GRITTY TOURS GLASGOW
This project was a partnership between the Glasgow School of Art, the Glasgow City Coucil, and Open Glasgow.
The project ran for 5 weeks (4 days per week) including, in the first week, skills workshops and briefings.There were 19 third year undergraduate students engaged in the project over half of whom are on exchange from partner design institutions from countries including: Japan, India, Sweden, Israel, Germany, Portugal, Italy and France.
The project was organised, by the students, as an open collaboration with specific groups formed for the exploration of each domain and an overarching co-ordinated structure to communicate the project as a whole. They have called this OSD Colony.
The project concluded on Friday 12 December 2014.
OSD COLONY
We were charged with analyising and making a critique of the open source data produced by Open Glasgow in the areas of Health, Energy, Transport & Public Safety which were specifically aimed at improving life in the city. We were then asked to transform through further research, analysis, critique and design ideas, and/or their derivatives, into refined concepts that could be, more readily, turned into reality and in doing so, show clearly in the resulting concepts:
• social benefits and outcomes for the city and its citizens
• economical benefits and outcomes for the city and its citizens
• potential for sustainability over time
• potential for long term impact on some of Glasgow’s enduring social issues
• the relationship and communication between council and citizen
• the broad impact of a open source approach to solving issues
My team was assigned with the theme of Public Safety.
MANIFESTO
We want to form a toolkit that improves the situation for the homeless community, how they are percieved by themselves and by others.We believe that by destigmatizing homelessness it will increase the feeling of safety for all parties.
We intend to do this by delivering a service that is based on factual research, understanding Glasgow’s own homelessness community, and by drawing on concepts that are proven to work on other locations. We aim to work together with the homeless community in order to enable co-creation, because we believe that they have the best understanding of their own needs.
The concept that we produced aims to be inclusive, tangible, a long-term solution, and actively develop skills that can be applied to build and foment careers. Overall, our goal is to create a service that can be used as a tool to help people and find a oneway path through homelessness.
We designed a service that aims to integrate homeless people, city council and the public.
The service is a platform for the homeless of Glasgow to become the guides for tourists and locals around the city. They will give a unique experience of the city, sharing their personal story and places.
In the long term, “Gritty Tours Glasgow” aspires to improve the economy's situation by providing skills and employment to homeless and support local business; Raise awareness to social care issues; Improve public safety by creating more activity in the suburbs; and improve the ‘safety feeling’ by integrating homeless community with the public.
