The Social Innovation Company, better known as TSIF is a foundation that focusses on social innovation through co-creation, working with the industry and students. You could describe them as a Think Tank. TSIF notices all the innovation in Rotterdam but unfortunately, Rotterdam fails to show the innovative side of the city.
The design question that had arisen was: "How can we put Rotterdam on the map as a innovative city."
As an answer, we created the "Pioneers” platform. It's really a set of platforms within a worldwide network. Each city has it's own platform. This platform makes sure that cities get the oppurtunity to create a positive and innovative image. Innovative companies that are settled in that particular city have the opportunity to show the things they're working on. This would be reviewed by people that are visiting the platform, which would mainly be people from that city or really interested in the city. The amount of reviewers and the reviews of projects (by sharing, liking & grading) will make up the ranking of this city eventually, amongst other cities.
I've been working on this as interaction designer in a team, over a period of 6 weeks.
After a lot of research and brainstorming, I found out that the platform could be devided in parts. Something like 'platforms within a platform'. As you can see in this sitemap we have the 'Worldwide' part, in which all the best content and cities meet each other. But tthen we also have the 'Local' platforms, which is a platformfor each city.
The biggest challenge was to make a clear distinction between the worldwide platform and the local platforms. So, a lot of wireframing was the next thing to do.
It was hard, we made a lot of assumptions and.. we tested it with users! We made a clickable prototype and tested that. This way we got into a iterative proces that would optimize the overall user experience. After a couple of tests we analyzed the results and made changes in the wireframes.
Find the prototype I developed here.
The end result, UI design credits to Jimmy van den Ijssel
In the end, it would look something like this.
