A couple of days ago my girls suddenly decided to learn coding.

Like most of the things they show an interest in, coding became an immediate obsession and for the past couple of days we’ve been writing Python on the Raspberry Pi, my phone, a laptop and a micro:bit. We’ve made an adventure games, a racing game, a version of Snake with LEDs (on the micro:bit). We’ve learned about variables and loops and inputs and graphics.

Much of unschooling involves bouncing around from one thing to another; sometimes sticking with something for a long time; sometimes picking it up and dropping it overnight (or even more quickly). One of the hardest things about this way of learning is letting go of pre-conceived ideas of how we learn or how we think we should learn. We expect to commit to something and see it through.

But the coding example is a reminder that switching around is never wasted: even a brief introduction to something—a passing glance—is enough to bury something in their consciousnesses for later use. The coding interest didn’t come from nowhere: we’ve had a Raspberry Pi for years; we’ve got computers and other computing devices and Arduino and micro:bit. Plus I’m interested in coding. I can do a bit myself.

I’ve taken the girls to technology events, and we’ve played with Scratch. We even built a couple of simple websites when they wanted to try that. But it never stuck. For one reason or another it didn’t spark anything and they dropped it.

I don’t know how long they’ll be interested in coding this time and it really doesn’t matter. However long they pursue it it’s both something to be an enjoyed and a means to an end: they want to do something and they’ve decided that coding might be the way to do it. They’ve dredged up something from their brains and found a new use for it.

But it’s also pure discovery. Many people who have been working for years—many “grown-ups”—still have no idea what they’re really interested in, or what they want to do as a career.

It’s hard work to find what excites you. It’s probably even harder to do that when you get older and you’ve only ever really known one path. So if you can’t use your childhood as pure discovery, rather than making a choice and sticking with it then when can you do it?

That discovery means freedom to pick up and drop things; freedom to try things on for size and decide whether they’re really for you. To the outsider—and particularly the outsider with very different life experiences—it sometimes looks like a lack of engagement. But it’s quite the opposite.

Simon on Twitter

Here's a niche request: factually accurate historical novels for teenagers. My eldest has gone a bit history mad and she loves good stories.

Anyway, it became a bit popular (due mainly to a retweet from Twitter Celebrity Moose Allain (whom you should definitely follow if you don’t already).

Anyway, as a result I got rather a lot of responses and so I made a quick spreadsheet, which still needs a lot of work but I wanted to capture as much as I could before it all slipped by in the timeline. I’ve made it possible to comment on the spreadsheet too.

My daughter loves reading (both my daughters do) and she’s recently got more and more into reading historical novels. She’s gained quite a knowledge of the Tudors and right now she’s really into the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Stories are a great way into learning a bit about history. Personally I loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel; I don’t know how historically accurate those books are (or indeed any of the other suggestions people made) but then history can be pretty vague anyway, and more often than not a matter of opinion. Finding something engaging is probably a lot more important in the beginning than complete accuracy. Once you’re passionate you can start to dig deep.

I’m going to keep working on the list. I’m particularly keen to organise it a bit more by era and add some notes. I’m also not sure how suitable all the books are for a thirteen year old so I’m going to do a bit of investigating. If you’ve read any of the books and have opinions please let me know here, on Twitter or in the spreadsheet. And if there’s something that would make it more useful to you then tell me. Thanks!

It can sometimes be disheartening to be only slightly good at things and not really good at any one of them. I’m jealous of people who have pursued a single craft, art form or creative discipline. I wish I’d started earlier, or stuck to something, or specialised.

But as I signed up for yet another course (I’m back to music production) I realised that maybe the dabbling is the craft itself. When I think about the things I do on a regular basis in my work—problem-solving, working out how to make things, prototyping—it seems to make sense that I can do a bit of everything. Most importantly it seems to matter that I acknowledge the dabbling and work with it.

I wonder how well we support people to dabble. Most of what we do in learning and work is still very much about specialisms. Or we look up to the true polymaths who are brilliant at everything they do. But we need people who can have a go at things, not only so they can acquire broad skills but also so they can remove the fear of creating, having a go.

Thinking about my own needs I know that I need to take a more deliberate approach to this partial learning. I need to better map out what I can do, what I want to do, what I’ll need to be able to do. And I’ll need to find the gaps and the opportunities for improvement. I need to commit to a programme of amateurism.

Dabbling-As-A-Craft was originally published in Redfront on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are some real problems with the very idea of rebels, not least of which is an implicit acceptance that everything must already be so bad that people have to set themselves against what exists to do anything valuable. This binary perspective isn’t necessarily the healthiest starting point for change.

And potentially, identifying rebels and rewarding them is the beginning of making them special. And this group of special people — a group who demand a disproportionate amount of attention — is potentially mirroring the status quo rather than challenging it. It’s ultimately an alternative hierarchy.

Then there’s also the danger of making quite mundane change seem rebellious. In the article I read those things which marked out the rebels were often slightly different ways of working, or technology preferences. Are these the kinds of rebellions we should be championing? If we’re going to rebel at all what would be the truly worthwhile causes?

But perhaps the most damaging thing around the idea of rebels is the way in which it continues the kind of combative language that is all too prevalent in business already. Do we really want to couch things in terms of incumbents and rebels or are there better ways to think about these things?

Tensions and problem-finding can be powerful ways of making changes. But finding problems and bringing together people as some sort of invading force might do little more than exacerbate things, back people into corners, escalate. How else might we do this? How else might we describe what needs to be done and the people who can do it?

Rebel Annoyance was originally published in Redfront on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is sometimes an assumption in service design that the customer focus is sufficient a driving force for change that it can help an organisation reorganise internally to become better. And yes, an organisation-wide focus on purpose can be a powerful catalyst for change.

But many of the functions of good design (e.g, research) are based on even more fundamental principles (e.g. caring, listening) and so there needs to be a stage before, or at least in parallel with this customer alignment. And this internal focus provides one of the safest spaces available to an organisation.

A place that can get this right for itself can get it right for the other people they serve. A place where staff can listen to each other and care about what they hear has a better chance of listening to customers. A place that can try new things internally has a better chance of building new things externally. A place that can serve itself has a better chance of serving others.

Design Begins at Home was originally published in Redfront on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve written about adoption once before, from my perspective; this time I felt like I wanted to try and understand things from my birth mother’s perspective. I’ve wondered what life’s been like for her, but I’ve never sat down and given it proper thought. Perhaps I should have. Ideally I’d ask her to write something herself but maybe she’d rather not have to put it into words. There are topics she’s glossed over when we’ve talked; I’m guessing she’d prefer to keep some things private.

I know some details: she got pregnant when she was 18; she doesn’t know my birth father any more (and has never told me who he was); the next man she was close to didn’t want somebody else’s child; I was put up for adoption; I was in foster care for a while; and I was finally adopted.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to give a child away. I have two myself and the thought of handing one of them over as soon as they were born is beyond comprehension. And there’s no way to make it easier: whether you’re trying to give them a chance for a better life or you have other reasons, the reality is the same.

She was clear about her own reason (even if she didn’t want to talk about the details). I know that the man she was in a relationship with after my birth father didn’t want someone else’s child and was strongly opposed to her keeping me. That’s all I know about that. I’ve never asked her to say more.

I have an arms-length relationship with being adopted: it’s abstract and buried. There are no definite events I’m consciously aware of. Everything I know and feel is either second hand, too long ago to be a real memory, or just intangible. But for my birth mother it must be the opposite: real, memorable and tangible. I know I should talk to her about it all but I’ve never really had the courage. And, like I said, I’m not sure how much she wants to put it into words.

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure why I started writing this. I’ve haven’t written anything for quite a while. I think I stopped seeing the point. But this was something I wanted to write about because writing helps with understanding. And I want to understand better how my birth mother felt and why she did what she did and how she feels now. I’m aware that at some point it might become too late. I’m also painfully aware that the best way to understand is to talk to her. But it’s difficult.

I know I’ve made things worse for her by not knowing what to do. She’d expected me to make contact with her since I was an adult. I didn’t do that until I was thirty. And once I’d done it she probably expected to be a part of my life, but that never really happened. So I feel like I’ve been selfish: I’ve only ever really thought about it from my perspective. And I want to do better, but I still need to think about how I do that. This is me making a start.

International Women’s Day really made me reflect on what it means to talk about individual women. I’m never sure how (or whether) I should contribute to events such as that but this seems like something I can do. I’m not going to show my birth mother this post. But maybe other women who’ve had to give up a child might read it. I don’t know how that feels, but I’m trying to in some way.

At yesterday’s ThingsCamp (5) in Birmingham I pitched a session on learning and skills, which is something we’ve been thinking about for a while. As I mentioned in this previous post we’re wondering how ThingsCamp can more deliberately support the kind of learning and skills that people need when it comes to IoT and data.

From running ThingsCamp we know that it’s a pretty broad topic, covering everything from how to make and code devices to how to explore future scenarios and design with connected devices. I’m sure we’ll learn more about this on the more business-focused event on Tuesday (19th—tickets here), but for now here are some notes from our session.

Personal Needs

Connected devices are a part of our lives and yet their functionality (and what they do with the data about us) remains largely opaque. One of the first themes we explored in our session was the needs we might have around personal learning. In other words what we should know in order to make better personal decisions and develop a more healthy healthy relationship with technology.

Related to this we talked about how difficult it was to strike the right balance between cheerleading for tech and being constantly negative about technology and our futures with it. This is an important balance for ThingsCamp. We want people to see the possibilities but we also want our participants to have room to explore the implications—negative and positive. So, this learning need is really about how we curate what we do and that theme of curation is something that came through explicitly in our discussion.

The Craft

Actually making things with technology is a theme we’ve revisited at every event: we’ve worked hard to make sure that ThingsCamp is not just theoretical; and there’s a real purpose to making devices available and making space for sessions in which things are built. Getting hands-on with technology is transformational—it helps everyone to move from abstract concepts to a rooted understanding of what things do and what that means.

We’re keen to better support this in future events and we have some ideas about how we might do that which we’ll share in a future post. In the meantime it would be great to know about anyone else who’s working in this area: what’s worked for you and what hasn’t?

Technology as a Catalyst

One of our discussions centred around how technology can be a catalyst for other types of learning. Much of what’s required to do things with IoT is actually more about what we might call “soft skills”. In other words, using technology to tackle challenges requires all sort of vital things like problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate and work in teams.

I hope that we’ve made that a core part of ThingsCamp but it’s worth some further exploration. It’s easy to assume that because you’re putting on some sort of collaborative event you’ll naturally be helping people to work together and build collective knowledge; but that isn’t necessarily the case. It needs deliberate cultivation and it’s something we’ll be working on as we plan for the future of ThingsCamp.

Policy Influence

Interestingly this is a theme that’s becoming more a feature of our conversations recently: how can something like ThingsCamp be part of a wider push to positively support those making the big decisions around things like smart cities?

We expect to be actively pursuing this over the coming months but in the meantime the conversations we had during this session highlighted all sorts of challenges that we need to overcome, including:

• how to get the policy-makers along to practical, collaborative events so that they can be better immersed in the concerns and realities of IoT
• how to better understand the motivations and targets of the people making decisions so that a community such as ThingsCamp can speak to them in the right way
• how to generally bridge the gap between grass roots activity and large-scale programmes.

This was a particularly rich discussion that looked at the experiences from other events like Homeless Hack and how to better use communications methods around data and technology. But part of the reason this was such a concern for everyone was the fact that the ideas we discussed were relevant far beyond our initial scope.

There was felt to be a huge amount of disconnect when it came to technology and policy communities, but this disconnect was also perceived to be present in the business world, or in non-profits (and in fact another session focused on precisely that).

The people making the big decisions about technology and how it fits into people’s lives are not necessarily those who really understand it. Or at least they have a very different perspective from those who use technology for practical purposes on a daily basis. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that.

So, on one hand there’s an opportunity for something like ThingsCamp to bring people together and support the sort of conversations that can break down some of the walls. But of course, there’s a more pressing issue around things like time and money. How do we get the right people to allocate the time and resources to learning about the things they don’t even know they don’t know? Or meeting the people they don’t know they should meet?

So, there’s plenty to think about and even more to do. But we found some time at the end of our session to explore some practical ideas (and afterwards as the conversations continued). I’ve mentioned some simple ideas like curation already, and the ThingsCamp business event will help us to try out some other approaches that we hope to build on. At some point over the next week or so we’ll write a follow-up on what’s next for ThingsCamp and hopefully get some feedback from the community on how we can tackle some of the challenges and ideas here.

ThingsCamp for Business takes place on Tuesday 19th of June at iCentrum in Birmingham. Get your ticket here.

Supporting Learning and Skills was originally published in ThingsCamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today we spent some time manufacturing our first physical “coins”. We’ve been thinking about how to do this for a while; it’s a little bit of a challenge. There are some basic principles we need to stick to for a start:

• the coins need to be made from recycled materials so that we’re not creating more rubbish or buying pre-existing tokens (such as poker chips).
• the coins need to be distinct and different from anything else we have lying around (and therefore also relatively difficult to counterfeit*).
• they need to be relatively easy to mint so that we can produce them in bulk.

The solution we’ve decided on for our initial prototype coins is to use Tetra Pak cartons as the material. They have relatively thick walls; are metallic on one side; and we have a lot of them.

In order to make coins from this material we need a consistent punching method; for this purpose we’ve found a decorative, hand-held punch that cuts a jagged-edged circle. This provides us with something fast, easily repeatable and low cost. At this point the total cost of minting is three Euros and unlikely to increase in the near future (although this is just a prototype).

The finished coins are shown in the header image in this post. They’re a bit too small at the moment and we anticipate changing the punch in the future; but we also need to remember that these are not to be used in the same way as normal currency—we won’t be using them to pay in shops, for example.

So, for the purpose of SNOFCOIN these tokens are perfectly adequate right now and they allow us to get started so that we can tackle some more difficult questions, such as:

• how do we set up the bank (and who controls it);
• what is our M0 and should there be a limit at all;
• how do we store these coins; and
• how much should be in physical circulation before converting to digital money?

The next post will tackle one or two of these. In the meantime we’re going to experiment with our prototype coins.

*we don’t expect to have to worry about counterfeiting in our family (although we’re always vigilant). However, imagining different future scenarios (such as what happens if more people use our currency) is a useful way of designing something more widely practical.

Sharing work that’s a long way from finished — work that’s just the starting point or a single aspect of what we’re aiming for — is a crucial part of working with other people. And thinking of it as substandard is a useful step in getting better at that sharing.

It might seem easier to share work that’s 99% there, almost perfect, just in need of some magic fairy dust to make it better. But sharing far less developed things can be more beneficial for everyone.

There’s a pleasure that comes with the freedom to show substandard work: the implied trust that others have in you to make something better, to build on what’s there; the value you place in others to contribute more than just tweaks; and the loss of friction you feel as you no longer need to agonise over things being good enough.

Collaborative tools like Google Docs have given us the ability to stick half-baked ideas into a semi-public space. But they haven’t necessarily given us permission. Even explicit encouragement to throw something together can be meaningless when the relationship isn’t based on a reasonable level of trust.

Substandard work as a vital part of an iterative, collaborative process is different from the binary of success and failure. Rather than experimentation to see what sticks, substandard work is about the kernel of something valuable unfettered by the need to complete the picture before showing it to someone else.

It’s about finding the smoothest path between an idea and its audience; it’s about the kind of mutual understanding that allows that idea to become something better through contact with other people; and ultimately it’s a powerful way to learn.

If we wait, if we internalise the process of improvement, we close ourselves off from the immediate feedback that accelerates our ability to learn more than we can teach ourselves. But to different extents we’ve learned to internalise; we each have our own expectations of what makes something ready or good enough.

If we want to get better at sharing substandard work we need to help each other. We need to learn and unlearn: collectively change our ways of looking at what people share with us and develop the trust that allows us show people just the essence of something rather than the finished article. After all, the finished article might but substandard in its own way, and with a lot less opportunity for improvement.

Originally published at mistergough.com on May 30, 2018.