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allay waiting time experience

Team

Steven Kok
Sanne van Wegberg
Gionata Fronduti
Matthijs ten Berge

Project Manager

 m.ten.berge@hva.nl

Commissioner:

Description

By steven October 11th, 2012

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

By steven October 9th, 2012

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

 

 

 

By margreet riphagen September 20th, 2012

ProRail project team, reporting in.

ProRail project team, reporting in.

Oh, my. This place! Studio HvA looks amazing. Designed by hand by the people that inhabit it, it’s a place surging with young energy. We have ACE working here, diligently crafting their new businesses and Urban Management, solving the cities’ problems one at a time. And then there’s us: MediaLAB. Sitting behind our shiny new iMacs, we’re working on even shinier new media projects. The next few months are looking good.

The last few weeks have been a blast. We have been working on a project to improve the waiting time experience of people on railway platforms. ProRail is putting up screens on platforms in a few large cities in the Netherlands, and has asked us to research the possibilities for these screens. We are in the middle of our research right now, working many hours looking into literature, doing market research and thinking of ways to integrate these different fields. While one of us is looking up the effects of the emotion felt while waiting, the other is looking up some of the coolest urban screens projects there are to be found. While one is researching the multimedialization (yes, that’s a word now) of screens in public places, the other is looking up how screens may effect perceived waiting time.

When we’re not at the studio, we’re out doing interviews and meeting new, interesting   people. Some are involved in the project, giving us insight in the dynamics of current events, others have presented us with great articles and other sources of information. Next Thursday we’ve got another appointment with Marco van Hout, who has done extensive research in platform waiting experience. It’s a brainstorm session to look forward to.

Meanwhile, when we’re not doing all of these things, we’re doing prototyping workshops on a loud boat in the canals of Amsterdam, we’re actively participating in the platform experience by getting out at a wrong train station in Hilversum while on our way to a meeting, we’re ordering Surinam food at 21.00 hours at the studio, we’re visiting new media festivals, and we’re anticipating the arrival of our new team member, Gionata Fronduti.

Next week we’re presenting ProRail the total of our findings, after a series of peer presentations and feedback sessions. We’re looking forward to giving everyone an insight in our findings, since there is a lot to be told. The next few days will be filled with the gathering of information and the finalization of our research report. As long as the coffee machine doesn’t break down again, we’re good to go. We’ll keep you posted!

Sanne and Steven