Week 4: Further Research and Portable Pub

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

Further Research

Following our feedback from last week we decided that it would be beneficial to circle back to our research about pubs and learn how people congregate / experience a pub. Therefore over the weekend we decided that we would all visit two pubs each to do an in-depth AEIOU analysis and crowd flow map / heat map.

After completing our research we began analysing it over the week. Here is a quick overview of what we learnt:

• Most popular time of day = Early to late evening

• Most common clientele type: Young adults and Middle aged people

• Space most occupied = Outdoor spaces when good weather, places with easy access to the bar and places with activities (such as pool, juke box, games machine)

• Preferred seating = Indoors: Padded/cushioned seats, Outdoors: Wooden benches

• Average number in one group = 2 - 4

Original AEIOU research and heat map

This time round we wanted to ensure that we could present our data in a visual manner so that it could be easily digestible for other to see. Therefore we created a digital copy of our heat maps so all the information was in one place and presented in an organised visual manner.

Digital heat map of how people use the space

While doing our research we also took time to look at how people congregate outside of busy pubs when there is limited seating.

Visual analysis / heat map of people outside a busy pub

The number one thing that stood out from all of our research and conversations with Richard and Mark, is that people go to the pub to be social. Wether they go alone, or in small groups, it is a place where people can either enjoy being surrounded by people, spark conversations you might not generate in other environments or catch up with friends. Therefore when we were considering what to do for our final project we wanted to find a way we could capture this community engagement in a tangible and exciting way.

Portable cart ideation:

After some discussion our group decided to test out the idea of a portable pub cart. We envisioned the cart to be something that could generate research while also showcasing what a community pub could look like in the future and get people excited about community pubs again.

On Tuesday we decided that we would all meet at uni to sketch potential ideas for a cart design. Giving everyone the chance to sketch their own ideas allowed our group to make sure no one felt like their voice was getting lost and that everyone could experiment with any ideas they liked during the early ideation stage.

Initial pub cart ideation sketches

After this we collected all the sketches together and narrowed down overlapping ideas with general favourites. This allowed us to make a mood board of the potential portable pub cart and see what it could potentially look like when finished.

Mood board of sketches and influential ideas

Presentation and Feedback:

After the presentation on Thursday, we received feedback that our idea for the cart was confusing and spreading into too many directions. Therefore we decided to narrow down our main goals of what we wanted to achieve through the cart to make our final outcome more realistic.

Our 4 main goals for the cart:

1. Become an interesting artifact that we can take to crowded pubs that would help us draw people's attention.

2. Act as a giant research toolkit armed with multiple methods to help us gain insight into the community.

3. Lastly, serve as a medium to visualise the concept of the community pub governance model.

4. Document the process of how we scale this to multiple locations.

To achieve each of these goals we would have to focus on:

1. Co-design activities (pub sign & bottle workshop & music playlist)

• Engage people and feel like they are contributing to the shared space.

• Allowing people to personalise the cart it to their own locality.

• Showcase their reflection of how they see this community.

2. Creating a Walworth community map

• Where people can share stories (pubs they go to in Walworth, their experiences in the area and any key aspects of the community).

3. Incorporating Prompts (hanging on the station & through pub games)

• Meant to generate research about the communities pub preferences

4. Building unique furniture

• Meant to be stackable and portable to go with pub station when required, also light enough for people to pick up and rearrange how they please

Reflection:

This week I learnt a lot about the importance of visualising your research findings and collating them in a way that is digestible to external eyes. Before this week, while we were doing a lot of research, it kept getting lost because we were not effectively analysing it and presenting it in a way people can easily read. This meant that we were also not learning as much as we could from our research and just saw what we wanted to see from our research. This has been a real learning curve and something we aim to improve on over the next few weeks

Next Post: Week 5: Planning final event