Hello, Tobias here signing into the Blog. Here in our team we have also Julian, Manveer, Sam and Yilin. Ultimately, we are going to seek a digital solution for our project partner, namely North Tyneside Council, to try to get the youngsters to tell the Council what they want in their own community so that the Council can craft around it for the future. We’re still very much newbies on WordPress, so please go easy on us!
On the first week, we’re glad to have already met our project partner and we’ve had a very constructive conversation to start off with.
We’ve brainstormed a little and have identified some long term goals. In fact, we only had one initially – we wanted the final outcome to be engaging amongst the younger generation. This is at the heart of our project. Simple.
But when the project partner come to us, what they really want from us is “how”. To answer this question, first we need to know more about what’s actually going on; why it’s not working at the moment.
Claire, the representative of our lovely project partner that day was very kind and analysed with us patiently the links and relationships between different parties involved in the planning processes. With the help of Sharpies, we’ve produced a diagram shewing exactly what is happening currently in the real world as Claire shared her experiences on urban planning, having worked at this industry for over a decade already. It’s all complicated, so the easiest way might be just to let you have a look at the diagram yourself:
No, unlike the maps on Local Plans, we don’t have a legend for the diagram. Sorry! But we believe it actually speaks for itself.
So obviously, developers are also very important stakeholders in the processes. Even if the youngsters have a jolly good plan, if the developers don’t want to build it, it’s just no point of doing anything at all while the young people might also end up disappointed. As a result, we went back to our long term goals and added one more item: how to get the developers to build?
Although the meeting was only an hour long, we still attempted to get some short answers – and questions – for these two long term goals. For engaging with young people, we’ve came up with a few sub-categories: how do we grab their attention? Do we want to make it real fun? How do we make it not too childish to appeal to the older-young people and at the same time not be overly-fledged to appeal to the younger-young people? And if we make an app as the final outcome, do all young people have access to mobile devices?
On the other hand, commercial institutions perhaps have another sets of values that differ from the general public’s in order to sustain their businesses and profits. Okay, that’s fair enough, but if we’re gonna have to work with them to materialise the community in the end, do we have to look at their values in the business world and lead the (even) younger generation to give their input with that in mind, or would that be limiting ourselves to the developers’ world? It really is a tricky business.
Anyways, this pretty much sums up the first week in the office. If you have any dandy ideas on our project, please drop us a few words below – we’re all ears!
Hi all, great to see your first post on here. This is a good start! Your post indicates a key tension between different user groups: those who may be(come) users of the space and should ideally influencing local development choices and those who wish to develop. This tension has been frequently mentioned in work on communicative planning theory (e.g. Arnstein or Innes). It shows you very different needs of different stakeholders that you could try formalise more as you go along.
The questions you ask regarding to your final proposition are good. They give you scope to come up with a process, workshop design (, perhaps an app?) that you can design and then test by asking the three young people to test your idea in week 9 or 10. Keep asking critical questions though, such as whether an mobile app concept is the right ‘solution’ (e.g. does it fit to the needs of your user participants?); or would a different approach be better suited (e.g. a workshop methodology)?
I notice your goals are to make the process engaging and understand how to get the developers to build. Perhaps then your goal may be reformulated to: (1) to give young people a greater voice in shaping new built; and perhaps (2) to encourage developers consider young people’s voices early?
Just a few comments for improvement: The user map is a good start, in the interviews, use it to go back to and to refine it. For example, explore (1) what are the key events / meetings / channels of communication how those groups interact, (2) what problems arise in the existing process, (3) do you mean the ‘youth council’ and councillors? Finally, nice to see you refer to mobile adoption statistics. When you reference, ideally write up a key point to substantiate the argument.
Over to Jen…
Hi Seb, thank you for your comments. There are loads of people who are involved in planning projects and dealing with different stakeholders’ needs is obviously a tough job. But that’s why we need planners!
We really ought to challenge what is already on offer in the market and help young people, who are at the core of our project, to make their voices heard. Our team is still in the process of consolidating some key areas that we would like to have guests’ input on the coming Wednesday and we’ll come back to you as we continue to work on it.
Manveer will also talk a little more about our preparation for our Airtime with the guests from the youth council in the upcoming entry so stay tuned.
Thanks Toby, nice to hear you feel comfortable and make progress. I shall look forward to commenting on your plan for the meeting with the representatives from the youth council. Ideally, post your plan and preparations here before the meeting on the 19th of October so that me and Jen can comment and guide you and refine it. On the day you’ll have a workshop-type situation, please check out some references on how to run workshops and ideally use those as part of your preparation. The course book gives some guidelines, for example one activity it suggests is to use interactions with your user representatives to continue collecting information on the needs of these participants and existing processes and materials involved in their interaction… You might then use the remaining members in your team to take notes as you discuss and speak with the young people. For example, use post-it stickers to reformulate challenges into “how might we […]” notes. Generally, use this interaction to look for their practices, needs, wants; and remember to avoid leading questions.
Also note: the young people are user representatives, but I wouldn’t call them guests.
Anyways, good work… onwards to prepping your user interview.
Thanks again Seb for your comments. Rest assured that we’ve taken note of them and our teammate will put the questions on here as quickly as possible before we meet the user representatives.
Great first blog post! Good to see you documenting the process of what you’ve done so far this week. The topic of engaging young people is definitely one with tensions amongst the stakeholders, particularly in the development context. I think it would be great to nail down your key goals and maybe, as Sebastian said, it is simply to 1) engage young people and 2) get developers more on board. Once you have your key goals set and clear, the other issues you discussed in the post sit nicely under those as things you can explore and consider.
I think the key will be to speak to the young people about how they feel about current practices in relation to planning and whether they feel their voice is heard. I also think it’s important to explore with them, their current technology practices to get a sense for how the ‘digital’ could be a potential solution to bring their voices to the forefront. Apps are great – but there’s lots of other technology out there. You’ll hear a bit more about technology in Tuesday’s lecture but if you’re thinking about preparing your interview schedules then have a look at youth engagement projects from around the country. I know from my own experience, there has been work done on this, with varying levels of success but it’d be a really great place to start to explore lessons learned from previous work. This previous work might not be focused on technology, but that doesn’t mean it’s not relevant or there are not lessons to be learned.
Similarly, I think it’s important to consider the developer’s perspective about the technology. Would they respond well to young people taking part through an app? Is there a particular format that is more appealing to them? Do they need ‘data’ (young people’s voices) to be given in a certain way? This doesn’t mean you should be too focused on creating something that fits into their processes exactly, but the technological idea could look to incorporate the needs of both. At the very least, it’s good to be aware of the constraints that developers might put onto the projects from this angle so you can try to overcome some of them through the design process.
Hope that is helpful! Great work – keep it up.
Jen
Hi Jen, it’s great to see your comments here. We hope our blog entries can document our project as much as we can so that when we look back at it at the end our team can look at them with big smiles in our faces. (And hopefully yours too!)
It’s always difficult to start a project when we have no technical knowledge on the topic whatsoever and we didn’t have much information in hand. But don’t worry, and we aren’t either, because we believe our goals will only become even clearer as we work on the scope of our final outcome. We have already heard quite a few details that we didn’t know; they surely will help our project development and we’ve taken note of them carefully.
You’ve made some good points on the importance of understanding what the target users think about the current situation. It’s crucial to understand what they think or what they have in mind really because our project indeed is more about rethinking the current adopted solution rather than creating a brand new item.
We have realised that there are apps on App Store that have similar goals as us but in a different geographical context. We might have a closer look again later and if it’s deemed suitable, they may be referenced accordingly but at this initial stage we would like to keep our mind open.
We really hope our final outcome could be appealing and inclusive. The input of our guests from the youth council, whom we’re going to meet on the coming Wednesday, is particularly critical and our team is working on the items that we would like to have their views on. And as you can expect, further progress of the project will be documented and they will subsequently become available here. Thank you for your support and be sure to check back regularly!