Core Project | Virtual Community Engagement
Project Background
Researchers at the University of Salford had an objective to develop a virtual environment for stakeholders of MediaCityUK to aid physical, social and economic transformation that initially set out to address the following research questions:
- What are the key characteristics of a digital infrastructure that can support stakeholder engagement in large-scale urban transformation projects such as MediaCityUK?
- What type of new data models and visual metaphors are necessary for representing various social and economic data at a city level?
- What form of virtual interfaces are necessary to support stakeholder engagement?
A ‘Living Lab’ methodology was employed to address these research questions. The idea behind the Living Lab is to introduce end-users as the co-creators of technology products, to design, develop, evaluate, provide feedback and apply the technology in real-world settings.
In order to define the initial specification for the virtual environment, a series of living lab workshops were conducted involving partners from Salford Policy and Improvement Team, Salford Research and Intelligence Group, Urban Vision, Salford GIS and Ordnance Survey. These workshops helped identify challenges faced by stakeholders in the city, in terms of disintegrated databases, interoperability issues, lack of team-centric tools for stakeholders to explore complex social challenges, and community engagement tools.
This early exploratory work helped the team identify desirable characteristics of an ICT platform for supporting urban regeneration around a large-scale project such as MediaCityUK, leading to the design and implementation of a ‘Mirror World’ concept for Salford. This work defined the Mirror World as informationally-enhanced virtual models or ‘reflections’ of the physical world, that integrate sophisticated virtual mapping data, real-time data from sensors and social data extracted from various data sources.
A software architecture was designed around the Mirror World concept that can exploit the power of advanced visualisation, service oriented architecture, integrated data models and multi-user interfaces. The team then took the challenge of designing and creating the first version of the Mirror World as a first proof of concept demonstrator and to connect with a range of stakeholders in the city and FIRM partners to identify further research challenges.
A series of presentations were made to a range of senior decision makers from Salford City Council, Greater Manchester Police, Jobcentre Plus, Skills Funding Agency, Salix Homes, Environment Agency and community groups. The purpose of these presentations was to get buy-in from the key stakeholders in the City to ensure greater impact of this research. This task was successfully achieved by securing support from the senior people from a range of agencies in the city.
This has now been recognised by the University of Salford and the City as an ‘Iconic Project’ and the University is now offering the emerging technology platform to the LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership) to support their strategic planning and inter-agency working.
Project Status
The potential of this technology platform is being explored by many stakeholders in the City of Salford for various application possibilities beyond its initial intended purpose. Plans are in motion for Salford to work with FIRM partners in Goldsmiths and Lancaster to create an innovative virtual interface to capture citizen’s visions and to engage them with MediaCityUK.
Virtual Community Engagement has become an umbrella project for a number of strands of work now evolving within FIRM, see CoMedia, MediaSense, MirrorWorld, Surface Table, 13Spaces.
