Team Omega Ω Hello world!
Introduction
Who are we?
We’re Team Omega Ω. We are a multidisciplinary and international team consisting of:
Floris van der Werk — Communication and Multimedia Design
Floris is one of the designers in our team. He focuses on visualizing our research results and our brand design. His background lies in UX design.
Jessica Nguyen — Game Developer
Jessica is a game developer who focuses more on the game design part. She is in charge of researching and documenting our findings. She also processes the feedback we receive each sprint.
Max Groen — Game Developer
Max is the technical member in our team. His role is being the ‘head of development’. His tasks are about tech-related subjects such as hardware (Arduino) and databases.
Prachi Lai — Social Designer
Prachi is our international team member originally from India but she studies in Australia. She focuses on social design and really tries to empathize with users.
Project
What are we working on?
We are interns at Digital Society School (DSS) in Amsterdam. DSS focuses on sustainability. Students and researchers work together to create innovative and interactive media projects for Creative Industries.
Within DSS there are 2 tracks: Digital to Physical and a Data Driven Transformation track. We are doing a project in the former one and it’s called Project Smart Campus.
HvA Facility Services wants an evaluation tool for their smart campus app to gather feedback from campus users (mainly students). Currently, students struggle with finding available work spaces to study, HvA FS wants to solve this issue so students and teachers can focus on their research instead of searching for a free room.
HvA FS also wants to know if there are enough spaces on campus or if there is a need for new buildings.
Sprint 1
Our first sprint was mostly planning and doing research about the students (what are their needs? what are they struggling with? where do they usually study?) through deskresearch and field research. Not only the users are important to this project but also the smart building itself: how does it work? What kind of functionalities does it have? What is the purpose?
We were familiar with the SCRUM framework, since SCREAM is a creative spin-off, it did not take too much effort to switch to this method.
During the field research we asked students 2 questions:
“What is your favourite place in the world?”
“What is your favourite place on the campus?”
We wanted to get insights on what their study habits were and what kind of work environment they prefer.
We discovered that most students’ favourite place in the world was their home. Because they have everything they need. On the campus it would be close to their classmates or in a quiet study room so they get their work done.
Brainstorming
We also had 2 brainstorm sessions. The first one was about:
- Discussing the most important facts from our user and smart building research.
- What we wanted to learn from this project (for example: we want to work with sound or we want to work with VR). Afterwards, we did a ‘dot voting’ (part of the Design Method Toolkit) where we picked which subjects we liked the most.
- What we wanted campus users to achieve with our prototype (for example: we want users to be able to book a room or we want users to stop wasting their time in searching for a free room).
Since the project was really broad, we wanted to have a clear goal to work towards. So our 2nd brainstorm session was about creating a main direction. What kind of tangible object did we want to make?
This session gave us 2 main directions:
- Heatmap representation with LED lights.
This idea would be an interactive art installation at the entrance or at the elevators of a HvA building where students could see how busy it is on each floor.
2. VR with a 3D model of one of the HvA buildings.
Our second idea was to work with VR and a 3D printed model of the building. This idea would be a temporarily booth for first year students during their introduction day to create awareness for the Smart Campus app.
The user will be wearing the VR headset and walk through the building. There is a TV screen next to him so others could see what he is looking at through the VR headset. The actions the user executes in the virtual world would also happen in real life (through the 3D printed building). For example: if the user opens a door in the ‘virtual world’ the door in the 3D building (real world) also opens.
Sprint review
During the sprint review and peer feedback session we received valuable feedback which we will apply to our second sprint. This will be the main points we shall focus on:
- Rapid prototyping: realizing our Heatmap LED lights concept.
- It appears that we were (too) focused on what we wanted to make as a group rather than considering the students (target group). So we will have to take a step back and really get to know the students before we can create something that provides a solution to their problems. We could do this by in-depth interviews, creating user stories and a customer journey map.
- We should also do research about universities that are already using the Smart Campus functionality to learn from them.
- Our clients mentioned that people with disabilities also play an important role within the target group. How can we help them in search for a suitable study space? how do they know how to get there? are there any elevators nearby they could make use of?
- We should focus on 1 problem for now which is: How can we help students in finding a free space to study within the buildings?
