Diables — Traditions meets innovation Pt. 1
With roots in medieval theatrical representations, “Diables” or “Balls de Diables” are part of so-called spoken dances — the first recorded date of this performance is 1150.
It was not until the arrival of democracy in Spain and the recovery of the street as a space for festivals that new groups of “Diables” appeared in Barcelona.
These groups, in contrast to the historical ones that managed to survive, move away from the traditional evolution, especially due to the “Correfoc” influence, which arose almost spontaneously in Barcelona as a game between the devils, firework fire and the public assisting the show.
There are many festivities that are celebrated with a “correfoc” all across Catalunya, Valencia region and the Balear Islands.
What people don’t always know, is that it requires a lot of work, planning and organisation to be able to organise one — and what is more impressive is that all the “Colles de Diables” are made entirely by volunteers.
For the best or the worst, these willful people do not always have the best skills or tools to plan efficiently, and this often leads to unpleasant organisational issues.
As a “Diable” myself, I want to lend a hand and try to help the different groups.
So why not put our UX/UI design skills to use to make a Design Thinking project to come up with an innovative solution to this centuries old tradition?
THE CHALLENGE
How can we improve/facilitate the internal and external organisation of the “Colles de Diables”?
Before taking any steps, I needed to fully understand how a “Colla” is actually structured internally, how it interacts externally and the decision-making process.
Surprisingly, I found out that there is quite a variety in the type of structures within different groups, so I will go with the most common type found :
A group is composed of 2 sections :
- Tabals
- Cremadors
Each has a head of section, “Cap de Tabals” and “Cap de Foc” respectively.
These two figures answer to the overall group’s board or “junta”.
The board facilitates the distribution of tasks, interactions with external entities, such as the city hall, but never takes important decisions on its own — it always depends on the voting of the members of the entire group.
Now that we have a better picture, we can begin with writing down potential Research Questions that will be our guide in User Interviews and further investigations.
I was able to interview people (Focus Groups and 1 on 1s) belonging to different “Colles de Diable” but there some clear patterns :
DIABLES/TABALERS (USERS)
Many groups rely on a wide variety of software in order to manage activities organised by the group — emails, doodles, forms, chat apps, etc.
Among all the interviewed people, there was a clear pattern of overwhelmingness when it came to all these tools.
If you needed to sign up for an event, you used one, if you wanted to read the notes of the last meeting, another, the agenda for a future event in a whole different place all-together.
This was at the base of a common pain point: getting lost in all these tools and not always being able to get the piece of information wanted — this sometimes caused members to miss events entirely.
JUNTA (SERVICE)
Similar, but on the other way around, members of the board share other common pain points: a big difficulty getting their members to always be up to date on all events, reminding them to sign up to the latter, and the need to manage so many different tools.
OTHER GROUPS (BENCHMARKING)
Many other cultural groups face similar challenges and they too rely on a variety of software to plan their specific activities. That is when I came across “APPsistència”, which is a management app for another cultural activity called “Castells” — it helps to track member’s assistance to events, training, and meetings and also works as a repository to word-files for meetings notes. This pretty much hit the marks although not 100%.
Now that we have a clearer picture of the organisation of the “colles” and their biggest pain points, we proceed to create a couple of personas representing specific archetypes and have tried to create simulated scenarios that may help us identify points of opportunity in order to tackle our main challenge.
Here is Jordi, a “diable” of a “colla”, and Laura, “Cap de Foc” of the same group :
I’ve depicted similar situations to that explained to me through the interviews in the Scenarios.
Now we can do a deep dive and try to analise individual pain points.
We proceed to Zoom-in to some of the pain points that our 2 personas had to face and extrapolate what we believe to be potential insight :
To summarise :
- difficult navigation through the chat — time-consuming process to retrieve needed information.
- Important notifications/emails get lost within spam/trash mail.
- Excessive manual management of attendance and schedule, which leads to the inability to attain “last minute” up to date information about the members.
This brings us to the next step — How Might We…?
By going through the HWMs, I try to come up with potential ideas and/or features that a potential digital product might need to tackle such pain points and create a value proposition that resonates with all these elements combined :
All that needs to be done to end this first part of the project is to apply the scenarios to a storyboard to give us a further sense of how our digital solution may work in a real-life case :
In Pt.2, we will cover the second and last part of the development of this design thinking project.
Thanks for reading!
