Blog3 for Self-built housing

Blog 3 —Response of Interview

On the 21^st of October, our group met with Jerry Drake who is the member of West End Housing CO-OP. We asked a series of questions of her daily life and their organization, and then noted the key responses:

With her previous experiences she informed us that there is a lot of trouble regarding land and grants and she experienced many barriers during the process of self-built housing. She also struggled with finding available land that the government would provide to build on.
the West End Housing CO-OP are all equal members within their society and are all involved within their community as they all occupy the houses they own.
Before the housing co-op began to build, in the areas they were planning on doing so they vigorously asked the local community within that area. Finding out the local opinion and then questioning them how they felt it would affect them.
When the housing co-op began a regenerative project, Jerry said that the council were very helpful and supportive of projects like there’s. In addition, Newcastle council are interested in this form of project, along with Your Homes Newcastle owning the majority of the land available within the Newcastle.
Jerry made it clear that throughout the process that the West End Housing CO-OP went through to complete their self-build homes they had many issues along the way such as: time constraints on the planning side, financial issues for housing to rent, acquiring the land, the cost of self-build housing.
The housing co-op runs off a democratic model with every member as equal as the other. The co-op they run makes for a cheap living as they occupy their own properties they are their own landlords.

After this interview with Jerry, we found that the suitation of self- build housing is not as good as the other housings (like socail housing).Self-built housing is not the mainsteam housing in UK and most of the public are not familiar with this new type of housing. So we thought that engaging more people to have their own self-built housing can improve the current environment. In the next step, we try to create a new website for the West End Housing Co-op, because we found that the current website is not useful for the public to understand the process of self-built housing clearly. Therefore, in the new website we will provide more links for the public to contact with the Co-op. Also, we will try to create a bridge for both the experts and non-experts to join and cooperate in the design process of self-built housing.

interview schedule for air quality 2

Week 2

Interview Questions – Duncan

Introduction

Thank you for your time Duncan, we are second-year students at Newcastle University who are currently looking at air pollution on Gosforth high street. We understand you are the managing director of Sanderson young estate agents which has a branch on Gosforth High St.

1. What is your Role within Gosforth high street?

-How do businesses and shops currently talk to each other? (Is there a traders association?)

– Do businesses and shops (or trader’s association) currently talk to any other groups in Gosforth e.g. Space ?

2. What challenges do you feel Gosforth high street faces?

-How do you personally think these issues should be solved?

3. Do you know how most of customers currently travel to the Gosforth high st?

-Do you feel that is reprehensive for most businesses on the high street?

4. How do local shops on the high street feel about the Air pollution?

-How would local shops feel about a reduction the car traffic to achieve lower air pollution?

5. Do the businesses have an existing plan concerning the high street in general?

– If yes, does this plan mention air pollution?

6. Are you aware of the Urban observatory data available online at http://uoweb1.ncl.ac.uk/ that shows real-time data from the 10 air pollution sensors on Gosforth high street?

– If yes, do you ever look at these sensors ?

7. Given the choice of a Smartphone App, Interactive Display on the high street, Emails, Website, Newspaper or any ideas of your own. Which would most likely engage you with air pollution is Gosforth High St ?

Interview Schedule for co-design housing

Interview schedule

This morning, we are meeting with Jerry (who worked in the West End House coop). The meeting will be to discuss how to make the coop homes become more accessible. Below is a brief plan for the interview.

Item	What questions
Introduction to us	Thanks for meeting us, I am Ying and this here is XXXX. We are the stage two planning student from Newcastle University. Our project is about developing a method to co-design self-built homes, so now we are doing some research and collecting data for this project. Here is the project brief for information. Briefly we are looking into a way for your residents to contribute to the design of new houses that you build. Our main goal is to make the co-design self-built homes become more accessible to the public. (Would you mind if we recorded our conversation？)
Discussion of Jerry’s work	To start, can you tell us a little about what you do in the west end housing co-op? – Could you share some information of how this participatory design process happen？ -What is the main requirement for the resident? And how do you achieve these requirements in the design process? -What is the feedback from residents after your designing and are they satisfied? If not, why? -How can the council be involved more directly?
Discussion of the community	On the community website, it says that co-operative is a group of people who jointly manage the houses and control the way their housing is run. -Could you briefly explain what your community does? -Who would you need to engage when developing plans for a new development? -How do residents decide on changes to the existing buildings? -What is the biggest challenge you meet?
Intro of prototype	Thank you. As noted in the email, one aspect of this project is to come up with a digital tool or method to support non-experts come up with a building design. We looked into 3d models and website. We’ll show you some project ideas ask you a few questions. -How the participation will affect the design process? -What you talk about in the monthly meeting? -How do you communicate with the non-expert(like residents) to make them know how the process going -Do you think digital tools could help to reduce the distance between you and the other client?(resident) -As we know, you community already have a website, does it effective? -What is the strength & weakness of the current website?
Review of prototype	We are thinking of doing a 3d model or create a blog. 3D model can make people more easy to understand co-design self-built house by the visual effect and create a blog to record the meeting to the public is effective for people to know the process of design. -Would this be of use for your organization? How could we approach this? -If not, why?
Next steps	We are so glad to meet you and thank you for your feedback.

Blog Entry 1 – A digital means to create and share energy in your neighbourhood.

Our group is called JEPP – Jesmond Energy Co-Production Platform.

Members: Crystal, Conrad, Rob, Chris and Brandon

Members of JEPP met with the client Tony Waterson of the Jesmond Residents Association on Thursday 6th October. Initial discussions with the client involved …

It was established that the team should approach the project by setting goals. The goals were discussed as follows:

To improve JEPP’s understanding of renewable energy principles and current technology systems, which include solar power and our platform of an energy dashboard regarding its role and ability in reaching the target audience.
To discuss the role that energy has as a resource to the target users in the locality of Jesmond.

To look into what is considered viable to the interest groups and what is not.
To foster a shared ownership of energy at neighbourhood level similar to those principles of energy co-operatives.

But ultimately,

we want to support residents, organisations and businesses in Jesmond in adopting a more energy efficient approach to their current consumption patterns.

Stakeholders

We have discussed about stakeholders with our client and decided business owners are the biggest stakeholders since they uses a lot of energy compare to other stakeholders – according to our client. After that, there are less important stakeholders such as, elderly and retired people living in Jesmond, young professionals and organisation based in public buildings, since they’re the ones who’ll use the energy dashboard.

However, the stakeholders are afraid of installing solar panels. They’re scared about the price of installing solar panels. If that’s the case, they need to be communicated in order to make them notice the importance of renewable energy and the message of using renewable energy can actually save them money in the long term. Then we’ve discussed about ways to communicate with them.

Advertising and publicity

We talked about ways of publicising the JEPP project:

We need to promote the JEPP project
Find out more about the Jesmond Residents’ Association
Have a forum to gather communitiy opinions and level of interest
Design an engaging email to send out to possible stakeholders
Deliver a message – the importance of renewable energy
See if we can use exisiting ways of advertising information to the local community ( e.g. through a display at the Library or by asking if we can have an advert on a school newsletter)