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Sandbox is hiring!
Sandbox has some exciting new opportunities as we want to expand our operation. We require the following people to help us move into new markets.
Principal Facilitator
Ref: 143D-25-06
2-year limited term contract
You will oversee the facilitation activity for Sandbox in all its
locations and will ensure that a quality service is delivered to
existing and new clients. You will have an established network
of clients in the public and private sector, and a proven track
record as a facilitator.
Creative Facilitator (London Based)
Ref: 142D-25-06
1-year limited term contract in the first instance
You will be part of a team of facilitators who will have
responsibility for the delivery of workshops to a wide variety
of clients. You will be expected to have the main responsibility
for delivery and negotiation with clients in the South East of
the UK. You will be expected to have experience of a wide
variety of facilitation techniques and be familiar with working
in a creative environment.
Marketing and Sales Manager
Ref: 141D-25-06
2-year limited term contract
You will formulate an effective strategic and tactical sales
and marketing plan for Sandbox. A key activity is liaising with
potential and existing clients to encourage and develop new
business opportunities. You should have proven experience
in marketing and sales and also building relationships with a
wide variety of clients.
If you wish to discuss any of the posts you can contact:
Simon Robertshaw, Directory of Sandbox
Email: srobertshaw@uclan.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1772 89 5966
To apply please visit the UCLAN job page at:
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/information/services/work/support_vacancies.php
Closing date: 16 July 2010, at 4pm
Sandbox launches new operation at the British Film Institute at the SouthBank London
On the 17th February Sandbox opened its next phase of operation. The successful launch attracted a large number of clients to the London operation.
The new space is an innovation environment designed specifically for group facilitation to engage, debate and find solutions to real business problems through a unique combination of interdisciplinary activity, cutting-edge creative technological toolkits and professional facilitation by experts.
If you would like to make use of the facility in London contact sandbox@uclan.ac.uk.
Improving Public Confidence in the Merseyside Police service
Sandbox were approached by Merseyside Police in the late summer of 2009 and asked to help them deliver a programme of activity that would support the force in achieving government ‘public confidence’ targets. Data received from the British crime survey in September 2009 showed Merseyside public confidence at 56% and the target for Merseyside is 62.9% by 2012.
Sandbox worked with the Merseyside Police confidence project team to deliver a series of events that touched all areas and all levels of the organisation. A large-scale consultation of staff, partners and the public took place between July and October and the outcomes of these consultations formed the backbone of a senior management team workshop in October. This workshop managed to successfully identify the primary strands of confidence: things that, if done well, would enable the public to feel confident in the police service.
Having highlighted the strands of confidence (being visible and available, listening and understanding, taking action and keeping people informed) Sandbox took a leading role in the production of 16 large workshops at Aintree Racecourse. We offered both technical and facilitation support to the police force. Almost 3,500 staff, representing all roles, ranks, areas and departments attended the Confidence main events at Aintree Racecourse during January and February.
The events aimed to raise awareness and understanding of Confidence the Merseyside Way. Staff heard from the Deputy Chief Constable about what he believes the force need to do to improve public confidence and why it’s so important.
Delivering a quality service is at the heart public confidence and over the coming months everyone across the organisation will be asked by their line manager to complete the following action plan as part of their professional development review:
“I will improve public confidence, delivering the service our communities want us to deliver by…………..” (event participants had the opportunity to fill in the gap).
The events also gave people time to reflect on their role and how they, and their team, can make small changes that can contribute to improving confidence.
For those staff that didn’t attend the Aintree events, they will be asked to attend similar local briefing sessions in their area/department over the coming weeks.
Games Designers and Journalists exploring new narratives.
Meld ‘upped sticks’ to London for its latest foray into new forms of cross platform narrative. Coinciding with the London launch of Sandbox, UCLan’s creative and digital industries centre at the British Film Institute, journalists invited from the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, SKY News, Johnston Press, Haymarket Media were joined by Skillset and the Broadcast Journalism Training Council to work with professional games designers and students from UCLan’s MA Games Design programme.
The aim of the day – to collaborate and develop a new game on the theme of ‘democracy’. The cross disciplinary teams were given a basic structure to work within. As well as making sure the end result was compelling, simple and innovative the games needed to:
- demonstrate cause and effect (results from actions)
- build/create a user community,
- grow and develop with that community,
- respond to users not direct them,
- be social, inclusive and free.
The Sandbox team were on hand leading the newly formed groups through a series of exercises designed to foster creative collaboration. Four teams each produced a game concept and pitched it to their peers before assessing its viability and desirability.
Paul Egglestone, who set the project up, said: “What’s really interesting about a process like this is the very different approaches both Journalists and games creators take to narrative. Journalists think of themselves as ‘storytellers’ - as do games creators - but their priorities are very different. Gamers want to build a great game. A decent story provides the vehicle for the game whilst the focus is firmly on the gaming experience. Journalists don’t generally focus on the user experience – they concentrate on telling the story.”
This is the latest chapter in an ongoing project that draws together senior editorial personnel from the BBC, the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror, Haymarket Media, Nokia research as well as freelancers, Indies and sector skills representatives. They’re all committed to working out where the future of journalism lies and to explore new ways of telling stories on digital platforms.
Andy Dickinson is leading the project for the School of Journalism, Media and Communication. He recognises the value of this contribution from working journalists taking time away from the cut and thrust of the day-to-day news cycle to collaborate across print, broadcast and online to determine the skills future journalists will need. He says: “The project is at a really exciting stage. We’ve already used the Sandbox method to develop three new MA level modules aimed directly at working journalists. The new digital journalism masters will survey the digital landscape and offer a range of intellectual, creative and digital or technical skills that our ever growing industry panel tell us they’ll be looking for in future.”
This part of the process isn’t due to finish until January 2011 but the first of the new digital modules are ready for delivery online and the School of Journalism, Media and Communication will be recruiting from September this year.
Digital design and hyperlocal news structure forges ahead with Bespoke
The Bespoke Project has reached a number of milestones since Sandbox's last quarterly update. These include publishing it's first newsletter, collaborating with other community and development initiatives and progressing with our first iteration of digital designs.
Our project hopes to assist people living in the Callon and Fishwick area in East Preston to tell their own stories using a variety of platforms. Once told, the stories will be used to inspire 'Bespoke' digital design solutions in this way and construct a new methodology for gathering creative insights. Bespoke is funded by the EPSRC research council as part of the Digital Economy programme.
Bespoke, Sandbox and Hyperlocal content
Bespoke's Sandbox team has continued to develop relationships within the community and at the beginning of March published our first newsletter in the Callon and Fishwick area of Preston. This newsletter was a key marker project as it represented the creation of our first 'news and information platform'. Our work will now progress onto the design and build of a unique web portal and examine the potential of mobile phone devices as tools for disseminating community-based content.
However, we'll continue to publish our 'analogue' newsletter throughout the duration of the project as we see this as an important method of reaching the entire community.
During March, Bespoke as also partnered with Contour Housing and not-for-profit social enterprise People's Voice Media (PVM), which aims to provide communities with a social media voice and presence. This innovative six-month scheme has come about through the Future Jobs Fund and aims to provide 14 employees, who have been out of work for eight months or more, with a range of new media and employability skills. This new team will be tasked with community reporting duties for PVM's national network and Bespoke's Hyperlocal remit. In addition, the group - now operating as CAve Media - will research community-themed topics for Contour Housing, as well as assist the local community to vocalise issues that are important to them.
They'll be visiting Sandbox regularly, to show their films and other work. They'll also participate in training workshops and a variety of other sessions.
In addition to this reporting scheme, Bespoke has continued to work with its citizen journalist volunteers, and hopes to increase the number of contributors between now and the end of the project in mid-2011.
Digital Design
In October last year, our Bespoke Project university partners, which include Dundee, Falmouth, Newcastle, Surrey and UCLan, gathered in Preston to speak with residents and agencies who operate in the Callon and Fishwick area. Thanks to a number of workshops, the design team took away a number of insights, which have evolved over the last few months and now form five distinct concepts.
These include:
Community Captured TV
This involves a re-appropriation of CCTV, which allows residents to use video cameras for leisure. Our initial plan involves fitting a range of cameras around local Astroturf pitches and streaming the content live to a publically-accessible website.
Digital Buskers
"How do local musicians get their content to a wider audience?" This question is central to our digital busker design.
We're hoping to build statues of local musicians and place them around Preston. These statues will play tracks when a user inserts a specially-designed Bespoke token. It's hoped that the buskers and will enable local performers to access the public on a much wider scale than has been possible previously.
Family Hedge
A variant on the family tree concept, our family hedge hopes to represent a cross-section of a family's memories. We'll build a device that allows people to both store mementos and record digital memories around them. Once recorded, families will then be able to listen and share these memories for years to come.
Blogging Pad
Reinterpreting an online forum, this blogging pad will allow those with analogue newspapers to log their thoughts and feelings digitally. Users will convey their own responses to what they read, but will also be able to access and listen to opinions from other blogging pad users.
For more in-depth information on our designs, take a look at our website at www.bespokeproject.org.
We're hoping that prototypes of all these ideas will be in place by the end of April. Once installed, our community journalists will speak to local residents and others to assess their success. Our university partners will then use this feedback to further hone the items for future use.
OPEN 09 - Creative futures and dynamic change.
Sandbox is helping to organise a 2 day event in Preston on November 16th and 17th called OPEN 09.
OPEN 09 breaks with the normal conference model and creates a new participatory experience to explore, inform and create change in the Digital and Creative sectors.
Sessions will include open discussions alongside world class speakers, workshops and networking events.
OPEN 09 is for designers, developers, musicians, artists, photographers, journalists and gamers – in fact it’s for anyone working in the creative industries – so whether you’re a coder, strategist, information architect fashion designer, user experience professional or gallery curator, you’ll feel at home at OPEN 09.
And in the true spirit of social media, the content of the sessions will be decided by the delegates contributing to what will happen on the day via the OPEN 09 blogs. The blogs are the virtual spaces where the themes for sessions – we’re calling them ‘Turtles’ – will be debated and decided. We’ll be adding more Turtles that focus on particular areas of the creative industries.
So, if you want to find like minded people to talk about the things you’re interested in go to the dedicated website at http://open09.com.
Dual Diagnosis - co-creating the future of the service through collaboration
Sandbox is currently working on a one year project with the NHS in the area of dual diagnosis provision.
Dual diagnosis is arguably one of the most complex issues currently being tackled by mental health services across Lancashire. As its name suggests, dual diagnosis clients are people diagnosed with multiple problems, a combination of mental health problems and alcohol or drugs related issues.
Because of the nature of the condition, a dual diagnosed client needs to be supported by several services and agencies. The danger with this is that all too often the person ends up being bounced around from service to service, which only serves to worsen their condition. For the agencies providing the service, the situation is not an easy one. Data is not shared across services and agencies; very often they don't know where to refer patients, who to call, who to ask. In addition, who wants to admit that they don't know, who wants to do anything that can leave a negative impression on their professional standing? Also, if nobody else seems to be interested in collaborating, why should they?
The complexity of nurturing a collaborative culture within these agencies is at the heart of the work we are doing.
We live in an age of ever-increasing information overload, emails, guidelines, strategies, frameworks, pathways. We seem to be so confused with everything we have to deal with. We think it is acceptable to have poor communication with each other. We have more “communication” devices and technology than ever before; however we feel more and more isolated and lost than ever before. Have we forgotten the basic human skill of collaboration? How can we re-learn the skills and benefits of collaboration in an increasingly complex world? Why should we do it? Who will be affected if we don't?
Using a number of creative tools such as Lego, serious play, and open space technology, we are, for the first time, inviting all stakeholders, managers, link workers, carers, patients into an space of co-creation and collaboration to work together to find solutions for the challenges they are all facing. Top-down directives are unlikely to generate longer-term attitude shifts; we are helping participants to think and work creatively in order to generate solutions based upon a spirit of genuine collaboration.
As opposed to a “client-centred” approach, we think of what we do as a human-centred approach. It not only has to work and benefit the client, it has to make sense for the mental health and substance misuse workers, the managers, the carers, the liaison workers; the change has to come from them if it has any chance of surviving.
As Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Professor of Business at Harvard Business School) once said, "change is disturbing when it's done too us, exhilarating when it's done by us".
Merseyside Police
Officers from Merseyside Police Force were recent guests of Sandbox. Following initial meetings with senior managers in the police force at the Liverpool HQ, Sandbox were asked to run a pilot workshop with 20 officers. Although very much a ‘what can Sandbox offer’ workshop, the themes were very real.
In a culture of measurement and targets, the people and community element side of the officer role can at times be neglected. There seems to be a genuine desire from Merseyside Police managers to work on changing this culture – to move to a more consultative operational style that engages local communities and delivers a professional service that meets the needs and expectations of victims and witnesses.
The Sandbox design for this particular workshop focused on using and Appreciative Inquiry approach.
Organisations were originally created to meet a challenge or satisfy a societal need. Appreciative inquiry philosophy comes from the standpoint that organisations are not (at their core) problems to be solved. Re-connecting to those original needs / challenges and the original motivation for joining the organisation are powerful ways of initiating change conversations. It is an approach that seeks to uncover the best in people and involves a systematic discovery of what gives life to an organisation. It is an approach where intervention gives way to inquiry, imagination and innovation and involves the art of asking positive questions to heighten positive potential.
Further conversations between Sandbox and Merseyside police are planned to establish the next steps in this change project.
European Think Tank
The think tank is comprised of select members from various European organisations that support and stimulate growth for regional SME’s and promote international collaboration and thinking.
Sandbox hosted their December meeting and created a engaging and target oriented workshop. Challenges, solutions and strategies were actively explored and the results will be used to address European ICT Policy and Strategy.
Attendees:
- Irina Blomqvist (Chair), Culminatum Innovation, Finland
- Marta Ysern, Business Development Director, Barcelona Media - Centre d’Innovacio, Spain
- Marina Zago, Digital Media Cluster, Venice, Italy
- Iain Bennett, Sector Leader, Digital & Creative, NWDA, UK
- Esa Blomberg, Programme Director, Forum Virium Helsinki, Finland
- Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Pôle de compétitivité CAP DIGITAL, Paris, France
- Andrew Bullen, Independent Consultant (for IIP/Create, Dutch Creative Industries Platform), Netherlands
- Bill Boffin, Strategic Sector Champion (Digital), Yorkshire Forward, UK
- John Joughin, Dean and pro-Vice Chancellor, UCLAN, UK
Sandbox is a dynamic new initiative from the University of Central Lancashire that brings together a wide range of skills and expertise to enable innovative and collaborative ways of working.
The hybrid Sandbox centre is both a creative facilitation space and a digital media R&D lab, with opportunities for academic and industry partnerships across all of the centre’s activities. Our interdisciplinary staff welcomes the opportunity to rise to your particular challenge.
