A little while ago a group of Fellows in Suffolk undertook a Human Centred Design course using the resources of IDEO.org (…see our archive of entries on our regional events page for more details).
IDEO have long had success with their Human Centred Design toolkit, which is an enabling mechanism for those interested in community development. The on-line course, which Suffolk Fellows undertook, has seen over 40,000 individuals from 148 countries wrangle with a specific problem in the last two years. That is poverty.
There is now a new development. IDEO have recognised that where the problems are most significant, then take-up of web resources can be limited. This may be to the complete absence of any technological infrastructure to engage toolkit users, or that the technology that is available is far beyond the community’s ability to acquire it.
Their solution is to create a printed book, the ‘old fashioned’ way of disseminating knowledge.
You can get involved and support the HCD book project. They are raising funds on KickStarter, where for very modest sums you are able to support the creation of this new medium, to the benefit of communities around the globe.
A pledge of 25 dollars will see you receive a pocket guide to Human Centred Design, with a 50 dollar or more pledge getting you a full copy of the toolkit in bound form.
With the unseasonably mild autumnal weather seeming to persist, now is a great time to get out and about into the East Anglian countryside. Our region is blessed with some wonderful ‘perambulatory’ landscapes.
Fellow event:
Our Fellows are looking forward to their re-scheduled visit to the Kingfishers Bridge Wetland Creation Project on 27th. November 3014. You can see more details here.
The pages of the National Trust offer over 70 downloadable walks in the Eastern region, across the counties of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex.
We particularly like the Tremendous Trees walk at Sheringham Park in Norfolk, where the trees are at their finest in the autumn, but where the views across the landscape are great at any time of the year.
You can take a virtual tour of the Sheringham Park vista on this National Trust web page here. Can even smell the sea when the wind is in the right direction?
You can park dawn to dusk and if visiting at the weekends then the Courtyard Cafe and Visitor Centre will be open.
You can even download and install a Humphrey Repton at Sheringham Park smartphone app from from iTunes or the Android store – adding to the pleasure of ‘finding out’ if you are a first time visitor to the estate. See more here.
Another office favourite is the coastal walk at Dunwich Heath in Suffolk. Even at this late time of year there is much to see, including a walk on the beach. Best be well wrapped up, just in case.
You can enjoy the Birch Walk, the Heather Walk or the Gorse Walk – each having their own attractions and visual delights throughout the year. See more here.
Finally, the last item that caught our eye on the National Trust walks page was the potential of a visit to the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire. Ideal if your really want to blow those cobwebs away.
You can visit the outstanding chalk and grassland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty throughout the year. Circular walks, medieval rabbit warrens and other ancient monuments are all on the ‘to visit list’ of any walk. The view from the ridge is tremendous, there may even be kite flyers up there too.
The British Science Association have just announced details of grant funding schemes for British Science Week in 2015.
Event dates: 13th to 22nd March 2015
As well as the usual grants by region in the UK, offering their traditional support to schools, this year (2015) sees the introduction of community organisation grants, offering those in the community sector working with ‘hard to reach’ communities the opportunity to build new work using science and discovery as a lever to engagement.
Kick Start Grants – grants of £300 for school activities (and up to £700 for schools/communities) in the UK faced with challenging circumstances.
Scottish Grant scheme – grants of £200 for schools and £350 for organisations in Scotland.
Welsh Grant scheme – grants of £200 for schools and £350 for organsations in Wales.
Community Grant scheme (new for 2015) – grants of up to £500 for community-based groups and organisations working with hard to reach groups in the UK whose targeted audience/participants include those not traditionally engaged with science. (These might be people who “..are from the Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic community (BAME); not in education employment or training (NEET); or who live in a remote and rural location”…Ed.)
Although the sums are modest, it is possible with imagination, to see how the seed funding could be used to engage those interested in science, or to give the undiscovered young scientist a chance to take their first step on the road to research, for example.
The Association web site offers the following as eligible activities under the grant scheme.
Presentations from invited speakers on science and/or engineering topics.
Field trips to local science centres, museums or university science departments.
Arranging a talk or workshop with a local STEM ambassador.
Recruiting a freelancer to deliver an arts and science activity.
Fete, family science days, mini festivals, science fairs.
Busking displays run in public venues, such as a supermarket, park or high street.
Hands-on workshops.
Debates and discussions with scientists.
At conversationsEAST we really warmed to the idea of a cross disciplinary event, say using musicians, artists and electronic engineers to devise an event using music, graphics and an introduction to audio-visual or web technology. The output of the engagement and learning to be put on the web, or streamed live, or turned into a music CD, for example.
As always, if there any Fellows in the region planning an event, we’d be happy to donate web resources from conversationsEAST to contribute to the work. Just let us know?
Ipswich Arts Centre in association with Ipswich Historic Churches Trust and Re-Create are to establish a new Ipswich Arts Centre at St Clement Church.
In early November there will be an evening of talks, discussion, music and refreshment to celebrate the rebirth of St Clement as a new contemporary arts venue forming a bridge between the waterfront development and the town centre.
“The aim is to create a contemporary arts centre which will host national and international acclaimed acts in a diverse range of media including music, visual arts, performance, film and theatre. It will complement and support Ipswich’s existing cultural offer, placing Ipswich firmly on the regional and national cultural map.
The rebirth of St Clement as a contemporary arts centre aims to restore this beautiful 14th Century building, which provides a natural space for creative expression, where people can congregate and share in this experience”.
The opening of a new Arts centre in any community is a red letter day. The impending work at St. Clement is set in a long tradition of utilising redundant church property as theatres, community centres and libraries.
The creation of a new, full mix Arts Centre to add to the cultural context of Ipswich and East Anglia as a whole is very exciting indeed.
The project has already attracted media attention and has been featured on BBC news, The Stage and East Anglian Daily Times.
To discover more information about this new Centre and the role that UCS in Ipswich will play see…
Vikki Heywood, Chair of the RSA, will be giving a presentation at Chelmsford’s Anglia Ruskin University on Wednesday 22nd October.
Her topic is the cultural aspects of First World War centenary commemorations. She chairs 14-19 Now, an organisation funded by the Heritage Lottery and Arts Council England, to produce a programme of commissions relating to the centenary.
Now back in the diary for Thursday, 27th November at 10.30 a.m. – Kingfishers Bridge visit.
To book your place, please email jodurning@btopenworld.com
The project team at ‘Kingfishers’ are doing innovative things to establish and maintain the wetland for wildlife. The project web page has some fantastic video and images of the site.
Here is a sample of the work the project is doing with technology, creating interest for visitors and providing insights and understanding about the inhabitants of the wetland.
‘We have recently set up a series of high resolution colour and night vision nest box cameras on the reserve, and plan to install a number of high definition digital cameras in the larger boxes in the near future. We have several aims we hope to achieve using these cameras over the next few years, including bringing our friends closer to the breeding birds they help to support with a live video service on this website.
Video recordings of nests can give us a great deal of information on factors affecting good fledging outcomes here at Kingfishers Bridge. The live view of the Barn owls has already shown how weather conditions affect the hunting efficiency and prey types caught by the male Barn owl. We currently have cameras in the Barn owl and Tawny owl nest boxes, there is also a live feed of a Great tit and House martin nest here at the wardens office’.
(Narrative courtesy of the Kingfishers Bridge project).
Matthew Taylor has produced a new RSA Short to accompany the current drive to embrace creativity across society. See it below…
Matthew draws from his recent RSA Chief Executive’s lecture.
The message, that we should all embrace our creativity, is a telling one. Rigid thinking can bring with it the warm comfort of supposed ‘certainty’. However, to the creative mind ‘…every individual has the freedom and opportunity to develop their unique capabilities to the full’.
Oliver Reichardt, the RSA Director of Fellowship states that ‘…this concept will be central to our work(The RSA) in the future’. We warm to the sentiment at conversationsEast.
Mind Change
Leading neuroscientist Susan Greenfield considers the implications of the vast range of technologies that are creating a new environment around us all. How can we ensure these powerful forces bring out the best in us, and allow us to lead more meaningful, more creative lives?
Followed by an informal discussion.
(Baroness Greenfield is Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University. From 2005 to 2012, she was Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. From 1998 to 2010, she was director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In September 2013, she co-founded the biotech company Neuro-bio Ltd, where she is Chief Scientific Officer….Ed).
All Fellows and guests welcome.
For more details and directions jodurning@btopenworld.com
Our small journal produces a lot of data. We generate twitter feeds, meta-tags and article categories…on and on. Does it have a use?
One thing we do at conversationsEAST every month is to run our Twitter generated content through a Knight Lab application called BookRX. (Part of the conversationsEAST team day job is to be booksellers and publishers, so the findings can be used to plan thematic content for our literacy projects, for example…Ed).
For our journal it can serve the same function, offering insights into subjects that can be useful as leaders to content ideas, or to see if the profile of our readers is on the trend we believe we are following.
it analyzes your tweets (the words, Twitter usernames, and hashtags you use) and compares them to terms that are correlated with book categories.
… it is a book recommendation app at heart. The results can be interesting. We publish below this months analysis of our journal Twitter feed. We have featured the lead book in three categories; Science and Technology, Politics and Social Sciences and Business.
The Mobile Wave – are we immersed already?
‘In the tradition of international best-sellers, Future Shock and Megatrends, Michael J. Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, brings The Mobile Wave, a ground-breaking analysis of the impact of mobile intelligence-the fifth wave of computer technology.
The Mobile Wave argues that the changes brought by mobile computing are so big and widespread that it’s impossible for us to see it all, even though we are all immersed in it’.
The book examines theories (models) of how systems (those of humans, nature, and combined human natural systems) function, and attempts to understand those theories and how they can help researchers develop effective institutions and policies for environmental management.
The fundamental question this book asks is whether or not it is possible to get beyond seeing environment as a sub-component of social systems, and society as a sub-component of ecological systems, that is, to understand human-environment interactions as their own unique system
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems by Lance H. Gunderson (Editor), C. S. Holling (Editor) Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk here
‘The first make-or-break step in persuading anyone to do any thing is getting them to hear you out. Whether the person is a harried colleague, a stressed-out client, or an insecure spouse, things will go from bad to worse if you can’t break through emotional barricades.
Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, and backed by the latest scientific research, author Mark Goulston shares simple but power ful techniques readers can use to really get through to people—whether they’re coworkers, friends, strangers, or enemies’.
Getting through is a fine art but a critical one.
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M.D. (Author), Keith Ferrazzi (Foreword). Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
Did BookRX get the feel of our readership right? The acid test for us is does the machine generated selection have an appropriate ‘RSA feel’ to it? We think it does, providing sources that are appropriately defined through the prism of our journal content.
The app also generates selections for sports and fitness, as well as a fiction list. These are a little more difficult to empathise with, although we may publish future lists as book recommendations of regular interest for Fellows, particularly as the volume of our Twitter traffic grows.
One charitable application for the technology, we can think of, is to use the Knight Lab service to generate book lists for on-line sale as a fund-raising initiative. Taking the guess work out of list building for your audience?
Editors Note:
BookRx was created by Shawn O’Banion and Larry Birnbaum and designed by Jeremy Gilbert and Sarah Adler at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the National Science Foundation
Northwestern University Knight Lab advances news media innovation and education. Developing ideas from experimentation through adoption, the Lab makes technology that aims to help make information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on the Internet.
We wrote recently about how glorious was the summer of 1914 and how those balmy days before the Great War seemed to reach on into the Autumn. (Revisit the article here…). We were lucky enough to be at the 1st World War commemoration event at Hylands House, sponsored by Essex County Council, on the weekend of the 14th September 2014.
The machinery of war in Hylands Park…
The fields of the estate provided a glorious backdrop for families and groups to enjoy the late sunshine, to listen to martial music from a band on the terrace and to enjoy the military re-enactments and be-uniformed attendants, at a variety of regimental stalls scattered like a canvas billet around the great house.
The inside of Hylands House afforded visitors the chance to meet and greet a variety of historically textured projects from the Essex area. Enjoying views of the landscaped gardens and lawns from the restored windows, of the horse-drawn charabanc and the 574 acre landscape designed by Humphry Repton. Read more about the history of this lovely house here, on the web pages of Chelmsford City Council.
Drawn through the grounds in some style…
On the first floor of Hylands House that sunny morning were members of project called Chelmsford Remembers.
The Heritage Lottery Fund project, led by Fellows of the RSA, is a history project designed to capture ‘…the history and of Chelmsford and its people during The First World War’.
Below you can see what we discovered, at conversationsEAST, about this great project…
Chelmsford Remembers
The project will have a major exhibition in place, generously supported by High Chelmer Shopping Centre, that will feature the work of project volunteers and to enable residents to see the findings of the research…as well as contribute information about their own family members, we hope.
With kind thanks to Freddy Slater of the project…
It is intended to to transform the central square of the Centre into a replica trench, with artefacts and displays of Great War material relevant to the area.
The display at the High Chelmer Shopping Centre has a particularly poignant centrepiece. A large Memorial Plaquette, or ‘Dead Man’s Penny’, which was issued to the families of all those service personnel killed as a result of the war.
Tragically, some 1,355,000 placquettes were distributed, consuming some 450 tonnes of bronze in their manufacture. We were lucky to meet with members of the project who gave us permission to use an image of their precious artefact. We thank them.
Would you like to get involved in the Chelmsford Remembers Project? You can.
Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk
All successful applicants to the project will get a free copy of Dr. Paul Rusiecki’s The Impact of Catastrophe, a book detailing his research into the people of Essex and the impact of war from 1914 to 1920.
You can join the team by making contact with Chelmsford Remembers.
chelmsfordremembers@gmail.com
The project is looking for ten volunteer researchers who are passionate about uncovering the past of Chelmsford. The project provides free training and support and will also be involved in the forthcoming Ideas Festival.
Talks were given…
In the Pavilion, adjacent to the main house, the day was spent in listening and watching a variety of talks from researchers and authors on the theme of the war in Essex. The event was sponsored by the Essex Records Office and was chaired and the business of the day guided by Malcolm Noble FRSA. (Malcolm is the Chair of the Eastern Region RSA Fellowship).
Malcolm Noble FRSA making a point during the opening talk…
We illustrate below two quick samples of the talks, which were well received by the respective audiences. Providing attendees in the Pavilion with access to new information and insights into the The Great War in Essex.
Stylistically different, the programme afforded the interested listener with a wealth of data, images and reflection on this momentous time in the County.
The Lights Go Out in Essex: August 1914
Dr. Paul Rusiecki delivered a short paper to the morning audience around the emergence of war into the summer sunshine of summer 1914.
Paul’s principal thesis was that ‘…war crept up by stealth on the people of Essex’. He cited Dedham Church Choir, so oblivious to the impending storm, that on the day preceding the announcement of hostilities, ‘…the singers took an overnight visit to Cambridge’.
As further evidence of civil society behaving as normal, there was reflection given during the paper to a strike in the County by agricultural harvest workers. There was significant unrest during August of 1914, with police marshalled and shots fired to suppress the protest. This dispute rapidly came to an end as wages were able to rise as a result of war measures to secure food production, we were informed. Ferment was also current in August 1914 with regard to the Irish Home Rule Bill, with all the consequent fears of uprising.
Dr. Rusiecki informs his audience…
The local Essex press made no mention of the assassination in Sarajevo, but by the end of August 1914 ‘…the cold hand of realism had fallen on Essex’. The air of unreality had dissipated, we were told. The early battles at Mons had led to an increase in the call for conscription in England.
By May 1915, Dr.Rusiecki enlightened us, attitudes to German and Austrians resident in the County had hardened. A shift in mindset driven by the sinking of the Lusitania, air raids over Southend and the publication of the Bryce Report, which detailed atrocities committed in Belgium during the early stages of the war.
A wonderfully lucid and well paced delivery, we thought.
Mobilisation and Land Defences in Essex
Clive Potter, a local county based historian, gave his audience a delightful visual and data festooned presentation. We were offered a variety of county maps, which showed us both the disposition of troops before hostilities and the numerous training grounds across the Essex landscape.
Strong visual presentation from Clive Potter, local historian…
Similarly, Clive was able to reveal the likely landing places for small detachments of ‘enemy’ troops on the Essex coast. These visual elements were supported by notes and the detail from the 1914 UK battle plan, ‘The Land Defense of the United Kingdom (Eastern Region), which gave us detailed exposition on how our defense would be undertaken in the event of invasion.
Detailed maps were offered of inland defenses in the county, including a significant amount of trench works for troops to block advancing enemy forces. This was very enlightening, as we had always, as a ‘lay ‘audience, assumed that trench warfare was the sole remit of mainland European combatants.
Clive completed his image selection with a very interesting range of contemporary images from 1914 of troops in their billets. A strong section was presented on quartering troops under way in Witham and the various early training exercises undertaken in the hinterland of the town.
A refreshing story was told, that made the war in Europe a very local affair. We enjoyed it immensely.
In summary:
The band played on…a perfect backdrop to the activities…
This was a well planned and executed commemorative event for the people of Chelmsford and the county as a whole.
For the projects presented in Hylands House, the talks organised in the Pavilion, as well as the activities in the Park – all created some interest for every visitor.
We understand that nearly a thousand people entered Hylands House to engage with projects and that sixty visitors stayed on for the final talk of the day from Ivor Dallinger on the Stowe Maries Great War Aerodrome.
A great day in the last, lingering days of summer. Thank you.
Images by conversationsEAST, alternative sources as shown
You can get involved and support the HCD book project. They are raising funds on KickStarter, where for very modest sums you are able to support the creation of this new medium, to the benefit of communities around the globe.
