THE WORK

THE THINKING

As part of my first week at RED Academy, we were tasked with designing an app for our soon-to-be new best friends — our new classmates. Once our partners were chosen, we had to get to know each other a little better in order to find out what was missing from our life. What were some of our biggest challenges? What frustrated us the most? Did we wish we were doing something else, but didn’t know how to find it?

I discovered during my user interview, that my subject felt creatively blocked when working at her old bank job. She loves to paint and play the violin, so having to be stuck behind a desk all day isn’t really her idea of fun. That, coupled with having to offer people advice about their money, is a recipe for life motivation disaster.

There are so many motivational and inspirational apps out there, but motivation is pretty subjective. The person next to you on the bus may like a daily dose of quotes or photos to keep them energized, a life coach per se, but the same may not be true for someone else. Based on my user’s requests, I decided to build her a mobile app that would provide her with personalised, curated content based on her creative likes, and would also provide her with some new tools.

The result is a simple application that provides my user with local art exhibition lists, images of contemporary and historical works of art and design, which are all socially shareable. After logging in and selecting her main interests and sources of creative inspiration, the app would then act as a window into the world’s leading creative spaces, art galleries and museums. The user wouldn’t have to go and search for the content (only to change interests), so she can just sit back and see the world through her phone.