Civic Technology
Climate Assembly UK
Supporting the first UK-wide citizens assembly on climate change with a permanent home on the web
Role: Design Lead Client: House of Commons Date: 2020 Visit: www.climateassembly.uk
The problem
Creating a digital home for the UK’s first climate assembly to support invitees before the event, keep the country informed during the assembly and persist as a permanent record of the event for years to come.
What I did
My role as design lead was to
Establish a visual identity for the assembly
Research, design and test a website that supports the three phases of the event: before, during and after
Implement HTML, CSS and Javascript to production quality, to version control in GitHub
Design product features to support the running of the event by content editors
Collaborate with the technical team to implement features in a content management system.
An information hub
Before the event the sites’ main role was to meet the needs of invitees, giving information on the event, travel, accommodation and other FAQs. As well as this, the team were drumming up media interest with the press, which directed journalists to the website as a hub for information.
A Livestream
While the event was in progress, the role of the site was to host the livestream, as the assembly was broadcast live for key moments. We designed a component for homepage that could temporarily be turned on and off by an editor to host the livestream when it was available. During ‘on air’ moments the homepage design changed to support this.
A permanent record
The climate assembly was an event, in happened at a time and a place, and the website’s job was to immortalise the proceedings so that people in the future could understand the event, see decisions that were made, and reference the outcomes in newspaper articles, research papers and events inspired by the assembly.
It was also home to an HTML version of the report, also published in print and PDF, to ensure it was indexed by search engines, could be deep linked and added to digital archives.
The results
As a way of changing the way we make decisions around the climate Climate Assembly UK was the first event of its kind. The website supported the attendees, over 100 of which took part, gave people the information as it became available during the event, and is now a permanent record of the proceedings. It has since become an exemplar of how citizens assemblies can be supported by a coherent digital strategy to ensure success on all fronts.