Blue Future Case Study

Project Overview

Blue Future

Blue Future is a youth led civic engagement start up. Blue Future is focused on organizing young people around progressive electoral campaigns and aim to aggregate and promote training, create volunteer, and campaign opportunities, and to re-design the experience of being a young person who wants to make a difference in our elections.

Scope

Task:

To look at creative ways to empower and engage young people, whether through collaboration, events, learning, creativity, relationships or culture. Conduct research locally and pitch a mobile application that speaks to a need and has viable application in relation for policy, advocacy, activism, or political campaigns.

Solution:

A mobile role playing game (RPG) focused on a major political topic to help create awareness and empathy. By producing a mobile game, it would bring the world of those that are different to apathetic users.

Deliverables:

User Interviews, User Research, Paper prototype, Clickable prototype.

Research

User interviews

I took to the streets of DC looking for youths from the age range of 18–35 to interview. Two types of personas emerged from my interviews.

Important Quotes from the interviews:

“Politicians don’t care for people. It is just a power struggle now. There is a lack of heart.”

“Realize things can affect you when you think they don’t affect you. We need compassion.”

“Things don’t change much. Why get involved?”

Synthesis from Interviews:

Problem:

• People had lost hope

• Lost connection to one another

• Lost compassion- unless one was personally affected, there was no motivation to get involved.

Solution:

Empathy. But can empathy be taught?

Empathy Research

According to BBC news and researchers at Berkeley I discovered that a way to teach empathy could be by employing some of these 6 methods:

1. Meet their needs — own emotional needs are met and are receiving empathetic help with their own problems.

2. Modeling cognitive empathy and narrating your thought process pointing out situation that call for empathy

3. Find common ground — empathy for those who are similar.

4. Practice changing roles and perspectives

5. Make faces

6. Foster a happy environment

6 Habits shown by those with empathy:

1. Cultivate curiosity about strangers (natural inquisitiveness)

2. Challenges prejudices and discover commonalities

3. Tries another person’s life

4. Listens hard and opens up

5. Inspires mass action and social change

6. Develop ambitious imagination

And the idea was born: a mobile RPG- a role playing game. By producing a mobile game I could bring the world of those that are different to my users. 

Game Inspirations:

Paper Prototype Game play

Testing Issue:

How does the game play relate to the real world?

Solution:

• Include a similar current video or article to the campaign played once the campaign is finished

• A call to action to donate or call your senators

• A forum where players could discuss and encourage one another to act

Balsamiq Prototype

View The Balsamiq Prototype In Action!