Stage 5: Iteration + Storytelling
Introducing a product solution
Team: Corine Britto, Ema Karavdic, Anukriti Kedia, and Josh LeFevre
Defining our story
After the feedback on our presentation last week, we began outlining what would be important for a final presentation pitch. We want to frame the final presentation as a product design-fiction pitch about what the future with our product would or could look like. As if the future is already here.
We believe that this style of story telling will allow us the chance to get past just showing an app user-flow demo real; with the added benefit of placing the audience in a believable synthetic future about what could be and not just postulate endlessly. We think that this approach, tied with a strong story, will lead the clients and stakeholders toward taking action to being moving forward and implementing the researched product.
For our story, we sought to focus on a testimonial driven narrative between three friends (in order to more clearly show scalability).
This led to the rough video storyboard and script (below) that emphasized a friendly, non-linear testimonial that highlights the core features around how Scout builds empathy and community. Especially, since our goal is to drive toward intergenerational connection that is friendly, neighborly, and lasting.
We also began looking into the branding of our Scout and exploring the tone that the app should take.
Inspiration
In order to pair our presentation and concept video into one complete narrative we use some of the following sandwich videos to help us set the right tone and mood.
Community Animation
We wanted to be sure our to show how Scout create community at scale in the concept video. We did this by having part of our video set the context for why the app is needed. Our script included breakaway animation with a narrator explaining how scout is being used to decrease social isolation by connecting others then expanding on those connections. We decided we would have an animation of those connections with a neighborhood map in the background. The animation would first show our characters Alex, Todd, and Miso being connected then zoom out to show their connections multiplying throughout the community. We used google earth movie to show a fly over of a neighborhood in Pittsburgh then zooming out to show the larger community. Ulu was an expert narrator and Corine executed the animation. Below are few screenshots of the animation.
Preparing to film
Once we had defined our story, we needed to iron out the details in order to do all the filming effectively. This turned out to be quite a challenging experience with many moving parts.
Three of the most challenging elements were:
- Aligning the schedules of three, diverse individuals who would be acting for us
- Finding the right locations that wouldn’t require too much travel to be time efficient but also considerate of James, our older actor
- Organizing the run sheet. This included where people had to be during the entire filming time, the equipment that was necessary and the related scene
- Learning how to set up a scene with a crash course tutorial on lights and cameras from Josh
We had originally planned to film on Saturday as there would be less students on campus, where we were filming. We also expected that our actors would be more free during the weekend. However, this didn’t turn out to be the case, which meant that we had to plan to film on Monday, pivoting our schedule and instead working more on the designs and presentation to frontload some of that shift.
Lights, camera, action!
The day of filming was action packed and full of adjustments to account for lighting issues, location changes and other changes that occurred on the fly. Given that this was the best chance we had to get all of the content filmed and most recorded, it was important for us to maximize our time with the actors. By getting to content creation quickly, the aim was to start to put together the video and have some buffer room for more filming, changes or surprises if necessary. We were incredibly conscious of the alignment of our own team schedules in the lead up to finals week, with many other courses demanding time.
Finals week is here!
We are finally in our finals week! These 15 weeks have been quite a journey for us as a team, with its own ups and downs. But this week was all about making. Even though we had pieces of our final presentation, it took a whole bunch of 3 am nights and work to get to our final presentation together.
This week we spent a lot of time cleaning our empathy map and making it connect to our research. Peter gave us good advice on our last team meeting, to find an intersection between the map and our research insights. While skeptical at first, this was a great challenge to take up as a team. We iterated and re-iterated and finally were able to converge our definition of empathy, scale, and research learnings into one final piece for the presentation. This allowed us to build a consistent and time-bound narrative.
As a team, we had conquered the art dividing the work in a way that we all bought our skills to the forefront. Josh spent a lot of time in the starting of the week to clean up the audio for scenes where we had to accommodate for the audio from video files and making a rough cut of the video. Corine focussed on fixing the map files and animating them. Anukriti focussed on the App and Visual design and making interactive elements for the video and Ema focussed on putting our presentation together. All four of us had sections to focus on so that we could work on the parts and then combine them in a whole, which in hindsight was a great decision.
This week was however not challenge free, it took us a while to get our final video together. We faced challenges dealing with different audio qualities, some tightly cropped video shots as well as the bane around working on different systems. For a team, that had front-loaded a lot of our work, we still felt that design is never truly over till the very last minute. However, we were able to spot some of our technical problems in the right time and worked actively towards fixing it. Here, we present to you; Scout:
Working back from our App, we found it important to highlight the different ways in which the features of the App reinstated our points in the empathy model:
And finally, on scale and impact:
Technology also allows us to scale Scout. Given the strong community aspect, we imagined that we would initially start with the local community in Pittsburgh.
- The Pittsburgh model can then be adopted by other cities
- Begin to create connections between people and cities that adopt Scout
This allows us to scale our empathy model even beyond the city to connect generations in other regions and countries.
Scout not only allows us to work towards inclusion on the platform, but it also allows us to move forward to the desired intergenerational future of 2039 and the SDG goal #10 around reducing inequalities between races, age, ethnicity
- Promoting inclusion through community mentorship
- Empowering marginalized groups to find resources for learning and teaching opportunities that are not solely career based
- Creating an alternative economy of skills sharing to allow access to knowledge and learning for all
