Around where I live there is a joke which involves someone asking for directions. The answer comes back, “well, I wouldn’t start from here.” I am not sure why this joke has been at the back of my mind on week 2 of our Definition Programme marathon.
As a community arts organisation we have a simple mission which is to empower people to use their creativity to change the world for the better.
Our response to covid has seen a massive upturn in the digital content we have created. In 2020 we had about 120 pieces of digital content at some stage of the production process.
Our digital challenge seemed modest to us.
We want to find a way to curate our digital content in a way which works to empower both the people on our projects that make digital content and the people who go online to see what has been produced. So far, since the summer of 2020 over 15,000 viewings of content made by our participants and artists have happened.
Around 4,500 were from the community and youth programmes, around 150 viewing a week since we launched the digital content.
10,500 views were from our live music gigs, the majority came within a 10 week period.
With the right partner networks – we can command good audiences.
Our mentors suggested we shouldn’t start from here.
They asked us to consider using the definition phase to look at one aspect of the challenge relating to digital content. It is hard to hear that you have to limit your ambitions. But we can see that getting part of the project fully formed and prototyped – is better than being overwhelmed by the breadth of the work and never achieving the depth of understanding we need. Critical friends are annoying – especially if they are right.
Because we are working to deliver a design that is user centred, it made sense to explore an area which has content at various stages, including live production and work being curated. The best project of Collage Arts that fits this brief is the Voices Against Hate work.
Consultation work with young people in 2019 and official statistics flagged up some challenges for young people in relation to hate speech. We fundraised to make an intervention and we are now working in primary and secondary schools, with young people excluded from mainstream education and young people in the care of the local authority. It is rare to unite all these strands of the borough’s education provision in one project.
In headline terms Voices Against Hate works with young people. The project gets them to think about when they have experienced hate speech, then works with that feeling to build empathy and to produce digital products. These are used by the cohorts of young people to challenge hate speech when it occurs. For this to work, young people aged 13 and above need to be able to easily access and download the Voices Against Hate materials. We plan to do some training of the young people who will lead the hate interruption work in their schools or institutions.
From 20 March, our young people’s group will be back in the building each week. We are going to use them as a reference group for the project. We know that realistically we are going to get very limited interaction with teachers and school managers. So, pragmatically we are to focus on the young people as our key user group.
All of this meant that we had to go back and review our work on personas, but now we do know where we are starting from.
In our discovery phase we looked at some of the user profiles of younger people and older BAME women to help us think through our proposal. We also developed 7 personas. We now need to edit these proformas down to the youths – rather than expand them to be fully inclusive. But we have gaps in our proformas – mainly relating the role of the youth interrupters.
Duncan Sones heads up communications, strategy, and new business development within Collage Arts.
Image credit: @visualthinkery / @bryanmathers