Process

Our project started with the initial idea of wanting to make the CMU campus more lively. To create a space where students can relax and interact with one another. However, we wanted to share our project with the greater community of Pittsburgh and hence looked at other spaces. Once we identified bus stops as our creative space we moved on to ideating the experience.

Some of the themes that emerged from ideation were:

• Interaction 
• Collaboration 
• Competition 
• Exploration 
• Safety 

Playing games was central to our idea since it facilitates interaction. While gaming can be competitive, we wanted to focus on collaboration as the primary method of interaction. We looked at the different ways in which we could incorporate the gaming experience at a bus stop.  

Since our idea revolved around collaboration rather than competition, we looked at ways in which people could come together to light up the bus stop stand with their combined efforts. We considered having bus stops light up differently across the city to reflect the character of the area and promote exploration. We also considered interactions between bus stops on opposite sides of the road. In all these instances, we faced a few challenges. 

• How can we make it intuitive?
• How can we clearly and easily communicate to the user the functionality of the system/game?
• How can we make it interesting for the user to want to interact with our system not once but multiple times?

Our final concept design takes these challenges into consideration and works at creating a system that facilitates interactions in an intuitive, engaging and simplified manner.