If you’d like to come along to Social Innovation Camp this weekend in Edinburgh, here are the ideas that we’ll be working on:
When a building isn’t accessible it’s pretty easy to see what the problem is, even if you’re able-bodied: no lifts, no ramps for wheelchairs and lots of stairs. But there are many other less-visible factors that make buildings and spaces inaccessible.
For people with cognitive and psychological disabilities there are many apparently trivial changes that could make a huge difference to how they experience the built environment.
invisibleRamps is a site that helps people with those disabilities – from colour-blindness to autism – to identify features of their environment that need to be improved; collaboratively building a database of those features to allow architects, designers or employers to make spaces and buildings better.
It’s a little bit like Fix My Street for things that are harder to spot than a pothole.
A site that matches older people who have a spare room with unpaid interns who need somewhere to stay for the duration of their internships.
The idea is that Homeshare reduces isolation and loneliness amongst older people at the same time as widening access to internship schemes.
Bubble is a mobile game for tracking and encouraging social contact between people.
The user creates ‘bubbles’ representing people they have contact with based on their existing social circle across different social media platforms. A user’s ‘bubble’ moves further away from them if they have low levels of social interaction over time. Contacts are brought closer again by the user checking in with them either online or face-to-face. The idea is to encourage people vulnerable to loneliness to maintain important social connections.
Foodini is a mobile app and website providing real-time information on local food deals.
The aim is to reduce food waste by local cafes and supermarkets by providing a platform to which they can post cut-price offers to a wide user base of bargain hunters in the local area. It’s Lastminute.com for food from your local shop.
Befriending schemes and respite services are typically used to provide intensive, long-term support to carers. However, getting someone to provide quick, fast help with small, simple but unplanned tasks – popping to the shop for some milk, or changing a lightbulb – is more difficult to coordinate.
Lend-a-hand is a messaging tool for carers to ask family, friends and neighbours at the same time for help with quick-and-easy every-day tasks where a little bit of brief help goes a long way, leaving the carer to worry about more important things.
Inspired by the happiness-tracking app, Mappiness, Volunteer Impact is a tool for volunteers to self-measure the impact that their volunteering is having on them and the communities in which they are volunteering.
The app captures data relating to volunteers’ health, well-being, social connections, skills and confidence across a period of volunteering to show the true impact of their activity.
It’s always a really good weekend and we feed and water you from Friday evening through to Sunday afternoon. Oh and you might also just find it changes your life. Sign up here.
