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To effectively engage with your community, adapt your communication method to best fit your audience.
To effectively engage with your community, adapt your communication method to best fit your audience.
Adaptability is an essential skill to have when engaging with multiple audiences to gather insight, suggestions, or feedback on a project. First, you must adapt your method of engagement to your unique audience. This means having a good understanding of who you are engaging with and what communication method will be best suited to them. You should be careful to ensure that all forms of communication are accessible and don’t unintentionally alienate anyone, preventing them from offering their true feedback or insight.
After you have a solid understanding of who you will be engaging with, the second aspect of adaptability is being prepared for multiple outcomes. If your initial plan doesn’t go as expected, having backup options is important to avoid missing out on valuable insight. If one activity in the participatory design process doesn’t seem to be effectively engaging people as you hoped, being able to pivot in the moment and offer people other options becomes necessary.
Suggestions on adapting to your audience's needs:
Know your audience
Ensure Accessibility
Come prepared with multiple avenues of engagement
Tips for adapting your methods:
Know Your Audience
Know Your Audience
Doing prior research to understand the audience you are engaging with is essential. What engagement methods or activities are most likely to interest them and capture their honest feedback?
Ensure Accessibility
Ensure Accessibility
After you have an understanding of who you are trying to engage, you want to make sure you present your method of engagement in the most accessible way. For our project with senior residents, this looked like ensuring that we spoke clearly and loudly, our presentation was large enough to read, and we used as many images as possible. However, ensuring accessibility is also taking into account who is not directly in front of you. Are there people you need to engage that could not be at your presentation for any reason? For us, this was staff and outside community members who were working during our presentation time and could not attend in person. Being able to adapt your engagement activities to reach a larger audience can have a significant impact on the amount of feedback you are able to gather.
Prepare Multiple Methods
Prepare Multiple Methods
A large part of being able to adapt is being prepared. Having multiple avenues for engagement ready can help you to deal with any unforseen circumstances on the day of your event. It may also allow you to reach a wider audience than you would have if you only offered a single avenue for your audience to engage with the design process.
Applying the skill:
Getting design input from garden club members and staff during initial site visit
Survey sent to community members and staff
In-person presentation with residents, staff, and community members
The Magnolia Manor project required engagement with multiple audiences to ensure that the final design would cater to the needs of all of the garden’s users. This meant finding ways to engage with senior residents, facility staff, and community members who were invested in the development of the space. The priority for the project was the senior residents, so we wanted to find ways to effectively engage with the seniors as much as possible during the design process. However, staff, visiting friends and family, and members of community groups like the local garden club, would all be interacting with the project site in various ways. These groups of people were much more knowledgeable about the wants and needs of the residents than we were and all possessed valuable insight into the community we were designing for. Finding ways to engage with those outside of the senior residents was just as important as direct engagement with the residents themselves.
On our initial site visit, we talked with the director of the facility, staff, and members of the garden club to about their vision for the site’s design. This was very valuable input and gave us a framework to begin the initial design process. However, we did not get to engage with any residents during this visit. We knew our primary goal for our return visit was to be able to get feedback directly from the residents of Magnolia Manor. We prepared a presentation of our initial design ideas but were unsure of exactly who would be attending our presentation. We knew residents were invited, but we didn’t know what their abilities would be in terms of communicating their feedback and suggestions. We prepared a simple sticker activity based on similar case studies from our project research. The plan was to print out our individual designs on large posters to lay out on tables. We would supply stickers with each poster so people could place green stickers on the design elements they liked, and red stickers on the elements they disliked. We figured this would be a simple exercise that didn’t require too much reading or writing and could be accessible to a wide range of residents. For those who did want to provide verbal insight, we printed simply worded surveys and supplied pens in case anyone in attendance would rather write down their feedback than say it out loud. We came prepared with three options of gathering input: residents could use the stickers, fill out the survey, or tell us in person when we asked for feedback during the presentation.
When we arrived to present, residents were seated in a semi-circle around a projector screen. We set up the posters, stickers, and surveys on tables behind them and invited them to participate in the activities anytime during or after the presentation. After we presented our designs, many residents spoke up to give us feedback on our presentation and we were able to gather the most valuable feedback by asking specific questions about the designs instead of simply asking for any questions they might have.
At the end of the presentation, nobody had filled out a survey or placed a single sticker on a poster. However, we left satisfied with the amount of verbal feedback we received from residents, who seemed very excited and passionate about the design. We realized that the activities we prepared were not necessarily suited to the abilities of the residents we were presenting to. However, since we had the surveys and designs printed, we were able to leave them with staff who had not been able to attend the presentation. When we got back to Athens, we also made the survey into a Google form and attached a digital copy of our presentation to send to any other interested parties that did not attend in-person. The feedback we got from these surveys, along with the verbal feedback from the residents, was our most valuable feedback that guided our final design process. Since our project site was quite far from Athens, we did not have many opportunities to visit Magnolia Manor during the semester. We may have missed out on a lot of feedback if we hadn’t come prepared with these multiple options for engagement and were unable to adapt to the needs of our audience in the moment.
Summary
Design phase: This skill is especially helpful in the initial design phases of a project to gather the best and most holistic insight from your audience. However, it is an important skill to remember whenever you are engaging with your community at any stage of the design process.
Goals: The goal of adaptability is to help designers most effectively engage with their audience to ensure that the final design reflects the values and interests of the community it is designed for.
Suggestions: This is a skill applicable to all projects. The best way to practice it is to do your community research, gain an in-depth understanding of your audience, and to prepare for the unexpected.
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