Dates: 02 February 2023 – 09 March 2023

Group Members: Kimberly Rodrigues, Anushka Kurien, Munira Kazi and myself.

WEEK 1

For the Spring term, we partnered with external organisations and companies and I had the pleasure of collaborating with the Southwark council for the duration of this project. We received our brief ‘design a way for residents to imagine Southwark in 2030’ which was part of the ongoing ‘Southwark 2030’ project in the borough.

Initially I had some inhibitions about the project, I felt maybe it will end up being too restrictive to design a workshop or that our options will be limited while working with a local governing body. Although it was soon clarified by my course leader Alaistair Steele, that the external partners would be our guides not clients.

So the image above is of a few notes from the initial meeting with the Southwark Council and the progress they have made. They had conducted a few workshops, sent out questionnaire’s and talked amongst themselves as a body.

The first exercise that our group of 11 did was branch out to a few different groups of stakeholders around LCC to get to know their set of preferences for a public intervention.

The categories of people and their respective analysis was:

• People on the street were mostly interested in interactive game play but their job being a priority, the date and time of the planned intervention mattered a great deal. Getting people’s attention on the street was a challenge and they did not necessarily know about the Southwark council.
• Students in LCC were easier to approach and showed an evenly spread interest in different ways of public interventions. Although most students were unaware of the Southwark borough.
• Shop owners around the local area seemed to be more interested in public installations but had some concerns with English being used as the primary language for communication.

We presented this progress at the end of the week and received feedback that suggested we focus more on helping the residents talk about Southwark in 2030. Our course mentors also advised we create multiple small outcomes along the course of the project that helps us understand along the process.

WEEK 2

The council had already been organising in-person workshops for the residents as part of the ‘Southwark 2030’ program before we began our project, so we visited one such workshop on 13th Februrary, 2023 at Tate Modern.

In preperation for this event and to make the most out of this as an opportunity to interact with the residents, we formed a set of questions to ask the workshop participants which drew inspiration from the discovery step of the ‘appreciative inquiry’ method.

A few observations of the event were:

• The location of the workshop being Tate Modern had attracted a few of the participants.
• The elderly participated openly in the event and showed up as a large parcentage of the crowd.
• Using workshop items like play-doh and pipe cleaners helped people get imaginative.

The following day, we put together a set of prerequisites that would help us narrow down the kind of public facilitation activities suited for our project. These were:

• Replicable + Participatory
• Self Explanatory + Aesthetic 
• Prompt Activity
• Incentives for participants 
• Inclusion of digital elements

We even formed a tagline that helped summarise our purpose: ‘ Attract – Interact – Participate ‘ and began working on two prototypes to help people imagine the future through written prompts:

• Spin a wheel: This prototype required the participants to spin a wheel that gave a ‘How?’, ‘When?’ or ‘Why?’ prompt for Elephant and Castle in 2030. Then they could write and post a small note in a letterbox to the future.
• Diary Entry: This exercise had a number of different prompts such as ‘My daily routine’ or “A day at work’ and asked the participant to imagine what that would be like 7 years from now.

These prototypes were placed in college at LCC and the observations made through the interactions were that although the ‘Spin a wheel’ attracted more people to look at it, people did not interact much and for the diary entry people were attracted and interacted with the prototype. Infact some people even interacted with other people’s responses which was interesting to note.

The feedback we received this week was that we add a layer of complexity and thought to our prototypes although the observations we had made hold value and we should incorporate them in designing better ones. We were advised to move out of LCC as a research space and approach communities apart from that of students.

WEEK 3

With two weeks already over, brainstorming over ideas was our next step. After a few back and forth discussion within the group, the idea of ‘a call from the future’ seemed to be liked by everyone in the group and our mentors. The plan going forward was to have multiple prototypes along the way and have a constant feedback loop of what was working and what was not by testing the prototype out. This way we could move quickly towards designing a method and avoid overseeing loopholes in the design. As an initial prop to help us envision our idea, we bought a blue phone receiver.

The core conceptual idea that we began working on was to have a public installation with the phone and when someone crosses it- the phone would ring. Instinctively, the passerby would be prompted to pick it up and an audio clip of the prompt would play and when the participant answered into the phone, their response would get recorded. To better visualise how this may look, we put together a few renders of the installation.

As a group we decided to work parallelly on two fronts:

• Prompts: This needed a lot of refining and constant testing, to understand if they were helping people imagine their futures or not. We tested out a few of the prompts within LCC by carrying around the Blue phone receiver in hand.
• Coding: This was definitely a huge learning curve and hence needed a lot of time and guidance from the assistants at college. We began with using p5.js as the platform.

At the end of this week we had our midpoint review with all the project partners for the term and in the presentation we made sure to also mention the challenges we were currently facing in the project. The feedback received from all of them was super valuable to us. The blue phone receiver was observed as a useful prop. The idea of receiving ‘a call from the future’ was appreciated but it felt like the current experience we had designed was a little underwhelming for them. The current prompts seemed to be halfway there but needed more imagination. A disclaimer that informed the participant that their voice will be recorded was missing and needed to be incoporated. We were once again prompted to start testing outside of LCC and move out of our comfort zone.

WEEK 4

Post-review amongst the group we decided to add an illustration that helps connect our installtion to Southwark and a string of lights that light up to connect the participant to the future when the phone is touched. This was done because our project was missing an element related to the Southwark borough and an element that helped the participant feel a sense of the connection respectively.

We also began focusing on the coding extensively. There were a few steps and requirements to it:

• The phone rings when someone passes by it.
• As soon as someone picks up the phone it stops ringing.
• An audio disclaimer is given about it being recorded.
• The prompt plays as an audio recording and the phone begins to record the real-time audio simultaneously.
• The recording ends and is saved once the phone is put back.

There was a lot of experimentation, reaching out for help and back and forth between platforms like processing, arduino and p5.js to get the installation to function the way we wanted it to.

The council had also provided us with an opportunity to test out our idea at the London South Bank University. We tested out the prompts that we had been working on and throughout the testing at LSBU we continued to refine the prompts depending on the kind of responses and feedback we were receiving.

Our only incentive at the time was stickers and so we decided to even the playing field with the other group testing beside us, we decided to buy some snacks, even though that was not part of the design of the interaction.

Through the testing at LSBU, we learnt that the prompts needed more work because they were not working as we had expected them to. It was not helping people imagine on the spot, what their 2030 futures could look like. We also realised that we needed to work more on the look of our installation for it to be attractive enough so that people are willing to interact with it without the snacks.

The feedback we received in this week was to find a sweet spot between personal, future and Southwark related questions to frame your prompts appropriately. Think about developing a script that helps gather personal insights about the community and neighbourhoods. Include follow-up questions but be mindful of the flow of the conversation and test them out. It would be better to leave the coding setup behind and focus on the prompts more.

WEEK 5

In the last week we mainly spent our time in the Creative Technology Lab- coding and physical computing and in the 3D workshop – laser cutting and using the wood workshop. On the side we were also editing and testing out our prompts but this testing like all others were done within the college.

The final format that the prompts used were:

And the final outcome looked like:

The feedback received was that the presentation should have had a larger part dedicated to the demonstration of the project rather than it’s explanation through words. The project came across as a simple concept which could have been more experimental and weird to help engage with the public. There was not much evidence of interaction with the residents of Southwark throughout the project and this was criticised. The installation looked attractive but the organic build-up of why all the elements used in it’s design were used, lacked structure and thought. The framework designed for the prompts was appreciated although more refining and testing was suggested. A major concern was that the installation had not been tested outside up until the presentation but was scheduled insteadd for a future date.

TESTING (28/04/23)

After a lot of planning and coordination we were able to finally take our project out for testing around Elephant and castle.

While the coding could not be tested out on Friday because of unavailibility of plug points, we had the opportunity to interact with people and they with our installation. Passersby were attracted by our installation and were willing to interact with it.