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.