Participate Consortium

18 months into a 3 year research and innovation collaboration the Participate team needed to consolidate research interests and decide on the best approach for a nationwide public experiment.

The project consortium (Microsoft Research, BT, BBC, Blast Theory, Nottingham and Bath Universities and Science scope) aims to create mass involvement in environmental issues using ubiquitous technologies.

Together with members of BBC Innovation and Blast theory I designed and developed workshops to help the Participate management group develop a design strategy for their public trials.

Workshop aims: to establish ways in which different research streams, themes and technologies could be integrated to create a shared vision for the final project stages.

A user-led perspective: shifted the emphasis away from competing needs of individual organisations and technology-driven solutions. By using scenarios to bring alternative propositions to life we encouraged team members to focus on how different users might engage with the project and which concepts would encourage mass participation.

Persona’s: Prior to the workshop we sketched a range of persona’s representing a cross section of society in terms or age, demographics and attitudes / engagement with environmental issues (agnostics to evangelists)

These were based on real people and evidence coming from earlier focus groups including attitudes to green living and participation across a spectrum of activities.

In a series of activities at the start of the workshop teams to reflected on and fleshed out the persona’s to create a more vivid picture of that persons daily life, activities and affinities.

Throughout the workshop these persona’s were used as a lens for reflecting on the scenarios and evaluating ideas.

Scenarios: The planning team created two alternative scenarios which brought to life alternative ways of integrating prior work streams, technologies and research to create ‘the big project idea’.

One was a nationwide, location and event specific with a focus on mass environmental data collection and documentation.

The second was a campaign model with a social networking hub at its heart. Designed to spark grass roots action and track attitudes and behaviour over time, creating a national environmental footprint.

In a series of iterative tasks, teams evaluated each scenario against user needs and a set of agreed design criteria (Scale, located-ness, degree of user participation, level of technology, business opportunity, repetition and emergence)

Improvements to each model were brainstormed and models developed for cross-platform technology integration.

The strongest elements from each scenario were brought together as building blocks and used to develop a design strategy following the workshop.