This week during the seminar session we met Jen, our mentor, and had the opportunity to explain in detail the research, progress and initial ideas we had for our project. We explained to Jen how our project had developed from the initial brief, as that is the only information she had of our project until that point. We discussed with Jen our user research and told her our plans to run a workshop for the year 5 children of Front Street Primary School. Jen helped us to develop a clear, structured plan for the workshop. We also decided on our main aim for our project, to encourage pride and stewardship of young people in Chase Park. Jen also helped us to prepare questions ready for our interview planned for week 6 with Holly, the youth worker, from ‘Kick the Dust’. Aspects we plan to interview Holly on include, the context she works in, whether the people she works with are connected to Chase Park and what ideas she thinks are most likely to encourage engagement from younger people.
Week 5 was when the majority of our research into other projects in digital civics took place. One project we researched was Jen’s, ‘Participatory Media: Creating Spaces for Storytelling in Neighbourhood Planning’. This was useful as the project also used a park, Kingston Park. The project was to develop an app where citizens would have a platform to share their own stories. This project involved running workshops as a research method which we are also using as our own research. Another app we researched was an app created for breastfeeding mothers called ‘Feed Finder’. This app is location based, it provides. platform where breastfeeding mothers can rate and review places they have found to breastfeed for the information of other breastfeeding mothers. This app is loosely related to our project as it brings together experience of citizens themselves to create a reliable information service on an issue of importance to that community. Chase Park is an issue of importance to their local community, to have a location based app for Chase Park where users can share experiences, photos, videos, events etc in the park we believe would encourage others to visit.
Our next steps include: running the workshop at Front street Primary School, interviewing Holly from ‘Kick the Dust’ and drawing together all of our previous research to have a clear journey for our project development, ready for the midterm presentation at the end of week 6.
Thanks for the post, given the presentations today, our feedback will relate back to the discussion in your blog post. If you can please try to also response to the respective reflective questions per week, so that we can easily tally up your responses to those weekly reflective questions. So if you can it would be helpful to see your response to the revised goals and solution sketching here, too, even if it came later.
Hi team, thanks for your post. Glad to hear you had a good experience meeting Jen – sounds like she has provided you with some very useful insights. Shame you have not had chance to meet Holly as you intended so think about if possible and time allows there is something you can do instead to get this additional perspective on your research. Not much else to add, apart from just echoing what Sebastian has said. But I do appreciate you were playing catch up with this post, and that you are now up to date. Just make sure you have the reflective questions in mind and are clearly responding to them when you are getting to the final design log.