Linknote — — 239 words

Business — Service design

Work:

From 40 sets of ideas to one in 20 minutes — A collaboration experiment with the Web Publishing Community — Website and Communications Blog

Liberating Structures leaflet designed by Open Change

Here’s another post I published to my team’s blog over the summer and forgot to link to from here.

Back in June, I ran an experiment in mass remote collaboration at our Web Publishing Community. This was, of course, at the height of lockdown, as we were adapting to the new reality of a prolonged period of working from home.

[I’d come away from the Service Design in Government conference](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/three-highlights-from-service-design-in-government-2020/) in March really keen to try out [liberating structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/), following an excellent [session run by Open Change](https://www.openchangeacademy.co.uk/liberating-structures).

Liberating structures is a set of workshop tools designed to include everyone and generate innovative ideas. These are ideally carried out with people who are physically together, so it was a little awkward when I wanted to try them out just at the moment everyone was required to be physically apart.

But some liberating structures are possible to run remotely, so I decided to introduce a large number of colleagues to a foundational liberating structure — [1-2-4-all](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/).

Through this session, we collaboratively sifted through ideas generated by over 40 participants, before coming to a consensus on the one strongest idea.

[Read the blog post for the full details of how it worked — and what went wrong](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/from-40-sets-of-ideas-to-one-in-20-minutes-a-collaboration-experiment-with-the-web-publishing-community/).

Linknote — — 106 words

User experience

Work:

Meeting the challenges of collaborating remotely — Website and Communications Blog

A Miro boards with digital sticky notes on it

I realised that while the summer got pretty busy for us, there are a few work blog posts that I haven’t cross-posted here yet. So I will drip-feed them here over the next little while.

This first one is from July, where I outlined some of the lessons we have been learning from getting collaborative activities done remotely. This post also highlights some of the work my colleagues have been doing to continue our user experience work despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus outbreak.

This was a follow-up to an earlier blog post, [Meeting the challenges of conducting user research remotely](https://duncanstephen.net/meeting-the-challenges-of-conducting-user-research-remotely-website-and-communications-blog/).

Linknote — — 197 words

Architecture — Business — Social science

It’s official: Open plan offices are now the dumbest management fad of all time

New research suggests that open plan offices hinder collaboration rather than help it.

> Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
>
> The Harvard study, by contrast, undercuts the entire premise that justifies the fad. And that leaves companies with only one justification for moving to an open plan office: less floor space, and therefore a lower rent.

My current office is my first open plan one. I am still ambivalent about the benefits or otherwise of open plan. The shift may have contributed to [my feeling that I had lost my mojo](https://duncanstephen.net/how-i-learnt-to-embrace-handwriting-sketching-and-sticking-stuff-on-walls/).

I definitely make heavy use of chat and messaging to communicate with people a couple of desks away. That might not necessarily be a bad thing. But I do miss the gently assertive act of simply walking into someone’s office to get their attention. It all seems a bit more difficult to do that in an open plan office.