Translink teamed up with Anaeko for this year’s ‘Generation Innovation’ work experience programme to challenge young people to come up with a data-driven solution to enhance active travel across Northern Ireland.

(Photo: Generation Innovation held in Belfast)

Generation Innovation, a programme run by Catalyst, is a future-focused one-week real world work experience programme for 17 to 18-year-olds, designed to empower, enable, and upskill young people for the workplace of tomorrow.

Workshops delivered by expert facilitators covered topics from design thinking and user-centred design to communication, problem solving and presentation skills.

Generation Innovation gives young people a real-world working experience to put Design Thinking into practice by solving a company set challenge from Translink’s RailVISTA – the transport operator’s team focused on digital inclusion and data-driven solutions.

The eight participating students from schools across the region were asked: “As a team, how can you use a data engineering solution to enhance active travel in Northern Ireland, making it easier and more appealing to combine walking, cycling, and public transport?”

Their solution was an all-inclusive app combining information such as real-time schedules, travel routes and special event travel, all in one place, with new features such as reward schemes and gamification to give customers incentives to walk or cycle to stations.

“By building points with every step they can earn free offers with local cafes or coffee shops or reduced-price public transport tickets,” explained the students.

The Generation Innovation student team which presented its ideas to a panel comprising of representatives from Translink, Anaeko and SISCOG added: “A connected and real-time app allows customers to benefit from enhanced features but also gives transport and infrastructure companies insight into travel movements and customer preferences allowing them to either reduce or increase stations in certain areas or improve facilities such as bike shelters at stations or areas for bike parking on trains.”

(Photo: Lyndsay Orr, Programme Manager for Translink’s RailVISTA)

Lyndsay Orr, Programme Manager for Translink’s RailVISTA, said: “A key part of the Translink strategy is ‘Go Healthy’ whereby we promote public transport alongside active travel. Translink tasked Anaeko to provide a data-driven solution to enhance active travel across Northern Ireland alongside our public transport provisions. This includes leveraging data engineering techniques to analyse travel patterns, optimise route planning, and integrate real-time data to improve the overall efficiency and appeal of active travel options in conjunction with public transport.

“The students presented some exciting and innovative ideas and we are excited to see how we can move these forward as well as get more young people involved as one large focus group to enhance services for passengers.”

(Photo: Students Rachel Douglas and Sara Craig)

Colm Hayden, CEO at Anaeko, said: “Anaeko is an innovative, collaborative, people-centric data engineering company on a mission to deliver environmental and social benefit from timely access to quality data.

“Capturing student opinions from diverse backgrounds through Generation Innovation helps Anaeko and our RailVISTA delivery partner SISCOG design solutions that are digital inclusive. In doing so we ensure everyone can access and benefit from digitally inclusive solutions we deliver for Translink.”

The presentation took place at Anaeko premises in Weaver Court, next to the new Belfast Grand Central Station.