Getgo Probe Tools
Well what an exciting week!
Getgoglasgow, which is the design collective of the two Masters courses at the Glasgow school of art (Design Innovation and European design) won the Audi Sustain our Nation competition and £10000 for the community we worked with.
We’ve been working with an area in Maryhill Glasgow called Wyndford to develop a sustainable social enterprise for their community. The project has been tough, with some great highs, and almighty lows.
For the group, it was a challenging project. This demanded a new role of the designer away from the solo author to the co-creator. We made it really clear at the beginning of the project to work with people rather than for them.
View this document on ScribdThe winning project was Green Gorillaz, a way to bring back community spirit and the community voice, using offline and online message boards, linked up by residents. We created some seed groups which will house events and see knowledge transferred across generations. It stems from the closure of their primary schools last year, and a real loss of community. They had come together to fight the decision, so we knew there were passionate local champs. We wanted to harness this and turn that energy into something positive.
But credit should go to everyone involved in the project, there were three projects developed from the same process. We held co-creation workshops with residents and stakeholders to generate ideas to take forward, but made sure at all points we were transparent and open about our process, returning to the community regularly to work with them again and develop proposals.
If design education should learn anything from this, is that building relationships takes time, and if projects like this are to be handed to students, proper training in community work, sustainable thinking and an understanding of ethics should be taught. We’ve struggled with the competition and institute deadlines. For example, after handing in the first three projects, we had to wait to see whether any had made it through to the regional finals. At this point, we decided as a collective to carry all of them on anyway, even though none might be taken forward.
Anyway, we’re down at the RSA on the 17th February to represent a ‘developed’ concept (we’re working to make it real and it starts tomorrow with a football pitch party at 10am where we’ll be feeding back to the community), and hopefully we can win another £10000 for Wyndford.
In the words of John Gray yesterday,
“bloody good for u……bunnets in the air !……mon the weegies 
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