'tweak' (verb): to change slightly, especially in order to make something more effective.
High street tweak is a project exploring how local residents, businesses, young people and everyone in between can work together to develop ideas for small improvements to help make our high streets more successful and liveable places.
Led and delivered by the Edinburgh Futures Institute and New Practice, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Living Lab and Data-Driven Innovation programme at the University of Edinburgh, the project will include a range of workshops and activities for everyone to participate in, inviting local audiences to shape the delivery of a series of tweaks. The tweak might be big or small, physical or digital and each high street has been assigned £20,000 to design, develop, build and test the idea.
Between now and June 2021 the high street tweak team will be talking to as many people, organisations and businesses as possible in both Dalkeith and Gorgie Dalry about their experiences of their local high street, the challenges the High Street faces from the impacts of Covid-19 and long-term decline, and their ideas for how small tweaks might spark long-term improvements.
You can read more about the project and the team behind it on the Edinburgh Living Lab website.
To help us better understand Dalkeith and Gorgie Dalry, complete our short survey.
This survey helps us to identify particular challenges on the high street and retail areas of both location, as well as map potential locations for future tweaks.
Take the survey
We want your help to develop ideas for tweaks that we can make in both locations. Through co-creation workshops and activities with local businesses, residents and young people, lots of potential ideas will be explored and then refined by an expert team of designers and architects.
Workshops are open to all, and if you are a local business holder, sign up and attend our online interactive session for your chance to win one of the following three prizes for your business.
A bespoke chalkboard for your business by Charley's Chalk
A 1-minute promotional video for your business by TCH Creative
A Bespoke A4 watercolour of your business by Wil Freeborn
We hosted four workshops at the end of March and heard lots of great ideas from local people. To help refine these ideas we are holding another series of workshops at the end of April.
There are another four workshops, two for each location and there are two ways to take part:
You can join for 30 minutes for a speedy introduction to the ideas developed so far and share your thoughts.
If you have a little more time available, you can then stay for the full two hour session, with workshop activities to refine the ideas ahead of their creation in May and June.
With a project budget of £20,000 for each location, a tweak will be designed, built and tested in Dalkeith and Gorgie Dalry. Each tweak will be carefully monitored against existing data, to learn what sort of changes they make. This data will help to inform ideas on longer term changes in the future.
Once launched, we want to hear from local people about how these tweaks are changing experiences of the high street.
