London Service Jam …what makes it special?

I only became familiar with jamming about a year ago when my friend Ann talked about videoing a service design weekend. What is jamming I asked? Well its a weekend where different people come together in cities throughout the globe to jam out a new service idea based on a central theme. Right..so somewhat of a startup type of bootcamp? That’s when she said – you have to just attend it and you will see what I mean.

She was right. Experiencing the London Service Jam was the best decision I could make to help get the creative juices flowing. The strangers that come together and have a desire to do something different is astounding. Its really enigmatic! On Friday the event kick-off takes place – icebreaker games are played, teams form, and the theme is revealed. This year’s theme was grow ‘up’.

The team which formed quite organically after exiting an archway of joined arms was 6 woman strong. Ace! We immediately called ourselves Mad Men and put on our idea’s hat. Friday night is used for the start of idea’s, but really the whole weekend flies by so you need to work well and efficiently as a team. The way we came up with ideas was actually through a technique called brain-walking. It required everyone starting with a blank sheet of paper and writing words, ideas, sentences that sprung to mind. After a minute the paper is then passed to the next person and we are able to add to the idea’s.

Saturday is meant for idea selection and prototyping. I knew that we needed to have a couple of idea’s to kick start the dialogue. That morning I pondered our discussion the night before and thought about 2 tangible propositions based on education and ‘bringing it back to basics’. These were 2 central themes we continued to discuss.

Here are my initial notes…

We tested 2 different ideas with strangers on the street in Spitalfield Market area – one of which was similiar to the gardening idea above. The other idea was about creating a new peer to peer platform for 11-18 year olds to learn about sexual education through gaming and ambassadors.

It was becoming apparent that the idea about disruptive sexual education was a bit of a provocative move for the team and certainly one we passionately thought should change. Who wants to be taught sex-ed from a 40+ year old man in high school? I will tell you the highlight was figuring out the content for the site – what the sex taboo myth buster game questions should be and discussions around how to handle parents concerns and petaphiles using the site.

Then in a blink of an eye Sunday afternoon rolls around and the mentors helping move along your idea are reminding you that presentations should be ready. Yikes! The teamworking and comraderie was second to none. As woman there was an unspoken understanding for getting it done and making it happen. So what was making it happen you might ask? ..well acting it out and role play. We didn’t go for the fancy storytelling and concepting. Read more about TalkSex here>>

Looking back at the jam I have digested it’s essence over the past couple of weeks. A jam is really all about the energy from people with a common interest and working as a newly formed team to challenge yourselves, follow a design process that provides a solution, and of course work within the time constraints. Obviously one weekend is a bit shorter than usual to successfully pitch a new business idea. However, the mad chicks (echem..Men) really pulled it together and role playing was a powerful tool to understand purpose and functionality.

Why not join the next Service Jam…as for 2013 – almost 3000 people in over 120 cities had Jammed for a total of 84000 person-hours (that’s about 50 person-years) and produced over 500 projects. Nice one!