The Wishing Well

A public economic hub for local communities

The Wishing Well is a digital artefact which through a magical narrative encourages and enables donations to local communities and organizations.

The Wishing Well is meant to be placed in public spaces and domains, where users can via mobile payment solutions, donate money to the communities.

In The Wishing Well movies and pictures from the local community are displayed, whereby the users gets immersed in the specific challenges, faced by the community.

At the donation-moment, The Wishing Well creates an auditory and visual experience for the user. Furthermore, this creates positive feedforward, attracting more users and thereby more potential donators to the design.

A graphical representation of The Wishing Well.

The overall look and feel of The Wishing Well is inspired from fairy tales and folk tales, in which the well has a religious, magical, or supernatural role. This magical expression is a pervasive element of the interaction and experience of the design.

Users seek memorable experiences when donating money

A model illustrating the relationship between different points of interest in Aarhus.

Due to digital centralization that society have undergone the past decades, economy is today lacking in the public space. There is a lack of local hubs with emphasis on economy, which ends out in a less transparent society.

Donations to the local community often goes through private banks and are hidden behind a shroud of secrecy and complexity. Through our research we learned that users seek more clarity surrounding their donations. Furthermore, the users expressed a desire to have an experience in relation to their donation.

These are the challenges that we sought to face and overcome through our design. The Wishing Well creates a physical public space with economy and community at its core. Through immersive technology combined with engaging storytelling, The Wishing Well takes the users on a journey of experiences.

On a foundation of research and fairy tales

For the development of the final artefact, we gave ourselves some constraints to help us narrow down our design space.

We wanted the materiality of the interaction to play a big role in the experience, and it was important for us that our final design wasn’t isolated to a user interface.

On the backbone of several field studies, interviews, domain research sessions and brainstorming sprints, we came up with the idea of a traditional fairy tale well, as the central concept of our design. We decided that it was important for the final narrative of the experience if the well could hold actual water.

The Wishing Well is made with around 50 LED-strips, an Arduino as a controller, connected through a serial connection to a laptop displaying the video and images from the local community.

A simple user story depicting the interaction flow of The Wishing Well.

Experience Ideation & Lead of Technology

Picture of me working with the hardware of The Wishing Well.

The design group was run democratically, with most design decisions being made based on discussion and vote. Therefore, we all partook in all aspects of the design process. However, I had some concrete responsibilities in the process.

I played a central part in the prototyping process of the final artefact. Here I had the responsibility of experience ideation and working with integrating our design vision with the elements of the prototype. I worked with the challenges of turning the water in the well into an interaction point, that would be central for the experience.

Later in the development process I had the responsibility as lead of technology of the prototype. I programmed the main part of the final artefact and was head architect for the system design of the individual components.

Finally, I acted as designated photographer during our user workshops and final expo of the artefact.

Stakeholders

The Wishing Well was made during a design course at Aarhus University, during the spring of 2018. The theme and case of the design course was defined by Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark. By the end of the course, all students participating in the process would participate in an Expo, where the final design solutions was presented to the client, Danske Bank, and the university.