MediaLAB Amsterdam is now the Digital Society School! You are viewing an archive of MediaLAB projects. Content on this website may be outdated, and is without guarantee.

allay waiting time experience

Team

Steven Kok
Sanne van Wegberg
Gionata Fronduti
Matthijs ten Berge

Project Manager

m.ten.berge@hva.nl

Commissioner:

Description

That’s all, folks!

We’re done!

The final presentations were on wednesday, and it was great. People from the creative industries showed up, experts in the field, teachers, students, our assigners, friends and family… it was a full house!

It was great to see everyone tell about the projects they had been working on the last half a year, and the projects were cool indeed. Gemeente Amsterdam had their working installation, IKEA had laptops set-up with their game and we had iPods dangling from the ceiling, showing our app, and a big screen with our animation. Good job, everyone.

It feels strange to have finished the project, although we’re still going to be here for a week or so, rounding everything up. It’s been a half a year of hard work, inspiring people and a lot of noodles. We would like to thank MediaLAB and everyone who helped us for this great opportunity. Most of all we would like to thank our fellow students for a great half a year, and for the help and tips throughout the project.

WAIT.THINK

The documents

Over the last months we have been working on documenting the process we’re going through. The documents are: Research, Concept, Design, Prototyping and testing and Final. We wanted to make these documents fit together, so here are the covers for the WAIT.THINK! documents.

The covers represent the progress in the project, starting out with a single person waiting by himself. More and more people join him, and communication is started. Finally they all catch the train together. This represents what we want to accomplish. To let people have fun on a platform, to have them communicate, and to have them spend their waiting time in a pleasurable way!

As the FINAL document might give away, we’re almost done with this semester of MediaLAB. Everybody is very welcome to come visit us at the final expo on the 16th!

 

 

Almost done…

Hi people,

We’re getting close to the end of the project. The animation is being created full throttle by our animators, and our new programmer Jens Kat is working on our app. Meanwhile Gionata is keeping everyone on the same page, overseeing the visual style of the entire project. It’s starting to look really good. We settled on a style with soft colours, which is easy on the eye. Here’s a sample.

The creation of animation like this is quite a process! We have a lot of information to convey, and little time to do it in. What information has priority? How do you determine the order of information presentation? What is right way to emphasize certain elements? These are now the type of questions we’re thinking about and our different disciplines are really showing in this phase.

All right then, back to work!

Skating and shaking

Yesterday was a good day. Skating at the Jaap Edenbaan and shaking cocktails afterwards. Nice!

Animation!

Hi everyone,

We would like to welcome Ka Bo and Gregory to our team! They are working on the animation for our concept, which we have called WAIT.THINK!

Ka Bo is doing our character design and Greg is doing motion graphics. Things are starting to look really slick, really fast. We are also in the middle of finding a programmer to help us program our app. We’re beginning to settle on final visual styles now, and we’re really loving the way it’s turning out. Here is a small preview.

 

 

Prototypes everywhere!

Hi everyone,

The prototype phase is upon us!

We’re now translating our designs to paper prototypes and digital prototypes. We’re using these to find out if what we thought of actually works as we thought it would. We’re going to be doing user testing soon to test the functionality of the app. To do this we are going to use this really cool kit made from meccano! The old toys? The new can’t do without the old. We’re using iPods to test our app, and the kit can fit one exactly in the middle. There is a webcam attached to it, aimed at the screen. This allows us to film exactly what a person is doing when using the app. What buttons are being pressed? Is the navigation clear?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s great to see our project become more solid and clear every day, and we’re anxious to see what the next few weeks will hold. The other teams are going through the same, and the subject matter of the discussions around the tables is changing. It’s going from: “I really think that adding user generated content here would be better.” to “What pages should have a link to the user generated content page, and how should this page look?”

Until next time!

Design design design!

Hi travelers,

We settled on a concept! It has the working title Wait. Think! and we think it will be great. The direction of the assignment has changed somewhat, and we’re now working on a concept that helps people pass their time on a station while giving people important information about safety on railway platforms. Did you see this clip, by any chance? That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about!

In short: We are creating a media object that uses big screens on a platform in combination with personal screens like smart phones to make people aware of safety issues, while getting a fun and informing experience out of it. To accomplish this we’ve been doing technical and visual design, we’ve made paper prototypes, created prototypes and put together a moodboard. And more stuff. These two weeks we’re also doing working sessions together with ProRail, and are really working together on the project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this moment we’re in the middle of creating a video for the platform screens and working on creating a working testversion of our app, which means that a storyboard is being drawn on my left, and Adobe Fireworks is being used on my right. Shortly we’ll start doing user testing, which is one of the most exciting phases. How will people respond to our concept? What will we have to improve? Will it work as we thought it would? Will the message we’re trying to send across be clear? Starting next week we plan on starting out tests, so we will have to work hard the next few days to get everything done on time. This week we’re talking with an animator and a programmer to help finish our first prototypes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amidst all of the hard work that is being done over here, a little fun is never far away. Every once in a while we go out to kick a ball around, and play an old-fashioned game of ‘lummelen’. It’s been a while.

Last but not least, Gionata would like to say hi to his mom. Hi mom!

The ProRail team

 

 

Concepting

Hey everyone!

Autumn break? Nah. We’re hard at work, finishing off three of our concepts. We’re presenting these brand-new-just-out-of-the-box ideas to ProRail next monday, and the idea is that they’ll choose one of our concepts for us to develop. There was writing, scribbling, drawing, sketching, folding, gluing, lining, brainstorming, storyboarding, and there has even been word of a guitar being spotted around the Lab. We used so many pastel-colored post its that it felt like an early, slightly too cold easter, and we haven’t used this many markers since kindergarten. We had workshops about concept creation, and we read books on brainstorming games. Our minds are becoming more limber every day, and we’re really starting to get the hang of things. We have been focusing on keeping the user central to our project, and want to reach the train traveler in an interactive way. We’re proud of our three ideas, and we’re convinced that these projects have the potential to be interesting and inspiring. We can’t wait to start prototyping one of our concepts. How cool is it, to see one of your ideas actually going in to action?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right now the last details of our concept document are being finished, which will exhibit our three favorite concepts. We’re curious of what you think, and would like to hear from every one. The document will follow soon, together with the research document, which we still owe you.

Since it’s autumn break for most students now, it leaves the studio a bit more quiet than usual, which is nice for a change. Some of us have exams for other courses as well, so there’s a different group of students everyday. A small group of MediaLAB students comes in every day, and has even been stranded with pre-packed supermarket cake and coffee on a cloudy morning.

Alright, time to call it a day! Talk to you soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Team ProRail

Platformedia magazine

Good afternoon, viewers!

Our research magazine is here, and we’re the proudest of parents. We presented our findings to ProRail yesterday, which resulted in an interesting and fun meeting. We made a few important decisions, and now it’s off to the concept phase! The next two weeks we’ll be brainstorming and thinking of a million ideas to finally end up with a few great ones. The digital version will follow in a few days, so you can see all we’ve done.

See you soon!

The ProRail team

Research fase round-up

Hey everyone,

Our magazine is almost here! Our research has brought us to many different sources and has broadened our horizon a great deal. Waiting turns out to be a quite complicated process; After almost three weeks of hefty desk research, hands-on field research and market analyses, we’re now working on our hand-designed research magazine. It’s starting to turn out pretty good. While I’m writing this, Sanne and Gionata are hard at work, designing the document and visualizing data. Luckily there is rarely a shortage of pepernoten (By now renamed to ‘Papernuts’) at our side of the Apple island, so morale is high. We received some great articles from friends and acquaintances of MediaLAB and gathered a large database of information by using sources like the UvA library, the HvA library and this new hype called ‘the internet’. Tomorrow we’ll be taking the train to Utrecht to present our results to ProRail. Very exciting.

We just finished a workshop from Charlie Mulholland, doing some brainstorm exercises. The assignment: Come up with one hundred ideas for your concept by next week. Luckily for us, they don’t need to be good ideas. Charlie: “I have an endless amount of really bad ideas every day! But if somewhere between all those bad ideas there is one good idea, that’s still a pretty good score.” Duly noted.

The new foreign students merged with the group flawlessly, and within a day or two they were up to speed on the project and working with everyone else. Our little melting pot is becoming increasingly diverse, with Ankit joining us from India and Gionata, Alberto and Stefano coming from Turin, Italy. We’re now a Japanese-Russian-Italian-Indian-Dutch group, and listening to each other trying to pronounce tongue twisting sentences in foreign languages provides a steady supply of laughs. Meanwhile, Studio HvA is starting to feel like home. We’ve been working here every week day since the start of the project, and in these last days of our research phase we’ve had some late-night dinners here as well. We’ve ordered Surinam, Italian, Indian and Thai so far, and we’re slowly becoming worldly culinary experts. Everyone has claimed their personal workspace by now, and the teams are all seated in a way that allows smooth collaboration. The teams help each other out when needed and provide each other with feedback.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alright, let’s make a presentation! Also, who’s feeling like Greek?

The ProRail team