Engage Lochee

This semester, my other project brief is beginning to pick up speed. We will be working on a project that is about engaging the social community.

The brief:

'This semester you will be working on the brief: Engage Lochee: catalysing social change through design led citizen participation. The brief will involve you working closely with clients in the community and the public sector. The public sector comprises of many different bodies and organizations and as such you will be required to facilitate effective engagement with a number of key stakeholder groups (e.g. local councilors, government officers, retailers, community groups, local residents, and possibly more).

As research and design practitioners, you are being asked to identify problems that affect the community and then to develop a new product service system to help fix them. Your design solution should make significant and positive changes in the local community and to the everyday life of people. You will bring your skills and knowledge as design visualisers, facilitators, communicators, thinkers, mediators and integrators to this project. The interaction you have with stakeholders affects your design outcome. You will be primarily the listeners in the first stages of this project – you need to be mindful and sensitive to your interactions with all stakeholders.'

So far we have been out to Lochee and done some observational research and spoken to some of the local people to see what they would like to see happen to make a social change.

A couple of our group have gone and visited a local school and spoken with the headmaster. We felt that targeting youngsters and setting up a project that they could be involved in would give them pride in their local area.

We are currently brainstorming possible systems that could be implemented to involve both the older and younger generations in Lochee to engage them with the community.