Week 4, NUDC: Mentor Meeting

Hello again,

For week four we had a meeting with our academic mentor Sean. At this point we had already got a good outline of the mid-term presentation which allowed us to go through it with Sean making sure it was efficiently informative of our research. Specifically, we went through our goals for the project along with our prioritization and stakeholders. The meeting acted as a reassurance for us that we were on the correct path. With the conclusion of the meeting we decided that the main stakeholder as the target for the project would be students, tailored for the JRA rather than the council.

Furthermore, the seminar gave us some time to go through relative literature about different digital civics projects. For example, one of the inspirations that we had from said literature was the VoxBox, a playfully nostalgic booth that provided the user with a reward in the form of a simple ball. With the addition of an old phone set with a clunky aesthetic it stood out in public and tapped into the public’s curiosity. This led us to the importance of grabbing the user’s attention before they even become a user of the prototype, furthermore this example showed that there is a lot of freedom available for the design of the prototype that could make it eye-catching and intriguing.