DESIGNING WITH SKCP
Designing with a neighborhood help desk
South Kensington Community Partners (SKCP) is an organization based in South Kensington that serves as a help desk to the neighborhood and a catalyst for community engagement and action. Over the course of fourteen weeks, we worked with them to help them connect with their community in order to better serve them and we helped them address some of their internal issues.
A colleague and I led our design team during this project. In order to discover an effective entry point, we listened to those in SKCP and explored the neighborhood with them. We were given a broad design brief and discovered multiple areas to address so our goal was to create a simple yet powerful solution that could create a ripple effect for SKCP long after our collaboration was completed.
Throughout our collaboration with SKCP, we made observations and designed tools to facilitate decision making within the organization. We also conducted interviews with residents of South Kensington and local business owners. We found that though South Kensington Community Partners were present to serve those in the community, many people did not know about them nor their resources. We also discovered that the community was very diverse but people tended to keep to themselves making the issue even more challenging. SKCP already had connections with some business owners and the local businesses had strong connections to the those in the different parts of the neighborhood. Building strong partnerships with more businesses was an opportunity to connect SKCP to the community. We worked with SKCP to help them connect to their community in this way. At the end of the projects, we presented SKCP with our findings and the one step they needed to start a ripple effect in South Kensington.
We
wanted to be transparent with SKCP so we gave them a timeline showing our design process and how we intended to go about with the project. We updated them weekly on our progress.
After exploring South Kensington and getting to know SKCP better, we synthesized our findings, pulled out some reoccurring themes and brought them to the organization.
After exploring South Kensington and getting to know SKCP better, we synthesized our findings, pulled out some reoccurring themes and brought them to the organization.
The members of SKCP seemed to describe themselves in several ways that were not unanimous so we assisted them in developing one elevator pitch together.
Using our findings from our previous synthesis, we facilitated SKCP in deciding what was most important for them to accomplish through our collaboration.
We went out to the community and conducted interviews to see if the concerns of SKCP matched up with those of the community. We also wanted to find out where groups of people came together in South Kensington so we used an interview tool to gather this information.
We used our findings to design another decision making tool. This tool, confirmed that the concerns of SKCP did align with those of their community and it helped narrow down our focus.
Using our findings from our previous synthesis, we facilitated SKCP in deciding what was most important for them to accomplish through our collaboration.
We went out to the community and conducted interviews to see if the concerns of SKCP matched up with those of the community. We also wanted to find out where groups of people came together in South Kensington so we used an interview tool to gather this information.
We used our findings to design another decision making tool. This tool, confirmed that the concerns of SKCP did align with those of their community and it helped narrow down our focus.
After some ideations with SKCP, we created a place making prototype to test how we could engage pedestrians by drawing them into local businesses while connecting them to SKCP.
We agreed on having a campaign in the neighborhood so we designed a workshop to help SKCP make some decisions about what the campaign will entail.
Using the results from the campaign designing workshop and findings from our place making prototype, we put together a packet that included detailed steps and preparations necessary for the campaign to take place. We presented SKCP with a packet showing all the details that would go into the campaign.
Using the results from the campaign designing workshop and findings from our place making prototype, we put together a packet that included detailed steps and preparations necessary for the campaign to take place. We presented SKCP with a packet showing all the details that would go into the campaign.
