The aim of Phase One was to gather evidence to build a quantitative and qualitative digital data bank of insights to inform about possible future scenarios in future worlds with future citizens and places experiences.
Working as two sub-teams of four, we collectively began to understand and investigate the two complementary aspects within Citizen-Centred and Place-Based. Sharing knowledge between the two sub-teams developed a broader understanding of how future experiences of people and places come together, and might relate to each other to create a collective understanding of the future world.
Through desk research, we worked collaboratively with experts from CCI, GCC, the Innovation school and external professionals, to gain specialist insights into the needs of diverse communities within Glasgow, identifying those most excluded from notions of Participatory Democracy.
The research collaboration and communication have been facilitated by the use of Miro to visually share our research and map our landscape of knowledge together as a team.
Collectively, we analyzed and translated our investigation into Research Cards (with multiple dimensions such as the Social, Technological, Economic, Educational, Political, Legal and Ecological). Designing those cards helped us to identify gaps in knowledge, and produce a range of insights highlighting the potential needs of future citizens’ and places.
Together with Studio And then specialists’ Santinia Bara and Freyja Harris inputs we consolidated and synthesized our research material into key directions during an online workshop session at the end of Phase One.
EXPLORATION
Introduction and discussion
The project launched over a zoom meeting with all the GSA team, the CCI team and experts from GCC.
Kirsty and Stevie introduced the project's context and focus. Steve presented the Center for Civic Innovation and talked about it as a Social Innovation branche of GCC being Citizens-centred. One of their main mission to co-design a world-class city for all. Some experts from GCC gave us short talk about their understanding of diverse communities’ needs within Glasgow, identifying those most excluded from notions of Participatory Democracy. Marie, a GCC expert, evidenced the ways in which marginalised communities are often most affected by place-based change. One key insight was the lack of trust and feedback loops between local authorities and communities. To conclude the morning, Lateral North, another member from GCC, presented us the After The Pandemic' project, an initiative he curated with friends during lockdown in march.
In the afternoon, we split into our two lens teams, using Breakout Rooms. Through discussions with experts and between us, we brainstrom starting points and aims for the project. We used padlet to record and map our thoughts.
As a Citizen Lens based team, our main aim focused on communication and how to build common language to make participatory democracy inclusive.
Stephen McGowan
CCI
Marie McLelland
Economic Development Officer
GCC
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Padlet Board with ideas and themes that were discussed during our ideations sessions.
Landscape of knowledge
We started the first week by gathering individual and sub-team desk research on Miro to build a common digital spectrum of knowledge and references around citizens, communities and places. Miro allowed us to create a digital wall, and share our knowledge by adding post-it notes, sharing links and grouping information into categories as we went along.
Landscape of knowledge : overview (top) & detail (bottom)
On a personal level, I approached the desk research by writting key questions for myself, highlighting key notions in the brief, searching definition of key words (Participatory Democracy, Life centered approah, Social innovation, Trust in Democracy) and looking at case studies. This allowed me to understand better what Participatory Democracy was and have a starting point to dive into the research.
First Expert input day
The day was divided into two sessions: Zoe and John in the morning and Marie and Michael in the afternoon. For each sessions, lens-based teams respectively provided an overview of the research so far, then the experts gave a short presentation before to split into our lens-based teams in breakout rooms. This was an opportunity for us to share our ideas and get professional insights to move forward and ground our research in the context of Glasgow City Council.
what does it mean to be a citizen? And what does it mean to be part of a community?
core questions that are sitting in both groups, and they do overlap
Zoë Prosser
Supervisor and Researcher
Design Innovation and Land Assets
Innovation School - GSA
John Campbell
Development Officer
CCI
Dr Michael Johnson
Creative Economy Innovation
Leadership Fellow
Exploring visual mapping methods
Innovation School - GSA
Marie McLelland
Economic Development Officer
GCC
Citizen lens presentation : identification of issues and system's relationships
John talked about present day interventions and strategies that Glasgow city council is currently doing. In particular the Poverty Leadership Panel an action plan to tackle poverty in the city that englobes the Community Activist Panel, a group of people with direct experience of poverty. He also mentionned the Connecting Scotland program put in place during lock down for digital divide.
Zoe gave us insights around the movement of community land ownership in Scotland and social design methods to support democratic participation. This was valuable for both lens as it informed on the potential future use of lands (i.e derelict land for place based lens) and informal ways of meetings (i.e. using familiar environement for citizen based lens).
In the afternoon, Michael shared approaches around reframing community as network of actors, and strategies for visual mapping. He shown a diagram like engagement tool to enable participants and communities to reflect on their assets and what they have achieved. A tool we could later reuse for our own engagement.
Marie brought potential categories of people overlooked that we could focus on for the project. She also raised an interesting point about how during lockdown citizens in Pollock found local solutions and how bureaucracy then brought constraints with it. This observation informed us about what is currently working and what are potential gaps within communities. She also told us about the 20 minutes City Neighbourhood policy in Glasgow which consist of meeting all our needs within a 20 minute walk. All these insights were great opportunity to learn from as a way for capacity building within communities.
Michael's diagram
ORganising experts input
Mafalda organised the experts input from week 1 into a colored visual landscape representing different thematics :
-Advice
-Questions
-Insights
-Potential people / communities to reach and
-Concept/Approach.
Within the citizen based subteam, we shared some reasearch we did during the week-end and added them to the diagram.
Some of the research I shared with the subteam about different roles of citizen in public services and a Democratic Landscape that summarizes formal and informal ways of participating in politics.
Democratic Landscape
Different roles of citizen in public services
Review and Feedback
We started the second week with a review with Kirsty, Marianne and Stevie.
To make our presentation as clear as possible, we synthetise our desk research under key themes :
- Ecosystems and autonomous communities
- Diversity and Inclusion
- Accessibility
- Participation, Tools and modalities of engagement
In addition, key entry points emerging from both desk research and experts inputs were added, color coded into steeple categories. This almost looked like ethical principles we would consider for the entire project.
Inspired by an Ecosystem Mapping system made by Ideo that I shared during my research, we arranged in cercles key questions into key scales of ecosystems.
Citizen Lens : pinciple themes and questions that emerged from research and experts input day
Kirsty Ross
Academic Leader
Some examples of key principles we mentionned
First Cards prototypes
Edoardo and Staś began to prototype the research cards. Both categorised them into type of information (Tool - Event - Topic - Case study) including a description and a relevance of the card as well as information about Steeple categorie or key principles.
From these first draft, we observed a first bias. That one of avoiding photographies associated with cards' topic to avoid influence through image.
In reponse to this obersvation, I start to illustrate possible drawing of the cards. At that point it was just draft and we didn't make any decisions even tho the team liked it.
Following Kirsty advice, we also started sketching ways to represent the scales, still inspired by the Ecosystem Mapping diagram as well as timeline
Primary research cards : testing layout
Scale and timeline's visuals testing
Drawing I proposed to illustrate the cards
Staś and Mafalda also drafted ways to connect cards : with lines or color shades. We found interesting to consider the cards not as independent element but rather as living artefacts and pieces of a 'puzzle' that create a story. This was new from last year and it's something we kept developing for the next days.
In parallel, Zsofia created a color coded frame to orgnanize our research. It included Steeple Categories colomns and Scales / Type of cards for the lines. This was helpfull to have a quick overview at what categories or scale were overlooked. For example we could directly see that we were missing research in the education, economic or cultural colomns. It was a good tool for macro vision, yet because of the scale it could feel quite exhausting to zoom in and out to analyze the information in micro scale.
Testing ways to connect cards
Overview of the organisation of the research into a color coded frame
First STUDIO DAY
For the first studio day, only students had access to school. We used our the studio to print the cards, and start to play with them to create scenarios. We questionned how people could interact with them as well as how their arrangement could benefit us.
I brought the idea of connecting them with preposition to generate sentence or scenario.
I took inspiration from the Preposition Tool project my tutor from Konstfack, Martin Avila, created and shared during my courses last year as a tool to generate ideas.
During the day, we also watch a live talk about deliberative democracy.
Collective sketches
Deliberative Democracy Talk
Uses and framework for the cards
The next step was to define clear objectives and potential roles for the cards for us, CCI and future citizens. It worked as a guidance for the rest of the project.
Marianne presented us ideas to translate metrics into meaningful visuals. Following her advice we quickly draft some ideas.
An example I shared looked like a submarine periscope, plus it was only informing Steeple categories. So we looked at existing engagement cards to find inspiration and think about a visual that could inform more metrics.
Defining objectives and roles of the cards
Writting and Classifying cards
As a first draft to visualize our research, we combine information into a basic blank frame with a title, the scale and time and a description. We organize the cards by color coding Steeple categories. Cream for Ecological, Green for Social, Pink for tehcnological, purple for economical, blue for political, orange for educational, yellow for cultural, grey for methodological, green/blue for insights.
As we were a group of 10, it was important to split the tasks into subgroups so we didn't lose time.
Zsofia and Mafalda were charged to review the text part. They used Google Excel Sheet so everyone could access and proofread content.
Edoardo and I worked on the scenario board and in addition with Neal, on the visuals for the cards.
Cards interpretation round
We used our studio day to print the text based cards draft and research different ways to use them and make knowledge accessible. From the observation that last year the STEP cards were quite text heavy, and regarding our current draft, one of our challenge was to generate less content without overlook information.
As we were the 4 students, we did a group exercize of cards interpretation rounds. Each person gave its own interpretation of the cards content by summarizing it into few words title.
First, this allowed us to get familiar with the content and to give a more accessible language to the card. We compared the different thoughts and contrasts between interpretation and map different actors revealed through the generate new title. Then we group the cards under new categories.
Overview of the Research
Cards' classification
Cases study : visual inspiration
Codifying the Cards
Using Miro, we start gathering and sharing visual references, cases study of civic board game cards or other engagement cards. It allow us to have inspiration on how various graphics could communicate ideas in an abstract way.
Finding the graphism of the card game created for Helsinki residents simple and efficient, I tried to reuse the idea of a geometrical pattern to code the metrics.
https://intuiti.it/
https://superflux.in/index.php/and-now-for-something-completely-different/#
https://bloombergcities.medium.com/how-a-card-game-can-help-city-residents-suggest-new-ideas-b1da60bb112b
The concept was to generate a bank of symbols to illustrate the metrics as well as colors for each Steeple category. By doing so it was easier for us to identify the type of card as well as facilitating and automate the creation of the visuals. The proposition was only a draft and other shape, less flat would be interesting to develop.
Cards grouping into categories : development process of interpretation round
Bank of symbols : testing visuals to identify categories
Card: Creative catalyst
How cards can be a tool for engaging people ?
The previous researchs about engaging cards also informed us about ways to interact with cards and how they can generate conversation or ideas.
From these inspiration, we draft few concepts around Scenario Board. We imagine scenario elements like in a story such as a topic, a stakeholder, a case study or a tool.
For example, the one I was imagining was about placing given STEP cards on a board according to their type and see what scenario could result from this combination.
Board to generate scenario (top) &
inventory of the elements of the scenario (bottom)
Identifying Gaps in knowledge
Through the research we identified opportunities and key tension points that help us to formulate research questions. We proposed a range of experts to speak to that could bring more specific knowledge about those gaps.
I focused on experts abroad following Kirsty advice in week 2 about understanding what has been successful in other cities.
Two of the tensions points we identified were about lack of diversity in participation and digital inequalities so I contacted 3 experts:
- David van Reybrouk, founder of citizen initiative G1000 specialized in deliberative democracy (Belgium) and
- Jenna Burrell and Tawana Petty, specialized in digital connectivity for marginalized communities (USA)
Identifying gaps in knowledge
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EMERGING THEMES
Individually, we gathered a range of themes emerging from the tension points and share it to the group. It helped us to notice commonalities that through colors and by then evidence 4 key themes.
Details of the Flower landscape : identifying common points and merging them into key themes
Research Cards
Neal proposed a new layout of cards, color gradient-based. Each shade represented a category generated during the 'interpretation round' exercise while each corner a specific category(scale, stakeholder...). The idea was to create a gradient landscape with all the cards, inspired by temperature diagrams, to identify the card's content according to its position on the virtual map.
In parallel, we developed a framework that allowed connections between topics, methods, stakeholders, theories & case studies. The cards became the research and tools to generate unexpected links and start a conversation. The goal of the framework was to develop creative ways to solve problems and get views on topics.
Cards layout draft : trying to organize key information
Cards framework : testing ideas and visuals
At the end of phase one we had a workshop with Studio And then to synthetise and narrow our research down.
Identifying Drivers
First, we gave them a presentation of our research so far and an overview of our 4 themes. This served as a basis for Studio Andthen to have a context and for us to refresh our minds for the following exercize.
Santini guided us with a presentation explaining notion of Drivers and Trends. Then synchronously as a full team, on Miro and Zoom we exchanged verbally, wrote down and re-organised main elements of our research into 5 Drivers influencing participation and social change.
Santini Basra
Founder, Strategy Director
Freyja Harris
Junior Designer, Researcher
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Evidencing drivers
The next step was to evidence the drivers with cases study, notions, methodologies etc we came accross during the desk research to ground the drivers in concrete context. This exercize brought a new dimension of research's classification. Indeed, we classified our cards under new labels grouping them by common thematics of content and less by type of cards.
Emerging question
For each drivers we split into our lense subteam to define key citizens, key places and key research questions per lenses. The view being to build in the near future a common research question for the two lenses.
At the end of the workshop, we shared our progression of the day with Kirsty, Marianne, Steve and Zoe to have experts feedbacks.
Miro Board, Andthen Workshop I
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