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Space Challenge

Team

Tarun Bhandari tarun_b@nid.edu
Lisa Greuter lm.greuter@gmail.com
Brun van der Horst brun@brunvanderhorst.nl

Commissioner: European Space Agency

Description

How can understanding and engagement be increased in broad audiences in the processes involved in space missions? Together with ESA we are designing a playful method to create awareness about the challenges that a space mission encounters.
By yunasong April 15th, 2016

Big Step ahead to the Space Challenge

 

Big Change  😮 (Uh,oh…) → 😀 (Yay)

Spring has come already!

Leading you straight to the news, we made a big change on our game. Last 3 weeks (the 3rd Sprint) was about finding a better/best solution (genre) for the game and researching on other mediums as a suggestion, to promote our game the best way.

When it comes to game, beforehand, we were going for ‘mini-game’ as the main structure of our game, since our research was focused on playful and fast/short-pace game to encourage our target user play the game as much as possible. However, it turned out that it was not the best solution to create ‘long-term’ engagement to the space mission.

 

Tycoon game

A ‘tycoon’ is one of the game genres, which is the best viable option for our client ESA because it triggers the long-term engagement we seek, it can incorporate a story and/or quests and the player is being rewarded for coming back. Thus, our game goes, as the player establishes a space centre to perform a series of missions in order to lead the space centre to perform the AIM mission.

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Other mediums

We’ve looked into other mediums to deliver our game with the best way. For example, screen media such as film, animation and exhibition.

 

–Film & Animation

Researching on film and animation, we found out that ESA has a lot of experience with creating informative but beautiful (and also sometimes) fun videos to watch. They have a YouTube channel which we used as a source. A pretty successful example are the Short Videos about the Rosetta mission. We could manage to make this as well for AIM. What all the videos had in common was that they trigger emotion, give valuable but yet understandable information and they have beautiful graphics. We made a distinction between live-action and animation videos and designed them both on a mood board (see image). An important conclusion is that a film is not a replacement of the game (which we still see as our main medium) but a proper secondary medium as a marketing tool.

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–Exhibition

The advantage of an exhibition as a medium is first-hand experience. It gives you more immersive, and engaging experience than looking at the screen since you walk around in the (surrounding/enclosing) space yourself. To create more playful/ engaging experience, we developed a prototype of interactive-exhibition with game on mobile.

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exhibition prototype2-to show

Meeting with ESA

We were excited to let ESA know about our plan and suggestions. It was nice that they liked our new idea and we adjusted/moderated our understands on specific target group. We agreed on our main focus is the game, and we have to make a trailer of the game so we could drag attention of the public (before actual launch of the game). Now we have a much more clear direction on our project, we look forward to the fourth sprint, which will start next week.

 

Creative Session at ESA

Creative session (brainstorming / writing session) is a design method to get ideas from outside of the team who has different backgrounds. Engineers and Scientists from AIM team took part in the session, and we gained very creative and inspiring ideas.

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Next Sprint Plan

Now we got a clear idea of game and direction of our project, we are going to get started on developing actual assets of the game. (Framework, Story, Graphics, Game Design Document) We will develop prototypes and test them with our target group, so we can get closer to our goal. I’ll keep you posted within our next sprint!

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By lisagreuter March 4th, 2016

ESA coming here

Yesterday was an exciting day. Our contacts from ESA (Paolo (Engineer of the AIM mission) and Linda (Communication manager)) came to the MediaLAB to look at the things we made during our first sprint. We held a presentation and showed them the paper prototypes (which they also tested). Paolo and Linda were pretty amazed by what we did in those first three weeks. They thought it looked great and gave us lots of positive feedback. This gives us extra motivation to continue our process this way.

So the first sprint is finished. Next Monday starts the second one, where we have to formulate a new sprint goal and make moves on what we want (and going) to do. We’re all really looking forward to this. Soon we’ll give you an update on how things go, so keep following us 🙂

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By lisagreuter February 18th, 2016

Visiting ESA

In the early morning of Thursday 11 February, we went to Noordwijk to meet our partner and client ESA. First, we had a meeting with people who are featured in the AIM-project. We showed our user scene video, the prototype we made in the tinkering workshop and we were able to ask questions about the project. This meeting was very useful and it felt great that the people from ESA were so enthusiastic and confident about our working agreement. After the meeting we got a tour through the building and other areas of the ESTEC. It was so inspiring and fascinating, we all enjoyed this day very much! Take a look at the photos we made during the day.

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By lisagreuter February 15th, 2016

Wave that flag

Flag-Space-Challenge-Team-2

Tada! Here’s our team flag. It represents all five of us and where we were born. Yuna = Seoul, South Korea, Brun = Delft, Tarun = India, Lisa = Purmerend and Michel = Lelystad. We looked at our country/city flags and took some colours and symbols out of them. All these things combined visualises a satellite. Do you see it?

 

By lisagreuter February 12th, 2016

Hit the asteroid!

Tuesday 9 February, we had a tinkering workshop. Tinkering is a nice way of prototyping with many different tools. We worked with littleBits, this platform consists electronic modules that snap together with magnets. We created a prototype which represents our project: the space challenge. The idea is that you try to hit the Didymoon asteroid which is twirling around Didymos. You can make this process as hard or easy as you want, depending on the speed level. It is a fun way of gaming and tells the story of the AIM-project.


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By lisagreuter February 10th, 2016

Visualise the problem

John is an average, twenty-something student who’s living his ordinary life. He has many hobbies and interests, space as one of them. One day John is watching tv and sees the launch of a satellite by the European Space Agency. He gets really excited and wants to keep track of the mission. However, a few years later, the space mission is not on his mind anymore.

We used this scenario to visualise the user problem in video form. Our next task will be to define our user problem(s) better by continuing our research on the target group.

Keep you posted!


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By lisagreuter February 8th, 2016

Space Challenge: It’s not rocket science!

Space missions are fascinating, but they’re also very complex, take a huge effort and an enormous amount of time. How can we involve a broader audience in this process in co-operation with ESA? We will design an informative and playful method to create awareness and engagement about challenges that a space mission encounters.

So, to give a brief indication of how we think our target group is like we divide them in two sections. Section 1: The people who are interested in space but forget to keep track of it and section 2: people who think they’re NOT interested in space because they believe the theory is too complex for them to understand. Our main group falls in section 1. How can they benefit from constant information about space missions?

The space mission we’re talking about in our case is called AIM (Asteroid Impact Mission). In October 2020 AIM will launch from the earth to reach a group of asteroids named Didymos and (a smaller asteroid) Didymoon. The arrival of the AIM satellite will take place in May 2022. AIM will investigate the asteroids and gather information about the infrastructure. These asteroids won’t form a threat to the earth, but it is a smart move to figure out more about asteroids in general, just to be prepared when future asteroids will be making their way towards the earth.

So, where do we start and how are we going to work? First we need to think about why people are losing their interest during a particular space mission. We assume it’s probably because the people are not provided with any new information about the space mission. This is the problem we’re facing here. So how are we (as a team) trying to get people excited about space missions and evoke awareness and engagement. In the end we will deliver an interactive method which will be the solution to our user problem.

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