by julia🐨razumovskaia -

5# Product & Business Idea – Design & Research II (Katerina)

✍️ What problem are you solving?

Most navigation systems are designed solely for speed and efficiency. They guide people from point A to point B as quickly as possible, but ignore their mood, context, and the quality of the journey. This creates a sense of passivity, stress, and detachment from the city itself, especially when it comes to large cities or complex journeys.

✍️ Why should we care about it?

Because the way we move around cities affects our attention, stress levels, and attitude toward urban spaces. When navigation focuses solely on speed, people miss out on the city’s opportunities and the chance to explore it. In large cities, this often means we stick to our usual routines and never get to know the city beyond what is strictly necessary.

✍️ What is the solution you are offering? How does it work?

The solution is an adaptive map navigation system that suggests routes based not only on the destination but also on the user’s mood, time of day, and preferences—in other words, on the right kind of onboarding. Instead of always suggesting the fastest route, it can offer alternatives such as peaceful, curious, social, or exploratory paths—for example, through parks, cafes, quiet streets, or unfamiliar neighborhoods. Safety and lighting can also be taken into account.

✍️ Who is the target audience? Who is the customer?

The target audience includes city residents, travelers, immigrants!, researchers, and people seeking more meaningful ways to navigate urban spaces. This is particularly relevant for users who are tired of navigation focused solely on efficiency (such as myself). Clients may include individual users as well as city tourism organizations, municipalities, or mobility-related services interested in promoting a more measured and people-centered urban experience.

✍️ What is going to happen? (Change & Impact)

My product prioritizes mindful navigation over mere ease of use. Instead of simply speeding up movement, users get more information, more choices, and a deeper connection to the city. This can reduce stress, encourage exploration, and help people discover new neighborhoods, rhythms, and everyday experiences in places they already know—or think they know.

Thanks! 🙏

by julia🐨razumovskaia -

4# Customer Profile & Value Proposition Map – Design & Research II (Katerina)

💼 Persona I – Busy Commuter

This is a time-conscious person who needs to move efficiently between locations, often under stressful conditions. They rely on navigation to save time, but in doing so experience stress, overload, and reduced alertness. They need routes that remain efficient, reduce mental strain, and allow for brief moments of calm.

🗺️ Persona II – Curious Explorer

A user who explores the city with an open mind and curiosity, rather than in a hurry. They are interested in discovering new places, atmospheres, and experiences. They need a navigation system that supports exploration, suggests meaningful routes, and helps them engage more deeply with the city.

by julia🐨razumovskaia -

NIME Article Review – Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface

I’d been looking for a topic that interested me for a while—and the title itself caught my eye because I was searching by keywords. Of course, I’m not usually interested in much of the technical information related to “music.” But this really caught my attention.

Sonic City is a powerful and innovative project precisely because it presents the city not as some kind of “backdrop” for interaction, but as the interface itself. This certainly resonates with me as someone with a background in architecture. There, we always thought of the city in terms of movement, rhythm, route, atmosphere, and—not least—the physical perception of space. In Sonic City, all these qualities are not just characteristics of the environment, but also part of the interaction. The authors of the article literally propose “playing the city,” transforming everyday movement into a form of musical and spatial experience. This idea is explicitly stated in the project’s main text: the city is viewed as an interface, and mobility as an interaction model.

From an interaction design perspective, I find it particularly significant that the project moves away from the conventional screen-based UX. There is no traditional screen, buttons, or graphical interface here. Instead, everything is built around body movements and environmental data—rotations, movement, light, even pollution levels and the presence of metal—as well as pauses and combinations of context and behavior. The authors describe a two-level mapping system, where some parameters influence short musical events and timbre, while others affect the more structural composition of the sound. This makes the interaction less abstract and more situational; the music arises precisely from the connection between a person and a specific place and moment.

The first text “In Duet with Everyday Urban Settings: A User Study of Sonic City“ [1] struck me as a stronger conceptual and design-oriented exploration of the questions ”Why can the city be an interface?“ or ”How does this project differ from a musical performance?”. It was also very interesting to see how they included not only engineers and designers in their team, but also architects and sociologists. The project isn’t just about technology; it’s also about the body, the city, behavior, everyday life, and its aesthetics.

The second text “Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface” [2] is a bit more important to me, since it tests whether the idea works in real-world user experiences. The study was smaller and more qualitative than quantitative. It included people of different ages and lifestyles, and, by the way, none of them considered themselves musicians. This is an important point, since the project was tested on ordinary people. The authors, by the way, asked the right UX question: “Do people perceive Sonic City as a research tool or as a musical one?”

Overall, I consider Sonic City a very important example of how to think at the intersection of architecture, urban experience, and interaction design. For me, the project’s value lies precisely in the fact that it translates spatial perception into an interactive experience, and interactivity back into urban and bodily reality. The papers showcase not just interesting technology, but a different way of thinking about UX: not merely as interaction with a screen, but as interaction with space, the body, the route, and the atmosphere of the city. And that is precisely why this project still seems relevant to me today.

Sources 🛈

[1] In Duet with Everyday Urban Settings: A User Study of Sonic City. Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2004). Authors: Lalya Gaye, Lars Erik Holmquist. Available at: https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2004/nime2004_161.pdf

[2] Sonic City: The Urban Environment as a Musical Interface. Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2003). Authors: Lars Erik Holmquist, Lalya Gaye. Available at: https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2003/nime2003_109.pdf

by julia🐨razumovskaia -

3# Inclusion & Accessibility – Design & Research II (Katerina)

These factors highlight that access to slow navigation is not the same for everyone. The experience depends on physical abilities, emotional awareness, and cognitive skills—such as the ability to walk, recognize one’s mood, and make decisions about the route. It also requires a certain level of spatial awareness, which is not always equally developed or maintained.

At the same time, accessibility is shaped by external conditions: pedestrian infrastructure, GPS accuracy, access to mobile devices, safety, and cultural habits of movement. This shows that slow navigation is not just a matter of design, but a systemic issue influenced by the environment, technology, and the social context in which the user finds themselves.

by julia🐨razumovskaia -

#2 Change & Impact – Design & Research II (Katerina)

This comparison highlights the shift from efficiency-oriented navigation to experience-oriented movement. Most existing navigation systems prioritize speed, offering the fastest route by default and guiding users through the city with minimal user involvement.

As a result, users typically follow directions passively, often losing their sense of the surrounding environment and missing opportunities to interact with it. Travel becomes functional rather than experience-driven.

In contrast, this project explores navigation as something more adaptive and human-centered—where routes respond to mood and context, encourage exploration, and foster a more meaningful relationship with the city.

by julia🐨razumovskaia -

#1 System Map – Design & Research II (Katerina)

This diagram illustrates the broader ecosystem surrounding my slow map navigation system. At the center are the direct users—people who move around the city with different needs, rhythms, and intentions. Surrounding them are groups that use maps in their daily lives, from residents to travelers, each of whom perceives the city in their own way.

The outer layer shows indirect users—entities that do not use the product itself but shape the conditions in which it exists. Urban planners, local businesses, infrastructure, and data systems—all of these influence how we move, which routes are available, and how the city is perceived.

Together, this underscores that navigation is not just a tool, but part of a larger system. How we move through the city is shaped not only by personal choice, but also by design decisions, the environment, and the social structures around us.

by martina.monterisi -

Accessibility requirements and barriers

Breaking down the accessibility requirements of this project felt like one of the more hard exercises of the whole research process, because we are used to think everything would have been “easy and smooth” since it’s a niche digital research product. But there was much more behind.

What the user should be capable of

On a physical and personal level, sight would be the most relevant sense, since the experience is largely text-based, but it can be made compatible with screen readers and text-to-speech tools from the start. Hearing is not a requirement at all. Movement needs are minimal too, limited to basic typing, clicking, or scrolling, with voice dictation and keyboard-only navigation as fallbacks.

On the cognitive level is where it gets more demanding. Following an iterative loop of prompting, reviewing, and editing requires sustained mental focus and a willingness to sit with a process that is genuinely not instantaneous. As well as the need for a strong digital literacy to navigate AI tools or terminology, and enough language confidence to work in what are predominantly English environments. Though nowadays everything can be translated in real time.

Financially, the core methodology is designed to be of course a free to access tool, to be used as a starting point or guideline to use AI tools. Infrastructure needs are also few: a device and internet connection.

Who is it meant for and where does this happen

The methodology will be designed for anyone engaging with storytelling on a professional or exploratory level, from researchers and creatives to students and private users. It lives entirely in digital space, which means it can happen in any place and environment.

What it does require is probably the mindset: willingness and awareness to co-create with a machine, and enough critical thinking to question what the machine gives back.

The barriers

Two barriers kept coming up in the entire thinking process. The first was language, since AI tools lean heavily on English, nuance is often the first casualty of translation. The solution here could be to develop a simplified and even more visual version of the methodology that relies on basic English, diagrams, and examples rather than dense theoretical language.

The second barrier was knowledge. The informatics specific terminology involved is genuinely intimidating and not of common knowledge (it was for me too). The solution I thought for this issue was to add a vocabulary directly into the framework itself, so all the basic knowledge can be in the same place as the product.

To conclude, cognitive overload is also worth a mention. When the prompting loop feels endless and the output feels overwhelming, the step-by-step structure of the methodology becomes less of a nice-to-have and more of a way to escape.

by martina.monterisi -

Close your eyes and imagine: what’s the future like?

After outlining the actors and affected people and sectors within a possible new direction in the creative process, let’s try to visualize what the current state of things look like and what what it could become after the introduction of a new methodology.

Before

  • involvement of AI in all stages of storytelling generation/ideation/creation
  • no precise and documented knowledge on how to do it in this precice field
  • the prompts to ai tool not well written, without puropose
  • Too many requests = extreme waste and environmental impact
  • Unethical use of AI

After

  • easy to use / step by step methodology to understand and use a correct workflow in the creation process
  • Aware and ethical use of AI tools
  • Less prompts / requests sent with more efficient answers
  • Open a new dialogue
  • Set a standard or starting point for the field

Right now, most creatives are figuring this new directions out alone. A structured methodology could change that and optimize our workflow without making us feel left out of the process. It’s not just about better prompts, yet it’s about reflecting on how an entire field relates to a tool that is now part of our everyday life.

by martina.monterisi -

Who is involved?

Trying to make sense of how AI fits into the creative process meant also looking first of all at who is actually involved in this process and who could be potentially affected by something new in this field. The system map I put together tries to capture the messy, layered connections that a new methodology for AI-assisted storytelling would actually have to deal with. What surprised me most has been how quickly the actors in the circles can expand and increase. The part I keep coming back to is where genuine human intentionality sits in all of this. When so many actors are pulling in different directions, tracing where creative agency actually lives feels less like a technical problem and more and more a human one.

by anja.kljajic -

D&R2 SED – Inclusion & Accessibility 3/3

On a functional and sensory level, creating inclusion requires identifying exactly where the barriers are. For a player to be truly included, the design must look beyond just visuals and incorporate haptic feedback/vibration and audio cues to support those with different sensory abilities. As seen in the exploration of colorblindness, a major barrier is often a reliance on a single channel of information (like color) to communicate vital game data.

Identifying these barriers makes it evident that participation in a game world is shaped by how much information is “translated” across different senses. The “Who and How” of inclusion depends on moving away from a “one-size-fits-all” visual approach and instead providing multi-sensory tools—like vibration and sound—that allow players to navigate the game regardless of their visual or physical constraints.