Air Quality Group Week 7

Approaching the set methods to create our prototype we first faced which prototyping resources would be the most effective form of communication with the User Groups conveying the set message of air quality activism in an easy approachable format.

A Prototyping model is built, tested, and then reworked as necessary until an acceptable prototype is finally achieved from which the complete system or product can now be developed. (SearchCIO)

As outlined our approach to prototyping our concept would have to convey effectively our concept while being open to change depending on the user’s feedback, for this Marvel seemed an appropriate resource for prototyping allowing a visual and easy to use fundamental app dashboard concept façade to be displayed and tested by the user groups hopefully allowing easy understanding and honest feedback, to fully display our concept Marvel provided a good displaying platform however to fully depict our concept Adobe Photoshop is also a reliable and efficient prototyping tool to allow concept images to be displayed in a real world image environment to further engage the audience.

To create our prototype our team had to decide on a format that is accessible to a wider audience of pedestrians and commuter of various ages, to effectively target both a pedestrian and commuter audience the prototype would be in two part with two member primarily in each while also working and assisting the other part of the prototype. A Marvel App is to be designed on edition for pedestrians and one for commuters displayed on the adverting space already existing on current bus tops.

To promote air quality activism displaying of accessible information is crucial in engaging the user audience along Gosforth high street both pedestrian and commuter. This is to educate and promote community matters such as air quality pollution in the surrounding neighborhood by creating a need to talk and address these issues which are held back due to the current difficulty of interputating the existing data generated by the air pollution censors already fitted along Gosforth high street and projected by Newcastle’s Urban Observatory.

Blog Entry 1: Air Quality Gosforth High street

Digital Civics: Air Quality Blog Entry 1

Project goals:

FullSizeRender (5)A Newcastle university urban planning focused bottom up campaign initiative to increase user and community awareness of air quality control centered on Gosforth high street. Working with the users on easy and effective forms of interpreting the data supplied by the air quality monitors situated along the high street, making the data accessible to everybody with the goal of increasing community awareness and support for self-managed air quality control through community projects.

Stakeholders & users:

In this project, the main users are students that in both private and church schools, commuters from the North, different business on the street and residents. They are quite important as variety role are played by them. For example, students and the old residents should be taken good care but the poor air quality make them expose under the risk of illness. Commuters come here by private or bus and bring business to this street and shop owners really need them to live. However, they can make traffic congestion as to many cars and buses which is also the main cause of air pollution. As residents, they create a group called SPACE on Facebook, Twitter and website. What they have done is they have posted the problem of the air pollution and explain this to the public. People can say their needs and make suggestions in this group.

At first the council and population wants less traffic on this road because of the
air pollution but the thing is they wants more traffic for the health of businesses. FullSizeRender (4)Besides, there are a lot of data available on a few websites but they are unusable. We think because it’s difficult to understand the data if you are not an expert. For example, for the level of the pollution in air there are only numbers with abbreviations of products. Therefore, to have a better use of data, they need to be more imagery with colours and map for the localisation.

Key Questions for the Sprint

  • Why does the existing air quality data not work?
  • We think this could because the current data is hard to interpret and very technical.
  • One way we could improve this is by colour coding the data so the average resident know it the current amount of air quality is bad.
  • To what extent are the stakeholders participating with each other?
    • Despite Space existing as a community group it is unclear how much corporation there is between other stakeholders such as the GPS forth schools trust.
    • We will aim to work with them all in our development process in order the improve links between groups. This is important as the long term goal of improving air pollution in Gosforth will require all the stakeholders to cooperate.