Physical design in a digital world
By Marc Cairns, Umi Lovecraft Baden-Powell, Celina Carlisle & Cat Drew
A whole new digital world
With opportunities to meet in person during the pandemic restricted, digital spaces have become an essential addition to our ‘toolkit’ of interactions both as citizens and designers. In this blog, our Design Associates Umi Baden-Powell (London) and Marc Cairns (Glasgow) share our learning from a project called Design, differently where we were exploring how to create feelings of connection and community between people from all four corners of the UK, in a digital world.
Over the past 15 months, digital platforms such as Zoom have offered opportunities to people across the UK to stay in touch, share important information, learn about each other’s ideas and concerns, and offer opportunities to participate creatively in changes in their community. But they have their limitations too. The barriers to accessing and participating in digital spaces can be significant to many people; ranging from a lack of access to digital devices, the costs of high-speed internet access, a lack of space to work from home or perhaps more simply (and commonly) the inability to really connect with others through a screen.
Design Council had been quick to develop a creative set of digital activities and beautifully designed miro boards, to engage people from different backgrounds, for example local councils and their partners working on climate change, local communities reimagining their local high streets, and people from different sectors and lived experience to create new networks of supported accommodation for homelessness. We’ve learned and shared as we’ve gone and also brought together experts from our network and beyond to open up their digital community engagement practices too. It has brought our focus on inclusion and accessibility into even sharper relief.
Thinking differently about digital
Design, differently was a real opportunity for us to think creatively about this. Funded by Local Trust and the The National Lottery Community Fund’s Emerging Future’s Fund, it is a project focused on creating connections between inspirational community activists across the UK to better understand how design can be used by anyone to reimagine and bring about positive, lasting and widespread change within communities.
Through the initial research carried out for this project, we know that communities were all having to get to grips with learning to use new sets of online tools and platforms to stay connected with their families, friends and colleagues, whilst managing numerous urgent demands caused by Covid-19. Whilst these change-makers recognised the real benefits to these digital spaces, it was clear that using them could often feel overwhelming, exhausting or even exclusionary. Fundamentally digital lacked the fun that was such an important part of their pre-Covid ways of coming together.
With this in mind, for Design, differently we designed a programme of interactive online sessions to encourage a more actively participatory and memorable experience, with opportunities to share important ideas, learn about challenges and participate in creative conversations provided through the design of a blended ‘digital and physical’ space.
The anchor piece of these interactive online sessions was the creation of a ‘special session pack’, a physical pack delivered to each of the participants across the three sessions which provided hard copies of digital materials, hand held prompts, inspirational items and supporting objects such as a disposable camera and a participant guidebook.
The design of the special session pack was multi-purpose. Firstly, using resources to create physical tools for participants was a way to mitigate, as much as possible, barriers to digital and a way of opening up collaborative, rather than extractive, conversations. Providing a wide range of tools in the pack allowed for the sessions to be planned and choreographed but also flexible — open to changing approaches in the moment, if this is what felt right. Critically, the physical tools allowed participants to reuse and re-play the conversations from the sessions in their own time and with other people from across their organisations and communities. Lastly, the design of the pack was carefully crafted to create a visual identity that would resonate with the widest possible range of people across the sessions. This enabled the participants’ purpose, values and commitment to shine through and further incentivise active participation both within and beyond the sessions.
Pack contents
Highlights from the Design, differently special session pack included:
- An illustrated ‘participant guide’ to the interactive online sessions so that participants knew what to expect in advance and could prepare for the sessions in their own time if they wished.
- A ‘conversation menu’, created in collaboration with social broadcasts, to help every participant to have a chance to speak up and be heard.
- The gifting of ‘Do Something; Activism for Everyone’ book by Kajal Odedra — provided to inspire and motivate
- A disposable camera to allow participants to record, return and share the story of their community.
- A printed suite of useful ‘design thinking’ tools to be used at a later date at their own convenience as a way to continue the work from the sessions independently.
- A few squares of ethically sourced chocolate… to provide some workshop sustenance!
As the opportunity to meet in person and undertake more established forms of community engagement begin to open up, many interactions will remain online. We believe that the design of a blended space for conversation will remain a critical part of ensuring that diverse and under-represented communities are included. Hybrid approaches that weave together digital and physical opportunities to participate are invaluable to improving the way we create conversations and invite people across the UK to design things differently.
Top tips
Our top tips for creating special session packs for digital workshops:
- If possible, design the pack to fit into standard packaging items, such as a padded envelope or poster tube. Even better, design the pack to fit through a standard domestic letterbox to avoid any possible issues with postage.
- Design the pack to be easily accessible for as many people as possible.
- Make sure to include, where possible, stamped address envelopes, so that participants can return any materials that you might like to collect, such as photos from a disposable camera.
- Including provisions for a hot drink and snack within the pack communicates a sense of care and kindness that will go some way in replicating the experience of an in-person session or workshop.
- Use recyclable materials and design things that can be re-used rather than just thrown away.
- Make it fun!
Participant feedback
“The Portland Inn Project has already begun to use the mapping and priorities tools in our sessions to consider the urgent issues facing our area as we recover from the pandemic, and to support our organisation to also review our individual and organisational values. What was hugely interesting was to explore the ‘design thinking’ model, and to realise this was already how we work, but we didn’t know the language around that. Practically speaking too, the conversation menu has already been used in sessions, and we plan to do more work with this in the coming weeks, as we begin a conversation club locally, supporting residents that are looking to practise their English and also to combat loneliness.”
Anna Francis — The Portland Inn Project, Stoke on Trent
“Nudge has used the ‘Design, differently’ resources to plan how we will refresh activity in one of our three buildings — Union Corner. Using the journey maps has enabled us to have energetic conversations to re-balance the space and encourage new activity. We are now on track to recreate our offer of a ‘great-big community house share’ where everyone will feel equal and welcome to try or host new activities and build connections. Each journey just took an hour and we have used the community conversations tool to plan our first drop-in where we’ll tease out feedback from our community. Thank you!”
Wendy Hart — Nudge Community Builders, Plymouth
