Hello, I am Tian Lan. I had a visual communication background and now I am learning interaction design and design innovation. I am really interested in the design strategy, especially how to use visual language to illustrate what it is. This project process journal is talking about how I work with communities to find their potential needs and use these valuable things to offer more useful service, and also how I feel and what I learnt from this project.
The RNLI is a national charity, but they are strongly rooted in local communities through their lifeboat stations and volunteers. “Our strength lies in operating through local teams, centrally directed and resourced.� (RNLI Business Plan, 2016). Coastal communities are deeply attached to their lifeboat stations, and in fact many lifeboat stations are still in operation because they are part of the local heritage as rather than because their strategic value. Better lifeboats, which have more function, mean that some lifeboat stations are no longer necessary. However they are maintained because they provide some other value to their local community.
What is this value, and how might we be able to enhance or change it to create more value (visible or invisible) for RNLI? Kessock Station Provide Washing Service for Cars
The main challenge we are working on is about how RNLI might evolve it’s traditional cash based donation system or mechanism into an interactive user transaction experience that supports economic sustainability and offers wider public engagement. On my mind, the main purpose of our project is enhancing existing donor experience or charity service in some way. Commonly, charity is a kind of giving without return. However, with the increasing of people’s psychological needs, they start to pay more attention on the feeling which comes from donation processing. But it is hard to say whether people know exactly what the feeling is. I am not trying to define what people really need, because it’s totally depends on the different groups they belong to. I am just assume that if we can offer some interactive things according to our limited investigation for local evidences, we can prove that the change we have brought for the existing context is useful or not. In other words, it is a good way to test whether the RNLI need to improve these aspect for local evidences in the future.
Personally, Charity is a series of non-profit social activities. However, in order to maintain daily operation, they have to obtain certain money through fundraising or public welfare activities. So the public is often very cared about this part. People want to know where the money comes from and where they will go. Therefore, we collected a lot of data about RNLI's financial statistics from the Internet. (img) At the same time, we learned from this video (https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_ charity_is_dead_wrong) that people also have various kinds of unfair and prejudiced treatment of charity, because the charity activity is a matter of great need for trust and self-discipline. In comparing the operability between the two, we believe that it is more valuable to re-think people's psychological patterns in conducting charitable activities because we found that their financial management is undertaken by another independent foundation. In the management and operation of funds itself, RNLI does not play a leading role in it. Therefore we tried to explore how people’s feeling when they participate in donation activities.
Context
Stakeholder Map This stakeholder map is made by myself, and also Gul gave me some advices to expand. I used different size to show the different contribution with donation. We can find that RNLI fundraising team have a strong connection with local people. It means they have already got a mature relationship. I assumed that this relationship as a preexisting context is hard to change. Therefore, we should put our focus on other potential groups.Although the tourists do not occupy a large proportion, they are closely related to the majority part and have potential value.
Knowledge Map
Community
Mixed feelings about levels of community support & perceptions. People who interact less with water, don’t understand importance of water safety. Closing down a station is controversial. Especially for crew. Lack of clear channels for rescued person to engage with RNLI.
Donating People want donating to be fun. Educated & captive audiences more likely to donate.
Internal Culture Large amount of donation data is unclassified. Strong relationships & immensely high level of commitment.
Volunteering
Volunteer crew highly skilled. Communication, First Aid, Crisis management. Many have pre-existing relationship with water (work, play, childhood).
Collaboration Local businesses very supportive. Donations and time. Limited collaboration with tourist industry (only boxes on boats).
Monetize Assets Public speaking, crisis management or first aid training for a fee. Water safety ‘experience days’. A chance to increase awareness as well as generate income.
New assets
Interactive artefacts (e.g. juke-boxes or installations) which jointly educate & act as donation points. Technological solution to help RNLI make most of their data & improve their targeting. Raise profile of RNLI & water safety in highly visual way.
Capitalize on tourism Embed RNLI stations, artefacts / history into tourist trail.
According to our research results, we raised some questions :
How to… • Enhancing relationships between local communities and RNLI. • Make people feel more connected with donations. • Make giving more fun • Encouraging longer term donation commitments. • Exploring funding opportunities opened up by new technologies.
How might the Royal National Lifeboats Institute evolve it’s traditional cash based-donation system into an interactive user transaction experience that supports economic sustainability and offers wider public engagement?
Engagement ideation • Engaging with community members to understand their donation experiences, test out new ideas & provide opportunity for participation. • Sharing insights and initial concept ideas with RNLI team members, for them to sense check and participate in concept development.
In my opinion, engagement tools should be a medium which can build a link between interviewee and interviewer. Interviewee can remind their memories by these tools and interviewer can collect interviewee’s data from these tools.
Engagement tool
First one is a paper box like donation box, made by all of us. People can write their memories about donating and then put them in this box, just like donating. We try to simulate the behavior of donation in this way and use this behavior to arouse people's deeper memory in consciousness which come from donation experience. And this tool is focus on local communities.
Second one is a wood box made by me. At the beginning, I plan to build a scene to evoke lifeguard’s experiences about drowning by Lego toys. But we need to bring this tool to lifeboat station to engage with crew members, so this tool must be portable. Then I decided to use a case which can fold different size wood cards in it. People can open it and pick one card up to talk about their memories about this element. And this tool is focus on RNLI team members.
As we had previously assumed, RNLI is firmly rooted in the local communities, so its connection with local residents is very strong. From the public awareness to the operating model, this relationship is difficult for us to change, so we turned our attention to another tourist who has more development potential. Compared with local residents, tourists are characterized by high mobility and strong consumer awareness. Flowing crowd can bring energy to push new things happen, while consumer awareness promotes donation development directly. The RNLI has their own corporate culture. These cultural cores have the genes of indigenous traditional cultures. Before that, they have not been well magnified and displayed. Under the guidance of the tourism industry, both of them can be quickly and effective to build more substantial links, and ultimately into a tourist souvenir with commercial value and cultural connotation.
Ideation Who
In our visits and surveys of local residents, we gradually realized that local residents had a more mature view of donation behaviour. On the one hand, these opinions laid the foundation for their stable and continuous donating. But on the other hand, such a solid understanding cannot bring new opportunities for donation. In my opinion, moray as a tourist destination, visitors can be a good medium for new changings. Therefore, we chose to use tourists as our main users. We heard from many people that they support causes which have affected them or their loved ones. So we also think it should also pull in the local community. Maybe we can suggest that schools local to the heritage sites, can enter into the‘key design’ competition.
What
It can be a souvenir, lock, gift or anything you want let it be, but it is a kind of medium in fact. It is a medium which can connect tourists with their memories, it is a medium which can connect people with RNLI. And in the behavioural model, it accords with the logical relationship between giving and getting, which is very similar to donation.
Where
There will be advertising online, through a social media campaign and there will also be posters at the major airports, bus stations and rail stations about the trial. People can buy the love locks at vending machines all around Moray, and either keep them as memories, or take up the offer to lock them on the identified sites.
When
Passers by will be able to see the lock locks monuments and can scan them to find out more. And participants will have access to it when they arrive in Moray.
Why
Because of our main user are tourists, so we put our focus on tourists needs and how we guide their needs to connect with RNLI. Firstly, the lock can satisfy people’s needs of indirect experience, people can participate in lock events by the lock. Secondly, the key can satisfy people’s needs of memories in future. Lastly, the lock and the key can be a medium to encourage tourists to donate money to RNLI indirectly, and also the application can be a media platform to popularize RNLI things to people who may care.
The bucket trail inspired us to come up with the idea for lock. This trail used different character toys which made by local artists. And Keys designed according to the outline of different monuments. (https://creative-review.myshopify.com/ blogs/news/an-interactive-treasure-huntcase-study-have-you-seen-oor-wullie)
In my opinion, souvenirs hold strong symbolic value related to pleasurable travel experiences in people's lives We wanted to offer people something which both held local value, as well as something that was universally understood. The love lock has become an extremely prevalent artefact, commemorating a travellers visit, they are used to capture a moment, as evidence of visit, and as a conversation point.
However in some cases it has become a nuisance, overloading weight on bridges and creating an issue for local councils. Some councils have found alternatives to this trend. Out concept plays on the idea of subverting the use of a love lock, turning it into a precious artefact that is kept, but may in time, become part of a designated trali of love lock ‘locations’, with a unique key becoming the commemorative part.
Here is a demo to show what it is.
Here is a demo to show what it is.
We plan to print a QR code on the lock and brochure. When tourists get the lock, they can read brochure or scan the QR code to know how to use the lock and trail.
Users can download our app by scanning this QR code. Then this app can be used as a good platform to give users suggestions and routes in their trips. Users can also through this platform to obtain information on RNLI, so as to achieve cultural promotion of RNLI.
This screen is used to embed our donation box of an interactive system and it was designed by me and arjav, the meaning of this concept is to add more interactive experience, existing form of donation and donor of the user experience of ascension. Users can choose to donate different amounts of money to get different rewards, and when the user chooses to donate a pound, they'll be able to use the photo print for free; When users choose to donate five pounds, they will get free love lock. When users choose to donate ten pounds, they will get a free photo print and two love locks.
The concept was proposed by arjar, but I don't think he developed the concept very well, because he did not have effective communication with me and gul in the development stage. The device, in his view, was more technical than the concept of development, so he ignored me and gul's voice many times, because we had no corresponding technical experience. But in my opinion, as a concept of development, it should not be restricted by technology, it should look to the future and focus on the needs of users. And we combinated our concept together finally.
Prior to this concept, we have also mentioned several different concepts to bridge the gap between RNLI and tourists. However, these concepts had obvious deficiencies in the early stages of development. The first is our movable wall. This concept comes from Arjav. In my opinion, this wall has indeed established a novel interaction model and links the elements of RNLI with it. But as a installation, first of all its mobility is poor, because its shape is a cuboid, so its stability is poor; Secondly, the meaning of choosing the wall itself as a carrier is not clear, I think it is difficult to explain why we and the audience To choose the wall, if our device can be embedded into the wall instead of the wall itself, such as the projector can be cast on a variety of planes, it reduces the space constraints, then it is more reasonable.
Storyboard of Love Lock Trail
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This subject for me, one of my harvest is learned how to through the analysis of scenarios to find problems and to solve the problems according to the known information. For example, our donation box can get different services by donating different amounts. In the beginning, when we set up the donation of a pound, users can use the selfie service on this machine. However, by analysing the characteristics of the selfie itself, I find that the selfie plays an important role in the journey of people. The reason for the lack of space and time is that people can take selfies at any time and place. It seems like a contradiction to me, and if the user tries to take a selfie, it takes up a lot of time in this machine, which weakens the other functions and even affects the experience of other users. So, I analysed the potential needs of the selfie users from another perspective. By analysing what I found, the photo of the user's selfie will be preserved in the form of an electronic file, which is not physical, so it can't interact with the user in the real world. That means that the connection between digital and physical photos is missing a port to switch. As far as I know, there is a kind of fast printing photos of the micro printer, can be fast printing through a Bluetooth connection to the mobile devices, and print out on the back with double-sided adhesive, you can paste anywhere as a souvenir. I don't think this solution has reduced operational costs and improved the user experience, rather than the previous selfie machine.
The second one is rethinking about visual communication. I'm going to start with a word: "recognition". Our topic focuses on local communities and RNLI from the beginning. RNLI's recognition is their logo, uniforms and lifeboats. But local communities do not have recognition like that. So, I started to think about what the local communities are, or how to define a region as local communities. By collecting the relevant information I think that the local communities we've been working on are actually a small cluster of users in the current situation as a unit of native residents. The identification of this user group seems to me to be lower than RNLI, but what is interesting is that the recognition between them can be converted to each other. The main reason is that RNLI's main staff comes from local volunteers. When volunteers wear uniforms and participate in the development of RNLI they will be considered a part of RNLI, when they take off their uniforms and return to their homes, they will be considered a part of the local communities. In this scenario, the presence of recognition is not to distinguish, but to convert. This phenomenon provides a new possibility for the visual language to convey the object in a certain context.
3 The last one is about how culture can be used to convey its unique meaning through the language of the semiotic language. Through observation and experience, I learned about the popularity of lock culture in European tourism culture. The lock itself has its own symbolic language, hidden. At first, I thought the secrecy was difficult to establish direct contact with tourism. With the collection and observation of news and data in this field, I believe that this culture originated from the herd mentality and developed into a popular language with the gradual expansion of scale. How can a popular language establish a connection with regional cultural symbols? Personally, I think it can be achieved through interaction. We introduced a very simple interaction model, "unlocked". The key itself, as a tool, gives people a certain form of participation, and it passes through the people's participation to turn the message from passive to active. In the end, intangible culture attracts people through symbolic language to achieve the purpose of communication. However, there are some difficulties in the implementation of this model, such as the balance of functionality and artistry in the process, and the differences in the interpretation of symbolic language by people with different knowledge backgrounds. Additional costs may arise in business operations.
Thanks!