Remix, improve, sketch – Page 2

4) TRECC Review and Project inspirations

This week we made a lot of advancements from the previous week as we felt we couldn’t really move forward without meeting our mentor. When we met with Peter he guided us on power dynamics as something major we need to consider- do community feel safe expressing their views to a large, intimidating company? Will their voices be heard? Will their views and opinions be twisted? David also expressed concerns over transparency- how much will be released to the public? Will anything be held from public? Regarding the app he suggested a few things for us to consider:

A reference/scrutiny group to sign things off from developers before posting on the site and approve comments from residents before they go live
Is it possible to have a framework? Each development is different
Developers digitised proposals make it easy for them to gloss over more difficult/controversial parts of the scheme- we need to be aware of that and keep up level of transparency
Always going to be controversy and challenge around new developments- has potential to cause more dispute
WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

From the meeting and time spent as a group we had began to perfect our ideas and think more in depth about the exact features of our app. Another main point is the we had previously been calling the group of people we wanted to engage with ‘hard to reach’ and from our mid term presentation it was pointed out that how could we engage with all these different groups of people with one app when they all have different needs. We came to the decision that we would be focusing our app on the groups of people that already show an interest in planning but due to current procedures they cannot express how they feel. Now our aim was to focus on people that wanted to engage but couldn’t rather than get more people engaged because you can’t really engage someone if they don’t want to be engaged. From this we had a clear focus and could begin to start thinking of how we would design our app.

Atlanta Community Engagement Playbook:

Inspirations for the app came from literature and ideas around the world and we could really start to get specific in what we wanted. One very helpful literature was about the Atlanta Community Engagement PlayBook which is designed for Atlanta one of the fastest growing cities in USA to engage communities to facilitate constructive engagement and to mobilise community-led development and change. The long-term goal is to offer community associates and service providers a set of actionable practices to achieve greater levels of quality engagement. We selected this as one of our main inspirations as we would be associated more closely with being a ‘service provider’, but some of the principles behind the plays for community associations are what we are trying to include within the app (e.g. creating a community led vision for change; creating an inviting and open platform for community members to rally around; and weaving elements of fun and culture the practice). The long-term goals of the playbook is similar to our long-term goal as we want to create a tool that will actually alter the current practices, however we are going down the route of the app rather than more community based projects. This makes it easier for us to involve all the members of the community that wish to be involved. Some of the action guides provide useful methods for some practices, we have used, and could still use, some of these guides when going through the processes of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing.

Playing with Empathy: Digital Role-playing games in Public Meetings

This literature was a study of the implementation of a game called participatory Chinatown a 3D multiplayer game designed to be played in the physical space of planning meeting in Bostons Chinatown neighbourhood. The reading helped us to understand how role-play can affect the way people understand issues and engage and looks at challenges of extracting player empathy from gameplay to a larger context that can then be studied and implemented. Some features include augmented deliberation like debating while playing as character in 3D virtual world (not necessarily as themselves) enchancing empathy, which is needed for group cooperation. There were high scores at the end for discussion where the discussion moderator asks people (using characters name) on how they felt about results this prompted discussion about competition, trade-off, lack of resources, transportation. Participatory Chinatown demonstrates that role-play can engage players in local issues and motivate engagement. However its making people aware of how the framework acts outside the game when you cannot score points. We used some extractions from this document rather than the framework of the game. Our target audience is not people that have a lot of time on their hands and would not really engage in something that required so much effort as going somewhere and walking around. However from this we learnt that the whole idea of visually seeing something and being able to walk around it and see all elements really helped with engagement. From this we started to develop ideas about a map feature in our app that would allow users to physically see the development locations and scroll around to see exact details. Also the importance of the discussion aspect, in our app rather than promote a huge conversation between everyone which could go off topic we are thinking about more of a news feed of everyone different comments so everyone feels their voices are heard.

Second life:

This idea is advanced logging (collection of data) techniques to capture the interactions of the user with the virtual environment to generate a log i.e. what people look for in a CAD imagine or where they go in a game. This is then brought together to create an approximate estimation of real user interaction with the project in real life. It can produce design ideas and amendments from planners and users of the programme. Second Life gives a running account of user experience with the project as it starts and moves on, giving planners better and more comprehensive ideas for the use of space. Second Life puts users in a virtual world in the place of an avatar or a playable character, users walk through and interact with the space and the objects within it. Users can see how the new development will look or show how they interacted with the old site and information is collected from both. We took a lot of inspiration for this as it really showed that ICT is becoming ever more vital for urban planning in 21^st century but there is some worry about more local communities being overlooked in favour of more global and further reaching initiatives so we realised the importance of focusing on the local. From this we decided to make everything user specific so that the community felt that this application had been made for them and tailored to there needs which we had gathered from our stakeholder meetings. But also heavily featured these ICT features that are fairly new and we new we wanted the make something modern and innovative. It showed us that to visualise it there needs to be a feature of the virtual environment we have continually seen pop up to stay with the times.

We look forward to start defining and perfecting our ideas.

4) Youth Council group – example search

Digital Civics blog

During last week’s session it became clear that we had one main design concept in mind – a website with an interactive tool to address litter as a social problem. Originally we were going to design our interactive tool in an app, however it became clear that it could be too costly and therefore decided to do it via a website. The website also fits in well with the feedback that we got from the youth council as they said it would be a good idea to put the website link on the school home page, which in turn should generate a larger user group as more young people will be coming across our page on a daily basis and get to a large young audience as we are targeting schools.

The design of the interactive tool itself revolves around being able to go through the North Tyneside area with your mouse on the computer screen. From here young people will be able to gain more of a perspective of where litter ends up i.e. landfill, the ocean etc. There will also be a game that almost takes inspiration off Pokémon go where you can collect points from barcodes off bins and in turn get rewards when you pick up rubbish (this is an minimally developed idea and we are looking into the logistics of it more). We are also hoping to design a ‘North Tyneside of the future’ which will give an outlook on how the area will look if we continue to litter at such a rate, and on the other hand how it would look if we were to become cleaner- we hope that this could encourage behavioural change that will change their outlook on how to treat their local area. Below are a couple of links to show the sort of style we want our website to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur9MqboHfhw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v64KOxKVLVg

Although we have a relatively clear idea in mind, we are still yet to get much feedback off the client, and because of this we have been in contact to ask a range of question. Although we are still waiting on a reply we hope that once we get these answers we will be able to shape exactly the direction that our project is going. In addition to this we received feedback during our presentation that it would perhaps be in our interest to look at a wider range of environmental issues which prompted us to think of the possibility of a quiz on the same webpage that young people can fill out, this data can then be collected and returned to the schools – this can then get passed to the youth council who can use this information to benefit them when putting forward ideas to change the area and express young people’s point of view in a more professional manner.

4) Cycle stakeholder forum

After the first meeting with Rob Snowball, we established some specific goals that we reached after interviewing our stakeholders, Rob Snowball, Heather Evans, Rorie Parsons and Mark Nelson. Regarding or long term goals, they haven’t really changed, they are just more precise. We still want to get more involved in the forum, a feeling shared by most of the people we met but our main goal will be to focus on how to make this forum progress.

This idea is divided in two points :

First, we need to improve the visibility of the forum, especially on the website which is not very visible. But also help cycling to get a better recognition in the city.
Secondly, to make access to the feedback easier for all the people who attend the forum and also easier to publish it, after Heather has taken the minutes.

Furthermore, we find it useful to improve interactions between the council and the forum.

Products/services/devices that serve as inspiration for our project

Mobile Phone: We chose this piece of technology as it can be accessed by a wide range of individuals due to the popularity of smartphones and the fact that individuals can access information anywhere anytime. In our project it is important that we have a system that can communicate information clearly and can be accessed by a wide demographic of individuals in the forum, we think a mobile phone could meet this criteria.

Computer: We chose this device as it is one of the most effective ways of communicating information between individuals however this device is more accessible by the older generation. This is important as a large portion of the cycle stakeholder forum are of the older generation that might have more access to computers than mobile phones.

Email: Email was recommended to us as a good transfer and display of information by Mark Nelson as a way to communicate the time of meetings and also to supply the meeting notes to a group of individuals. Email newsletters are also simple to setup and use.

Website: A website is an accessible way to present and relay information. They can also be interactive which is important for the cycle stakeholder forum as we need a system in which people can communicate their opinions on different cycle routes around Newcastle.

Week 5 NUDC: Mid-term Presentation

Hello again,

This week started with our mid-term presentation in front of the rest of the class. With some mishaps while presenting we pinpointed things that we should remember for our final presentation in January. We got good response for our example research and were told that we should limit our key requirements a bit. Thinking about this we have now discussed and decided upon our most important requirements to be: easy to use and understand; time efficient and enticing; informational and provide opportunity to give feedback on the planned changes in Jesmond.

For this week’s seminar we continued with a bit more example research but later began talking about gamification which means adding game elements in order to evoke more interest in the users. Gamification is something we talked quite a bit about during our Tuesday meeting and that we want to implement in our final product. One of our biggest obstacles with this thought, however, is the risk of getting poor but high-quantity feedback instead of quality feedback. We tried keeping this in mind when we started sketching out ideas for the design.

One of our earliest design ideas was very basic and not really interesting enough to evoke interest in the users. It basically just showed users the changes and were given an opportunity to comment on them if they wanted to. This of course is the main objective with our product but it isn’t really anything new since it is very similar to Commonplace.

After discussing a lot and sketching out ideas we landed, after many iterations, on a design rather similar to our first one but a bit more enticing and different. As a way to encourage users we introduced the concept of giving out stickers when they were finished using the product. These stickers are both meant as an reward but also a means to spread the word about the Streets for People project as well as our product.

Also during our group meeting, we started creating a user experience flow chart so that we could have a clear idea in our heads of the whole feedback process. This is the most basic visualisation of our concept and from here on we need to start focusing on the small details such as colourways, sizing, stickers etc.

Week 4, NUDC: Mentor Meeting

Hello again,

For week four we had a meeting with our academic mentor Sean. At this point we had already got a good outline of the mid-term presentation which allowed us to go through it with Sean making sure it was efficiently informative of our research. Specifically, we went through our goals for the project along with our prioritization and stakeholders. The meeting acted as a reassurance for us that we were on the correct path. With the conclusion of the meeting we decided that the main stakeholder as the target for the project would be students, tailored for the JRA rather than the council.

Furthermore, the seminar gave us some time to go through relative literature about different digital civics projects. For example, one of the inspirations that we had from said literature was the VoxBox, a playfully nostalgic booth that provided the user with a reward in the form of a simple ball. With the addition of an old phone set with a clunky aesthetic it stood out in public and tapped into the public’s curiosity. This led us to the importance of grabbing the user’s attention before they even become a user of the prototype, furthermore this example showed that there is a lot of freedom available for the design of the prototype that could make it eye-catching and intriguing.

Week 5: Concept ideas sketch

Our original idea for the project was to create a website – online platform for volunteer groups and wider community in Walker to communicate, share ideas, information and opportunities. While this is still main focal point of our design, during interviews we have noticed that many people in Walker have difficulties regarding computer literacy and/or accessibility to computers or smartphones. To overcome this difficulty we assumed we need to promote our website as well as various courses in computer literacy offered by volunteering organisations across walker, but as well creating a paper version of a ‘newsletter’ – something like yellow pages. This will help to reach to the elderly, and to people who would not be keep on learning how to use a computer. The drawback of printed newsletter is it’s cost, so to cover for it, we believe it would be a good idea to ask local businesses to pay a small monthly fee, so that we can run the website and the newsletter, and for that the businesses could advertise themselves to the local community.

Other alternative that we propose to help to reach out to as many Walker residents as possible is to mount a public interactive displays, where people could gain information what events, activities and opportunities are available for them and sign up for them. Public displays could be placed in libraries, community centres, etc. They would also be provided with easy to read and follow infographics how to use them, so the people won’t be discouraged to use them. Other discussed alternative was a smartphone application, something like a simplified version of the website, but we have agreed that since Walker is facing economic hardships and not many people do have a smartphone, combined with low computer literacy skills it won’t be too useful for the community, at least during first few years of the project.

To summarise, the main point of the program will be the website, as it can be easily modified to suit the needs of the users, and as well as it has relatively low cost of running. It could also help to create sense of community without a need of leaving your home. To reach to computer illiterate people we aim to advertise computer skills training sessions and as well as hand out a monthly newsletter through the mail door. This way everyone in Walker will be informed about opportunities, events and activities, while the cost will most likely be covered from advertisements from local businesses. Public interactive displays can be a helpful add-on to the website for the people who lack a computer in their homes. We estimate that a smartphone application would not be used to the extent it will be worth creating it on so early stage of the project.

Blog5 for self-built housing(1)

Blog 5

Ⅰ Reflection of the mid-term presentation

After the mid-term presentation, we found that most of the groups choose use an App as a digital tool to solve the problems. App is more popular among the young people, so our group thinking about create an extra App which can be linked to our website. In this App, we try to provide an implementation of design process and create a more direct contact between the customers and the self-built housing Co-op.

Ⅱ Sketches / concept ideas

APP Design:

To involve self-build organizations with the design concepts. This includes a multi login page, with 3 types of login. These include people already registered, sign in with Facebook and also a register.
** 1011049481 **

Include images of geographically located areas with ease of understanding for multi-generational use. We get this idea from the seminar, and try to add this into our APP. This section will link to the Google Map and help people to know the distance between their houses and the nearby services.

As well as this, having individual pages for other aesthetic principles including galleries of self builds and furniture buffers.

The program section will involve pictures of local self builds, which basic descriptions and more information too.

When it comes to the design page, we decided to take inspiration from a catalogue portfolio. The dimensions, materials and colors also, so people really can feel like they are making a different when it comes to design principles.

In the galleries section, there will be pages or present self-build homes, and potential blueprints for an individual to use also. There will also be a number of bedrooms’ slider, this is so the individual will be able to see designs that fit their criteria a lot better. – As well as this, we have thought about the audition of an advance settings page so again, people can very detailed, specific recommendations giving them more control over the process. app-design

When it comes to feedback, we feel this is going to be one of the most important sectors of the whole process. Recommendations from people who have used the site and have had a gain in their knowledge and participation, are the key for this service to keep going. Perhaps a rating system could help to see if there are any connections with self builds and see if any certain principle is more popular.

Include a real time chart of people interaction and their views also. This would enable the architects and the people who are involved with the self-build to be more active in what they need to do. This would be a great way to link the online website and the application as well.

The potential weakness & limitations:

We feel that a limitation for our idea is simply getting the publicity for people to use our app/site in the first place. Perhaps if self-build organizations in the area where prompted to actually promote it then there wouldn’t be an issue.

Another limitation is the actual size of the application. With such an expansive gallery and many features that we would like to offer, we don’t want this to take up significant space on our client devices.

Blog 4 – Energy Dashboard

After reviewing on our interviews with Tony and Steve, we have evaluated our goals again for initial development on our designs. We had ‘to support residents, organisations and businesses in Jesmond in adopting a more energy efficient approach to their current consumption patterns.’ as our initial ultimate goal, and this does not change.

With the details of what the client want in the energy dashboard we are going to developed, we tried to do some more in depth research on different dashboards as examples for us to get an idea on our initial design. Each of us brought in an example of an energy dashboard we found on the internet and indicate what is the pros and cons of every single detail of it, hoping to pull all the best things about each dashboard together to create the most suitable one for Jesmond. There were examples from America, Lincoln University and other companies, each has a different feature depending on the building it serves (eg. university campus, accommodation, commercial building etc)

However, we would still need different datas from the stakeholders in Jesmond in the future for further development. We would also need to decide on creating an app or a webpage for the Jesmond residents based on which one we think would allow more people to look at it constantly and conveniently.

Blog4 Self-built housing

Blog 4

Ⅰ How the goals going

The intimal project goal is ‘To make the co-design self-built homes become more accessible to people. Improving the current weakness of co-design self-built homes, finding a way to promote their ideas (like workshop/website) and then widening public’s community participation.’

Our goals are mainly stay at the same, however, we do some small changes reflected on our interview. As a team our aim is to provide and design a website and an app, through this platform we would help those people who are already involved in self build houses, to become more involve with the design processes.

Detailed wants and wishes from the client. What are their aims and what they want to achieve?
Provide some easy soft wears and make it easier to understandable for non-professional self-build through our app and website.
Make a better link between our non-expert and expert such as (workshop, one to one contact, and online communication.
Make the design process smoother to understand.
Provide design concept e.g. 3D.

Ⅱ Search for relevant related project

Example1: Protor Homes

This establishment takes the idea of self-building to a more self-chosen type of style.
Proto homes take the self-build ideology to a more prefabricated manor.
The organisation from the off go incorporates the customer with design. For example the customer chooses a pre-made design, and can edit to their own needs. Useful in thought that people can see the development of their homes designs and other self-build activities.

Example2: Site For Self-Build

In addition, we thought the gallery would be a great concept when it comes to the sketch up. A gallery / portfolio of houses of which aspiring self-builders can look and choose depending on what they see fit. We thought that an interesting concept would be to have a more interactive design concept, which is where the sketch up idea came. Pre-designing houses over sketch up gives people great access and interaction with the design process as a whole.
The way in which the company involves the customer is clear from the get go. The Home page of Proto Homes’ website provides a potential and current self-builders a whole catalogue of dated events. This therefore gives both consumer and organiser a whole platform of interaction. We feel that using a similar idea on the home page of the website would be useful.
This organization is more of a platform to enable people to look at self-build organisations within their area.
The group describe themselves as self-build creators and offer their professional services to individuals, groups and private enterprises.
The organisation enables people to start and join self-build locations also, and have a large team enabling high quality of service.Also, the addition of blueprints and maps on their website is very useful. When it comes to the location of any build, it is important and also well worth doing research. We find that providing maps and location diagrams gives people understanding of that given self-build. Using Blueprints of the area, or potential blueprints, the consumers of the self-build project will understand that they can have influence on the project from the foundations.

(Here is the initial design of the format of website)
The website of Site For Self-Build had strong social links. Compared to the West End Housing Association, and Proto Homes we felt that Site 4 Self build has much clearer contact methods. The whole point of this project is to get people more involved with the design, and this is obviously done by contacts and connections. A strong and explicit few of methods of contact I feel is essential for this type of project to go ahead. Especially, the phone number. Giving that other self-build projects have out of country numbers such as the Proto homes, a recognisable number I feel would suggest clarity and trust too.

Young People Engagement – Week 5

After a successful site visit, we came together as a group and discussed the different possibilities of creating a digital device. We were inspired by a number of non-digital and digital ideas. We came across ideas such as having a VR hologram projecting the user’s propositions of the development. We debated other potential ideas, like the use of chalk to make graffiti visualisations on a surface that could show the user’s proposals but chose to keep a more digital approach to our final project because we considered the non-digital ideas to be less suitable for our users.

At first, we thought of making a QR code. The idea was that the code would be scanned by the users which would lead them to a government related website with information about the current development site. We knew this idea would appear quite late during the planning process and thought it might have an affect on the user’s propositions. We were also worried that the website would provide too much information at once for the users which would not be easy to understand nor enjoyable to read.

The second concept we were trying to develop was an app. We thought the proposition of an app would allow the users to take part in the planning process at an earlier stage, therefore giving time to the Council and developers to consider the user’s propositions. The app would work like a visual interface. The app will allow for new topics and activities to be created. How does it work? Well, once the app is opened, a plot of land would show up on the screen. Through its tools, the app would support a large variety of subjects, like inserting different types of infrastructures or ponds onto the plot of land. A dragging feature would allow the plot of land to be filled with houses, schools, parks, roads, shops. These would be designed through Sketch Up (One of our design software’s) and then integrated into our app with the help of our technician. We want these animated features to reflect what the users want to see in the new development like leisure centres, open spaces and well linked roads. We also suggested that the app would have a share button indicating that the user designs can be commented on by other users, or shared with developers and the community and downloaded for future use. This is where we have got to so far, next week we’ll be looking into more detail about our concept while discussing it with our project mentor.

photo-on-10-11-2016-at-18-18