We were then to conduct a mid point review of how our project was coming along so far and to present this to the class.
At this stage in the project we were asked to present our progress to the class in the form of a group presentation. The goal was to take stock of everything we had gathered so far, from our initial research deliverables through to the mentor interview, and begin to narrow our focus toward a direction worth designing for. We split the presentation across the group with each person taking responsibility for a section they were best placed to speak on.
My responsibility for this presentation was to present our possible directions going forward. This meant looking at the strongest problem areas surfaced by our research and the mentor interview, and making a case for which had the most potential to design around.
As a group we agreed on the following breakdown of responsibilities for the slides. The presentation covered our research journey up to this point, key findings from the mentor interview, our problem areas, and finally the possible directions going forward which was my section.
This felt like a natural structure as it told a story from brief to insight to opportunity, which is what the double diamond process we had been following was always building toward.
Going into this section I drew heavily on two things. The research we had all conducted up to this point, and specifically what Barry had affirmed or reframed during the mentor interview. I landed on three possible directions that I felt were each grounded in evidence and worth exploring further.
The first direction came directly from my own experience working at BT/EE. During the interview Barry confirmed something I had suspected for a while, that prisoners are often completely unaware of what is happening to their finances on the outside. Direct debits continue to run, services keep billing, and by the time someone is released they can be returning to significant debt they had no ability to manage or even know about. This direction explores some form of automated alert system or protocol that would notify service providers at the point of incarceration, pausing or cancelling obligations before the debt has a chance to accumulate.
The second direction grew out of what was probably the most consistent theme across all of our research, the lack of communication and coordination between the organisations involved in the prison and release process. Barry described this in stark terms during the interview, two sets of systems, two sets of ethos, two ministers, and nothing joined up. Organisations competing for funding rather than collaborating. Before the interview this felt like a rich problem area to design around. After speaking with Barry however, the scale of the issue and the political complexity behind it made us question whether a student project could meaningfully move the needle here without stepping into deeply entrenched territory. This direction remains worth noting but feels like the most difficult to design for with real impact.
The third direction came from what I personally found to be the most surprising insight of the entire interview. Early in the project we had assumed that routine and structure within prison were broadly positive forces. Barry completely challenged that. He argued that the dependence prisoners develop on the prison routine strips them of their agency entirely, and that on release this learned dependence simply transfers elsewhere, onto the state, onto old peers, or onto substances. This reframe opened up a really interesting direction around designing for agency within the prison, giving people the tools and autonomy to begin planning their own release while still inside. One idea we explored here was a self owned release planning tool, something a prisoner could engage with during free time to begin lining up housing, work, and a day by day picture of what their life after prison could look like.
With my content ready I turned my attention to how the presentation would actually look and feel as a whole. The biggest risk with a group presentation is that each person's slides end up looking completely different, which makes the whole thing feel disjointed and hard to follow. I raised this with the group and suggested that rather than agreeing on a rigid template, we instead settle on a set of shared visual elements that each person could carry through their own slides naturally.