In this presentation you will see how ministry communication works around access. issues today, how regulations and guidelines impact the end result of building construction and what ministry might need in order to get better productivity.

a process to accessibility guidelines

The Ministry of Evironment guidelines are going to be updated soon. R&G are the tool for the ministry to communicate with builders and publics to improve the built environment and bring in safety and accessibility.

People participating in the process understand the role of R&G differently. What you see here is the regulations coming from ministry, municipality, NGO's and commercial producers

Because of this misunderstanding the end physical solutions today meet regulations but it is not good enough, there is a lot of information missing and only the bare minimum is done.

This is a common case around the world. Here is a NY regulation for venders that was redesigned. Better understanding reduced the faults therefore reduces the fines and allowed street sellers to stay in business meeting the law.

There is an opportunity for improvement in the guideline itself and the way the guidelines are made. Today we will follow the chapter on safety regulation to prevent falling and misstepping in the stare cases. What new could we bring to the system?

In order to have such change you need partners, and the partner in this study case is the Ministry. When ministry is working is working on the guidelines there is information coming in and out.

OUR PARTNER IS

MINISTRY

This is how the ministry impact is realized today. First the regulations are done for construction companies, they build the building and public receives it as a final user.

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PUBLICS

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This way communications coming from the ministry is linear. It is a monologue

TRYMINISINPUT

Source: The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

What if it is a dialog

TRYMINIS

WHAT IF?

INPUT

Source: The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

INPUT

Source: The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

The product of the ministry are regulations and guidelines that today perceived as bonding. A new set of guidelines is released every 10 years today.

MINISTRY

WHAT IF?

OUTPUT

Source: The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

INPUTINPUT

What if we could separate regulation and guidelines and break the link of perception. Could in this case the guidelines react on changes sooner and be released more often.

MINISTRY

WHAT IF?WHAT IF?

Source: The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

OUTPUTINPUTINPUT

This is how the processes go in construction now, people included in different stages and never meeting all together. Our challengeis to establish communication among all the actors. The most beneficial part open up the process of guideline development for public participation.

CHALLENGE

Work with the ministry begins with separating regulations and guidelines from each other and starting a dialog in between the actors and the government.

GOVERN

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R&GCREATE

DIALOGUE

What if we could connect actors like this

So the trust will be build in between publics and governments as well as in between gov. and pro enablers. Our suggestion is to target these three actors separately keeping in mind their way of communication.

TRUST

What we did to initiate a dialog with citizens is a sticker campaign called #iisimeno. Participants can mark accessibility spot physically and share the experience online.

Participants of our campaign showing in a positive, negative or suggestive way the changes that could be happening in your environment. This is quick and easy for any group of citizens to participate. It allowed us to work with seniors and severely disabled wheelchair users, as well as with the regular publics.

And the use of digital media makes it common for the public to access the results of such campaign. You do not have to be a user of any particular social media platform, when you use a hashtag. As well as you do not have to invest any money in media support.

#IISIMENO

This is how #iisimeno fills in communication gap via connecting actors across different processes. To the new guideline the campaign brings stories allowing to grow empathy and understanding of the reasons behind the law.

Another dialog initiated was with professional enablers: such as regular architects, accessibility experts, municipal planners. We asked them to read guideline about stare case safety out loud and comment on possible interpretations.

These comments help to develop the layout design for the new guideline that you see later in the presentation. There is a chance to involve all the actors in helping to make the guides as readable as possible.

In order to initiate the dialog with the government. We developed a game board tool, where people from the ministry or municipality go through the board and describe each step themselves, saying which actors go with them there. Inside the game board one can in an easy way express the fears on each of the steps and envision compelling future. Using this map you can see that the process has its beginning and the end.

The comments received through the game board give insight into the actual process. Any complex public sector organization (like Aalto building planning office, for example) can also make use out of this method.

We spoke about the dialog and now we will talk about the guideline development.

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CREATEDIALOGUE

SEPARATE R&GPROCESS

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When you build a new guideline with common understanding you build trust in between prof. enablers and government even stronger.

TRUST

In order to develop guideline for better understanding you need to consider reordering the layout and content revision. Today guidelines address what you do, how you do it and do not mention why is it so.

WHAT

WHY?

HOW

What we did first was rearranging the guideline layout physically by cutting out and and placing back theelements in the way that allows you to read easily.

To include the "why's" (the actual reasons) into the guideline, we suggest tangible storytelling method. Which will allow the professional to decide themselves upon better building solutions. We got the "why's" from dialog with professionals and publics.

When we took all those things together our first prototype of the guideline was ready. New regs are gonna be in a separate book, and to accompany them this prototype can be used.

So you might think that the processes go one after another in time.

1 2 3

TODAY TOMOROW AFTER

in fact the processes are simultaneous.It depends on your situation at work where you begin and how you continue.

CHALLENGE

DIALOGUEGUIDELINE

DEVELOPMENT

The processes we suggest are blending into what is already working in the ministry, which is workshops. Today the workshops with all of the stakeholders are happening to plan the ministry papers.

CHALLENGE

DIALOGUEWORKSHOPGUIDELINE

DEVELOPMENT

In order to reach a compromise between all of the interested parties, you need to repeat each of the processes few times.

FINDING COMPROMISE

CHALLENGE

DIALOGUEWORKSHOPGUIDELINE

DEVELOPMENT

Finding compromise means getting an agreement among the interested parties about what do you take in consideration from the data you collected and where you apply it. In our experience: Content from guideline reasons goes from iisimeno, layout suggestion come from the perception comparison and the roadmap method is connected to planning. Note that the only thing that iterates is a guideline not the law, so we can release new guidelines more

FINDING COMPROMISE

DIALOGUEGUIDELINE

DEVELOPMENT

Thank you

To open up the conversations, just to remind you this is how communication takes place after the concept is implemented