is mainly for personal benefit, but there is a wider benefit, or potential contribution to sustainability…the exploration of alternative macro-economic models and the growth imperative has highlighted that we could all do with working (formally ) a bit less and sharing the labour around a bit more, making non-financial contributions to our society.

So already, co-production is asking me to operate in a new way, a way where my personal and professional lives are blurred. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually, I do know how I feel about it right now…I feel resentful of the ask, guilty that I’m not responding enthusiastically, wondering if I come up short already. A bit more reflection required, me thinks, to reframe this “problem” and think about how I can contribute, and if I can contribute.

Co-Production in Practice Event Schedule

The Co-Producing in Practice Event is coming up next week on the 13th of January.

Below are details of presentations and times

Sign up to attend at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/coproduction-in-practice-tickets-14222023455

12:00 Lunch

12:45 – 12:55 Introduction to event. Gordon Dabinett (director of the Research Exchange for the Social Sciences)

1:00 – 1.20 Farida Vis (Information School). ‘Co-Producing Aspects of the Cultural Values of Digging Project’ – https://culturalvaluesofdigging.wordpress.com/about/

1.20 – 1.40 Casey Strine (Biblical Studies) and Emilie Taylor (Artist and Registered Art Psychotherapist). ‘Finding the Overlaps: Using the “Frame” to Create Safe Spaces for Planning and Conducting Co-Produced Research’ – http://caseystrine.com/ – http://www.emilietaylor.co.uk/

1.40 – 2.00 Fiona Scott (Department of Psychology). ‘Co-Production: Collaboration with Industry Partners and Knowledge Exchange’ – https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/psychology/staff/research/fiona-scott

2.00 – 2.45 Discussion and Feedback

2.45 – 3.00 Tea and coffee

3.00 – 3.20 Speak Self Advocacy and Dan Goodley (School of Education). ‘Co-Production and Disability: Working in Critical Disabled Ways’ – https://bigsocietydis.wordpress.com/

3.20 – 3.40 Mark Taylor (Sheffield Methods Institute). ‘Co-Producing Quantitative Research’  – https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/smi/about-us/mark-taylor

3.40 – 4.10 Discussion and Feedback

4.10 – 4.30 Plenary

Thinking Collaboratively About Play: Videogames and Hospitalised Children

In this post Xinglin Sun and Caroline Claisse from the Royal College of Art discuss what was the first of a series of workshops which took place as part of the ‘AHRC Videogames Network: Developing videogames and play for hospitalised children’,a network developed by Elizabeth Wood and Dylan Yamada-Rice from the University of Sheffield School of Education. The discussions and activities undertaken in these workshops allowed network members to collaboratively participate in the research and design aims of the overall project. In this workshop the group created a playful space within which participants could develop their ideas collaboratively.

This post is composed of material originally posted by Sun and Claisse on the project blog (http://iedgameresearch.wordpress.com/) which also contains summaries of the other workshop days as well as posts concerning the design and development of games for hospitalised children. All writing and pictures are the work of Sun and Claisse.

Background

The videogames network is developing videogames and play for hospitalised children. Currently, UK hospital play tends to be based on ‘traditional’ toys and games, with limited innovation in digital play, such as children using tablets/smart phones brought in by family visitors to access videogames. The network is exploring the considerable scope for development in the videogames industry, using expertise from the arts and humanities to co-create digital play opportunities that respond to the specific needs of hospitalised children, to stimulate their play experiences, imaginations and creativity when confined to medical and recovery spaces, and to connect with siblings and friends. The network for this project brings together academic researchers from different disciplines; videogames developers and hospital play specialists in a series of workshops, using multimodal and arts-based approaches.

The aim of the network project was to have three workshop days to explore the perspectives of each of the key participant areas: (1) hospital play specialists, (2) academics from Education, English, medical humanities and (3) the digital games industry. As well as a final workshop to bring together the themes that emerged from the initial three workshops.

First Workshop

We had our first workshop day which focused on hospital and medical perspectives on Wednesday 26th of March 2014. It brought together play specialists with artists and academics and featured short talks and workshops to inspire participants on the project’s main focus:

• The potential of play for supporting children in hospital and recovery spaces.
• How to inform the games industry about creating content for the design of videogames which blends both traditional and digital forms of play.

To start with, Kevin Hartshorn from Sheffield Children’s Hospital talked about his practice as a Play Specialist and emphasised the potential of play in hospital contexts. According to Kevin, play can help patients to understand and cope with stressful situations and encourage them to express their feelings and aid a quicker recovery. He described different types of play such as those for development, rehabilitation, post-procedural, distraction and bereavement. Play specialists use a variety of activities that involve free play to encourage children to express themselves using activities such as hand printing and hand casting. Other activities included memory boxes, which are used to remember a child with a terminal illness and can involve family participation in the making process.

Key points that emerged from the presentation:

• To what extent are children allowed to customize their hospital spaces? Children are encouraged to personalise the walls with possessions that are sometimes used as talking points.

• Is there capacity to develop a personalised play program? Perhaps by considering the patients’ developmental stage and grouping them in different categories such as, physical, personal social and emotional, communication and language, cognition and intellect. After which it is possible to better consider which activities can meet their personal needs. In relation to this, records of preparation and distraction are kept to allow consistency with individual patients.

Challenges and complications from the presentation:

• Using stories to illustrate difficult subjects – be sensitive to people’s beliefs (e.g. religion).
• Physical and communication restrictions that emerge from being in hospital spaces.
• Challenge in capturing patients’ interest – everyone is unique.
• Engaging different ages of children.
• Encouraging social connection – be careful with social networking as it is not always positive for patients suffering from some illnesses.

Current hospital play and ideas for future hospital play. Susan Davies from Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

Following Kevin Hartshorn, a group of play specialists talked about their current practice at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital and emphasised the changes made in the last twelve months of their practice. Their team of qualified play specialists are split into different categories: medical, surgical and youth services. They deal with both outpatients that are referred to them for treatment preparation and inpatients that they see frequently. The play environment at Birmingham Children’s Hospital includes a play centre and playground which allow the children to keep playing outside when the centre closes. The centre features multi-sensory areas and a kitchen, amongst other exciting things, and the play specialists usually works with young people in the hospital to design these spaces. They also propose a lot of creative activities and spaces for people to come down to from their ward. In terms of technology they have TVs and an iPad to take around the wards. They also recently got a 3D TV and some special games controllers for patients with limited movement.

Some challenging and important points were raised:

• Some children cannot always mix because of illness.
• Important for teenager to socialise in and outside the hospital.
• Important to encourage the children to get dirty and messy: “if they were at home they would stick their feet in mud and eat worms, but what we tend to find with the younger children is after being in hospital a long time they don’t like getting messy anymore”.
• Needle play: assess their understanding before but this gives them choice, control and understanding of the procedure, making them more familiar with it all. For example, by using safe needles to paint with or squirt water.
• Role play is also used as a technique to teach children how to behave when they receive the treatment.
• How to break the routine in the hospital (boredom).
• Give the child responsibilities e.g. reporting on what happened with their treatment/procedure to their parents.

After lunch, Medikidz Digital Director Adrien Raudashi introduced the children’s medical education company Medikidz. It’s aims are to teach children about medical conditions, by giving them access to information in a format they understand, thus they are more likely to retain information. Adrien highlighted in the past the lack of patient information specifically designed to deliver medical information to children. The decision to use comic books and superheroes to inform children about health issues was informed by research in which young people stated that these were two of the things that they wanted to see the most. In the comics, each super hero represents a different part of the body and takes the child on a metaphorical journey. Visually appealing, the comic books are accessible, easy to read and the narrative guides the reader through aspects of each illness. All their stories are based on real people’s stories.

Some challenges and relevant points:

• Creating content: how to take these very complicated facts and transfer them into a meaningful narrative for the reader?
• Comic format: breaks down barriers between peers.
• Digital potential (user experience). Considering the medium: phone vs laptop screen not the same experience for the users.
• What makes game appealing? Take them down to their fundamental parts and think how to re-apply those ideas to other formats?
• Short term vs long term engagement. Narrative is powerful, it can hold a person’s engagement much longer.
• Different types of feedback, short vs long term feedback, contributes to people’s engagement.
• Taking social network into consideration, where children have their own voice.
• Partnership with Oculus for affordable virtual reality to simulate immersive environment.

Later in the afternoon, Sarah McNicol also recognised the power of comics in her talk “Journeys, Battles and Engines: The potential impact on graphic medicine of patient emotions”. Before looking at the different examples that dealt with comics and health, she introduced her background in bibliotherapy, where books are used as a form of therapy, a method widely recognised since the 50s. Sarah’s presentation featured examples that questioned ways of dealing with the emotional impact of illness and discussed how comics were used as a medium to create a more intuitive and direct engagement with the patients. Comics allow the patients to have different interpretations of a story which encourages creativity and imagination. Sarah also highlighted the use of metaphor in comics as being useful, a way of taking something difficult and scientific and making it understandable and more memorable to a wider audience.

Finally, Jo Birch presented her research on the use of space in Sheffield Children’s Hospital. She introduced some findings from “Space to Care” (2007), a project which looked at children’s everyday experiences in hospital. Her research promotes a co-design approach and is concerned with how to make hospitals more child-centred, child friendly environments. For this project, she used interviews supported by field notes and child drawings with 255 in and out-patients across three sites. She mentioned the hospital as a challenging setting for research with children. Her study looked at what children would ideally like from hospital spaces. Using pictures, children and teenagers were asked to reflect on different spaces in and out of hospital, looking at the look of the room, the different elements and what kind of things would be scary for them. They found that decoration and emblems such as clowns or long plain corridors would be an increasing factor of pain. However emblems that were familiar or cultural icons would decrease this feeling of fear. They also looked at the hospital layout, the notion of order and tidiness, hospital sitting etc. The study emphasised that children have an important role in shaping their own experience of spaces. The kind of environment they like would feature familiar elements, not only from home but from any other familiar spaces such as school or shops. The study shows that people would always try to keep them occupied and to maintain daily routine. Jo emphasised that sometimes children would just sleep and watch TV, those things they would be doing when ill at home.

Workshop let by Andrew Godfrey.

During the day, two artists gave short talks about their practice and led drawing workshops. First Isobel Williams talked about her Kancer Sutra project and showed examples of her work which she drew from “an uncomfortable position”, such as her work drawing in the Supreme Court where cameras are not allowed. Through her activities she challenged us to think about our childhood, what kind of “comforter” we used and still use, but also about darker themes. Later, Andrew Godfrey got us to draw a series of self portraits in 20, 10, 5 and 2 lines. Then, for the second exercise, he gave us a scale of pain (from happy to sad faces) and asked us to create a short comic, a conversation between two characters. The main constraint was to use the opposite emotion of what the characters were supposed to feel.

Participant’s self-portrait drawing. Workshop led by Andrew Godfrey.

Slide from Andrew Godfrey

Participant’s drawing featuring a short comic where faces of what characters were supposed to feel are swapped. Workshop led by Andrew Godfrey.

For our wrap-up at the end of the day we projected a constellation of keywords from all the talks and workshops on the walls and we gave each table a set of cards we recycled from our little movie Dreamland, which explores themes of imagined space and isolation. We asked everyone to have a conversation and write down words to finally build a little model together out of the cards. We gave them ten minutes and then, we asked each group to talk about their model in order to conclude the day. The list of keywords we projected was meant to help them start a conversation on key points from the day. We also displayed our own model from the day, each tower represents a talk or workshop and features keywords from it.

The first group emphasised the importance of recognising children’s imagined spaces and physical ones but also the meanings children attach to their experiences.
Emotional journeys/independence/objects/home/flexibility/narrative is placed/words are not enough/adult as expert/imagined space.

One participant from group 2 explained “were very uncollaborative, we wrote our own words and built them together at the end”. They talked about entertainment vs quietness. According to them, it is not always about feeling things and talking about it. This group emphasised the importance of paying attention to children and being attentive to what is going on without necessarily engaging in a conversation which some children will find difficult.

Culture/sugar coating illness/rights/institutionalised/escapism/quiet/listening/connection/everyday/authorities/voice/hear me/stories/things/stuff/space/safe-guarding/social/space/assumptions/smile/expectations/creativity/enjoyment/beliefs/stones/feelings

Group 3 stuck everything together a bit randomly. One participant explained that the fact of doing it – the simple pleasure of putting things together – was interesting and stimulated conversation. Also we noticed that words would get randomly next to each other which encouraged imagination and new ideas to emerge.

Narrative situation/emotions/engagement/needle/practice/med info/no Words/empathy/identification/social/isolation/sound/the function of play/into practice/narrative/agency/play/parallel lines/familiar/parent Ill/active/solipsistic/dissonance/peer/euphemism/play/earnest/augment/small/alienated/environment/metaphors/clowns/needles/graphic/simplicity/play/inpatient/emotion/grotesque/fear/only images/gamification/passive/children/child’s perspective/playing with fear/actual fear/needles and pins/whose narratives?/size/scale/prospective/ways of knowing/adult/children/gifts/panels/selective/mute.

Finally the last group embraced the concept of free play. One participant added:  ‘we have played, that’s what we’ve done!’

Young people/blood/communication/honest/control/social/exciting/interactive/hospital heights/draw

Below more participants’ drawing.

For more information on this project and further posts on the thinking processed involved in this project please visit http://iedgameresearch.wordpress.com/

Speakers Confirmed for Co-Production in Practice

Co-Production in Practice

Tuesday, January 13, 2015 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM (PST),

The Circle, 33 Rockingham Lane, S1 4FW, Sheffield

Dan Goodley (Education) https://twitter.com/DanGoodley

Fiona Scott (Education) https://twitter.com/_FionaScott

Casey Strine (Biblical Studies) https://twitter.com/caseystrine

Mark Taylor (Sheffield Methods Institute) https://twitter.com/markrt

Farida Vis (iSchool) https://twitter.com/Flygirltwo

All will be discussing the realities of co-producing research. If you are interested in attending please follow the link below. We would like to encourage participants to share their experiences or examples of co-production and to explore the benefits and limitations of co-producing research.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/co-production-in-practice-tickets-14222023455?ref=enivtefor001&invite=NzE5MzcyMS9oLmVzY290dEBzaGVmZmllbGQuYWMudWsvMQ%3D%3D&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=yes&ref=enivtefor001