MAKING CAMDEN SWIFT
- with CAMDEN COUNCIL
Project Brief
This project focusses on the benefits of social engagement to health and social care and the potential role of social interaction and companionship in enabling older residents to live independent, fulfilled and healthy lives.
Service Concept
Swift is a hyper-local transport service - powered by volunteers - which enables older residents to travel for free on their own schedule and to where they want to go in their local area. It is designed to encourage social interaction across generations and backgrounds to strengthen a sense of place and community.
My Role: Service design, User-Centered Research, Concept Development, Prototyping, Feasibility Test, Graphic design. I was one of the team member among 4 people.
Keywords: Older People , Health care, Social Care, Car Sharing, Social Innovation, Independent live.
Time & Location: 09/2016-01/2017, London
ABOUT THE CAMDEN SWIFT
INTRODUCTION
Our project focusses on the benefits of social engagement to health and social care and the potential role of social interaction and companionship in enabling older residents to live independent, ful lled and healthy lives. Our fieldwork revealed that there are already a lot of formal and informal social hubs offering a wide variety of high-quality activities and services in Camden, so we looked at issues of access to these activities for Camden’s older residents.
We experimented with two main concepts, both focussed on bridging what we perceived as a gap between users and existing services but each concept approached the solution from very different directions.
This webpage presents our findings and our proposed service solution - a hyper-local, community-based volunteer driving service. It allows older residents to get to where they need to be and car-owning residents to be rewarded for their time with free parking. Through an existing under-used infrastructure, we aim to strengthen a sense of community and place at limited cost to those involved and to the local authority.
FIELD RESEARCH
FOR WHOM
Personas are developed based on people we’ve encountered in our research.
KEY INSIGHTS
INITIAL DIRECTION
Our research uncovered factors that are limiting older residents access to social activities and events in the wards we studied. The diagram (left) is a simplified depiction of the situation as we see it.
Transport and cost are major hindrances to older residents accessing the diverse range of high-quality services and activities that are already being offered in Camden. Furthermore, there is a lot of capacity that cannot be used to alleviate over-subscription in other local sites due to limited access, funding and staffing.
We also saw a lot of activities and services in Camden that we staffed substantially or entirely by volunteers and, having spoken to many of them, we have come to believe there is much more that volunteers could do given the proper motivation and direction.
PROBLEM DEFINE
How can we create stronger, more sustainable relationships between residents and connections with the existing activities and services in the community?
VALUE
Based on the insights generated before, also take the whole situation of this project into consideration. We listed below key points to shape our design concept.
SERVICE CONCEPT 1
We spent a lot of time in Community Centres during our eld work and saw them as under-utilised but having huge potential. We mapped the usage of the three main Community Centres we’d visited across the week and found that, whilst there was often something going on in most of the centres, the spaces were not being used to their full capacity.
BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
Having extensively reviewed our ideas for this business modelling, we decided that the concept would struggle to sustainably attract local businesses and there was a potentially limited appeal for the wider community to get involved. Therefore, we decided to experiment with new concepts rather than develop it.
EVALUATION & ITERATION
At many of the Centres, access was a signi cant issue - many were built in highly residential neighbourhoods with dif cult to reach transport links and, especially in Highgate, there were steep gradients.
When we analysed the strengths of Highgate’s Community Centres, we found that, in order to get a full cross-section of available activities, significant travelling was required. Knowing that transport was difficult and, having assessed the most popular activities in Centres, we developed a concept that centralised activities in one place with the aim of reducing the need to travel from multiple venues to a single central point.
We anticipated that a significant side effect of this centralisation could be an increase in social interaction between users and an added attraction to other members of the community. This could help to encourage cross-generational interaction and alleviate issues of over-subscription in other local Centres.
However, as we studied the business model for the concept and considered the potential attraction for local businesses, we became concerned that the concept was not sustainable without a significant outlay for which would could not account.
Then out service concept transferred from CENTRALISE to MOBILISE.
FINAL SERVICE CONCEPT
CO-DESIGN
We prepared a preliminary interface design on mocked up phone screens to ensure participants felt they could engage with and edit the material. The co-design was launched between Manager of Highgate Newtown Community Centre, a group of the Centre’s users and volunteers aged between 50 and 80 and from varying backgrounds, and local residents among wider age.
SERVICE BLUEPRINT TOUCHPOINTS
USER JOURNEY MAP THROUGH THE SERVICE PLATFORM
To clearly structure the service form users' perspective, we did a graphic below, which is the adaptation of user journey map and service blueprint.
INTERFACE
BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS FOR CAMDEN SWIFT
With the extensive opportunities to entice local businesses and other community groups - alongside the embedded role of the local community - we feel that the Swift concept has a strong chance of success.
CONCLUSION
We believe that our solution gives older residents the freedom to travel to where they want to go - be it activities that interest them, visiting family and friends or attending healthcare appointments.
Equally importantly, it gives this freedom whilst encouraging new social connections within their immediate community - the service is hyper-local, it aims to provide Drivers from no more than a couple of streets away wherever possible.
Swift gives its users a stronger sense of place and an initial human connection with their neighbours that can grow over time to benefit in ways far beyond simple transport.
