Active Streets

Remote engagement programme developing active travel and public realm improvements for Sustrans - ‘Places for Everyone’

The neighbourhoods surrounding Portobello High School in Edinburgh, have huge potential for more participation in active travel.

Active Streets was a chance for us to speak to Primary and Secondary school children across the area about how we can all become more active in our communities. We invited local community members of all ages to have their say on the challenges and opportunities for making more sustainable everyday journeys.

Active Streets was developed initially to include a variety of in-person engagement activities - in schools and at community events across the project area. As the risks due to Covid-19 increased across the early months of 2020, the project was re-imagined as an innovative and comprehensive suite of remote engagement activities, adapting to the challenges of working with participants experiencing lockdown at home. 

We worked with illustrator Jason Kerley to develop a bold and engaging project identity. To help communicate the purpose and value of the project to a youth audience, a range of characters were developed to help explain what active travel is, and the forms that future ideas might take.

 New Practice developed a suite of engagement methods across digital and physical media as a way to mitigate these challenges. Tools were designed so that participants might be able to respond if they only had 5 minutes available, or if they were interested in taking much longer to develop a creative response. All tools were designed using simple and understandable language and terminology. 

These ranged from print-at-home and postal activity kits for young people, with simple questions and fun activities to gain insight into their perceptions of their school commutes, to online surveys, and even the recreation of the project area in the hugely popular video game, Minecraft, allowing participants’ imaginations to run wild and creatively reimagine their environment. 

Active Streets is at the outset of a much longer project funded by Sustrans and Transport Scotland’s ‘Places for Everyone’ funding stream. This will see ideas developed in this project stage translated into physical interventions across the Portobello area making opportunities for active travel as part of peoples’ everyday journeys safer, more attractive and easier to access. 

Find out more at www.active-streets.co.uk

Behind the scenes

While New Practice have a long track record of developing remote engagement tools as part of our work, the emergence of Covid-19 during the early months of 2020 offered an unprecedented challenge in delivering a project originally conceived of as very hands-on with young people in educational settings.

Everyone has experienced the challenges of the pandemic and subsequent lock-downs in different ways. It was clear that we had to radically rethink our approach, and build a fully remote engagement process which was flexible and accessible to people of all ages and abilities.

We threw ourselves headlong into researching and testing new technologies. We took inspiration from well-established online communities, from YouTube streamers to video-gamers. These communities have developed sophisticated approaches to fostering connection and conversation through digital devices. Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, we looked to embed well-tested approaches in our tools.

We worked hard to make sure that the personality and identity of our project was legible in all aspects of our tools and communication. A consistent identity across an engagement programme helps to foster greater confidence that participation will lead to meaningful outcomes, and we embedded a host of colourful characters and illustrations across a range of tools, from print-at-home surveys to custom designed YouTube Live broadcasts, breaking away from the formality of a traditional webinar.

• Client: Sustrans

• Location: Edinburgh, UK

• Ongoing

• Collaborators: Jason Kerley