We’re all curious people and the Covid-19 lockdown has limited our experiences, but also provided new opportunities for many people. Even for those people who have been working throughout the ‘great pause’, as we’ve heard it described, it’s been a chance to reassess approaches to all sorts of things – work, life, family, friends, hobbies… the list goes on and on.
At Equal Vision CIC we’re going through a lot of change. Pre-lockdown, on 4th March, we launched a new programme, the Curiosity Museum, an interactive career and life-planning workshop which tours to schools and colleges. Of course, with all the current Covid-19 restrictions, we can’t go into schools at the moment, so what happens next?
After our own pause and a period of contemplation, we applied to the Arts Council England Emergency Response Fund for some money to explore taking the Curiosity Museum online and we were delighted to be successful. This is an opportunity to reach more young people, offering them a unique experience that existing careers programmes don’t do – a chance to really branch out and expand their horizons, rather than narrowing options down to a few well-worn paths. The Curiosity Museum is a student-led coaching and personal development programme that builds confidence and helps people to really be able to visualise success.
The first thing to do was form a team of dynamic, creative people to work on a plan for the Curiosity Museum Online. Assembled from arts and digital professionals from the West Midlands and further afield (as far away as Aberdeen, for our new web designer, Graham), the team has spent several days in June in an intensive creative ideas programme, called a ‘Sprint’.
The ‘Sprint’ is, “a five-day process which supports teams to answer critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.” It’s a really useful structure to think creatively, share ideas and innovate on projects.
We’ve been looking at what the Curiosity Museum Online needs to do, who it’s for and, most importantly, how we can retain the magic of the Curiosity Museum Live experience in a digital format.
We’ll share more in our next blog post…
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