Crompton Place Bolton – RnD
A one day sprint RnD experiment by our concept team focused on the Crompton Place development in Bolton.
Bringing information to the people of Bolton about the regeneration of their town.
Why: On our studio trip to Bolton last week we spoke to a few people who, it turns out, had little to no idea what was happening with the regeneration in the Town Centre, our Creative Director is from the area and has recently joined the Ambassador for Bolton scheme, by We Are Bolton, so with that in mind we formed a small internal brief to see where we might be able to add value and / or solve the disconnect.
Observation: The information is out there, people either don’t know to look for it, they don’t know where to find it or it’s behind a paywall wall.
As we undertook our first hours desk research it became apparent that the majority of the information was in places your average person is unlikely to see it. The Council website is a great source tho we wondered how often people check the local council website, the majority of the information was spread across business or real estate publications.
We approached the project knowing we would need more than one solution.
Solution 1: Manchester’s Finest
Our director is also the Founder of media and content platform Manchester’s Finest. The platform speaks directly to a wide audience across Greater Manchester, including of course Bolton. So. We used ai to collate the relevant information, wrote a summary and asked one of the writers at Finest if they would kindly publish an article for their readership, reaching people that the usual commercial, development, regeneration platforms usually wouldn’t.
Solution 2: Persona Studio
We decided to create a content aggregator site, somewhere that took all the information available online, summarised it and housed it in one place. We ran a quick design and code sprint, utilising ai tools to expedite the process, keep in mind also this project is not for a client and the design itself is not tied to any brand or subject to the same rigour of a real studio project, meaning whatever we did “would do” (subject to approval from our Creative Director of course) but we had creative license.
The result is www.Crompton.Place
The final problem to solve was the issue of 'old news'
Solution 1: Automatic Listings
One of the issues with creating a “latest news” or “insights” section on most websites is that after a while people stop updating it and before you know it your last company news article was 3 years ago. We recognised very quickly that development news is constantly updating, as demolition is complete, ground is broken or the building is topping out if the user is still seeing developer appointment news 12 months in it’s hardly a useful site. So we created an ai command that scrapes the internet for any relevant news or insight every 5 days and updates the site accordingly. This led us to our next issue to solve.
Solution 2: Image Generation
We knew we wanted the headline of the stories to pull through and given the site was clearly directing people to the article source off-site we felt there was no conflict or potential issue as we weren’t claiming content as our own, merely referencing to produce a link to the content itself. This however is less simple with imagery, we recognised some imagery would subject to copyright so hosting them or even showing them on our site could cause issue, as an elegant solution we created an ai command that generates a unique SVG illustration based on the content of the article itself, each one different, each one relevant and of course, free from infringement.
The website is self sufficient, the ai adds any new news stories every 5 days and notify’s the mailing list.
We did this project in a 1 day sprint, whilst we'd not advocate for that in a client project with real deliverables and real world considerations it does show what we are capable of. If you're interested in this project or something similar please do reach out, we'd love to hear from you.
