What are we doing?
FutureEverything is leading community-led innovation in CityVerve project by doing two things interchangeably. On one hand, we’re promoting community engagement; an ongoing conversation between CityVerve partners and the people of Manchester. We organised multiple community events, where the project has been openly presented and discussed with the public — we have a whole bunch of future Community Forums lined up, if you are interested in participating stay tuned. On the other hand, our role has empowered CityVerve partners to implement a Human Centred Design approach to the design and development of Manchester as a Smart City.
HCD is an overarching approach that sets the process and frameworks to integrate tools, methodologies and practices to unveil problems, needs, wants, limitations and restrictions of the people who will use the end product or service. It’s a big picture discipline that focuses attention on improving strategic decision-making by putting the people at the centre of it and continually assessing what’s needed (desirability), what it’s possible (feasibility) and what it’s sustainable (viable).
On late July we kicked off the Human Centred Design (HCD) process in CityVerve, starting with an induction workshop. This workshop also brought CityVerve partners together for the first time. At FutureEverything our job was to design and build HCD frameworks that will support the CityVerve use cases, developed by our partners. We teamed up with Simone, Matt and Chris from FutureGov, to deliver a three-month series of labs and workshops involving partner organisations and Community Champions. Our FutureGov colleagues did a brilliant job helping us introducing the HCD approach for designing with user needs in mind.
Take a look at a short video about the four workshops we ran to kick of HCD:
