Challenges

Three challenges have come back over and over again:

Retention – keeping students in education, even over the Christmas slump and when they have let work pile up before exams;
Achievement – helping students obtain their qualification and continue on;
Employability – preparing students for the world of work.

Living in the moment

Unfortunately, there is no magic wand. Just hard work and step-by-step improvements to help students see where their experience fits in the bigger picture: where they’re coming from and where they’re heading. Once we have achieved something, it can be hard to remember how we felt beforehand, but there’s an added complexity for young people who struggle to project themselves into the future. Not all are able to see how doing well at College will help them get an interesting job.

My learning journey

Open Badges capture and visualise this learning journey, including the invisible learning that goes on inside and outside the classroom. Open Badges are a Mozilla universal standard:

An organisation recognise that a learner has acquired a skill;
They award a badge which is visible to all in a ‘backpack’ or ‘passport’;
The learner can import, export and display this badge on a place of their choosing, on their CV for example;
In the context of employability, the Open Badges allow employers to spot whether the applicants have the skills and qualities they need from their future employees;
The Open Badges are also a powerful motivator to help learners develop those skills and qualities.

Open Badges bring together learners, employers, organisations and decision-makers in the education field.

Badgemaker 2016

At the end of 2015, Snook started a new phase of the Badgemaker project. It is funded by a grant from UFI Charitable Trust and includes Borders College and Dynamically Loaded as project partners. Although the project ends in August 2016, the need for a 3-year plan is emerging. The longer horizon will help us embed change in the College landscape and give us the time necessary to gather impact data. Does helping students visualise their progress throughout their College journey motivate them to stay in education and obtain their qualification? Does helping students and employers work together to identify the skills they need actually have an impact on employability?

Project approach

Continuous research is uncovering insights into what drives or hinders those who use the service and those who provide the service. Only by considering these two points of view at the same time can we design an innovative service that truly delivers value. This leads to co-design, the second core principle. From the onset, sustainability was a priority. We wanted a project that would have a significant and lasting impact. We would try to go beyond a prototype that would require further funding to live on.

Insights

Badgemaker is providing new or renewed insights into the potential and difficulties of implementing Open Badges approaches in the Further Education landscape. Here are a couple to begin with and we’ll continue to share as we go along:

One shoe doesn’t fit all Several organisations have contacted us to scope how Open Badges could fit with their objectives and ways of working. In many cases, their particularities mean that a customised approach would be more likely to be successful.
The importance of the organisation’s journey BadgeMaker Phase I was about the learner’s journey. In Phase II, we are now focusing on the organisation’s journey: how can we help an organisation start from where they are today to where they want to be in the future? Given the stakeholders involved, budgets, policies, types of learner journeys, how do we help these organisations adopt badges?

With Badgemaker II, Snook and Borders College are exploring the idea that designing for the organisation’s journey is key to unlocking the potential of Open Badges. We continue to test our ideas in the real world and see how far we can go. If you would like to contribute to the conversation, we would love to hear from you. Do get in touch: curious@wearesnook.com, read the project blog and join us for the next Open Badge Networking Group on March 17^th, 2016. [post_title] => Could we 'badge' the College experience? [post_excerpt] => We have a keen interest in applying service design to further education and, in particular, student journeys. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => badge-college-experience [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=10645 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 13416 [post_author] => 18 [post_date] => 2016-09-29 09:28:17 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-09-29 09:28:17 [post_content] => It’s been a while since we updated the story of our BadgeMaker project. What follows is the transcript of the presentation given to the UFI VocTech Showcase in London on September 28th and at the Open Badge Networking Group in Glasgow on September 29th. It’s been a hard journey, but we’re getting there. The UFI Charitable Trust funded the project and their unwavering support as we hit roadblocks has been invaluable. Throughout the project, Borders College have involved their learners, lecturers, digital learning and IT teams to make the project deliver real impact for future learners. View BadgeMaker presentation

Showcase new skills

Inspired by Scout badges, Open Badges are an international standard to inspire people to learn new skills, recognise and showcase those skills, in particular to employers. BadgeMaker’s brief was to support innovation champions in Borders College to build an Open badge prototype. We worked with learners and lecturers to explore how Colleges can use badges to challenge users to try new skills, like submitting their assignment as a podcast instead of a written paper for example. The co-design with young people showed that open badges help learners put their learning experiences in perspective, use them as assets to reach their objectives for their next destination.

Identify the barriers

We also worked with lecturers and managers to identify the barriers to adoption, in this case around buy-in, resource and technical constraints. The insights from the business case and stakeholder research moved us away from a commercial solution to a free open source Moodle plugin to improve the Open Badge experience.

Crafting an original approach

There isn't a single Open Badge solution for all organisations. We want to look at the needs, constraints and opportunities and support each organisation into taking their first steps into digital badges. We want to guide to the platform most appropriate for them - as a short, medium or long-term solution - and fill the gaps in the offering if need be. Offering the best possible solution in this initial implementation is key to building support. Instead of bringing people to an open badge platform, we see potential in bringing open badges into their existing learning environment. It allows users - from learners to educators and managers - to experiment with badges, to observe the benefits and deal with the barriers one by one. We know that openness, innovation and out-of-curriculum activities could be challenging. For this to work, our research has shown the benefit of free and open source solutions as any outlay - no matter how small - can be a barrier.

Free and open source

By making the Moodle BadgeMaker plugin free and open source, we hope it will allow the 200,000 College learners in the 26 Colleges in Scotland who use Moodle (and eventually 3,000 organisations in the UK) to experience open badges. The plugin opens access to the criteria and the evidence so that learners can showcase their skills and the quality of their work to prospective employers. It also allows Colleges to embed badges throughout Moodle to increase take up. It shows the progress with the number of badges increasing in the dashboard.

Sometimes innovation is the small stuff

Focusing on such a small change isn't an easy choice for designers who live and breathe UX and end-to-end user journeys. Free open source isn't an obvious choice for a small business focused on sustainability. In this case, it was all about impact and the hundreds of thousands of learners who don't have access to Open Badges because their institutions can't afford it. Sometimes innovation is the small stuff.

BadgeMaker launch

On 29th September 2016, we officially launched BadgeMaker with College representatives and people interested in the Open Badges arena. Dr. Doug Belshaw, our keynote speaker, presented the past, present and future landscape for OpenBadges. Robert Stewart from Scottish Social Services Council told his story of developing Open Badges and lessons learned. Anne and Marie shared our BadgeMaker journey and a demo video. The launch ended with a workshop led by Marie for participants to experience the open badges process by reflecting on skills they used during a transitional points in their life using our Skills Story Tool. A detailed blogpost is coming soon to recap the launch.

Watch our BadgeMaker demonstration video:

Plans for the future

Our long-term goal is to embed open badges throughout the College experience inside and outside the Curriculum.

Test the development with more Colleges to strengthen it
Publish the plugin openly on the Moodle directory
Expand the partnership to more Colleges
Design a toolkit to help other organisations explore badges independently
Continue fostering the Scottish Open Badge Network
Develop new functionalities
Find partners who are interested in supporting open source innovation in Colleges and Moodle
Look outside of Colleges at organisations who could use open badges to motivate young people, accredit and share their skills: schools, volunteer groups, charities, universities and employers. Signpost them to the solution the most appropriate for them and continue filling the gaps wherever we need.

Open badges really fulfil their potentials when we can build a complete picture of our learning journey throughout our lives. [post_title] => BadgeMaker is ready to launch [post_excerpt] => Discover the Badgemaker free and open source solution to improve the Open Badge user journey in Moodle in partnership with Borders College [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => badgemaker-update [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:37 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:37 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=13416 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [2] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 12855 [post_author] => 19 [post_date] => 2016-09-02 17:03:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-09-02 17:03:12 [post_content] => Are you passionate or just interested in the topic of Open Badges? Because we are. And we're organising a launch event for our Badgemaker project - come along and hear about the result of this work and other ways organisations are approaching open badges. Snook and Borders College have been working together with the support of UFI's VocLearnTech Fund to support Colleges who wish to explore Open Badges. Save the date for the launch event where we'll share the result of our work, hear about other ways organisations are approaching open badges and experience badges for yourself. We look forward to seeing you there. Please note that unfortunately, the venue doesn't have disabled access. RSVP here [post_title] => BadgeMaker launch - 29 September [post_excerpt] => We're organising a launch event for our Badgemaker project - learn more about Open Badges and hear about the results of this project. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => badgemaker-launch [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:37 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:37 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=12178 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [3] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11711 [post_author] => 18 [post_date] => 2016-05-20 09:34:21 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-05-20 09:34:21 [post_content] => Borders College began issuing Open Badges in 2013 using badges to acknowledge efficient use of Moodle by students as well as considering the application of Open Badges within the curriculum. The most significant impact, however, has come through the issuing of Open Badges to accredit all staff CPD learning. The College’s HR department have now replaced all paper based certification with Open Badges.

Borders College prides itself on student success and in order to facilitate increased success across the student body they have established a dedicated e-learning team within the College to support technology enhanced teaching and learning.

The Challenge

Paper based certificates issued by the HR department to staff upon completion of mandatory and optional CPD training, which takes place four times per year, were often lost or thrown out. This resulted in two main issues:

It was difficult for the HR department to track staff CPD activity as staff were not always able to produce evidence of attendance and completion. Similarly staff found it difficult to report to line managers on their progress as certificates had often been misplaced.
Staff saw limited value in CPD sessions as the paper based certificates were only recognized within Borders College and provided little professional value to staff, particularly if they chose to move employers.

The aim, therefore, was to introduce a system which overcame these issues and provided added value to staff. Mozilla’s Open Badges appeared the best method to resolve such issues and also offered an opportunity to raise awareness of the potential of Open Badges amongst all staff for application in other areas of the curriculum.

The Activity

Barriers included:

Defining a process for creating and issuing badges

At the time of first issuing the College was running Moodle 2.3 which did not support badge issuing (versions 2.5 onwards easily support the process - http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Badges). The College’s Learning Technologist was able to develop a piece of code which made it possible to issue badges through Moodle 2.3.

The time taken to develop an aesthetically pleasing badge

The e-learning team (responsible for open badges in the College) felt it was important to make the badge aesthetically please and although the criteria were agreed to be the most important element, a good looking badge helped to encourage people to aspire to the achievement of such. This meant that the team’s graphic designer spent a significant amount of time drawing badges in Adobe illustrator and defining a Borders College style for CPD open badges. This has been useful in the long term as now badges are produced much more quickly according to the guidelines set. Examples of the badges designed at Borders College can be seen here: http://www.bolt.ac.uk/badges

Badge issuing

Badge issuing is done manually. HR send an email to the e-learning team indicating who has attended/completed which CPD courses. These are then issued. A more efficient method is currently being discussed with HR and consideration is being given to linking to existing HR systems.

Staff acceptance of Open Badges

Initially staff were wary of the concept of Open Badges, feeling it was something which was going to add additional tasks to their increasing workloads. Awarding badges for sessions which they had chosen to attend allowed staff to engage with badges in a risk-free way. This had the added benefit of raising awareness, introducing an element of competitiveness amongst staff (some of whom were keen to collect as many badges as possible) and enabling staff to consider alternative implementations of open badges across the College.

The Outcomes

The project had significant impact on the College as all CPD training is now recognized through Open Badges. This is now accepted as standard practice across the College and the maintenance of this system will be sustained by the e-learning team. By showing the power of Open Badges in this way there has been increased interest and acceptance of the potential of Open Badges across the curriculum. The College’s HR department is showcasing the badges developed with the SCDG group and considering opportunities for creating and issuing consistent badges across all Colleges within the group. The project has also generated interest from local organisations around opportunities for using Open Badges for similar purposes, including NHS Borders. Economically the College is saving time and money previously invested in designing, printing and issuing paper certificates as well as the environmental impact associated with lower printing volumes.

Learner Perceptions

“We introduced open badges for our continuous professional development in June 2013. This method of accrediting CPD enables our staff to demonstrate in various forums their commitment to CPD and their achievements through an extensive CPD programme. Staff are able to share their electronic data on moodle and social media sites providing evidence to potential employers and regulatory bodies of their involvement with relevant and valuable CPD. From a College perspective we no longer issue paper certificates of attendance which only contained limited information. Now we are able to use the Open Badges to share comprehensive information embedded into the badge to make the learning more meaningful”. Debbie Kerr Head of HR and Development [post_title] => Replacing paper based certification of CPD activity with Open Badges [post_excerpt] => Using Open Badges to acknowledge student learning and accreditation of Staff CPD learning, has not come without challenges. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => badgemaker-paper-certification [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=11711 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [4] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10682 [post_author] => 14 [post_date] => 2016-02-26 09:27:52 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-02-26 09:27:52 [post_content] => Type: Contract freelance or company Location: Glasgow, Galashiels or remote working from any UK-based location Contact: jobs@wearesnook.com Together with Borders College, we're looking for a talented Moodle developer to create a user-friendly solution for creating, issuing and displaying Open Badges in Moodle. ‘Badgemaker’ is funded by a grant from UFI Charitable Trust. The project will create a ‘one-stop-shop’ plugin, which could be offered to other Colleges and Universities. This is an exciting opportunity to solve an outstanding issue in Moodle, which has previously limited the potential of open badges across the platform.

The Role

The plugin will:

Create a simple badge image
Create the metadata: issuer, endorser, date, criteria and evidence
Store evidence
Create an easy-to-use interface for issuing badges
Notify users appropriately
Share badges across other platforms including criteria and links to evidence

Snook & Borders College will support the design, user requirements and testing. Time is of the essence! The plugin needs to be operational by end of May 2016. Ideally you would be available to start in March and will take full responsibility for the development and reporting of progress to the Project Lead.

Skills and abilities

You will need to be comfortable working in an Agile environment.
At least one year experience developing Moodle plugins (evidence of previous development required)
Working knowledge of MySQL, SQLServer or similar
Solid knowledge of PHP, and PHP best practices
Experience using version control
Some experience with JavaScript
Knowledge of Linux servers would also be desirable, although not essential

Application details

Is this a challenge you can take on and make a difference in the lives of students? We want to hear from you. Email us at jobs@wearesnook.com with the subject title “Badgemaker Developer” with a CV or portfolio of development. [post_title] => Moodle plugin developer wanted [post_excerpt] => We’re looking for a talented Moodle developer to create a user-friendly Open Badge Moodle plugin. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => developer-wanted [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=10682 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [5] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9181 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2016-01-11 15:07:24 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-01-11 15:07:24 [post_content] => We've just got over the indulgence of our festive cheer to take a look back at the year of 2015. This was a particular year of growth for us, with our team spreading out across the country: working up north in Aberdeen, across the East Midlands and in Central London. We opened a new office in London, grew its central HQ in Glasgow to a beautiful new space and notched up some fantastic new collaborations with local authorities, Government Departments and some great private sector service companies. Let's take a run down of our year: quarter by quarter. January – March April – June July – September October – December

January – March

AyeMind

Our project in collaboration with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, funded by the EU Chest gets started. Throughout 2015, we co-delivered our AyeMind service (previously Project99) with 23 partners across Greater Glasgow, Young Scot and the Mental Health Foundation, continuing on into 2016. Our particular favourite moments are the workshops with young people building animated gifs to create content for the service and hearing about our service being used by professionals in the field to find digital tools to use in the mental health field. Dearest Scotland

Dearest Scotland, our self-initiated project crowdsourcing letters to the future of Scotland hits the target of £10,000 on Kickstarter with the support of you. We get our first book design underway and partnership with publishers RingWood Publishing. You can purchase the final book here. Creating digital tools for mental health and employment support We continue our research with the Department of Health and Department for Work and Pensions on how digital can support the journey in, out and during employment in relation to positive mental health and wellbeing. In partnership with The Point People, we are re-commissioned to produce follow-up solutions on how the research could be taken forward into products and services by the system. You can read the report below: Culture Shift Athens In partnership with the British Council, we run our 4th Culture Shift, this time in Athens. Alex and Sarah spend three days in the Greek capital running a hack focused on surfacing more grassroots cultural activity in the city. The event is supported by Google and the winners take a trip to Youtube in London. Carr Gomm We complete our 9 month relationship with the fantastic Carr Gomm. We worked inside the agency to actively embed design thinking to improve their innovation capacity and service design. The results created Carr Gomm futures, an in-house research and development unit, which is now actively staffed, and a series of projects where cross sections of the staff came together to research and design new interventions to improve their care delivery. Department for Education In March, we kicked off our 12 month project with the Department for Education, Codesigning Care. Based out of London, we have been working with Affective State, Kent University and the University of Portsmouth. The project explores how technology can support young people in care to stay safe; recognise and manage their emotions and behaviour; and communicate more effectively with practitioners. Glasgow Service Jam Our long time friends, The Global Service Jam, come around again and we run the annual Glasgow leg of the Service Jam. We love running this event where anyone with or without 'design experience' can come together and learn a bit about prototyping, design and have some fun on the side too.

Innovation Labs Led by Valerie Carr, in partnership with SeeMe, we brought together a great group of people from all over Scotland to work on ideas and projects that help tackle mental health stigma and discrimination. Culture Shift Dubai We run our second Culture Shift of 2015, this time in Dubai at the JamJar. Our wonderful friends at Flux Video produce an amazing video of the weekend.

April – June

Cabinet Office | Designing Social Investment Commissioned by the Cabinet Office and in collaboration with The Point People, we continue our research into the Social Investment sector. Our report captured findings from our design-led research and prototyping project that aimed to find ways to improve the process of seeking and applying for social investment for social ventures. The final report can be found here. Open London office We confirm our London office and get to work on taking over a space in collaboration with Origin Housing Association. In collaboration with The Point People, we open The Interchange: London. Hello London! Snook visits Austria We are kindly invited by the Travel and Tourism Research Association (TTRA) to keynote on Social Innovation and how design is considering the total experience of tourism. We talk about the Glasgow Smiles better campaign, and how involving the local community in service delivery can drive results and volunteering in cities. Apps for Good We continue to work with Apps for Good to research their fellows programme. We spend time with young people who have been on their programme, reviewing their experience and looking at the process of the competition. We spend a fantastic evening in Reuters, London, witnessing 11-16 year olds pitch and present their apps for social good. Systems Changers Systems Changers has been a particularly special programme for us in 2015. Working with The Point People and Lankelly Chase, we support the branding and running of this initiative.

Systems Changers is an investment in frontline workers who support people facing severe and multiple disadvantage. The projects enables them to develop their voice, their collective knowledge and their influence on a wider system. We worked with 10 frontline workers up to December this year embedding skills from systems thinking to service design to surface insights on how the system needs to, and can be changed from the perspective of frontline workers. Includem: Now Including Design Keira finishes her 12 month programme with Includem whose one-to-one support model helps young people in creating and sustaining positive changes so that they lead happy and healthy lives. The Transitional Support Service takes young people through the transition from Child Services to adult life and the charity asked Snook to help develop the future of this service. Read more about Keira's experience here. Know How What a year we spent with Broadway Cinema! In collaboration, we ran a £1 million 12 month programme Know How that supported arts, cultural and heritage organisations across the East Midlands to develop design and digital thinking capabilities inside their organisation. We had a brilliant time working with Broadway and the story doesn't end here.

BFI Cinema Know How kicks off Continuing our work with Broadway, we create Cinema Know How. It aims to deliver a bespoke, forward thinking and open source programme designed around the cinema experience with impact for venues, their audience and culture change. From June onwards, we worked with Broadway to test the programme and then open up the programme to six new cinemas. CycleHack 25 cities We support the running of the second Global Annual CycleHack. CycleHack is a global hack focused on reducing barriers to cycling. This year, it takes place in 25 cities and our friends Maklab and Trakke dive in to support the initiative from our home town in Glasgow. SmartSTEMs Our friends at Seric launch SmartSTEMs: encouraging, involving and inspiring more young people into science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Their first mission in 2015 is to inspire young girls, aged 11-18, to become the great thinkers and creators of tomorrow. Snook's Sarah gave a talk on co-designing a better world in a room full of inspiring young girls in June and even managed to fit in a brilliant Mexican wave! Core 77 Award So, we only go and bag the top award from Core 77 in the Social Impact category for CycleHack. We're honoured, given the other awards went to some of the biggest design agencies, including IDEO.

July – September

Glasgow City Council Website We continue our work with Glasgow City Council to engage citizens in the re-design of their new website. A first for the Council, we directly bring the public into the process, researching their needs from services and relaying this back iteratively week on week to the Council to modify both their user experience and content for their forthcoming new site. Make Things Last (Zero Waste Scotland) We support Zero Waste Scotland and their Make Things Last campaign to run a quick fire hack in our studio to develop new service models for the shared economy. Ideas span from recycling and reusing birthday cards to rent a suitcase models for travelling. TedxPortobello We take part in Tribe Porty's first TedxPortobello: an amazing event we feel lucky to be part of. Our Sarah manages to squeeze her design journey into less than 15 minutes. Sexual Health and Wellbeing report Working with Young Scot and LGBT Youth Scotland last year, we explored young people’s views on sexual health and relationships in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area for the NHS GGC. Young Scot hosted an online survey and all partners were involved in a series of workshops with young people. We worked closely with a core group of young people who acted as peer researchers through The Matter process, producing a newspaper outlining their findings. The results were published and our original report here. Design for health | Sheffield Valerie is invited by Sheffield Hallam University to take the lead of a team at their 24 hour Design Challenge at the 2015 Design4Health conference, organised by Matt Dexter and led by Julia Cassim of Kyoto Design Lab. Revolution Talk at Creative Edinburgh Mornings Sarah gives a new talk entitled 'Revolution' and building movements for our friend Alex Humphrey Baker at Edinburgh's Creative Mornings. Vista Over a four-month period, our Andy and Alex facilitated 5 workshops with Vista: a leading provider of services for blind and partially sighted people in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. The initial brief aimed to deliver and support the upskilling and capacity building of staff at Vista by introducing members of the team to design thinking and service design processes.

New Office and Interchange opens We move! Our team rolls their sleeves up to move us from our humble beginnings on Bath Street to our mammoth new space on Miller Street. We open our co-working and events space which still has space and is open for events at half day and full day rental.

Stirling Futures Lab We run a hack focused on Stirling City Centre and the forth coming Culture Plan. On behalf of Forth Valley College, we invite students to build prototypes of what they'd like to see the city centre used for. Society by Design Pecha Kucha In collaboration with Taktal, we run a Pecha Kucha at the Whisky Bond entitled Society by Design. We ask what design means to different sectors of society and how we apply the process to engage citizens in the design of the future. Our very own Valerie and Keira take to the stage. Better World by Design Sarah is flown out to Providence in the States to join a panel with the Director of Frog and curator at the Moma in NYC under the fine roof of Brown University. We have an amazing time and kudos to the brilliant organising panel who like to dabble in Karaoke too. Dearest Scotland Book Launch at Scotgov What a year for Dearest Scotland. We close the core of the project with an invited exhibition inside Scottish Parliament and book launch in Edinburgh. We're particularly happy when Nicola Sturgeon shows up to grab her copy of the book dressed in the brand colours. And that's it – Snook's first published book.

Culture Aberdeen We begin an exicitng new project with Aberdeen City Council to support them in engaging citizens and the cultural sector to co-produce a Culture Plan for the city. We launch a Citizens Circle and Culture Circle to support the development of wider public events. We're continuing to run and update Culture Aberdeen here into 2016. Walk Hack

Building on our CycleHack work, we support Sustrans to develop a model to bring interested citizens together to encourage walking in the city. Run by Keira and Sam, they bring together a variety of groups to undertake fast paced research and create design interventions and prototypes for the city. Inspiring City Awards We don't win but at least we're shortlisted for a finalist in the Inspiring City Awards for young business person of the year. The whole team join the evening and our Eve wins selfie of the evening (she does do communications after all!) Whose Round Freshers Weeks Our work from 2014 continues on in 2015 as we deliver our Alcohol Awareness work for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. During September, our busiest period kicks off, spending time at Fresher Festivals collecting Dear Alcohol stories from new students. We will be publishing these in 2016.

Innovative Learning Week | Edinburgh University We work with our friends at Edinburgh University to co-design a hack pack and model for rethinking events at the annual Innovative Learning Week. Aye Mind Gif Workshops

AyeMind continues to grow over 2015 and we run a host of workshops with young people to create animated GIFs for the Aye Mind site. London Design Festival Launch We take part in London Design Festival and Emma opens up our London base to talk about Snook and Service Design. We co-host with Jon Foster of Origin Housing Association, Settle and The Point People.

October – December

Unusual Suspect festival Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) from the Young Foundation bring their conference up North and Snook support in designing the host tools, opening up our new studio as Café during the festival. Over 600 people engaged with the Festival across the city. #UnusualGlasgow was supported by the Big Lottery Fund Scotland, Nesta, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Rebase Dublin Our friends at Rebase, Dublin kindly invite Sarah over for a flying visit to talk about social innovation and design. BadgeMaker We're awarded a Vocational Learning and Technology fund by the UFI charitable trust to continue the work on BadgeMaker we began in 2013. BadgeMaker will allow young people to display a range of skills that build upon traditional qualifications. As educators and businesses devise their own badges, we're expanding the ways in which young people can personalise their learning. Badges act as a digital form of validation that can be shared with educators and future employers. We're excited to be working in partnership with Borders College and Dynamically Loaded to bring this to life in 2016. Promoting Change Network We work with Lankelly Chase again to run a two-day Promoting Change Network event in Birmingham with 150 people. We come together to discuss actions we can take to create a supportive, trusting and relationship-based approach to end severe and multiple disadvantage. The groups create 14 projects for taking forward in the New Year to drive a movement around equality and people facing severe and multiple disadvantage.

National Galleries of Scotland We run a project with National Galleries of Scotland and pupils from James Gillespie High School in Edinburgh to design interactive media concepts to promote the gallery to their peers. Students took part in workshops, designed in collaboration with us, thinking about what they might want to gain from looking at modern art in a gallery setting. The aim of the project was for the students to come up with ideas for a digital resource, using the exhibition as inspiration, and to learn about digital career possibilities within the creative industries. Read more about the project here and the outputs here. Fife Council We run a hack focusing on the future of the digital work force with Fife Council. This is a first step into this practice for the Council. Hosted in collaboration with Microsoft, we work for a day with staff from different departments to design new initiatives around what the future workforce needs to meet the needs of service users in the future. Domino Letting We work with our friends at Domino Letting to document their end to end processes. We love working with local business and supporting them to become more efficient and customer-centric in what they do. We create a new service manual for the letting agency and a digital Wiki to continuously update and find work processes for all new and existing staff. Home Care We continue to work on a new online Home Care service. We undertake research with UK citizens and their families to research the feasibility of buying home care online and design a service model for integrating care providers, council direct payments and service users all into one journey. The final alpha product is being built now for testing in 2016 which we'll be supporting. Service Design for Uni Training Working with our long time collaborator, Jean Mutton of Go Process Design, we deliver our final training sessions in Service Design for Universities. This year, we've worked with SROC and self-hosted the training in our own Interchange. Expect more of this in 2016. Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park win award Our friends over at Loch Lomond only go and bag themselves an award from Scottish Government for Our Live Park, an initiative that Snook supported back in 2014 to improve the engagement with the local community in the Main Issues Report. Congratulations team! Andy in Poland Our Andy heads over to Krakow to present at #WDKRK on design innovation. He gets over 150 people playing with play-doh and delivers a stellar talk. New Brand Over 2015, with a growing a team and getting our studio move underway, we slowly developed a new brand. You'll see from some of our open blog postings, it's really tough to make the time to service design yourself. We're going for the soft launch approach, you may have seen elements of it appearing across our platforms but we're awfully proud of our new logo and brand.

Keep your eyes peeled for our new website in 2016.

What can you expect in 2016?

There are some big new projects in the pipeline that we can't quite announce yet but will be coming to your inbox shortly in 2016. We're continuing to support CycleHack in 2016 and will be helping them get over the line of 70 cities this year. We're going to be running our own training on service design and sector specific training: from health to cultural sector. With over 7 years experience designing services and 150 projects under our belt, we don't just bring the textbooks and methods but case studies and stories of how it works in the real world. So, cheers and here's to a brilliant 2016! [post_title] => 2015 | A year in review [post_excerpt] => We opened a new office in London, grew its central HQ in Glasgow to a beautiful new space and notched up some fantastic new collaborations. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => snook-2015 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=9181 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9462 [post_author] => 18 [post_date] => 2015-12-17 12:04:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2015-12-17 12:04:12 [post_content] => Snook has been involved in the field of Open Badges for a long time and has seen the interest among educational stakeholders increase over the years. Several organisations have contacted us to get support, advice and information. Thanks to a grant from the UFI Charitable Trust, Snook has started a new phase of the BadgeMaker project. To expand the support for Open Badges, Snook has launched a Quarterly Open Badge Networking Group. The Networking Group will aim to create strong connections between the participants, further the development of Open Badges and better understand the use cases as well as the barriers. It will help us access learners, educators, decision-makers and policy-makers and research the end-to-end journeys, not only of learners but also of educational organisations. Snook hosted the first Networking Group in our new Event space, The Interchange, on December 15th, 2015. Attendees came from a wide range of organisations: Glasgow Life, Glasgow Caledonian University, Creative Scotland, Education Scotland and Digital Me. Click here to view the presentation. The BadgeMaker project team introduced the new project and its objectives:

Share how badges benefit learners, employers and educators
A working solution of the end-to-end BadgeMaker for its project partner, Borders College
A sustainable model and plan

Where we are:

Borders College have identified the group of learners who will co-design the pilot
We are exploring the technical options
The principles that will underpin the solution are also progressively emerging:
We will focus on accredit skills that are not currently recognised
The project will be a step forward on the organisation’s journey, not necessarily the perfect and final end-to-end solution
We will focus on the sustainability of the pilot beyond the lifetime of the project
Wherever possible we will re-use or build on existing solutions
We might focus on developing behind-the-scene connectors between existing systems

This is still in a work in progress. While Borders College recruits their Digital Ambassadors as their first cohort of learners to co-design the Open Badges, our next steps will be to:

Develop the process blueprint
Start sketching the user experience
And continue to explore the technical solutions

If you are interested in Open Badges, don’t hesitate to get in touch: curious@wearesnook.com. [post_title] => Open Badges Networking Group Scotland [post_excerpt] => If you are interested in Open Badges, join the Quarterly Open Badge Networking Group. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => open-badges-networking [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:42 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:42 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=9462 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [7] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 9448 [post_author] => 18 [post_date] => 2015-11-26 10:37:14 [post_date_gmt] => 2015-11-26 10:37:14 [post_content] => Following a first prototype in 2013/14, Snook has received a grant from the UFI Charitable Trust to continue the development of BadgeMaker. The project aims to develop the marketplace for Open Badges, which has not been achieved yet amongst educational stakeholders. Our objectives:

A full system-wide understanding and blueprint of how Open badges (can) work between educational stakeholders, employers and vocational training institutes
A working prototype of the end-to-end BadgeMaker, which contains co-produced badges between Scottish Colleges
A plan for sustainability

To deliver this project, Snook has partnered with Borders College and Dynamically Loaded. Borders College are early adopters of Open Badges for their staff’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD). They are keen to explore how badges can benefit learners in terms of motivation, retention and employability through learning and banking their new skills. Dynamically Loaded brings to the project their experience on business model innovation and scaling technology platforms, designing and developing data platforms and educating on creativity. Snook are experts in co-design and creative methods that bring the design process to life to undertake research in user needs for digital builds. Before the digital build we will work through ideal user journeys with learners and also educators and employers to understand how the technology can fit into their lives. To reach all stakeholders with an interest in Open Badges, BadgeMaker has launched a Quaterly Open Badge Networking Group. If you are interested in Open Badges, don’t hesitate to get in touch: curious@wearesnook.com [post_title] => BadgeMaker 2015 Launch [post_excerpt] => Following a first prototype in 2013/14, Snook has received a grant from the UFI Charitable Trust to continue the development of BadgeMaker. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => open-badges-2015 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2019-12-04 00:09:43 [post_modified_gmt] => 2019-12-04 00:09:43 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://wearesnook.com/?p=9448 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 8 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10645 [post_author] => 18 [post_date] => 2016-02-24 14:04:39 [post_date_gmt] => 2016-02-24 14:04:39 [post_content] => We have a keen interest in applying service design to further education and, in particular, student journeys. Up and down the country, we have met educators committed to seeing their students succeed and support them in any way they can. We have met students striving to reach their goals and others struggling to see the point of it all.