Discovering seestadt

Design Thinking | Vienna University of Technology

Project Overview

The course
As part of the master course "Design Thinking" at the Vienna University of Technology, I worked with a team of three other students to develop an idea with the goal of designing an interactive tangible interface in the Seestadt in Vienna.

The topic
My Team came together to develop an innovative solution that addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: climate change. Our idea not only raises awareness of the problem but also empowers individuals to take action and make a real difference.

The Idea
After our first impressions of the Seestadt were characterized by a yawning void, we aimed to bring some life to the area. For this we developed the idea to create a game with an emergent narrative to provide an attraction that draws more people to the Seestadt offering them and the local residents the possibility to discover the area in a playful way.

My Contributions

As a member of my design thinking team, I played a key role in the development of our project. My primary responsibilities included working as a designer and workshop facilitator.

As a designer, I was responsible for generating and developing new and innovative ideas that address the problem of climate change. This involved researching, brainstorming and conceptualizing new solutions that could be implemented to raise awareness and encourage action. I also helped to evaluate and refine these ideas to ensure they were feasible and effective. This included creating visual and interactive elements that helped communicate our ideas and solutions to our target audience.

I also played an important role as a workshop facilitator, where I led sessions with team members and stakeholders to gather feedback, identify pain points, and generate new ideas. My facilitation skills helped to keep the team focused and on track, and ensured that everyone's voices were heard.

Design Thinking

Student Project | Master's Course

Oct 2022 - Aug 2023

Two-parted course
The course "Design Thinking" consists of two parts that deal with the complexities of a design process. The goal is the evaluative development of an interactive tangible interface according to a defined project theme – since the university has a strong cooperation with the Seestadt in Vienna, a connection to this is a mandatory requirement.
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During the first part we therefore developed an idea using different cognitive, strategic and practical methods and techniques in the form of several research methods. The following second part "Explorative Prototyping" is about the iterative and user-centered development and presentation of a working innovative prototype.

Ideation
The ideation part of our course took place during the winter term and was organized in different assignments that incorporated the use of previously mentioned research methods aiming at different results.

Kick-Off
To kick off this part of the course, we visited the Seestadt to gather initial impressions and brainstorm rough ideas as a subject for this semester's ideation process. During our visit to the Seestadt, we had the impression that the cityscape has so far been characterised by a void of residents and visitors and that life mainly takes place in the same places – therefore the question was how could we breathe more life into other areas?
Idea approaches included tracking the movements of Seestadt residents and visitors to identify high and low traffic paths and areas, as well as developing an awareness-raising tour of Seestadt.

Literature Review
In order to identify relevant problems that have not yet been answered and to familiarize ourselves with the scientific field as well as the state of the art, we conducted a comprehensive literature search. To do this, we formulated specific research questions to systematically search library catalogs and review literature on the selected topics. Based on our findings, we concluded that we will be able to reach and engage a lot of people with playful interactive installations and that, consequently, this approach is suitable to successfully raise awareness about climate change and sustainability. This provided us with a theoretical basis for the next steps.

Interviews
In an effort to shed more light on the practical side, we conducted four expert interviews to obtain the opinions and experience reports of renowned experts in these fields. Among them were two escape game masters, a technical game designer and an award-winning location-based game designer. The insights gained confirmed some results of our literature review, discarded others and provided further approaches to further develop our idea.

Location awareness, gamer engagement, game design content, specific challenges, and the differences between emergent and embedded narratives have emerged as important points to pay attention to.

Cultural Probes
Building up on the theoretical findings from our literature review and practical insights gained during the expert interviews, we were thinking on how we could progress further in our specific ideation process. We decided to prepare some cultural probes as these are a method of research used in the design process to get to know the potential users and their environments. They consist of a kit of items and prompts, in our case a booklet and a camera, that are given to participants to use and respond to in their everyday lives. The resulting data provided insights into the participants' experiences, behaviors, and perspectives as well as helped us identify important locations for our game. Additionally, we tested the playfulness of the participants as representatives for our target group.

Scenarios
To take our idea to a more concrete stage of development, we decided to write two scenarios. Scenarios as a research method can help explore and understand potential future states and situations. They are usually written narratives that describe a specific situation or scenario in which a product or service could be used.
Therefore, we wrote one scenario to an Escape Game with embedded story narrative and one to a Decision Game with emergent story narrative, both in best and worst case respectively. As a result, our idea quickly took shape by adopting elements of the scenarios.‍

Design Workshop
As design workshops are collaborative sessions where a group of designers come together to generate ideas, solve problems and make decisions, we held regular brainstorming sessions and design workshops over the course of the semester. However, a supervised design workshop that I facilitated during the middle of the term was instrumental in helping us identify key issues, clarify others, and align our idea development.

Design Games
After aligning our idea development, we needed a design generating method to further clarify it and approach further insights idea- & solution-oriented. The research method of design games was very suited as these are interactive and playful activities that are designed to help participants explore and understand a problem or opportunity in a fun and engaging way.
By adopting the concept of "Cards Against Humanity" we created an analogy focussing on climate-change, extending the concept with a scoreboard and different roles in order to find out more about the preferences of our target group. This helped us to identify game elements and themes that are provocative and exciting to our target group as these will be crucial to create an artefact that is not "just another climate-change related" game. Therefore, we will try to wrap the educational content up in a light and entertaining way to keep participants engaged throughout the game.

Presentations
Throughout the semester, we communicated our progress to the leadership of the course. In addition, we presented our idea in different stages in front of different audiences and received valuable feedback. The final presentation in the Seestadt is imminent.

Final Idea
For the presentation of the final idea after having gone through the ideation process, I could write a separate article. Anyway, we decided to develop an interactive tour in the Seestadt, which invites you to discover different places playfully by means of an emergent narrative. There will be stations that we will design in the "Explorative Prototyping" part of the course where the players can influence the course of their game story with the help of a tangible interface. The results of the scenarios have provided approaches that help us to develop the storyline in concrete terms, whereby it has become apparent in the design game that our target group prefers the themes of "love" and "nasty/dark" related topics.

Explorative Prototyping
This part of the course will take place in the summer semester of 2023, where we will prototype our tangible interfaces - the game stations. We will also polish our story and hopefully finally play it for the first time.