The response will now feature a gallery of user submitted images and stories to run simultaneously with the Games. Users would be able post pictures by using Twitter or the Glasgow Commonwealth Games website which will feature a live feed of submissions and Games news in one feed.

The gallery will feature user submitted images with their stories over the top. By uploading, hopefully the gallery will go viral and since it would be on the official website, it should garner some attention; communities will see the values of the Commonwealth and understand that they are applicable to every-day life and hopefully this will unify them and bring people together. Visitors and inhabitants of Glasgow alike will see each others’ lives in comparison with athletes.

Additionally, there will be a section to create a ‘Meet Up’, where users can post projects they are working on in a Community and people from other Communities or their own can respond and help, either through labour or by donating/lending resources. This gives each Community their own sense of a wider Commonwealth across Glasgow, unifying Glasgow.

Currently I am wire-framing the potential final website, and will start a brief mock-up to take back to my Community to test.

The original concept was to gather experiences of the people during the Games in Pollokshields (my given community) in a safe place that would open to later generations in the area, and even those who originally took part. This would preserve the personal community experience of Pollokshields in regards to the Commonwealth Games, and promotes the idea of a ‘legacy’. The collection of ideas and experiences (through photos, videos, stories, etc.) promotes unity across cultures.

This time capsule concept evolved into a timeline, stored online, and then later to be turned into a physical artefact. The timeline would document every-day, mundane activities in Pollokshields and promote the values of the Commonwealth Games within these activities. An analogy I have been using is:

As the 100m’s comes to a close two men are neck in neck, there is a photo finish; at the same time, two buses have arrived at the same time in Pollockshields (each story will have a photofinish-style picture to show the contrast)

How to document these activities? Cameras would have to be set up in hubs of activity, documenting everything, and later on a selection of these things would be put together with commentary or a story, and matched with events that happened during the Games simultaneously.

Hovering over images brings up information

Concept for physical artefact

After discussion, this concept was turned into what is essentially an advertising campaign, to promote the games itself and link everyday activities to the more ‘heroic’ achievement going on in the games. I am still exploring whether or not I will be ‘bringing the athletes down’ to the level of the mundane, or elevating the mundane to the same heroics of the Games.

Through direct engagement with a variety of communities across the city, you are asked to consider how the values of the Commonwealth might inform a series of urban, ‘civic’ design proposals that add value to these communities and the lives of those who live, work and play in them. These interventions/proposals will somehow embody the spirit of the Commonwealth Games at a community/grass-root level, but beyond that very loose guideline there is no prescribed outcome – your challenge is to identify an opportunity within a given context and develop a product, service or experience that acts as a form of ‘souvenir’ for the Commonwealth Games 2014.