The more I think about the last project we completed at uni, the more unsure I become about it.
Another final-year project where the 2 week marking response deadline has come and gone, I've had plenty of time to mull over whether the work I did was even worthy of the bottom grade, let alone the fairly high one I need to pull my average up to where I'd like it to be.
We have to submit extra evaluations of two of our completed projects in our final 'reflective journal', and that's meant to then give you the opportunity to raise the grade that you initially received. It's meant to be in light of the feedback you received, but seeing as we haven't received it yet, and the reflective journal deadline is drawing near, I thought I'd get started.
If you're thinking of jumping out now let me assist by saying that the rest of this post is about community involvement, the internet, and my ineptitude in design.
So…
You can't move on the internet these days without hearing of the demise of the newspaper, regional, and even national television. And often this is coupled with a sense that there's going to be a gap in local community news and interaction, with no real vision at the moment as to how that would be filled (except for something that I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about that I saw in a presentation on Thursday.)
So when we were given the opportunity to set our own briefs for our penultimate project at the end of last term, I decided to try to do something about it. I briefed myself to 'encourage people aged 16-30 to engage with their local community' and based my project in the Canton and Riverside areas of Cardiff, where I've spent most of my life so far.
Another reason for doing this was this great quote from Richard Millington
"if you want to clean up the litter in your street, don't grab a broom, build the bonds between members so they won't drop litter on your street. It serves to reason, if you want to improve the value of your home, you should increase the social capital of your street. You can do this easier than ever with online tools."
A massive part of what we were asked to do was research, which was fine for a project like mine. It was actually the first time I've really done a substantial sketchbook, which probably held me back a bit but was a lot of fun. I'm not sure, though, if having the work schedule weighted two thirds research and one third development was really appropriate for a web-based outcome. Anyway.
I knew a proportion of my efforts would need to be online, but how much, and where, and why and how would people interact with whatever was there? Ruby Pseudo was super helpful at this point in reminding me that, essentially, there is no online - younger people see their online activities as an intrinsic part of their overall lives, and not an end in themselves.
Bearing that in mind, I chose to style an online presence that was more of a hub of existing content and activity, as opposed to a completely new, facebook-style utility site that would require new sign-in and content from users. I figured that the APIs of the services that are already out there could be used in such a way that my site could be a collection of everything the community is doing, simply with a new mechanism overlaid for people to get involved and make new connections.
My main problem at this point, however, was still how would I get people to use the site and populate it with the interactions that would begin to meet my brief. Before I even started web ideas, I was still a long way off the question of 'how do you design that interaction'.
I needed to make my project remarkable, i.e make it able to be remarked upon, so it needed to be visible in the streets it was representing. That's why I thought about the idea of hanging shoes telegraph wires.
I like the ambiguity. I thought that if done enough and effectively, and followed up with good press and outdoor to add a name to it, I thought it could be pretty effective. The fact that I had so many twitter responses proved how good it might be in conversation on the street when people saw some.
The twist would be that instead of manky trainers, I would be throwing high heels, fluffy slippers, brogues, shoes from all parts of the community.
So my next challenge was to think up names that would link an ongoing online presence with this initial promotional activity. I messed around with lots of shoe-related names until settling on 'step up' which I thought crossed the youth-street-community-footwear divide quite nicely.
I deliberately stayed away from graffiti styled 'yoof' logos, I think they're a bit patronising and also not so appropriate to the top end of my target market. I ended up with this:
This is such a small part of my project but I spent far too long on it, probably a few days, without really getting anywhere. As you can see. I'm wondering now if I should have just done something even worse and got on with the website.
So anyway, after the initial shoes go up, the plan was that a week or two later there would be press releases to local media to start answering a few of the questions that people on the street would hopefully have started asking. So I wrote some press releases.
I don't know if they'll be considered as part of the outcome.
The next part was to get posters out into the area just to finally link the telegraph wire shoes and the website. I tried a few approaches.
An early idea. That's my friend Mr. Pinder. What was good about this one was that I could have used the models more on the website, with features and banners to make the site seem more personal. But I couldn't make it look exciting and engaging enough with the time that I had and the weather and season at the time. Long term, if this project went ahead, pictures of locals would definitely have been the way to go.
But this particular example was slammed in crits and I didn't then have the resources to improve upon it, so had to go a different route:
Yep.
All that's left to show you is my web interface. I'm a bit ashamed of it to be honest. I spent far too long doing things to actually get it ready for launch, which was never going to happen, instead of spending the time mocking up a better layout. So the CSS and coding was all there, but not so much the answer to the question of designing interaction.
Now that all the groundwork is done in terms of the surrounding campaign, I would definitely re-visit the actual site and try to get that to work. I would de-clutter the columns, change the header, use better photography, and include more encouraging language and calls to action. I think buttons like 'do something' and 'news and conversation' were definitely in the right direction, but that whole empowerment idea could definitely have been developed a lot more. It would be good to actually work with a developer to get all the twitter and flickr feeds working how they should.
But apparently, there's now an almost identical site somewhere within walesonline.co.uk , but I haven't been able to find it yet. Knowing that has made me feel a bit better about setting myself the task, but not so sure that I'll try to take it live over the summer, as I was originally planning.
I still think it was a noble ambition, I'm just a bit concerned that I've made an absolute pig's ear of it.
We'll have to see what the final grade is, but that won't really prove much more about whether this project is actually any good, just what my tutors thought of it. I felt pretty much out on my own in terms of support and guidance when I was putting this together, getting the distinct impression that it was an area that very few of the staff knew anything about. That's probably why my work time was so weighted towards pointless things like the logo when I now realise that it should have been on the content and interaction design. I could have done with another crit session with a tutor when I'd got the interface to how you see it above, to seek more guidance then. But after they'd asked us to spend 4 weeks just coming up with ideas, it didn't really work out that way.
But anyway, as one speaker from Friday at St Brides would say, 'there it is'.
