Digital Civics: Air Quality Blog Entry 1
Project goals:
A Newcastle university urban planning focused bottom up campaign initiative to increase user and community awareness of air quality control centered on Gosforth high street. Working with the users on easy and effective forms of interpreting the data supplied by the air quality monitors situated along the high street, making the data accessible to everybody with the goal of increasing community awareness and support for self-managed air quality control through community projects.
Stakeholders & users:
In this project, the main users are students that in both private and church schools, commuters from the North, different business on the street and residents. They are quite important as variety role are played by them. For example, students and the old residents should be taken good care but the poor air quality make them expose under the risk of illness. Commuters come here by private or bus and bring business to this street and shop owners really need them to live. However, they can make traffic congestion as to many cars and buses which is also the main cause of air pollution. As residents, they create a group called SPACE on Facebook, Twitter and website. What they have done is they have posted the problem of the air pollution and explain this to the public. People can say their needs and make suggestions in this group.
At first the council and population wants less traffic on this road because of the
air pollution but the thing is they wants more traffic for the health of businesses. 
Besides, there are a lot of data available on a few websites but they are unusable. We think because it’s difficult to understand the data if you are not an expert. For example, for the level of the pollution in air there are only numbers with abbreviations of products. Therefore, to have a better use of data, they need to be more imagery with colours and map for the localisation.
Key Questions for the Sprint
- Why does the existing air quality data not work?
- We think this could because the current data is hard to interpret and very technical.
- One way we could improve this is by colour coding the data so the average resident know it the current amount of air quality is bad.
- To what extent are the stakeholders participating with each other?
- Despite Space existing as a community group it is unclear how much corporation there is between other stakeholders such as the GPS forth schools trust.
- We will aim to work with them all in our development process in order the improve links between groups. This is important as the long term goal of improving air pollution in Gosforth will require all the stakeholders to cooperate.
Thanks for this first entry. It seems that your overarching goals may be “increase user and community awareness of air quality”. Your questions seem to be feasible as well. Perhaps it would be “if we showed air quality data in the street, might it change behaviour / awareness?” As you do user interviews, you’ll get many chances to review your goals and questions, but keep those in mind when you do go in to meet the individuals listed in the brief.
At some point, it would be nice to get a bit of a better feel for the area. Could you bring in more nuance into your understanding of the concerns on the highstreet by looking at some local statistics. How many shops are there? How many cars come through and when during the day? What are the local demographics? Your drawn map of the area is a good start for this; combined with some more review of local statistics and data as well as feedback from your user representatives, keep introducing more nuance to understand concerns and needs from different points of view.
Start looking for references, for example, where else projects have managed air pollution or behaviour change towards commuter patterns. What has worked elsewhere and why?
Good start, now onwards to preparing for user interviews. Hope my comments are useful!
Great first entry and great to see your project goals being defined. As Sebastian said, as you go through the project, your goals might change and shift and it’s important to know that is okay.
You’ve got a great start in identifying the key stakeholders. I maybe would suggest thinking of any others that haven’t been discussed or that are not included? What about the parents of students as they will be the ones to drive their children to school, for example?
The key questions are also a great start and it’s good to see the beginning of some ideas for the project coming through in this. Be careful not to have too many project goals, aims or objectives but at the same time you introduce the idea of whether stakeholders are working together as important. Going forward, it may be worth considering all of the key issues and goals you’ve set out and as you carry out the user interviews and move forward, you can narrow down and concentrate on those you feel are most important.
Before the user interviews, I think having more knowledge about the local area – what are the wider issues? what is the make up of the community? what can you find out about Gosforth High Street and the businesses? This is particularly relevant to inform you user interview schedules.
Great start! Keep it up!
Jen