Day 1: Settling in and learning about petitions

On my first day I met a kind woman named Vicky. She gave me a quick tour around the building showing me where everything was, and also took me through all the safety procedures to ensure that I have a safe time at Unboxed. The other employees also gave me a very nice welcome. After I had settled in I met a year 11 student called Sam and Liam, Head of Design. I started learning about UK parliament petitions and direct democracy. Until 2 days ago I didn’t know about petitions and direct democracy. A petition is a formal written request about a matter that could be affecting a group, borough or even the country and a certain number of people have to sign this petition for it to be debated in parliament or at least considered.

Day 2: Understanding the problems and exploring solutions

Liam taught me more about petitions and how every 10,000 signatures triggers a government response and every 100,000 signatures is considered for a debate in parliament. Sam and I started to brainstorm ideas of why so many young teens and young adults don't like politics and what their opinions are of it. We also had to find all the most difficult problems of why young people don't like politics and come up with solutions, or How Might We’s to address the problem. Sam and I had to try and put our ideas on paper about how young people don't like politics and ways we could try to get them more engaged.

We also joined the Design Club session with the other employees. Every week a different person presents a topic. This session was talking about the Unboxed’s principles.

Day 3: Learning the double diamond process

While we were doing our research, we learnt about the Double Diamond; a design process which consists of 4 steps: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. We did some desk research and also asked our friends and family about their opinions on politics. A lot of them said they don't like politics and just weren't interested. They didn’t see how they could change things or how it affected them.

Day 4: Preparing to present

On day four we were touching up our research document and preparing a google slides deck ready for the meeting me and Sam would be having with the second clerk to the Parliament Petitions Committee at the end of the week. We also tried to figure out the problems with the website that people were finding. One of the problems we found was that the title of the petition did not go into much detail about what the petition was about. This is a problem because someone my age might not understand the big words that they use.

Day 5: Presenting our ideas

On day five we corrected all the grammar mistakes and trimmed it down to all the relevant information. Later in the morning we had a meeting with the 2nd Clerk to the Parliament Petitions Committee to show what we had learned in the last week about petitions and young people. We talked about why they don't like it and presented some suggestions that we thought might help younger people like me stop being overlooked because of their age and get them more involved with politics in general.

Some of the solutions we came up with included:

  • Youth club forums: A way to encourage children and young people to expand their view on politics while having fun.
  • Politics day in schools: Putting children in real life scenarios of how politics works and what is discussed.
  • 5-minute videos: Short videos on politics and current affairs that teachers can play in tutor/form time before lessons.

Reflecting on my week at Unboxed

This work experience was very fun and I want to thank all the nice people at Unboxed who gave me a very nice welcome. I would like to say a big thank you to the people at Barawak Centre for helping me to secure my work placement with Unboxed.

A highlight from the week

Finding a very tasty chicken wrap at Petticoat Lane that I can highly recommend.

One thing I learnt

One thing I've learnt from this experience is that when you're working on a project, always try to think of as many ideas as you can and use the Double Diamond method.