Asking More and Talking Less: Sprint 1 of the Data Driven Athlete at DSS
The first full-fledged Sprint of the Digital Transformation Intensive Program is complete, so now is a good time to reflect on our Digital Twin team’s accomplishments throughout the past three weeks. We posed this question as our sprint goal to guide our process:
How could we use the Digital Twin technology to help student athletes reach well-being/balance throughout their daily life in an inclusive way?
During this Sprint, we delved deeper into the research of our design challenge, users and technologies to answer the question. To find the answer to this question, we took several directions of research.
Research to understand and to empathise
Understanding Student Athletes
First, in order to empathise more with the pains and challenges of our target audience, we conducted interviews with two Paralympic athletes from the Topsport Academie Amsterdam, as well as with the organisation’s founder, Dennis van Vlaanderen. We also investigated recent studies on the well-being and balance of student athletes.
The main takeaway for us became the wide array of stressors and challenges that student athletes encounter in their daily life, which differs them from just athletes or just students.
This could be the overall workload of combining studies with sports or figuring out a schedule which would let athletes prepare for the competitions and not get left behind in their studies. Apart from that, our interviewees stressed the importance of good sleep and relaxation time that “would cost zero mental energy,” both of which can be in shortage in their everyday lives.
Researching the technologies that seek to define, engage, and steer us
Thirdly, a large segment of our research was devoted to technologies. Desk research revealed that digital twins can be created by us either willingly, as in case with several self-tracking applications, or without our awareness, as on content-driven platforms like YouTube, Netflix and Spotify.
Recommendation algorithms seek to mirror our own tastes, beliefs and choices, so the content we see in our profiles can give a glimpse into what kind of digital twins these platforms created to engage us. These both have positive and negative implications for us. On the one hand, their algorithms evolved to be able to deliver us engaging and relevant content. On the other hand, they can also put us in the so-called filter bubble where the same ideas and tastes get reinforced by picking content that we will most likely enjoy.
Visiting partners to understand their technology
To understand our partners’ technology, we went to visit Streamingbuzz / AionSports for a discussion on the applications of their VR solutions. During this trip, we had the chance to try out their VR experiences first-hand and learn more about their engine and development process. One important takeaway of this visit was the agreement to explore the audial aspects of the VR in our collaboration; a novel direction for our partners.
Taking inspiration from the UN Sustainable Development Goals
During this Sprint we had the chance not only to research, but also to ideate on our design challenge. March 1st and 2nd were dedicated to the Global Goals Jam, where all project teams were invited to expand their knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and discuss how these goals could be translated into design principles with invited international experts in Sustainable Development.
One insight that we got from the speakers’ talks and team exercises is that, sometimes, it is more important to listen, than to talk.
We applied this insight to our design process and realised that we might have been too quick to jump to creating solutions in the past weeks. We figured that letting people speak can sometimes be a solution itself.
Playing around this idea, we came up with a concept for an ice-breaker object that would facilitate conversations with annoying yet insightful questions. Acting similarly to a data-driven chat-bot, it would encourage athletes to share their feelings with their coaches, for example when a terrible dream kept them from sleeping during the night. We might not continue the development of this concept, but its ideation process became a valuable mental exercise in itself.
Defining balance
Finally, our sprint goal motivated us to develop a working definition for balance to guide us in future. As a part of our exploration of the topic of balance, we decided to conduct a week-long self-tracking experiment, where each of us would use their own methodology of tracking well-being. The idea of this experiment was to highlight the subjective nature of balance and demonstrate different ways of visualising it. Read more about our self-tracking research here.
After exploring the different views on the topic from academia and from our own self-tracking research, we realised that balance is a multi-dimensional idea that can’t be narrowed down to either health, accomplishments in life, or positive emotions.
Instead, balance represents a complex construct with subjective and objective layers.
Stay tuned!
We have greatly increased our knowledge of the main pains and challenges encountered by student athletes, explored the applications of VR technology and rethought our design approach. At this point we have everything to start ideating and rapid prototyping, and it is exactly what we plan to do in the next Sprint.
In the following weeks we will share more about our process, so be sure to follow us.
Learn more about our project
- Read about our Maker’s Sprint
- Visit the project’s web page
- Follow our progress on Medium
About our team
The Digital Twin team is composed of people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and cultures:
- Alexander — UI/UX designer and media researcher from Russia.
(read more about him on his web page) - Elisa — UX designer focused in digital and exhibitions from Italy.
(explore her past projects in her portfolio) - Markéta — Master’s student in psychology from Czech Republic.
(find out more about her work in this page) - Valentina — Experience Designer & Researcher from Colombia.
(check out her previous works on her website)
Our coaches are Mariana Pinheiro and Gaspard Bos, who lead us through this process and help us to think “out-of-the-box”. Finally, Shauna Jin is our program manager, who guides our project through the semester.
