Share the Road

The share the road project was run by University College Falmouth through Dott as a pilot AIR project. The project addressed problems of traffic and parking congestion in Falmouth and Penryn. As the Universities have grown, increasing numbers of students bring their cars to the area and use them infrequently, meaning there are many cars lining the streets of the two towns that are not being used and still many people requiring travel who could potnetially be sharing cars.

Car use in Cornwall is perceived as a necessity by many due to the cost, frequency and coverage of public transport. The share the road project has helped to reduce the number of cars on the roads in Falmouth and Penryn by offering alternate modes of transport that are as good or better as owning a car.

Co-Delivered

The service we developed was an innovative transport club. It has elements familiar to users of car-share clubs, combining more innovative elements that make it distinctive and relevant to this area and to local people.

We drew up a business plan for the service, talking to delivery partners, and made a pre-launch experience prototype film in order to raise awareness of the service amongst a wide audience.

Co-Develop

We ran a workshop with Penryn residents on 3 September. This workshop was primarily about testing the co-designed service with the people that would be using it.

The day before the service was storyboarded and the people present (who had all responded to adverts in the local paper and the fair day) were talked though the idea and asked to comment at each stage.

In addition to this all of the information shown at the Sandpit was available for people to look through so at any point either the experts or the residents could see what information was shown to and created by either party.

The session generated community buy-in and identified some potential delivery partners for the project.

This was the last workshoip session, and was followed by detailed work on the service blueprint.  We also conducted and filmed an ‘experience prototype’, using members of the public and potential users to trial a mock-up of the service.

Co-Design

We used workshops and 1:1 interviews to engage the community in “ideation” – generating ideas and concepts through brainstorming and other techniques. These sessions were filmed and were a key tool to open up ideas for development in later workshops.

We focussed these sessions and interviews on four very ‘rough’ ideas – hitchhiking, car rental, car sharing and cycling. In a classic design tool, these were deliberately kept sketchy to invite them to be ‘pulled apart’ – over presentation can lead to an assumption that a clear recommendation has already been made.

We set up a stall at Penryn Fair Day which made quite an impact. There was very positive feedback about the University’s engagement in the community. On the stall we used quotes from the interviews and from various other social media and newspaper articles and created quote cards to take along. The people attending were asked to add their comments to blank quote cards and to let us know what they thought of the other ideas. This left us with over 100 cards of ideas, problems and challenges.

These helped us to draw up storyboards, for use at the sandpit.

 ‘Sandpit’ is AIR terminology for an innovation workshop made up of  experts and stakeholders in the project.  We experimented with a two-day format, allowing the team to use the space between the two days to use their design and visualisation skills to develop and then present back to the attendees.  
We used a large amount of space in the Tremough Design Centre, enabling the participants to become immersed in the project, and used video, prompt cards, sketch sheets, and the ubiquitous post-its.

As well as the project team, external attendees included senior representatives from Cornwall Council, local businesses, business leaders, the Students Union, and an experienced car club entrepreneur.

Diagnose and Co-Discover

The project began with a period of desk research, analysing research and years of travel surveys already undertaken by Tremough Campus Services and  Cornwall Council.

These helped the team to target key streets and groups of people in the diagnose phase.  It also highlighted the key areas of low take-up of public transport.

We also assessed public transport and other services, and gave volunteers GPS tracking devices to analyse their travel patterns in real time.  This helped us to identify and classify those journeys suitable for walking, cycling, driving and public transport.

Finally, we conducted a series of interviews, aiming for a balanced sample of permanent residents, visitors to the areas and students.