Eli Card - A New Way to Embrace Your City

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This project is designed as a team by:

ZHOU Yue (Amber)

XU Shijie (David)

CHEN Di (Cindy)

2012, summer

Introduction

Almost every activity has "Meaning", it is important for the activity itself though people always go though it with another purpose. How to design a set of activities to let people doing with one purpose while feeling what you want them to feel?

In ourdesign proposal, we took “Belonging” into the content of people’s relationshipto city.

There is a new way to fulfill the connection between people and city. Eli Card helps people to take value of their steps, paths and even transportation miles. People can be real owners of their own city, and build strong belonging feeling for community and city.

We set up an activity-based design, which can be one doable avenue toencourage citizens to bring about their personal feeling toward their livingcommunity. Citizenship is the quality that pervades the entire experience.Therefore we started with the daily life, figure out how citizens feel abouttheir own living community and what we expect them to feel. We aim to designthe actions which people do everyday to exert a subtle influence on the meaningof belonging.

Our proposal can be described as an interaction modelbelow:

For interpretation, the interaction model is sketching a system, which provides aplatform for people and city to interact with. It is not difficult tounderstand that the City Card is both an avatar of the city and a tool forpeople to interact with the city. It represents the city to give citizenreactions (the blue bubbles in the right square) according to what they acttoward (the green bubbles in the left square). Since people go through thoseactions in their daily issues, these reactions are not the main purpose of theinteraction but the extra ones.

Theactivities provide a way to make citizens recognize they are accepted andconnected with the city. It helps them to build up experiences about citizenship,which is possible to get the belonging meaning of the whole experience by goingthrough their daily issues.

The mostinteresting part of this system should be the orange part (community). It canbe regard as a probable result of the interaction (when people meet baychance), as well as a feature help to influence the interaction (when peoplemeet by task). This part proofs that the activity we design is not always hasonly one possible way to go. Sometimes new meaning can be created by accidentbecause of the different sequence or perspective of the activities people do.