Concept

The OZCHI 24-hour design challenge topic was “Find yourself in Melbourne: the future of maps.” We had 24 hours to design our vision of the future of maps and demonstrate the concept as it would be used in the city of Melbourne.

StoryTime is a system of geographically associated stories as told by the people who experienced them. StoryTime allows visitors to a location to explore a place from a new perspective, providing insight into the lives of those who live there.

Process

We began by researching Melbourne, and looking for inspiration from existing unusual maps. Next we listed potential user groups and discussed how some of the map ideas we saw could apply to them. Once we agreed on a set of target users, we created personas and brainstormed map concepts, focusing on trying to push the concept of a map to meet the needs and desires of our users.

Our final concept drew on ideas from psychogeography and participatory mapping to encourage people to share and experience stories associated with the places around them, to foster a sense of history and community. With the core of our design defined, we refined the details of how the StoryTime would work.

Results

For the contest entry we created a video. Our entry won second place in the online challenge, and were invited to write a paper about our design, which was published in a special section of the OZCHI ‘09 Proceedings. You can view a pdf version of the paper here.