Background research and goal setting – Page 2

Week 1 Log – NUTC

Hi, this is our week 1 blog for the project “Digital visualisations for transport scheme engagement (focus on Heaton road)”, which is being done our group Newcastle University’s Transportation Committee or NUTC, which consists of 3 of us, Kim, Sofia and Gabriela. We are from different countries and have therefore different ideas of planning and are able to have a wider range of background knowledge from many places, which we think could be an advantage for us in this project as we may be able to benefit from our different lifestyles and come up with a range of solutions that would be beneficial in many different parts of the world. The skills we bring to this project vary between organisation, planning, research, visualisation/ creativity, analysis and communication. We chose this particular project as we found it particularly interesting as we all have taken an interest in transportation and in developing a sustainable infrastructure, hoping to create a more beneficial environment for the locals.

Aims

Our project is based in the location of Heaton Road, its objectives is to create less parking spaces along the roadside in preparation for a bicycle route along the road in which would create a safer environment for pedestrians. As it is the first week of the project our aim is to get a better understanding of the clients expectations and be able to identify ourselves as fellow cyclists and understand more the routes needed to link residential areas to more public areas, such as shops or schools. We also believe we need to focus on accessibility, safety, an appealable route and an incentive for people to want to take the route.

To prepare for our client we think we should take a more questionable approach upon the first meeting, to learn more about the project from them to help us gain a greater understanding of the locals and what they would want out of it. After this we believe it would be easier to bring propositions to the client of different approaches we come up with and imagine could be a suitable plan.

Questions for the Clients

The sort of questions we currently have are more uncertainties of their preference of formatting of our propositions.
Any specifics that should be included within our proposition
The current situation for cyclists and pedestrians in the area
How connected will the bicycle lane be once incorporated into the road
What is the main outcome of the scheme and what is the most important objective predicted

3) Cycle Stakeholder Forum Week 3

For our user research and before planning to meet different stakeholders, the first step is to use internet research to understand exactly who we are meeting with and their role. That means attempt to get as much information as possible about the users, such as what are they doing in life, how old are they approximately and what they look like.

We involved Robert Snowball who works in the transport department at Newcastle city council and also Heather Evans who has been attending the cycling stakeholder forum meetings for an extended period of time and currently takes the minutes for the forums meetings. Meeting with Heather we hoped to gain further insight into who currently attended the meetings in terms of their demographic and gain a better understanding of its running.
We hoped to gain insights into how the workings of the forum and the interactions which took place within it, by understanding the functioning of the forum we would be more aware of the problems it faces such as lack of representation of all different kinds of cyclists and its problems in getting information regarding it out to the public.

The meeting with Robert Snowball was based around design research, we carried out several activities with him to try to have a better understanding of the project and its issues. This was done through the use of various materials like post it notes and diagrams on posters. The meeting with Heather Evans was totally different. We performed an interview with open questions, which allowed her to speak as much as she wanted about various specific topics and questions that we carefully prepared.

For the user interviews, we met and planned the questions we were going to ask Rob Snowball and Heather Evans,to get the most out of our meetings with them. This involved focusing our questions around the roles, which each of them undertook, so for example Rob’s interview questions revolved around his work at the council and the creation of the forum. Heather’s interview involved more around her own opinions and experiences of being involved in the process and some of the history of the forum to further our own understanding of the meetings and other individuals and groups that are involved. We tried to leave the questions we chose open to their own interpretation rather than leading them to answers to understand their own opinions on the cycle stakeholder forum. For example asking their own opinions and experiences on the forum rather than asking if they have any negative opinions or experiences from the forum.

Furthermore, we just want to add that we have three interviews remaining with Mark, Andrew and Rorie.

2) TRECC- meeting with the stakeholders

Hi, this week our team (finally!) came up with a name and seeing as our project is all about community involvement, we decided to involve all of our team using our first initials to spell TRECC- we are TEAM TRECC.

Other than that, we met with two stakeholders, John and Nigel, who both work in the planning department at Newcastle City council and Nigel is a stakeholder listed in our project brief- he will be our main point of contact at the council. We went into the meeting with many questions and conversation points to discuss with the stakeholders, as listed in week 1’s blog post. We attempted to organise the questions into common themes, although we found both ourselves and the clients talking outside the ‘theme’ and often jumping ahead to discuss the overall aim of the brief. However, overall, we think the meeting was very successful and feel we gathered all the information that we were hoping for at this stage (plus a little more, perhaps for a later stage).

Who are the stakeholders and what do they do?

Firstly, we wanted to gather information about the stakeholders and how they currently exchange with each other; our stakeholders are the developers, the city council, and the community groups, all involved with a specific development proposal. We created a ‘user-centric’ process map to display this information, which outlines the interactions between the 3 main stakeholders.

Nigel and John explained to us that the developers engage with the council in the ‘pre-application’ stage of the proposal; the developers then,by request of council guidelines, engage with the community at a consultation meeting organised by the developers. Then, the developers go back to engage with the council, having produced a ‘statement of community consultation’ and community engagement will continue between locals and the developers until the council are satisfied with the developer’s community consultation and no more amendments are necessary; the application can then be submitted.

What is the current process? What issues does it raise?

It was made clear to us straight away that there are very few guidelines around the ‘statement of community consultation’, other than that developers have to do it, so it is seen more as something they need to ‘tick off’ in order for their application to be submitted. The council are the stakeholders mainly behind wanting this to change so that there becomes a more standardised process, as explained in our project brief. Nigel and John attempted to summarise the ‘pre-application process’, focusing specifically on the ‘statement of community consultation’ part, and so we have displayed this in the form of a flow chart.

One of the main issues with this process is the lack of representation from certain demographics of the local community, so it is important for us to prioritise reaching out to these groups as a long term goal. An example Nigel and John gave of why this is happening is the fact that developers hold the community consultation meetings during working hours of the day, say 2pm on a Wednesday, when the majority of people in a community would be at work, or, if it was a densely populated student area, at university. The stakeholders went on to suggest the developers also do not advertise the meetings very effectively, as a consequence, only those members of the community with a real insight into planning within the area were aware of the meetings; these tended to be well-educated people of the older generation.

Furthermore, the impoverish or less-educated are often not represented at community consultations, because they simply aren’t aware and can’t access information about the development proposal or the meetings. Often, if comments and objections are made about developments, especially larger ones that will attract more attention from the public and media anyway, they will be ignored by the developers and council because they aren’t always planning related or specific to that site. This is down to lack of education about planning-which we could attempt to rectify on the app,-as well as the ‘nimbyism’ approach that many residents take to any type of development going on in their local area, something which nobody can do anything about if it is an area highlighted for development in the local plan.

A topic that was also brought up is how the space in a development is allocated; developers are obliged to leave some open space within a housing development, conforming to the space standards set by the local council, however, due to lack of input from the community, the open space often ends up being not used, or misused. Overall, this leads to tensions between the community and the council, where complaints from residents are made directly. If developers knew, in the early stages of the application, how this open space would be best served they could alter their designs to better fit the purpose of the space, in line with the community requests. It would also allow the community to raise practical issues that perhaps the developers wouldn’t be aware of, that only members of that specific community would perceive as a problem. Again, this issue highlights the importance of consulting with the community as early as possible, and with as much of the community as possible.

These issues could be solved, using the app we have to design, by making the information about developments more accessible for students and working members of the community, so even if they cannot attend the meetings there would be a space on the app for them to leave their comments about the development. Nigel and John also suggested for us to simplify and condense the application proposals, in someway, in order for it to be more understable for those who wouldn’t understand the terminologies or policies highlighted within a planning application; hopefully then everyone in the community would feel comfortable and confident leaving comments about the development. Furthermore, this would speed up the overall ‘pre-application’ process, benefitting both the council and the developers, so that issues raised by the community can be altered sooner rather than later, leading to fewer objections when it comes to being submitted and lowering tensions between all the stakeholders. Early engagement is key for a smoother process, improving relationships between all users so everyone feels like their voice has been heard and compromises have been made on all sides.

Long-Term Goals

Overall, our long-term goal is to design an app that improves the interaction between all 3 stakeholders, and standardises the way in which members of the community can leave comments about potential developments. Within the app we want to achieve 3 main things that will hopefully improve relationships between the stakeholders, making the process of community consultation much smoother and more efficient for all users:

Early engagement- allowing users to access information about the proposal as soon as possible and leave comments for the developers to consider before it is too late for them to change anything.
Education- simplifying and explaining the terminology within a planning application so people can understand the development proposal more thoroughly and leave relevant comments for the developers.
Community representation- reaching out to all members of the community so everyone feels comfortable and confident leaving comments, and if all demographic areas are fairly and fully represented, there will be fewer objections and lower tensions between stakeholders.

Week 3, NUDC: Stakeholder meeting

Hello again,

So far, we have held a meeting with two of our stakeholders, Ali Lamb and Ed Barrington. Ali Lamb works for Newcastle City Council and is part of the Streets4People (S4P) programme. By meeting her we hoped to gain a second opinion (the first being Tony Waterston) on what our goals and main focus should be. She had a slightly different viewpoint in that she thought the residents of Jesmond were already willing and able to provide feedback on planning applications whereas Tony was concerned the JRA were only reaching about 10% of the local population. Ed Barrington, who is a member of the S4P reference group, gave us insight into what difficulties might be found in trying to place some sort of digital technology around the school areas to gain feedback as he is a parent and long term resident of Jesmond. In this meeting we also involved our academic mentor, Sean Peacock, to give us assistance in managing the meeting as he had worked with our stakeholders previously and use his expertise in digital civics and experience as a student to give us a more clear focus of what our role is. Afterwards, Sean told us to not put too much emphasis on trying to reach children as the meeting had a large focus on Jesmond primary school.

We came into the interviews with some pre-prepared questions in mind that had come up from our meeting with Tony Waterston but by carrying out a semi-structured interview, we allowed ourselves to use the new information that the stakeholders told us to think of new questions.

According to Ali the council received money from the Cycle City Ambition Fund (CCAF) to invest into improving cycling routes and walking alike. Ed had informed us that locals often miscomprehend planning goals so instead of adopting to improving cycling they cared more about the council creating more parking lots which contradicts their aims.

The council beforehand became involved with Commonplace, creating a Needs Analysis (interactive feedback map) utilised for 3 months. Jesmond had done considerably better than other areas, which had 467 people registered and producing comments, between them creating 1500 comments. The council has 7 locations in Jesmond in mind, based off of activity and analysis findings which we could utilise as locations for our product placement. Moreover, Jesmond was identified as the most behaviourally malleable area from mosaic profiling, as residents often consist of students and alike. This means they’d be more likely to adopt greener transportation methods such as cycling to the universities. Ed also highlighted the significance of having the physical product we’d create indoors to make it more comfortable and potentially more secure from both weathering and vandalisation.

We have also started thinking about our midterm presentation about our user and stakeholder research. Currently we feel like we’re more or less in phase with the module work and looking forward to meeting our mentor again during the next seminar to further discuss our meeting and what we should do next.

3) North Tyneside youth council – stakeholder interviews

Our approach to user research has been specifically based on the key stake holder North Tyneside youth council. These a young people aged between 13 – 18 therefore it is particularly important that our method is suitable for the age group.

What methods do you employ? (i.e. see lecture 2), Who do you involve and what insights do you hope to gain? What did you plan for your user interviews?

The initial method was contextual enquiry as it includes user conversation. With emphasis on the talking aloud method and artefact use. We feel this would be best as sometimes younger people can express their thoughts and ideas verbally or through visuals aid such as drawings. With large groups such as a youth council it will also encourage a collaborative detailing practice. Where all members are included rather than a survey or questionnaire style. Along with this method we also decided to conduct one of our meetings with the youth council using a design research method. It was intended to run the session in a workshop format. We created poster prompts to allow the members to write down ideas and thoughts in a creative way including different coloured pens in order of importance. Through these posters we has planned for a particular points or question to be on each so it wasn’t to over whelming. The points were of significance to help us better understand what the stake holders wanted achieved. With putting two methods into place we could create a strong attention to values and experience, but also making tangible with the use of posters and interactive activities.

Although we have had one meeting with the youth council members we do hope to have a more productive second meeting. Unfortunately, we did face some challenges with the adults present. They did take over the session and asked many of their own questions. Making it difficult to run the work shop style session with the youth member. Although it was beneficial because it clearly outlined we have a lot further to go with understanding clearly what they want achieved through the digital method. As it was different to what we had expected, they don’t want an app or anything online due to cost. So we are revisiting this as they want something much more simpler.

For our future research we hope to follow a workshop style for the youth with an additional element of wither surveys or questionnaires for the adults involved. This would allow for both groups to have a platform of opinion and ideas without one dominating. During week 4 we have also decided to outline some goals based on feedback from our previous blogs and what we learnt from our client meetings.

Key issues or issue the North Tyneside Council want achieved from a digital method
Is there a particular emphasis on the environment in the area if so do they wish for this method to help solved these issues?
Who should this digital method be aimed at? Youth council member or general public?

2) CSF – Week 2

During seminar two we got to meet Rob Snowball from the City Council who informed us about their work with the Cycle Stakeholder Forum. The forum’s role is to bring the people interested in cycling together to exchange information and ideas on how to improve the current cycling conditions in Newcastle. At the moment the forum’s demographic consists mostly of the same people who’s been in the forum from the beginning; people who already cycle and they are mostly elderly people or women and men in their 50’s and older. There’s a lack of younger people in the forum which he’s hoping we could find a solution for; how can we get younger people and students involved in the forum?

It became clear that the main point of our project with the Cycle Stakeholder Forum is to find a solution on how to get more people involved in the subject. Right now are the city council only using their current email list of 200 people to get the discussed information about the forum out which means that the rest of the city’s people won’t get the information and therefore they probably don’t know about the forum’s existence and that they have a chance to get their voice heard about this subject.

During the discussion with Rob some questions about how the city council actually work with reaching out to different groups in the community came up and it became clear that they aren’t really working on doing that at this point at all which is questionable since it’s also clear that it’s the variety of community groups they want to reach out to. So one big question is how to get the council to go from “wishes” to actually take action in this subject.

Together with Rob we came up with some project goals; both short term and long term. The short term goals are to talk to more stakeholders so we’ll get a wider perspective on what they’re expecting from the project. The stakeholders we’ll talk to are currently in the forum with different roles; Heather who takes notes and minutes, Mark and Andrew who work in different communities in the city with for example questions about disability and also Rorie who’s working at Newcastle University and has been involved in the forum as well. We want to hear what they think could be improved, maybe they have their own solutions or ideas on the problems which could help us with our final result.
The long term goal is to find a solution to the problem which basically means to get more people involved in the forum and also inform the community about the benefits from cycling.

Week 2, NUDC: Meeting with our client

Hello again,

Last week we met with our client Tony Waterston who is the chair of the JRA. During the seminar he gave us some new information crucial to the project as well as contact information for other people involved with S4P that could further our understanding of the program and situation. We also talked a lot about the different stakeholders and the problem with reaching out to them. One of the stakeholders we hadn’t considered was the younger demographic, a group that quite often gets left out. Waterston said that one of the goals for the project was that the area should be so safe that eight year olds should be able to move around there for themselves. We also discussed the fact that many students reside in the area and only stay for a few years at most, therefore they might not be as interested in the future of the neighbourhood compared to long term residents. Yet, their input is important nonetheless due to a continuous influx of students moving into the Jesmond area.

As shown by the mind map below there are a few different stakeholders that we have pointed out. When it comes to existing residents, it’s students that mostly use bikes to move around the area. We believe that a bigger percentage of students would cycle if there were direct cycle routes to the universities. We also have the long term residents, mostly elderly people who’ve lived in Jesmond for a long time, these tend to drive, adding to congestion in the area. The last group would be the school children and their parents, both who live in the area, as well as those who drive into Jesmond from other areas. It is the latter group that causes a lot of congestion around West Jesmond Primary school. Other stakeholders are of course the JRA and the Streets for People project.

Currently the JRA communicate information to the residents via mail, notice boards and library files but these options offer no way to gain meaningful feedback from the public. Residents in the area could if they want comment on the JRA website but this is not often used so the JRA still suffer from a lack of response from the community. The council on the other hand have better methods to obtain input from the people via means such as Let’s Talk, an online survey and discussion website for the residents of Newcastle, and committee meetings where local residents are welcome to take part in and give their opinion during a meeting with representatives from the council.

The main goal for our design is that all of these different groups should be able to use and understand it. Since it will be digital we are somewhat concerned that some of the older population will have a hard time comprehending the interface, while the younger generation probably won’t. Therefore it is important for us to have this in mind while designing. For now we have quite a clear view of what our client wants from us as a group and also some ideas as to how we would achieve that. However, after talking to our stakeholders we might discover other aspects that need to be included. In short our key questions for the sprint would be:

How do we make an easy to understand interface for everyone while still being able to collect the information our client needs?
We know what the client needs, but what is it that the stakeholders want?

During this week we will meet with some of the stakeholders to discuss these matters.

1) A tool to gather young people’s priorities in North Tyneside

A tool to gather young people’s priorities in North Tyneside
BLOG 1 – Danielle, Sally, Sophie, Adam & Alex

Our group project is ‘a tool to gather young people’s priorities in North Tyneside’. Over the semester in digital civics we will be working with the North Tyneside council and youth cabinet. We will use digital civics to establish a method to enable young people in the area to express their opinions for what makes a good neighbourhood with a particular focus on the environmental issues in the area. There are a number of stakeholders listed in the brief, including North Tyneside Council, Youth cabinet representatives, young people in the wider public and officers in the environment directorate. Some challenges that might be associated with these stakeholder groups include – The council may have financial incentives which could make them biased when it comes to the development regardless of the data that is provided by the youth, however they will also benefit if development is done well as people will move into the area. The youth cabinet that currently exists may not be an accurate representation of the wider population. However, we will consider all stakeholder groups interest when designing our final product.

After unpacking the brief further during the week, the list of questions that we came up with to ask our client (Teresa) at the first meeting are as follows;

Is there a specific age group of the ‘youth’ we are trying to engage through the use digital civics?
What is the socio-economic status of the people that will be using these methods? – – – This could potentially impact our final design if not all members of the community have access to a mobile phone, there may be limitations to what we design if it needs to be accessible via computer as an alternative.
Will there be a chance where we can speak to the youth members in council to discuss whether they have had success on other projects to get advice on how we could approach this?
Since the project is looking at new housing development proposals in North Tyneside, is there a particular development happening at the moment that this project should be focused towards? Or is the aim of this long term use for all developments within the area and therefore it should be a more flexible design?
Is there a particular method that the client would be leaning towards us using in our prototype for example; an app, a blog, engagement on social media or are they open minded to see what we come up with ourselves.
Whilst this project aims to get young people to express their priorities for their neighbourhood, is there a system in place that successfully allows the rest of the population to contribute their opinions that we could potentially take ideas from? Or is gathering priorities an issue for the entire population in North Tyneside and we have just been asked to focus on this specific population group.
We also realise that Teresa is not our main client and therefore after the meeting we may still have outstanding questions for Julia following the completion of the meeting which we will look forward to exploring further in the coming weeks. We hope after our meeting we will have a better understanding of some parts of our project so we can keep moving further.

2) Initial Client Meeting – Project Tyneside Council Youth & Environment

Stakeholders – First Client Meeting

Client Meeting 11/10/2017

Throughout the meeting we address a number questions and highlighted areas we need to further research. This will be done through a meeting with the direct client and youth council members. We have also outlined that secondary research such as previous council minutes, youth data for the local area and the comparison of North Tyneside council and others in the country that have been successful regarding similar issues would be beneficial. A key component that as a group we feel we now clearly understand who the stake holders ae and the level of importance within each of those.

Long Term Purpose:

Youth feeling apart of the council and the decisions made
UN Convention (children should be involved in decisions that impact them)
Engaging the youth in matter locally
North Tyneside leading the way for encouraging youth to be involved
Participating at younger age has long term benefits
Encourages involvement in other aspects of life (eg. Political)

Environmental Challenges:

The progress as be so far limited
Cleaner streets
Recycling issues
Physically looking after the street scape
Energy saving
Improving the area and how that reflects and improves self-image and pride of a community

Why are you doing this project?

Being youth ourselves we can engage on a better level and understand why those involved want to be heard with their concerns
Environment is an element in this council that is currently lacking but a major issue both locally, nationally and globally

What Stakeholders are in the brief?

North Tyneside Council
Mayor
Youth Council
Youth Mayor
The community

What collaborative exchanges are challenging for them currently?

Youth council is only presenting their ideas and concerns in basics forms such as hand drawn images therefore hard to convey this seriousness to the council

What do they want to solve together?

Yet to know will follow up directly after a meeting with the youth council directly

Short Term Goals (week 5)

Meet the youth council
Talk to Julia (direct contact for project)
Outline what digital method would be most effective
Find out the main issues that the youth council wants to the change. Find out if these changes would have to go to a planning process?
Address if we are aiming to provide a solution to one main issue or multiple

Long Term Goals (week 12)

Provide a digital method that allows young people to present their ideas or concerns in a way that adults will take the information seriously (eg. statistical evidence)
Ensure the youth council feels the method we design will be useful long term
Allow the digital method to be used to engage people in multiple issues that directly affect them within their council

1) TRECC- analysing the brief

Hi, this is our week 1 blog for the project “Standardising ‘statements of community consultation’ for major housing schemes”, which is being done by Cara, Ellie, Cindy, Rory and Thomas.

Project Brief

Within the first week, before meeting with the clients in the seminar on Wednesday, we met as a group to analyse the brief we had been given. We can establish from the brief that the overall goal of the project is to improve the communication between developers and local residents to formulate the ‘statement of community involvement’ developers are required to complete in the ‘pre-application’ stage of a major housing scheme, as set out by Newcastle City Council. The brief lays out the long-term goal of delivering a model ‘community involvement app’. For the project, the key stakeholders identified are the developer, the city council, and the public/community groups.

Questions for the client

We discussed, as a group, potential questions we had from breaking down the brief and so listed them to ask in the upcoming client meeting.

What is the current process for community consultation? How could it be improved? What is currently good about it?
Have there been any previous attempts to improve communication between developers and the community?
Do you have any prior ideas about what you would like the app to include?
What are the main issues normally raised from community consultations? Are there similarities that can be drawn between certain types of schemes or certain areas in the city?
Demographics? Who are the people that generally respond to community consultation? Who are the people that don’t? Do certain areas of the city always respond more than other areas?
Are there any users involved, other than the listed stakeholders?
Are there any tensions between the stakeholders? Why do those tensions arise?
Contact details for social groups or community groups, to get their opinion on how to improve communication
What goals do each stakeholder have for the future, in terms of developing major housing schemes?

We are looking forward to meeting with the client on 11th October to ask these questions, in order to establish exactly what they want from the project- what processes there are now and how they want it to change.