HELLO NEIGHBOUR. Service Design.
Three week group project.
The quality of our lives is enriched by the social fabric which surrounds us, but increasingly people are becoming less involved and connected to the communities in which they live. Through a deeply human-centred research process and rapid iterative design development, we have designed a service aimed at creating a more inclusive neighbourhood for everyone in one area in Dublin, Stoneybatter. Hello Neighbour is an introductory service from the Residents Association which connects new residents to their neighbourhood at the first point of contact, the letting and estate agents.
Learning Outcomes: Research, Personas, MosCow, Service Blueprint, User Testing
AIM
Our brief was to design a public service around the theme of neighbourhood networks. We chose Stoneybatter because like a lot of other areas across Dublin, it is going through a lot of change.
RESEARCH
We started on the street, chatting to local residents by visiting the locals spots. We spoke to local business and residents, including the organisers of Pride & Place, a local TD and the President of a local Residents Association.
KEY FINDINGS
From our initial contact it was clear that there was some tension between those who had grown up in the area and those who had chosen to live there. We decided on our direction: How might we build trust and rapport between new and old residents? We designed a set of co-creations to better understand residents motivations, beliefs and attitudes around neighbourhood relationships.
In total we conducted four co-creations. The first being: Draw your neighbours. Presented with a row of blank houses, locals were asked to draw or write about their neighbours. The purpose of this was to test residents in order to explore how well participants knew their neighbours.
Boundaries Test. Locals were asked how comfortable they would feel sharing a given task by locating it on a map with three rings.
Five Scenarios. What would you do if... When presented with a scenario, residents talked us through what they would do in a given situation.
What would you and wouldn't you share? Postcards. Presented with a set of postcards, locals wrote what they did and didn't want to share with their neighbours. This was a great exercise to explore what participants would write to a neighbourhood stranger.
MAKING SENSE
From there, we analysed our findings and made three personas for the Stoneybatter area. We brainstormed ideas and concepts which led us to three core ideas. Following this, we returned to the streets to ask locals about the feasibility of our ideas. It was a tie between two concepts, we performed a MosCow which helped us with the decision.
CONCEPT
We decided on Concept 3, Welcome to the neighbourhood designed to support new residents to be integrated into the Stoneybatter way of Life. The primary user would be the new neighbour as they would be the ones to initiate first contact and would benefit most from the service. We then started to sample our idea in prototypes, testing and reiterating each time.
FINAL DESIGN
Hello neighbour is a welcome service. As part of this service, we provide an ice breaker welcome pack which consists of a leaflet explaining how the pack works, an introduction to the residents association, eight postcards which act as a tool to meet new neighbours in a non-obtrusive, relaxed manner and a ‘fill-in’ map to help new neighbours remember house numbers and names of those around them.
We had to find a realistic stakeholder who would advocate for this service. The Residents Association was an ideal match, as this service would allow them to preserve a sense of community as the area expands and continues to change over the years. In this way our service is B2B, designed with the end user, the new neighbour, in mind.
USER TESTING
Each member of the team tested the postcards in their own neighbourhoods, namely Finglas, Clontarf and Donnybrook. In just one day, we received the above back. We were delighted with the response in such a short period of time. Over the following weeks, we continued to receive a number of postcards back, demonstrating the enthusiasm people showed in building new neighbourhood relationships.
