Practical Doing

Tagged with families | interdisciplinary thinking | TACSI

Some weeks, you put the intellectual part of your brain to use. Other weeks, you put the practical part of your brain to use. This week was all about the practical: organising a free family festival this Sunday from 12-3pm in the Rajah Street Reserve, Marion, South Australia.

I scoured the yellow pages to find experts who could teach cupcake decorating, kite making, cartoon drawing, and coffee making. I tapped posters to trees and handed out flyers at schools, cafes, gyms, libraries, laundry mats, corner stores, supermarkets, and health clinics. Carolyn visited nearly every Salvos for spoons and forks to bash together wind chimes, bought tents and blackboard paint at the hardware store, and found a masseuse. Chris hunched over the computer designing festival programmes, brochures, activities, and materials. Had we written our team job spec this week, it would have said ‘marketing’ ‘outreach’ ‘mobilisation’ ‘event planning’ and ‘logistics management.’ I worried Carolyn, coming from a high-pressured social work position, would feel this was all a bit beneath her: so banal compared to the everyday urgency of keeping families intact.

So where’s the social innovation?

The family festival isn’t the innovation. But learning what attracts and how to engage families is critical for finding the innovation. Our ethnographic work has showed us how challenging it is for families to create the time and space for learning, discovering, and trying out new things together. By putting on a festival, we hope to open up that time and space and start a conversation about how we might enable this on a more day-to-day basis.

At the festival, we’ll have an ideas tent where families can bid for $100 to ‘boost’ their family. It’s grant-making at a family level. We hope to get a sense of what families want to do, and what they see as being good for their family. Past projects have taught has how valuable it is to identify the upper bounds of people’s thinking and experience: what do families think is possible? How can we then broaden their sense of possibility? All of us can only aspire to the things that we know exist.

This is also true of professionals and academics. For an hour on Monday, I tried to switch on the intellectual part of my brain. We met with folks from the University of South Australia for a chat about how to build the capacity of social work, psychology, design, public policy, and anthropology students and faculty to work in a ground-up, experimental, and interdisciplinary way. First step: introducing students and faculty to moving beyond the labels, categories and silos that define disciplines. We’re wanting to find those people in academic institutions who are willing to blur boundaries and redefine what they do by the problems they jointly help to solve.

We’re finding solving problems is all about getting back down to basics: to person-to-person interaction. Not person to researcher or person to professional. Sometimes that leads us to pin posters to a tree and cold call businesses from the yellow pages just to create an opportunity for that interaction, and a chance to change how we think about the potential solutions.

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families TACSI outcomes prototyping co-design social innovation design thinking older people measurement Family by Family ethnography Participle health logic models behaviours capacity building innovation teams learning young people thriving ideo innovation ageing transitions social impact social entrepreneurship social problems education cross-cultural IUHPE