People’s Pub Partnership (Pt. 5) | Micro UX
April 28 - June 16 (7 Weeks)
Brief: Design a way to materialise the community governance model of pub ownership
Group Members: Ava, Ella (Me), Effy, Fangxue, Jacob, Kristen, Parth, Ranga and Zhe
Week 5 (26th May - 1st June)
Time passed quickly and the interim presentation was already upon us. Displaying our research process so far and our design directions we hoped to impress Mark from the People’s Pub Partnership along with our tutors and peers. We discussed our coordination with the Walworth Community Pub group as well as our AEIOU findings, probes and interview analysis in depth. We made sure to demonstrate our findings in a visual and easily comprehendible way, highlighting the key findings that has shaped to our design decisions.
The feedback was exceptionally positive, Mark liked our work and praised us on our coordination with the Walworth Community Pub group. He stated that our desired project outcome could easily become a part of something bigger and display the value of community pubs to those outside of institutions and pub fanatics like himself. We also gained comments from other brief collaborators regarding inclusivity and accessibility along with comments about building trust within communities. Similarly, John and Alastair enjoyed our engagement cart idea and thought that it could become something that would be continued after our project was completed. However, they warned us about overwhelming the structure with too many probes or artefacts and to ensure that the structure outcome would still be reflective of community governance as the brief states.
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Later in the week, with our designs well on the way to being completed, we finalised the event details properly. Our event was set to be at The Walworth Livingroom on the 15th of June from 7:30pm to 9:30pm. Now with the time confirmed, we wanting to start planning how to utilise the space within the Walworth Livingroom. We went to the event location and produced a 3D scan of the space so that we could use it to produce a floor plan of the final event layout. This also helped us to visualise how many different probes, artefacts and additions we would be able to include in our final event outside of the portable engagement structure itself.
Meeting as a group, we began discussing how we planned to configure the cart and the event space. Looking back at our cart ideation mood board and our feedback from the interim presentation, we decided that focusing on community led or codesign style creations would ultimately fit both the brief and the events purpose effectively. We decided that the engagement cart would include: a pub sign/plaque creation activity, modular chairs and interactive written prompts. We also discussed briefly the other things that would be present at the final event, Matt and Richard wanted to include food and drink elements so had come up with a beer tasting and a selection of community based snacks which they would provide. Alongside this, we also wanted to include a bottle repurposing segment to meet the previously mentioned comments about sustainability and green spaces within our research. And to complete the layout specification, we thought that both our event and any pub was not compete without an element of fun and wanted to also include a selection of games.
Based on our focus on both community and engagement, we decided that a community curated playlist would be another perfect way to encourage people to become interested and involved in our event. We generated a playlist on Spotify entitled ‘Walworth Community Pub Playlist’ where people could add their own song preferences if they desired. This playlist could then be used during our event as the background music and could become a reflection of the community of Walworth.
With the date for our event drawing closer we also helped to write an email invite which Matt and Frances sent out in their mailing list for the Walworth Community Pub project. They were generous enough to add our invite onto their monthly newsletter email which allowed us access to users who would not normally have been incentivised to come to our event or try out our creations. This meant that we were expecting a reasonable turn out for our final event and had to plan accordingly in the following weeks.
