Simplify simplify simplify!

I’m the managing director of the media organisation mediale pfade working in the field of political media education at the federal level. We have an expertise in a broad variety of political, societal and civic challenges and work at the crossroads of media education and political education with a focus on people between the ages of 12 and 27. Our methods include creating active media works and game-based learning. Currently, our organisation comprises 16 full time employees, two in admin and 14 as media educators. We’re project-based and financed through our projects, which is a blessing and a curse – it makes it harder to find funding but it also means that we’re independent from structural funding and so we’re flexible in what we’re doing.

Younger people come to our office where are workshops and games, we have a website, our media competency work is mobile and we take it to the entire region. Besides young people, we work with educational professionals and the methodology of media education.

The concept before Techlab
Our main concept when we joined the Techlab’s consultation process was a participatory project using data visualisation to show the needs of young people in the district. We wanted to make this project public and urgent, to show the actual needs of young people in the district. Our best-case scenario was doing huge projections on the Town Hall. Over the course of our consultation, our project changed a great deal; including the name, the structure, the concept grew smaller.
We had initially wanted to install little voting machines for young people to use, to ask them questions like What’s your favourite meal? and show them how we collect data. We then wanted to work with this data in workshops, to focus on visualisations so they could create a product that they’d worked on to take home with them.
New discoveries – the user’s experience
This plan changed after our meeting with a service designer as part of the Techlab, when we learned about “use cases”, a step-by-step account of how a user interacts with a service, often visualised as a diagram, to try to understand the user’s experience.
Seeing things from the user’s point of view made us change our perspective. We pivoted from what we wanted to do or felt people might need to pay more attention to, to asking whether young people want to do or need to do what we’re offering. We all understood this at a conscious level, but on an emotional level it was hard to make this change. But we knew it was the right thing to do.
My time with Abhay at the Techlab was the best consulting experience I’ve ever had. He asked if he could be totally honest, which led to a conversation in which we spoke very plainly about our work and the culture we operate in. He challenged our assumptions about our work and his questions triggered just the right amount of pain, but we didn’t feel attacked or devalued. It was actually reassuring. We felt like he understood our values even if he was questioning certain aspects of our plans. I felt like I had to piece myself together again afterwards, like I’d been taken apart but also reassembled in a way that worked better.
Meet people where they are and not where you want them to be
We have worked in education for a long time now. Our process has generally been that we have concepts in mind and we try to conceptualise from an intellectual point of view. Following our conversation, we could see how some of our ideas have good intentions but not an actual project goal. I can confidently say we excel in the quality of what we do but what we have reflected on is whether our projects are evolving apace with a society that’s dramatically changing. We don’t get as far as we used to with our intellectual approach at the moment. We tend to assume that we share a common ground with the people we’re reaching out to, that everyone broadly agrees that democracy is cool and that racism is bad, but that is not the case any longer.
Process matters
We’re quite good at transferring processes from one thing to another and so we have been quick to synthesise our learnings with the Techlab into our work. We’re making an effort to get to know our target users better and based on this research, we’re creating formats that are more responsive to their needs.
We’re also taking a much closer look at our processes. Sometimes our projects offer up a large number of activities but don’t sufficiently connect the dots so that people can take the tools we’re used and go and do it themselves. Process is valued not only by service designers in the Techlab but also increasingly in funding. Funding in our field has a greater failure tolerance but more of an interest in the process and its challenges. What we will be focusing on in future is on documenting our processes to make sure they’re involving more stakeholders.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
The Techlab offered different consultants with different approaches – some of whom had exactly the same thing to say. They all asked us what it was we were doing. Responding repeatedly to the same question was a great opportunity for us to workshop our responses, to come up with new ideas, to reformulate our answers. While it wasn’t as explicit as the initial consultation, it did make us see something about our perspective and our approach that we hadn’t seen before.
When we had our consultation with the service designer Amarinder, he dug deep into who came into our media centre. We kept coming up with types and personas but after a bit of back and forth we realised that the majority of the people who engage with us are between the ages of ten and 12. This again made us adapt and simplify our project. The change of perspective was that making an idea simpler doesn’t make it worse or any less effective.
When the time came for us to present our pitch, we took a problem we knew that our target audience knew well and developed a story around it. We talked about how the media centre was able to find support to solve the problem. It wasn’t the most sophisticated of stories and even as I delivered the pitch I had my doubts, but I had the best feedback I’ve ever had. A simple story managed to convey the big picture in a way I’d not managed before. The shift for me was that making something simple and easy to understand doesn’t take away any value.