Update: Night Beacon is the winner of the 2010 CHI Student Design Competition.
Night Beacon is a project developed during my Interaction Design course as part of a team of five. As part of the CHI student design competition, our team was challenged to think about the problem of walking. Early in the process, we decided to narrow the problem of walking into that of walking at night. By narrowing the problem, the potential solution could tackle the reconstruction of notions about trust and safety in city spaces. We completed a contextual inquiry, created personas, conducted field research with paper prototypes, and came up with lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes for an Android application that included user testing for feedback.
The paper we wrote drew on this design experience, and was named as a finalist to be presented in the April at the CHI 2010 ACM conference (along with our peer group, mibo).