The problem
Our team has chosen to address the problem of motivating people to walk. Our project scope and definition come in part from this year’s CHI student design competition, whose brief outlines the problem as follows:
This year’s challenge is to design an object, interface, system, or service intended to encourage people to take a walk. Use methods of ethnography and contextual research to understand the problem space, and develop user-centered design solutions to support, assist, enhance or otherwise benefit your target audience. Your solution should address one main theme that encourages people to walk such as health, enjoyment, sustainability, community, or commuting. However, whatever the focus, the solution must clearly illustrate positive value of walking to both the walker and impact to the locale that the walking will take place. Hopefully, you will discover as you delve into this challenge that there are many benefits to encouraging people to take a walk, and consequently create other unintended side-effects such as to get individuals to slow down and pay attention to the world in front of them.
General solution direction
Because the design problem outlined above is very broad, our team has considered partnering with the Google Android project to add some additional constraints to our project; so we are thinking of designing a mobile application that will encourage people to take a walk. However before we commit to this, we would like to perform and analyze our initial research so that we can make sure that a mobile application will be the most appropriate solution.
Scope & Users
Because we are partnering with Get Downtown, a local Chamber of Commerce organization that attempts to motivate alternate transportation to improve congestion, our project automatically takes on a commuter/local business flavor; and since our team members come from a diverse background that includes public health expertise, our eventual solution will be informed by our health expertise.
Through our conversations with (and community connections we have made through) Get Downtown, we have focused the scope of our project on employers and employees in downtown Ann Arbor. In our research we have asked employers about various walking initiatives’ success and failure, and we have talked to employees who both live and work within walking distance (for the most part) of downtown to find out when and why they either walk or don’t walk to work. We’ve also talked to members of the Downtown Development Authority and the Planning association about their perspectives – what they have done to make the city more walkable, and what has worked or not worked in the past.
So in a nutshell, at this point our scope statement is “we want to encourage employees to walk, either as a commuting means or at other points during day.”
Resources
CHI website: http://www.chi2010.org/authors/cfp-sdc.html
Walker Tracker: http://walkertracker.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/30/walker-tracker-ann-arbor-create-walking-community/
Get Downtown A2: http://getdowntown.org/walk/
BCBS – blue cross blue shield ‘walking works’ program http://www.bcbs.com/innovations/walkingworks/
Bill Herman, SPH : http://www.sph.umich.edu/iscr/faculty/profile.cfm?uniqname=wherman
st joe or chelsea hospitals
YMCA – kids
Ann Arbor is 3rd most walkable city in the USA:
http://walkertracker.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/05/congratulations-ann-arbor-mi-third-best-walking-city-in-the-us/
http://blog.getdowntown.org/2008/03/04/ann-arbor-voted-3-best-walkable-city-in-the-us/
Guide to walking to work in Ann Arbor: http://blog.getdowntown.org/guide-to-walking-to-work-in-ann-arbor/
Walk Score – how walkable is your community? http://www.walkscore.com/
Alliance for biking and walking: http://www.peoplepoweredmovement.org/site/
Ann Arbor Walking: http://stanford.wellsphere.com/wellpage/ann-arbor-walking
Not a walking program but a site where you make real bets with yourself to accomplish a goal. The idea is that you set up an automatic money deposit if you fail (oftentimes to a charity that you do not support) http://www.stickk.com