follow US

A summary of the group work element

 

As a practice, we decided it was important to strongly define our motivators from the beginning. This would then help us get a clearer idea of our goals as a collective, which in turn would make our process, both group and individual, a lot clearer. Our interests and experiences in cycling have proved to be the main source of our experiences of navigating the urban landscape that surrounds us, it is this combined with our belief in the bicycle as a tool for positive change on so many different levels, that led us to focus on public realm and transport links as a practice.  

Through our research, we had hoped to build a good understanding of the existing methods of transport in and around stretford in order to gauge the type of design intervention we would need to undertake. But in addition to this, we wanted to understand the way locals used the existing public realm in stretford. 

​

A discussion of the specific methods used 

 

Our approach to the engagement event was simple, we wanted to compare the locals' idea of what they wanted stretford to look like and what they think of it now. This was something that we managed to do through our postcards. We focused a little more on what the locals envisioned by allowing them the chance to create simple collages to the map of stretford, an exercise that generated plenty of interesting in-depth conversations about potential intervention strategies in stretford. The route drawing exercise was quite useful in showing how the locals would negotiate the complex and at times dangerous traffic junction that split the centre of stretford into quadrants. Using the information from this specific exercise, we began to see hints of how cyclists would approach the hall and cross the busy A56 junction and compare this with pedestrians and even motorists. This exercise had the most potential to reveal information about public use of the existing transport infrastructure to the hall and also reveal any hidden desire lines that would not manifest as easily as they would on a more natural and malleable landscape (grass and other plants). The main weakness for this was the relatively small sample size, a shift in focus towards this exercise would have really helped reveal if there are any specific patterns of use and would have fed directly into our design process.

 

The main issue we had faced after our engagement event was that we found it quite difficult to analyse the data we had gathered as it was so open and varied. By being very specific in our methodology we somehow managed to leave our questions quite open. This was something that was particularly pertinent when it came to looking at the feedback from the postcards, which gave us more than 100 different responses that weren’t answering a specific question but merely adding comments, often about irrelevant or unrelated topics. Although we were still able to get some meaningful results out of the information gathered, we definitely had to spend an extended amount of time considering the individual comments and trying to gauge how to represent these comments. 

One thing that helped us, on the other hand, was the amount of information we had absorbed from the locals during the spoken interactions we had with them. Although these interactions weren’t documented in our research they did reflect in our approach and ideas to the development of the master plan, which we had began planning out after our analysis of the feedback. 

 

What this as a whole meant

 

Going forward, we’ve each found the research that we’ve done useful but have also carried out further research in order to investigate possible options that we can take forward. The process itself has been useful as a learning tool, with the analysis of the information being the most interesting aspect of the process as we had to consider how the different layers of information could be compared and analysed.