London Boaters
2018
Designer : Shuo Chen, Bowon Hwang
The London Boaters program began by investing in actual London groups or communities to identify areas of interest and to investigate.
At the beginning, we were quite interesting. We randomly selected the London underground stations to decide the location. We were lucky to be in the east (because the school is also east). In the area of Mild End, this place is an area that has developed in the early days of London and is also very close to the area of Stratford (Olympic Stadium) in the emerging region. Until we actually began to explore this area, we were soon attracted by the large and historic Victoria Park in this area; and we began to explore the park in this park, indirectly we explored this There are many boat houses moored in the nearby river.
This is the first time for us to get in touch with a large city like London. This group of people live on the river with their boats as their home; this is very novel for me, the Taiwanese and my Korean partner. So we started looking for them to chat and go home to do their homework, trying to understand the lifestyle of this group of people, and to find the problems they encountered.
Here's a small animation that Shuo Chen made in the early stages of the project to us and others who are new to the community, and who can quickly understand the problems they have encountered in their lives.
After that, we continued to collect the oral sharing of different houseboat owners, join the Facebook community, and actually participate in their gatherings, and join the volunteer activities to help, and also went to the Canal Museum to understand this history.
Among them, the most important thing is the Facebook community, because this is the only communication channel of the boaters so far. In other words, joining this society, we can go deeper to understand their daily problems, and they care. The topic of sharing things. So we spent nearly a month collecting topics in the community, and we also found that the function of Facebook is limited. There are different kinds of things in a single community every day. It is very messy. For example, fresh people just joined this group and asked questions. There are also people who want to leave this group want to sell his ships, and some people have problems in a certain river section and want to seek help from people around. So we have the idea of integrating a platform for them.
This platform has a total of five major functions, the first is the dynamic home page, users can view the latest information today, you can also see other users' posts. The second is the calendar, which records when there will be public hearings, seminars, and gatherings. As well as a variety of boaters activities. The third is the trading market, through which you can buy and sell ships, tools, and other ship-related items. The fourth one is the one that I personally think is the most effective. Through the co-edited maps, boaters can mark the water station, the supply station, the gas station and even the rest area. No matter how novice veterans can quickly grasp the hot spots on the river. In the last part, by veterans uploading various kinds of teaching videos about repairing the motor and modifying the ship, the boaters may be able to do an instant crisis treatment through teaching when they encounter problems.