Project brief and our client
The City of Casey is located in Melbourne's southeast suburbs and is Australia's fastest-growing municipality. With approximately 380 000 inhabitants, the City of Casey is Victoria's most populated council. It is also one of Australia's fastest-growing areas, and by 2040, its population is expected to exceed 500 000. Various people from various cultures, faiths and identities reside in Casey. The City of Casey council focuses on developing various areas in the community. One such area that requires focus is connecting the existing and new residents in the community.
Space can play a role in building connections between people. There are various instances and places to meet people and make social connections. Within a community, a common point of social connections can be a cafe, a garden where the residents take their dogs to walk or the council library.
Our design team, which consists of three Swinburne masters of design students, focuses on enabling social connections between the residents of Casey and making use of existing public and private spaces. Individuals use spaces for various reasons, which can vary for each person. The Swinburne co-design team conducted research workshops to explore and better understand the various reasons why individuals use the common spaces in the community like a library, cafes etc. and how they make connections in these spaces. After our first workshop, we formulated our research question.
Project aim
This project aims to develop a Co-Design Toolkit and framework for the Council to collaborate primarily with Developers on early community activation. We believe this can be achieved by understanding the residents better and ensuring they feel like they are a part of the community. The design team should make sure the tools are created in a style that is simple to use. Council employees should ultimately be able to modify the co-design toolkit to allow for future development.