Content

1. Background

2. Objectives

3. Initial Concepts

4. Physical Experience

5. Digital Experience

6. Prototype

7. Outcome

Background

As the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation's (USDOT) first-ever Smart City Challenge, Columbus was awarded $50 million in grant funding and the designation as America's Smart City. The city is "becoming smart" by embracing the reinvention of transportation to accelerate human progress. And with it, taking on the coveted job of teaching cities as they evolve similarly around the world.

Columbus received a total of $50 million in the form of two grants: $40 million from the USDOT and $10 million from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. These dollars provide the seed funding for Smart Columbus—a region-wide Smart City initiative co-led by the City of Columbus and the Columbus Partnership.

Objectives

Our team conceived a connected data platform via a partnership with the city of Columbus, OH, a year prior to SXSW. The intent of this platform was to aggregate data at an urban scale that could be used to inform decisions. As one of the designers responsible for architecting concepts and experiences of the platform, I was tasked with translating those experiences for our interactive experience demo for the participants of SXSW.

Due to the magnitude of the event, it wasn’t enough to just tell the story of our creation - our team also needed to conjure up an interesting experience that supplemented and magnified that story. I wanted to:

• Tell the connected data platform story

• Showcase launch of a general platform

• Leave a lasting impression on potential clients/investors

Initial Concepts

The physical manifestation of our concept would be the first encounter for participants at SXSW - It would be something that would either catch eyes and draw people in, or go unnoticed in a sea of other exhibits. It was important for the manifestation of the physical experience to enhance the theme of our smart city story, so it made sense to use the “city” as the motif in an interesting and captivating way.

Inspiration

Exhibit Concept

Physical Experience

Various Configurations

Final Layout

Digital Experience

With the physical experience being the bait to draw participants into our booth, the digital experience would be the content to keep them hooked. We needed to keep the audience interested long enough for them to hear our story and understand in a matter of moments all of the complexities our team had built throughout the year.

The digital experience consisted of 3 major components:

• Summary/Explainer Video (reference item 6 in the final layout above - due to NDA reasons, video can’t be shown here)

• Real-Time Interactive Data Station (reference item 7 in the final layout above

• Real-Time Interactive Data Game/Simulation (reference item 4 in the final layout above)

Real-Time Interactive Data Station (Proof of Concept)

One of the key strengths of our connected data platform was its ability to digest and visualize real-time data. We wanted to use SXSW as an opportunity to show how the data of Austin changed with a major event like SXSW compared to a normal day. We also wanted to give participants the ability to interact with this live data, allowing them to control how granular or high-level the data became depending on how close or far out they zeroed in. In addition to participants being able to scale the live data, we also allowed them to toggle between current data and data from the past.

Real-Time Interactive Data Game/Simulation (Proof of Concept)

Visualizing data is one thing, but data doesn’t mean much if you can’t do anything with it. Part of our story was to let participants know that data can be used to make informed decisions at the city level, or the neighborhood level. The true power of the platform revolved around its flexibility, scalability, and real-time outputs.

To bring this concept to life, we wanted to allow participants to be “The Mayor” of their city. As The Mayor, they’d be able to use real-time data to make real-time decisions and see the results and outcomes of those decisions. We did this by gamifying the experience to tell the story.

The goal of the game was simple - use real-time data to generate the most effective bus route. In this case, effective meant picking up the most passengers in the shortest amount of time. The setup to accomplish this goal consisted of two side by side displays (reference item 4 in the final layout in Physical Experience above).

The display on the left acted as the input display, where the participants would play the game. To create their routes, participants would tap an intersection in the neighborhood until eventually reaching the finish node.

The display on the right acted as the output display, where participants would be able to see the effects of their decisions as they’re creating their routes. Here the participants could compare their new route to the original route and also see their community served to route time ratio. The game was programmed to randomize how many people resided in different areas of the neighborhood. So while one route may be faster, it may only serve a small portion of the neighborhood. It was up to the participant to use the output display to ensure they were building a route that not only was quick but also served a good amount of the community.

Prototype

Before the event, our team built a mockup in house to spot any potential defects and test run the experience.

Outcome

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, SXSW 2020 was cancelled and this endeavor ended at the prototyping phase.