Ericsson's Stuff
May 2009
This project was done in collaboration with Ericsson Research. They asked us to develop a location based service and this is the final result and its process.
Stuff is a service that lets you access your music, videos, photos and other files remotely and gives you access to other people or businesses' stuff depending on your location.
The idea is that you can browse your stuff or listen to your music from your laptop or mobile phone wherever you are, but if there is other stuff available in your current location, you get notified and can access to it: books and other data in the library, the collection of music and movies of the hotel you're staying at or the digital magazines, music and books available in the cafeteria where you are having a tea.
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Sponsored by Ericsson Research
Scenario: how it works?
This is the sequence that explains how does the application work. In the thumbnails above you can see the different screenshots.
Imagine you are having a coffe at Wayne's, they only have a copy of today's newspaper and somebody is already reading it, but you get a notification on your laptop or phone, so you know they have digital stuff you can acces while being at their cafeteria.
This green plus bubble shows up next to the the application icon and notifies you that there's public stuff available. By clicking on it you can switch between browsing your media or the media of the location you are in.
If there is something you like, you can purchase it directly from them at a cheaper price for being their customer or just borrow it during a certain time, so you can access it from other places until it expires. Good for you, good for them.
The ethnographic approach
When I started with this project, there was no defined problem we had to solve. Everything was wide open and the first month of the project was based on ethnographic observations and research.
I teamed up with George Paravantes and Meng Meng. Together decided to observe the university cafe during a week to find out what are people's behaviors and what location based applications we should develop based on the observations done.
Lindehallen, the name of the cafe, is a huge bar located in front of the library. It is a common meeting point and the traffic of people is quite intense depending on the time.
Cultural probes
We decided to build four cultural probe kits that were given to some people in the cafe. Our goal was to gather as much information as possible about what do they like about a public space like this one, what they don't, why do they go there, what could be better, how do they socialize, what is correct or not in that place...
The probes consisted in three basic tasks they had to complete: finish some open sentences in different moodcards, take pictures with the smileys to show us what feeling do they relate to the picture and mark places they like, don't like or where they have had good/bad experiences in a map.
There was no hurry and they could take as long as they wanted to. Later we would get the probes back.
Organizing the raw data
The amount of information gathered was incredible. We kept track of the amount of people in the cafe during a day for a week, where do people prefer to sit, the common paths the people follow until they pick a table...
It was very interesting to see that people prefer the tables on the outside first because they felt less exposed, magazines are sometimes taken and there is nothing to read while people wait for somebody... A lot of patterns became evident after looking at the information collected that were not so obvius during the first days.
This time lapse shows how we organized all the information. →
Early ideas and wireframes
From the observations realized, each of us had to work individually and develop our own service.
I decided to focus in the fact that most of people's media is becoming more digital while in public spaces it is still mostly analog. I decided to explore on how would it be possible to make it more digital and accessible to more people at the same time.
These are some of the sketches that were made during the process.
Final proposal
The final result was presented to Ericsson Research. Only the desktop application was developed for this presentation. The service would be sold to businesses as a hosting service to share files with their customers and resell music while particulars could create personal accounts to store their media in the cloud making it accessible no matter where they are.
If you still want to read more about this project: download the project report.
