Tobias Ho – DigiCivics @ APL

It’s been a great time

It has been our great honour to have the opportunity to work on this project and we think it’s time to look back on the many things we’ve achieved, together.

When we were first assigned the project, we had no idea how to start. We didn’t know what the young people were after. Our team had to come together to explore and think about all possible options to set out a basic framework.

Comparing with other teams, we’ve come a long way before we finally made the decision of what we were gonna do – an educational app. It was late and so we were pushing the time limit a bit, too. With the invaluable input we received from our project partners, we’ve learnt, we’ve grown, we’ve refined, together.

This is the final interface update we expect for now and it is based on the feedback we’ve got from our project partner. We’ve given it a bit more of character, we’ve got the street view and we’ve revamped the way it looks. We’re loving it and we hope you love it as much as we do.

Another reason for us to celebrate the finish of this final Plan A Lot prototype is that it responses to our original intention naturally and successfully. It looks good and it is helping young people to learn about planning. We haven’t gone for the ‘hard-sell’ tactics to get the idea of urban planning across, but it is working even better than using the ‘hard-sell’ tactics. So yes, it really is something to celebrate.

To us, we’ve given our best shot to this project. As much as we want to continue bringing this project further, we’re afraid it has to come to a close at this stage. We’re committed and we still firmly believe that this project will really make a difference to the young people and we hope further developments would be considered by the relevant parties, but we regret to say that this might not be something that’s within our ability today. Please allow us to say a massive ‘thank you’ to you for being part of our journey on Plan A Lot in the past three months.

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P.S. Just before we go, we’d like to let you know that we’ve actually done a presentation plus a write up that chronicles the processes we’ve gone through to produce Plan A Lot. If you’re one of our project partners, you should have received these items electronically already through Teresa, our very charming coordinator whom you really should have known by now. If you’ve never worked with us before but would still like an electronic copy as well as for all other enquiries, please email us at T[dot]Ho1[at]newcastle[dot]ac[dot]uk.

On track

Just before the stand-down period commenced, we’ve been rounding up and reviewed what we’ve done this term – the things we’ve learnt together, we’ve achieved together and also to look at the details we needed to work on and make them even better – these are covered on the previous blog entry.

Apart from that it was very much an admin week in general: we’ve assigned roles for each of our teammates and we’re working closely together to produce the high quality work for final submission in early January 2017.

Have a great Christmas and all the best for New Year and we’ll see you all in 2017.

If you do have any issues over this leave period, please feel free to email me or leave us a message here.

Plan A Lot. Planning a lot at a time.

Cogito ergo sum.

Just as we started to go deeper and refine our offerings, we stepped back. We thought.

Why did we do it? Who would it help? What made it deserved to exist?

We simplified. We started over. We’ve made it better.

And this is it.

We still have a lot to cover.

Come back soon, we can’t wait to show you what we have on offer.

Allow us to introduce ourselves

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!