Pallion Ideas Exchange

Proboscis has been invited to collaborate on the VOME project by researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London’s Information Security Group. Vome is a 3 year EPSRC, ESRC & TSB-funded research project involving partners such as the Universities of Salford and Cranfield, Consult Hyperion and Sunderland City Council to “explore how people engage with concepts of information privacy and consent in online interactions”.

Our work has so far included providing usability feedback on a VOME data privacy prototype and now we are working on a community engagement project to co-design a process for a local community in Pallion, Sunderland to create a household economy knowledge network. Pallion is a former shipbuilding community which is still suffering from the long term effects of the closure of the shipbuilding yards in the 1980s. Long term unemployment stretching across multiple generations, poor social infrastructure (housing, health and education) as well as lack of opportunity are all factors affecting the community and making it particularly vulnerable to changes in the benefit system as well as wider impacts from the ongoing economic crisis.

To find ways for people to cope with the increasing pace and impact of changes, we are collaborating with Pallion Action Group to devise a process by which the community can identify the keys areas and issues challenging people around their household economies, then devise a means of establishing ‘knowledge champions’ and helpers to keep track of changes and how they affect peoples’ circumstances. This involves co-designing activities that help people map out the problem space in their own terms and from their own perspectives; identify the relevant areas requiring support and attention; as well as to organise and coalesce the necessary people, skills, capabilities and resources from within the community to address them.

View all the project’s posts

A0 sized worksheets for the Pallion project

Team: Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Hazem Tagiuri & Mandy Tang (Proboscis). Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Elahe Kani (RHUL); Karen Wood (PAG).

PartnersRoyal Holloway, University of London ; Pallion Action Group