Our team consists of 4 members : Aymeric, Ellen, Isaac and Jordy. We are from different countries and have therefore different planning backgrounds which we think could be an advantage for us in this project since we can benefit from our differences and come up with a good solution to the project.
Digital civics is a way of coming up with a solution to a specific issue through understanding the needs and requirements of a set of users through working with them. Nowadays, people use technology in their everyday life and is the most common way to receive and distribute new information in an interactive way. This is also why digital civics has become so important over the last years and is an helpful tool to get people more engaged and more involved in important questions that involves them and the area they are living in. By talking to different stakeholders and other people through a contextual enquiry in the concerned area we would get a wider perspective on the issue which would probably make us come up with a better solution to the issue.
This project includes working with Newcastle cycling stakeholder forum in order to come up with some sort of solution of how to display and allow discussions of the ideas and the issues of the forum meetings. Our goals for the meeting with our client are to understand the functioning of the forum and gather a greater understanding of its members and their experience of cycling in the city, how it could be improved and the issues they face. During this client meeting, it is also important to comprehend our client’s favourable method of displaying the information. We also need to identify the users who are going to be involved in our project as we need to cater to their individual needs. For example some individuals may not have access or be familiar with new technologies.
A issue we could face while talking to the client is that we will only receive one person’s perspective on the issues raised. If we were able to get the chance to talk to different people from different groups of the forum and various areas around the city we would get a wider perspective of the actual issue which would give us a better chance to come up with the best solution for every part of the project, therefore resulting in a greater overall uptake in the numbers of our selected civic grouping using our project.
Hello team, thanks for this entry. It is nice to see you introduce your team members and the diverse backgrounds that they have. You could have perhaps mentioned why you choose the team name ‘we love bikes’ or mention that this is your team name.
I like your description of the topic domain of digital civics. However be careful that it is not a clear cut concept and that there are not even clear definitions for what it is. For us in the lecture, we noted that some see ‘digital civics’ as related to Dewey’s concept of ‘publics’, so parts of society that come to identify themselves as a group for some shared matter or concern. So in this regard be wary of saying that ‘digital civics’ as a domain is “a way of coming up with solutions”. In the lecture we outlined that work in this domain aims to achieve novel forms of public participation; we also how De Lange related it to “issue-based politics”. For your final submission, I do encourage you to go back to our lecture slides and also the key reading by Oliver et al. and De Lange et al. for that week.
Your review of what the project main entail is good albeit brief. You manage to restate and rephrase key aspects of the project brief in your own works and you highlight two / three concerns for why it would be good to include a ‘diverse’ set of stakeholders in defining your design proposition. Heather (the meeting minute taker) may give her a run down of the challenges of producing documentation for the meeting. Do work with Rob to get access to the two stakeholders in the brief that may be able to tell you more as to how the actions of the forum are perceived by attendees and perhaps cyclists who do not attend.
I hope this is helpful and I look forward to your next entry.