In 2015, the United Nations' Member States agreed to a set of objectives known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure better lifestyles of our children. In particular, Target 11.7 focuses on safety in public spaces, aiming to “...provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces…” (United Nations, 2022).
The Safer Together project seeks to tackle the aspect of safety in cities with a unique and innovative solution that has a combination of a physical product and digital application.
Our solution aimed to combat the problem of safety at night by invoking feelings of companionship and familiarity in users. In particular, it aimed this solution towards those between 16 to 34 years of age.
The physical product, a small plush keychain that comes in the form of familiar toys, acts as an easy-to-use personal protection device.
The application aims to solve this problem by creating a network of users that can choose to walk together in unsafe situations. For example, if someone is walking home from the station, they can choose to walk with someone else that is walking in the same direction, thereby invoking that feeling of safety through companionship.
This product's design took over two months, with numerous design and testing iterations. My team and I first began by identifying the problem space by answering the following questions:
Who is unsafe?
Why are they unsafe?
How can we make them feel safer?
We conducted thorough user testing and evaluation processes, as well as primary research on existing solutions in the market. Most of this research pointed to the fact that the perception of 'unsafety' was more important than the actual feeling of 'unsafety'.
This implied that our designed product simply had to improve the user's perception of safety, and this would lead to the user actually becoming more safe. Although this seemed like a leap at first, we understood these were linked because of the user's confidence.
Using this information, we used an Affinity diagram to model our results, seen in figure 1.
Figure 1: Part of an affinity diagram, used to model data from user research.
Using this data modelling tool, we were able to synthesise a set of main needs to address for our users. These were used for our further ideation as well.
Familiarity Provides Comfortability
A Sense of Community Provides Safety
Unsafety is not Limited to a set of Locations
Virtual Companions Provide Safety
Figure 2: The four main themes identified from the background and user research phases.
Ideation followed closely afterwards, with methods such as Crazy 8's and 5 Why's to stimulate creative thinking. Starting with an initial 32 ideas, we sat and analysed the positives and negatives of each, listing some features that we found most interesting along the way. This eventuated in three main ideas. Each solved some facets of the complex problem of safety at night, with it's own interesting features.
Concept 1
Raito, Luminous Path
Concept 2
Custos, Companion Bot
Concept 3
Safer Together
Figure 3: Three initial ideas
We conducted multiple rounds of user testing using paper prototypes, wireframes, think-aloud sessions and post-experience interviews, to determine which concept evoked a feeling of safety in most users. All of these pointed to the fact that Safer Together was the best concept to introduce safety back into the lives of those walking alone at night.
Figure 4: Paper prototype testing
This was followed by numerous rounds of user testing, with increasing levels of fidelity. We began with a Wizard-of-Oz representation of our device, tested alongside users to gauge feelings of safety while using the app, primarily. At this stage, the physical device was not able to display the features that we intended for it.
Figure 5: Users testing a low-fidelity prototype of the digital solution with a Wizard-of-Oz version of the physical device.
We followed this round of testing with a few small iterations, changing the flow of the application slightly and creating a more helpful home page. More testing ensued, this time with the physical device included as well, with most of the feedback gathered revolving around the device. The colours of the lights, the pattern of the alarm, the volume of the sound and the position of the buttons were all questioned by users, and iterated upon in the final phase.
Figure 6: The mid-fidelity prototypes of Safer Together. Each image shows a different phase of the physical device's development
My group and I were fortunate to be able to showcase our work at a graduate exhibition show, with our work on display alongside many of our classmates. Our final product shone through the crowd, with many people interacting with the physical and digital prototypes.
Figure 7: Safer Together's high-fidelity prototype, with felt on the ears as extra affordances for new users.
