After the first meeting with Rob Snowball, we established some specific goals that we reached after interviewing our stakeholders, Rob Snowball, Heather Evans, Rorie Parsons and Mark Nelson. Regarding or long term goals, they haven’t really changed, they are just more precise. We still want to get more involved in the forum, a feeling shared by most of the people we met but our main goal will be to focus on how to make this forum progress.
This idea is divided in two points :
- First, we need to improve the visibility of the forum, especially on the website which is not very visible. But also help cycling to get a better recognition in the city.
- Secondly, to make access to the feedback easier for all the people who attend the forum and also easier to publish it, after Heather has taken the minutes.
Furthermore, we find it useful to improve interactions between the council and the forum.
Products/services/devices that serve as inspiration for our project
Mobile Phone: We chose this piece of technology as it can be accessed by a wide range of individuals due to the popularity of smartphones and the fact that individuals can access information anywhere anytime. In our project it is important that we have a system that can communicate information clearly and can be accessed by a wide demographic of individuals in the forum, we think a mobile phone could meet this criteria.
Computer: We chose this device as it is one of the most effective ways of communicating information between individuals however this device is more accessible by the older generation. This is important as a large portion of the cycle stakeholder forum are of the older generation that might have more access to computers than mobile phones.
Email: Email was recommended to us as a good transfer and display of information by Mark Nelson as a way to communicate the time of meetings and also to supply the meeting notes to a group of individuals. Email newsletters are also simple to setup and use.
Website: A website is an accessible way to present and relay information. They can also be interactive which is important for the cycle stakeholder forum as we need a system in which people can communicate their opinions on different cycle routes around Newcastle.
Hi team, thanks for the post… it is good to see you having think about what your creative proposition need to address, however, I am not sure you go into sufficient depths for the reader to judge how you come to settle on those key goals for the project. For example, after the mid-term presentation and also in the S4 seminar, we briefly mentioned raising accountability of the from (what is being proposed —> what is being decided —> what is being completed in response) as a key point. How you been thinking about this as well? For the final submission I would strongly encourage you to further discuss and unpick the key goals for your project and how those were routed in user interviews.
As for the example search, please note that you have perhaps completed a slightly different task from what we have been asking. Your discussion of different devices seems more alike to a discussion of different ‘touch points’ or end user devices through which users might reach your eventual product. However, what we were interested to see is a discussion of systems and products that are related to your topic, that might serve as an inspiration. For example in the seminar, we briefly discussed a number of examples that might be interesting for you to consider, e.g. Trello (as example for a platform that helps built work-flows across members of a team); we also mentioned the Leapfrog project from Lancaster University, which is about developing physical tools and workshop materials for civic participation. For the later, we noted some of the toolkits they developed might have elements that may serve as inspirations for your project, too. There may be other examples found in research papers, such as the ones we provided in class. In the final reflective log, it would be good to see a bit of a discussion of some of these and other examples; and how those may relate to your eventual prototype, so to understand already existing tools (so to see what you may do differently) and to understand what might work / not work based on insights from these examples.
I hope this is helpful. Please speak to Jen or me in class if you need further guidance.
Hi team! It is helpful that you have revisited the goals of the project to take into account the information you have gathered from the interviews. For the reflective log it would be good to see more reflection on how the goals have changed and, importantly, why. Linking your interviews findings more closely with the changes in your goals will help to show how you made decisions and will help to show the story of how the project progressed.
For your example search, you need to engage with more of the academic literature, of which there has been a lot provided both in the seminar and suggested reading from the lecture. There has been a lot of academic and non-academic work that has created, tested and evaluated different technologies and, without engaging with this, you are open to challenge. More examples from academic literature needs to be engaged with and looking at non-academic examples will also help you to situate the project within the ‘real world’. When you include more of those examples within the log, you also need to show why they are relevant and how they have influenced your prototype and the decisions you make. Hope that helps!