Holding our Nerve
In Tessy Briton’s insightful blog on How Do We Create New Knowledge for Creative/Collaborative Participatory Paradigm?, Tessy outlines some vulnerabilities for this time of emergent shifts in ways of working together and how this reflects changes in our own thinking and behaviour. This link between organisational change, for example, change in how we deliver services and how we reconsider our own personal responsibility in this, is one we are examining within our work with the public services in Peterborough. And Tessy is so right – it is difficult and can be deceptively difficult because it must be about the doing and not the talking about doing – a much easier option. The Wikipedia entry on the principles of positive deviance suggests it is easier to change behavior by practicing it rather than knowing about it. “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting”. This is the route the RSA team of Citizen Power and The Map are taking with an ambitious cross public sector delivery programme in Peterborough called the single delivery plan. We are most definitely seeing seeing a new participation ‘Creative/Collaborative’ paradigm emerging.
This programme has emerged from a strong set of working principles to help transform communities in Peterborough:
- Outcomes, not organisations
- Addressing the root cause of issues – a preventative agenda
- Innovation – doing things differently for less
- Prioritisation – clear focus, not everything we do
Remarkably, we are approaching this through the arts, utilizing the tools of creative processes to enable discoveries and change with a committed group of 45 senior leaders across the city. It is big, and risky and a bit of a miracle that we got here at all. One of the key reasons we did is through the leadership of Gillian Beasley, Chief Executive for Peterborough , who leads by example in taking a full and active part, identifying the long term aim as being about a mind-set change, urging colleagues to try things differently and not seek immediate and band-aid like solutions.
There is the inevitable temptation to make a plan of action and not take advantage of the opportunity to explore, reflect and observe patterns of behaviour in one’s own working life and act instead upon this. To make this manageable, we are in small cross sector groups of 6 – representing health, the fire service, enterprise, police, council services, the voluntary sector and facilitated by someone with a background in how arts can make change. We have all identified behavioural changes and lines of enquiry that can address the changes we want to make and are now at the stage of designing ‘experiments’.
We are trying to find our way without a road map, as Wikipedia says, – acting our way into a new way of thinking. It is transparently a ‘top down’ approach at the start, given the roles of the participants, but remember this is led by a commitment to a personal and organisational change in working practices. We are doing ‘bottom up’ and ‘from the middle’ approaches in other programmes in the city. And over the next year, we hope to uncover some of those key factors Tessy refers to. So far, the toughest thing is just keeping our nerve, holding on to a fragile confidence that working with those we don’t normally engage with and trying experimental approaches together is worth doing.
The Ecology of Innovation
One of the component parts of Citizen Power (a two year programme of innovation, participation and place-making in Peterborough) aims to spark and support local people’s ideas that could make “green” behaviour easier throughout the city. When planning the project we were inspired by insights into what can influence people’s behaviour and decision-making (such as the dramatic effect of social proof).
Our approach has been to teach these principles to local residents and help them apply them to the behaviours that underlie local environmental problems. We think that giving community activists the knowledge and support to “nudge” their neighbours could be a better way of encouraging behaviour change. National attempts to apply these principles could leave people feeling preached at, or alienate people by taking covert approaches.
Instead, we think that training community activists with the knowledge they need to nudge their neighbours can harness their local knowledge, their “one-of-us” status, and their existing trusted relationships with their community.
Towards the end of last year we tested this approach in a two-day workshop. Twenty-five enthusiastic residents learned about the effects of personal, social and infrastructural factors on human behaviour, then worked together to apply this knowledge to Peterborough specific problems. After a pitch to a panel of judges, two ideas were selected for seed-funding and non-financial support to allow them to become pilot projects.
One of the pilots will encourage a wider segment of the community to manage local plots of unused land. The group behind this project plan to map unused land in their neighbourhood and throughout Peterborough, then run small interventions to encourage local people to take an active role in stewarding the land.
The other pilot will encourage residents living near an area of ancient woodland to take an active forest management role. Currently neglected and the scene of anti-social behaviour, the community decided to create a woodland walk to make walking through the forest a normal activity for local residents.
Part of this approach to local nudging was informed by a paper – The Ecology of Innovation - that we published just before Christmas. It presents a few simple principles that could be used to encourage and support local people in getting projects off the ground. These principles include ensuring that local community organisations are able to participate in contributing their ideas, and supporting their ideas with financial and non-financial support so that they can be tested. You can read the paper online or download it here.
In 2011, we’re looking forward to getting these ideas off the ground, and also holding more workshops to encourage and support more ideas that could make Peterborough into an even greener place to live!
The Need for Design and Designing for Need
“Design isn’t radical enough.”
“Design is less innovative than business.”
“Designers don’t know how to make.”
What?! But jazzy, animated (literally, in some cases), colourful design is everywhere. Now with the London Design Festival in full swing, design, not just the stuff, but the very word itself, abounds. So, who says that design isn’t radical, innovative or curious? The speakers at yesterday’s debate at the RSA on ‘What should we be teaching professional designers today?’ that’s who.
Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective, design definitely does seem to be everywhere. Actually, from an insider’s perspective, too, but therein lies the problem. Designers have ‘won’ status for design, but with a changing and increasingly diffuse definition of design, much of design has lost the ability to identify and meet need. Thus, the debate asked three experts to tackle the questions: what are the skills that a designers needs today and how can we teach them?
Sam Hecht, an industrial designer and former teacher at the Royal College of Art, distilled the issue right down to its essence. By contrasting design for media (the Milan syndrome) and design for use, Hecht senses a disingenuous relationship between design education and the true need for and importance for design. Design students are enroling in advanced university design courses without ever having taken an object apart to see its parts and see how it fits together. Now, that might not sound too shocking to many of you, but this causes great concern for the professional design industry. Designers should know how to put things together (and you can’t know how things are put together without taking things apart). With a lack of understanding of design as a system of making and a system of use, design becomes utterly marginal. It is artists today, rather than designers are asking why things are the way they are…
Roberto Verganti, Professor of Innovation Management at the Politechnico di Milano, addressed the issue from his own experience of teaching design thinking to businesses. Verganti acknowledged that ‘design thinking’ has become a hot-topic in international MBA programmes and front-page news on business weeklies, but that as designers learn the language of business, design is becoming less and less innovative. Designers must return to their roots: identifying needs, pursuing radical visions and ultimately, delivering ingenious solutions. Hecht and Verganti agreed: designers are losing their language, being usurped by artists. He argued that designers need to be ‘radical’ again (citing Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group) and they need to resist the urge to be ‘culturally neutral’ if they are to continue to work with and influence not only business, but also design!
Ellie Runcie, Director of Design Support Programmes at the Design Council, introduced us to the power of design interventions from a policy perspective. Highlighting the Designing Demand and Public Services by Design initiatives, Runcie illustrated how design teaches people to think differently. Designing Demand supports businesses to become more innovative, competitive and profitable by giving managers a sort of ‘designer’s toolkit’ to spot opportunities, respond to a brief and work with clients. Public Services by Design builds capacity for managing innovation in the public sector and asks the crucial question: ‘How can design simplify public services around the needs of citizens?’ Runcie cited Lewisham Council’s successful engagement with the Public Services by Design programme to tackle the problem of homelessness (no small feat). By highlighting the strategic role of designers to think in a systems way (in this case, working with the public sector), Runcie summed up the quartet of essential skills for a designer:
- understanding people’s needs
- working visually and tangibly
- prototyping to manage risk
- working inclusively and collaboratively
So, there you have it: designers need to be radical, designers need to think in a systems way and designers need to rekindle their curiosity and the urge to make. Three different perspectives that provoke many more questions about design, its role and how its taught, but no matter whom you talk to or what you agree with, that old Eames adage still resounds: ‘Recognising the need is the primary condition for design.’ Oh, and it helps to take things apart once in a while.
What’s so new about ingenuity?
Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in his The Ingenuity Gap that the increasing complexity, pace and unpredictability of our world make a greater demand on our ingenuity than ever before. He suggests there is a gap that emerges between this demand and our ability to supply the ingenuity required to match it.
I’ve been thinking a little bit about ingenuity lately, particularly the distinction between ingenuity, innovation, invention and creativity, and there are a couple of characteristics of ingenuity that I like. One of these is picked up in The Ingenuity Gap, which notes that innovation describes new ideas being put into practice, but ingenuity “assumes that ideas don’t have to be new to be useful”. I think this nuance appeals to my distrust of the hype that accompanies technical innovation.
A similar theme was picked up in the excellently-named Hopeful Monsters and the Trough Of Disillusionment blog post last week from BERG. Matt Jones reports on a workshop that re-imagined applications for those commonplace technologies that would fall into the Trough of Disillusionment in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, like low capacity USB sticks, landline 
telephones or accelerometers. Resulting for example in Matt Webb’s comment “cross-breeding thumbdrives and, oh, something else that triggered a thought about audio… and the product that came up was audio textbooks on super cheap hardware for the developing world”.
The RSA is an organisation in the rare position of being able to look back as well as forwards. Its original working practice of giving out premiums “for any and every work of distinguished ingenuity”, has meant that the organisation has a long perspective on many technological developments over many years. Some of these [pdf link] are as relevant now as they were in their day.
I wonder if, when we face huge public spending cuts and the need to use the Earth’s resources more sustainably, some of the solutions might lie in past ingenuity as well as future innovation. So to stretch the original metaphor, might some of the most appropriate bridges over the ingenuity gap be those that have simply fallen out of use rather than ones that need engineering from scratch…?
Civic Geeks
What does “civic behaviour” look like? Voting springs to mind, as does volunteering, with perhaps starting a charity or social enterprise towards the black-belt end of being an active citizen. Debugging a page of code in the evenings is not something many of us would immediately point towards. But this particular example of civic behaviour, hidden to many of us, is going on across the country.
It’s become much more visible to those with an interest in technology through the example of pioneers like mySociety, who presciently argued for public sector data to be freely available in helpful formats to everybody at the same time as demonstrating how it could be put to social use through sites like TheyWorkForYou – created entirely by volunteers. And while the slowly-turning machinery of government chewed the idea over (now manifest in data.gov.uk), ingeniously came up with their own solutions of scraping it from the Government’s very web 1.0 sites and making it available to others.
Other enterprising groups have established their own community websites, which pull local residents around their neighbourhood, achieving in a Big Society-ish way some of what local government would like to do, while hacking events like those run by Rewired State (“Geeks meet Government”) bring people together to make useful and open applications from public data.
Rory Cellan-Jones broke the news today that many government websites could be cut, after a review from the government that highlights some of their soaring cost. This review seems in sympathy with a report the RSA published earlier this year that heard a variety of stories around the depressingly wasteful cost of public sector IT and argued for a more parsimonious approach to technology in a cold economic climate.
When the RSA was founded it aimed to “embolden enterprise, to enlarge Science, to refine Art, to improve our Manufactures, and extend our Commerce”, and offered premiums or awards “for any and every work of distinguished ingenuity”. William Shipley, a drawing master, felt deeply about the importance to Britain of the skill of drawing. One of the first premiums given is recorded in the minutes of the RSA’s very first meeting on 22nd March 1754:
“It was likewise proposed, to consider of giving Rewards for the Encouragement of Boys and Girls in the Art of Drawing; and it being the Opinion of all present that the art of Drawing is absolutely necessary in many Employments Trades & Manufactures, and that the Encouragement thereof may prove of great Utility to the public, it was resolved to bestow Premiums on a certain number of Boys or Girls under the age of sixteen…”
Drawing was a key skill in the eighteenth century, but in the twenty-first, it seems to me as though developing computer code is also important to solving some of the real problems we face. Developing code that helps people to feel attached to their neighbourhood, strengthens community, helps keep the government accountable, and reduces the burden on public money is of course a civic behaviour.
An accidental hero? BP, oil spills and innovation
It’s been the story that has covered the financial press for weeks. BP’s involvement in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has dominated the news, sent its share price plummeting, and erupted a row of diplomacy between the US and the UK over the treatment of the oil giant.
But in all the bad news perhaps there is one area of hope to come from all of this. And that’s in the area of green technology and innovation.
Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures recently said that he believed the BP oil spill would spur innovation in the green technology market and provide a once in a lifetime window of opportunity to develop and build new and sustainable technologies as a result. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems has a track record of investing in winners making his comments worth taking notice of. Could this be a turning point?
Evidence of new ideas spurred on by the disaster have been seen close to home. The BBC website asked readers to come up with novel ways to find a solution to plugging the gap. Ex-plumbers and would-be inventors all came up with a variety of solutions to deal with the problem from a giant umbrella to a larger version of the technology used to plug a leak in household plumbing. None would work, but what’s promising in all of this is that the oil spill has managed to capture the imagination of innovators and would be inventors.
Courtesy of Infrogmation of New Orleans
So the question that this raises is what fosters such innovation in the light of such adversity? In a world where technology has generally been spurred on through wars and subsequent technologies spun off from military hardware, perhaps we are entering a new age where it’s not warfare but the environment that will drive innovation. And why is the BP oil spill different from the many others corporate accidents that occur?
Firstly, the locality of the accident to the US and to Silicon Valley will play a big part in the regions industries and venture capitalists focusing on green technologies. When the problem is on your doorstep, and the environmental impact of the gulf spill certainly is on America’s, it makes the problem local, personal and the need to solve it becomes greater. America has long been criticised for not doing enough in terms of the environment but this will all have to change following these recent events if they are to continue to enjoy the landscape and ecosystems that many have taken for granted for so long.
The second reason is that things can’t actually get much worse, which leaves innovators with a golden opportunity to make mistakes. Sir Harold Evans, the legendary journalist and commentator on innovation discussed this very concept in his talk here at the RSA a few weeks ago. He discussed that the myth of the “Eureka” moment has discouraged many would be innovators and inventors to consider themselves not good enough with their ideas. The process of innovation as described by Evans is one in which mistakes are allowed, if not essential, as part of the process of developing and bringing forward new inventive ideas. So in the Gulf of Mexico things can hardly get worse. This gives a golden opportunity to try out new solutions and develop and innovate them. Entrepreneurs and would be inventors can work and trial the unthinkable, knowing that failure is only one of the steps to finding success. This will allow for more bolder and creative solutions to be tried which Kholsla and many others argue will be the place in which we find some of the great technologies that will change the environment and our society.
Thirdly, view this crisis from the eyes of on entrepreneur and it’s an industry that has just received a cash injection of £20 billion dollars and unrivalled government support to help technology – not bad conditions for any would be industry. This opens up opportunities for the rate of change and rate of innovation in the green tech sector to develop far beyond what has been seen previously. If we look at the development and innovation of the internet, new entrepreneurs and new minds accelerated the use of technologies and changed the industry from dial-up to the super fast broadband we have today. This same pattern of development could be spurred on from the BP oil spill as a variety of new entrepreneurs who follow the mantra “that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” enter the market supported by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who have a personal interest in cleaning up the environment because it’s right on their doorstep.
So even in the face of one of the world’s most significant disasters, we can find hope for the future, and for our planet. Localised problems spur on localised innovation, and a space to make mistakes may well see the development of technologies that help combat climate change and ensure that we have the tools to deal with future environmental disasters. Let’s hope that one thing that comes from this is that we don’t waste this opportunity to change the face of the green technologies industry or even more importantly create a new wave of green entrepreneurs committed to developing technologies in this sector.
Frugal innovation
When I studied product design as a student, I loved the combination of thinking about people and how they interact with technology. One of things that makes product or industrial designers distinct from engineers and other technologists is that they don’t start with what the technology can do, but with what people want (or moreimportantly I suppose, what people need).
But as a design student it was a constant temptation to get side-tracked by some new material or mechanism or electronic component that you wanted to experiment with. Having that new widget at the centre of your creation inevitably left the user side-lined in the final design. It doesn’t really matter as a student, but the same thing happens in the real world too, resulting in a proliferation of products that focus more on finding applications for intriguing technologies rather than putting the needs of the user on the centre stage.
I was reminded of this earlier in the week, at a discussion (with a variety of academic researchers and business people) led by the Foresight Horizon Scanning Centre. We were gathered together to discus what kinds of “technology” (primarily intelligent systems) would be most important in 2025. Towards the end of the day, a few people suggested that our imaginations had followed somewhat predictable lines, such as a world filled with sensors that give people optical and haptic feedback forming an “augmented reality” to take one example close to the heart of the geeky (mostly male) delegates.
Many of the attendees came from the slightly more technical end of the spectrum, but I did have a 
fleeting conversation with an academic with a more arts-led perspective who also noted the lack of user-centredness in our futures discussion. Presumably the discussion was not too representative of the industry view though, as it was refreshing to read last week’s announcement from Nokia of a new product, a dynamo powered mobile phone charger for the most ubiquitous mode of transport, a bicycle. Recently launched in Kenya (where it will cost 15 euros), it will give about half an hour of talk time from a 10 minute ride.
While Nokia’s product is user-centred design, it’s also another example of a theme picked up by The Economist in a special report on innovation in emerging markets, one of which expounded the refreshing idea of frugal innovation: “[General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services are] taking the needs of poor consumers as a starting point and working backwards. Instead of adding ever more bells and whistles, they strip the products down to their bare essentials”. Not necessarily containing last year’s technology, such frugal innovations include mobile phones that can connect televisions to the internet (both of which are ubiquitous, unlike internet-enabled personal computers) and hand-held electrocardiograms that reduce the cost of an ECG test (cardiovascular disease kills 5m Indians each year) from $2000 to $1.
It’s easy to see how putting the user at the centre in emerging markets, where prices are low and profit per unit is squeezed, would result in frugal innovation, but I wonder whether fragile economic times will encourage more companies to offer more “frugal” products in well-established markets. Does anyone have any examples?
Surprise yourself
In the RSA journal this quarter, there is a section on innovators chosen by project directors here at the RSA. My choice was Karl Friston. I chose him because he is (amongst other things) attempting to prove a unified theory of how the brain works – one which is general enough to explain all the different functions, but not so general as to be uninteresting. That is, the general theory must inform research into specific functions: it must be possible to apply it to, say, the movement of limbs, in a way that means we learn more about this particular function.
So such a unified theory helps our understanding advance (it helps us understand how our brains move our limbs). But it also gives us a metaphor for understanding ourselves, and metaphors are important because they shape the way we approach problems, allowing us to find new ways of thinking about things and thus new solutions.
In part the Social Brain project is about metaphors – what do the major insights of neuro- and behavioural science over the last twenty years or so tell us about ourselves? If they give us a different metaphoric conception of our identity, which new approaches to problems and issues might arise? We aim to make this understanding available in accessible form to various people and then see what insight it might give them into their practice.
This is a form of reflexivity, something which Anthony Giddens claims defines self-identity in our ‘late modern’ era – to be a self is not to be a fixed type or play a heavily circumscribed traditional role, it is to construct a story that one tells to the world and updates in light of experience.
To go back to Friston’s theory of the brain, I’l try to explain how it begets a new metaphor of self-identity. The basic proposition is that nothing comes to the brain uninterpreted – every piece of information is interpreted as meaningful in some way or another. In other words, our brains constantly look for patterns in the world, whether this be our bums telling us a chair is hard, or our hearing ‘fork handles’ as ‘four candles’.
Friston explains this interpretative work in terms of something he takes from physics, the idea of ‘free energy’. The latter is the energy available within a system that can be put to work by the system in question. Take a steam engine. There are a certain amount of variables that matter to its running – summed up roughly by the relations between water vapour, heat, and pressure. Electromagnetic fields, on the other hand, do not matter to the running of steam engines. The variables that matter are what Friston dubs ‘free energy’ – the energy present in a system that can affect its behaviour.
According to Friston all brain functions work on the principle of identifying ‘free energy’. This is the case whether the functions are unconscious or conscious. When walking down the street our sensory system automatically feeds in information about our surroundings, constantly looking for what is salient to avoiding falling over and bumping into things – that is, it is constantly looking for what the ‘free energy’ is in its current environment pertinent to the ‘system’ that consists of bodily interaction with air, surfaces, other objects etc. In doing this it ignores many things – the colour of the sky for example.
In the case of conscious processing, the aim is the same. If I am solving a crossword puzzle I am concerned to identify, in the case of each clue, everything that is pertinent to finding the answer. I ignore many things as irrelevant, like the typeface the clue is written in, the current time, what I ate for breakfast, focussing down instead on the ‘free energy’: that within the ‘system’ of meanings that is relevant to the particular question.
Friston sums up this search for free energy in the following nice metaphor: the brain interprets the world with the constant aim of avoiding surprises (a hole in the ground, a fast-moving skateboarder; an unknown meaning to a word, an unknown connection between concepts).
Think about it, I challenge you, everything you do can be thought of in terms of avoiding surprises. I have to admit, I cannot prove this point but I have tried to think of something within my own life that contradicts ‘Friston’s law’, and haven’t managed it so far. If you do, let me know!
It might be thought that the joy of surprise – for example when we come across a twist in a film or a story – conflicts with Friston’s metaphor. But I don’t believe this is so. Once the ‘twist’ is revealed, it becomes one more pattern we can predict, one less surprise we are subject to. Or perhaps another way to look at it: when we understand how the surprise came about, we are exhilarated by almost losing predictability before regaining it, rather like a mountaineer might push herself to the limit of her ability in order to enjoy just how far-reaching it is.
Is he or isn’t he (the world’s first industrial designer)?
Yesterday afternoon, at the awards ceremony for Shine at the V&A Sackler Centre, David Kester, Chief Executive of the Design Council, began a little 3-question quiz by asking “Who was the world’s first industrial designer?” While my brain auto-prompted “Christopher Dresser“, discursive noise-interference stopped my mouth. It depends what you mean by an industrial designer, obviously. Didn’t Alice Rawsthorn in Gary Hurstwit’s new film Objectified date the birth of industrial design to the rationalisation of armaments by mediaeval Chinese knights? Christopher Dresser, however, was the “right” answer.
He later asked what design was. Mike Ive said “The opposite of accident”; a nice answer, and I anticipated a range of further suggestions. Not so. According to the Design Council, design is the connection between creativity and innovation. Innovation, moreover, is “getting ideas to market”, and the Design Council has a diagram showing you how to do it. Right. I felt generally sadenned by the contraction of language’s rich ambiguity to this rather dry, pseudo-scientific lexicography, and particularly indignant on behalf of the word innovation that it should be appropriated in the Design Council’s merely expedient definition.
Recently, another Design Council person asked me, in conversation about the RSA’s Opening Minds secondary school curriculum, whether my colleagues had used “the strategic design process” to develop it. I stared blankly back, for surely there are many?
I do accept that when your communications targets are civil servants and businesspeople, it pays to be straightforward; to give one answer rather than many. The Design Council is justifiably admired around the world for the definition, often numerical, that it gives to design in business and public affairs. But to say innovation is this and “the” strategic design process is that is to lead poor design-innocents into a false sense of security.
Ironically, Kester’s middle question (“How old was Christopher Dresser when he started design school?”) clearly had a completely unequivocal answer, but he gave it to someone for being close enough (14; correct answer 13). Maybe the Design Council think all the things I think are clear are fuzzy; the opposite is certainly true.
Celebrating innovation
I am quietly reassured when I read things in the media like this courtesy of Eric Allison. This week, Timpson, the shoe people, announced a new Academy at Liverpool prison to train up prisoners with a view to employ them on release. Yet another example of some of the fantastic initiatives in this sector. Bravo Timpson!
“In the last year, [Timpson] has taken on 40 ex-offenders, with an impressive 80% retention rate.”
In the spirit of celebrating the work and dedication of those working out there at the coalface, I thought I might mention some of my other favourite organisations, initiatives and schemes going on out there in the CJS minefield.
The Ideas Project, Media for Development
The Ideas Project Team work with prison staff to apply for a grant from UnLtd of between £500 and £5000 to set up and run a project that will benefit other prison staff, the prisoners or both. Projects have included a homework club at HMP Wandsworth which helped to maintain family relationships by allowing fathers in prison to help their children with homework. Fantastic stuff!
The Good Vibrations Gamelan Project
Good Vibrations develops team-working, communications and other important life skills, through participating in gamelan (Indonesian bronze percussion) workshops. Gamelan is uniquely suited to this as it is very accessible – you don’t need to have any previous musical experience, you don’t need to be able to read music, and it’s easy to learn the basics. It’s also a very communal activity – there is no overall conductor or leader, everyone’s contribution is equally important, and the nature of the music means that you have to listen to everyone else to fit your own part in. In short, participating in a Good Vibrations project has a sustained and positive emotional and psychological impact on participants, leading to positive behavioural change. Listen to Lucy Ash talk about the project on BBC World Service.
The P.I.P.E Programme at HMP Preston
The P.I.P.E programme. is a series of short term intervention courses which have been developed individually by the PE Officers at HMP Preston. They range from between 3 to 18 hours and tackle topics such as Effects of Alcohol on the Body, Body Image and Self Esteem, Diversity for Prisoners, Bullying, Gambling, Stress and Anxiety, Supplementing your Goals, Diet and Nutrition, Smoking Cessation and Mental Wellbeing, engaging many prisoners in education who might otherwise exclude themselves.
I could go on and have a long list of many others that I promise to build into my future blogging efforts. If you’re keen to know more then keep checking the Prison Learning Network website where we will be adding information about all the inspiring innovation taking place right now, even as you read this blog!
Twitter feed of #theRSA- RT @theRSAorg: #thersa blog: Five #FRSA tips to get started with crowdfunding http://t.co/nCLsikJkcG May 24, 2013 corletti (Ian Corlett)
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