Category: 01 Living

By: Marit Coehoorn
Keywords: Living, community, neighborhood, sharing
Final presentation poster: Click here

Design Goal and Interaction vision

Strengthen community feeling by giving neighbors a trigger for personal contact.
The interaction should be natural, effortless, open and lively. It should feel like ‘a moment of serendipity’: an unexpected but fortunate discovery of a shared interest, feeling, thought or experience.

Research Explorations

The initial research in different neighborhoods showed that a lot of people experience their neighborhood as being too anonymous. By handing out senzitising booklets and conducted a few interviews, I discovered people would like to have more contact, but don’t have a reason for this. Nowadays, people can connect anywhere and anytime, decreasing the need for a social neighborhood. This makes people feel less at home and decreases their sense of belonging.

With a small-scale sharing system in my own neighborhood, I discovered people love to share books: they are passionate about sharing something they liked, and also enjoy reading messages of others. Contact with neighbors was indeed established in a natural and exciting way.

A one-week test of the system in a student complex, showed they all love the initiative and believe it would decrease anonymity, but many students read too little or are too busy to participate.

Design Explorations

My initial design direction was about creating the feeling of sharing something, such as having a shared goal, experiencing a similar feeling together, doing an activity together and/or experiencing team spirit.

Next, I decided to focus on establishing personal relations within the neighborhood. I thought of a system in which people can share tools with neighbors: There would be a website for people to place tools and for people to request tools.

To trigger a more personal conversation, I focused on just sharing books. This could be an online system, or a physical system in a hallway. Instead of placing the books in the hallway, I let people write a note about a books, so others can come by their homes to borrow.

Final Design

The BookCloud is a sharing system with which neighbors can share their books with one another. The BookCloud hangs in the hallway of a flat. Neighbors can write a short personal message (in which they recommend a book of theirs) and hanging this in the BookCloud. They read each others’ messages and are triggered to visit a neighbor and borrow a book.

The contact moment is established naturally, and gives people the opportunity to get to know each other better.

By having contact and sharing experiences, neighbors get connected. This increases the feeling of belonging to your neighborhood and makes people feel more at home.

 

By: Joep Deiman
Keywords: Living, controlling, relaxed, effortless

Design Goal and Interaction vision:

Providing a temporary shift within the city for working people to get an engaging moment.
A Sudden shift of environment or perspective; from irritating noise to comfortable/reassuring sounds.

Research Explorations:

My first goal was ‘Escape within the city – getting away from the routine of daily life’. I decided to do a Context Mapping session with a target group I thought had the need of an escape: people who are working behind a desk all day. My goal was to get a clear view on the latent thoughts of these people when they thought of their work, focusing on the lunch break. This session gave a lot of insights; during lunch break there is a need for ‘rest’ or ‘(social) interaction’. My participants thought ‘escape’ was too negative. Words like ‘pause’, ‘break’ and ‘shift’ suited better. I continued exploring the context by searching for existing solutions, talking to the target group a lot and via design explorations.

Design Explorations:

I did a lot of design explorations by drawing and brainstorming. Especially the brainstorm sessions with a couple of student from our studio were very generative and useful. While designing, first the focus was on passive objects to fulfill the need of rest. Then I decided to explore more in the direction of interactive products that make people aware of the noise surrounding us. I came up with a ‘Tunnel’ that played with sound. To evaluate different concepts with sounds, I tested some of them with a small group to gain feedback. Eventually I wanted to avoid an imposed interaction and tried to return to an object people can use when they want/need to. The final concept was evaluated by making all kinds of scale models that were used in a stop motion movie. This was a very effective way of testing the imposed interaction without building large prototypes.

Final Design:

The final design is a big and soft chair in the shape of a Shift-key placed in for instance the canteen of an office. When someone needs a silent moment during lunch break, s/he can take a relaxing seat on the Shift. If someone wants to take a seat in the Shift, the key-shape will transform into a chair. Once the person is seated, s/he will be embraced by the chair, especially around their head. It will block surrounding noise and play the reassuring sound of birds.

 

By: Nur Findik
Keywords: Living, Social Places, Collaborative, Inspiring, Open, Sharing
Final presentation poster: Click here

Design Goal and Interaction vision:

The goal of this project is to shorten the adaptation process of new comers by increasing their connectedness with the local people. The interaction vision was `Imece Culture` where, in small villages, all residents are supposed to take part for the general needs of the village collaboratively. (Such as school building, wedding ceremonies, etc)

Research Explorations:

First research exploration started with a context mapping study with Dutch and International students. The goal was to understand what their common or different expectations are, in terms of social life and their interaction with each other. Almost all of Dutch students described their communication with internationals either by being a group mate in a project or helping them with some survival issues such as places to eat, accommodation, transportation etc. On the other hand, their ` needs and desires for an ‘ideal social space’ remain similar. The keywords that they used for this space involve the words such as open, friends, relax and easy. At the end of the research, I aimed to make design explorations on what kind of special moments do they share with each other apart from the survival issues.

Design Explorations:

First design experiment aimed to understand how local people would respond to share their personal stories or advices related to Dutch culture if they were asked by new comers. This experiment provided a good insight about the context and the interaction. I created funny anonymous questions from new comer’s perspective related to Dutch Culture. Questions were located on the tables in a restaurant for 4 hours long. It was a good moment to answer questions while they were waiting their meal. And most of the answers were also in a very funny way as expected. As a last step of exploring the qualities of this story sharing activity; I tested taking the pictures of special moments, items or activities and writing about them by using an application. QR code tagging tests also gave nice insights for further development such as using stickers or post stamps on larger places like walls.

Final Design:

Delft Stories is a community that aims to publish a year book consists of different stories written by the citizens of Delft. By installing the Delft Stories Application, local people and new comers create personal library and QR Code booklet. Each QR code is connected to one story url link which is editable by the author of the story. As people capture their stories and save in the library, they are able to leave these stories via printed QR codes among different spots in the city .Those spots are usually restaurants, cafes and bars, where people can leave or scan stories on the walls or tables. This way, new comers have chance to get nice tips about specific activities, places, or get inspiration by learning more about local activities from local people`s point of view .