Day one was about ensuring teams ‘design the right thing’ through the proper research and framing of the challenge.
Teams conducted desktop research and interviews with their target audience and users were placed at the front and centre of the design process.
Specialists from partner organisations Disability Rights UK, Mermaids, Activity Alliance, Street Games, Sport England colleagues and individuals with lived experience provided support, guidance and feedback to the teams (either online or in person).
Teams also took to the streets of London to speak to members of the public: from faith leaders at local mosques, to parents waiting for the school pick-up or at the park.
Day two was all about ensuring teams designed ‘the thing right’, generating ideas and creating prototypes to put the stakeholders to test, learn and adapt.
One team spoke to two PE teachers who were so impressed with the concept, they asked for it to be pitched to their headteacher!
Theories of change, user journeys and pitches were created ready to wow the judging panel.
The ideas
The jam culminated in presentations from all six teams hoping to hit the criteria the judges were looking for: beauty, brains, heart, magic, mastery and bravery; plus Sport England’s values of being innovative, collaborative, inclusive and ambitious.
A whole range of tools including Lego, Canva documents and even pipe cleaners were used to bring ideas to life, always with the user in mind.
Reflections
It is hard to capture the energy, creativity and power of design-thinking that I witnessed over the two days, but my biggest takeaways are:
- Collaboration is key. It was brilliant to see the dynamics of the teams, with students working alongside professionals and service design experts, as well as individuals new to the subject, and all bringing a diverse range of lived experiences. It was this variety of backgrounds, working collaboratively on a shared brief, that created truly innovative magic.
- The power of partnerships. The insights that teams gathered from our partners, in person and online, made a huge difference to really grounding the concepts to build upon.
- The importance of freedom. From live user research, ideation, testing prototypes and forming presentations, it was truly remarkable what the teams achieved in just two days to tackle such complex system challenges when seeing barriers to innovation disappear.
What’s next?
These are truly exciting times!
We will be sharing more information and some of the brilliant ideas and concepts that came from the jam over the next few months, so keep an eye on our channels.
Thank you to all our partners and those who joined our efforts during the jam.
If you want to keep learning about innovation, we’d love to hear from you.
