Many people in the UK are currently excluded from the benefits of digital technologies and the connections to other people, businesses and groups that these provide. These technologies are not affordable by the poor and not usable by many older or disabled people, leading to a double exclusion from the digital and social world around them.

The Bespoke project aimed to tackle this problem at a neighbourhood level, by helping local people to tell their own social exclusion stories and use these stories to inspire simple bespoke design solutions created with and for the excluded people. This collaboration between emotive, technological and functional design with hyper-local journalism had never been tried before.

Working closely with deprived communities in the Preston area and their local news media, we gave residents training in how to identify and report needs through a monthly community newspaper. Based on discussions around the content generated by journalists, designers created new bespoke digital objects connecting people to each other and people to existing content and services on the web. A philosophy of the project was to make these as radically simple as possible, using familiar objects and behaviours from the real world. The resulting artefacts and solutions were then be placed back into the community for feedback in the ongoing community news system.

Over the course of the project, we developed a series of highly customised technologies based on the community’s individual needs:

• Viewpoint: a community voting device that posed simple questions to the community on a weekly basis, opening a new channel of communication between residents and local organisations.
• Family Hedge/ Talking Memory Box: a device for recording memories and associating them with personal objects.
• Wayfinder: three electronic ‘signposts’ were placed in the community, which moved to point towards nearby events sent by residents.
• Digital Buskers: two local musicians were recreated as digital ‘buskers’ who played music in response to text messages.
• Community Capture Television (CCTV): a camera device for recording and immediately upload footage to the Internet.
• Blogging Pad: allowed residents to leave audio comments on articles in the Bespoke newspaper.

Date: April 2009 – June 2011

Funding: EPSRC Digital Economy Programme £164,527

Researchers:  Nick Taylor, Gavin Wood

Collaborators:  Jayne Wallace, (Northumbria University), David Frohlich (Surrey University), Alicia Blum-Ross (Surrey University), Paul Egglestone, John Mills (UCLan), Jon Rogers, Mike Shorter (University of Dundee), Justin Marhsall (University College Falmouth)

Press: Gift of the gadgets to get residents talking, Lancashire Evening Post, 11 August 2011

For more information see the Bespoke project website.

Publications:

2012

Viewpoint: Empowering Communities with Situated Voting Devices (2012) Nick Taylor, Justin Marshall, Alicia Blum-Ross, John Mills, Jon Rogers, Paul Egglestone, David M. Frohlich, Peter Wright, Patrick Olivier, Proc. CHI 2012, New York: ACM

2011

Crossing the Digital Divide in the Other Direction: Community-centered design on the Bespoke project (2011) David M. Frohlich, Katie Smith, Alicia Blum-Ross, Paul Egglestone, John Mills, Mike Shorter, Sean Smith, Jon Rogers, Justin Marshall, Patrick Olivier, James Woods, Jayne Wallace, Gavin Wood, Mark Blythe, Proc. Include 2011, Royal College of Art, pdf