UX CASE STUDY — PROJECT: SMART CITY MUNCIE
Overview & Objective:
This project was an academic group project which brought about the desire to transform the City of Muncie — a historic city in Indiana, into a smart city. Our project entails proposing ICT solutions. As of 2020, Muncie’s population was estimated at 67,000. With the small population of Muncie and the limited infrastructure in the city, our goal for this project was to collaborate with residents of Muncie and inquire about which areas need to be strengthened. We realize the best way to help Muncie is to encourage open communication between the different aspects of the community. Opening the communication pathway is a proven method to improve collaboration and innovation. To develop this communication platform, we propose developing a Smart Digital Town Hall composed of an application, an organization, and interactive kiosks. Through this initiative, we hope to improve public relations with the citizens, retain intelligent people, and encourage communication. We are going to examine our problem space from a more systematic approach that largely depends on smart governance and support using technology and data.
Project Goal:
- Establish connections between Muncie’s government and citizen
- Data collection practices for smart city development
- Attract businesses via smart city transformation initiatives in Mucie
Method:
We employed interviews in this project. Our participants include individuals or natives of Muncie. This means that the primary residence of participants must be in Muncie. We also included business owners in our interviews.
Role:
We deployed a scrum approach to this project. I was on the development team working specifically on developing the smart kiosk. In our ‘Road Map’ and ‘User Story Maps’, I interviewed participants, and I engaged in a mini participatory design exercise to gauge how our participants envisioned the kiosk. In addition, I helped in writing the full report of the project.
Outcome:
We proposed two overlapping solutions for the City. We proposed an App, Smart Kiosk. Both solutions will work hand-in-hand with each other creating a streamlined path to meeting the needs of the citizens.
This project was also sent to the Mayor of Muncie.
The full report can be found here: https://uwmadison.box.com/s/xnbewf9080e39q40477o346fk2xxcsj2
