ZANDKASTEEL | The ZK Social labs
WONAM (developer company)
2019
UX RESEARCH | CONCEPT | SERVICE DESIGN
Creating opportunities for the local community
Housing developer Wonam will transform a large part of the Sandcastle building in Amsterdam Southeast, into a mid-range rental-housing complex.
The issue at hand was how to create acceptance of this ‘new’ building and its inhabitants in this culturally diverse neighbourhood with a high amount of social housing and the other way around.
Solution
The ZK Social labs - a program where social initiatives apply for free space and funding to work on a project for the community. The local community gets to vote for which initiatives will be granted access to the program. Funding is being generated by a "Social Capital Fund", the 1% of the collected rent of the used spaces in the building. The service design is cyclical and at the end of each cycle, another round of social initiatives will be hosted at the Social Labs.
01 Research
We created a satellite box with which people of Bijlmer could express freely what do they like or dislike about the area. We also conducted interviews with locals, on-site observations, and participated in local workshops. In this ways, we tried to understand the local community's needs, values, feelings, and current most pressing problems related to their neighborhood, to uncover connections that local people might have with this emblematic building and the general history of the area.
Key findings:
1.Bijmer is improving but the fear of gentrification is real. Most of the residents are living in social housing which is already being demolished due to the new development projects.
2.Very open and diverse community that is eager to participate in local affairs.
3.There is a strong sense of community.
4.Lack of activities and facilities in general. Especially youth and elders do not have many things to do in the area.
02 Define
We managed to reframe the problem to "How might we use the ZK Building to promote positive transformation to the area?"
We sketched out different ideas about how we could achieve this and the most prominent was the ZK labs
03 Start with the business plan of the service
We needed first to map out all the stakeholders involved in such a concept, understand their inter relations and then fully fledge out the necessary resources and metrics for such a concept to succeed. The service includes 5 steps: awareness when the local community will get to submit their social initiatives, followed by engagement phase when people can vote on which initiative can get the funding and the space. After careful selection, an implementation period is given and then voting can start.
04 Design the service and user flows
We then started to fully analyse the different user journeys and use cases and created multiple different scenarios. We focused on fully designing the voting process and the general landing page of the website service in order to convey the concept of our service to our client stakeholders.
Results
Due to covid-19, we only had the chance to test our concept remotely with real users. Overall, the responses we got were pretty enthusiastic and most people wanted to participate or volunteer. Our client was really satisfied with our work and wanted us to pitch the concept also to the other investors in order to start its implementation in 2021. The most rewarding part of our project was the final responses from the locals:
“Very good idea! Really interesting how the local community can participate in deciding who will claim a spot inside the building. (...) I would really like to help spreading awareness about this project with my TV station”
Patrick - Bijlmer Resident - Local Business Owner
Learnings
-Involve expats more: Relationships with the future residents of the ZK building is something that needs to be addressed more in the ZK Social Labs since they are the main funders.
-Ensure continuity: relationships with entities who rent out (office) space in Amsterdam (Lola Bae, Wonam, Municipality) would help social initiatives to root themselves permanently in the community.
-Increase inclusivity: More language options, using other mediums other than websites and social media (for 65+). Some ideas were: Live events, TV, radio, and influencers in the neighborhood.