Humanising Data: Bridging the Gap Between Numbers and Narrative

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Elouise Quigan

I’m Elouise Quigan, I joined Place Creative in 2023 relatively fresh to placemaking and urbanism. Being a city-dweller with two small children, I wanted to work somewhere that fit with my values, and could build on my 20+ years in digital, brand and strategic comms. Working on place-based projects is much closer to marketing and advertising than you’d think!

Putting my strategic chops to work over the last few months has highlighted new approaches to consider when measuring social capital, community engagement, and sentiment across place-based projects.

Dmitriy K, Michael Dzidzic, Pat Whelan, Unsplash

1: First: unpack, unpack, unpack.

Context, or asking, “Why this project?” will set up your data collection for success, by helping to create project guardrails.

This is particularly crucial with multi-stakeholder and multi-consultant projects. Understanding the ‘why’ of a project from different people’s perspectives, and developing supporting objectives as a team helps mitigate scope creep, springboards your project in a clear direction, and ensures cross-team alignment.

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2: Use context to build profiles of your users.

A crucial part of insights development for place-based projects (much like any marketing initiative) is to understand who your users are - and it’s always about more than where they live, or what income bracket they fit into.

Asking how they experience the context your project is working in; for example, a neighbourhood, street layout, or community, helps to build your user profile. Do they commute through the place? Do they wander through it? How does the time of day affect their experience? Weather? Is it a place they experience with family? Friends? Their partner? How does their relationship with place differ moment by moment?

Leading with empathy to understand your users’ wants/needs/concerns helps to build your knowledge base, a project rationale, and clear objectives. This can focus the data you want to capture in the place, and why.

Maximal Focus, Pietro Jeng, Mahdis Mousavi, Unsplash

3: Place data isn’t just about counts. It’s talking to people and hearing their feedback.

The most interesting area I’ve found in the Place Creative monitoring and evaluation methodology is the gold in the verbatims - the actual quotes from user feedback.

It’s easy to have a conversation, but encouraging people to share their sentiments and personal experiences in a safe, non-judgmental environment that enables them to be critical and honest can deliver meaningful insight and constructive ideas that lead to project outcomes.

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4: But on that note: Don’t be afraid of nuance

Qualitative feedback can present a challenge about what to do with it - when quantitative points are so much quicker and easier to lean on.

However, the strongest case for your project will often be made by the users themselves.

When we seek feedback from different people, we often see themes come up from what they tell us. A single sentence of honest, constructive feedback will often contain multiple nuances.

Getting a lot of responses and collecting a lot of data can feel overwhelming. But the more feedback and information you collect, the more you find commonality between people and their experiences. It’s important to see that information as representing your different user groups, and how they sit across a spectrum of engagement, rather than reacting to specific, singular voices or groups alone - as we say: “Insights not individuals”

Elouise Quigan, Magnus Engo, Josh Young, Unsplash

5: Take a walk…

Collecting data and commentary is one thing, but seeing it play out on the ground is another. In a recent project to add to our qualitative data collection, we included on-the-ground behaviour observations. Seeing the data and sentiment transform from counts and surveys to lived experience enabled us to drive home the impact of the on-the-ground changes, and deliver us an incredibly useful stream of information to add to our insights.

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6: …and be curious

Having a curiosity mindset is a game changer.

I wanted to see what the experience was like on the ground in a recent project involving travel modes around schools - so I took my 4.5-year-old on site, popped my iPhone on her helmet, filming while she scooted around the footpaths. Seeing things from her level highlighted what we might have been missing. As adults who can confidently navigate busy streets and complex road crossings, without in-depth engineering and design knowledge it’s hard to visualise what the experience is like at kid-height.

Elouise Quigan, Simone Hutsch, Nadine Shaabana, Unsplash

Taking an empathy-led approach highlights the human side of data collection in any place-based project. It’s not just about how many people use a place or how they feel about it, but about developing an understanding of the humans experiencing it.

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Cover image courtesy of Waikare Komene

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Humanising Data: Bridging the Gap Between Numbers and Narrative

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