Photo: Wade Odlum
Project overview
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Context
This project was developed during a course called Exploring Interactions as part of my TU Delft's Design for Interaction masters program.
The general topic Social City was framed by the course mentors, while the individual interpretation of the topic was open to each student.Since I had just moved into a new neighborhood for my studies, I found this to be a great opportunity to explore what potentials I might be able to discover in this context and decided to focus on this area.
Over the course of a few weeks, this project's concept evolved through collaborating with several local residents in user-centered research, concept testing and creating the final concept video. -
Support
Although this concept was developed entirely by myself, I did receive support at times.
Maik de Rooij, a fellow student of the course at the time, and I teamed up during the research phase since we both were investigating similar contexts and without support with his native speaker abilities, I could have never discovered the depth of information I lastly did.
After the research phase, each of us developed a concept in his own direction and ended up with entirely different solutions.Lorenzo Romagnoli was another fellow student, who thankfully helped me bringing my prototype to life and making my hardware prototype do what I needed it t during the testing phase through his Arduino knowledge.
I was wondering how residents perceive their neighborhood and how I could positively impact their social connectedness in an explorative project. As it turns out, small gestures can have a great effect.
Framing the design goal
An initial goal was defined that should function as a measure of success as well as a reference to give direction throughout the research and development phases of this project. The aim was to design an interaction that would be able to, in some way, make the individual residents become more connected with each other within their own community context.
First I needed to know more about people's situation in general
Outlining the context
A basic map of the neighborhood was created to get a better overview of the situation and understand where interaction potentials were as well as were most likely to affect the people who are living in the area.
Quantitative user research
First data was gathered through a printed survey which was delivered personally to every neighbor's mailbox. After briefly informing them about the nature of this project, we kindly asked people to provide some general data about their household as well as openly invited them to participate in this project. Most of the households did actually respond with general data, yet despite the curiosity of many, only some neighbors were willing and able to participate in the following phases of this project.
How the first insights shape the project focus
The results of the initial inquiry already provided crucial understanding of the situation by clarifying existing assumptions about people's willingness to connect with other neighbors. The answer's discrepancies shown below gave valuable directions for the further explorative focus during the following qualitative research.
Exploring people's deeper context from within their own perception
After the initial survey provided helpful data about the general situation in the neighborhood, we managed to get in touch in with a few residents who were open to participating in our further research. Together with them, semi-structured interviews and context mapping sessions were facilitated, which often took place in the participants' own living settings. Not only did the sessions reveal a substantial amount of details about people's community perspective, but by this, allowed for an even closer connection with the residents and their daily context.
The main findings were:
- open communication between residents is rare and selective
- habits and lifestyle often ordain the chance of spontaneous encounters between residents
- people are interested in their community but don’t want to initiate things on their own
- they focus on their comfort zone behavior
Converging research insights and design potentials into an interaction vision:
The user-centered exploration efforts provided further valuable insights which strongly influenced the decision process during the following ideation phase. The final concept resulted from converging various interaction potentials into the unifying interaction vision:
"The effect of the design solution on the user should feel like when spotting a neighbor and greeting him with a waving hand to communicate a friendly hello.”
The vision's qualities were defined as simple, subtle and greeting.
The design concept was also intended to make the user experience as simple as possible.
Creating a tangible solution could increase the solution's impact and make it as accessible to residents of all ages across the shared neighborhood area.
Based on all the gathered insights and inspirations, the following design concept was developed:
This rough interaction concept was then rapidly developed into an interactive Arduino-based prototype and tested with the participants.
Through this step, further insights could be gained which allowed for corrections and optimizations of the final design.
At last, the resulting user reactions were documented in form of a printed report and, together with an explanatory storyline, compiled into a final presentation featuring the following concept video.
The interaction with the design solution within the group of participants was by them described as pleasant, surprising and warm and received as a positive addition to the neighborhood feeling.
Due to the short duration of the project, long-term use of the prototype and its effects on the community could unfortunately not be tested but would have certainly been interesting to investigate in another design iteration.
