The APP # Design and Coding

Most cities are designed by urban planners and architects who leave their footprint through multiple buildings that become iconic pieces of cultural heritage.

The SmartDEMA project question itself “what if citizens can leave their footprint in the form of emotions?” Then we could create thematic maps, sense the city from a different angle and bring into light muted voices.

Design Thinking defines four steps, ideate, prototype, test, iterate. For the first step, we decided to create a MIRO board https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lZr54OA=/  containing a series of elements that may help us understand what we want to discover with the App, what kind of emotions we should choose and what features the App must have. 

The APP FEATURES

The stories

Publishing stories in the App is straightforward. Here are some of the most important things you can do with the App, and we will show you how to do it through a series of short videos and images with explanations

Find new stories

Every time you read the stories, click on the House icon and get the last published stories. The App geolocates you and shows the closest ones to your position. The heading of NEW STORIES appears on your screen.

How to post a story

The Stories are geolocated. You post your stories by clicking on the MAP icon. To locate you at the point you are now, the MAP has a tool on the right side just below the satellite layer. If you are still in Paris, no problem, keep the position

What do we want to discover? 

We focus the question as a Possible Research Question for a paper. Does the construction of a collective imaginary through an App enable:

  1. The development and the visibility of a new digital tourist service?
  2. The creation of thematic maps through citizens’ shared emotions?
  • What is the potential influence of the different types of emotions connected to places/city, on the relevance of these person-place relationships to other people and people’s interest in exploring this personal data?
  • Do the technological devices and services utilize the emotional and social connections people have with places in the urban environment in novel ways?
  • New EMOTIONAL layers have already been added to the urban environment with the proliferation of smartphones and digital tools.

This EMOTIONAL layer offers the possibility to augment our experiences, emotions of the places in the city. Still, to that end, there is a growing need to understand person-place relationships better. We would like to involve citizens to create new content and thematic maps of user experience with content based on storytelling geo-referenced in the territory and retrievable via mobile App, to create new information layers for Destination Management. 

The first request to colleagues from the tourism sector :
We need your help to design an APP to capture the citizens’ emotions and feelings based on your stories connected to the places. In that sense, we have prepared a list of emotions, and we want to know if you agree with that. The project proposes an innovative implementation of the rich tourism experience of the partners’ countries and increases citizens’ sentiment of sharing local tourism-related values co-creation geo-referenced stories and places. Emotion/Thematic maps can help understand the personal, emotional relationship that people currently have with personally meaningful places in the city and explores the potential and value of sharing this personal geo-located emotion data with other people in novel ways shortly.

  • Place: A meaningful location
  • Place attachment: The emotional bond that characterizes the relationship between a person and their personally meaningful locations, which develops from people’s in-place experiences & emotions
  • Story: written by the citizens and not by the tourist operators
  • GDPR: about cookies and other private information rules

Other missing points:
We would like to know what kind of features you would like to have in this APP. We suggest these, but we are open to change them: post stories, comment on the stories, select emojis, routes, multilingual, map features.
A First rough design of the different screens/features the App should have. Then we circulated to a reduced number of colleagues to give feedback about questions/doubts they may have about the App design.

Once we had the feedback, we decided to create a survey to validate some of the ideas.

On behalf of the SMARTDEMA ERASMUS+ Project, we aim to design an APP for capturing the emotions of citizens based on their stories that are connected to different places in the city. That is why we need your help to design a user-friendly app that responds to your needs. Help us by answering this short questionnaire. Thank you!

There are 22 questions in this survey divided in three part

  1. Demographic questions
  2. You and the App
  3. You and the others

The survey collected more than 1.000 answers; data was evaluated (see data evaluation), enabling us to draft the first concept of the App generating the prototype. 
See survey evaluation.

The prototype skin idea

The actual App looking

Try it in your computer at https://smartdema.es Registration required.