Experimentation and prototyping, two design practices, can be powerful drivers to build trusting relationships with the local communities Clear Village works with. As we have experienced, building prototypes of the projects and involving the local communities early in the process helps in building meaningful relationships with the members of those communities, as well as generating conversations and gathering useful data about the future of our projects.
Don’t be afraid of getting your hands dirty
Experimentation is wrongly perceived as a messy process. Indeed, experimenting is a revolutionary thing to do, when long- term planning has been the dominant way of working in our culture. When carefully framed, it can drive a lot of positive effects in the community-led design process. If artists and scientists are the ones who have historically embraced the experimental process, experimentation as a learning and data-gathering technique is now reaching non-traditionally experimental sectors such as the business and social sectors. Tech start-ups and community-led design practitioners are now embracing experimentation, sharing the same conviction: that it can be a powerful way to gather an important understanding of users or community members, either to stay competitive in the market or to build trusting relationships.
Experimentation as a way to gather qualitative data about projects
Experimentation, or more specifically in the case of Clear Village, the practice of building early version of a project and involving the local community early in the process, is a great way to get to know the members of the local community and how they are interacting with the space or place we are regenerating. Because successful places are the ones adopted by local people, building a successful space requires designing the best interactions between the people and the place. Experimenting with a space over a long period of time, as we are doing with the Marlborough Square project, allows us to observe a wide range of interactions between the residents and the space, and to better design a place that is desired and useful for the local people.
Experimentation to build engaging and trustful relationships with local communities
The biggest challenge in working with communities is to build trust between us and the members of the community so involving them early on in the design process allows us to build this trust, and to design places that respond to the people’s needs. The longer we stay at a place and interact with it and its members the more chances we have to immerse ourselves in the local culture and be adopted by the community. This is a crucial asset in our work.
Prototyping to generate conversations about the future of communities and places
Professor and creativity specialist David Gauntlett explains in his very interesting study Making is Connecting, building things in collaboration with other people is a great icebreaker and a way to generate conversations amongst a group of people. In the case of the Marlborough Square project, people are asked to prototype their visions for the Square in a tangible way, from a drawing to a mural made with chalk. As Professor Gauntlett explains, when people are making tangible versions of their ideas, they engage much more with the idea and the environment surrounding them. That is why at Clear Village we try to generate conversations from a collective making of things.
Chalk, clothes pegs, post-its: the more simple the trick is, the more interactions you can observe
When it comes to involving the local communities in the experiments, the more simple and ordinary the ‘tricks’ are, the more people will relate to them. If we design too complicated a scenario people will barely adopt them. But when we let them play around with some simple materials while making really clear how they are supposed to interact with the objects or space, we observe interesting – and often unexpected – interactions that help us to define the next steps of a project.
If you want to learn more on how to implement experimentation and prototyping within community work, visit the Central Saint Martins MA Innovation management degree show on June 18th – 22nd 2014. All info here.