Team Omega Ω: Let’s light up the place with our LED Light Heatmap Prototype!
Sprint 1 recap
During our previous sprint, we conducted research about the students and the smart building to get a general idea of what kind of problems students are facing and how a smart building could solve the students’ pain points. The most common problem was that students struggle with finding available workplaces within the campus.
We brainstormed about concepts and main directional goals which were:
1. A heatmap representation with LED lights.
2. VR with a 3D model of one of the HvA buildings.
Sprint 2
As with every sprint, we started with a sprint planning where we set our goals and deliverables.
Our general (sprint) goal was: “How can we provide the HvA Students with relevant data to improve their campus experience? How can we make them feel happy, welcome and comfortable?”
Each sprint, we narrow down the scope of the general (sprint) goal, so our 2nd sprint goal is:
“How to improve the campus experience of HvA students by showing them the available spaces in the buildings?”
Our feedback from sprint 1 was that we were too focused on what we would like to make, rather than considering the needs of the user. So, we needed to take a step back to get to know the students better through in-depth interviews.
Since we brainstormed during the 1st sprint about different concepts, it was time to realize one of the concepts and create a better picture of who we are making the product for. We also want to look at similar smart campus projects for inspiration.
Keeping that in mind, our deliverables for this sprint are:
- Gain insights by researching about similar smart campus and smart building projects.
2. Create personas based on in-depth interviews.
3. Find opportunities by clustering user data (e.g. through in-depth interviews).
4. Get a better understanding of the user pain points.
5. Create a prototype that shows the heatmap data.
- Gain insight by researching about similar smart campus and smart building projects
Floris researched about Islelabs Flows and Tidy Street Project. The first one is a business intelligence platform that can help you understand your visitor’s footfall patterns. It collects anonymous data to measure how many people visit your venues and at which times. This gives you an understanding of how long, how often, and where your visitors spend their time at your locations. The second project is about showing people who live at the Tidy Street. This is a street in Brighton with a high energy usage. The university of Brighton decided to change the behaviour of people living on the street by showing how much energy the houses uses.
Jessica researched about the Smart Campus Tools 2.0 book that compares smart campuses of different universities in the Netherlands as well as different universities worldwide. A few problems and recommendations could be used to improve HvA’s Facility Service’s app and/or we could keep them in mind while making our prototype.
To start with, the most common problems all universities face are the fact that students complain about the lack of space while universities think they provide enough space. The reasons are because:
- Spaces on the campus are claimed but not used. A room is reserved for meetings which do not occur 20% of the time.
- During specific times, specific locations are overcrowded, although there is room elsewhere. For example: during exam weeks the library is overcrowded while other study spaces remain unused.
Now, there are some recommendations to solve these problems, these are:
- Increasing the interactivity between tools and users: This is based on the development of an app that enables users to book a meeting room based on their proximity to the room.
For example: if you want to identify overbooking of rooms, you can use an app that punishes or rewards users for their good behavior. There are similar apps out there where users are stimulated to live a healthier life by taking the stairs instead of elevators. Within the app, they can compete with colleagues to see who’s using the stairs the most and therefore, living the healthiest life.
- Using multiple sensors/data to gain more insights in the use of space:
For instance, the TU Eindhoven uses infrared sensors that connect with the lightning to detect presence in a room to see if the booked room is being used.
2. Create personas based on in-depth interviews
Based on several interviews with students, Prachi created 2 personas and mapped out the user pain points, while Floris clustered the user data to find opportunities for us to work with.
These are the personas that Prachi created.
The students’ main pain points were:
- Students not knowing where the available spaces are within the building, so they just go home to study. What the HvA wants is to keep students on the campus as long as possible. So, they’re trying to improve the study spaces and host events. The problem is that students don’t know about these events, so they leave early anyways.
- Another problem was about safety. Students don’t want to carry their bags around. That’s why they usually sit at places with familiar faces, so when they got to leave for a second to go to the toilet for example, they can leave their belongings on the table.
3. Find opportunities by clustering user data
Floris visualized the user pain points and categorized them by interview question. We still need to do a dot voting session on which problem we find the most important to work on.
4. Get a better understanding of the user pain points.
The picture below shows the visualisation of the user pain points.
5. Create a prototype that shows the heatmap data.
As the head of development, Max mostly worked on the prototype with LED light strips and Arduinos. He managed to load a heatmap picture, which then gets divided into grids. Each grid calculates the most dominant colour. This colour (RGB value) gets saved to a database that is connected to the Arduino. The Arduino reads the database colours and displays them on the LED light strips accordingly.
We also experimented with different materials to diffuse the light. In the picture above we used tape and balloons.
Translate session
During the translate session, Dan invited Roland van Dierendonck, an interdisciplinary researcher, biologist, artist and educator based in Amsterdam working on the intersection of life sciences and creative technologies. He is a co-founder of Amsterdam Biolabs and directing the international BioHack Academy at Waag. He is imploring the impact of smart city technologies on ant colonies.
During this translate session, we received feedback on the process, our ideas and the presentation. The feedback was:
- Finish the prototype. We were still experimenting with materials and the prototype wasn’t put together yet. We had LED light which worked with Arduino and the database, but there was no heatmap yet.
- Do a dot voting session on the user data visualization poster.
- Test the prototype with UvA if HvA’s application is not live yet.
- Making the translate session presentation more professional by focusing on phrasing insights.
- Infographics will help to reduce complexity and discover patterns.
Sprint 2 review
The feedback we received from the clients and Gijs Huisman made us steer into an entire new direction:
- At first, we want to create awareness for the Smart Campus app, so students will start using it which in return gives us feedback to work with. However, we need to disregard this problem and focus on what the client really wants: an evaluation tool to make info about space more transparent and improve the MAPIQ tool.
- Because the Smart Campus app is not live yet, we have to shift our way of thinking. So, instead of focusing on MAPIQ, we could focus on the use of space. If we truly need to test how MAPIQ works, we could always go to the UvA (University of Amsterdam).
- The idea which came out of this session was an AR Evaluation Game where students scan an object (this could be a QR code) with their phone, which then shows the students a menu to rate the space they just used to study. This rating is done with AR emotes.
- In the previous post, one of our goals was to research about people with disabilities and how we can help them with our prototype. However, during this review it might be better to focus on this at a later stage.
