Imagine Iriss

This week, Fiona, Gayle, Lisa, Rhi­ann and Rikke from Iriss, The Insti­tute for Research and Inno­va­tion in Social Ser­vices, a char­ity that bridges prac­tise, pol­icy and research based in Glas­gow vis­ited the Leapfrog team at Imag­i­na­tion­Lan­caster.   The aim of the day was to share ideas and approaches, par­tic­u­larly to tools and explore how we might work together in the future.

We started the day by work­ing together in small groups to design tools that could be used to get groups to think more cre­atively and move away from a pet idea, which gen­er­ated a num­ber of inter­est­ing ideas includ­ing an Iriss bus and radar.  This was fol­lowed by a demon­stra­tion of some of the dig­i­tal tools from Roger, which have been pro­duced at Imag­i­na­tion­Lan­caster and a gen­eral dis­cus­sion about tools, includ­ing how we might eval­u­ate them and when it is appro­pri­ate to use them.  After lunch and a tour of the LICA build­ing, Hay­ley shared insights from the recent Make it Stick project and we dis­cussed com­mon inter­ests, which might guide us in decid­ing how we may work together.

At the end of the day, the two teams parted feel­ing excited about the pos­si­bil­ity of a project where we both use our exper­tise to do some­thing dif­fer­ent or a team mem­ber swap, where some­one has the oppor­tu­nity to soak up knowl­edge and bring a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive to the cur­rent way of working.