Reinventing the High Street
Creating a speculative vision through participatory design
Reinventing the High Street was a student participatory design project working with local residents in the Scottish town of Forres. The brief was to develop speculative designs to explore future visions of the high street. Our team of four (Caroline Inckle, Jan Nowel, Yu Gong & Tianle Shi) focused on imagining a future High Street with ‘a radically enhanced ecology where the social and cultural is a driving force for prosperity’.
Conversations around ‘the death of the high street’ have been going on for years now. Fears of what online retail is doing to our ‘great British high street’ have prompted a form of existential crisis about what the high street is, or could be, when retail is no longer the driving force.
Government backed initiatives such as the Portas review may have initiated injections of cash to selected high streets, but they have largely been dismissed as thinly veiled publicity stunts, which only scratched the surface of the issues.
A closer look at what high streets mean to communities beyond retail is clearly indicated.
How can the high street respond when competing commercially on price point is no longer a viable strategy?
Deeper insight into this question came from an unlikely source in the form of ex Wickes boss Bill Grimsy who, in his extensive report in 2013 and subsequent review in 2017 indicates that
“It is futile to start with the premise that retail will remain the dominant force on the high street, because it won’t” (Grimsey, 2017).
Grimsey’s report points towards the high street becoming a ‘complete community hub’ and talks about the importance of ‘the curation of place based on its unique heritage’ (Grimsey, 2017). This way of thinking is very much in line with cultural strategy in Scotland, as evidenced through Creative Scotland’s Place Partnership scheme. This scheme places the creative sector and the strategic development of art & culture as an important driving force in the concept of place curation with its associated social and economic benefits.
This context of rethinking what the high street could be, formed the starting point for our project, and the findings of the Grimsey report felt very much in line with the insights from our initial period of field research. Our field research involved understanding the local context and use of space through observation, conversations, interviews, pop up street engagements and more focused research techniques such as behavioural mapping. We began to understand the high street in terms of constellations and movements of people within its historical space.
There is a rich and often untapped seam of heritage in the buildings and stories of the town as well as a huge amount of community involvement through voluntary groups, many of which centre around the high street. At certain times of the day the streets flood with people moving from school to home to lunch and back. There is an ebb and flow to the town, which the high street facilitates like a river running through its centre, powering its identity. More than anything else the high street is a space for people.
These insights led us to explore the idea of a radically enhanced high street ecology where the social and cultural is a driving force for prosperity, and where economics, while important, is not necessarily placed as the primary indicator of high street health.
We set about exploring this question using a participatory design framework, which involved engaging creatively with a broad range of people from the town. Teenagers on their lunch breaks, residents of the flats above shops, local farmers, artists and elderly people at coffee mornings. We used codesign workshops and creative tools such as story building and drawing alongside good old fashioned conversations to develop together a speculative vision.
The engagements formed three phases, the first, creative workshops in partnership with local organisations, (Findhorn Bay Arts, Transition Town Forres and Orchard road studios). The second phase saw us sharing developing ideas in a rough 2D prototype at a pop up engagement during the switching on of the Christmas lights. (The one time in the year when, for a short time, people can experience pedestrianisation as the road is temporarily closed). Finally a further visual prototype was shared with residents to gain feedback and prompt discussion during a coffee morning hosted by Forres Area Community Trust.
I have to admit that we came up with some pretty wacky ideas together!
However, ‘speculative’ was the brief and so ‘speculative’ we were. While a grassed over high street offering tourists rides in solar generating balloons may not be on the immediate horizon, the exercise was worth while in my opinion, and here is why.
Firstly, when you ask people to engage creatively in a speculative vision of the future, when you stretch their imagination and encourage them to unleash the crazy stuff, you allow people to tap into (and therefore gain access to) underlying values and needs which they might not otherwise express. In this case the underlying need for access to and connection with local food was identified as a strongly held value, as was the desire to have spaces to gather as a community.
Secondly, engaging creatively can help in reaching diverse sections of the community in order to gain as wide a perspective as possible before drawing out common themes. We used a wide variety of engagement tools, including creative activities, workshops and pop ups to help us achieve this. Some sections of the community will never show up at a pre-arranged town hall meeting so in order to gain insight from their experience, you have to go to them and find a way to engage.
This is where rough prototyping and visualisations come in. Nobody wants to scribble on or add their ideas to a masterpiece so the rougher the prototype, the better, and we gained a huge amount of insight through people’s high street doodles during this project.
In conclusion, the debate about the future of the high street may rage on for years to come but for me the conversation is at its most interesting when it focuses on what we want from our social and shared spaces beyond the basic economic exchange of goods and services. I’m happy to be a part of the conversation which activates imagination and engages the community in a process of co-creation and which is inclusive enough to reach those who won’t ever be present at the town hall meeting or be represented at the community council.
Long live the high street and long live creative speculation!
Many thanks to:
Findhorn Bay Arts, FACT, Orchard Road Studios, Pupils from Forres Academy, Transition Town Forres, Glasgow School of Art & the residents of Forres.
Please see the videos bellow for a little peek of some of our engagements.
References:
Grimsey, B. (2017). Grimsey review 2. [online] Available at: http://www.vanishinghighstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/GrimseyReview2_new1.pdf [Accessed 3 Dec. 2019].
