People often feel powerless to make a difference in their own community. CrowdChange is a ubicomp system that connects citizens with issues they care about and shows them how they can contribute.
User Research
Out of a set of possible user groups, we chose to focus on the interactions that occur between citizens and their local government. In order to focus on a worthwhile opportunity, we interviewed several very broad user groups that have different needs and backgrounds when it comes to their local government.
Based on this research, we decided to focus on engaging local citizens by finding opportunities and causes that are aligned with their interests and encouraging them to take action to improve their community.
Concept Generation
After our initial research, we began brainstorming ideas for a ubicomp system that could facilitate engagement and facilitation between citizens and city hall. Overall, we generated more than 50 ideas, based around several opportunity statements, such as:
- How might we suggest courses of action citizens can take?
- How might we make people aware of the positive things their government does?
- How might we create a way for people to express opinions that fits conveniently into their routines?
Speed Dating
We chose 10 of our ideas and created storyboards to quickly illustrate the concepts. We then showed these storyboards to several groups of users in two rounds, with iteration after the first round of feedback. We were able to get many different opinions and use those to determine the final direction of the project.
Design
We photographed a concept video to convey our ubicomp system. I was responsible for the photography and the design of the ubicomp interface. Check out our concept video to see CrowdChange in action.