Speculative Design
Speculative urban technology concepts catalog and prototype; Collaboration with a group of researchers at UC Santa Cruz during my internship there
The project aimed to go beyond the traditional focus of smart cities on efficiency and productivity. Instead, we explored the potential of urban spaces to be socially and culturally engaging, emotionally rich, and playful. We designed a catalog of future-oriented technology concepts that stimulate playful and social interactions within the urban space. The ideas in the catalog were inspired by our research on the play potentials of urban spaces, identifying forms of playful interaction that already exist in people's daily urban practices. The project was completed in collaboration with researchers at UC Santa Cruz, as part of an internship exploring increasingly playful smart city innovation.
Concept development | User Research | Co-Design | Future Design | Prototype | Editorial Design
Play potentials are spontaneous manifestations of playful engagement that emerge in the wild. In this first part of the project,we "catch play potentials" in the urban spaces, and we did that thru two interventions: Chasing play on social media and a play & culture workshop
With the catalog done, we performed a series of interviews and another workshop with experts to polish the ideas and select the ones with more potential to prototype. I was in charge of a team to prototype a version of the "sensorial memory bench", that we transformed into a sensorial memory box to make the testing.
A short video recorded on the testing day. Every part of the box hides a story that happened in that place, and the user can listen to them.
