We started this week with two workshops that have moved the project on no end. There have also been four - count them - mob meetings this week, two dog mobs and Timemob and a Backmob. And while we're on stats the request for unfaclilitated mob packs now totals 15.

Our first workshop tackled motivations, we realised from our work with Anne Marie that people not only had to be motivated to start mobs, recruit members and keep them going but also to keep doing their activity and most difficult of all to push themselves further each time.

Our second workshop tackled the issues of feedback and measurement - how do we feed back to show and encourage progress, what do we base our rewards on and what do we need to measure to show an increase in activity from the perspective of Kent County Council.

RED is all about using design to better connect policy and citizen users. We use design as a space to create a constructive and creative dialogue between these groups and experts in their fields to create practical solutions and across the two days we've brought together a diverse range of experts to work together on Activmobs: a sports scientists, sports psychologist, a personal trainer, economists and statisticians, policy wonks, experts on working with older people, an interface designer from Sony, service designers and an experts in social software.

Some of the biggest learnings have been:
Keep it simple
Beware of external motivations (eg cash) negating internal motivations to be active. External motivation should not be related to fitness gain only to getting your mob started and keeping it going.
People have individual motivations, they need self selected reward
Feedback should relevant to the individuals own goals and show improvement.
Measurement at a local authority level should be based on this self reported improvement.

Some of the favourite ideas have been:
Use national lottery type OCR machines to record peoples progress
Create a catalogue of programmes, incentives, and rewards from which people can choose their own combination.

CATEGORY: HEALTH PROJECT