As you may remember from our first weeknote on 5 May, we (Ada, Valentina, and Jacob) are here at Camden Council for a 7-week placement focusing on the challenge to harness participation for the Community Wealth Fund in Camden.
We started the first week with an introduction to Camden Council and the lovely Strategy & Design team. Then, we spent the last two weeks meeting with more internal stakeholders, beginning our interviews with external organisations, and doing desk research. Today marks the end of the third week of our placement. Please find below a summary of what we’ve worked on so far!
Internal Stakeholder Interviews
During our second week here at Camden, we kicked things off with a meeting with David Burns, Director of Economy, Regeneration and Investment, to learn more about the history, intended outcomes, and limitations of the CWF. We then met with Osian Jones, Head of Corporate Strategy, and Caroline Kennedy, Head of Participation. This allowed us to get some more background and context into understanding strategy and participation in Camden. We then had the chance to meet with more members of the Participation team, including Dominic, Ruth, and Shah. With a clearer understanding of the context both behind the CWF and the Camden Council, we moved on to desk research.
Our Desk Research and Initial Research Synthesis
Through our internal meetings, we developed a list of all the different organisations, programmes, and participation models we wanted to research. After conducting our desk research, we worked together to synthesise our findings, first creating a table with all the different participation models we found and analysing the benefits and risks for them. We also gathered our observations and insights and came together to brainstorm frame creation, based on the Kees Dorst approach to apply design thinking in our work.
We have an interim presentation coming up soon next Monday, where we’ll share more details about what we’ve accomplished and what we’re planning to do moving forward. In the next two weeks, we’ll be getting ready to speak to more external stakeholders and test some participatory models with them. That’s it from us until the end of our next sprint. Have a great weekend!