My Project Proposal

I've been so busy this week trying to finish the report to submit on Friday that I haven't even had a chance to write a post!

On Wednesday I met with my tutors Emma and Marc to catch them up on my project ideas. The areas that I am looking into are Future Cities, Smart Cities and Big Data. More specifically, I want to design something that uses data from an existing database to help citizens by improving their everyday experience or a particular touch point. I have started identifying some vulnerable citizens that I could design for and with, for example, visually impaired people, deaf people, pedestrians or young school children. I am also aware that everyday citizens may be able to benefit from something, so my user demographic is not rock solid yet. I want to keep an open mind to the possibilities and opportunities that may come my way.

I don't know how but while researching these areas I never came across Smart Dublin and Dublinked or have thought of looking at the Dublin Dashboard, having heard of it before. Smart Dublin are setting out challenges for citizens to enter with innovative solutions and they have framed a few design questions.

I can now take one of these frameworks and apply it to my own project and work in that direction which is sort of cheating but it also gives me guidance in a certain direction and is something that I am actually interested in. The different challenges that they have like Smart People, Smart Environment and Smart Living suggests that they have some sort of databases or sensors, something capturing relevant data that I could possibly use in my project.

From all the research I've done I have identified a bunch of stakeholders and people for me to contact and hopefully get in touch with so this will have to be started next week!

After doing some more online research and reaching out to companies I finally stopped researching and went back to trying to finish my design report. Right now it's on its way to being printed. Scary stuff! From my undergrad in Architecture I've experienced a lot of drama, meltdowns, tears and broken plotters the day before a final review so printing makes me very anxious nowadays..