WHYVOTE PROJECT
This was our first project of 2014, which took place over a four-week period. Our client was Caroline Shepard, a senior civil servant and Chief Adjudicator for Parking Appeals focused on engaging young people with voting. The projects’ focus was around youth voting and engagement; our main question we were posed with was;
can innovation and design improve public engagement and participation in our political life?
This was a scoping and exploratory research project. Our deliverables were to build a number of propositions that can be used as a vehicle to engage partnership within the Cabinet Office. The end result was one coherent body of work to allow Caroline to speak to relevant people about taking this project further.
This was an amazing project to be involved with; I loved it from start to finish. As I am from Scotland and the Referendum is fast approaching there, this was really something I enjoyed getting stuck into. On a personal level I have never voted, not because I don’t want to, but because I was never sure which party I should vote for. An ill-informed vote is worse than no vote at all in my eyes; not having this knowledge was partially my fault but I never had any schooling on this topic, and I found most information confusing and conflicting.
 Team Positive Activism! |  First meeting with James |  Our inspiration corner |
|---|---|---|
 Morning meeting with Mark |  Alain searching for inspiration |  Our Topic of Focus |
 Team idea generation |  Working out the schematic |  Interim wall sketch |
WEEK ONE: RESEARCH AND SCOPING STAGE
After the briefing on the first day back with Bob Young and Phil Sams, we had a cohort discussion, including the staff; about who voted and why? Neil Smith brought to my attention 38 degrees, which is a way of actively being involved with politics on a day-to-day basis. This information proved invaluable later on in the project. We also discovered only 20% of the group round the table voted, and as we were our own target market this was a great place to start. From there we had a discussion about the initial topics laid out for preliminary research by the client. There were three topics to focus on:
Team 1. Government held data on voting statistics and demographics.
Team 2. Analysis of current voting mechanics and the potential role for design.
Team 3. The positive/negative/creative role of media past and present in politics.
Team 4. Voting and engagement within a global context.
Team 5. Youth culture and behaviours.
On the Tuesday we broke off into 5 groups, I was especially interested in looking at the role of the media in politics as I felt this is where most of our political information is broadcast. I was in a group with Laura McKay, Alain Nkusi and Catie Hang; I felt this was one of the strongest teams I had worked with over the whole semester. As a team we all contributed and communicated equally which meant we had some great ideas and I felt produced some strong work in the end. We began by doing individual research into the broader social media effects and found out more about how people discuss politics through social media. There is so much research and in-depth analysis into the effects of social media; it did not take us long as a team to start really uncovering the power and outcomes of social media campaigns. Whilst doing this I discovered the Thunderclap website; this is a feature integrated into existing social media. The principle of Thunderclap is to try and reach as many people as possible by simultaneously posting on the users social media about a campaign or a specific topic to raise awareness. This was an incredible way of getting people to talk about an important topic, I felt if we could create a strong campaign using this feature or something similar we might be able to encourage more youths to get talking about politics. I suggested as a team we used social media to try and reach out to our friends and find out how many people voted our age or even were interested in politics. The results for this were astonishing; we had almost 200 responses in 24 hours. People were extremely passionate about this topic but many felt there was not an appropriate place to find nonbiased information or to voice their opinion. Below are some results from this questionnaire; the most powerful result for me was the response to the question, “do you feel your contribution would make a difference?” It was almost a 50/50 split with people unsure whether their vote even made a difference, this demonstrated a key factor to overcome, the loss of trust from the people about politics and politicians. From there we began exploring the possibility of connecting the people and the government to co-create policies.
 Results from the Survey |  Results from the Survey |  Results from the Survey |
|---|---|---|
 Results from the Survey |  Results from the Survey |
WEEK ONE PHOTOGRAPHS
 Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |
|---|---|---|
 Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |
 Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |  Week One Photos: Scoping |
Week One Photos: Scoping |
A timelapse Alain created to show an afternoons project development on our new walls.
WEEK TWO: DEFINING DIRECTION
After reviewing all our results from the questionnaire, Alain approached Gateshead College about the possibility of discussing with a younger group of people around their views on politics. Unfortunately, because of time pressures, we never got an opportunity to organize a meeting, but we did manage to speak to some friends in the younger age range around 16-18 about their opinions on the topic and how important social media was for them. By week two ‘Team Positive Activism’ (name by Laura) was well on its way to finding where we could add value. Immediate solutions that jumped out at us were around creating a website or platform where younger generations could discuss politics, as from our research existing websites in this field were quite unattractive and un-engaging. Below are images of some of these websites.
On Tuesday we had an early morning meeting with Mark to discuss where we were at and possible next steps. Mark was very happy with On Tuesday we had an early morning meeting with Mark to discuss pur progression and possible next steps. Mark was very happy with our directions so far but said we need to think more broadly; so we started looking into things such as ‘if politics did xfactor’ and how difficult is it to really contact your politician. Later on that day we began a ‘tablecloth’ brainstorm, were our team sat down and populated the page with some ideas, insights and directions we could use.
Before the interim, Nick wanted to gather information from each team to clarify; what is our vision, our key insights and our proposal moving on from the scoping stage. Our teams initial vision was
“We aim to change the way young people engage in politics by creating a social media driven platform that facilitates an open discussion between the young demographic (18-24) and politicians and policy makers. This will result in a better relationship, more trust, and enthusiasm with political issues.”
Later on in the week we met with Prof. Bob Young, one of the partners within this project. He said we needed to identify our core values and possibly a strategy for change within our direction. Following this insightful feedback/ conversation Alain and I reviewed our existing direction and discussed a philosophy for change, that we could use within out interim presentation, which clearly showed what we were trying to achieve with our platform.
The next few days we planned our subsequent steps in preparation for the interim the following week. We decided we would communicate all our findings so far on the walls and present our work that way. Over the weekend Alain and I came into NDC to design and draw up our ‘wall art’ to present the following week, ensuring we included the vision, key insights, proposal and design features of our idea. We also created a short video explaining the ‘Power of Social Media’. Our presentation consisted of:
Intro - our vision
Key facts - questionnaire findings
Example of power of social media
Our proposed idea - online platform
Our idea characteristics (features)
Enhancing existing social media
Nigel’s story (our persona)
Conclusion - reflection next steps
WEEK THREE: INTERIM & DEVELOPMENT OF IDEA
With the interim approaching at the beginning of the week and our team finished; we ensured all the information was included and practiced our team presentation a couple of times. We were the first team to present; there was a few staff from the politics department, Neil Smith and Phil Sams on Skype and Caroline on the phone. Having all these different communication platforms made it extremely difficult for our team to clearly present our findings. Although this made it difficult for us to gather useful feedback, we collected some useful comments and began to redefine our vision and goals. Later in the week we met with Nick, who shed some more light on what was expected of us. We needed to create one final group deliverable for the client Caroline, so more collaboration and communication was needed between the groups.
INTERIM FINAL WORK
 OUR INTERIM WALL |  OUR INTERIM WALL |  OUR INTERIM WALL |
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 OUR INTERIM WALL |  OUR INTERIM WALL |  OUR INTERIM WALL |
 OUR INTERIM WALL |  OUR INTERIM WALL |
The following day we met up as a cohort and discussed how we might create a coherent deliverable for the final deadline. One of the teams focusing on politics on a global scale did not have a definitive direction to follow on from after the interim so we decided to disband the team and reallocate the members into the remaining teams, meaning Haroon joined Positive Activism. Whilst having a meeting as a cohort we decided there were some overlapping trends to our work. Although initially we had hoped to incorporate an education section into our platform, we decided it would be clearer if we had 3 categories and one team looking at each. These were education, media (social and tv) and technology; from there Luke Jackson would create a website to link all this information together.Our team then came together to clarify our next steps. There were a few gaps in our solution that we needed to fill, for example; who would run/host the website? Would they be biased to a specific party? How would the website layout work? How would it operate? Between us as a team we did some specific research to close certain gaps in our theory.During our feedback session with Nick, he told us we should try and push ourselves and start those important conversations; he also suggested we create a schematic of how our website works. I began by creating a Facebook page called the WhyVote Campaign to get people to start talking about politics. As a team we then talked through how people might navigate the website. I then created a visual schematic using Lucidchart which add illustrated during the final presentation how the website might work.
WEEK FOUR: FINAL PRESENTATION
The final deadline was brought forward 2 days so we began developing our final communication for Caroline. We needed a name for our campaign; we brainstormed as a team and decided on ‘Shockwave’. I also suggested we all individually write an ‘elevator pitch’ of what we thought Shockwave was. Our final statement was:
'Our Website is a discussion platform to engage and encourage conversation among young people about political issues. We want to create a higher understanding of British politics, and motivate young people to care about our countries future. By creating an easy to use, interactive place for people to voice their opinions and share their thoughts, we can inspire a media focused generation to be involved.'
I suggested we use Prezi as it is a clear creative way of presenting our idea. Laura and Alain developed some website visuals to accompany the schematic I had created. Catie worked on identifying how much it might cost to set up, and how we could initially market this website. Haroon worked on the evidence, and explanation of who runs the website. All of the team sent me their work as I was building the Prezi. We had a short meeting with Mark a day or two before the final presentation, he suggested we create a video that explains how the schematic and webpages are linked. Alain completed the video in time to be added to Luke’s final website. Here is the website and links to our final work.
Self-running video of our Prezi
How Shockwave Works
The first presentation was to Phil Sams and Bob Young, then the following day we presented to Nick Spencer, Mark Bailey and Lizzie Unwin. Both presentations went very well and I believe the final client Caroline was happy with the results. I thoroughly enjoyed this project, and I hope the results can be used to improve the future of the politics world.