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design

Less is more. Our final design is as minimal as possible: there are a very few different screens and no unnecessary options. We wanted the user to be the center of the application, interacting with gestures more than with buttons, and attending to the world around him or her more than to the device itself.
This video shows the look and the functioning of the final prototype:

Here you can download the detailed step through.
As you saw there are three main screens after the “welcome” one: only one step is needed to browse all the functions:
1.”See” mode:
showing a radar map of the current location of the user, switching to augmented reality visualization if the device is kept horizontal and playing all the whispers planted in the zone when the device senses proximity to the ear. Reeds can also be selected by hand, listened to and voted one by one.
2. General map:
showing the whole map of Venice and all the planted reeds in a smaller scale. It is smoothly draggable with fingers.
3. Plant a reed:
enables users to dig a hole through the screen, whisper their emotion into it, and see a new reed growing.
Here is the step by step screen flowchart and the actions’ flowchart:
To augment users’ emotions and help them express them, we added a filter to the whole application that changes the color of the graphics according to weather conditions. These are some examples:
One of the most important aspects of the application is the way the user interacts with it: we replaced a boring sequence of common buttons with a set of metaphoric gestures, allowed by the multitouch capability of modern portable devices.
Like real plants, the reeds have a certain life time and an own dimension: both can increase according to people’s likes, or gradually decrease and decade if nobody likes them.
This is an useful and almost natural way to make a selection between good and bad whispers, and together with the registration phase a way to avoid spam and possible malicious users.
Link to prototype application run on the browser.