Hiveboard

The question

Social organisations teach digital skills to groups that are hard to reach: homeless people, vulnerable young people and the elderly. Tree Company and DigitAll asked us to develop MobiDig for that teaching practice, with the explicit wish to build a playful, physical component into it.

What I made

We started with in-depth interviews with the people at the non-profits who run the classes, backed up by a survey of how they work. Two problems kept coming back: learners attended irregularly and were hard to keep motivated, and they could not gauge their own progress. A hard practical requirement came with it: the installation had to be transportable by bike, while staying visible to a group of about twenty people.

Through affinity diagramming we settled on two objectives: creating group cohesion, and making progress visible within a class. We first tested those assumptions with a paper prototype of an LED board in a co-creative workshop. Out of that grew the Hiveboard: a panel of interchangeable hexagonal tiles that light up, showing both collective and individual progress, and able to run quizzes and timers.

We tested the working electronic version in every use context, which surfaced further functions. Along the way we also defined the requirements for an online learner and teacher platform that works with the board. Finally we delivered a fully functional prototype to the organisations for further testing and feedback.

What came of it

MobiDig strengthened the learning experience and engaged diverse user groups. The main lesson was one of alignment: a design only works once it fits the strategic and operational reality of the organisations that have to run it.