Evaluating our Toolkit We took our prototyped tools and gave them a hard look: what worked and what didn’t? How did our new tools achieve our goals and answer our research questions? What new ideas did our prototypes generate? We present an analysis of our prototyping process here and a design brief for ways to continue to hone the Public Life Diversity Toolkit.
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All in all, this was a successful first test. The three tools work in tandem to solve for sampling issues in each. But, in our prototypes we found new holes, and thought of new tools to answer our research questions. We need to do more tests to test and refine this toolkit. Fortunately, we have opportunities to do this with current Gehl Studio projects and through Gehl Institute.
We can also complement our vision for this work by formalizing relationships with skilled researchers and data providers in the social sciences, sensor technology, and urban data community who will improve the effectiveness of our toolbox. We can also work with community groups thinking about public life diversity and get their input on how they would use this data.
Specific suggestions for how to improve our tools are described below. In general, the most important next step to improve the toolkit will be to improve the rigor of our methods. We need to correct for known biases and discover new biases in our data and then correct for those. Normalizing our data sets based on biases in our data sets and comparing our findings to local census data are important next steps.
Once we improve the methods of our toolkit, we can move to phases two and three of this project: performing design research in places with high levels of public life diversity, and from this research generate a guide that shares process and design inspiration for civic leaders to invite public life diversity.
Public Life Diversity Toolkit Design Brief