The month of ‘firsts’
Welcome to the very first post by the HTP (HugThePolice) team! We are excited to share the outcomes of our partnership with the Dutch police in the project that aims to (re)define safety and security as urgent issues in the upcoming decade.
Police organisations need to be adaptable and anticipate to future security issues and therefore, it is important to gain experience and experiment with future technologies, and keep up to speed with technological innovations in and outside of the field.
Meet HTP!
Starting from the left :
Ola, Eva, Sasha, Lama Neel and Mick.
Our team is versatile and each one of us brings important skills to the table. As university students or recent graduates in subjects like New Media, Social Science, Graphic Design and Game Development we have a great set of methods we can use when it comes to designing for the future generation.
First Week
In our first week, we were given a brief provided to us by the Dutch police in which our partners have stated issues with safety and security that in their opinion might be relevant in the future. Because at this point there were so many points that were brought up we have decided that first, we need to find out more about the subject (safety and security) itself in order to narrow down the scope of our work.
All of us have chosen terms and keywords relevant to the topic and began an intensive research session on subjects like Ethics of AI, Digital Identity, Digital Accessibility, Cyber Security and Digital Discrimination. After two days we were able to define most of those topics and exchanged our ideas on which subjects seem to be the most important.
First Translate Session
To present our findings to the partners we went to visit headquarters of the Dutch police in Driebergen. For some of us, it was a first trip outside of Amsterdam!
During that meeting, we reevaluated together what should be our goal and what are the possible limitations of our project. We discovered that in many ways we and our partners share similar ideas but it was very insightful to learn more about the work of the police and the range of their tasks.
After that meeting, we were ready to get back to work!….almost. In the following days, the weather got the best of us and we got sick one by one. We resorted to drawing missing members of the team for emotional support.
Thankfully, after a couple of rough days, we were able to come together and reorganise our work so far. We decided to test our research and run a trial version of the future prototype. We pre-tested by asking several people about their actions in an effort to feel safe and secure. It has proved to be a great idea as we were able to match some of the responses with the research questions we have created. Below you can see a visual representation of said test.
In the left part you can see the answers to the question “how do you make sure you are safe”; in the middle, we have grouped the concerns connected to the answer and on the right, we have interpreted the concerns into a bigger umbrella term that covers the issue.
First Sprint Review
Meeting our partners again! This time we presented several ideas for possible physical prototypes. Some of them we had to let go of and some were expanded with the approval of both sides. We were also happy to have some help in the practice of “killing our darlings”.
That’s a wrap!
After our sprint review, we held our own review session. Because it was our first month of working together we had a lot of ideas on what to improve and we made sure we “posted’’ all the issues out there.
Next Sprint
Right now we are planning for the next sprint, one in which we will finally bring our sketches into physical forms!
If you are curious about HTP’s upcoming prototypes and the direction of our research please stay tuned or contact us for further questions.
contact
olabonati@gmail.com | eva.van.haren@outlook.com |
The Digital Society School is a growing community of learners, creators and designers who create meaningful impact on society and its global digital transformation. Check us out at digitalsocietyschool.org.
