Creating a new way of working with Community
Location:
Melbourne, AUS
Year:
2021
Core Service:
- Embed
- Share
- Create
Client:
City of Melbourne
Designers:
Dalton Bruyns
Charlotte McCombe
Jeremy Walker
Suppliers:
Language Loop
Henry Leng
In partnership with Craig Walker, we developed a strong social design brief that helps uncover and amplify the voices of Melbourne as the city begins to bring emerging technology online.
Working closely with the Smart City Incubator Team, we created a framework enabling the team to engage, communicate and gather feedback on emerging technologies the City of Melbourne wanted to implement. Through listening, understanding and structuring, we provided an effective toolkit allowing the City of Melbourne to approach underrepresented communities.
"Data is meaningless if people can't perceive a use for it"
We focussed our research around the powers of 10 approach — that detailed how to scale from the individual right back up to the city wide, super scale of millions — meaning we could dive into a specific community based in Carlton and begin to design outwards from a single point. This meant spending 2 weeks onsite, with street intercepts, group interviews and community events to gather the necessary knowledge to build our insight and framework whilst in consultation with the community.
The result was a framework that defined key gates for the City of Melbourne to follow, describing their pilot programmes, who it involved and how the community has responded previously. Light in the beginning, the framework is scalable and becomes a repository for past experiences to learn from, meaning future engagements are not starting from scratch.
In addition, a suite of tools include examples of engagement types from around the world, a set of principles to embed at every level and a conversation mapping tool to test, document and share in field research with peers and other cities.
This project was in partnership with Craig Walker — a Design & Research Studio
