Indbrudsbordet
A video of the final prototype and how to interact with it.
The design received an award for best out-of-the-box idea.
The Brief
The brief was given by the insurance company Almen Brand https://www.almbrand.dk/ and had only two demands: Make a technology that either creates prevention or creates preventive behavior. Since Almen Brand is an insurance company, they were interested in investigating how to stop accidents before they even happen, therefore the focus on preventive behavior.
The Design
Indbrudsbordet (translated: The burglary table) consists of two screens placed vertically above each other. On the bottom screen you will see a simple floor plan with only walls recorded. On the top screen, the exact same floor plan is shown, but with more details like windows, doors, furniturs, garde etc. To interact with the screens the user must place a box, that represent a specific type of prevention, on the lower screen. This input will create an output on the upper screen. The output us a graphic representation of the prevention e.g. a dog, as well as a percentage change in your burglary score and an info box that informs the user why and how the specific prevention gives a certain score.
The problem we are trying to address is the fact that not many people know exactly what measures to take to decrease the risk of burglary. On top of that, many think some perventions are effective when they are actually not. This is what users are suppose to realize when they interact with the table. Because the percentage change rarely changed significantly and sometimes even went down, users realize that the only a few perventions are actually effective.
The process
After making the decision to focus on burglary we started investigating the field. We found a precious interview with up to twenty thieves who explained how and what kept them from committing a burglary. This interview made us realise that that many commonly know precautions were ineffektive. The realization, combined with the design group's common interest in tangible user interfaces, soon created the idea of the burglary table and led the prototyping begin. see figure 1.
Figure 1. During our first pitch we created a mock-up that had light sensatvie sensors. The focus was on the interaction so whenever these sensors were covered a LED turned on to show a reaction to the interaction.
This horizontal prototype was suppose to give stakeholders an overall idea of the concept and possible interaction. It was created out of an old shoe-box, som cardboard and a simple Arduino program.
Now that we had found the problem and a way to adresse it through a digital artifact, the further research now focused on how to communicate all this knowledge visually, so that as many users as possible would remember and hopefully act upon it. This included reading a lot of papers on how humans perceive and remember, as well as doing A LOT of test and observations of users interacting with the finished prototype. We also make short workshops/test with ramdone people e.g. we made a game where the subject would have to interact with different bricks by "playing" a homemade board game, followed up with questions about the specific brick.
Figure 2. After interacting with a brick the subject had to describe it with three words from the pile of words put available. The pile included both negative, neutral and positive words. The subject could not use the same word on two bricks, but were allowed to swap them.
This way we found out, that a more detailed and larger sized brick were preferred by most subjects because it made the interaction more fun and inviting.
We made yet another test/workshop to find out which kind of floor plan to use. we focused on three types of floor plan: a template, one that the user draws herself or one that the user draws by finding their own house on Google Maps. From this we gained the important insights that the Google Maps idea was difficult when the user lived in an appartement since the the building form the outside does not tell much about the indside, as well as the fact that not many people feel comfortable giving up their address in a public place.
