This project involved five phases, initial topic proposal, topic exploration, further engagement, initial ideation and test, and final challenge and solution.
During the initial desk research to decide the topic, I learned that in the UK, among different community institutions, pubs play a critical role in everyday social life as sites and icons in terms of leisure, lifestyle, consumption, and work. They provide a safe and neutral environment to allow people to engage in conversation with, and get to know better, other members of the local communities. Consider the consistently shutting down of the community pubs in Glasgow these years due to various factors. It might bring negative influences to people's social wellbeing and sense of a community. Therefore, I propose my general topic is strengthening the sense of community belonging through a pub.
After I set the target, I started to explore social well-being in a community pub as a start point. With further desk research, I focused more on the independent-run pubs as my definition of the community pubs. I found the distribution gap of typical community pubs between Northern and Southern wards in Glasgow, which led me to continue further engagement from the Southside. The six expert interviews helped me gain initial insights into the relationships among community pubs, community residents, and microscopic community cultures. ( See Figure.1 )
I selected three communities in the Southside, one northern community in Glasgow, and their four community pubs to do engaging case studies. With a combination of another six in-depth interviews, it helped me to figure out further the relationship between an independent-run pub and its located community. ( See Figure.2 and Figure.3 )
Based on the analysis of further engagement, I summarized five critical roles involved in community pubs and the communities, and rethink the different origins of their senses of community belonging to inform the key initial insights. ( See Figure. 4 and Figure. 5)
I proposed six initial 'how might we' questions and eight initial ideas for the three critical roles, pub staff, regular drinkers, non-regulars, and non-drinkers based on my key insights. And I collected the feedback from five regular drinkers and four pub landlords. Those feedbacks helped me to decide on a final design challenge and refine my final solution. ( See Figure.6 - Figure.9)
