Over the last decade, digital technology has become another layer in the already dense and complex context of the city, and urban life has become an important new site for interaction design. The city has become interwoven with networked technologies, and ever more sophisticated mobile phones are shaping how we understand and experience our urban environments.
Over the next weeks, you will be working on a creative task where you are going to be introduced to the basic tools and methods for designing for and with screens and the web.
For this project, you have been approached by Oslo Kommune to explore how mobile applications might enhance and expand how citizens interact and related to the city. They want you to design and communicate a small scale application for mobile phones. Small scale means your application doesn’t have to end poverty or fix city government. It should be rather small and humble, yet interesting or useful, playful or effective. It doesn’t have to be for everyone, it can have a small and very specific user group. It doesn’t have to be designed for eternal relevance, it can be valid for only a specific period of time.
The application should focus on one core function, and it should do that one thing really well.
They point the following, non-exclusive, points as possible areas for explorations:
Information dissemination. How may we improve how we distribute information in order to make it more understandable and accessible?
Engagement. How may we make citizens more engaged and involved in city development?
Service offerings. How may we improve our service offerings? How can they be more understandable, approachable and engaging?
Playfulness. How can we make the urban environment more playful, inclusive and make people take part in new and delightful ways?
Feedback. Can we improve how we collect data from citizens and environments?
Awareness. Are there ways we can make hidden aspects of the city more available so that citizens might become more aware of their surroundings?
Provocation. How can we bring attention to undiscussed topics?
You may choose from the following branches of city administration as your starting point:
Gate, transport og parkering
Choose a thematic area quickly. Then start to research that area. What is the city doing, what is it about, what are interesting areas for exploration? Talk to people about their experiences within your area.
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 concepts and move on to 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 your product / service / app in the form of a website. This should convey how 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 things interconnected and related to each other. To repeat, the deliverables are:
An experience prototype of an app. This means that you have to design interactions that can be experienced, not necessarily work technically. 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 (max 60 sec) films that present the app’s functionality and use. Think about what you learned 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. The site is your final presentation.
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.
