The Challenge: How can we use smart city and other digital technologies to enhance the design of space between buildings?
Target Users: Joggers who frequent parks.
For our Creativity In Design group project, our end-product was a smart locker service offered in parks, mainly aimed at joggers. Below is a description of our design:
The BioLocker provides you with safe, biometrically secured storage for your luggage and personal items. The locker can be booked online or via the app as part of your run planning and preparation.
As part of the BioLock Service you can make use of
- Augmented Reality Glasses – preloaded with your run route and up to date park information.
- Fitness wearable to record your health and run data as you go around the park.
When you return these to the BioLocker they will sync your data with your personal fitness account.
Throughout the design process, I was mainly responsible for creating the storyboard and generating a basic interface for the wearable devices. I also had a major contribution to the user research phase, as well as to the literature survey on smart city technologies.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The main objective of this group work was to familiarise ourselves with creativity techniques and implementing them into our design process.
Before getting to design the BioLocker, we sought answers for the following questions:
- What is our target public space?
- Who are our target users?
- What Smart City technologies can we employ?
CHOOSING A TYPE OF PUBLIC SPACE
The type of location we would be addressing was the first variable that we decided on. After 2-3 weeks of brainstorming, we were determined to focus on opportunities that parks offered.
At this phase, we freely diverged by using creativity techniques such as: desktop walkthroughs with legos, constraint removal, analogical problem solving.
Another major creativity technique we implemented at this stage was the imagery trek. We observed types of public spaces within the city, trying to bring out opportunities and pain points. Parks seemed to present a lot of them, so it was a reasonable choice for us.
We thought of addressing the litter problem on the streets.
We thought of transforming playgrounds and offering a more pleasant experience.
We thought of ways to provide a better shelter for people in parks.
We thought of addressing the problems that arise in parks based on the weather conditions.
After gathering enough inspiration, we all shared our photos on our mutual, digital workspace. Throughout the term, we used RealtimeBoard to create and curate our findings, inspirations and themes. This is what the board looked like, in the end:
CONDUCTING USER RESEARCH – SPECIFYING OUR USER GROUP
Once we had converged on our chosen space (Parks) and explored options for general users the team split into two groups to physically explore and observe activity in large parks. Observations were taken with the goal of identifying user groups, key issues and the environment.
Follow up discussion on the user groups by the team saw us converge on joggers as our user group. We had identified issues from observations (Hazards, Safety, Weather). Semi-structured exploratory interviews (characterised by open questions and a willingness to be surprised) demonstrated that active joggers are:
- rarely halted by the weather, although it will affect their route,
- have safety concerns – preferring well-lit paths,
- would benefit from secure storage at the park.
DESIGNING A SERVICE AND FINDING APPROPRIATE SMART CITY TECHNOLOGIES
At this phase, we focused heavily on researching smart city technologies. Each of us came up with several findings, and during a group meeting, we voted for the technologies that we wanted to work with the most.
From the technologies mentioned above, we chose to focus on: AR, Safety Locker, Biometric Lock, Quantified Self & Personal Data, Big Data.
Afterwards, we moved on to sketch several scenarios consisting of joggers in the park as they encounter obstacles. We quickly sketched solutions to address their pain points.
- Storyboarding – Initial Sketches
While exploring possible design solutions, one of our tutorial sessions acquainted us with the Hall of Fame creativity technique. Imagining what famous figures would want or do in specific scenarios helped us get into that extra-creative zone. By using BrightSparks, a platform that facilitates this technique, we generated 3 random figures: Jeff Koons, James Bond and Sweeney Todd.
This exercise helped us converge in an immediate sense, and settle on a rough idea regarding our service design. Our digital touchpoint focus came from:
- Sweeney Todd‘s need to keep his valuable razors safe when he is out jogging = STORAGE
- James Bond‘s love for gadgets and smart technology to support the jogging experience = WEARABLES
After this point, we came up with the idea of BioLocker, whose main functionalities are described in the storyboard below.
- Storyboarding – Final Version
- AR Glasses – Simple Interface
- Prototyping Session
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