Project scope
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the world’s largest performing arts festival, featuring over 3,500 shows during the month of August, shows include; comedy, theatre, dance and more. The goal was to find current problems found at the Fringe and try to solve these problems using blended experiences. These experiences focus directly on correspondences between physical and digital components and by integrating them together we are able to create a unified, closely-tied balance between the digital and physical spaces.
Value Proposition
Laugh Traders is a biological recommendation resource that allows for festival-goers to better trust reviews and gives performers the ability to improve their shows daily using live audience reactions unlike critic, blog, and magazine reviews.
Scope of All Data
Using the high volume of tourists arriving to Edinburgh Scotland during the Fringe Festival, it provided opportunity to walk around each of the individual sectors of the Fringe to observe, survey, and interview the festival-goers. We were able to collect 376 survey responses an unmeasurable number of open ended interviews with workers, visitors, and locals. From this data one thing was very evidential flyers were everywhere and causing problems.
376 Responses
Flyer’s Environmental Impact
It costs "150 quid for about 10k flyers" which according to employees and performers we interviewed was "the most popular deal". With that in mind on average one tree makes about 500 sheets of paper and according to the Fringe own statistics there were 3841 different shows in 2019. Thats 20 trees per show that printed flyers, so even if only half the shows printed flyers that's 38410 trees for flyers alone.
Pollution Problem
Further flyers are so unwanted they often just end up on the streets, sidewalks, and buildings. Not only does this look bad, but according to locals takes months to clean the city. The photo to the left was taken just two days into the Fringe Festival. Another big standout to me was in finding out that flyers cannot actually be recycled due to a release of VOC’s caused by a specific plastic finish to give each flyer a glossy look. This very obvious problem not only being ignored by The Fringe but flyer usage had been growing every year due to the growing number of acts and tourists. All this pointed to performers feeling that flyers were an integral source of advertising.
Data Collected
Through our data collection we found out just the opposite. Locals and tourists alike found flyers to be fairly useless and actually a nuisance. With The Festival Fringe’s over-saturation of flyers and their random reviews left festival-goers not viewing flyers as a reliable source of information.
61 responses
78 responses
78 responses
73 responses
73 responses
"The abundance of flyers makes me not trust them"
-Festival goer
Pinpointing Causality
After all of our data collected I began actively trying to solve the problem flyers were creating. From data I had collected I was able to figure out that on average 76.3% of festival-goers went to see comedy acts. Further the Fringe Program consisted of 2592 various comedy acts at the 2019 Fringe Festival. That means 67% of all shows at The Festival Fringe are comedy acts. By changing how comedy acts could advertise and reach visitors it could start a chain reaction taking flyers out of the Fringe’s ecosystem.
Design Fiction Characters
Design Fiction
Pointing to the poster,
Stewart thinks the comedy
show might be a good laugh.
Mike is skeptical about the
reviews, and questions “who are the reviewers?”
Stewart brings reluctant Mike over toward the ticket booth to purchase tickets for Dan’s show.
Stewart and Mike are encouraged to download the Laugh Trader app, so they can review any comedy show during the festival.
Mike is still not convinced
that he can be a comic
reviewer with his smart
watch. Stewart reminds him
that the Laugh Traders app also serves as a digital ticket to the show.
Mike loves the show.
During the show, Laugh
Traders identifies each of the twos laughter through spikes in their heart-rate.
Mike and Steward chat
about the show. With a
smartwatch vibration,
Laugh Traders shows them their reviews
for the show based on biological data.
Mike thought the show was
hilarious, while Stewart
thought it was funny.
Upon exiting the show, Mike
receives a discount
notification for his next
Laugh Traders review. Mike
and Stewart realize that the reviews on the poster were from other Laugh Traders participants just like them.
After his performance, Dan
checks his Laugh Traders, l
augh data from audience’s
smartwatches have
collected and analyzed.
Dan is able to get unbiased feedback from shows in live time.
With Laugh Trader data,
Dan can see which jokes
need improvement and
which do not.
Dan is able to improve his show as the festival goes on.
All scenes were illustrated by Mike Mastermaker based off my original story and sketches
Total Laughs from Dan Soder’s Show
Wizard of Oz Prototyping
With the technology not being available to properly test our solution, I decided to run a wizard of oz prototype at two comedy shows currently showing at The Fringe with three participants. Using the stopwatch on our iphones, we were able to simulate how the solution would work by tapping lap each time we laughed. In doing this I was able to better determine what data could be gotten just from audience laughs. Overall I found the wizard of oz to be very successful as we were able to compare stats at the end to see who biologically, without bias enjoyed the comedy show more.
Low-fidelity Prototype
A quick low fidelity prototype was created in order to give a visual representation of the data the comedians would receive from the Laugh Traders service.