On the 23rd of March, the UK was placed on lockdown and overnight our town centres became ghost towns. As I write, people are gradually returning to the high street, but the relationships that were once had have changed, but as yet we don’t know how. Recent figures from BDO…

Climate change is happening. We are in a climate and environmental emergency as a result of human activity. If humanity takes collective action now to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions it’s believed that we can limit the effects of climate change and adapt to them. To this end, the UK…

Smart cities promise a bright future for urban communities with safer, more efficient infrastructure. From greater mobility in public spaces to faster improvements of public services, thanks to a more connected citizenry, the increased integration of digital technology into everyday life can be transformative. However, in recent times there have…

Bristol is home to more than 460,000 people, a thriving culture and arts scene, and a city centre with an ever-evolving outdoor space. These public spaces are critical to cities as they can support the local economy, provide cultural opportunities, improve public health, and help the environment (along with many…

In January, the Landscape Institute held the Digital Integration and Transformation event where specialists from industry and academia presented several ways that digital technologies can be used in urban design and landscape architecture practices. There was a host of talks and workshops about playable cities and urban play, data and…

Sir David Attenborough, during his speech at the prestigious Landscape Institute Awards 2019, said that helping people to understand that our entire world is in danger means we have to “bring them face to face with the complexity, the beauty and the importance of the natural world… They have to…

Worldwide, city leaders are hungry for smart city status. They believe in the promise of connected devices, location-aware sensing technologies and masses of data combining to inform (or make) better public service decisions, optimise efficiency and provide a brighter future for all citizens. What I hope they also believe in…

Digital placemaking really came of age in 2019 and the next decade promises to take us to new levels of digitally-enabled experiences. The ways that people understand the public realm and – critically for businesses and for public services – expect to interact with these spaces, has been transformed by…

Calvium has lead this Innovate UK funded project to develop a mobile wayfinding system to help people with less-visible impairments to navigate railway stations independently and with confidence.

In partnership with Transport for London (TfL), Open Inclusion and Connected Places Catapult we shall deliver a digital wayfinding solution that has inclusion at its heart. By bringing together this team of specialists, Calvium has ensured that NavSta (Navigating Stations) has the greatest chance of becoming an integral part of the travelling public’s wayfinding toolkit.

User-centred design is a product development process that puts the end-user at the heart of the project. This means gaining an understanding of who they are — their wants, their problems and their perspectives — and then creating solutions tailored to those needs. When products are designed from their target user’s eyes, they are more likely to be embraced.

People with physical and mental differences face a host of barriers that reduce their quality of life by limiting their participation in social, political, cultural and economic life. It can be difficult to move around familiar neighbourhoods let alone strange places. For example, those with mobility impairments often can’t fully enjoy public spaces due to uneven surfaces, visually-impaired people can’t access everyday wayfinding information, and people with less visible disabilities often find crowded place to be a sensory minefield. This is the situation, and it is unacceptable.