YourGround: Towards a safer and more accessible city

This session focused on YourGround, an interactive map and communication platform designed to enable more inclusive public spaces for everyone to enjoy leisure, sport and play. As the impact of gendered violence reverberates across our communities, Monash University’s XYX Lab, and digital consultancy, CrowdSpot, teamed up with 23 local Victorian councils and state government partners to crowdsource perceptions of safety in public space. YourGround empowered individuals to critically assess their local streets, parks, trails and recreational spaces in order to expose the often hidden public safety experiences of women and gender diverse people.

Associate Professor Nicole Kalms from XYX Lab and Anthony Aisenberg from CrowdSpot presented the design strategy and technology that allows communities to gather the data pertinent to what makes them ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. XYX Lab and CrowdSpot walked through the development of a simple, easily accessed, web-based mapping tool by which diverse community members could precisely (and anonymously) document locations and how they felt within them. Once gathered together and analysed, this research project generates significant data on which to create a richer understanding of public experiences and identify spatial design changes that facilitate safety for women and gender-diverse people.

YourGround was highly commended in the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Design Awards.

Visual summary

Download a visual summary of the presentation here.