Designing innovative solutions to engage youths in sustainable urban planning, part 2: The process and solutions!
In a previous post Designing innovative solutions to engage youths in sustainable urban planning, part 1: Presenting the challenge! a challenge was presented that students at the bachelor programme IT, media and design at Södertörn University were given during a course called Design, innovation and creativity. The challenge was about designing innovative solutions for engaging youths in sustainable urban planning and in the creation of attractive and sustainable living environments.
The process
To solve this challenge, the students worked in nine teams with six persons in each team. They based their work on initial studies, thematic lectures by researchers from the project Planning with Youth, talks given by representatives from the Coordination Agency Huddinge Botkyrka Salem and Huddinge municipality, and by Amanda Larsson. Amanda is an artist who created Magiska trädgården; a playful platform that aims to listens to children and young people’s opinions, to remind adults of the child perspective on things, where nothing is obvious and everything is possible, and with the ambition of making the society more democratic, climate-smart and playful. The students worked with different design methods and were able to formulate a focused challenge for future work. Each team worked iteratively, and formulated a problem statement (or Point-of-View). Then, based on that problem framing they created a variety of design solutions and concepts to solve the specific part of the challenges they were introduced to. The task for the students were, so forth, not to find the answers to all challenges introduced, or even to find a solution for an entire problem area of engaging youths in urban planning, but rather after creating an understanding for the area and the target group, to find limited innovative and creative solutions to specific issues within the frame of the challenge.
Related to this, the students had opportunities to find solutions that in various ways that can be linked to artistic practices, games and digital gaming, or other ways to create participation and commitment to bring young people’s perspectives into the creation of sustainable living environments. It can be about finding ways to get youths to get involved in their immediate environment, or something more specific, such as thinking about how young people in a suburban or residential area can meet across social boundaries (linked to i.e. age, class, ethnicity, gender etc.) to jointly develop sustainability goals or detailed plans for a specific residential area.
Innovative solutions
The student’s projects ended up with nine innovative solution to the challenge. The solutions ranged from physical and digital activity centers, game applications, to various tools to hand in citizen suggestions to the municipality and urban and spatial planners.
The Happy Bin concept was initiated with the expectations that is would help reduce littering by encouraging the use of garbage bins designed with sound feedback playing when the bins were used. The sound feedback aims to make the interaction with the garbage bins more fun. Inside the bins there are sensors noticing when the litter is thrown into the bin, and when this happens the sensors starts playing the sound. On the top of the Happy Bin there is also a QR code that the users can scan by using their smart phones and downloading an app that includes the possibility to gather points and get rewards.
Trash Cult is a concept solution that address a target group in the age of upper teenagers, but can also be used by adults. The solution is based on a designed game using augmented reality technology, trying to immerse the players in the gaming experience. The aim is to disguise that the player gets outside and moves around in the environment, interact with the surroundings and simultaneously cleans up in their local environment. Part of this concept is the fact that the designed game needs to access its public and also needs to include parts of the experience that is happening in the physical local environments, so as a part of the solution teams has designed QR codes that they have put up on garbage containers around the local areas, so that the players can scan the codes to get rewarded within the game. The whole concept of Trash Cult has a unique and challenging form language, and by using weapons, post-apocalyptic sceneries and a dark image for the whole concept, as well as for the game design, the aim is to attract users and players and invite them into a full game experience. Trash Cult aims to give the user an exciting gaming experience even if it simultaneously gives the municipality a cleaner, safer and a more sustainable living environment. The storylines that is outlined for the players in the game get the users to forget the fact that they are involved in societal benefit.
The concept Korsadväg is focusing on a solution based on an app and a website that aims to act as a digital meeting place where youth can meet. In this case the solution is focusing on a meeting place for youths where they get to show their talents in, for example, football and video production to scouts or recruiters. The solution is also focusing on opportunities for youths to present business ideas for potential investors and business management. The app allows users to create their own profiles with space for video clips, photos and CV:s, which stakeholders can take part of in order to invite the youths to collaborate in various ways. It can be to share contacts, financing the youth’s suggestions or to provide them with guidance on how to be engaged in something productive that benefits themselves and the society. The app would meet the youths needs to get something out of visiting the website, for example, to get a job or the right guidance to be able to achieve their dreams and goals.
Håll Koll is a concept that combines elements from popular applications such as Snapchat, Pokémon Go, and informative application such as Stockholm city’s Tyck Till-application. The aim of the concept is to provide youths with a channel, through which they can make their voices heard, while they simultaneously get information about, and get encourage to, participate in sustainable choices, follow up on project that they get involved in, and see results of their opinions that they collaboratively share within the setting of the concept. The concept consists of an app that is divided into two sections, the first one is focusing on municipal issues where polls and information is provided regarding urban and spatial planning and new project, the second is more personal and focuses on the users own agendas and provides opportunities to gather points by making sustainable choices such as scan receipts from recycling bottles, counting steps or distance that you have travelled by taking the bike or public transports, error reports, and to send in suggestions to the municipality. The gathered points can be used to either decorate, or take care and nurture trees that you have in the app, or to get discount coupons on various local shops, cafés or restaurants.
The Huddinge City Games concept is also consisting of an app, but in this case in the form of a game application. The team that made this gaming app was focusing on the challenge of finding fun and innovative ways to engage youths to contribute to their own neighbourhoods and the urban development in their closest living environment. As they found that many youths that they had interviewed during the project liked to play video games, the team choose to move along that path. The games in the app is designed to be a fun experience and at the same time make the youth contribute to the planning of residential areas, parks and other public spaces. In the various games offered in the app there are also communicative dimensions that offers the youth a possibility to communicate and interact in between each other.
The SpelPlanen concept is based on an app which is interwoven with a physical gaming hall with the same name. The physical gaming hall is a planned construction within this concept where the app in its turn will function as a means to get the youths in Huddinge to hang out and use the activities that are present in the physical gaming hall. By being a member, using the app and visiting the physical localities the youth get involved in urban planning both by using the app, and getting to use the localities of the gaming hall. The concept is meant to motivate young people to get involved in their urban areas by offering them a meeting place where they can meet and get influence from each other.
The concept Tyck till aims to involve youth in urban planning by a solution that act as a mediator between youth and Huddinge municipality. The solution consists of a box with a built-in touch screen that should be stationed in schoolyards in the suburban area. The box contains various functions to give students at the school’s opportunities to directly participate and influence decision makers in the municipality regarding the specific school area. The main function of this solution is for the youth to report problems and give proposals regarding the schoolyard. The proposals and reported problems are to be directly communicated to the school management and the municipality.
The Huddinge-appen concept is designed as an app with associated information signs, which purpose is to get youth to participate more sustainable urban planning on a municipal level. Even if there are many similar applications for participation and getting inhabitants input in municipalities, this concept focus is on feedback and response. By the use of physical information signs in combination with the digital app the student groups mean that this concept really will get access to youth participation.
The concept RE:MAP is a mobile and interactive screen that can be placed on various physical localities where youth usually are present in the municipality. By using the interactive screen youth are able to leverage their ideas on how they would like to change things in their local environments, vote on specific suggestions concerning their neighbourhood and also take part of ideas that has been realised and implemented. The screen is connected to a website with the same functions so that people also are able to access the same information and possibilities from their homes etc. The use of the screen mainly is to create curiosity and interest so that youth are aware of when and where they can leave their suggestions.
Reflections
The nine student’s projects with the challenge of designing innovative solutions for engaging youths in urban planning mainly focus on local issues, and several of them address the question on how to get youths to influence and participate in local decision making concerning their own living environment in the municipality.
It is possible to find themes for the solutions that the students proposed. For example, the aim to reduce littering, offer youths the possibility to share their views on how the municipality could be developed, provide youths input to urban and spatial planning, and games offered for the youths, seems to be the main take for the suggested concepts. By providing the youths with elements of gamification, gathering of points to be used for other purposes also seems to work as means for making youth to be engaged and to participate in societal applications as the ones proposed by the students.
The representatives from Huddinge municipality and the Coordination Agency Huddinge Botkyrka and Salem (Samordningsförbundet Huddinge Botkyrka Salem in Swedish) were very pleased with the concepts that the students came up with and promoted that some of them had potentials in being implemented both short term and long term within the municipality.
The innovative dimension of the proposed solutions can of course be questioned, as several of the suggestions for solutions are incremental rather than innovative. Maybe this might be affected by the students strive for their solutions to be put at use in the municipalities and by the local youth residents and their fear of not being so if their solutions are too innovative and creative. Or, this might be the effect of the students aim of designing something useful and easy to access in relation to the issues brought up by the youth residents that they interviewed within their projects.
Even though, the voices of young people are some of the strongest in the current climate debate, maybe the aspects put to the fore by the students in this project demonstrate that the youth in the suburban areas expressed that the opportunities to participate in the development of sustainable living environments could be realised by incremental development and design of systems through which their voices could have an impact. The students involved in this project tried to meet the needs that they could find from talking to youths in these areas, something that might even be the most important part to make use of the youth’s voices in a meaningful way.
