Experientia s.r.l

We are an international experience design consultancy

With the behaviours and contexts of people driving our designs, we create product and service experiences that really matter.

Brief

Build understanding and innovation in the space of data visualisation and interaction paradigms, for large quantities of information, in order to inspire and guide the Vodafone design team.

What

Exploring how we visualise our memorable, emotional, behavioural, relational, and activity data, through an interactive interface, to visualise the information that we accrue over a lifetime. Special attention was paid to human-centred metaphors.

Where

Presented at Lift Conference ’09, Switzerland.

How

Benchmarking, mood boards, co-creative workshops, concept generation, video scenarios, Lifestream Visualisation prototype.

Impact

Lifestream was presented to a completely packed workshop at the Lift Conference in 2009, by Vodafone and Experientia representatives.

LifeStream

“The deliverables are top-notch through and through – thinking, content, findings, approach, design, layout –  everything is beautifully executed. I am so impressed. … [Experientia’s] are the best deliverables the Concept Development got in the year I worked there.”
Jenny Dunlop, past manager of the Vodafone Concept Development Group.

Information visualisation was a foresight project with the aim of understanding and innovating in the space of data visualisation and interaction paradigms. Experientia designed and prototyped an interactive interface for visualising large quantities of information.

The first phase of the project created a benchmark document that presented a gallery of existing visualisation models and current methods of representing data.

After an initial design phase, involving co-creative workshops and concept generation, Experientia and Aeolab combined all their insights into a sophisticated visualisation prototype, together with a video presentation of the interface features, using software such as Flash and Processing.

Envisioning
Current technologies allow people to capture, warehouse and retrieve vast amounts of data. As companies look at ways of storing and accessing this information, Experientia took a unique starting point, asking:

Do we want to store everything just because we can? How can people best access their data? Can computer systems be intuitive enough to treasure our important information, and to let the rest go?

Understanding
Before the Experientia team put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we carried out extensive research on designing information visualisations, effective human-computer interfaces, the nature of information and the ways in which people search for information.

We created a Gallery booklet, containing photos and descriptions of some of the most innovative current tangible and visual interfaces and solutions to visualising information.

Design
To start the design phase, the team brainstormed seven mini-concepts and five mood-boards, and took these into a co-creative workshop with the client, which led to the final vision.

Prototyping
The team combined the most relevant mini-concepts into the Lifestream Visualisation, showing the precious data and information that have accrued around a person over time.

10 video-scenarios, created using Flash and Processing software, demonstrated interface features and applications of the Lifestream.

Final deliverables
We have envisaged a world in which information visualisation is not just useful, but also beautiful. Where information patterns show us the connections and coincidences in people’s lives, remind them of favourite memories and moments, and allow all that is no longer relevant to fall away like dust. We call it the LifeStream.

▶▼ Downloads

Prototypes (you need Java Runtime to run these prototypes)