Background
Participatory Democracy offers a more collaborative role for citizens, enabling them to interact and work directly with public sector organisations, such as city councils, as well as make their own decisions about how their local communities are governed.
The aim of this project was to deploy, utilise and evaluate the CCI team’s emerging model for embedding design in communities for open innovation and civic engagement. Our partnership would help the CCI to develop its capacity to explore the future experiences of local people and places, so to inform the council’s developing Social Innovation Ecosystems and Participatory Democracy strategy for Glasgow in 2030.
DESIGN APPROACH
In this project, we gained real experience and direct insight into contemporary design practice by working collaboratively with experts from the Centre for Civic Innovation, The Glasgow City Council, and with citizens to co-define Glasgow’s Future Stories.
Taking place between September 2020 and January 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, the project was challenged by new and agile ways of working and learning remotely in-light of the social distancing measures. This led to forms of virtual synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, as well as developing innovative approaches to facilitating participation through hybrid material and digital engagement tools
Community of practice
This project was a collaboration between Innovation School (GSA), the Centre for Civic Innovation (CCI), Glasgow City Council (GCC), graduate designers and various design professionals, and a variety of civic and academic stakeholders.
The GSA team was made of Mafalda, Zsofia, Chris, Heather, Neal, Staś, Edoardo and myself.
As a team of eight, with a diversity of creative and professional backgrounds, we all brought different kinds of knowledge, methodologies, perspective and expertise, creating a learning community for a collaborative and innovative exploration.
Place-based
sub-team
Citizen-centred sub-team
Project Brief and Lenses
Our objective, as a design team, was to investigate, in both analytical and speculative ways, what Social Innovation and Participatory Democracy in Glasgow 2030 might look and feel like from both Citizen-centred and Place-based perspectives.
Through the lens of Citizen-centred, we wanted to explore the characteristics that make a citizen’s experience of Glasgow unique by looking at their role within communities through the way they live, work and mobilise to create place-based culture.
The Place-based lens strived to understand how people relate to their surroundings and spaces they inhabit, both physically and digitally, and how these two things can enable or disable the social mobility of citizens.
