Key Features

Interactive infrastructure placement

Issue: Participants have an underdeveloped ability to understand and reflect on their emotions.
Being able to log significant moments within the application allows a participant to instantly recognize and provide detailed information on emotionally significant moments within their day. By logging these moments and providing context to them, a participant creates a repository of emotionally charged moments that can later be reflected on with their caretaker.

Policy tracking

Role selection

Project Framework

The team used SCRUM for this project, having 3 separate sprints each being 3 weeks long. Having prior experience with SCRUM, I felt at home using it, and implemented some methods within our process including Burndown charts and planning poker which helped the team to plan and have an overview of each sprint.

Discovering the problem

Through several interviews of city planners, that I led, the team discovered that one of our client’s chief pain points was the map making portion of planning Delft. City planners use physical maps on which they draw rough concepts to begin making basic plans for development projects.

This process of using physical maps during the many stages of urban planning creates several issues for the city planners. For one, policies that must be complied with are not taken into account until later in the development process. Secondly, ‘editing’ these physical maps is not effective. Thirdly, having only one copy of these plans is less than ideal as there are many stakeholders involved and only one copy of the maps. After learning about our user's pain points, the team decided to pivot our mission to focus on revolutionizing the map making portion of city planning by modernizing it through an interactive digital map in which infrastructure could be placed and edited on the map, parameters could be set, and development policies could be checked.

Research results - city planners

In order to understand the specific needs of city planners in regards to map making, I held three interviews with city planners and one interview with a map digitizer. The meeting provided a few key insights.

1 Development plans are physical and scattered

It would be great to keep track of changes and ideas, to have ‘version histories’ where you could see the initial plans and archive them. Currently there is only a physical version of a development plan, created through drawing sketches on maps which are later digitized.

2 Policies are not brought into the development process until the end

This can cause issues for the map digitizer. Beyond that, plans often have to be revisited and changed once policies are considered.

3 In person meetings are rare

The lack of in person meetings between the stakeholders of development projects slows things down considerably. Couple that with the scattered development plans, and development projects become significantly hindered.

Experential prototype - Iteration 1

Key activities: Programming Fiducial Marker Tracking, Designing Lo Fi Screens (Me), Building Projector Rigging and Table (Me)
The team developed an iteration of the interactive table that would finally result in the Delft City Planner.

The table works by a Computer Vision program tracking fiducial markers on the table. A fiducial marker is a marker that can be identified by any kind of imaging system. Using these markers, we were able to create interactions within our program in Processing that reacted to the location and angle of the fiducial markers. I created Tokens from the fiducial markers which would be used by users to interact with the table. The tokens had a fiducial marker on the bottom and an identifying icon on the top so users knew which token was theirs throughout the session.

Experential prototype - Iteration 2

Key activities: Designing High Fidelity screens (Me), Creating a Sturdier table (Me), Fine tuning the Computer Vision program, Reworking the user flows (Group)
In the second iteration of the prototype, I upped the fidelity of the design, utilizing the Gemeente Delft style and expanding the designs to fit the reworked user flow that the team had created.

Alongside the design rework, I created a sturdier table for the prototype. The table that I initially built was structurally unsound, which led to some awkward Sprint Reviews in which the table was finicky and fragile in a way that didn't do our designs and programming justice.

Exposition at Gemeente Delft

At the Expo, the team presented the Delft City Planner, alongside a video made by team member, Pablo, and a poster made by me. The creation of the video was done in order to provide a better experience for Expo goers, so that individuals could understand our project even if the table was in use or if team members were occupied in conversations with others.

The prototype was an attention grabber at the Expo, largely due to its unconventional nature in comparison to some other prototypes developed by other teams. Gemeente Delft was happy with the attention given to the project, and asked to keep the prototype to develop it further with a design agency that can do the project justice.

Reflection

Changing the Digital Twin space. When we started our project, every digital twin we found was so similar, they were essentially a visualized bank of information about whatever had been ‘Twinned’. We really wanted to revolutionize this concept and bring something new to the table (so to speak). To do this, we created a digital twin that promoted discussion, would help stakeholders emphasize, and would help the planning of Delft in a way that wasn’t so focused on the exact data of the city but rather the broader perspective. This really struck a chord with our client, and they identified strongly with our vision. This was quite helpful in the entire process of creating our product because this vision was always clear and always cosigned by our client. I think we changed the concept of what a Digital Twin can be and demonstrated to our client the value of interactivity and collaboration. I think our product definitely had a direct impact on our stakeholders, sparking an excitement in interactive technology and revolutionizing their own workflow.

Test everything always all the time. One of the lessons I learned during this project was to test absolutely everything multiple times in the exact same conditions that the upcoming presentation will be in before presenting it to the client. If the team would have learned this lesson much earlier, our sprint reviews would have gone much smoother. We learned our lesson before the Expo, though, and recreated the conditions that would be present by having more ambient light. This led to a much smoother presentation. Another lesson that I learned is that research is invaluable. The team was initially a bit lost on what our client wanted in the first sprint. However, once we had a meeting with them in which we interviewed them and asked questions about their needs, the vision for our product became much clearer. The last lesson that I learned is that clear communication between team members is absolutely essential to facilitate. This became apparent to me during the second sprint. Some team members were having struggles with their tasks and would work on the silently, trying to fix the problems with the Processing program, and were hitting roadblocks. However, once I learned of these issues, I was able to offer assistance and resources that helped to solve these roadblocks quickly. Sometimes thinking of a problem with a new head is effective for solving a pervasive issue.

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