So, dot net mag were kind enough to ask me to write a piece for the magazine back in summer while I was working on the constraints cards kickstarter campaign. Rather than write about the deck, I decided to write about some of the principles behind the deck.

The article was published this month. As a direct result, I’m now being refered to as ‘the creative block’. Aren’t workmates hilarious.

I’d link to the article but I don’t think it’s online yet (at all?). Who knows, following the whole creative bloq thing this last month. It’s in the issue with the huge wordpress logo on the cover.

I thought I’d post a quick update about a small design decision I’ve just made, while you all wait for your cards.

One of the main reasons I did the Kickstarter for Constraints Cards was to let me create a deck of cards that would last.

Cards that could take the kind of damage that comes from rumbling around in a Crumpler bag, being blu-tac’d to the wall occasionally, being shuffled absent mindedly for hour on end, and being thrown at colleagues from time to time.

Cards that would still look and feel great after a lot of use. They could age, everything ages, but they shouldn’t look broken. They shouldn’t just collapse or look bad suddenly.

I’ve had various samples going through just that kind of use and abuse for the past few months, with mixed results. Some have been actual printed test decks, some have just been samples of existing cards using different processes / stocks / finishes. They’ve all been rumbling around in my bag together.

On day one my favoured finish was a smooth paper with a matt lamination. I love the look of a matt lamination finish, it feels great to shuffle, it seems to make the cards feel stiffer, it looks amazingly rich, and generally makes the cards awesome.

That is the finish you see in the sample shots on the kickstarter page.

The usage I put my cards through was a little too much for the laminate though – it started to give up – to rise – and to peel away. The cards look pretty old within a few months. They looked like they were dealing with the aftermath of some serious sunburn.

This was mainly down to mistreatment I think, but we all know things get mistreated. They get thrown in your bag at the end of a hack (‘I’ll put them in the front compartment with my keys – they’ll be ok – I’ll box them tonight’), shuffled around on your desk endlessly, used to prop up your mac when it sounds like it’s away to overheat.

So that kind of lamination is out, lovely though it looks.

Uncoated paper is out too. You have to be able to shuffle cards, and after a decent amount of use, any uncoated paper is going to fray enough to make shuffling an absolute frustration. And people suffering from absolute frustration don’t learn very quickly.

The hardest wearing finish has been a straightforward playing card style plastic coating. Still on a flat smooth paper stock. This gives the cards more of a ‘poker’ feel when using them, which I actually like, but doesn’t go as far as the linen texture and super thin paper.

They’ll feel a bit slicker / smoother, and look a little more glossy than the matt finish prototype in the kickstarter photos. Overall though, I think they’ll look and feel great, and I’m confident that they’ll stay that way for a long time.

I’ll post some pics as soon as I get a hold of the latest test deck using this new finish, which I suspect will be the finish I go with. Fingers crossed!

Shameless plug time – point your chums at the Constraints store to pick up a pre-order if they missed the kickstarter.

I’m giving a talk at Lean Agile Scotland 2013 in September, here is the outline:

The story of how I developed the ideas that led to the creation of Constraints Cards – the card deck for web designers. I think constraints get a bad rep.

In this talk I hope to persuade you that not only should you identify the inherent constraints in your project – you should consider adding voluntary constraints to help achieve a more creative solution, to help improve your teams learning speed, and to keep life fun.

I’ll also discuss ways in which using Constraints as an individual, in any role, can level up your design thinking more quickly.

This isn’t a Theory of Constraints talk. This is an investigation into how creativity in the broadest sense benefits from the application of even the most arbitrary of constraints.

It’ll be great to have an outlet for all the constraints related stuff that’s been rattling around in my head while working on the card deck!

As ever, if you have any questions you can find me on @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com.

In an attempt to give Refresh Aberdeen a more varied calendar later in the year, I gave the first Workshop Workshop this weekend.

A small group gathered at 17 to work up outlines for their own workshops – to be delivered later in the year. Over the next few weeks I’ll be finalising dates and workshop outlines with the participants and publishing them over at the refresh website.

If you would like to take part in the next workshop workshop (and I’d really encourage you to) just fill your details in here and you’ll be informed when places are available.

Any topic that touches on anything creative, and/or digital is welcome. You don’t need prior training / workshopping experience, just a passion for your subject and a willingness to share.

As ever, if you have any questions you can find me on @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com.

It looked touch and go with a few days remaining, but Constraints Cards got funded. Due to my inability to organise my life, the deadline passed while I was in the highlands of Scotland with the family. If you’ve ever relied on highland mobile signal you’ll know how that went!

Lots of iPhone waving while looking for signal.

Huge thanks to everyone who backed the project, and to the hundreds of you that shared the project on twitter.

I’m working on a post to share some stats, and some thoughts about what went well, what didn’t go so well (not much) and what I’d do differently were I to repeat the endeavour. But for now, I just wanted to say hurrah.

I’m in the middle of the hard part now, actually getting everything printed and made.

As ever, if you have any questions you can find me on @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com.

The July Aberdeen Culture hack saw a rare gathering of Aberdeens tech and creative folk to hack together for a weekend.

I would normally tell a lengthy story about the weekend myself, but Kevin did such a good job that I’ll simply point you at that, and this article to get the scoop. There is also some video on youtube which gives a good feel for the day.

All I’ll add is that it’s great to see the council encouraging this kind of event, and supporting it with time and resources.

We’re thinking of running a follow up event, to further build on the app. If you’re interested in taking part drop me a line or jump onto the refresh aberdeen mailing list to make sure you hear about it.

Spreading the word

A number of people have told me that they didn’t hear about the hack until it was too late. At Refresh Aberdeen we’re looking at how we can help solve that problem – and use channels other than twitter to get the message out. If you have any thoughts / ideas – drop me a line.

As ever, if you have any questions you can find me on @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com.

So I just pushed Constraints Cards live on Kickstarter. This is my first kickstarter project, and it’s been great fun pulling it together. Head over and back it!

I thought I’d share a little of what I learned over the past 6 months pulling this together while it’s fresh in my mind.

1 – It’s been inherently good fun

I loved doing this.

I had a minor obsession towards the end of last year with figuring out how I think about problems. During one of the talks at Build 2012 I had an idea and quickly jotted out a few thoughts. Over the next week or so the idea formed more fully, I ordered some blank playing cards, and started prototyping.

Like most web folk I always have a handful of side projects on the go, some live, some die. I think this one was different because it involved atoms – not just bits.

I enjoyed the process of bringing Constraints to life. Designing layouts for a physical card, getting test decks printed, explaining how they work to folk, using them while I hack, it was all good hands on stuff.

As things got really busy at work, or as an event or other committment took priority the cards would be on pause for a week or two at a time, but it was always great fun to get back to them.

Kickstarter

Without the existence of kickstarter I don’t think I’d have progressed these at all. The financial risk of committing to a decent print run would be prohibitive. I’ve backed a number of projects on Kickstarter and generally been really happy with the results.

Working through creating a project in Kickstarter is a great way to help fully formulate your ideas. In some ways I wish I’d hit that ‘start your project’ button sooner.

2 – Video is impossible

The most challenging part of the kickstarter side of this project was the video. The one that went live at kickstarter was my eighth or ninth attempt. Not that you can tell, it’s still very much an “iPhone and iMovie” affair. Earlier versions were more ambitious. Ambitious but rubbish.

I don’t have a particularly ‘high energy’ voice, which I found really hard to get to grips with when doing the voice part. For some reason, although I give presentations all the time, I found the act of recording really difficult. I’m guessing this isn’t an uncommon experience.

Music was a huge time drain for me. I’m no muso, and I spent an age on the open music sites looking for a simple backing track. Eventually I just had to accept that I’m terrible at picking music. Having accepted this I chose no music. If I do another kickstarter project I’m getting in a music director! Seriously.

I’d have had this project live easily two months earlier if I had skipped the video. But I saw it as a big part of the whole kickstarter “thing”, and would have seen that as a bit of a fail. So – there’s a video, it’s not a great video, but it’s an honest video and it’s not as bad as the other seven or eight were.

3 – Finding the time is surprisingly easy

Between work, dad stuff, Refresh and other events, my week fills up pretty quick, but I’ve managed to get Constraints to this stage without taking away too much ‘quality’ time at weekends. The work has been mainly in the evening, or on the train, or getting feedback during lunch with guinea pigs. I should mention I hardly watch tv. Maybe a couple of hours a month.

A lot of that time has been obsessive tweaking of relatively minor issues. A lot of it was spent making bad videos, and re-recording voiceovers thinking I’ll magically start sounding less Eddie the Eagle and more Eddie Mair.

4 – Physical stuff is really nice

Working in digital, and largely playing in digital since leaving Uni, I’ve never really produced a physical ‘thing’ like this. Playing with arduino and paper mache and cardboard ‘maker’ stuff with the boys is one thing, actually creating a new ‘thing’ is something else.

This was never about money – I worked hard on the quotes / shipping / other sums to make sure the kickstarter pretty much breaks even at the funded minimum.

This was about taking an idea from a sketch in my notebook through to something a reasonable number of people might use. It was also about avoiding too much compromise, and learning new things outside my usual comfort zone.

A web app could deliver the constraints principles efficiently without the need for a deck of cards and all the work that entails, but I genuinely believe the physical presence of the card, the act of shuffling and selecting a card, and of placing it in the stand all play into the point of the exercise. It all switches up your brain, makes it “do” something, hopefully freeing it somewhat from the regularity of the day.

Also, I just like shuffling cards. They feel nice.

5 – Feedback is invaluable

I owe thanks to a number of people, but in particular to Kevin, Ian, and Sean for taking the time to let me bounce the idea off them over the past few months – it’s really helped.

6 – Start smaller?

One last thought. I might have rather that I’d have tackled a smaller project before this one to try out the kickstarter approach. I likely would have, if I’d planned this more thoroughly.

The problem with that logic though, is that you have to run where your interest takes you. Would I have been willing to put everything into a smaller ‘B’ project? I don’t know.

If the kickstarter gets funded I get to make my thing. If it doesn’t then I get a blast of self doubt and failure.

Win – win!

You can see how the kickstarter campign is going over on the Constraints Cards page, you can follow constraints on twitter at @constraintscard.

As ever, if you have any questions you can find me on @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com.

Just over a week ago we put up a poll about possible events that Refresh Aberdeen could run in the coming season. Refresh hadn’t been as active or as social as usual for about 6 months, so it was time to get moving again.

The vote was really interesting, and we had four clear ‘winners’ with a majority of votes, and a number of also rans.

The results

We posted 10 ideas, this is the order they finished up in. You can see the pretty pseudobarchart at Refresh Aberdeen.

• Talks Nights at PVA
• Creative Code for Designers
• After Work Meetup
• Workshop Workshop
• Web Retreat
• JS Workshop
• (unofficial) Kickstarter Jam
• Pecha Kucha
• 36 hour startup
• Print for Web Designers

The highlighted ones got a markedly stronger response than the others. But it’s worth saying that most options got a big enough vote that if everyone who voted actually turned out, they’d be considered a success if we ran them.

What’s next

The plan from here is simple. Get on and organise this stuff as quickly as we can.

I’m particularly enthusiastic about the Workshop Workshop. In a ‘buy a man a fish’ sense I think this has the potential to really kickstart a whole programme of workshops in Aberdeen, largely led and delivered by locals. Hopefully it will act as a spur and a confidence giver to the community to start sharing knowledge.

I’m keen to talk to anyone who has experience in delivering workshops – be it coding, crafting, knitting or axe restoration. Especially if you’d be willing to share some of your knowledge with the Refresh crowd.

If you are interested in taking part please get in touch as well, particularly if there are topics you are thinking you’d like to deliver a workshop on. This will help me figure out the best shape for the Workshop Workshop. @stevenmilne and steve@refreshaberdeen.com are the best options.

Sponsorship

I’ll also be out looking for event sponsors. Sponsorship levels will be modest, but really help us put on this programme. If your company has a soul, put in a word for us and send them our way (or send me their way) to join the fine roster of sponsors we thank over on the Refresh site.

Aswell as updates here, Refresh also hs a presence on most networks. So follow / +1 / like / etc… to get our updates right in your feeds:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Plus
• LinkedIn
• Mailchimp Newsletter

We’ve had a slow start to the Refresh Aberdeen year, so to focus efforts on upcoming events I pushed out a poll last night asking for feedback on our ideas for the coming season. The results so far have been pretty interesting.

With one thing and another the start of the year has flown past and I’ve not been on top of organising as many events for Refresh Aberdeen as I’d like. Partly this has been down to pressures of work commitments, and partly to my work on constraints. Whatever the reason – this weekend is reboot weekend.

One of my favourite things about Refresh is that it has a really open brief. We’ve done code retreats, movie nights, talks at a gallery, pub meetups, javascript competitions, and even sparked a project or two.

I’m keen to keep this diversity alive, but want to avoid putting large chunks of time into organising events that there isn’t a demand for. So I thought I’d throw the ideas out to the community to see what goes down well.

Options options options

So I knocked up a quick replacement homepage for refreshaberdeen.com, with a simple anon poll system. It’s tempting to ask people for their email / twitter etc… to litter the page in smiley avatars, but we’re interested in broad numbers, rather than profiling the group. I also think an anonymous poll is more likely to be genuine, as people don’t feel the need to be seen to ‘eat their vegetables’ by marking the more worthy events. We shall see.

Night Owls

I pushed out the first messages about the poll late on a Saturday evening, and saw a nice flow of votes through the rest of the night. The top runners were all new events we haven’t run before. Creative code, Kickstarter Jam and 36 Hour Startup did notably well.

Does that suggest that those voting on a Saturday night are the workaholic entrepreneurs still at their keyboards, but with a secret hankering to learn Processing?

Early Birds

The vote switched around quite a bit on Sunday morning. As I write this the PVA Talks Nights, and the After Work Meetups are string favourites among this mornings voters – although the creative code is also doing really well.

Presumably these more socially focussed folk were too busy to vote last night, preoccupied with being all sociable.

Meetup

Once we have a good number of votes the plan is to have an after work informal meetup in town in late May or early June. This will be an opportunity to discuss the ideas, gather teams to organise each of the top ones, and start planning the calendar in some more detail. Mainly though, it’ll be a chance to catch up with folk, so everyone is welcome. You won’t get strong armed into volunteering!

As ever, I’d appreciate it if you spread the word about the poll. Anyone in the creative / digital / web space should find something to love in the Refresh Aberdeen calendar, so send them over to RefreshAberdeen.com.

We also have a presence on most of those social network things. So follow / +1 / like / etc… to get our updates in your feeds:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Plus
• LinkedIn
• Mailchimp Newsletter

This past weekend was exhausting but incredibly good fun. A weekend of problem solving, research, prototyping, video making, and working with new people.

The Global Service Jam is a global event applying product design principles to service design (please don’t shoot me for that description service design fundies! ;).

To get the best feel for what went on head over to the archive site where a stream of progress reports from the teams gives you a genuine feel for the amount of effort everyone put in.

Here are a few thoughts and observations from the weekend though:

Setting up

Getting ready for the service jam was good fun. As one of the organisers I had to ensure that the participants had a good weekend, knew what was going on at all times, had something to eat / drink etc…

The Basecamp set up by the GSJ team globally made this pretty easy (if reading dozens of messages a day for weeks in the runup sounds easy). The one thing I’m ashamed we forgot was simple A4 paper. We had lashings of worksheets and posters and post its, a mountain of stattys. We even had branded JAM! But no A4 paper.

For ‘experts corner’ we had a number of tools, books, worksheets and lego for participants to use. You could turn up with nothing and take part fully. The event was free thanks to our sponsors, I think it’s important that events like these should be as non exclusive as possible.

Kick off

Once the theme is announced on the Friday evening all participants start throwing post its around. Issues, problems, areas, anything that springs to mind based on the theme.

Once we had the massive window nicely covered in scrawled sticky notes we had to form some more concrete ideas around these concepts. This was a fun, interesting session where the most unrelated post-its imaginable seemed to lead directly to what looked like good ideas.

Feedback

One of the most powerful aspects of the GSJ format is the inclusion of regular feedback and validation points. At these points you are incouraged (and if it comes to it, forced!) out onto the street to ask the public what they think of your ideas, your assumptions, and your approach.

Now, it has to be said, Aberdeen isn’t the easiest place to do this. Approachability, friendliness and generosity with time are not the first bullet points on the wikipedia page for our city. That said, all teams managed to get some genuine feedback from the street – and social media proved fruitful in seeking wider opinion.

The value of validation feedback cannot be overstated. By the end of Saturday morning more than one idea had been disproven, discarded, and the team returned to the drawing board. The process and guidance of the GSJ format ensured that ‘negative’ feedback was turned into ‘positive’ evidence that the team needed to rethink.

Prototyping

Another key concept of the service jam is that a prototype is worth a thousand words. Get building. More making, less talking.

On the first day we had lego models, example marketing campaigns, food containers, wearable devices all helping to bring the service some shape and make it more real to everyone. This is much more than a gimmick. As soon as you have a model, you have photography of the model, as soon as you have photography you can describe the concept more easily. You can video the model / prototype while explaining the function.

The speed with which Youtube Channels and Facebook Pages can be created really helped to bring the projects to life. An idea which hits the wall on a post-it note at 10am can have photography and video content by noon, and have survey responses coming in while you lunch. The feedback loop really can be that quick – all the teams made use of these channels to some extent.

Tools

Among the other tools available to the teams were more ‘traditional’ service design tools like the business model canvas, stakeholder analysis, user profiling etc… These were well used, even though most participants hadn’t used them before.

We had pre-printed sheets for many of these, which really helped. When a team got stuck you could just say ‘here – complete this’ and talk them through the tool. The value often came in the first 2 minutes of thinking about the problem from a new viewpoint.

Production Values

We had a number of iPhones and an HD camcorder available throughout the weekend so something in the region of 50 videos were shot. Most of these were simple status updates which I forced the teams to make at set times through the weekend. This made sure that the teams slowly got used to having a camera pointed at them, which meant that over time they started making their own videos. Some of the creativity in the videos was remarkable.

Another side effect of the quick, single take, ‘just tell us where you are’ style of the videos was to make poeople think about content, not production values. Grab prototype, find a quiet space, point the camera, have a 2 minute discussion about what needs to be said, 3, 2, 1, shoot.

If we’d started making second attempts at updates I’m sure we would have ended up with a third as many videos, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have got across the ideas nearly so well.

Saying that – some teams took the videos pretty seriously.

Again?

The measure of success of an event like this, for me, is whether I feel that the investment in time was repaid to the extent that I’d do it again. Before the weekend was out we were discussing things we could do to make next year better – and I’m still enthused. I fully intend to make sure that GSJAberdeen 2014 is bigger and better.

Some ideas for things to do next time:

• Have participants warn their friends and family that they might need some feedback over the weekend, and that they might need their wider networks feedback. I think this may have helped us to spread some of the polls more quickly.
• Pre-create a shared facebook page where all participants can share validation questions – so other Jam cities could give feedback.
• Work harder to explain the event before hand – quite a number of people have told me they would have loved the day but they thought it was something else (entirely my fault!).
• Live blog. I wish I’d been more prepared to live blog the event.
• Bring A4 paper.