Author: b7024884

Week 10 – Team 2

This week we began our prototype testing process. We met with Clare Ross, from Gateshead Council at the Civic Centre to show her the PowerPoint presentation prototype of our app for Chase Park. As Clare is one of the stakeholders in our project, it was essential we gained feedback from her for the prototype to ensure we had fulfilled the project goals which were based around the stakeholders’ requests.

Overall Clare responded very positively to our prototype. She was especially impressed with the volunteer hours log section and explained how the volunteers currently use Whatsapp for this, but having this facility on the app would improve communication, make the volunteers feel that they were part of something and make volunteering more sociable. Clare also highlighted that having a public log for individuals’ hours, this could encourage volunteers to complete more hours as it may result in competitiveness. This would have a positive impact on the park and the log could be submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund as proof of the volunteer hours completed. Clare also gave positive feedback regarding the location service and the ability to share photographs of the park within the app.

Clare only had two concerns about the app. Firstly, she suggested we label the options on the main menu rather than only using symbols; to avoid confusion or doubt of what the symbols meant. Clare also highlighted the obvious issue around safeguarding. Safeguarding is something we need to discuss further as a group and find the most effective way of using security measures within the app without taking the fun out of it.

Clare used the prototype as we intended and we asked her to think out loud as she did. This was useful as we gained feedback from her regarding every aspect of the app. Overall, this prototype test left us feeling positive about our progress but highlighted that we need to think further about the clarity of the visuals and explore the best measures we can introduce for high levels of security and safety.

Our next step will be to hopefully meet with Alan from the Friends of Chase Park to also test our prototype with him and gain feedback from another of our stakeholders.

Week 5 – Chase Park – workshop design & example search

This week during the seminar session we met Jen, our mentor, and had the opportunity to explain in detail the research, progress and initial ideas we had for our project. We explained to Jen how our project had developed from the initial brief, as that is the only information she had of our project until that point. We discussed with Jen our user research and told her our plans to run a workshop for the year 5 children of Front Street Primary School. Jen helped us to develop a clear, structured plan for the workshop. We also decided on our main aim for our project, to encourage pride and stewardship of young people in Chase Park. Jen also helped us to prepare questions ready for our interview planned for week 6 with Holly, the youth worker, from ‘Kick the Dust’. Aspects we plan to interview Holly on include, the context she works in, whether the people she works with are connected to Chase Park and what ideas she thinks are most likely to encourage engagement from younger people.

Week 5 was when the majority of our research into other projects in digital civics took place. One project we researched was Jen’s, ‘Participatory Media: Creating Spaces for Storytelling in Neighbourhood Planning’. This was useful as the project also used a park, Kingston Park. The project was to develop an app where citizens would have a platform to share their own stories. This project involved running workshops as a research method which we are also using as our own research. Another app we researched was an app created for breastfeeding mothers called ‘Feed Finder’. This app is location based, it provides. platform where breastfeeding mothers can rate and review places they have found to breastfeed for the information of other breastfeeding mothers. This app is loosely related to our project as it brings together experience of citizens themselves to create a reliable information service on an issue of importance to that community. Chase Park is an issue of importance to their local community, to have a location based app for Chase Park where users can share experiences, photos, videos, events etc in the park we believe would encourage others to visit.

Our next steps include: running the workshop at Front street Primary School, interviewing Holly from ‘Kick the Dust’ and drawing together all of our previous research to have a clear journey for our project development, ready for the midterm presentation at the end of week 6.

Week 1 Blog – Team 2 – Chase Park

Hello,

This is the first of our blog’s for our project, ‘Engaging Young People with Video’, with our focus are being Chase Park. We are a team of four, Laura, Kathryn, Louis and James. We believe that the four individual skill sets we possess will allow us to work effectively as a team. We believe that, together, we can produce a successful project and also learn and develop new skills from each other along the journey. Between us, we believe we have strong presentation skills, creativity, great organisation and a useful understanding of the digital world.

We chose the Chase Park project as, the use of video in the planning world is something we all found innovative and wanted to learn more about. Furthermore, the project itself is something, as a younger generation, we feel we are informed on and potentially have an advantage when deciding what does and does not work.

The stakeholders in our project are widespread from Gateshead Council, to the Friends of Chase Park Group to Front Street Primary School. We are excited to meet the stakeholders as we feel they can give us a more informed idea of what is required of us and how we can meet expectations.

The main aims of our project include

– Making the park a more attractive place to visit, central to this we will explore the vandalism problem currently in the park
– Making the park accessible to all age groups, ensuring no group feels they are unwelcome there
– Using video to express our ideas and encourage the surrounding community to make the most of their available green space

The next step in our process is to meet the stakeholders. We are intrigued to find out more about the park itself, the community it serves and the priorities the community have for their park. We believe this next step will leave us in a better position to make our plan of action for the project.