Hive Health

Monday kicked off my winter night class on Experience Design at Central St. Martins. Asymetric haircuts, country headwear, the diverse and arty greeted me for a 10 stretch of academia. I even took a pencil to sketch  with whilst looking into the mid distance.

Experience design is just that and far from just that. Dozens of man-years have been spent crafting a definition that still struggles with the difference between art and design, let alone the requirement we have to trap, cagoule and force down the edges of what it is to be experiential or to provide experience. The wooliness of the subject is refreshing and helping get my head out of the structured, problem/solution world that billable work often requires (especially on a Monday!).

From 5 senses, to 360 degree immersive sessions it’s clearly going to be an awesome 10 weeks.

My reading list is whizzing past Hegel, Marx, through terms as diverse as relational aesthetics and dystopian community. It’s been a while since I read something (Harvard biz review tends to pride itself on accessibility!) that had me rubbernecking to google this regularly. Blindingly good stuff, even this early session got me thinking like mad on a stack of plans/briefs/trickies I have in front of me.

In a world where ‘Brand is…’ is cumbersome and ‘brand does’ becomes more central to our planning model - experiential planning is pretty sexy for me. It channel planning with lipstick on, spinning on a table, air thick with perfume.

With HBR continuing to kick sand in the face of goods providers with yet another article on the worth of the experience economy. Joining the greying of the boundaries between sponsorship, co-branding, commissioned design, corporate installation etc. And Josephs Pine conforming that customer value has run away from all the  commodities and goods, towards tailored services or authentic experiences. It it  the time to try and consider how we offer these experiences, planned, proactive and of course with an audience insight bang in the centre.

With crossed fingers, in a dark, endless cold room . I am hoping that experience design and the time spent with the talent at CSM contributes a component  to me working on a structured approach to behavioural change achieved along a considered, multichannel, richer journey.

In the meantime – a rather nice Nokia experience, corporate installation, co-branded event, light show or Son et lumière (your choice).

This is half family and half patient experience stuff so bear with me. I will reassure you I am going to breeze over the hardcore stuff, just don’t consider me a emotionless robot!

It’s been a health intensive few weeks for me. An afternoon call from a disorientated father has resulted in me having to get my mum and I out, to a cliché that happens to many of us with a parent at ‘that’ age.

My dad’s been hit by a stroke that’s left him a little way from the capable fixer, never needing or asking for help that he has been all my life. I have become the adult in our relationship overnight. He is fine, on track to get better, sorted mentally and now discharged to a rehabilitation ‘hotel’ for the slow journey to getting him back on his feet. So don’t go getting sentimental on me and filling the comments box with sympathetic emoticons – this is a company time not therapy!

I know this country well, having lived, played and worked here throughout of my life. It’s a changed place. Spain is in depression. Suffering from unshifting thirty percent regional employment and a national debt that’s spiralling out of control. A gloom pervades this Costa. As I drive to and from the hospital avoiding the strays, the hospital remains a beacon of positivity, organisation and calm. Here the system works best with an extended family, who live locally and take turns to stay with their sick relative, tending, nursing and doing much of the menial and administrative jobs. It’s a system that adapts to cope with those that don’t have this Mediterranean advantage. In this emotional time, midst an economic mud we have found a pearl, an organism of care not a machine of health. Phew.

George, our Spanish/Scouse translator asked whether I was a doctor given my ‘confidence’ with medical terms; MRIs, thrombotic strokes, and secondary care procedures. My Mum is still laughing about this.  Jorge looked confused when I explained that my normal world is helping define stories for doctors and patients. “Who needs to do that?” He asked. “You need me to explain what they are doing. They don’t need telling – they’re doctors”. “Yes but…” said I. “Perhaps not the time” my Mum said. The comedy of this arrived over breakfast one morning, alongside a charm of a nurse who in pigeon English describing my dad whilst moving him up the bed as “a dead weight” which proved that the blackest of humour arrives as the blackest of times. “Not quite” we replied pretty much at the same time.

Equipped with a broken Iphone which I timely dropped on the floor in Malaga airport, a medical app, that I reviewed damningly the other month and an unashamed (cheers John W!) ability to ask the most basic of questions. My Dad’s doctor soon realised that ‘communications planning’ is going to be my default mode. I have to remind myself that I am not sitting behind the mirrored glass or midst a research group. The doctors here don’t seem as easy going as the ones nicking off with cans of coke and the free sandwiches in market research. I was tempted to suggest we run a workshop to get some answers, but I had the feeling the next pill would be for me if I didn’t stop ‘getting’ involved.

What hits me now, back at home, and with Dad out of crisis is the environment. Whilst sitting the hours out, we couldn’t be anything but calmed by the it. It felt  the lowest common denominator of healthcare; the cleanliness of the space has been a some form of solace. It’s spotless, there has never been a case of MRSA here and it’s a destination for European standard care. The option to go private results in a room on your own and not shared with another – simply nothing else can improve. As an ‘end of bedder’ the cleaning schedule disrupts you constantly. Seemingly every 4 hours the room is wiped down, floors bleached and a thoroughness that insist you exit the room. You are not the focus here, the programme is, and you sit within these confines, as a child in a room full of decision making adults. A perfect approach for a crisis situation.

I have no experience of ‘this’ in any other healthcare system, no comparison to offer. The UK doctors I know speak well of the Spanish system. Our hospital provided translator sought to quell in his mind, the most typical of British fears “our hospital is run by doctors not accountants; this is not your healthcare system”. I can say only that where he is has been the least of our worries.

Scoop.it, a tool that lets one and all hunt, gather and distribute content from around the Web launched publicly today after a year in an invite-only beta.

We were lucky enough to be one of the beta babes and we have been curating Patient Centricity News for a couple of months now.  Its dead straightforward, and is backed by a plum algorithm that once seduced helps you find relevant articles and videos. It cracked the automated pitfalls of death by junk content by leaving the curator to choose what’s right for them, and its this for me that has made the Scoop.it experience so fresh.

As “curation” becomes the next buzz word it been a joy to be part of the big beta crowd.  With more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month, we look forward to reviewing load more healthcare comms publications.

Heading back from a meeting and listening to Woman’s hour the acidly critical Hollie McNish cut through the chatter with a poem entitled Marketing Motherhood.

It’s not often that poetry smacks you in the face, seeks an ethical and moral review on your activities. Not since Pam Ayers Battery Hen has something felt this powerful (I was 7 and midst egg mayonaise sandwich).

I chucked this at a group of us last night to discuss in place of a training session on the Value Profit Chain. The crowd were mixed from the ‘it’s just not that simple crowd’ to the ‘our duty is to provide value not just proliferate useless products’.

We do market products to people often in crisis. But are we the target of this poem? It’s important for all of us to be able to hold our head high. I think that consumerism relies on creating needs that aren’t often real needs but manufactured wants. But that this categorisation often differs by person and it much more complicated than the puppet paranoid would have us believe. In this poem the mum sits centre of a manipulative environment, powerless and stupid. Whilst the corporates sit dangling the bright and shiny like fisherman at a trout farm. I am not sure that I am quite to this level of paternalism, or to this confidence in the simplicity of this situation. The mothers I have market researched have all been a little more street wise than this. Capable of identifying commercialism and opportunism. Understanding and rationalising their sometime irrational need for more into a bucket of first time mum stock piling? Or to a reaction to the basic human need to prepared pre chaos. In a capitalist world this means buying stuff, often irrelevant stuff. But acting on impulse.

This cynicism has to be answered by us as individuals. For me it means basing everything we do on a tangible human need, not just a superficial fear driven want. Am I naive? Basing what we do and how we drive genuine value, and maintaining consumer partnership at our core allows me to pass a personal test.

An interesting discussion prompted by creativity and passion.