JP Morgan

Contact: "Elliott, Michael" <Michael.Elliott@jpmorgan.com>

Ideas for 2016

"Many charities rely on volunteer networks, but small local charities sometimes don't have the staff to maintain those networks. On the flip side, many people would like to volunteer to help a local charity but aren't able to commit a set number of hours per week. Micro-volunteering allows individuals to offer up their skills on an ad-hoc basis and for charities to take advantage of that, and is extremely valuable to smaller charities or community organisations.

Your task is to design a micro-volunteering exchange, that can match volunteers to opportunities in their local area. Locality is critical in micro volunteering, perhaps a graph database (like neo4j) would be interesting here. "

2015 project:

Initial ideas from 2015

The first would be an application or game with the theme of "How does it feel to be old?". Some initial thoughts from AgeUk on that are:

"For a lot of Gen Y (or even Gen X) who use the internet, apps, games, social media on smartphones or tablets all the time, every day, it is really hard to imagine how using this sort of thing might be a really different experience for an older person. Older people may have fine motor control issues (shaking hands, etc), eyesight and hearing issues, and even just issues in processing information at a slower speed. All of these things may affect how comfortable someone feels about using websites, apps, or even doing simple things on a smartphone. How can we create a tool or an app or a game that brings this to life for younger people – and maybe helps them to think about getting involved with Age UK or donating as an outcome? "

The second would be data analysis and visualization around data representing the problems faced by older people in different regions of the UK (e.g. those in rural areas may be more affected by issues of isolation, whereas those in cities by issues of crime and security). Again, a very early description

"How can Age UK represent our complex regional-based data about older people in a commanding, visual way? We have complex data sets (we can send) in spreadsheet form that map occurrences of many different issues for older people, e.g. regional stats on disease, mortality, loneliness, health, etc etc. Could we find a way to visually represent this in a way that might be useful for PR purposes, to show to potential funders or donors, in a way that brings to life the multiple issues that older people use, and the way that Age UK helps in all its 165 localities"

If you think these are promising, I will work to flesh them out into more fully fledged projects. I think the first has some interesting aspects of user experience design, and has good scope for delivering a fully featured end product. The second perhaps offers scope for some creative thinking about data representation.