Recent Projects: A Vision for Altrincham

Recently I have collaborated with the Glass-House for the first time. The Glass-House is a national charity that gives both communities and regeneration professionals the skills and confidence to lead and contribute to design and neighbourhood planning that involves and benefits local people. In late 2011 Mindful Maps became part of the charity’s Enabler bank. Glass-House Enablers are a dynamic and diverse group of creative professionals brought together through a shared commitment to supporting the development of delightful and sustainable places shaped by local people.

On the 19th March, Hannah Gibbs from the Glass-House and I headed up to a day of workshops with Altrincham and Bowdon Civic Society about the role of Altrincham’s Markets in shaping the town’s future. My role in the workshops was to document the day and use Graphic Harvesting to ideas for the vision down on paper.

The ideas included increasing the flexibility of market buildings and streets, creating pedestrian dominated main streets free of bollards and clutter and improving accessibility to specific areas and under-used spaces.

Much of the vision created at the workshops will be fed into forthcoming plans for the market house, covered market, the old Altrincham General Hospital site and all the surrounding streets, which in part could become a new market square. The visual created has since been used in further events and was referred to in this local press article as a regeneration blueprint. It will also be used as the basis for a vision and strategy document.

Visually Noted: Peter Block on the Structure of Belonging

I have just been massively inspired by reading Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging.  The parts I found most meaningful were about the small group being the unit of transformation, the quality of how we gather together, questions being more powerful than answers, conversations to structure belonging, and other resonant questions about important things like gratitude and gifts. A great read and food for thought.

Visual Camp

Visual Camp took place last Tuesday; a mini unconference organised by the DotGovLabs innovation hub to kickstart dialogue between  policymakers and visual communicators. It was a space to explore how visuals might help communicate policies and issues, and how those of us working visually could work with public services and civil society to communicate policies & issues.

Mindful Maps gave a short introduction alongside the marvellous Simply Understand to present the groups with a few thoughts on visualisation which I will write up into a separate post (download the slides here).

We then went into workgroups around various themes. Laura Sorvala and I were in the ‘Maps showing the issues communities really care about’ group, where there was a lively discussion about what the value of map-making might be in terms of creating change.

From the Come to Your Senses event the previous weekend, we had a lot of questions related to this; what do we do with emotional and experiential data once we’ve collected it? How can this type of tool be of real value? How can we design and facilitate the map-making process in communities to make it helpful & relevant to contextual issues?

Image: Laura Sorvala, from this blog post analysing the themes from Come to Your Senses.

This will be an ongoing conversation, as many of the questions asked in the discussion provoked more questions! These are some of the main points covered:

• Maps can facilitate change by helping people connect the dots
• Maps can help us harvest human capital
• The data collected is important, but it’s what we do with it that will actually make a difference
• Maps can aid us in remembering data – conversations, opinions, issues etc
• Can maps translate between the public and policy, and act as a tool to help us find a common language?
• By enabling participation, map-making can give people permission to express opinions and emotions
• Maps can be powerful simply as visions, which can spark real change by altering perceptions, empowering the user and engaging people

More to come on this topic soon, hopefully facilitated by future visual camp conversations!

Looking back; a beautiful bathroom

Sorting through some old stuff I came across these photos (circa 2003) and found these images of a mural painted in collaboration with Cardiff-based artist Vikki Sewell. Lisa Wilkinson of the Elbow Room, a yoga studio and great community hub in Dublin, commissioned Vikki and I to make those trips to the loo a beautiful and creative experience.