Australia's horrendous bushfires of 2020 caused death, devastation and destruction. Over 30 people died and thousands of acres of land were burned to a crisp. The damage to people and homes was seen widespread, however the media seldom showcased the damage to the habitats of native animals and plants. IBM iX partnered with my university to guide us to form a final product which gave users knowledge of conservation efforts in the wake of the fires.
Animal Rescue aims to bring light to conservation efforts made all over the country, in a novel, gamified solution.
Animal rescue is a hybrid solution, combining both physical and digital aspects to teach people about the impacts of the bushfires on the declining numbers of animals in rural areas. It would work by introducting a game that users could join by tapping their phones to a 'pole', giving them access to a particular animal.
The physical portion of this solution was a specially designed pole, custom to each animal being represented. This pole would be placed in various places around the main city, particularly around parks.
The pole's design, using a wooden-styled top, paired with a darker paint meant that the animal would always be the centre of attention. Meanwhile the animal takes the shape of whatever animal would be provided, but it's colours would be adjusted to make it pop even more.
Figure 1: An example of the NFC Pole used to give a user an animal.
The digital portion of the solution was used to display all collected animals, the current status of each animal and information about the relevant animals in the app.
The digital section starts off as an un-intrusive web-app version of the game, where the users can still collect their animals and grow them as they please. All information and donation methods are available on this web-app, which aims to eventually convert users over to the mobile application.
The game itself focuses on trying to encourage users to grow the number of animals that they have, eventually bringing their animals from 'critical status' to 'no concern'.
Figure 2: A sample mockup of the full mobile application.
My study of animal conservation began through an exploration of the userbase. We aimed to answer a set of questions to help gain a better insight into the problems that current users were facing in terms of not being able to support these efforts in such a trying time for all. My group and I answered these questions through the use of interviews, questionnaires and context-mapping activities, finally synthesising them into some main ideas:
Do people know that there are struggles in conservation efforts?
Do people know how to donate to show their support?
What motivates people to support the animals?
The research conducted found a wide array of information, alluding to the fact that the general public was generally unaware of the issues with conservation efforts. Simultaneously, people were not motivated by simple advertising and needed something that was more relatable to increase donations to help rehabilitation. Advertising about conservation in the media was much darker and quantitative than people wanted, leading to the general public shying away from following stories about rehabilitation.
Figure 3: A quote from a user, displaying how quantitative statistics are not as impactful.
Our ideation phase followed soon after this, where my group and I used various creative thinking methods to approach this complex problem. In particular, we produced 4 main concepts, and combined a few to create a fifth. We used a decision matrix to narrow down our ideas, assisting us towards the end of this stage of our project.
Concept 1
NFC Pole
Concept 2
Fun for All
Concept 3
Animal Pole
Concept 4
Eco Guide
Figure 4: Our set of ideas from our first ideation phase. These each attempted to solve a different aspect of our identified problems.
Continuing through the project, we needed to conduct some research into concepts that would help round out the solution. Near Field Communications (NFC) was a new and upcoming technology which has since been used in payment systems, data transfer and more. This was our proposed medium to easily transfer the information of 'collecting' an animal in the game, as it was seamless and simple to do.
Finally, we needed to gamify our game! We created a target for the users: to save each species by improving it's status from 'critically endangered' when they collected the animal first, to 'no concern' as they grew their numbers. The users would be able to feel themselves passing breakpoints by gaining experience, making growing animals easier. They could speed up the process by purchasing items from the shop (all proceeds of which would go to conservation efforts), and finally, they would have their own quests per level.
Figure 5: Some of the screens used in the final mockup.
Paired with this, we wanted to be able to showcase our final solution in a succinct and simple manner. We created a video which displayed a mockup of our NFC Animal Pole, paired with someone using the pole in the environment. We used software including Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro to track and place our 3D model into the real world.
Figure 6: Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro edits, as well as some mockups of the pole with different animals
We concluded the project with a study of how users would understand interactions and feel at different touchpoints of the system with a User Journey Map.
Figure 7: The User Journey Map representing the user's feelings at each touchpoint in the system.
