Beer Sheva Urban Innovation Team
“How can an innovation team build a holistic innovation culture in Beer Sheva’s municipality by tackling complex urban challenges?”
CIVIC INNOVATION - LOCAL-GOV - SMALL BUSINESS - CITY CLEANLINESS - HCD - CIVIC PARTICIPATION - HOLISTIC CHANGE
Location: Beer Sheva - Israel
Role: Service Designer
Team: Vered Goshen, Maayan Eilat, Gili Baruch, Kesem Adi, Noam Noy, Maayan Eliahu, Yakir Partush.
Beer Sheva Urban Innovation Website
The Be'er Sheva Urban Innovation Team (I-Team), supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies worked from January 2018 to October 2020. The team acted an internal-external consultant and helped the Beer Sheva Municipality and the city to bring change by solving significant challenges through the use of data and collaborative methods. The team led this process while building strong internal and external partnerships, sharing knowledge, and promoting organizational change throughout its work processes.
The Innovation teams in Israel and around the world base their work on a user-centered design methodology where residents, City workers, and additional stakeholders’ challenges are placed at the center of the team’s work . This methodological processes, supports the development of quality initiatives with a wide potential for impact while being committed to answers stakeholders need.
As team’s service designer I was responsible for building and leading the methodological processes that guided the team’s work (for further details in Hebrew click here) .
For approximately three years, two major challenges were addressed:
How to create a municipal support system that helps small businesses thrive?
How can the City promote residents’ behavior change in order for Beer Sheva to become a cleaner city?
For each one of these complex challenges, the following methodological processes was developed accordingly to each projects needs.
Research: This phase consists on investigating and transforming a large and complex problem, like “small business arena” or the “City’s cleanliness”, into a tangible and addressable challenge.
Qualitative methodologies drawn from anthropology like ethnographic research, in depth interviews, in loco observations and mind maps, in addition to quantitative methods such as internal and external data analysis, surveys and social media analysis, were used to better understand the challenges.
The gathering of this vast amount of data went through a design-thinking led analysis resulting in strategic insights that helped the team and the municipality, deeply understand the root causes of those challenges.
For the full research report of Small Business research click here
For the full research report of City cleanliness click here
Ideation: Once the team was equipped with an in-depth understanding of the problem, opportunities areas were drawn identifying where impactful change was possible.
As a Human-centered design process, in this stage we brought residents from all backgrounds back for a series of co-creative workshops were research insights were translated into methodologies that prompted participants to think creatively on how to solve residents’ and stakeholders’ problems.
With hundreds of ideas collected, the team went back to analyzing and developing them at the same time that looked for partnerships and opportunities to make those ideas come to life.
From opportunities to initiatives: The team’s work focused on the processes of developing new initiatives that bring services or policies tailored to respond residents’ and stakeholders’ needs. Therefore for effective implementation, collaboration and close work with various departments in the municipality were essential.
An important step of this process is called prototyping, which is to test on a small and flexible scale versions of initiatives. This is another step of the process where residents were brought back again into the picture. As the future users of the service or program, they helped the i-team and City partners to learn through testing, receiving feedback and identifying errors that allowed adjustments before a pilot.
Representatives from the Business License Department test the prototype of a custom made searching tool.
For a successful rollout of initiatives, transferring ownership from the I-team to City Departments were an important step, showing how partnerships built in each step of the way were a fundamental stone in the work process. Finally, the team delivered to municipal partners sets of tools to help measuring results and document internal and external progress and impact.
For further details on each one of the projects click here
For further details on methodologies used click here
In addition to the projects focus on Small Business and Cleanliness, the team also participated in various municipal processes, which dealt with internal and strategic matters related to our work. The team brought to the municipality innovative methodological tools, knowledge accumulated in the research process and residents-centered design thinking that supported a variety of action, from a hackathon to a task force trans-departmental work to deal with COVID-19 crisis.
Jersey City Office of Innovation
““How might we work together to align priorities, promote partnerships, and modify behaviors to improve stormwater management in Jersey City?””
CIVIC INNOVATION - I-TEAM - SUSTAINABILITY - STORMWATER MANAGEMENT - GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE - SMART CITY
Location: Jersey City - USA
Role: Civic Designer
Team: Brian Platt, Annie Burtoff, Brianna Lawrence, Neelesh Tekal, Jasmine Wade, Arjun Janakiram, Raquel Rodriguez-Fadraga
Jersey City Innovation Team was part of Bloomberg Philanthropies Innovation Teams’ program that helps city leaders to drive innovation, tackle big problems and deliver better results for residents. The Office of innovation lives as part of the Mayor's Office as an in-house innovation consultancy.
The Office of Innovation works on mayoral priorities and starting in 2017, Jersey City is focusing on advancing its sustainability plan thorough a variety of projects. Starting with the Year of Water, the i-team took a deep dive to understand what are the challenges the City face regarding water sustainability. With 40% of its territory within a FEMA flood zone, 62% of impermeable surface, and a still recent memory of Hurricane Sandy impact, the coastal city has too much to work around this theme.
Through Bloomberg Philanthropies' mentorship, the Office of Innovation approach this challenge through a Human-centered Design (HCD) framework. As the civic designer in the team, I was responsible for employing design thinking-based approaches to explore the challenge. Therefore, we investigated water sustainability through stakeholders, government employees, and community partners' perspectives. I lead structured human-centered design-based sessions for the team in order to move from data gathering to ideation, prototyping and iteration.
Some of the methods used in the research phase of the project consisted on secondary research, contextual research and participatory research. To each approach, a framework for data analysis and synthesis was used to guide the next steps. Cluster mapping, user journey, rubric evaluation, and empathy mapping are a few examples of design thinking activities that led the team to narrow down the wide subject of water sustainability to a targeted and tangible challenge: stormwater management.
The outcomes of a project this scale are always a work in progress. Educating the community and creating awareness, writing public policies and legislations, as well as infrastructural implementations, were part of a medium to long term plan that the City took the responsibility of monitoring and measuring with metrics designed by the Office of Innovation.
Prototypes of large scale projects were tested in the City. For example, the Jersey City City Hall was a demonstration site for green infrastructure with features that help absorbing stormwater into the ground instead of having it running off to the sewer system. Also once a month farmers markets around the city received the Office of Innovation with a table with educational activities that were part of the Year of Water Campaign. A website was launched to host a learning and an action center to residents, in addition to carry data and mapping regarding the sewer system, green infrastructure and flooding zones in Jersey City.
Green Infrastructure features as part of the City Hall Demonstration Site project.
Educational materials and activities to create awareness in City events and community gatherings.