W for Wonder! — Sprint 1
“How can the ArenA create a better fan experience with WOW moments after the event using the new space?”
W e are the team Wonder Maker(s)! We’re all quite different in terms of our backgrounds and experiences. The team members are Nozomi (product designer from Kyushu University, Japan), Seiya (graphic designer from Kyushu University, Japan), Krassimira (sociologist from Soft Academy, Bulgaria) and Dikshant (engineer from IIT Bombay, India). Our coach (aka godmother) Evelien is a geographer turned media researcher who helps to streamline our thoughts and process. At Digital Society School, we aspire to use technology for the benefit of society in line with sustainable development goals as declared by the UN in 2016.
This blog intends to acquaint the reader with the process and thinking behind the SCREAM approach for achieving this objective and also give them (fun) behind-the-scenes of this whole project.
Week 1 (Sep 17–20): This week was all about getting started. First, we started with the sprint planning for the next three weeks. We decided upon which research methodologies to use and setting our goal for this sprint.
Sprint 1 Goal: “Get to know ARENA and its visitors and to conceptualize a prototype which extends the WOW moment after the event”.
On Sep 18, we visited the Johan Cruijff Arena (JCA) to meet the clients and get a tour of the stadium. The client gave us a brief about the history of the stadium and their expectations from this project.
Next, we started doing our research and we started by making a stakeholders map to find the key stakeholders involved in the project. Our key findings from this research indicated that our prototype should be not be focused on any particular event and instead should be universal in its use.
On Sep 20, we met researchers from Lectoraat Crossmedia to discuss past projects and overall vision behind this project. They also shared their past research and findings to facilitate our literature review process on how to improve customer experience at the stadium using place-making techniques and drawing inspiration from other public place designs.
Week 2 (Sep 24–27): We started the week by creating a survey and conducting one-on-one interviews with our peers and friends to learn their experiences and expectations from attending similar events in the past. We used these insights to build a customer journey map.
We also did brainstorming to map the general customer journey for an event so that we can identify the touch-points where we could interject to improve the customer’s overall experience.
Simultaneously, we started doing a literature review on improving stadium experience using place-making techniques, looking at designs of other modern public places like malls and airports, and checking social media channels to understand how the JCA is seen in media and by its attending customers.
On Sep 25, we met Nick from Design Across Cultures department of DSS to expand our research for inspiration from other places and cultures. We set up a correspondence with the team from Kyushu University who is also working on a similar project in Japan so that we could learn from each other.
On Sep 26, we met Tamara for our first translate session. She helped us to gather insights from the first one and half weeks and transition on to the period of creation. We did a private exercise about our ideas and vision for the prototype.
Next day, we decided to do a more elaborate brainstorming session to come up with our own ideas. Later, we decided to use dot voting to select the best ideas and lotus blossom to build around the main idea. We decided to build a playground as a indoor food court which could also be used as a base for our future ideas. The idea could also leverage our research on place-making and public place designs. We wanted the playground to have mushroom shaped tables to give the space a feel of a fantasy land and also encourage them to take more pictures in the stadium apart from the event. The playground also serves as a subtle hint of bringing the forbidden football field to the customers which they can step on and express their emotions while looking at the magnificent landscape through the newly constructed skyline windows. Thus, it gives the space a unique feel independent of the event.
Week 3 (Oct 1–5): Seiya started designing 3D model for our mushroom playground in Autodesk Maya. Nozomi started working on creating a digitized version of the customer journey map. Krassimira started working on the presentation for the sprint review and Dikshant started making a 3D model for the prototype.
On Oct 5, we met our clients at the Arena to present our findings and prototype idea and it was surprisingly received quite well. The clients appreciated the research and our approach to solve the issue. We agreed to focus on how to make customers stay in the moment after the event for our next sprint. We also discussed potential technologies like holograms, live video and text analysis, etc. that we should look into more for the sprint 2 prototype.
Thus, we concluded our first sprint (or shall we call it “the end of the beginning”) and ended our day with some chilled beers in a sunny afternoon. It was a seemingly short sprint but it had some giant, inevitable obstacles with a crazy idea in the end but that’s that’s what made it all the more challenging and fun(!).
Special Thanks to Emma Beauxis-Aussalet of Digital Society School for lending her wisdom and out-of-the-box thinking which really helped in giving meaning to our research and implement it in a more tech-savvy way.
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.
