A tool to gather young people’s priorities in North Tyneside
BLOG 1 – Danielle, Sally, Sophie, Adam & Alex
Our group project is ‘a tool to gather young people’s priorities in North Tyneside’. Over the semester in digital civics we will be working with the North Tyneside council and youth cabinet. We will use digital civics to establish a method to enable young people in the area to express their opinions for what makes a good neighbourhood with a particular focus on the environmental issues in the area. There are a number of stakeholders listed in the brief, including North Tyneside Council, Youth cabinet representatives, young people in the wider public and officers in the environment directorate. Some challenges that might be associated with these stakeholder groups include – The council may have financial incentives which could make them biased when it comes to the development regardless of the data that is provided by the youth, however they will also benefit if development is done well as people will move into the area. The youth cabinet that currently exists may not be an accurate representation of the wider population. However, we will consider all stakeholder groups interest when designing our final product.
After unpacking the brief further during the week, the list of questions that we came up with to ask our client (Teresa) at the first meeting are as follows;
- Is there a specific age group of the ‘youth’ we are trying to engage through the use digital civics?
- What is the socio-economic status of the people that will be using these methods? – – – This could potentially impact our final design if not all members of the community have access to a mobile phone, there may be limitations to what we design if it needs to be accessible via computer as an alternative.
- Will there be a chance where we can speak to the youth members in council to discuss whether they have had success on other projects to get advice on how we could approach this?
- Since the project is looking at new housing development proposals in North Tyneside, is there a particular development happening at the moment that this project should be focused towards? Or is the aim of this long term use for all developments within the area and therefore it should be a more flexible design?
- Is there a particular method that the client would be leaning towards us using in our prototype for example; an app, a blog, engagement on social media or are they open minded to see what we come up with ourselves.
- Whilst this project aims to get young people to express their priorities for their neighbourhood, is there a system in place that successfully allows the rest of the population to contribute their opinions that we could potentially take ideas from? Or is gathering priorities an issue for the entire population in North Tyneside and we have just been asked to focus on this specific population group.
We also realise that Teresa is not our main client and therefore after the meeting we may still have outstanding questions for Julia following the completion of the meeting which we will look forward to exploring further in the coming weeks. We hope after our meeting we will have a better understanding of some parts of our project so we can keep moving further.
Hello all, thanks for the first blog post… It is good to see that you are taking a journey in discovering your brief. Initially you notice that Teresa may be your client but realise that Julia (at North Tyneside is your main project partner). This may get you to reflect critically who actually your client is (so might it actually be the youth council for whom Julia stands in as a proxy). In design projects many such dilemmas exist and often the client in a practical context is the person who may hold the budget, but other stakeholder influence your choices.
I your reflection, I would encourage to dive deeper into some of the conceptual issues in relation to ‘digital civics’. For example, be careful not to see ‘digital civics’ as something that can be applied to a problem context (so formulation such as ‘using digital civics’ maybe somewhat ill choose). Note what a ‘civic’ is; which we said was related to Dewey’s idea of parts of society which have come to identify themselves as a group for a concern they share). Actions for you might be: (1) Have a look at the articles by Olivier and Le Dantec (reading for the week) what this might mean for your project. The weekly reflective tasks ask to look what ‘civics’ your project relates to and you have partly done this, by questioning whether you should only relate to young people in the area, or have a wider focus; it is also good to see you ask what age groups to focus on and perhaps over time more characteristics may appear as important criteria for who you try to relate to in particular via your project. (2) continue the exploration as to what groups your project might relate to and design for, but be careful not to go too far. In this case your target audience are younger people in the North Tyneside area.
Lastly, I notice that you have not give yourself a team name. Perhaps have another thought for future material. A team name is not a must but it may give yourself a better identity than the standard which would be ‘team 10’.
I look forward to your next blog entry reflecting on the kick-off meeting and the encounter with some of the stakeholders on Friday in that week.