Frontline Voices

A skilled and valued workforce is at the heart of Social Services Vision and Strategy for Scotland.

Our vision is a socially just Scotland with excellent social services delivered by a skilled and valued workforce which works with others to empower, support and protect people, with a focus on prevention, early intervention and enablement.

It is, therefore, crucial that we hear from this workforce in order to understand their experiences. Over 2015/16, Iriss carried out work to gain a richer perspective of these experiences.  It resulted in The View from Here, a project which brought together quantitative and qualitative (including illustrated stories) research on the experiences of the social services workforce in Scotland. The findings were launched in October 2015.

Early 2016, Scottish Care launched its findings from the Frontline Voices project, which heard the views of frontline care staff which were published in a report. In it, men and women gave an insight into what inspires them to enter and remain in the profession and also offers their views on areas that give them cause for concern.

Iriss worked with Scottish Care to produce an animated video presentation for the launch. A creative script was put together by Katharine Ross from Scottish Care, we audio recorded the ‘voices’ of social care practitioners and Paul Hart, Iriss’ interactive developer produced a creative, visual way to communicate these voices. This involved dropping the audio into a software package called Adobe After Affects and and adding a few filters and effects on the audio to bring them to life as simple animated waveforms.  The final pieces were assembled in Adobe Premiere.

Here’s the finished video animation:

Katharine Ross, National Workforce Development Lead at Scottish Care commented,

Scottish Care worked in partnership with Iriss to create a presentation for the launch of the ‘Voices from the Front Line’ report in February 2016. Their support was simply invaluable. Iriss – in particular Michelle Drumm and Paul Hart – were so generous with their time. Their expert knowledge and creative input (from supporting the recording of the voices, editing material to developing a 7 minute video) ensured that a quality, multi purpose resource was developed. We look forward to working with Iriss throughout 2016!’

Over 2016/17,  we’ll be building on  The View from Here, aiming to showcase the existing stories and curate new stories through a touring a multimedia exhibition. Frontline Voices will be incorporated into this exhibition. The plan is to launch the exhibition at the Social Work Scotland conference on 15 and 16 June 2016.

Throughout the year we’ll work with partners to promote public understanding about caring professions and the contribution of people who work in care, in line with the Promoting Public Understanding strand of the vision and strategy.

Preserving the history of social work

Stories from children’s migration

In 2007, IRISS undertook a digital preservation project to share – and safeguard – the migration story of the 10,000 “orphans, waifs and strays” who emigrated to Canada between 1869 and 1939.

The Golden Bridge was first created as a exhibition at the Heatherbank Museum of Social Work in Glasgow.  When the museum’s public exhibition space closed, IRISS worked with the exhibition’s curator and archivist to digitise the photographs, documents and stories and give them a home on the web. In this new format, the Golden Bridge exhibition is protected from age and damage. It’s also become an interactive tool for learning and sharing this migration story – with the ability to provide new ways of seeing this part of Scotland’s history.

We recently redesigned the Golden Bridge website. Why? Back in 2007, the original website wasn’t designed to be responsive, meaning it wasn’t designed to display on mobile phones or tablets. The advent of the Smartphone changed how people accessed the web, and given the growth in popularity of mobile devices, it was considered important to redesign Golden Bridge to ensure it was fit for purpose and continued to reach a wide audience. This redesign gives us a good excuse to take the lid off our work and share a ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at the knowledge and effort that went in to digitising this exhibition.

The Golden Bridge represents the collective effort of our knowledge media and evidence-informed practice teams. It draws on our skills as interactive web developers and designers, as well as our knowledge of digital preservation.  We learned to build a resource that reflects the visual elements of the 19th century and the interactive web developments of the 21st. We made use of tool called Zoomify, typically used for online maps, to enable visitors to zoom in on the detail of these historical photos.  Documents were scanned to capture the original Narratives of Facts which detailed the work of the Orphan Homes of Scotland and we captured the expert knowledge of the original exhibitions’ curator, Alastair Ramage, to ensure this migration story was not lost.

This resource draws on the value of stories to understand Scotland’s social services.  As Alastair Ramage suggests, this is “a story that needs to be told again and again to remind us how easy it is to stigmatise a whole group of vulnerable people – especially children”.

Listen to our IRISS.fm episode to hear more about ‘how’ we built this resource and what it has meant to us an organisation.

Related articles:

Preserving and re-presenting Social Work History with New Media: Digitizing the Golden Bridge Exhibition

Retelling the Past Using New Technologies: A Case Study into the Digitization of Social Work Heritage Material and the Creation of a Virtual Exhibition