Service and Mobility Design Project in collaboration with Region Västerbotten and In Use

Duration: 10 weeks, Spring 2019
Team: Lea Bachmann, Nancy Valerdi and Manu Revi

My role: design research and analysis, project management, research workshop lead, concept ideation, development and consolidation, app interface design (Sketch, Principle and AE), storytelling, filmmaking (Premiere), sound editing (Audition).

Recognition: Representative student project at the Microsoft Design Expo 2019 (Empathy at Scale)

CHallenge

As our mobility solutions have evolved, our travel experiences have become more isolated within the bubble of our cars. We go from one point to another with no other intention but to get to our destination. As we do we miss opportunities for new connections and engagement along the way. Our task was to find a sustainable and feasible mobility solution for the visitors and locals in a sparsely populated biosphere reserve, along Road 363 and the Vindeln River Valley, in the traditionally Sápmi territory of northern Sweden.

Result

Aura is an explorative experience that facilitates engagement opportunities for visitors and residents by raising awareness of the presence of people, local businesses and nature along the road.   By using speed as a filter to access different sound messages,  it encourages different car travellers to slow down, engage and collaborate with the region they are driving through. 

In this way it helps build and scale empathy between different people and nature as well as support a more collaborative mindset and a fair and balanced development in rural areas.

Along route 363, a road that runs along the Vindeln valley in the Västerbotten Region, a rural and sparsely populated area of northern Sweden where the main mode of transport is the car. It shares many of the same mobility challenges as other rural areas worldwide.

A TO B TRAVEL MENTALITY

Journey as a means to an end without engagement along the way outside the bubble of the car.

LOSS OF CONNECTION

Locals feeling that had been lost connection between the communities along the road.

LACK OF INFORMATION

A lack of information available for visitors to know what is available to them in the area.

What would we notice if we slowed down?

Our experience and engagement to the space around us is affected by the speed at which we travel through it. Aura connects messages to different speed ranges according to their content, giving travellers the choice to engage with different paces than their own. It allows people to travel at their own rhythm but also helps shift focus from themselves to others and building a more collaborative space to coexist in.

For people who want to explore…

Aura allows someone who is a short term visitor on holiday to discover hidden gems, have chance encounters with nature or with people that they would have otherwise never met.

Information about trails or more leisurely activities might be placed in a lower speed range so those in the car can be encouraged to tune into the activity by changing their speed before engaging with it.

…and Those with somewhere to get to but who want To collaborate

In higher speed ranges locals can still engage and contribute to the community they are travelling through. By picking up a package or giving someone a lift, they can make connections with people they may otherwise have never met but are entwined with without even knowing. This way Aura encourages collaborative support in the complex web that we all coexist in.

Giving Voice to Those With something to Say

The aura platform allows the local community to connect with those travelling along the road by uploading sound messages and placing them along the road according to content and location. In this way the platform gives a voice to those in the local communities along the road.

..through which the local community can upload messages and sounds which may be relevant to those travelling along the road

.. in the car generates visual triggers to spark the travellers interest and make them aware of a presence in the area they are driving through.

1. The local community can input messages related to anything of interest for people living or moving along the road, through the application. These are then placed ‘along the road’ at different speed ranges, based on their content.

2. The device makes car travellers aware that there is presence out there, with a light signal. They can then access the message depending on the speed they are travelling at. Then by choosing to find out more they can access the sound messages from the local community or the nature they are travelling through

3. Travellers can then choose to engage with the message by stopping and connecting with the local community or nature

Aura does not just provoke a behavioural change towards a more sustainable way of moving but also creates more empathy within and for the region. Our goal is that it supports and builds a more collaborative mindset and, therefore, a more fair and balanced development in rural areas.

Collaborative Analysis

On return from our field trip we had a lot of material to process and understand. We began by working together in sifting through everything had and reflecting on our experiences. This allowed us to map and piece together important insights we had gained from the trip.

A TO B TRAVEL MENTALITY

People only think about getting to their destination and rarely engage with the area they are driving through.

LOSS OF CONNECTION

Lots of the locals felt that they had lost touch with the communities along the road where their used to be a more communal feeling of belonging to the same valley.

LACK OF INFORMATION FOR VISITORS

As visitors to the area ourselves we realised that a lot of the information about what there was to do in the area was hidden to people from outside the community.

Builds on the way people already live without requiring any major changes in their behaviour

Caters for people with different motives, priorities and needs

Is scalable to other rural areas worldwide

We returned back to the community and and launched our ideation stage by gaining their input through a collaborative co creative workshop. Participants included locals but also important stakeholders from the municipality, local business owners and Region Västerbotten.

Our Kit

Our workshop kit asked participants to describe“Your Ideal Holiday in 10 Years” . Using various props and triggers inspired by our research in the area. This encouraged them to collaborate, discuss their different perspectives and have fun in imagining the different possibilities.

This gave us invaluable insights and material with which to move further into ideation.

SPONTANEOUS TRAVEL OPPORTUNITIES

people love being surprised by unplanned opportunities

A CHANGE OF PACE

appreciating a different pace of people and nature is key to appreciating a foreign place

MEETING LOCALS

experiencing local hospitality and warmth, creating a bond makes the experience more valuable

Exploring opposite tensions

Provotyping was about posing the boundaries of ideation in order to imagine different frameworks within which to explore ideas. As a team we stretched our ideation space, in exploring opposite tensions.

This project was one of my most challenging and complex but also the most exciting yet. The fact that we were catering for such a large set of stakeholders and looking and such a broad issue, at first felt quite overwhelming but also taught me a lot about how to process large sets of qualitative data and pick out the essential learnings from it.

As a group we discussed concerns about creating something that could somehow be monetized through advertising or through data gathering. It was really important to us that it was something that supported the community and built on the way people already lived without trying to turn it into an advertising platform.

The opportunity to present our concept first to Region Västerbotten and Microsoft was also a really valuable experience. For both presentations we had to think about how to communicate our concept to two very different stakeholders and this was a really interesting process of learning how to communicate what matters about the project to specific people.