We are excited to present to you the Lookout.
A tangible public interface that was designed within the COVID-19 era.
The Lookout Project is a collaboration between
Swansea University, Swansea City and County and a range of Community members.
There are two main contributions to take from this work
First, we provide a case point of the impact of the unique COVID-19 design context.
Second, we surface design characteristics that can promote the
use of public technology discovered from the evaluation of over 10,000 users.
We wanted to explore how an interactive public display
could be designed to engage members of the community with the city centres £1.3 billion regeneration program.
This would include an Arena
Pedestrian Bridge
a Coastal Park
a Car Park
and a new Housing Complex
To achieve this our initial design was based on a set of binoculars which are often seen near the seaside within the UK.
Users can walk up to these binoculars to see into the distance.
We wanted to incorporate this type of experience
by enabling the user to look into the future of Swansea city centers regeneration.
However, we needed to adapt these designs to ensure COVID safety.
Over 7 months we completed 7 co-creational workshops
with a team of 10 people external to the research team and a range of community members.
A vast number of changes were made due to these workshops.
Let's have a look at the biggest outcomes.
First, let's have a look at the physical changes that were made.
It was clear that adaptations needed to be made due to the ongoing COVID pandemic.
We decided to move away from our initial virtual reality headset design into a tablet based design
but we still wanted to ensure that users could interact with the device safely.
Therefore, within our workshops we evaluated two different options to enable interactions with the content
Elbow-based interactions and foot-based interactions.
Within a workshop with Sight Life, a Swansea based charity who aid the partially and non-sighted
we discovered that foot-based levers could be a trip hazard.
Therefore, we opted for the elbow-based design.
In addition, they helped us to co-create the final landscape design for the surroundings of the lookout
which included contrasting pathway colours
and the addition of boundary trees and benches.
Creating an inclusive device was a key aim for us
and therefore two different installations were created to ensure that adult pedestrian's
wheelchair users and children were able to interact with our device.
The Lookout for wheelchair users also has an extended elbow-lever area
to provide extra spacing under the device to enable comfortable interaction within a wheelchair.
In addition, we adapted the heights of the overall designs to ensure equal viewing opportunities for all genders.
A set of pictograms were co-created within one of our workshops
which included both graphical and written explanations in Welsh and English
for how to interact with this new type of technology
to enable users with a range of skills to understand the device.
In fact, all written text is provided in both English and Welsh
to enable users to interact in their most proficient language.
Whilst being a helpful information tool for the users to engage with the ever-changing city centre.
It was important to our workshop participants that the interaction was also fun for the community.
Therefore, a picture taking opportunity was incorporated with a series of filters
something that the children especially enjoyed whilst interacting with the deployed device.
Throughout, the nine month deployment we completed observational studies, interviews and data logging
and found that over 10,000 users interacted with the Lookout
for roughly 2 minutes over this time period.
Within our observations we found that the majority of users interacting were doing so in family groups.
An interaction would often begin with a child running down from the top of the high-street
to the Lookout to start interacting, whilst their guardians followed at a gentler pace behind them.
From this it was therefore, no surprise to find that within interviews
guardians hoped to see more interactive technologies such as the Lookout
incorporated throughout the city centre for them to play with.
In addition, we found that users found the drone footage section of the software particularly helpful
in understanding the scale of the site
and where the buildings were in relation to them.
This part of the software takes the user from the Lookout
up into the air and across the entire development site using a drone.
We found that users would commonly interact with the Lookout in pairs or groups
making it a new memory for them together
something that we all missed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Looking back we would like to thank our stakeholders
co-designers, participants, facilitators and funding agencies who enabled this work.