PROJECT PROCESS DOCUMENT
BHAUMIK KAJI I am an Interaction Designer from India. I am studying M. Des. in Design for Digital Experience at National Institute of Design, Bangalore, India. This project was a part an of exchange course at School of Design, The Glasgow school of Arts, Scotland under M.Sc. in International Management and Design Innovation. www.bhaumikkaji.com http://www.gsa.ac.uk/study/graduate-degrees/international-management-design-innovation/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express our special thanks of gratitude to our tutor Iain Reid as well as Emma Murphy for the continuous support and feedback during the project. I would like to extend our thanks to the Glasgow School of Art for providing us with the possibility to visit and experience Forres first hand. Secondly, I also would like to thank the people we met in Forres and supported our project in various ways. In that regards, I would like to express special thanks to the group which took the time to visit us and provided us with valuable information regarding the topic. I would also like to thank Irene Bell for facilitating me for this opportunity and helping me to be a part of this great academic adventure. Everybody had a significant impact on the outcome and success of the research and we truly appreciated it.
INDEX STUDY AND DISCOVER [ WEEK 1 - 4 ] Desk Research, Field Research, Our Experiences
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DEFINE [ WEEK 5 - 7 ] Information Gathering, Opportunities, Values, Vision, Mission
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DEVELOP [ WEEK 8 - 10 ] Idea Generation, Pool of Ideas, Implementation Matrix
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DELIVER [ WEEK 11 - 12 ] Forres Identity, Forres Tourism Website, Value Additions
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INTRODUCTION This brief asked us to explore Tourism business sectors within the Highlands and Islands with a view to developing proposals with impact on enterprise and community. The project looked at the above key sectors within the Highland town of Forres and the surrounding area of Moray. Our Tasks: To gain an understanding of ‘Business Culture’ in the Highlands and Islands (with a particular focus on Forres) to identify the components which shape and influence this business culture, and to be able to communicate this clearly in an appropriate form for relevant audiences. • Propose new business ideas and services for existing businesses in the area that could boost (quadruple) bottom line and skills in the area; facilitate dealings with national/international partners; create jobs for future generations of residents; attract incomers etc. • Identify the support (resources/ networks/ knowledge) that your ideas may require. • Locate your ideas with the local community. • Be able to articulate design’s value in the proposals you develop.
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THE TEAM ASSEMBLES I was a late addition to the groups formed by our mentors. I decided to join the Tourism group for this project. And then I met Andreas, Yuki and Dido (L-R) for this project. I couldn’t have asked for more suitable team mates for these project. We really enjoyed working together and executing this project with and everyone contributing and giving their very best in making this project a success.
SO WHERE IS FORRES ?
Forres is a town and Royal Burgh situated in the North of Scotland on the Moray coast, approximately 25 miles east of Inverness. There are geographical and historical attractions nearby such as the River Findhorn, and there are many historical artefacts and monuments within the town itself. Forres has a population of around 15,000 people and boasts a beautiful park that has seen it win Scotland in Bloom for years in succession. It has a strong sense of community and there is currently a desire within the town to build business, but to keep the residents’ interests at heart.
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Places of tourist interests from google maps
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DESK RESEARCH We started the project with brainstorming, asked ourselves what tourism meant and discovering what mattered the most while trying to improve upon it. We started doing secondary research about Forres and started finding information that could help us understand the place and give details about the existing tourism industry in and around forres. We created a brief user questionnaire to ask and get insights from people of forres. We also prepared a map of interest areas for our project before we went to forres for primary research. The user questionnaire for people of forres
DISCOVER
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Brainstorm - What is Tourism ?
FORRES TOWN Forres High Street (Left), City Church(Top-Right), Benromach Distillery(Bottom-Right)
FIELD RESEARCH
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The whole class went to Forres for 5 days study trip. This was a really exiting time in the project as the context and location was completely new. We were really happy that we were trying to improve the tourism aspect of the place where we ourselves went as tourists. So we could ourselves put us in feet of our users and follow the user journey.
Horizon Scotland, Lightening Talk Members ( Top - Bottom ), Francis Powel - FACT Development Officer ( Right )
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LIGHTENING TALKS First things we did coming to forres was to attend the Lightening talks by the reputed residents and Moray council member, who gave us information about forres, shared their experiences and life in Forres. We had members from Moray council, Town centre officials, City local business owners and local residents as part of these lightening talks. These talks were really great. as we got to interact in person with these people and helped create good connections for our field research. They really helped us with vital historical facts, local stories, people’s perception and current state of tourism industry in forres.
Suneo’s Stone
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Nelson’s Tower
Whisky Lounge for Visitors at Benromach Distillery
Local Candy Store in Forres
STUDIOUS TOURISTS IN FORRES Information Centre in middle of town
We did extensive walks and explored Forres on foot. We visited the places of interests and local stores talking to people and interviewing them. To our surprise we didn’t stumble upon any tourists in that time of the year but we got to know and experience closely the Forres community and culture.
Road to Nelson’s Tower
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Local Bakery
Local Stores in Forres
Forres Highstreet City Tollbooth
The Beautiful Findhorn Bay
INFORMATION DISCOVERY
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After Interactions with local people and residents we came to findout some really interesting activities and specialities of forres which weren’t discovered in secondary research. Forres is a host to World Hot Piping Championship and Forres in Bloom Events. The original place of Macbeth and one of the places in north to witness Northern Lights.
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OUR PERCEPTION AFTER VISIT People of Forres are really conservative. They have a very strong community spirit and everyone has a hands on attitude. They take real pride in hosting and executed their own initiatives but are reluctant to change. We got the notion after interacting with everyone that not everyone wants more visitors in this small community town. This is one the key reasons why Forres is not that popular among tourists visiting Scotland as their tourist destination. Also, we experienced a massive information gap from the internet and from what we collected from visiting Forres.
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There is a disconnect in the tourist information and portraying the authentic experiences and events of Forres on Internet so that tourist can choose forres for their visit.
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DEFINE
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INFORMATION TAKES A SHAPE The next thing after data collection was to analyse them again and identify the insights from the users. We took intensive notes and clicked pictures as a part of our research materials. We took all the information and put them all together in one place to get a broader picture of our research findings and observations.
Stage 1 : Information Sheets
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Stage 2 : Attraction Mapping
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Stage 3 : Problem Identification
19 Teams working on information analysis at Horizon Scotland
SYNTHESIS We did lot of stages of information synthesis with the help of various Design tools and exercises. This is really crucial stage where we had to use our design skills in collaborating and joining the connections to identify and use the insights generated.
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21 Final Insights identified from Human Body Map
FORRES AS A PERSON Human body map is a design tool which helps synthesize the user insights into understanding how to generate opportunities from it. Human body map is imagining the town of forres as a human body and categorizing the insights into 4 parts of the body, Head, Heart, Hands, Legs. All the four parts explains and relates to a particular characteristic/behaviour of a person. Head relates to what do people of forres think and what is their perception. Heart relates to the desires and exception of people of forres. Hands are what people of forres already have and can do something about it. Action items essentially. Legs represents how are people of forres grounded and what keeps them grounded to their beliefs and culture. We used one of the hand as a magic wand for people of forres that they could change magically. Human Body Map
Opportunity - Insights Matrix
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OPPORTUNITIES Once we choose around 10 top insights identified and opportunities generated from the human body map, we decided to create a filtration matrix. This matrix would have an insight in one axis and opportunity on another axis. The no. of intersection or relations an opportunity would with insights, the more important that opportunity become to solve for the tourism aspect in Forres. We Found 5 potential directions in which we could further carry out our design project with opportunities generated. Finally we created an opportunity map to communicate how we came up with design opportunities for improving tourism in forres. This map is represented by 3 concentric circles, starting from the inner most of LISTEN, then INSIGHT and finally OPPORTUNITY. This show the origin / source of the information, the insight/problem identified and then design opportunity generated.
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The Opportunity Circles
Final Opportunities Generated
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GOLDEN CIRCLE Several aspects have to be considered before the tourism industry in Forres can be redesigned. The starting point is the way tourism is communicated. The theoretical framework for that aspect is the “Golden Circle” by Simon Sinek. The “Golden Circle” revolutionizes the communication approach: the usual communication path taken by most organizations is to communicate the “what”-aspect in the first place (“we sell this product/service”) and only in some cases organizations move on to the “how” (“we made the product in this particular manner”). However, almost no organizations explain the reasoning for their product or services, the “why.” Therefore, Simon Sinek suggest to reverse this communication stream and communicate form the insight out: start with the “why.” Once your customers understand the reasoning behind you provided service or product, they are more likely to engage with you and form a long-lasting customer relationship with you.
VALUES, VISION AND MISSION After coming back from the visit, we decided to create the vision and mission statements for Forres from the values it portrayed to us and what we identified from our research. Considering Tourism at its best interest and understanding the age demographics and local people’s attitude we formulated our statements for forres.
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IDEA GENERATION For generating ideas on improving tourism in forres, we went back to the original project brief and thought on the ideas that not just boost the tourism aspect of the forres, but also considers boosting local economy and asked us how could a solution be adapted into the forres culture? We also took into consideration of future possibilities and next 5 year plans in development in forres.
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DE VE LO P!
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IDEAS We developed lot of ideas from a unique Tourism matrix that we created from understanding the complete tourism cycle and used the opportunity map together. We created a lot of ideas is various domains to boost the overall economy and address to the problems raised and addressed in opportunities.
Existing websites for information on Forres
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AUTHENTIC FORRES WEBSITE The biggest disconnect that we ourselves faced being the tourist and what we identified from our research was that there is a big information gap. The information that we got from internet was incorrect. There were very less images and no videos that showed forres and its various places on a tourist website. Moreover, the specialities that we discovered in forres were not accessible on internet from any trusted source or wikipedia page. The existing forres website is a community website which is a very poor source of tourist’s interest and lacks updation of content on its homepage. This made us realized that forres needed a great deal of web presence. We didn’t think of just creating a visual website that depicted beautiful images and lustre to the visitors, but create an authentic website that showed the true values of forres and attracts the suitable visitors to visit forres.
29 Concept Map - Exploring the Treasure Hunt idea
TREASURE HUNT Treasure hunt is a fun way to explore a place. Since Forres is not known by a large group of tourists as a tourism destination compared with Inverness and other places, a good way to promote the place is make it ‘unknown’ to visitors, which means that make Forres a place of mystery. Concentrating on the clues to a puzzle as its way of promotional marketing, creating a series of treasure trail packages to attract different group of people. Possible trail: Family treasure hunt Bloom Treasure trail Corporate (company) or personalised treasure hunt Heritage treasure hunt Whiskey treasure trail One possible way to achieve the treasure hunt could drive the traditional way of visiting a place, without using of your phone. All the tourists needed is a special kind of map (this could be a postcard, a unfinished puzzle jigsaw) and then just following all the clues in the town starting your exploring trip. During the trip collect stamps or hidden gift except for a enjoy of the different attractions.
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A similar existing beer taxi in Amsterdam
WHISKEY TAXI According to observation, we got the conclusion that Forres has a bad connectivity. We doped several ideas aiming to improve it. The first idea is the service of bicycle renting. As the fact that the existing public transport means in Forres only include taxi, long-distance bus and train, bicycle renting will surely provide tourists a more flexible and environmental travel ways. The second one named “Whisky Taxi”, which combined with transport tools and whisky, one of the most famous symbols of Forres. It can be a taxi with the pattern of whisky on it and carries on a model of whisky bottle. We believe it is an effective promoting way. The third idea is “Whisky Bike” which borrows the form of Amsterdam’s Beer Bike. It is a kind of whisky-selling car, requiring people pedalling together to let it move. On Whisky Bike, tourists can enjoy the whisky while travel around the city to get a special experience. Other ideas includes provide more taxis, set taxi spots, develop boat trips to promote Dolphins and Whale Watch and shuffle Golf Car during events in Forres.
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Some existing travel apps like LAYAR and Augmented Reality code
GPS SMART TRAVELLER This solution targets to a modern traveller who uses smart-phones to get information about any place. We imagine forres to be mapped digitally with GPS technology. A traveller can use his/her app and use camera and can see the digital information floating on his/her smart-phone screen. This would encourage a visitor in forres to engage himself more with the place as he/she has right information about the place on smart-phone. From our research, we identified that forres has rich historical facts and stories. We envision this kind of app to share these stories with the visitors making their tourism experience enhanced.
FUTURE PROJECTION
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AVIATION TOURISM Forres enjoys a strong connection to aviation. Over many decades, Forres was home to an RAF airport. The pilots stationed in Forres integrates themselves very well with the local people, who also saw the pilots as a great addition to their community. Some pilots truly enjoyed their time as part of the community of Forres so they decided – after their retirements – to move to Forres permanently. This again is a testament to the strong community culture in place in Forres. Understandably the decision of the RAF to close the airport came as a shock to the local community, since they really saw a part of their culture dying. The current situation: Forres has the infrastructure necessary for aviation (roads, airports, but also suitable weather conditions) but all of that remains unused for now. One opportunity arising from all of this is the possibility that Forres becomes an airport for space travels. Currently, Forres is one of the airports which is considered for the position. With space travel, a completely new kind of tourism would open up for Forres. In that case, Forres would need to take advantage of this new kind of tourists with additional accommodation. Furthermore, the buzz created around the space travel would bring attention to Forres, which can be used to promote Forres and its tourist attractions.
Possible opportunity to turn unused RAF Airbase as a Aviation Tourist place
Macbeth’s castle upon Dunsinane Hill near Forres
MACBETH One aspect completely ignore so far by Forres is the fact that Shakespeare’s Macbeth plays in the area. There are many tourists interested in Shakespeare in general and Macbeth in particular, because certainly the argument can be made that after Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth is his most famous play. This idea was generated when having a look at Denmark, the place where Hamlet’s castle is supposed to be located. The event is used to attract visitors to the area and even a whole festival was created around it: Shakespeare Festival at Hamlet’s Castle. It became not only a major Danish event but even a tradition for the area. The same concept can be employed by Forres with its natural connection to Macbeth. In a festival, that takes place over a couple of days during May, the city invites Shakespeare fanatics from all over the world to experience the play in an open area close to Forres.
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IDEA SELECTION As part of the research process, many ideas for improving the tourism in Forres were developed. Therefore, a system was developed that helped to evaluated each idea and new concept in terms of urgency (red), its potential return (economically as well as socially; green), and impact on culture (yellow). While involved risks and potential profits are logical aspects for consideration, the involvement of culture in the diagram has the reason that various scholars suggest that the key to a successful implementation of a change are people and the culture they create. However, one of the main conclusions during our visit in Forres was the conservative culture that is in place. Therefore, implementing change successfully in such a culture is naturally a rather difficult process. The higher the comparability is in terms of language, culture and tourism practice, the higher is the chance for a successful relationship (Scottish Development International, n.d.). Therefore, the desired shape has the form or a V; the steeper the V the better the conditions for a successful change.
Kotter’s Eight Steps of Change
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IMPLEMENTATION MATRIX As stated, the successful implementation of change is heavily based on people and their culture. Therefore, implementing change into the culture is a key process and needs to be addressed. Based on that evaluation process, the following guideline was develop. It also indicates by colour how much time is anticipated to be used to accomplish the objective with red being little time, yellow medium amount of time and green being a lot of time.
MEET THE IDEAL TOURISTS FOR FORRES
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DELIVER
Exploration - 1
Exploration - 2
We started doing some wordplay for creating the brand logo for the forres tourism. We found three same characters in words ‘Forres’ and ‘Tourism’. But we found out the readability of the logo was a problem.
We tried creating an ambigram with the character ‘f’ to represent balance and stable tourism for forres.
Final Exploration As the whole branding was an important aspect to tourism we had limited time to finalize logo design. We decided to use the exploration two with the words ‘your Forres’ which we thought was a suitable tourism name.
BRAND CREATION
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YOUR FORRES “Your Forres” is a Forres tourism brand, which relates different meanings for different visitors. It is trying to make a unique Forres for every single visitor. The brand is combined with the Forres identity of events, heritage, culture and natural beauty. Your Forres has a website which will drive visitors to explore the place online and make it easy for them to plan their trip and create and share their own Forres experience. The logo uses the first capital letter of Forres “F” as basic element to combine into a symmetrical pattern, reflecting our vision of creating a balanced tourism. The green colour gives expression to nature and sustainable development. The whole pattern is simple and impressive and shows the harmonious beauty.
Existing information sources ( Base Information )
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AUTHENTIC FORRES WEBSITE As it can be seen during the idea selection process, the idea which implementation would prove most appropriate is the website. However, designing a new homepage would only be half the step: as by definition, a homepage is just a communication vehicle. It does not include the way things are being communicate neither what is being communicate. As an example it would less effective to create a new homepage but keep the information incomplete or have an inappropriate way of communicating. Therefore, it was also decided to move the including the re-branding idea to the process of creating a new homepage and limit it to tourist aspects. Since it also would need also only short time to develop, it fits to the process of creating a website. So, after reconsidering the aspects that are needed to create an effective new website, it was decided to continue with the following structure: Forres, the brand Define tourism in Forres Use the brand in effective communication Construct suitable website
43 The Proposed Tourism Website with Features ( Integration )
Sketch Wire-frames for the Your Forres Website ( We selected green one to proceed with visual design after design critique ) Final Prototype
YOUR FORRES WEBSITE
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Homepage We designed the homepage with the big image slider in the centre of the web-page. This image slider is the place that would be dynamic in nature and would change the content after sometime. As planned we wanted to represent the authentic information of forres, so we integrated all the specialities and events on the homepage. We wanted to make the website a visual experience of Authentic forres which attracted true interested visitor. We also incorporated Your Forres Branding with the website design.
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Homepage ( Image 2 ) The website layout remains same. But we wanted to create a dedicated slider for whisky i.e. Benromach distillery as it the most visited tourist place in forres and we wanted to incorporate the whisky tourism aspect of the place.
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Homepage ( Image - 3 ) We wanted to create a dedicate page for Piping hot Forres, which is the world piping event hosted in Forres. Currently this event is not that highlighted with respect to forres as a host.
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Homepage ( Image - 4 ) We wanted to create a dedicate page for Forres in Bloom also, which is the Forres community’s own initiative . Currently this event is not that highlighted with respect to forres as a host.
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Homepage ( Image - 4 ) Forres is near to one of the best coasts in the world, the Moray Coast. We wanted to highlight its beauty and coastal activities as one of the major attractions for both nature and adventure sports visitors.
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Homepage Menu - Things to do As the menu item name suggest, this is the first section where the user is going to explore things that one can do in forres. We identified the different categories of activities and created a different sections of each of these activities. We wanted to communicate that there is alway something or other for visitors to visit in forres for their interest.
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Homepage Menu - Plan the Trip This section addresses to all the necessary information required for a visitor to come to forres and plan his/her travel, accommodation and travelling preferences.
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Homepage Menu - Destinations This section has all the places of interest for visitors in Forres and nearby locations. Here too we wanted to give stress to individual places and represent their best characteristics that the place would bring to the visitor.
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Homepage Menu - About Forres Forres is a strong community town, so we wanted to give a separate section for the people to represent information about forres culture, history, its natural beauty and climate information. We also integrated the local businesses here so that visitor can connect with the people directly though this section.
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Homepage Menu - New This is the most dynamic part of the website, where all the upcoming events and updates are made public for visitors.
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Destination Page This is a typical page that would provide an information of a particular destination in forres. This page has high quality image of the destination and also video multimedia so that people can experience the place better. We wanted to includes other people’s testimonials and all the essential historical and significant information necessary for that place. Lot of places have timings and seasons associated with their operations, which we ourselves faced when we visited this place and it was closed. So we also included timing information on this page.
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Whisky Page From our research we identified that forres has most tourism in summer season, but it has a very interest source of boost tourism in winter as well. We wanted to highlight whisky as a interest factor for whisky lovers as forres is home to one of the oldest whisky distillery. So we wanted to create a special page for visitors to show what they could also do in Winters in Forres.
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WEBSITE VALUE ADDITIONS Boost Economy / Increased Turnover Deliver Original Experience Experience > Money
Web Prototype http://marvl.in/h5hc69
THE YOUR FORRES WEBSITE IS THE PROJECT THAT BRIDGES THE INFORMATION GAP, REPRESENTS THE TRUE CULTURE AND DEPICTS THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE TO THE INTERESTED VISITOR TO FORRES
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LEARNINGS This project was a really exciting journey of understanding the inculcating skills of a serious designer. With no pre set temptations on the project solutions, the whole project was driven by serious research. We received valuable feedbacks and encouragements from fellow teammates and mentor during the whole project. Moreover the relations we built interacting with people of Forres are invaluable. This project has made me a better researcher and has given a true knowledge on how to execute an design project from scratch.
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Most importantly I wouldn’t have enjoyed or executed this project without the help and support of my dear group members Andreas, Dido and Yuki.
PROJECT REFERENCES http://forresweb.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forres http://www.forres-gazette.co.uk/ http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attractions-g551767-Activities-Forres_Moray_Scotland.html http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/findhorn http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/moray/attractions.shtml http://www.forresheritage.org/index.asp?pageid=240129 http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-methods-step-1-discover http://ronphillipstravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IMG_3605a.jpg https://www.flickr.com/photos/chriscameron/14536111844
Icons : thenounproject.com Image Credits : Flickr images Website Inspiration: http://www.greenland.com/en/ Mockup and Prototyping : Zippyshare and Marvel App
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BHAUMIK KAJI - 2015