People’s Pub Partnership: Weeks 1–4
April 28 — June 16 (7 Weeks)
Brief: Design a way to materialise the community governance model of pub ownership
Group Members: Ava, Ella, Effy, Fangxue, Jacob, Kristen, Parth, Zhe and Ranga (me).
For this project, we were supposed to materialise a community pub governance model. We got in touch with our point of contact, Mark, and immediately hit it off.
Not wanting to waste time just ideating, we got into it from day 1 and tried to realise our initial ideas: codesigning coasters in pubs as a community event.
We realised that for a community to get together, we needed to organise communal activities. Since we didn’t know the in-depth mechanisms of how pubs worked, how they were designed/materialised, and who frequented pubs, we decided to do pub crawls in the Walworth/Kennington area. Since there weren’t enough, we decided to do the crawls in all of the central London area.
Each of us picked two pubs, and did AEIOU Research on them, where we recorded user activity and hotspots of interaction over the time period of one hour.
We also conducted workshops experimenting with singular, modular furniture, and organised workshops to test soft prototypes.
It was our initial research that alerted us to the complications of a pub model, and what users did when they arrived there.
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We conducted user interviews, and used some artefacts to generate interest and smooth out the conversation.
Based off those observations, we realised our locations for various objects and events.
After that, it was a matter of selecting the necessary objects, events and markers.
After all this, all we had to do was assemble everything and bring it to the community.
