Timeline

9 weeks | February 2022 - March 2022

My Role

Team Project
Brief analysis | Primary research | Case study | Co-design | Ideation | Proposal

Methods

Mapping | Interactive questionnaire | Picture touring | Interview | Roleplay

Project Partner

London Newham Borough Council

Brief

Our task is to support Newham council and residents in imagining what a future, eco-socially just and sustainable ‘15 minute neighbourhood’ might look for the demographic represented by our team’s persona.

The speculative design works are expected to be radical proposals to help citizens think beyond what they may perceive to be possible in the here and now. The proposals will be complements to the more pragmatic outcomes of the citizen assembly.

We are strongly encouraged to question and take a critical approach to this brief. We expect you to develop design proposals that explicitly challenge the social, environmental, economic, political, technological, (...) status quo.

Click here to see the full brief.

Our Persona

Khan Family—— A joint family, including three generations

Final Proposal

OurSpace is a series of marked outdoor areas across Newham dedicated to public interactions. These spaces welcome anyone and everyone to participate, organise and engage through various activities and events. What happens in these spaces depends on the people who are using them. Through impromptu and planned activities, OurSpace will build bridges within the community and with the council. It will make every passerby a little happier.

From our research, we understood that people don’t want big plans and drastic changes enforced on them. Everybody has aspirations and intangible needs, but they also need to be able to see all these possible things that they can, want or aspire to. OurSpace would empower people to be their own agents of change and help people create experiences for and with each other. OurSpace was born from the insight that we don’t necessarily need to add something to a neighbourhood and that we could just make existing spaces more visible and use facilities already there to add curiosity, learning, sharing, connections, inspiration, support, empathy and happiness to everyone’s 15 minutes.

Brief Criticism
& Project Goal

Brief Criticism

Is the 15-minute city a buzzword?

The concept became a buzzword over the last couple of years. It is seen as a more sustainable way of living, thus many cities have put that on their agenda to keep up with the trend. Researched case studies in Europe and London, such as Barbican, we found that this self-imposed closure created by the boundary does give some more privacy to the residents inside the area, instead of enlarging a city. On the other hand, it can create mental and physical boundaries in community design. There is not enough data on how much residents or Earth really profit from it. More research should be done to understand if we can plan “Local Living” and if we should even be doing it in the first place. How can we rebalance our policies and approaches to ensure all these city elements are understood and supported?


Do we really need ‘a 15-minute city’ development for Newham?

In terms of Newham, as many bus stops, grocery stores, and other infrastructure have been built since regeneration projects launched, most local people can reach facilities that meet their daily basic needs within 15 minutes.

From our understanding of Newham, there is so much more to be done for the people, like ensuring they have a good work-life balance, feel like they belong, are happier and content and have a sense of bonding and connection. The brief sits within a vision of how we live and function today. To approach it speculatively, we must think beyond the systems that we currently have in place.


The diversity of a 15-minute city for individuals

For the children, 15 minutes of walking will mean something very different to their parents, let alone their grandfather who has health issues and is therefore less mobile. A time as a distance measurement is therefore not uniform for our family persona.

Project Goal

What would 15-minute Newham look like if we would take intangible needs into consideration? 

As a project expected to be framed from speculative perspectives, our team tried to picture what kind of future scenarios we wanted to present to the Khan Family and Newham. 

We want every member of the Khan family, who leaves home and has a stroll through the neighbourhood, to have a positive experience within their individual 15 minutes surrounding. We want to especially focus on the intangible needs within those 15 minutes, since what we understand so far from the plans the city council has, is that those are mainly profit-driven. 

Research

Persona Analysis

Preliminary Analysis Methods
Secondary Research | Role Play

Objectives
Figure out and empathise with family members’ needs and desires of a more- generation household based on demographic factors.

Main Finding
Multigenerational housing will bring disadvantages, but we are convinced that intergenerational coexistence can enrich everyone.


This became one of our inspirations in the ideation process:' transferring this kind of exchange and learning with others and sharing and passing on knowledge to others, to the community.' If even a single household brings so much wealth in knowledge and experience, what would happen if a whole village got involved?


Primary Research

To reduce the bias from secondary demographic research, we chose Green Street, one of Newham's busiest high streets*, to conduct primary research about 'real' joint families living in Newham.

*A research about Green Street: https://shaanbassi.typeform.com/report/SaOpbqYB/nfN8GHzHUaUfaM1Y

Setting up assumptions

Assumptions based on findings:

  • The area seems unsafe and a little dangerous. People do not feel happy living in Newham and are not active and do not want to be active in the community.

  • The main activity for joint families in the Green Street area is shopping and commuting to primary or nursery school.

Finding out existing services

The purpose of this stage is to explore what public facilities and community services were available within 15 minutes, centred on Green Street. We marked on this map the relevant places and locations vital to the Khan family. 

We also took it one step further and tried to think about how they feel on their daily walk through their neighbourhood and how they interact with their surroundings.

Green Street is the central commercial district, along with various stores and restaurants, to meet the daily needs of locals, including many shops that cater to different cultures. There are also residential areas, public facilities such as parks and schools on both sides and small commercial streets with various shops and restaurants.

Findings

Usually, this area is crowded and noisy, but in the residential area, it is very quiet, and there is little activity as if it’s isolated from the world.

Verifying the assumptions

To verify our assumptions and findings as outsiders of Newham, we conducted street interviews with people on Green Street. We narrowed the interviewees down to people from a three-generation joint family.

Main Insights

The key insights from primary research was that

1. People enjoy Newham's diversity, which makes them feel at home, but they need more access to community involvement. They also mainly socialise in their close circles, which are defined by culture, language, family, and religion.

2. People on Green Street do not want drastic change – they are not interested in redevelopments and overpriced infrastructure. They want stronger connections and better support systems within their community. 

Reflection

Street interview as a research method has some limitations. 

  1. Because of the limited time of each interview, the way to ask questions is challenging to design. Even though we adjusted some open questions, which are less leading but usually need time for interviewees to understand and compose answers, to more specific ones, such as 'What do you usually do in your spare time or on the weekends (for family or individuals)?' to help people set up links between the questions and their own experiences, we were still unable to dig out deeply about what people's real thoughts and feelings are.

  2. Bias and misleading insights might be generated because the interviewees did not match our persona. 

  3. The interviewees‘ answers were likely to be influenced by the surroundings and activities they were doing.

Design Direction

To create a better neighbourhood, we decided to focus on what the residents wanted and desired. They should be given the space and the means to be the agents of change they want to see.

They already have aspirations for the area they live in, but they do not always align with what the council thinks and decides the area needs.  

Ideation

Inspiration: Public Space

We researched theories and case studies of public space and concluded the important factors of a good public space, which would be the principle for our design concept: 

  1. People make places

    The success of a particular public space relies on people adopting, using and managing the space – people make places, more than places make people. 

  2. Usually banal designed, untidy, but actively used

    Most public spaces that people use are local spaces they visit regularly, often quite banal in design or untidy in their activities or functions, but which nevertheless retain important social functions.

  3. Variable and never finished

    Community as expert, triangulate, form supports function, and you are never finished.

Initial Idea: The White Square

The white square is an open space for social interactions with one another. Knowing your community makes you feel both safer and more at home and can lead to caring for your community, building connections, supporting others and also being supported by them.

As the persona and primary research before, every member of a three-generational household has individual strengths, qualities and characteristics. All of them are great in their own way. Every single member of the Khan family will be using ‘the white square’ differently and according to their wants and needs. Those desires might also change over time - the nature of a blank page/ white square has the potential to adapt and adjust to those changes. 

Co-design Ideas with Newhamers

To test our idea, we marked out an area on Green Street and asked passers-by what they would want to see happening inside the space. We mapped all the diverse ideas and looked for overlapping desires to group together.

It will make every passerby a little happier.

It will make every passerby a little happier.

Proposal

OurSpace is a series of marked outdoor areas across Newham dedicated to public interactions. These spaces welcome anyone and everyone to participate, organise and engage through various activities and events. What happens in these spaces depends on the people who are using them. Through impromptu and planned activities, OurSpace will build bridges within the community and with the council. It will make every passerby a little happier.

Testing

“Let's play” street testing

To test the concept of OurSpace, we designed a prototype activity named ‘Let’s Play’ and held it over the weekend. Let’s Play includes two games, Noughts and Crosses and Hopscotch. We invited people to play the games and asked for their feelings. The testing aimed to experiment with whether or not passers-by would get involved in the activities set up in the abundant spaces and know how they feel about it. 

When designing ‘Let’s Play’, we chose to do it in a simple and low-budget way. This is because, on the one hand, we did not have enough time to prepare many materials for the testing, and, on the other hand, we wanted to examine the feasibility of locals holding activities and enjoying OurSpace by themselves.

Insights

Over two-day testing, we were surprised at how the space evolved as people created their own games and made suggestions. Due to the type of activities that we chose for testing, not many adults joined us.

This made us realise that we need to consider what kind of activities OurSpace can inspire different age groups to organise and what different organisations OurSpace can collaborate with. 

Interview testing with a newham resident

We also tested the concept of ‘OurSpace’ with a Newham resident who is a member of the Newham citizen assembly and also an event organiser doing part-time work for a youth charity in Newham.

She showed great interest in how we want to use the existing ignored open space to link people together. She also provided lots of valuable feedback, which supported the marketing method design of OurSpace and also gave us inspiration on how we can use other vacant spaces in the city to expand the possibility of OurSpace.

Reflection

In this project, our team were trying to reduce the bias as an outsider of Newham, listening to their voices and designing ‘with’ people, not just ‘for’ them. Through street interviews and some informal conversations with locals, we realized that as designers, we should be inclusive and humble rather than taking a privileged and leading position to intentionally ‘dig out’ problems and want to create something new. Sometimes, valuing what exists and protecting 'being' from change is what they actually need. 

However, we noticed that the project is based on some assumptions rather than accurate data, as we didn’t get in touch with the multi-generational families, which our given persona stood for through local organisations and Newham council for a limited time and resources. Bias could not be ignored in our final design proposal.