We designed a series of pop-up kiosks and an interactive iPad game that worked to empathize data centered around High Blood Pressure in Nashville.
Our team was commissioned by Belmont University & the Belmont Data Collaborative to create something that tells a story in an interactive way, to engage people with real world numbers that may be daunting.
In doing so, guests of the event who had the power to make changes based around this data were more able to understand and become personally motivated to help tackle this issue.
The original idea for the kiosk was to make a puzzle-style board map of Nashville, where you can remove each zip code area to reveal information.
However, we later pivoted to a different interactive design that used hinged trapdoors. We did this because the shapes from the map were too complex to properly display the information.
We landed on a simpler, information-forward approach, but maintained the interactive element, with door that opened to reveal different text and graphics.
The concept of our Stories of Nashville game actually came from the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books Grace read as a kid.
By allowing the user to help our personas make life decisions, they would be able to empathize with the barriers and struggles that are present in the daily life of someone struggling with high blood pressure.
While the user explores the story, we presented data in-game from the Belmont Data Collaborative that's relevant to each story, since raising awareness was our primary objective.
Below is an example of what kind of planning goes into the initial story pathways of the game during the first part of development:
Complex, information-heavy designs like this often take a lot of moving parts and a combination of multiple techniques to pull off effectively.
For example, the kiosk combines digital design files like these, with a more hands-on, physical implementation that requires a lot of woodshop time.
The game requires a different kind of effort, that involves persistence and devotion to tinkering until the interface looks and works just right. Here are a couple of iterations before the final design:
Despite the many weeks and hours of exploration, development, and rethinking, this was still a wonderful opportunity for us to serve as a part of something bigger, and the satisfaction during the event, seeing people get interested, was worth it.
