G’day how’s it going? My name is Tim Denshire-Key. Some of you might know me, most of you probably won’t. I grew up in Albury, and have been living in Melbourne for the last little while, studying. I’ve finally come to my last year of Industrial Design, and so a major project that will kick on for the whole year.
I’ve chosen Service Design as my focus area, and to use Albury as pilot site. Why do you ask? Well for a few reasons. Even though I left town around 5 years ago and have little chance of moving back anytime soon permanently, I can see a lot of potential in the town. Albury (and the surrounding area, even including Wodonga 🙂 ) is a place where there seems to be a lot of initiative. The amount of small businesses humming away, the sports teams and committees that go with them organising amongst themselves. The community groups banding together on various interests and causes. Albury and surrounds is definitely far from being a slow town. It may seem a bit quiet down Dean st on early Monday evening, but there’s no shortage of activity happening under the surface. This was only part of what brought me to focus on Albury however.
Albury’s darker side too was something that drew me to use it as the project’s focus. Since moving away there has been a steady stream of stories of increasing violence and brutality. There have been individual cases that when I heard of sickened and perplexed me how someone could act in such a disgusting manner towards someone else. When I was home I hadn’t seen this side of Albury and couldn’t understand why it was occurring.
This violence became the entry point into Project Albury (it’s name for now). Last semester I conducted around 15 interviews with various people from within the community. Young and old, health professionals, council members, publicans, patrons, security, teachers, students, parents journalists, business owners etc. I asked them about their perception of the violence in town. Why did they think it was happening? What do they think needs to change? The responses I got had some similar threads emerging. The violence was not seen as overly worse then other towns, but there had been some horrible attacks. The town seemed to be doing pretty well economically with plenty of work around if you wanted it. So people weren’t struggling so much economically.
Something that rose to the fore was the perception of young people in our community. While over 30% of the community is aged 25 and under (according to the 2006 Census) this third of the community is quite widely perceived as the causes of the problems, especially relating to violence. However the solutions put forward so far to solve especially the Dean st issues, seem to have been done with little consultation with this important stakeholder group. You lot. The lock out, extra security, push for CCTV might’ve have made a bit of a difference, but I don’t feel has addressed the roots of the problem. Part of this is that we’re bored. Don’t take offence to this, but that’s why I left.
So this semester I will be working on a service design proposal, targeted at young people to encourage more creative outlets and options for socialising, other then the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I like to go for a beer as much as anyone else, but it’s also good to have other options, bit of variety.
But I’d like to hear your thoughts on it? Do you think there’s enough to do around Albury? What would you like to see happen? Am I completely out of touch and should I just shut up and stay in Melbourne? What would you change/ start up if we really did take over the city?
I will be posting regularly my thoughts and plans for the project, and am looking to get your interest and feedback. Also would like you lot to get involved in events and happenings I plan to facilitate over the next 3 months.
The first thing you can do if you this sounds like it could be an interesting meander to go on, is to put down your thoughts and then pass the Facebook and blog details along to anyone else you think may be interested.
Let’s see where this will go…
Tim
Project Albury 