Category: Workshop Outcomes

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

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:

InterrelationsNo, 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!