Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
ideaPortals
ideaPortals

ideaPortals

One-liner
Crowdsourcing urban design feedback
Type

ideaPortals were a prototyping project grant-funded by the Mesa Arts Center for the first-ever Main St. Prototyping Festival

My original vision and product idea was to measure how city-goers felt in various parts of downtown, and to encourage them to share ideas for making it better:

The original mockup to win the grant
The original mockup to win the grant

Over time, the concept evolved into a more tech-enabled design:

ideaPortals v1 at the Main St. Prototyping Festival
ideaPortals v1 at the Main St. Prototyping Festival

The term “idea portal” was intended to capture the fact that they were physical portals into “user ideas” or feedback from local city-goers. The portals were designed for city-goers to submit an idea and vote their emotion within that space.

Once we won the grant, I started refining the design and realized two things:

  1. It was likely that few people would take the time to write their thoughts down. We’d need to reduce friction if we wanted higher engagement rates.
  2. By using electronic buttons, we could report the data on a public dashboard!

From there, we created the five ideaPortals with a product team of seven:

And placed them throughout the city, among the other prototypes:

The number of interactions at each portal during the Prototyping Festival
The number of interactions at each portal during the Prototyping Festival

image
image
image
image
image

Each ideaPortal contained question prompts in two languages (Mesa has a large population of Spanish-speakers that I wanted to include), five “emoji buttons,” a chalkboard to submit ideas, and—most importantly!—an IoT-connected hardware setup to relay the button data to our interactive web portal displaying the results:

image

We also built a website and marketed it to people across our social media networks:

image
image

One of the visitors during the 3-day Prototyping Festival was none other than the Assistant City Manager of Scottsdale, who contacted us to request that we deploy our ideaPortals at the upcoming Scottsdazzle festival!

Needless to say, we were absolutely thrilled and promptly submitted a proposal which won us not one, but TWO opportunities to put the ideaPortals in action:

Catching some sun
Catching some sun
Getting some love!
Getting some love!
image

At the end of each event, I put together a detailed report of the data and ideas-based chalkboard results:

Conscious-WesternWeek-report.pdf1655.6KB
image

Overall, it was an incredible learning experience!

I learned to write a proposal for a competitive grant. I honed my 3-D design skills and formed relationships with local business owners willing to help me in my vision. I discovered a new way to connect with my father. I got to collaborate with some of my best friends and my then-girlfriend-now-wife 😊. I cut my teeth on GovTech / having a government agency as a client. And I had a blast doing it all!

Thanks to all who participated & perhaps one day ideaPortals will live again. 🙌

💡
image

jeremy.chevallier.net

🏡  Home

✏️  Writing

👨🏼‍🏫  Coaching

🎨  Art & 🎹  music & 🧰  templates

© 1993-2022 Jérémy Chevallier

Site built on Notion and styled with Portal.