Convenience. This word drives so many aspects of our lives at the moment. Our fast-paced lifestyles, and the need for instant gratification have forced us to rely so heavily on this word. We don't want to walk anymore; we drive or Uber to even the nearest locations, we don't want to cook anymore; we opt for fast food or instant food, we don't go to the library to find information from books; we can find everything on google on our smart devices; But what are the consequences of our convenient lifestyles? Lacking exercise results in unfitness, fast food results in obesity or illness and libraries were calming and fascinating spaces to spend time in.
In summary, the speed at which we live our lives seems to have sucked all of the fun out of it.
So – how might we use design to put the fun back into the daily boring activities that we do just for sake of convenience? How do we make the daily irritating tasks entertaining? How do you get people to change behaviour and do the right thing? How do you incentivise doing good?
To complete this task, I had to pick one daily convenience in Greenside, Johannesburg and design a way to make that convenience fun and nudge people's behaviour.
Among several other assumptions I made about which conveniences bore people in Greenside, the assumption that people who use the elevator/lift at Greenside Design Center find it dreadful projected to be the most prominent one; I came to this evaluation by personally interviewing some of the students at GDC.
I selected the elevator inside Greenside Design Center to be the space I work with.
The Greenside Design Center's elevator in its current empty and plain state.
From the responses I received in the several interviews that I conducted with the students, I found the two leading reasons that they do not like the elevator is firstly, boredom and secondly, fear. They need to use the elevator for convenience however they find it too boring or scary. I chose to tackle the boredom aspect of the lift by installing something for students to see and something to do.
The idea I decided to try out was to fill the entire wall surface of the elevator with colourful envelopes. This will be something bright and fascinating to see. To expand on the idea, since a natural response for a human who sees an envelope at their disposal is to open it; I've filled the envelopes with plenty little cards inside each envelope. These cards will have something written on them; a task to do, something kind to say to someone, something insightful to start a conversation with, or just some funny or motivational, relatable quote to read and share with someone to make them smile.
To test my fun theory, I started off with just six envelopes in the lift and stood at the elevator door for 20 minutes each floor with my phone camera to film their reactions.
The test worked successfully which gave me the go ahead to fill the entire elevator.
I have decided to name my fun theory, Smile; 'The room without a roof'. Needless to say, this because the elevator is a room whose roof you cannot see and the aim of the project is to make people who use the elevator smile and make someone else smile as and when they do.
Overall this was a fun project to do and it had positive and fun outcomes as well.
Short video of the documented outcomes of the fun theory project.
