Designing Distributed Community Participation

About

In light of the Coronavirus outbreak in early 2020 and the constraints imposed by social distancing, unique and complex challenges have emerged in participatory research and community engagement practices. In response to these restrictions, and the attendant health, socio-economic and cultural impacts of the pandemic there has been a rapid development of hybrid approaches (both digital and analogue) to re-orientate methods and interventions that would have previously taken place in-person.

The ‘Designing Distributed Community Participation’ (DDCP) project facilitated knowledge exchange workshops with design, public health, and community engagement professionals from the public and third sector and academia. Over three workshops, this newly assembly community of practice explored distributed participation through the lenses of practice, process and partnerships; collectively identifying common themes, challenges and characteristics of participation across our work; sharing our adapted approaches, key learning and practical skills; as well as prototyping what the future legacies are for practice as we incrementally transition back into in-person contexts post-pandemic.

Project Team

Research Fellow at The Innovation School, GSA

Marianne McAra

Marianne McAra is a Research Fellow in the areas of participatory design, youth engagement and creative education. Marianne is interested in exploring community participation through a youth-focused lens (widely characterised by the ‘Generation Covid’ rhetoric), where challenges have been exacerbated by the pandemic for many young people to participate in education and disrupted transitions in the context of declining employment opportunities.

‘During this project, I am keen to reflect on the unanticipated ethical dimensions of designing distributed participation in research. From a period of rapid methodological innovation, what assumptions have been challenged; and in what ways have the conditions of the pandemic augmented practices to support inclusion and accessibility through re-modelling participation processes and policies?’

m.mcara@gsa.ac.uk

Lecturer in Social Design at GSA and designer at Snook

Zoe Prosser

Zoë Prosser is a Lecturer in Social Design and Research Associate at GSA. She is also a designer at Snook and works with public sector organisations, local authorities and governments in the field of service design, with a focus on design for participatory democracy and systems change. Zoë’s research centres on social design methods for democratic community participation in decision-making, particularly within sustainable land use.

‘Throughout this project, I am keen to understand if/how new forms of distributed engagement are elevating certain voices and engaging new audiences. Combined with principles of accessibility and inclusion, I seek to question the appropriateness of participation methods, the balance of power between facilitators and participants, and future opportunities for truly equitable hybrid ways of engaging.’

z.prosser@gsa.ac.uk

Research Fellow at The Innovation School, GSA

Cara Broadley

Cara Broadley is a Research Fellow working at the intersection of design for social innovation and participatory design, set against the context of public service reform, local democracy, and community empowerment in Scotland. Through this she explores the implications of developing and applying creative methods and tools to support the participation of people and communities; and how such approaches can forge stronger connections between academia, practice, and policy.

I am interested in exploring how creative methods are being adapted and applied by organisations across the public, private, and third sector and the value that these add to distributed participation. How can we develop engagement approaches that simultaneously respond to the specific circumstances and preferences of people and communities, are inclusive and accessible, and capable of supporting meaningful dialogue and deliberation?’

c.broadley@gsa.ac.uk

Research Fellow at The Innovation School, GSA

Gemma Teal

Gemma Teal is a Research Fellow in the areas of health and wellbeing and specialises in creative engagement, participatory design and visual methods. Her work focuses on opening up the design process to include academic researchers from other disciplines, industry partners, health professionals, people living with health conditions, carers and members of the general public.

‘I am keen to explore how visual methods can be both translated onto online platforms such as Miro and Padlet as well as adapted for offline distributed participation; and ways in which this can support and enable communication, relationship-building and rapport with participants. How can we design safe and reflective spaces for distributed participation for people who do not have access to online tools?’

g.teal@gsa.ac.uk

Community Engagement Officer at GSA

Harriet Simms

Harriet Simms is the Community Engagement Officer at GSA. Her work is focused on exploring ways for the school to better connect, partner and work with the surrounding areas of Garnethill and Blythswood through creative initiatives. As a researcher she is interested in exploring equity and value based participatory approaches informed by accessibility, mutual learning and partnership.

‘With the impact of Covid, I want to investigate how place-based and embodied methods have been developed within remote/distributed participation contexts and what future opportunities there are in using hybrid methods of distributed and in-person engagement post pandemic.’

h.simms@gsa.ac.uk

Knowledge Exchange Workshops

The knowledge exchange workshops took place between May and June 2021, where the DDCP team recruited members (a total of 21) to the project through initially drawing on their own networks and then encouraging members to engage in their own project recruitment by having the option to invite ‘a plus 1’ to subsequent workshops. The workshops were designed to each explore distributed community participation through a complementary lens: practice (reflecting on community engagement practice and ways of enabling participation and collaboration before and after the pandemic); process (sharing re-imagined tools, techniques and platforms that have supported synchronous and asynchronous processes of distributed community participation); and partnerships (identifying future opportunities and partnerships, and ways of sustaining positive legacies as we move towards a transition back to in-person contexts).

1

Workshop 01: reflecting on practice

Reflecting on community engagement practice and ways of enabling participation and collaboration before and after the pandemic.
2

Workshop 02: sharing processes

Sharing re-imagined tools, techniques and platforms that have supported synchronous and a-synchronous processes of distributed community participation.
3

Workshop: planning partnerships

Identifying future opportunities and partnerships, and ways of sustaining positive legacies as we move towards a transition back to in-person contexts.

1. Reflecting on Practice

The first workshop brought together a diverse group of practitioners and researchers from across the public and third sectors, education and academia – including NHS 24, Widening Participation at GSA, The Children’s and Young People’s Centre for Justice, Scottish Care, The Centre for Civic Innovation, Central and West Integration Network, and The Glasgow City Council. The aim of this first session was to collectively reflect on the last 12 months, share key challenges that have been faced, and the ways in which these were overcome. To prepare for this, we asked participants to bring with them an insightful moment of community participation that took place either before or during the Covid-19 pandemic and to bring an image or artefact that helps to tell their story (to view the Conga Conversation in more detail, please download the project report).

2. Sharing Processes

In the second workshop, the DDCP team were joined by new members to the network, which included representation from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Centre for Population Health, The Scottish Community Development Centre, Alliance Scotland, Dartington Service Design Lab and New Practice. Building on insights from the previous workshop where the group collectively reflected upon and shared re-orientated approaches and methods, the focus of the second workshop was to unpack practical processes further with a focus on problematising the how of distributed participation (to view the Conga Conversation in more detail, please download the project report).

3. Planning Partnerships

​​Reflecting on the future-focused questions and scenarios developed in Workshop 02, the DDCP team consolidated these insights into the design of the final knowledge exchange workshop. To explore ways of future-proofing our collective learnings, a team-based design sprint activity was designed and framed around the following themes and questions:

  • The future of ethics (how does hybrid future engagement shape our ethical considerations?)
  • The future of resources, roles and values (how do we use future budgets to value hybrid participation in a different way?)
  • The future of (hybrid) engagement methods (how do we design future hybrid engagement methods to benefit participation?)
  • The future of communication (how does hybrid future engagement shape our communication for participation?)

Key Insights and Recommendations

Drawing on experiences and reflections shared by the participants from across the three workshops, the DDCP team synthesised common challenges and constraints, new and emergent approaches to participation, and opportunities for future hybrid ways of working. The key insights identified have been captured within three overarching themes, and have been framed as replicable approaches and practical recommendations and strategies for engagement:

 

 

Expanding on Broadley’s Methodological Typology (2020)

Storytelling and Communicating

Recruitment, Marketing and Storytelling

Particularly within remote engagement, the marketing and communication of projects requires accessible strategies due to the constraints of digital and distributed formats. Online communication must be clear and visual, and meet accessibility standards since this has become a key mechanism to recruit new and diverse audiences.

Key Insights

Involve participants, gatekeepers and recruiters in the storytelling of projects:

When recruiting and socialising projects, this allows for multi-stakeholder ownership and investment in the recruitment process. Story-telling supports gatekeepers to communicate the project effectively to different audiences due to their participation in the shaping of communication. Building on this, the group reflected on communication methods for different channels and audiences, and in particular the efficacy and value of visual communication materials with simple, short text.

Slow and softer forms of communication establish trust and extended engagement:

Informal digital communication platforms like WhatsApp can be used to build relationships and trust before more formal engagement takes place. With informal digital communication however, there must be additional safeguarding to support practitioners and facilitators, and participants must be enabled to ‘opt-out’.

Digital platforms can allow for better data capture and sharing:

During recruitment, digital platforms can allow for more effective and safe data sharing, for example when providing personal information such as contact details. During synchronous and asynchronous engagement, digital platforms such as Live Documents and collaboration platforms such as Miro allow facilitators to make copies and take time-stamped ‘snapshots’ of information to document interactions and the development of thinking over time. Outputs and findings can be disseminated with further reach via online and video distribution. This can, however, also exclude place-based and non-digital communities.

‘Internet noise’ can make it difficult for communication materials to be recognised:

While digital communication materials can reach wider audiences, online recruitment approaches receive much lower levels of feedback and are less able to target specific audiences due to competing ‘internet noise’. Online recruitment strategies lack the trust and relationship-building that longer-term embedded recruitment approaches are able to support. Therefore it has been recommended that digital recruitment and dissemination of findings should be delivered via gatekeepers, such as third sector and community support groups, who are supported to communicate the material appropriately for specific audiences.

Digital engagement does not support serendipitous and chance encounters:

Due to the constraints of digital communication platforms (such as the mono-directional nature of video conferencing), multiple voices and more organic conversations are less supported. This means that the serendipitous and emergent discussions that exist predominantly during in-person events are reduced (such as group and informal conversations during and in-between engagement activities). In virtual spaces, as the dialogue is often guided from the facilitator’s perspective, rapport with participants as well as the depth of findings can inadvertently be affected. Therefore, within digital engagement it is vital to recognise the positionality of facilitators and introduce mechanisms that can enable participants to steer and lead conversations, and adopt.

Ethical Participation

Supporting Accessibility, Inclusivity and Safeguarding

Remote and online engagement has broadened the scope of participatory practices and allows new audiences to be reached. However, this widened horizon brings new ethical considerations around accessibility and inclusivity; recognising that these approaches can contribute towards digital exclusion.

Key Insights

Use asynchronous and remote engagement to offer flexibility and choice:
Remote and synchronous engagement (for example, video conferencing and phone calls) offer participants more flexibility to attend sessions due to reduced travel requirements and increased ability to negotiate schedules. However, this also relies on the flexibility of the facilitator and their ability to dialogue with participants in advance and adapt activities to meet individual needs. Remote and asynchronous engagement (for example, physical workbooks and shared digital spaces like Miro or Google Docs), enables people to participate in their own time, which is more accessible for those with scheduling commitments during traditional working hours (such as caring responsibilities).

Supporting accessibility:
Accessibility requires designing forms of engagement that meet participants’ individual needs. As accessibility needs can greatly vary however, an engagement approach or method designed for one person may be less accessible for another. The attributes and benefits of distributed engagement include providing extended time for people to engage asynchronously; providing flexibility to engage around individual time commitments; and being able to tailor approaches. This can be described as ‘meeting people on their own terms’ or becoming ‘participant-centred’. Time should be factored in to mediate potential barriers to participation. The individualised nature of accessibility requirements means that to design for everyone requires plurality and the creation of multiple options (for example, running multiple sessions in different formats, having varying levels of participation within the same activity, or providing different variety in methods and resources for participants to choose from). Tailored remote and asynchronous engagement approaches can also provide participants with more time to prepare, digest information and contribute their thoughts and ideas (which is not always afforded in synchronous online engagement).

Shifting perceptions around ‘communities of place’:
Asynchronous and distributed engagement has brought people from diverse geographical areas together in novel ways. This could be shaping how we (re)consider communities and who we recruit for participation; rethinking recruitment frameworks and our definitions of ‘place’ altogether. Cultural biases and assumptions could still be preventing truly broad inclusion despite increased remote access for distributed geographical locations. For example, this might involve excluding people from rural or remote locations due to historic low awareness and limited access to appropriate recruitment networks. This poses the questions around what support is needed to involve new and diverse audiences and how do we ethically search for the previously unknown? With this comes a need for increased sensitivities when bringing together multi-cultural and multi-locational perspectives. Additionally, as perspectives have been shifted to distributed communities, it is important not to completely replace place-based audiences and local engagement that benefits from on-the-ground and co-located methods.

Embedding principles of hospitality within virtual engagement:
Hospitality principles, typically adopted for in-person participatory events, have also been applied during virtual engagement to emulate safe, comfortable, and welcoming online environments. In some cases, this has involved creating a ‘group charter’ to establish boundaries and recreate the benefits of co-located engagement, such as posting refreshments out to participants alongside paper-based welcome packs. In other cases, facilitators have attempted to recreate literal representations of physical places within a digital platform. There are opportunities to further question what a comfortable digital or hybrid space looks and feels like, and invite health and wellbeing experts to explore this alongside participatory practitioners.

Engaging from home creates new ethical considerations:
There is a need to recognise that not everyone’s home space is as safe, comfortable, or appropriate to work from as others, and often it is unclear what additional responsibilities or constraints this creates for participants (for example, if a participant is caring for someone at home or experiencing mental health difficulties). It is important to recognise that not everyone has had the same experience of distributed engagement throughout the course of the pandemic or previous to that. This includes their cultural and technical experience, and introduction to digital tools or etiquette. Acknowledging the discomfort of the pandemic as a context and recognising this as a new way of working is recommended to create safe spaces that foster empathy and human connection.

More time needs to be offered to get people ‘on the same page’:
When engaging digitally, participants may have varying levels of experience and knowledge. This means that more time should be factored in at the start for participants to set-up and become familiar with any new digital tools and resources and be supported with any project ‘onboarding’ or upskilling processes. However this must be balanced with people’s desire and capacity to participate digitally. Capacity-building, when sought, is best delivered through extended and slow engagement over longer periods of time with attention paid to the participants’ desired pace.

Fostering dialogue, deliberation and feedback within engagement:
To ensure facilitators of distributed synchronous engagement do not become digital gatekeepers, methods that combat the mono-directional nature of video conferencing conversations should be developed. This can include using breakout rooms and parallel asynchronous tools to allow participants to engage at their own pace and support multiple diverse conversations simultaneously. Regardless of the methods used, some participants feel less able to speak openly via digital platforms than in physical environments and this should be recognised and addressed to ensure equal representation. Facilitators using synchronous digital platforms such as video conferencing tools often struggle to ‘read the room’ or assess the live needs of participants due to ‘digital silence’: when cameras and mics are turned off and participant feedback is not recognised. This can make it particularly difficult for facilitators to know the level of engagement that is being achieved and adapt to people’s needs in-the-moment.

Expanding Engagement

Designing Digital/hybrid Experiences and the Value of Creativity

As in-person participation slowly becomes more available to us, those who design and facilitate engagement activities are faced with yet more options, methods, platforms, and tools to support participation. With this ever-changing context also comes the ability to develop new blended and hybrid models of engagement. By reflecting back upon the lessons learned from distributed engagement and the accessibility gaps still to be filled, considerations about how to continue expanding engagement for the future have been identified.

Key Insights

Connections between participants and facilitators may become less formal:
Slower and more informal ways of connecting with and between participants has been favoured by participants throughout this research, such as providing ‘drop in’ conversations, phone calls, or online chat spaces such as WhatsApp. This way of engaging creates more space to foster trust and longer-term relationships, and to develop an understanding of participants’ needs to inform subsequent bespoke participatory methods. However, the ethics of this approach must provide participants with space and opportunities to opt out. Informal engagement therefore needs to be effectively safeguarded and have expectations managed of both researchers and participants roles.

Prioritising participant ownership and agency:
Digital engagement can reduce participants’ sense of agency and ownership within participatory processes and the directions taken. This is often because, as well as reducing opportunities for live feedback and therefore live adaption, remote methods can remain rigidly bound to the constraints of the platforms used. The amount of time required to prepare for remote participatory engagement can lead to methods becoming rigid and over-designed. When expanding engagement towards hybridity, there is an opportunity to further enable and expand participant ownership and involvement within the design of engagement mechanisms. Approaches that reduce the barriers to co-ownership include involving participants in co-investigator/ researcher roles, establishing ethical considerations together, and moving beyond transactional and extractive engagement altogether. The desire for participant co-ownership has been accelerated by remote and distributed engagement and should be considered as a fundamental principle towards supporting inclusivity, capacity-building and impact.

Remote and distributed engagement has questioned how we value resources:
Project budgets that were typically assigned to catering, venue hiring, and travel during in-person engagements have been reallocated throughout the pandemic. At times, distributed engagement has proven to be more affordable and cost effective. However, this way of valuing the resources required to conduct participation should be carefully considered. As we continue to seek high quality, diverse and accessible participation, there is an opportunity to reassign value. For example, diverse and hybrid participation has demonstrated that the following activities should be more highly valued and resourced: longer lead-in times are needed to develop nuanced and context-led tools; the ways in which we reimburse or pay for participants’ time should be
re-evaluated; more resources can be allocated to support accessibility through providing appropriate tools and training; slower and extended engagements that suit the schedules of participants may require increased time allocation.

Hybrid engagement presents increased complexity and a need for increased capacity:
As we move towards hybrid participation (analogue and digital, synchronous and asynchronous, distributed and local), it is likely that a plurality of engagement methods and formats will be required to meet the preferences and accessibility needs of diverse participants. This way of working may increase workloads for facilitators, particularly as they return to co-located workplace environments. There are opportunities to further investigate what preparations are required to support participatory practitioners during this transition and as they begin re-engaging in increasingly hybrid ways. Likewise, frameworks that analyse the impact and value of engagement methods and their qualities, such as Broadley’s ‘Methodological Typology for Distributed Research’ (2020), may be used in the future to support practitioners with decision-making in the design and delivery of participation.

The value of creativity within participation remains evident but undefined:
Whilst a majority of those involved in the DDCP project had successfully designed creative engagement with digital tools, these often went beyond digital and synchronous-only mechanisms. In these instances, physical tools, asynchronous space and time and preparation materials were also offered. In parallel, the majority also believed that creativity fuelled more open participation, encouraged divergent thinking, and established trust between participants and facilitators. This suggests that hybridity may increase creative engagement. However more research is required to understand this relationship, how we maintain and create space for hybrid creativity going forwards, and how the value of creativity within participation might be evidenced, measured and evaluated.

Get to Know the Team
16th April 2021

Marianne McAra

My name is Marianne and I am Research Fellow based at the Innovation School at the Glasgow School of Art. My key research interests are in the areas of participatory design, youth engagement and creative education. During this project, I am keen to reflect on the unanticipated ethical dimensions of designing distributed participation in research – building on the work of Calia et al. (2020), Lupton (2020), Khlusova (2021) and Midgelow (2020). From a period of rapid methodological innovation, what assumptions have been challenged; in what ways have we ethically enhanced our engagement practices in research; and what key learnings will be taken forward with us as we gradually return to an ‘in-person’ research context?

For disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, the closure of schools, work, and in-person support services and originations during lockdown, and the move to online learning and engagement, has exacerbated a range of complex participation challenges surrounding digital exclusion (Darmody et al. 2020; Halliday 2020; Holmes and Burgess 2020; Lucas et al. 2020). In what ways has the conditions of the pandemic augmented practices to support inclusion and accessibility through re-modelling participation processes and policies (e.g. recruitment criteria and activity, use of virtual platforms and forms of digital up-skilling; the handling and storage of data).

A growing body of evidence suggests that inequalities have been intensified, and in some cases completely reshaped by the pandemic lockdowns (Baxter et al. 2020; Scot Gov 2020). I am particularly interest in this from a youth-focused lens (widely characterised by the ‘Generation Covid’ rhetoric), where challenges have been exacerbated for many young people to participate in education and disrupted transitions in the context of declining employment opportunities (Halliday 2020; Holmes and Burgess 2020). What strategic partnerships have and could be formed across academic, public and third sector institutions and organisations to better understand the effects of the pandemic? How could joined-up, collective ways of working support the development of person-centred evidence to foreground contextually-located understandings (Settersten et al. 2020) of the challenges and barriers experienced in communities to inform future policy interventions and reform (e.g. scaling up legacies established at a local institutional-level for enhancing ethical practice for undertaking dislocated research).

Cara Broadley

I’m Cara and I’m a Research Fellow at the Innovation School at the Glasgow School of Art. The 2020 COVID-19 lockdown coincided with the start date of Social Studios – a research project exploring how participatory design methods can support communities to engage with policy opportunities, specifically in relation to an aspect of Scotland’s Community Empowerment Act, Participation Requests (PRs). While I was able to continue with the initial stage of the project by carrying out virtual interviews with PR stakeholders from fields of academia, community development, and public policy, a reorientation of the project’s central community-centred activities and methods was essential. As well as the need to adhere to GSA’s ethics policy concerning the capture and storage of data, several factors were considered:

  • Pitching appropriate research – to what extent are communities willing and motivated to participate in research that is not contextually-aligned to the current circumstances that we find ourselves in?
  • Negotiating barriers to access – digital, socioeconomic, and personal – how can we develop flexible mechanisms for research participation that is inclusive, meaningful, and mutually-beneficial.
  • Capitalising on the ‘stay at home’ message – how can social distancing extend opportunities to broaden the scope of participation to include a diverse spectrum of voices from across Scotland into design research engagements?
  • More than digital – what are the purposes and properties of physical artefacts in distributed design research engagements?
  • Researcher orientation at a distance – how can we design participatory methods and visual and artefactual tools that respond to the intricacies and nuances of particular research contexts and communities? What does a ‘field trip’ look like during a pandemic?

In Social Studios, we created a hybrid approach comprising reflective, generative, and evaluative Zoom workshops captured through audio recording and Miro capture, and a printed ‘Companion’ workbook and kit. Whilst being inspired by the premise of the cultural probe as a package of materials to support communities to document and reflect upon contextual issues and inform design development (Gaver et al., 1999; Mattelmaki, 2008), the Companion is not positioned as a tool for data collection but rather, as an artefactual and asynchronous primer for participation. By setting out the aims of the research, reiterating ethical considerations, and communicating the virtual engagement approach, its purpose is to orient participants within each workshop activity and provide opportunities for individual reflection prior to sharing and collaboration.

Social Studios’ hybrid approach has been informed by discussions with the Design Innovation and Land (DI&L) network concerning the co-design of a land assets decision-making framework, considerations of how public participation and deliberation operate at formal and informal levels (from official policy processes to everyday community planning at a hyperlocal scale), and the role of design research to mediate this divide. To support the development of methods in DI&L and subsequent research projects, we’ve designed a Methodological Typology for Distributed Research Engagement.

The typology has been shared with postgraduate Design Innovation and research students across GSA and with practitioners and organisations such as Policy Lab UK. We think its really important to highlight the need for design researchers to reflect upon the hybrid approaches they are applying, articulate a rationale for the choices they are making, and define research methods that are appropriate to the context and community, and aligned to research questions and aims. As part of the Designing Distributed Community Participation project, we will position the typology to share a range of distributed methods, tools, and techniques and support our discussions around the impact of remote working on community engagement. Through unpacking our practices and processes together, we aim to foreground the skills and capabilities needed to advance sustainable engagement partnerships and develop strategies to address ongoing complex challenges with people and communities.

Workshop 01: Reflecting on Practice
12th April 2021

The first knowledge exchange workshop kicked off this week for the DDCP project, which brought together a diverse group of practitioners and researchers from across the public and third sectors, education and academia – including NHS 24, Widening Participation at GSA, The Children’s and Young People’s Centre for Justice, Scottish Care, The Centre for Civic Innovation, Central and West Integration Network, and The Glasgow City council. The aim of the first workshop was to collectively reflect on the last 12 months, share key challenges faced and ways in which these were overcome. To prepare for this, we asked participants to bring with them an insightful moment of community participation that took place either before or during the Covid-19 pandemic and to bring a image or artefact that helps to tell their story.

We began the workshop with a group conversation, which was facilitated through an approach the DDCP team have developed called the ‘conga method’. Instead of a facilitator chairing the discussion, this approach encourages participants to draw connections between and across their experiences themselves by ‘joining the conga’. The participants generously shared their stories as well as reflected back their insights and key learnings to the group, which was captured by the team in real-time on Miro:

Underpinning many of the stories was an ethical sensibility (particularly surrounding participation challenges such as inclusivity, accessibility and digital divides), and an emphasis on the positive legacies can be deduced from the pandemic. We discussed the ways in which both our engagement (methods, tools and techniques) and organisational (in how we communicate, recruit participants, collaborate and connect to audiences) practices have been augmented over the last year. In parallel to this, themes and opportunities for action were synthesised, which included:

 

  • the difference in how we dialogue online – broadcasting that can feel mono-directional as opposed to a more dialogical exchange when using platforms such as Zoom or Teams, and feeling comfortable with silences;
  • designing effective non-verbal communication – reflecting on ways of simplifying this and making it more visual;
  • ways to support the more informal and organic interactions – being able to follow up on tangents, nuances and picking up on body language, which can be challenging in virtual environments;
  • the importance of supporting capacity-building and ownership, and in examples of digital upskilling;
  • recalibrating ways we can provide emotional support and enabling connections;
  • how we ‘market’ projects in recruitment processes, the importance of story-telling and the role of social media.

Following on from the conga conversation, we used the map to highlight a range of questions to explore in the second workshop – examples of which include how can we recreate tactile, creative activities when we’re not engaging in-person; how do we future-proof hybrid approaches that support a widening of participation as we transition back into in-person and co-located contexts; what is the future of project budgets when freeing up and redirecting what would have previously been spent on travel; and how do we balance ethics with creativity, responsiveness, and perhaps risk taking?

The next knowledge exchange workshop is taking place on Monday 24th May and will be unpacking these questions in more detail as we explore our processes at different stages of engagement.

Workshop 02: Sharing Processes
26 May 2021

This week we had the second knowledge exchange workshop exploring distributed community participation. The DDCP team were delighted to be joined by new members to the network, which included representation from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Centre for Population Health, the Scottish Community Development Centre, Alliance Scotland, Dartington Service Design Lab and New Practice. Building on insights from the previous workshop where the group collectively reflected upon and shared re-orientated approaches and methods; the focus of this second workshop was to unpack practical processes further, with a focus on problematizing the how. To prepare for this, the team spent time synthesising these key reflections into the following 3 core thematics:

Participants were asked to pick one of these areas that resonated with their own experiences, and to reflect on an approach, process or technique (theirs or someone else’s that has been particularity inspiring) that could help deepen our understanding of participation challenges and potential responses ­– ­structuring their presentations by the following questions:

  1. What was the challenge?
  2. How did you respond (what worked/ what didn’t?/ what did you need?)
  3. What can we learn from this?

Adopting the ‘Conga’ method as before led to a really rich discussion where participants built upon each other’s examples and insights; exploring these thematics through multiple lenses. This included questions around acknowledging that there are different levels of crisis for different people experiencing the same thing and being conscious of this; negotiating the bureaucracy (red tape) and the institutionalisation of participation; the ways in which boundaries and barriers can, in fact, make us more innovative and creative; within participation what are the nuances between consultation, participation and collaboration; what is the future of research ethics, project budgets and participation spaces; and how can we embed hospitality into our approaches and tools so to sustain a more human touch?

Towards the end of the workshop, we were able to identify a range of additional dimensions to consider and calibrate in processes of designing distributed participation:

Reflecting on these future-focused questions and scenarios, the DDCP are now in the process of consolidating these insights into the design of the final knowledge exchange workshop, taking place on Monday 7th June. For this, the team are also considering ways to effectively disseminate key learnings from this project, beginning work on creating the digital repository of recourses through developing shareable examples and case studies, as well as exploring future opportunities for sustaining this nearly formed network.

Workshop 03: Sharing Processes
8 June 2021

This week we hosted the third and final knowledge exchange workshop in the Designing Distributed Community Participation series. For this final session, the DDCP team designed a more hands-on workshop to explore ways of future-proofing our collective learnings. Based on insights consolidated from across the previous 2 workshops, Workshop 03 centred on a team-based design sprint activity, framed around the following themes and questions:

• The future of ethics (how does hybrid future engagement shape our ethical considerations?)

• The future of resources, roles and values (how do we use future budgets to value hybrid participation in a different way?)

• The future of (hybrid) engagement methods (how do we design future hybrid engagement methods to benefit participation?)

• The future of communication (how does hybrid future engagement shape our communication for participation?)

For this, we began with some theme-based warm-up discussions, which were captured by the facilitators on Miro. Following this, the attendees were spilt into three working groups and given the design sprint brief to respond to as hypothetical creative research teams, which the aim of implemented insights gleaned from the entire knowledge exchange workshop series:

You are invited to bid for £20k for a 6-month project exploring the future of community centres for young people living in the Highlands and in Glasgow. Through participatory approaches, you need to propose how you will engage with young people and key project stakeholders to develop a set of key insights and recommendations for policy.

This project is taking place during a pandemic, so you are required to consider the ethical dimensions of your project, what potential platforms and tools you will employ and how you will allocate the budget.

Key Project Stakeholders:

    • Young People - 15 - 21 year olds
    • Community Centres
    • Youth Workers/Groups
    • Local Councils

The teams spent time quickly prototyping a proposed project plan, approaches and the timeframe using a simple template created on Miro, and were encouraged to reflect on what the key ethical dimensions would be, create a project budget; and to consider a recruitment and communication strategy. Before the teams pitched their proposal to the wider group, evaluation criteria typically used by funders was shared as a baseline for the group to consider who to vote for:

The first proposal, called ‘It’s about me, not you…’ focused on exploring the topic of the brief specifically with young people in the 15-17 age bracket who are differently abled, recruited to the project as co-researchers. So to remove barriers to participation, an application process would be developed to support participants to identify their own participation requirements. The project fieldwork would involve the young people becoming ‘community reporters’ to explore community centres in their local urban/ rural contexts – identifying who is and isn’t using community centres, identifying the tensions and drivers with the aim of producing creative outputs (e.g. vlogs/ films/ creative artefacts). A key ethical consideration problematized by this team were ways in which participants could be remunerated for their time – both financially as well as the opportunity of providing some form of an award or accreditation that formally acknowledges their project contributions.

The second team proposed to develop a collaborative working team to co-define the project challenge, priorities, approach and methods together with the young people; as well as what shaping what the outcomes will be with the aim of developing a framework with and for the young people focused on what they would like to get out of the process (e.g. new skills/ capacity building/ employment/ certification). The team proposed to use the project budget to employ a group of young people as peer-researchers and, using a co-design methodology and hybrid approaches, support knowledge exchange across the rural and urban contexts in the creation of both textual and visual data. A key ethical dimension was creating a non-hierarchical research culture and building structures that would enable the young people to lead, as well as safeguarding in developing trust between and across the groups of young people.

The third proposal, called ‘Youth Pen-Pal Policy’, again explored ways of supporting young people to be recruited as co-researchers in a project prototyping ways to support youth-led policy reform. Through gathering ethnographic insight from the young people on what the key challenges are (e.g. what’s working well/ what’s not); they would be invited to pitch their own ideas to receive an amount of the project budget to fund their projects. Instead of funds being allocated to travel, satellite workshops would be facilitated across the urban and rural contexts and take place over platforms such as Miro and Whatsapp. During these workshops, the young people will be matched with a mentor (e.g. local business owners, community champions, grassroot organisations) to support in the development of their own proposals. The project would also look to develop youth-led panels who would evaluate these pitches and vote on which ideas to allocate the funding to.

The workshop wrapped up the DDCP team sharing the next steps in terms of disseminating the outputs from the 3 workshops in the form of a digital repository, with the potential to also create a material version of this. The attendees were also encouraged to share their feedback and details so to explore opportunities to grow and develop this network in the future as we gradually move into a post-Covid world.

Reflecting on DDCP
Guest Blog Post - Chris Jamieson, Centre for Civic Innovation
24 June 2021

My experience within the DDCP workshops is an inclusive group striving for change and filled with a wealth of information from different partners involved. It’s also humbling to know that a lot of the people have the same challenges that we are all trying to solve which gives a common goal that we can all strive for. The workshops where perfectly time, I have still stolen tips from yourselves with having breaks in-between, which usually I sometimes forget to add in.

The workshops that I attended have made me reflect on the recent practices and has highlighted the importance of constantly looking back at recent work to see what you could improve and taking the learnings for the next project and thank you all for opening that door for myself.

The main points that I highlighted within the early workshops was the power of storytelling and the importance of becoming better communicators since the outbreak of Covid-19 making all of us working from home.

Social media is a large part of our communications at the CCI and we have seen a large increase of engagement from local people and business since the first lockdown and from then we have made it a constant part of our weekly work. By working with the constraints of the social media platforms and turning it to a benefit, it lets us get straight to the point and helps the team breaks down messages into understandable chunks of information that can be easily understood by everyone. By doing this it makes us ask these types of questions: ‘is this is the best way to say this?’ ‘does this make sense?’ ‘what do you get from this?’ This iteration is crucial to develop the ideas and making sure we are getting the message across simply and effectively.

The idea of sending over a play and follow guide simply does not work anymore, we need to dive deep and find what are we trying to achieve? and how are we going to achieve it? From the outset of a workshop or meeting, we have to be outcome focused. Facilitation has become more than running workshops and making it go smoothly, it is also to make sure that the remote session is simple to perform without having a seasoned facilitator managing the workshop. At the CCI we had co-designed briefs for the ‘Design school in Pollok’, which was shared over socials channels and we got feedback from a teacher from one primary schools that got involved asking if we can we make the briefs easier to understand for the children, so they can grasp the tasks easily and so the teacher can run the session themself.

We had to reimagine what the briefs where asking, so the children can understand the task at hand and the teacher can run the workshop on their own with ease. The first step we took was making the briefs tell a story with the visuals and making the language we used simple as possible. After we made the changes we heard back from multiple schools wanting to get involved from see seeing the great work that was produced from that one class on social media by the teacher, and word spread. This highlights that we need to become better communicators by constantly asking why? The power of iteration to make the message you trying to commutated understandable to everyone and not only to a sole target market.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by The Glasgow School of Art and the Research Development Fund.

Special thanks goes to each of the project contributors: Mark Charters, Rickie McNeill, Ian Elder, Florence Dioka, Tara French, Chris Jamieson, Mafalda Moreaud, Heather Hamilton, Ruth Kerracher, Kevin Lafferty, Digger Nutter, Francesca Vaghi, Gail Lumsden, Abigail Blunt, Andrew Paterson, Monique Campbell, India Roche, Cat Tabbner and Georgina Charlton.