monster-us
is a gamified pothole reporting service where pedestrian can report and draw on dangerous potholes they found during their walk.
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Practise : Urban Design
Timeline: 1 week
Project team: Jose | Nina | Herin | Shin
Roles: Concept, narrative, protoyping
the narrative
We created a monster origin story to make it an engaging fun activity for pedestrians to participate in reporting dangerous potholes on the street.
It all started with the pothole monsters who were happy staying underneath our concrete path. Until one day their food (tar and concrete) were diminishing and thus creating those scary potholes that made them resurface and chomps on anything that falls into them.
the quest
When the pedestrian found a pothole during their walk, they can scan and tag the pothole location.
During the tagging activity, the drawing tool will be activated for them to imagine and draw how the monster could look like.
the fun
If your monster creation get profiled, congratulations! You can revisit the location and see your doodle being drawn in REAL LIFE.
Activate the AR camera to see it come to life!
Other users could also browse the profile, or even give a "bitten" vote if they were chomped by the monster before!
THE HALL OF FEAR
The ultimate goal is to rank the most dangerous monster-us pothole, hoping to draw authorities attention for immediate action.
Once the monster is fed and returned back to the underworld, there is a page in the app to remember the fun times you discovered them on our streets.
HOW DID WE GET THERE?
During our one-day research, we discovered many streets in San Jose, Costa Rica are having potholes problem that endangers the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, especially during the night.
The team found this a great opportunity for an urban design intervention and came up with a design challenge.
How might we draw attention to open drains & potholes, so that it heightens awareness of its danger?
I guess we all took the design challenge literally and drew a monster figure around one of the pothole to test if it captures pedestrian's attention.
We quickly learned that as it may look attractive in day time, at night it would be harder to notice as San Jose's street are not brightly lit.
We imagined during the night the projection will be activated if it senses pedestrian around the pothole vicinity to warn them before they fall into the pothole.
We did a quick projection prototype to test if it helps with the night visibility. It managed to get some of the pedestrian attention but we realized it may not be feasible as potholes occur at random spots that may not have a space to install the projector.
The team wanted the pothole spotting to be a social effort, and started thinking about gamifying the pothole reporting activity into something more enjoyable, and at the same time becoming a quirky highlight of a town.
We really enjoyed the physical drawing activity around the pothole and we wanted to test how would others draw on the potholes if they have seen one. We sent out photos of different potholes we found during our research, and asked our cohort to draw the pothole monsters.
We were delighted to see how the collective result looks really playful with everyone's creation. Thus this led us to the final concept idea of making this a social mobile app that easily allow pedestrian report their location and find the pothole monsters as they walk around the city.
