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.

Young people engagement-Week 2

Welcome back to our blog. As a group we looked at the comments left to us from our previous blog entry and refined our aims with the project to two simple goals:

Engage young people. This is our main goal throughout the length of the module so that young people have a more active role/voice in shaping their future community.
Encourage developers to use young people earlier in the process of creating a plan. We want them to hear out the ideas of young people, to show their worth to provide a development that both parties would be happy with.

This week we have been looking at how to prepare for user interviews for the following week when we meet with the youth council. This is so we can get a clearer understanding of what the clients require from us. Splitting the questions into broader categories and then further refining them gives us the opportunity to get as much information as possible. If there are any other major clients we may have overlooked they should hopefully be identified by the end of the interview.

Questions

What is your role as a youth councillor?

Do you enjoy your work?
What do you enjoy?
What do you not enjoy?
What would you change?

What made you interested in being a part of the youth council?

How did you hear about it?
Do you think that method is effective?
What are the pro’s and con’s of this?
What are your aims/goals as youth councillors?
Do you have any previous planning experience?

How do you communicate?

How frequently does this happen?
Do you find your voice being heard? (If not why is not heard?)
How would you rate the current system from 1-5?
Any suggestions for improving the current system?

What digital devices do you use?

How often do you use technology?
What kinds of technology do you use?
What do you use technology for?

Do you think technology could help bridge the gap between you and the other clients?

What kind of technology do you think would achieve this?
Does every youth have a means of accessing the technology?

Who do you communicate with?

Are they easy to communicate with?
Which groups of people do you communicate with more or less?
Why do you think you communicate well with this group or not?
How would you go about bridging a gap between you and this group?
Are there any previous methods that you have tried?

How would you suggest we encourage young people to be more involved in the planning process?

Are there any reasons why young people wouldn’t be involved?
Would young people be more open to digital solutions, workshops or both?

Hopefully with these questions we know which direction we want to take our prototype towards and answer what is needed from us. We shall let you know what we learnt in the interview in the next blog.

Thank You.

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)

Walker Community project: Week one progress

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In the first week, we start off by understanding our project, the Walker creative neighborhood, and get a clue on what our project is about. We met Joy, one of our client representatives, to discuss on the project. It was a very meaningful meeting as she helped us to recognize the project’s objectives throughout our discussion.

Goal

The main goal of the project is to gather the Walker community. Due to the lack of funding to local community initiatives, the organisations may fail to cooperate with each other and brought down the connection between community. Therefore, our client hoped that some measures can be made to bridge back people in Walker.

With the aid of an online platform, such as a homepage or forum, we wish to build a space especially for the walker community. It will be a Walker-focused page including local organization and volunteer information. We hope that it can become a key in arising residents’ awareness to their community and promote volunteer work in Walker.

In long term, it is hope that connections can be rebuilt between the Walker community and people can also get use to helping each other or leaning for help on their own, which hopefully can increase their living standard or quality. The increase volunteering promote may also solve problems in business. People may also start their own business with the help of other volunteers.

Key stakeholders

Since our project involves digital technology, local people who are able to reach the internet may be our target. They may be looking for events and update information in walker in the website. Among them, we focused on people who have higher possibility in participating volunteer work at their free time, such as housewives or students, as our main users. Students, or other locals, may be interested in volunteering for their own reasons, such as building experience for their CVs, can also easily applying one through the website. We will also have to cooperate with local business in walker since they may also be promoted in the page. Especially community organisation, as they may recruit volunteers via website.

However, considering that people in Walker may experience any technological problems, technology support may be need. We suggested printed newsletter, as another media besides webpage.

Further Research

When meeting other representatives later on, we would like to know more on the status of the existing community group and their projects in Walker. It is important to know if there are already similar projects running now. We may also have to investigate information of walker residents to give a background study of our stakeholders. Their background may vary our decision and how we execute the whole project. Also, it is hoped that we can interview with people having different position in walker and get a full picture of what their needs are. People with different identity may have different goals and expectation in this project.

How to plan for your user interviews?

So you have set yourself some goals for your project (e.g. reduced air pollution on Gosforth highstreet, more people take up volunteering in Walker, etc) and developed some questions you like your project to answer to (e.g. Can air quality data, displayed at street level, encourage behaviour change in pedestrians are car drivers?)… and you have begun to map out stakeholders, and key activities those are involved in as relevant to your challenge… So what’s next?

For our projects, we do assume that nobody knows everything, knowledge is distributed. Somebody knows more about the local area, somebody may know aspects of technological interventions that might work, etc, etc. As suggested in the lecture, we approach our designs with the idea that the participants listed in our briefs are experts in their own lifes, and that their views in relation to our projects are interesting and important (see Halskov et al., 2015).

So one way to approach this is to say, given our goal, how might our user informants (listed on our brief) help us collect the insight required to develop better idea of the priorities, needs, expectations that they may place towards our projects. At this point, we are not yet so focused on specific solutions or approaches, we still keep an open mind and let the users we involve speak.

Preparing your interviews

So with your goals in mind (e.g. reduced air pollution on Gosforth highstreet, more people take up volunteering in Walker, etc), prepare your interviews around the following points.

What might the person tell you about?: Who is the person you are speaking to and which organisation they belong to? Note down a few points: e.g. community organiser in Walker, likely interests in x, y, z.
Do you prepare to bring some prompt materials? For example, you could bring a map of the area; flip chart paper and post-its are good to capture notes during the meeting.
Decide who is going to ask questions?: If you meet, consider who is going to lead and ask the questions? Decide on who is going to take notes.
What do you plan to cover and perhaps in which order?
- Start with an introduction: Introduce your project and indicate what you wish individuals to discuss.
- Invite your participant to introduce themselves: Why is he/she interested in the project and how does he/she relate to the, e.g., client & other users?
- Given them the opportunity to express challenges relating to your project: What key concerns do they share / talk about?
- Consider taking notes into opportunities: The sprint book suggests how might we questions (e.g. how might we reduce car traffic on Gosforth highstreet).
Thank your participant for their time
Sign the consent form: Bring with you a copy of the consent form template (on Blackboard shortly)

Example interview schedule

This morning, I am meeting with XXXX (Organisation B) and XXXX (from Newcastle City Council). The meeting will be to discuss the accessibility technology that we are working on with which accessibility concerns in public spaces will be automatically logged. Below is a brief plan for the interview.

Item	What questions
Introduction to us	Thanks for inviting us, I am Sebastian (lecturer at the planning school) and this here is XXXX (PhD at the OpenLab, part of the school of computing). We have won some funding to develop and test a system to collate feedback from elderly wheel chair users. Our goal is to explore alternative measures of accessibility that compliment council’s work. We are therefore understand your interested in this project as well as how accessibility concerns are presently raised.
Discussion of XXXX’s work	To start, please tell us a little more about your day-to-day work and what it involves. Could you tell us how you presently assess the accessibility of spaces and any challenges? Are there examples of ‘inaccessibility’ that are particularly difficult to identify? And in which ways do you presently hear from or interact with mobile impaired and other disadvantaged groups?
Discussion of the organisation	Could you briefly explain what your organisation does in the local area? How does it interface with the council officers?
Next steps	Thank you for your feedback.

After your interview

After your interview, share and review your notes, and write up some high-level interview notes. What was discussed? What challenges (pain points) does the participant face that the design project can or cannot address? What needs does your participant discuss that could be translated into requirements for your design concept?

Source: Halskov, K., & Hansen, N. B. (2015). The diversity of participatory design research practice at PDC 2002–2012. Journal of Human Computer Studies, 74(C), 81–92.

Blog Entry 1: Air Quality Gosforth High street

Digital Civics: Air Quality Blog Entry 1

Project goals:

FullSizeRender (5) A Newcastle university urban planning focused bottom up campaign initiative to increase user and community awareness of air quality control centered on Gosforth high street. Working with the users on easy and effective forms of interpreting the data supplied by the air quality monitors situated along the high street, making the data accessible to everybody with the goal of increasing community awareness and support for self-managed air quality control through community projects.

Stakeholders & users:

In this project, the main users are students that in both private and church schools, commuters from the North, different business on the street and residents. They are quite important as variety role are played by them. For example, students and the old residents should be taken good care but the poor air quality make them expose under the risk of illness. Commuters come here by private or bus and bring business to this street and shop owners really need them to live. However, they can make traffic congestion as to many cars and buses which is also the main cause of air pollution. As residents, they create a group called SPACE on Facebook, Twitter and website. What they have done is they have posted the problem of the air pollution and explain this to the public. People can say their needs and make suggestions in this group.

At first the council and population wants less traffic on this road because of the
air pollution but the thing is they wants more traffic for the health of businesses. FullSizeRender (4) Besides, there are a lot of data available on a few websites but they are unusable. We think because it’s difficult to understand the data if you are not an expert. For example, for the level of the pollution in air there are only numbers with abbreviations of products. Therefore, to have a better use of data, they need to be more imagery with colours and map for the localisation.

Key Questions for the Sprint

Why does the existing air quality data not work?

We think this could because the current data is hard to interpret and very technical.
One way we could improve this is by colour coding the data so the average resident know it the current amount of air quality is bad.

To what extent are the stakeholders participating with each other?
- Despite Space existing as a community group it is unclear how much corporation there is between other stakeholders such as the GPS forth schools trust.
- We will aim to work with them all in our development process in order the improve links between groups. This is important as the long term goal of improving air pollution in Gosforth will require all the stakeholders to cooperate.

First log entry: Connecting cyclists and transport planners

Hi, this is our first design log entry for the module by Alistair, Derek, Jake, James and Rachel. Only our second week into the course and we’ve already met the client in a workshop as well as set goals for the remainder of the project. By doing this, we’ve also come up with a few questions that we hope will be answered in the coming weeks!

GOALS

To increase the amount of cyclists in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. This is because cycling is seen as a renewable, cost-effective transportation method that does not consume energy and promotes a healthy, active lifestyle.
Making cycle routes more known, accessible and easy to navigate. In particular, routes between the city centre and surrounding residential areas as well as potentially linking neighbouring local authorities to the scheme in the future e.g. County Durham and Northumberland.
Producing a compact, interactive, integrated and easy to understand app that is accessible for a variety of users. Anyone should be able to use and operate our app regardless of their age, educational background or geographical area, for example.
Another benefit of this app is that it provides Newcastle City Council with new data about cyclists and their main routes that they have never had before. For instance, where are they coming from? Who are they? What is their cultural and social background? How long will they be traveling? What is their purpose (e.g. are they a part of a club, student, or commuting)?
It will enable city and transport planners to accommodate for high volume areas of cyclists and will enable them to understand and offer more cycle friendly facilities. These include bike lock/rack locations in Newcastle City Council and suggest where these installations can go. In doing so, it will also address problem areas that cyclists feel need solving.
It will improve the routes to make them more cycle friendly e.g. smoother road surfaces, an increasing knowledge of cycle paths around the city and wider regions, wider and safer cycle pathways.
To consider incentives that increase the amount of people that cycle and for longer. This needs to be done through interactive modes such as easy-to-read maps, user-shared routes and live traffic updates as well as business integration.
Secondary data has already been collected by organisations such as Newcastle City Council as well as key user groups such as Sustrans. Our app will hopefully provide the means to further develop the relationships with planners, developers and cyclists to create a balanced city.

cyclists in newcastle

QUESTIONS

Who: Cyclists of all ages. From families, school children, students, commuters and the elderly.
• Will an app be accessible/appealing to all age groups?
• Our main concern is the elderly age bracket. How can we reach out and involve this audience to this social community?
• Would additional physical resources be more engaging for the elderly or those that do not have access to digital means?

What: An app that creates an online community of cyclists who engage with each other to improve their routes and environment.
• How do we successfully promote the app to create this community? (Engage with local social clubs? Online forums? Physical posters/leaflets? Conduct focus groups?)
• Will this be easy to maintain and will the idea catch on? (Do we need a points system? Prizes e.g. sustained cycling = rewards at local businesses, discounts with retail brands)

Where: To begin, in the Newcastle City Council region.
• Could this develop and expand to engage neighbouring authorities?
• If the idea gains significant interest, would it be credible to work nationwide? Worldwide? Would it be easier to engage by using countries such as Denmark and Holland as examples where cycling is more integrated into normal life? Can we learn from these places to gain more cycling activity data and improve our town planning capabilities?
• Locally, how valid will individual data inputs from users be? Can this be monitored?

Why: To promote a healthy lifestyle whilst also promoting sustainable transport.
• Does everyone have a bike? Or know how to ride one? Can we promote bike hire companies on the app?
• Will the app actually produce the desired effect?

What makes a good design log entry?

On this module, we use an online reflective log to share stories, notes, ideas coming from the success and failures of our design practice (across teams). This post gives some guidance on how to evaluate your project activities through a series of blog entries.

Reflective writing helps your design projects in three ways (Zubizarreta, 2009). First, it enables you to document and evidence actions and activities. Second, it makes it easy to support feedback, mentoring, and collaboration. Finally, it helps to learn from success and failure, develop insight into why those occurred. Over time, it helps to make sense of complex issues. As you make entries over time, you capture observation through images and document notes, you’ll help revise your insight and reflection. So do review older posts and refer to those in newer entries for example by commenting on new insights gained.

Zubizarreta (2009, p. 46) mentions a number of aspects to consider for log entries:

Dimensions	Comments
Reflective depth	Logs often focus on future improvements and change: to learn from an action, indicate what improvement is desirable and critically assess why and how! “What change was necessary?”, “What process did we use to facilitate change?”, “Why was the change desirable?”
Source of evidence	(1) “Information from self” (teams’ set goals, earlier reflective entries); (2) “Information from others” (reflection on feedback from peers, the tech advisor, lecturer etc); (3) “Products of learning” (a note, or summary of, an achievement produced; interviews, requirements gathered, for instance).
Evidence	(1) From field notes: images, videos; (2) From feedback: emails, classroom discussions; (3) From research: concept maps, references to published material
Consistency	Posts should be of sufficient length to make their point, so at last a substantial paragraph in length; and an indicative entry per week would be around 500 words at least. Referencing to theory, literature, activities is desirable (see point ‘evidence’).

As a general note, try to start each log entry with a brief introduction (to give a bit of context to the post as a whole). This will help the reader understand where you are coming from; and you may also discover that your posts connections to reflections from previous weeks.

An example of a good reflective log entry can be found here: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/digicivics-at-apl/2017/10/25/2-statements-of-community-consultation-meeting-with-the-stakeholders/

Sources for follow-up: Zubizarreta (2009). The Learning Portfolio. John Wiley & Sons

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:

No, 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!

What is a story board?

Design processes can be messy and unstructured and that is particularly so in the fast-paced digital industries, where requirements, user expectations, technologies may turn over quickly. Good product design rests on the foundation of user-centred design, which means it always keeps sight of the users’ wishes, needs, demands. User-centred design is to design for the user. It is true that technological specifications may influence the design space, but in this module we are looking at designing bespoke interventions where this is not so much the case.

Story boards can be seen as part of the preparation work necessary before starting on any detailed designs or prototypes. Story boards are telling a story of how this digital product of yours will eventually be used. However, it also outlines a rational for why it would be used. Story boards depend on articulation of the use context, so where and why the practice you encourage is performed. Then, story boards detail a story of use. Here, a story is comprised of a sequence of events of use that coherently explain what practices happing when and in which order. Above all, stories assume the interactions in the story have a purpose for the user, a desired outcome without which the story would be incomplete.

Below is an excellent example from a student team on TCP2031 2016/17. Please note that the story board will develop alongside to your creative proposition and it may thus be updated, refined, polished, until you arrive at a final version.