Placemaker's
Our service is designed for FYA to engage, support and empower the young of the RPE community to taking ownership of their environment by means of identifying meanwhile spaces and developing, implementing and sustaining meanwhile use concepts.
Project overview
The challenge we got in our brief was about 'how can we support equitable access to meanwhile spaces using Service design innovation, which means leveraging meanwhile spaces and using them to benefit communities affected by the development of the Euston station renewal and HS2 link construction, in collaboration with Camden council. In addition, the London Borough of Camden, like many other municipalities in the UK and the world, suffers from Covid-19 consequences such as closing businesses and reducing people's traffic in public areas.
The research on Euston station development and how it affects the residents' lives, on top of living in times of uncertainty caused by Covid-19, demonstrates the paradox of losing the sense of home while you are obligated to stay at home in these challenging times.
Throughout our work on the project, we looked for opportunities to mitigate negative impacts and optimise opportunities by activating meanwhile spaces for the Regent's Park Estate community, moreover, it is an opportunity to prototype new visions for communal wards and neighbourhoods.
Details
Acknowledgement
Project partner: Fitzrovia Youth in Action
When: 2021 - 6 months
Team: Chen Adler, Liming Ye, Giselle Dsouza, Jiaoyan Yang
Methods: design research (various), workshop facilitation, insights definition, prototyping, stakeholder management, co-design workshops
Special thanks to these people and organizations that besides dealing with their daily issues took a pause and helped us to become better designers; Fitzrovia Youth in Action, Representatives of Camden council and our classmates.
As well as our tutors; Adam Thorpe, Cordula Friedlander, Fernando Carvalho that guided and advised us during the process.
Research
Methods
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Horizontal scanning
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Desk research
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Literature review
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Data collection
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On-site observation
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Expert interviews
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Site visit
Key findings:
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Regent's Park Estate is built of many residential blocks, most of them are social housing rented from Camden council.
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Construction caused a lot of excavations surrounded by hoardings and barricades throughout the ward, interrupting pedestrians and vehicles movement, in some cases it covered even more space than required.
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Although the ward is centrally located in the city, some areas in it have poor lighting and some areas are completely dark, especially close to construction sites.
How might we...
use meanwhile spaces to increase the sense of safety for the youth to feel more as a community in the Regent's Park Estate?
Solution
Methods
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Concept development
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Journey mapping
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Persona
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User testing
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Value proposition
Value proposition:
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Helping empower the youth by driving a change
aims to increase the sense of safety and community cohesion
by creating vibrant spaces out of untreated/ neglected spaces,
for the benefit of all Regent's Park Estate residents.
Service concept:
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A toolkit that would enable youth to drive change in their community through a design workshop and executing the ideas in order to create access to meanwhile spaces
Reflections
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This project started with the feeling we were thrown straight to the cold water with no ability to swim. We tried to learn how to float together and it wasn't easy four strangers from different backgrounds needed to learn how to work with each other, most of the time without the option to meet in person because these were times of pandemic, long last lockdowns and tier's not allowing us to meet.
During this period we start learning how to trust each other, when it's time to work individually and when it's time for a group effort. We had no choice other than learning by doing.
Having this project during a pandemic enforced us to come with creative ideas in order to enable us to keep the project growing. Looking for people to talk with and interview was not easy, but the volunteering activity we participated in opened us doors to wonderful people who later became our amazing partners in this journey.
We learned how to conduct a co-design workshop, and how to adapt it to youth in a way that will keep them engaged. Every stage in this project taught us more about the tools that we used, and about the right way to use them to gain maximum utilization.
Our project got it's identity at the moment we stood in Hampstead road and looked at the heavy tools working in front of residential buildings, in reach of a hand, that can almost touch them. The word 'home' got a deeper meaning to us, by being away from home, while RPE residents are at their home but it doesn't look like that. Diving into the brief and researching about meanwhile spaces made us understand that home is a place you nurture with people you care about. We hoped that by using meanwhile spaces in RPE, the residents could get some 'home'.