Welcome to the module called decision landscapes. Now, this module is about understanding the structures that govern the problem that you are wanting to address. This is an important step in a co-design process, because, this is going to help you understand how to create change, how to create action. As you can see from the map on the slide, we have now made it quite far into the MOOC. This particular module is really beginning to address two problems. The problems of making a target for your project, and also, the issue of making a proposal for change. These are all, again, parts that's going to make it into your individual case study. At this point, there's a bunch of things you know already. You know who you are, you know who your users are. You've done your research, and you've identified a target. Now it's time to think about the decision, and power landscape around your target. How are decisions being made? By decisions, I mean, how are the decisions that are important to your project being made by other people? This means that we have to take a little stop, and just recap the difference between division, and the goal, or in other words, the concern and the problem. The vision is the overall long-term idea of what it is, the change you want to see in the world. The goal is a short-term thing that you're hoping to achieve with a deadline. In the case of the trip project, the vision is a world where public transport is fully accessible to everyone, and all travelers can make it safely from A to B without having problems accessing these public transport offerings. Now, the goals specifically, again, the example for the trip project would maybe be coming up with a travel planner that will allow you to know whether, say, the bus you were hoping to take is delayed. As you can tell, there's a huge difference between the broadness of the vision, the idealism of the vision, and the goal is quite a practical place. The goal or the problem is where you narrow down your scope of action. It's where you make the framing of the thing you're trying to do, so small that is actually doable. If you're going to work in other projects or similar idea, might be to say your vision or your concern might be around environmental concerns and your immediate goal and problem could be finding, say, a new solution to how we might recycled bottles for example. The goal in the problem doesn't solve the overall vision or concern, but it's an encapsulation of this broader vision or goal. The thing you have to ask yourself at this point is, what have you set yourself up to do? What is your change proposition? This is something we will talk about in another module, in more detail. But it builds into this broader question that we have in the module we're talking about today, which is really a part of how do you build your case? It requires you to identify your audiences or your stakeholders as it were. Who would you have to speak to? What is their language of decision-making? How will you find them? What do you need to have with you in order to have a good conversation with them? This is all about taking this transfer between concept to problem. Really taking this move from an ideal towards something that you can actually do. If you want these things to actually happen, you're going to have to find a way to make them actionable. That also means you have to consider, what does success look like? What would constitute a success? Obviously you would be thinking, what would constitute a success for you, your group, your users, the people who are at the focus of your vision? But you should also be considering what would be a success for the other stakeholders inside your project. That means a technology providers, the service providers, politicians, maybe an administrator. It could be a funding body, like your other stakeholders are all the other people with an influence and power into the area in which you're trying to make a change, and you should have an idea of what would be a success for them. Let's take the example of the humble bus stop. This is a reoccurring example that we used in the church project, because it is an old-fashioned, simple part of a transport proposition. If you think about a bus stop, there are many, many factors that meets in the location of a bus stop. Any one of them not working would make that bus stop inaccessible. It could be the bus. The bus itself might not be constructed in such a way that you would be able to get on with a wheelchair, for example. It could be the driver. The driver might not know how to operate the sinking floor of the bus, for example, if it had such a thing. It could be that the timetable is incorrect. The physical timetable on the bus stop might be missing. It might be incorrect. It might be mounted in such a way that you can't read it. It could be that the online schedule, whatever travel planner you're using, is incorrect or for some reason inaccessible to you. It could also be a bunch of really practical things, the curb. There might be a curb that you can't navigate. The road layout might be such that you have to cross four lanes of traffic to get there, and it's simply not possible for you to do. It could be simple things like the paving. The paving might be cracked or broken, or it might be missing features that, say, a blind person might need in order to navigate it. The signage. You will have to find the bus stop as well. All of these aspects of a bus stop, while they are all mundane and fairly simple things to consider, it's important to keep in mind that every single one of these elements has a different group of people making decisions about them. The nature of the bus is decided by one kind of budget, by one kind of people, by an organization, in a particular situation, in a particular timeframe. The curb, the actual layout of the road is decided in this case often by the city council. We'll have a planning department where these things are decided. It could be an old installation or it could have been done fairly recently. It might be that the city knows that the curb is broken, but it's not on the most urgent list to be done yet, etc. This is a good example of a situation where something is stopping an element of a transport plan, the bus stop, from working, and there are all of these very, very different groups of people, officers, organizations, economic systems that are making decisions about whether or not this is in fully working order. The way to navigate this better is to ask questions from all stakeholders, our two old stakeholders. In order to understand how to get to the point where you see where a decision is being made, then you will be able to change that decision. You will be able to affect change. But in order to do so, it's important for you to know, what is the stakeholder's vision? What is a stakeholder success criteria? Now, for example, the city administration might have a vision for a beautiful and well-designed and accessible city, but they might be busy with other concerns. They might have trouble with, say, garbage disposal, and the curbs are falling down their to-do list. But at the same time they would want to be able to show their inhabitants. That they're being successful, that they are doing things to make things better. It's important to understand what is this situation look like from their point of view, and what would make it come to a successful conclusion from their point of view? The other thing to consider is timeframes. A good example, still staying with the bus example. Buses are replaced not very often. If the city has just bought new buses, it's not very feasible to propose that they will buy different ones if they just bought a new bus last year. Similarly, a bus stop is not renewed all that often. But say a single piece of stone in the curb has a much shorter time-frame that can be done economically and quickly if the fact that it needs doing is brought to the right people's attention. So it's important to think about time-frames. At the shortest time frames, we have digital travel planners that can be done faster because they don't have physical manifestations in the city. Anything has physical is always harder and more expensive to do. So it's also important to look at opportunities. There might be something happening already that you can piggyback on staying with the bus stop. There might be already a desire to do, say, a new travel planner, an online travel planner. You might be able to take some, brings some of your accessibility concerns into the development of that travel planner. There might be an ongoing road works next to the bus stop that you have identified as your problem. The change of the curb could probably or might be able to be enrolled in that change that has already happened to the physical layout. So it's really about looking to see if you can have a conversation with the other stakeholders in this specific location, whether it's physical or conceptual. Figure out can you find a shared vision where everybody gets a little bit of a win from the change that you are proposing. For your case study. We are hoping that this is the module where you get to identify the timescales of things. What would it take for a certain thing to be changed? How often are these things changed out, anyway? Are there any opportunities that you can follow along with and other things that can simply be achieved relatively easily by taking these opportunities as they come? In order to do so, you have to have conversations with these stakeholders because it's important to know what are the plans already in motion and how can you be part of them? What are the things that are simply not on the table for another five years? You can stop worrying overly about that because it's simply not going to be achievable. So your job in this module is to identify which problems are most likely to have a path towards achieving practical change. Because this is your ultimate goal, practical change. How is your best way of getting to a place where you will have practical change? So the question is for your case studies are really, what do stakeholders need to support their decisions? How can you support that process? Other material, you can give them, are there arguments you can furnish them with, is a research you can bring them. Can you deliver ideas for change that is mutually desirable? Are there things that everybody wants to see change around the table, and can you help by identifying these things? If you understand how they make decisions, you'll be more effective in your goals. So that means that these are notes from the trips project. You can see we went through a process where the trips project work from an ideal of wanting to have this accessible transportation, wanting to have change propositions in these seven cities. What we have done in the process of doing the project is that we have found that when the ideal meets the reality, it gets both harder and easier. Expectations needs to be managed. Understandings have to be noted down documents it's shared. So the starting point from the ideal to the finishing lines where something has happened is a process that can be quite, a winding road. But the important thing here is that the knowledge that you learn in that process is not wasted. You get one thing achieved. You achieve one goal in a particular location with a particular vision. You can then focus on the next one because now, you already know the environment you're working in. Now, you already know the landscape you are traveling. The exercise for this module is called the decision landscape and I will hand over to Elvia, who will take you through it. The exercise now is to figure out what is your decision landscape. I'll be using Lisbon as a group to show you how this could be worked through. In this case, the group of Lisbon was working with Carris, who is the transport provider. This was an initial setup that was very fruitful because there was a very direct line of communication. This meant that all the way from the beginning, the group was involved in understanding what was in the stakeholder's pipeline and what priorities they had. They had direct access to what constituted success for this stakeholder and also a clear visibility of what practical things were available. They figured out that there was this common vision that would be mutually desirable, which was to improve the Carris app to inform passengers in a better way, providing more information regarding accessibility. This was a win-win. They also identified that there was an opportunity to achieve this very practically. There was a project that is ongoing now that is about delivering software functionality to the existing Carris app. What the group identified as an opportunity was that they would be able to provide requirements and functionality for this existing project. This will be delivered in the existing app in 2023. In terms of what could be done now would be to come up with that accessibility information and then translate it or package it in the way that it could be fed into the delivery pipeline of the Carris app. This is exactly what the team did. This is also contextualized within the longer-term vision and goal of the group, which is around creating a transport network designed in co-production with disabled people to meet their requirements and desires. Becoming a welcoming network where people make the difference. They were very specifically focused on improving the connectivity, the real-time information, and reliability of the systems and services in Lisbon. Also one of the things that I know that the Lisbon group really wanted to show is that this way of working worked. They wanted to show that co-production with disabled people worked. This is what they're proving with being able to feed into a project and to essentially improve an existing service with information about accessibility. As an example, this is the prototypes that they started to create. This was again, having direct access to the pipeline and how the team at Carris was working. Very quickly they started creating artifacts that spoke their language and this is something that Christina has mentioned this. You have to figure out how you can translate, what it is that you want to do and when you have a conversation with someone, what is it that you need to have a successful conversation? The group identify that it was having prototypes such as this. They also did a bunch of things to communicate their work, but this is a picture of one of their meetings. This is juxtaposed with some images of the activities that they did to come up with the prototype and the accessibility requirements to be fed into it. In a way, they were able to work alongside an existing project or create their own way of working and prove that this works. This can be implemented in the timeframe of the project and also in the timeframe of the Carris stakeholder. To conclude, to create change, you really have to understand the structures that govern the problem that you are wanting to address. This is a very important step in the journey of co-design because if you want to effect change, you have to understand what governs the decision processes around your goals and how you can intervene in them so that you can achieve the change that you want to see happen. Thank you.
