BRIX is a community-based crowdsourcing platform that allows service providers and activists to crowdsource resources for their community projects.

Client

Youth Lambeth Co-op

Scope

3 Months

Role

Research

Strategy

UX Design

Team

Signe

James

Thomas

Cissi

Overview

My team was commissioned by the Young Lambeth Cooperative (YLC) to help better integrate the services in the youth and play voluntary in Lambeth. The YLC is an organization which branched off the local authority (Lambeth Council) to provide funding for organizations that provided services to youth in Lambeth. Our team focused on the Brixton locality, and defined our project scope as improving the relationship between the YLC and the community, to both funded and non-funded service providers.

Research

Our research focused on getting to know the 'true Brixton', and the service providers that have been serving the community for years. We were able to discover and develop relationships with service providers as well as community activists that live to serve the Brixton community, and dig into the dynamics of their services and how YLC does or does not fit in. We also interviewed YLC staff and observed their commissioning processes to gain a deeper understanding of how their system works, and how that reflects the relationships in the community, which is shown in the ecosystem map below.

Research Overview

Ecosystem Map

As we went through our research, we began to piece together the structure of the YLC and the different key stakeholders with whom they interact. It quickly became apparent that the YLC is a complex organization, even in a simplified representation. There is a relatively sophisticated infrastructure relating to their funded service providers (highlighted in yellow), but there was no consistent outreach to other organizations operating in the sector (highlighted in purple).

Key Insights

Expectations vs. Reality

Community members misconceive the YLC as a well-funded corporate organization, and set expectations as such.

Lack of Diversity

There is a racial and socio-economic selection bias of youth commissioners which biases the services that receive funding.

Creativity in Revenue Streams

As service providers struggle to get continuous funding, many seek alternative streams of revenue.

Synthesis

Personas

To give more life to the users we were designing for, we created two personas to address the different groups of people and lifestyles that would potentially use our service. These include a service provider that is not funded by the YLC, and a community activist who is very passionate about her town. These personas were inspired by the people that we met and talked to throughout our research, made to represent the people of Brixton.

Service Journey

The diagram on the left shows the service journey of a service provider that ultimately does not get funding from the YLC, which ends their relationship abruptly. Our goal was to continue this relationship and have the YLC offer more value to these service providers when they were unable to offer funding. The diagram on the right shows the consequence of ending those relationships so abruptly, with the broader community feeling alienated from the YLC's community. In our design, we aim to tackle that challenge.

Opportunity

How might we improve the value of YLC for non-funded service providers?

Concept Design

To address the challenge of the lack of an ongoing relationship between the YLC and the broader community, my team created BRIX. BRIX is a community building platform that allows service providers to crowdsource resources for their projects from the Lambeth community, as well as other service providers. It allows organizations to easily start relationships with each other by sharing the resources they have with their fellow community members. Through BRIX, organizations can involve the local community in their projects, and all supporters have both a stake and some ownership over something that helps improve Lambeth at large - aiming to build a community feeling. BRIX will be provided by YLC as an added value to what they bring to the community but will also be used by YLC to both support the community and call on the community for support and engagement, to promote equality across organizations. See our prototype here.