Hello everyone! My name is Kishen, and I joined the Good Place Innovators project in June 2022. Despite only working with the team until the end of July, this was truly an amazing experience as I felt my efforts were appreciated, and I was also able to see the fruits of my labour which was extremely fulfilling too.

My contributions include creating a poster to promote the Luneside Studios Art Exhibition. This was an event held at the Management School HUB Café at Lancaster University, hosted by the Good Place Innovators. I used Canva and Adobe Photoshop to design this poster and went over each draft of the poster with the team to continuously improve design elements and eventually create the perfect poster. Eventually, this poster was printed and posted throughout campus.

Additionally, I also created a two comic strips for the innovation challenge featured on the Good Place Innovators website. Once the personas for both people was finalised, I used the personas to design a comic strip personalised to each person. Just like the poster, I used Canva and Adobe Photoshop to create this, along with Adobe Illustrator to touch up some design elements. I went over each draft with my team, and after going back and forth redesigning and rearranging elements, I finally had something that my team and myself were happy with.

Moreover, I assisted with some design and aesthetic elements on the Good Place Innovators website, such as picking colour palates and modifying arrangement of icons or text boxes on the page to keep everything structured and neat. I also took some pictures and filmed some videos to showcase the challenges the personas we had created face on a day-to-day basis; these pictures were also used in the comic strips.

My time working on this project has taught me valuable skills like time management, teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, professionalism, and having a good work ethic. Additionally, the design work has also honed my creative thinking skills. Overall, I really enjoyed my time working for the Good Place Innovators project, and I hope the students enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it!

I come from a technical background with zero influence in the world of business. But I have a knack to understand this world better which is what has sparked my interest and is driving me to learn more and achieve my dream. Working with Dr. Radka Newton in the Good Place Innovators team came to me as a blessing. Working on various projects like the Lancaster BID and the Edujam’2022 truly changed me as a person.

I have never truly interacted directly with an established firm apart from our family business. But the Lancaster BID provided me the opportunity to learn how to conduct myself and ask the right questions. I also learnt that, in this case it was very essential to play the mediator but silently where we provoked students to speak their minds and also help the business to get question that directed the conversation in the direction. This helped the businesses also to gain a judicious understanding of what we expect from them and bring the University closer to the Town.

We as a team delved more into the available recommendations to enhance and turn them into feasible options for the future actions. It was really fascinating to see how the collaboration between the researchers and the Lancaster BID manager improved the initial ideas and led to generating more practical ideas and next steps. We are all super excited to witness the changes our ideas can initiate and are proud of ourselves to help make contributions to the city we now call home.

Coming to the EduJam’2022 that was held at the V&A, Dundee, the theme was CHOICE. Through this event I acknowledged that making a choice is only difficult because we always think of the future consequences and not the present problem. The day we learn to make a choice based on the situation and what is truly us is that it leaves no room for regret. The extremely insightful talks by renowned people like Birgit Mager, Andy de Vale & Adam Lawrence truly ignited a spark in us to appreciate the process more than the destination. I learnt how sometimes all we see isn’t what it actually is. We need to push ourselves that little bit more to dwell deeper and understand the actual underlying cause for the problem instead of assuming and providing solutions.

We further learnt that when making conversation it is extremely helpful to ask questions that don’t answer with just a yes or a no. It needs to provide us with more information and get the other person to start talking more about their experiences. Such simple elements make a big difference when applied into our daily lives.

We finally learnt how to bring our ideas to life. We were made to get into a creative zone and visualize all the tiny aspects of the scenario at hand and put on paper and into prototypes. This truly made me realize that you don’t have to be the artist but just be true to what you feel about things to change it to reality.

All of these learning are somethings I will carry with me almost as strong as principles of life. They have helped change my perspective and the thought line. Imbibing these into my day to day routine has genuinely pushed me to having a more optimistic approach towards life. Thank you!

 

For three days, the design museum of V&A Dundee was the host of EduJamUK 2022 and welcomed us generously with its astonishing atmosphere. However, one of the most eye-catching objects of the place was not inside the museum itself. After years of operating on the sea, the RRS Discovery is a barque-rigged auxiliary steamship located just next to the V&A. You see the Discovery and the Design in one single frame!

It seems that developing a product or service with a high level of quality like the V&A building is not possible without having the discovery element by its side. Thus, it was not surprising to see a considerable part of the EduJam concentrated on the first half of the diamond model, reminding us to dedicate enough time to understand the challenges rather than jumping to the ideation process. During the event, we realized that gathering around a table and thinking deeply might not help us to be innovative. We had to leave our comfort zone to talk to our target people, and obviously, we were rejected multiple times. It was unpleasant initially, but everything changed after receiving the first responses, which enabled us to see the challenges from other perspectives.

Using the invaluable tools, we have been given, we managed to analyze the insights of the discovery stage and define the exact issue to be addressed.

Just when we had thought we were done with the hard part, the second phase of the double diamond was equally exhilarating. The process of ideation had us knocking every working cell in our body.

It involved us channelling all the thoughts and instances collected from the task of talking to people and forming a generalized question to symbolize a trend noticed from the interviews and target that cause. It pushed us to draw insights on various levels of how a choice can play a major role in education. We gathered data from people about how it is extremely hard for some people to make choices and how it has impacted them. We further noticed that most people are scared of making the choice because it could be wrong. It was then that we learnt that the push to make a choice is what people need without worrying about the outcome too much.

Next came the prototyping phase in this we brought our ideas to life. A big thanks to Andy de Vale for pushing us to leave all the insecure thoughts of not being creative or artistic behind and inspiring us to just pick up a pen and sketch our vision. The outcomes were magical. The presentations of all group ideas and solutions blew our minds. It was a great end to a beautiful weekend of successful jamming. The learnings from this weekend will be carried forward a long way ahead. It genuinely changed us as people overall.

After organizing an exciting event on the 16th of March 2022 and analyzing the collected data, the Good Place Innovation team has prepared a report highlighting the key insights. Yesterday, we invited the Lancaster BID manager, Tony Johnson, to the studio to share our ideas and learnings with the BID. The keynotes of our presentation are highlighted as follows:

• The lack of stores on campus, particularly grocery shopping and having meals, encourages students to go to the city.
• On the other hand, transportation between the university and the city is time-consuming and expensive.
• Furthermore, Lancaster could offer the students a larger variety of leisure activity options to keep them in the city for further exploration. Even the available options are not announced effectively among the students.
• Partnership with Stagecoach to offer more student discounts, appointing student ambassadors to communicate the events, and presenting the concepts such as the “Night Bazaar” as a seasonal event may improve the current situation.
• The university would love to invite local businesses to explore the campus and offer them an ideal benchmarking opportunity for local businesses to analyze their competitors on the campus.

After the presentation, we delved more into the available recommendations to enhance and turn them into feasible options for future actions. It was really fascinating to see how the collaboration between the researchers and the Lancaster BID manager improved the initial ideas and led to generating more practical ideas and next steps. We are all super excited to witness the changes our ideas can initiate and are proud of ourselves to help make contributions to the city we now call home.

The final version of the presentation is available for download.

BID Event Presentation

 

On the 16^th of March, Lancaster University and Lancaster BID together hosted ten local city businesses at LUMS.

We, as research fellows, had this opportunity to have eye-opening conversations with business owners as well as participating students to understand their perspectives on the relationship between students and businesses. It was fascinating to see how business owners and the university’s students collaborated to facilitate entrepreneurial activities in Lancaster.

Many great conversations appeared in the activity! Business managers obtained significant insights into the students’ behaviours who either live in the city or at the university’s campus as their would-be customers. Students also learned a lot about the local businesses’ strategies and approaches for promoting their products and services. Many of them became good friends! Both business managers and the students looked forward to participating in similar activities next time!

We managed to collect a considerable amount of qualitative data. So, in the upcoming month, we will analyze the data and provide both businesses and students with a detailed report of the event. It is quite a lot of work, but we are very excited and enjoying the task! It is a delight to be on board and working with the team. We cannot wait to continue this journey to facilitate the collaboration of Lancaster University and the Lancaster business district. See you in our final report and presentation!

Authors: The Research Fellows (Xiaoxi, Lekhana & Farshad)

 

The Good Place Innovators Fellows, Farshad, Laura and Lekhana, met as a group for the first time to discuss the components of the project.  Together we started to draft a plan for the next six months of the project and came up with a list of questions and initial ideas.  We met in our own Design Studio Space in the new West Pavilion in Lancaster University Management School, where we were delighted to be greeted by a variety of creative materials and stationary, including LEGO, pipe cleaners, sticky notes and a large roll of paper.  We will be using these materials to generate and develop lots of ideas to implement as part of the Design Thinking Lab and City Innovation student learning resources, bringing together an exciting blend of knowledge in:

• Entrepreneurship & Innovation Management
• International Business and Strategy
• Design methods, Co-design and Social innovation

We have shared some reflections from our meeting for the DLAB and City Innovation:

Design Thinking Lab, DLAB:

We considered how to facilitate DLAB to the audience, who our possible target audience would be.  We looked into the various questions we had regarding the tasks at hand:

What do we name ourselves? Lancaster Explorer? Good Innovators city? 

The task lined up for next week’s upcoming meeting is to consider possible improvements to make the existing Design Thinking Lab more interactive and fun! This should include new videos, interacting with fellow students during activities and coming up with more stories to share with our city.

City Innovation:

We had the chance to delve into the details of the City Innovation project. There will be an event at Lancaster University on the 16th of March with local businesses and students, for which we are looking forward to listening to the challenges facing businesses and viewing students are active citizens in the city. We will discuss more challenges and try to come up with the most appropriate solutions. We believe that this team is going to create something special for the university, as well as the city of Lancaster.  There are several uncertainties, but it will be fine for sure!