SIA Week 4 Log

Week 4 Log

This is the week 4 log for SIA. This week we carried out part of our user research, meeting with various project partners and also began searching for examples of products/services/devices that serve as state of the art in our project.

User Research:

As part of our user research we went to the Greening Wingrove Annual Meeting on the 16^th February. We felt as though this meeting would give us a huge opportunity to meet some of our project partners and potentially even meet some local residents in the area. The event was also useful as it took place at 250 Philip Street, Arthur’s Hill (the building that part of our project is based on) and so we got a much better idea of the actual building we were working with.

At the meeting, we spoke with David Webb, who is a local resident and the Secretary of Greening Wingrove CIC as well as one of our key stakeholders in the project. Below are the most important and valuable points we obtained from the interview with David:

• Currently local residents communicate through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages. The WhatsApp groups are used to contribute ideas and thoughts, but are rarely used, with David mentioning that ‘messages are transferred maybe once every two weeks’. The Facebook groups are slightly more active. However, the problem is that there are many different pages and so trying to organise larger events or communicate on a large scale is difficult.
• The main issue David said we would have with our project is that not everyone will use one form of social network, which on one of the reasons multiple platforms are currently used.
• David’s vision for the building involved using it for multiple purposes. Ideas included a post office, renting out the top rooms for storage, use of the already in place music studio and events for the youth including youth clubs and weekly activities.

We also managed to speak with other members of Greening Wingrove with the main points from them being:

• Not enough is available for younger generations to do, with many just roaming and playing on the streets.
• There is a difficulty in getting all the locals involved in the area. This is primarily due to language barriers and people not knowing what events are out there.

We aim to continue with our user research in the following weeks with our door to door surveys. We are also hoping to organise an interview with Katrina Jordison, the Greening Wingrove CIC Community Organiser, as we were not able to speak to her for too long at the annual meeting.