Takram (Pt. 1) | Macro UX
Feb 3 - Mar 10 (6 Weeks)
Brief: Design a way for non-human creatures to get around the city
Group Members: Ella (Me), Ranga, Shuzhe (Amber) and Zhihan
Week 1 (3rd Feb - 6th Feb)
This module involves working with an external collaborator who sets a brief that encompasses their organisation’s values, interests and aspirations. I was fortunate enough to be put into the group who were given a brief by the design innovation studio Takram. This brief looked at user-centred design for non-human creatures, wanting to design a travel corridor in urban spaces for the otherwise overlooked non-humans who we cohabit these spaces with.
From the offset, the Takram collaborators were very welcoming and it was immediately apparent that they were invested in the subject matter of the brief. Their formal presentation about their organisation’s work and the impending project sparked a lot of questions and thoughts that we were in a hurry to discuss together as a group.
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My group took the opportunity to sit down and discuss the brief straightaway, we talked about potential non-human users that we already knew about as well as shared our knowledge of any pre-existing travel corridors. As it was mentioned on the brief and by the people from Takram, the Bee Superhighway was one of the travel corridors which we already knew about that used flowers as steppingstones along a specific route between Kensington and Chelsea. The second travel corridor we discussed was the ecoduct, otherwise known as wildlife bridges, that provide safe passage for non-human creatures over highways in the Netherlands.
We also decided to do some research about other animal travel corridors or nature based infrastructures that would open our imagination. Looking on a global scale at the different travel corridors in place within urban infrastructure, we saw that there was already an abundance of wildlife crossings, tunnels and bridges in place. These non-human travel corridors appeared to be the most prominent in places like Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, but there seemed to be a distinct lack of them in the UK. Researching on a more localised scale there only seemed to be a small amount of purpose-built travel corridors or systems for non-human creatures in place.
After going our separate ways, we decided to spend the rest of the week researching and adding any ideas onto the project Miro board that we had created. I started looking more at potential ideas for our project that could stem from pre-exiting infrastructure changes and additions from around the world, noting down both speculative and existing designs. Typically these noted infrastructure changes were for human users, which I then took and suggested repurposing for non-human users.
