Brief 9 - Urban Delighters
The whine of a tram, glances of strangers, the warm subway wind, litter and dogs, the dull beeps of an ATM machine, strollers and cars, the morning sun on wet pavements, the blue glow of a smartphone screen. The city is a feast of sights, sounds and interactions. Over the last decade digital technology have become another layer in the already dense and complex context of the city, and urban life have become an important new site for interaction design. The city have become interwoven with networked technologies, and every more sophisticated mobil phones are shaping how we understand and experience our urban environments.
_“we often use a term we learnt from someone in the Hotel industry - “Delighters” e.g. the rubber ducky that he might put in a guest’s room on the 3rd day of their stay or the Beach Ball he might put on their bed if it was forecast to sunny. We’re always trying to create ‘Delighters’ that can punctuate the experience of using Dopplr with joy” _– Matt Jones
Over the last weeks we have introduced you to the basic tools for designing with screens and the web. Over the next weeks you will be working on a creative task where you are going to apply these tools to design and communicate a single-purpose application for mobile phones. The theme for the application is the city of Oslo, meaning it’s functionality, content and context of use is related to Oslo and it’s inhabitants or visitors. The application should have just one core function, and it should do that one thing really well. Your task is to create an application that is delightful, that can punctuate the urban experience with joy (playful, useful, clever, interesting), intended to make you smile or think, make you experience or see your environment in a new way.
When inventing an app you should think about what a mobile phone is, what it can do technically and what it can do socially and culturally. A modern smartphone have incredible technical possibilities; it is connected to the web (and thereby other services), it has sensors, it has a high resolution screen and it is a powerful computer. But a smartphone also has possibilities because it is a part of everyday life. It is part of how we relate to culture, how we discover and produce media and how we take part in social contexts.
You also need to think about the city and Oslo specifically. The urban environment is full of activities and events, people and cars, places and buildings. It has a rhythm it to it; days, weeks, months, seasons. What themes, contexts, situations and locations are potent and interesting? What information is available elsewhere that you can make use of?
Build on the process and methods you did in the previous projects. First you need to start investigating ideas for your project and develop a basic concept that will be refined through the process. Methods such as observing people and situations, in-context sketching and ideation workshops are useful here. You need to quickly decide on a concept and move onto thinking about and defining users, use situations, user flows and further to sketching and prototyping both by hand / paper and digitally. Iterate. Iterate! We want to see bunches of sketches, variations and testing. The emphasis of this module is design through making and we expect a hands-on approach to all aspects of your process. Overall we expect you to progress from ideas, through research, concept and prototyping quickly and to iterate. We hope to see you working efficiently and evidence and prototype early so that you get the chance to evaluate and re-design.
You will present the your product / service / app in the form of a website. This should convey show how it the application works and what is great about it. Why is the app useful, fun, delightful or interesting? The site needs to contain one or more films that present and communicate your app. The website and film(s) should highlight the core functionality and concept of the app and why others should care and eventually buy or download your app. So, you have to make three things, an app, video(s) and a website. That means you will have to think about these thing interconnected and related to each other. You work in teams of four.
There are three deliverables for this brief:
An experience prototype of an app. This means that you have to design interactions that can be experienced. You do not have to make a functional app or make a technically sophisticated prototype, most importantly it must clearly and convincingly convey how it may be used and experienced. There are several prototyping tools available for this.
One or more short films that presents the app’s functionality and use. Think about what you learnt from the filmmaking brief and apply this to the app. The video(s) should both present and explain the core functionality of the application in an engaging and delightful way. You should also keep the video in mind when you design and prototype the app itself. What are the interactions that you want to show in the video, and how do you communicate these well? Please: no intricate stories or acting and no music (use contextual sound). Focus on communicating what the application does and why that’s interesting / useful / fun.
Make a functional single page website that presents the app and service. This should be focused around the video(s).
You should plan your process early and delegate tasks within the team. Try to map out all that needs to be done, and figure out how long you have on each part of the project. Part of the challenge of this project is to put together the skills and approaches you have worked on so far in the semester and run a design process using these.
Dan Hill - Street As Platform
