
Earound
Community platform
Discipline
Service design, UX design, UI design, User research
Team
Yi-tzu Chang, Kenjiro Taniguchi, Xinyue Ruan, Xiwen Zhu
Partner
Royal College of Art,
Met police
Duration
2 months


Earound is a community platform to help citizens and police service to communicate in a better way, creating a safe environment where the police and citizens can give and receive information based on their own living area.
Background
In the past 10 years:




In the last 10 years, the number around the met police are not encouraging. During the first phase of desk research, we found that the number of police officers is decreasing, the amount of funding is decreasing, the number of resolved cases are under 10% of the total and from 2013 to 2019 the crime rate has increased.
Field research
interview police & citizens




We conducted several interviews and a focus group with people working as police officers or with roles related to police and with people that have submitted a crime. We discovered that due to the lack of funds is really difficult for the police to deal with thieves and not extreme violent crimes in general, this has a repercussion on the public that most of the time feel unsafe and unheard.
Insights:
Citizens


Police


Problem statements

Due to the lack of resources, many crimes are left unsolved and victims are feeling less supported.

Police want to get information and communicate with citizens in a more efficient way
Opportunity for intervention



Earound is a community platform to help citizens and police service to communicate in a better way.

We designed a service platform that allows police officers to reach out to citizens to give safety tips and helping victim with information about the case. On the other hand victim and citizen can interact with police officers to ask for help or report any relevant information.




Benefit
The benefits from the Police point of view are to have better communication with users helping them with safety tips and with general issues. From the point of view of the citizens, they can feel heard from the community and get feedback and advice from the police.




November-December 2019, London

The Challenge