Week 3: Engaging with the Walworth Community

Designers: Ranga Bhave, Fangxue Chen, , Effy Liu, Parth Loliyania, Zhe Lou, Ava Shepherd, Kristen Sullivan, Jacob Tomes, Ella Wilson

Focusing in on the Walworth Community

At the end of last week Mark connected us with Matt, Frances and Richard who are currently working on a similar project focused on creating / saving community pubs within the Walworth Community. Jacob and Ella represented our team and attended their monthly meeting to learn more about their work and how we could potentially work together for this brief.

This meeting opened up the possibility of our group collaborating with Richard and Co and using the Walworth Living Room as our venue.

Having this connection was transformative for our group. Not only did we now have an area to focus our research specifically on, but we also had the opportunity to work alongside the Walworth Community Pub Group and share research / have support setting up a final event.

Following the meeting we decided to focus on 4 key directions over the next week:

1. Researching what community governance is (Ranga & Ella & Kristen)

2. Creating probes (Parth & Jacob)

3. Interviews with the Walworth community (Effy, Fangxue, Zhe & Myself)

4. Discuss ideas for creating a stall showcasing our findings (community engagement) (Everyone)

Talking to the community

On Tuesday, Effy, Fangxue, Zhe & Myself headed out to Walworth to conduct interviews with members of the public. Our goal from these interviews was to understand how the local community of Walworth feel about pubs in the area and if they use them regularly.

We spilt into two groups and explored half of Walworth each. We felt this was the best approach to ensure we cover the most ground and subgroups of Walworth.

However once we began to go out and begin interviewing people it proved a lot harder than imaged. Fangxue and I were turned away by over 10 people before someone would speak to us. This was really disheartening as it was a big knock to our confidence and made it a longer process than we were anticipating.

We learnt that people who were sitting outside cafes and in pubs were our best option as they were generally more open to talking than people on the street as they were not 'busy'.

Talking to the people of Walworth

By the end of the day, we were able to speak to a total of 16 people. While this sample was smaller than we had hoped it was at least a start for us to work with. From our interviews we learnt that:

General analysis from interview

• Majority of the people only worked in this area and did not live here / socialise

• 4 of our 16 did live in the area and liked to socialise

• 10 out of 16 do not currently participate in community events but would be open to it depending on what the event is

• People enjoy going to the pub to socialise with friends

• The atmosphere is the most important aspect of a pub. However some around Walworth do not have good atmosphere and feel like they are for old people.

• 13 out of 16 people do not feel safe in Walworth pubs

From our first analysis of the interviews, something that really stood out to me was how many people do not feel safe in the pubs around Walworth and also feel that they are for older generations only. This is something I believe should be a primary focus for our group when considering the atmosphere we create at our final event.

Walworth Map: Probe

Since we were struggling to get people to speak to us via interviews, we came up with the idea of using a probe to encourage engagement with the community. Therefore we created a map of Walworth in which we would use to prompt conversations about where people are from, what their favourite places in Walworth are and where people like to socialise. This proved much more effective than interviews as people were excited to see where they live and build on top of the map and add their own ideas.

Testing our map probes

Meeting with Richard

Finally, on Friday, part of the team went to the Walworth living room to meet with Richard, and discuss the possible future of this project.

Key points discussed were:

• Food is often people's idea of what determines a good pub.

• Pubs are relaxing environments where we could explore different types of activities.

• An idea of a mobile stool that acts as a toolkit for engaging the public to help generate research about the local community. This could be combined with activities and a way to show people what a community pub could look like in the future.

• Richard could us a spot at the east street market in Walworth to do a day of public engagement.

• We could use the Walworth living room as our final event venue.

• Create an Instagram to generate interests online and reach out to more audiences.

Reflection

One key thing that I learnt from this week is that our team needs to improve on how we condense, analyse and present our research. During our presentation this week, while people could acknowledge that we did lots of research, they did not know what we learnt and what it means going forward. John made a comment that to ensure people can easily interpret data, it needs to be visual, which we had not done.

Additionally, while it was good that we were speaking to the community, the class felt like we needed to go back to our initial research about pubs and learn more about what distinguishes them from other venues like a bar, and how people navigate them. This is all really helpful feedback and something we will work on over the next few weeks.

Next Post: Week 4: Further Research and portable pub