Hi #SmartCommunity friends, in this episode of the Smart Community podcast I have a fantastic chat with Melanie Thewlis. Melanie is a Full Stack Engineer at Sitemate. At the time of the recording Melanie was Front End Developer at City of Melbourne on the City Data Experience team, specialising in interactive data visualisations in the browser, with 15 years of experience in the space.

In this episode Melanie tells us about the City DNA platform, a large 3D printed model of Melbourne where different data scenarios can be projected onto the map. We discuss the stormwater gamification project that transformed tense flood conversations into empowering community experiences, including how playing the ‘maintenance crew game’ built trust with concerned residents. 

We talk about mapping Aboriginal Melbourne with traditional owners and designing engagement websites for major projects like the Greenline and Royal Park Master Plan.

We finish our chat discussing the power of embodied data through examples like climate scarves and Giorgia Lupi’s Long COVID diary, encouraging creative and playful ways to explore data beyond Excel. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

What we cover in this episode:

• The City DNA platform as a 3D printed model of inner Melbourne where teams can project layers from stormwater flows to socio-demographic data, creating a distraction-free environment for collaborative decision-making
• Using the table for City Disruptions meetings to visualise road closures and construction impacts, activating lateral thinking about connections between different city systems
• The stormwater sensing game transforming community anxiety about flooding into empowerment by letting residents play as maintenance crew responding to pit alerts
• How gamification built trust and created open-minded approaches to new data and ideas, changing the emotional tenor of public engagement sessions
• Mapping Aboriginal Melbourne in collaboration with traditional owners, centering the Aboriginal worldview first with pre-contact vegetation and the Yarra as the primary element
• Designing for international students and young diverse populations with focus groups revealing “less text, less text” and the reality of holding attention for 90 seconds to 2 minutes maximum
• The crow, kangaroo and echidna audience archetypes combining domain knowledge with data literacy to create choose-your-own-adventure engagement experiences
• Giorgia Lupi’s Long COVID brushstroke diary and climate scarves as examples of embodied data visualisation that invite other ways of knowing beyond left-brain analytical thinking

Quotes:

“What’s so great about the table setup is… being in a room together with other people looking at a 3D thing. You are shut off from the distractions that a Zoom or Teams call can present. That activates other ways of thinking because you’re engaged as a physical person and bringing other parts of your brain.”

“This experience of people actually being engaged, of people actually doing something, of feeling like they won, created a real sense of empowerment in the community. It really changed the whole emotional tenor of those public engagement pieces.”

“ Things can be really rigorous and data informed and accurate and they don’t have to look like a PowerBI dashboard. You can actually do things that are playful, that are interactive, that are fun, that are engaging, all of those good things, without sacrificing rigour.”

“You enter initially to look at it through an Aboriginal perspective. The primary thing that you see is the blue of the Yarra, the pre-contact vegetation. Then you can choose to switch on the contemporary layers, but you enter to the Aboriginal worldview first.”

“The human visual cortex is the most powerful pattern recognition machine in the known universe. You can be looking at pages of numbers that’s entirely meaningless to you, and then you plot that on a graph or map or chart and all of a sudden the story is right there.”

Links:

City of Melbourne City DNA Platform

City of Melbourne Stormwater Sensing Pilot

Mapping Aboriginal Melbourne

Giorgia Lupi Long COVID brushstroke diary

Connect:

Connect with Melanie Thewlis on LinkedIn or on her website https://melaniethewlis.com

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital

 This podcast is recorded on the traditional lands of the  Kabi Kabi peoples and edited on the lands of the Gaibal peoples.   I pay my respects to traditional owners of country and their elders past and present. I also extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.  Here on the Smart Community Podcast, we talk about data, technology, communities and the future. First Nations peoples have been sharing knowledge, caring for country, and telling stories for tens of thousands of years.  I honour that deep connection of storytelling and community connection as we continue our conversation together here today.

Disclaimer

The views, opinions, and perspectives expressed by guests on The Smart Community Podcast are solely those of the individual speakers. They do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of the host, Zoe Eather, or of The Smart Community Podcast as a whole.

Any discussion of ideas, products, organisations, or services by podcast guests does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by the host or the podcast. Listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions and seek professional advice where appropriate.