People’s Pub Partnership: Weeks 5–7
During week 4, we decided to sort of concentrate the pub into one artefact. This happened because we wanted to create a sort of framework for our project to be applicable everywhere, not just Walworth.
We needed the artefact to be multi-dimensional, and also collect data. The entity had to store materials, objects, signify our brand and also collect data. We decided to make a cart. We experimented with many, many designs, much more than were realistically manageable.
Our ideas led us to create a vertical cart, something that would catch attention to show our brand but also act as a storage tool. Creating the cart was difficult, as we had to break up our group into different teams to manage tasks. Fangxue and Zhe worked on our bottle workshop, Ella and Kristen worked on our pub games, Ava and Effy worked on documentation and branding, and Parth and Jacob worked on the cart. I unintentionally functioned in a Multiple Team Membership model, where I assisted and worked on whatever was critical//needed to be finished as quickly as possible.
Building the cart was the critical path, and Jacob, Parth and I spent much of our hours in the 3D workshop. When the cart was roughly built, we had to add on our stickers, bottles, pub sign (our codesigning activity), our branding, and acrylic boards — which we used to collect data.
Getting the cart to the event place was difficult, but manageable.
The event was hosted at the Walworth Living Room. We needed every user to sign a consent form at the beginning, which was a significant dip into the negative area of our overall User Experience Map, and after that the users were free to interact with the pub-like setting. They could interact with simply questions on the acrylic boards (“what is your favourite drink?”), they could participate in bottle workshops, they could play pub games like ring toss and Jenga. We had chosen to go with international food items and non-alchoholic beer tastings to integrate teetotallers into the event, and it went smoothly.
I feel like we succeeded in recreating the community pub model, and identifying the “magic” that made the pub life so special.
