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We’re at our last Sprint. The Eneco on-the-go service is ready to go! In this final Sprint we’ve finalized our physical prototypes (power bank and charging station), application, and promotional video. To learn more visit our website www.energyonthego.nl
For our final deliverables we’ve created prototypes for the essentials of our service. Our goal was to stimulate our vision of the Eneco-on-the-go service that would allow people to stay free from battery anxiety.
Our Final Video
Our final video describes the quick recap of our customer journey. Our two protagonist are trying to stay connected when they are presented with the doom scenario of battery anxiety. This is when our service comes it with our omniscient voice over that presents the clearest solution of Eneco on-the-go.
Digital Applications: The Store Prototype and an App for Typical User
For our final prototype we present two interfaces. The user side made with InVision to stimulate a location based app that will allow users to subscribe to our service by filling out a few short details. The only step needed is to just find the closest station.
In our store prototype we have utilize NFC technology to keep our batteries in check. Each battery will have a RFID chip that needs to be scanned along with a customer card (OTG card) that will pair the two together to continue the cycle of borrowing and returning.
Physical Prototypes
Our physical prototypes display the battery charging stations at stores with optimized plugs that are created to fit our OTG batteries. The idea behind these optimized chargers is to make sure the batteries are charged at peak hours with our real-time pricing feature that will be ensure our batteries are charged in ours that green energy is excessively produced.
After branching out to form two strong services, we’ve narrowed down our choices to focus on Eneco-on-the-go (OTG). To dive further into our Sprint, our goal reflects the various components of research and design that will encompass our MVP. Our goal is as follows: design the customer journey based on qualitative and quantitative data, and develop the UX flow of the app.
Business Canvas
Our business model is focused on a sustainable mindset that promotes the use of batteries on the go. The on-the-service service charges batteries with green energy and powers the most essential device: the mobile phone. The rise of the ubiquitous device has led to the large demand and need for users to stay charged and connected. Hence, batteries have become integral for the use of ubiquitous devices such as tablets and mobile phones. However, batteries have been tied less and less to sustainable factors. With Eneco on-the-go the main aim is to have the user untethered from the plug and provide a ‘green’ solution for anxious smart phone owners.
Surveys
To test our customer journey, a interactive storytelling survey was conducted to collect results to determine different scenarios for the best experience for an on-the-go service. The infographics below display the results of our survey.
Supermodernity has reached a peak in this day and age. Physical alternations of public spaces and the individualization of references has moved us in a direction where our construction of places and spaces have been re-branded. The conventional office space has moved from an isolated office cubicle in tall shiny skyscraper buildings into a communal space that are shared with coffee drinkers and workers outside your company. With modernization and globalization, the world has become designed to cater to so-called ‘on-the-go’ life styles. In our 4th Sprint, we designed service that integrates batteries with human interaction. Our on-the-go services integrate a mix of communal working spaces and networking platforms that can engage freelancers with a communal experience to share their expertise and network.
Beam: Envisioning the Future’s On-The-Go Work Space
The culture of co-working has refined the very definition of a default working space. Today, networking has become the core value that have brought people together to share the experience of working together in a shared space. With Beam the daily commuter can plan their journey with an app that integrates convenience and purpose into a human like form through a friendly bot that acts as a journey planner.
The Future is On-The-Go
Our proposed services are not confined to non-spaces such as a train wagons but extend on to grab and go packages. To allow users to constantly remain charged as the move through their daily journey, the Eneco on the go allows users to pick up power banks when they need a charge and drop them off at the end location.
Using the app’s features users can find the closest pick up and drop off locations and stay charged and free of the crippling pain of battery anxiety.
Ever thought energy should be everywhere just like WiFi? Think about it for a moment, we live in a world that connects and transports us to physical locations through devices — phones, and devices have become an extension of ourselves. The construction of plugs that are tethered to walls becomes a hindrance. The kinetic motion that takes us to our next location should be unlocked not limited by energy. To bring energy beyond the walls we’ve integrated our previous insights to test a vision of ubiquitous energy: a concept of energy everywhere, for people on the go. .
A Critical Path for User Engagement: Personas
After creating a vision of energy everywhere through a photo series that capture our two personas: Isabella van Hout and Peter Parker, we documented their day to display the habits and their associated to our energy on-the-go service. To test personas we created a design for a qualitative data collection strategy, where 10 individuals were interviewed to confirm and deny our assumptions of on-the-go flexible workers.
When polishing our personas, we merged design of scenarios with design through lifestyle personas to depict where, who, and how our concept of ubiquitous energy can be integrated into a fast paced kinetic lifestyle.
One Goal: Two Paths
Our ideas have branched out to two possible routes to explore: a location based energy-on-the-go service that allows battery anxious individuals to charge in designated spots, and a service that provides transportable batteries that individuals can exchange at designated spots. In the following Sprint we will create a service design plan for to further explore these ideas and create a solidified idea of our two categories of an on-the-go service.
As part of our second Sprint, we’ve built spatial based user personas addressing three different freelancer groups to understand our users. Because our Sprint goal will address a new manner in which to re-frame energy sharing beyond saving, we’ve started to grasp the ‘on-the-go freelancer’.
Peter Parker has a casual life — he spends his mornings drinking fair trade coffee and reading articles on micro-finance enterprises in Far-awayes-stan. When he’s not playfully joking with the professionals that share his office space, he’s playing his interactive polyglot game that allows him to connect with programmers, designers, and social entrepreneurs (like him) that are trying to bring about change and make a socially driven start up.
Margreet works from home — she’s single and occasionally talks to her AI to keep herself company. She’s a self-starter entrepreneur that needs to save. She’s starting up her own sustainability enterprise and she needs co-founders, programmers, and designers … but it has to be collaborative because she can’t afford to hire at the moment. She goes to Seats2Meet once a week to network and recruit people that would be interested in sustainability.
Romana is based in Berlin but she’s a remote worker working as a freelancer consultant. She believes in inspiring ideas through other cultures by traveling to developing countries to improve and facilitate development programs. When she’s not busy working in her temporary room she’s commuting from client’s offices to hotels to facilitate workshops.
To involve users and integrate ‘real-life’ personalities into archetypes, we conducted an online survey along with a ethnographic safari documentary to observe ‘on-the-go’ freelancers in their natural working environment.
Battery Anxiety is a Real Thing
The Freelancers involved showed us two working dynamics. A freelancer — Simone, a battery dependent director that always keeps a back-up battery to be on the safe side and Bouke — multi-disciplinary designer that has high-end devices, leaving him plug free through-out his work day.
The Battery
Through our personas and observations, we found a new relationship with energy that was constructed through the battery. The battery icon has become more than a mere symbol for the daily power expiration of a device, but a symbol of anxiety and stress. High dependency on devices has intertwined the negative emotions involved in daily life — starting with the absence of the device.
I Spy is community based board game that promotes competition in teams through a point system of plus and minus cards. Each team will use individual boards and score their own team members based on green and gray behavior — green behavior is actions that contribute to the sustainability of the office space (this is perceived subjectively), gray behavior is unsustainable behavior in the workplace (again perceived subjectively).
Our aim is to move towards a gamified office space that evokes community building through the used of a shared board.
#CupsCanMakeItHappen: An Object Oriented Social Experiment
Do you think you’re environmentally conscious? How far does your through process take you in changing our daily routine? Can a product change the way you interact with a coffee machine? These are the fundamental question our experiment will answer. Through an ethnographic approach we placed cups in the creator’s lab to answer whether people will use alternative plastic cups rather than paper cups if they were both to be placed in front of them, and presented the choice of using either one? Below are quotes that capture answers to those that refused as well as those that participated in the experiment.
The quotes used capture the sentiment of cup users — displaying how placing a mere object like a cup may not get users to think about sustainability or re-usability but avoid negative confrontational conversations.
Fingers, Electrical Currents, and Loud Buzzing Sounds
As a part of our tinkering workshop various tools were used to explore concepts relating to our initial idea of community oriented energy sharing and the immediacy of provoking thinking on energy as a non-commodity. Initially, we planned to stimulate community building in an SME through the BTTN tool: a button that sends out email, alerts, SMSs, and is connected to internet-services. The idea was to stimulate responses through negative reinforcement as users carried out daily activities that could be deemed as “wasteful” by their colleagues. Most community based activities are generated from a common culture, our goal therefore was to integrate a ‘tattletale tool’ to get co-workers to react in a playful way to wasteful consumption through virtual reminders of their behavior in the real world.
Feedback and Gamification: Provoking a Thought Process From Annoyance
Our game “Shut Me Up” provokes players to find quick solutions to annoying sounds through interacting with light in a tangible way. The main concept behind the game is to get players to find a quick solution to the loud buzzing sound which is stimulated by light exposure. In the process of building our game we used the LittleBits kit to transform electronic building blocks into a chain of controls that would enable us to control our vehicle as it roams around with a buzzing sound.
We started our “Kick-Off Week” at the MediaLab with an experience at the Maker’s Lab. To integrate ourselves into the design process that resolves around our project we explored problem oriented designs through the use of tools and machines to transfer our experiences and ideas into objects. Our initial project with Eneco asks the question: “How can we create community markets to empower smart citizens to trade and share self-harvested energy within the grid?” During our brainstorming session in the Maker’s Lab, we concluded that the mindset of people would be our main goal. In this process various other large scale problems, such as those with the political economy and hermeneutics were brought up. This highlighted how energy was grasped in the minds of global citizens as a commodity; a commodity that is easily accessible with the flick of a light switch or the simple gesture made by our fingers; a commodity that has an invisible chain of side-effects. Therefore, in the process of creating objects, our main theme amongst the displays were to get viewers to reflect on their personal consumption patterns.
From Group Diversity to Energy Habits & How Green Are We?
The following visualizations display a cycle of large scale industrial consumption in various countries. The model narrows down global energy consumption in our team members’ countries: Lebanon, Columbia, Thailand, Brazil, and The Netherlands. The mindset behind our 3D visualizations is to exercise the use of data presentation in a way that allows the viewers to interact with objects. During the process of making the plexiglass visualizations, we used recycled materials, the ones we used to create two models of energy consumption in our home countries. In the second model, the blue slices of visualization display the amount of green energy produced by the respective countries to give viewers a balanced view of consumption versus the production of energy — to pose the question does the production of green energy compensate for the use of energy?
Have A Perspective
The concept behind the model is to users closer to understanding energy consumption through a display of the development of energy consumption in the Netherlands through time, in displaying the footprint of a country through a period of time (1982-2008). In the model, the intensity of the colors represent the increase of The Netherland’s footprint from the past to the present. The colors rage from a dark shade of red (representing heavy consumption) to yellow — displaying the reduction of energy use due to growing awareness.
