UX of Birdsong

The feedback from the last week's presentation drove us to the reality of rail stations and thus presented us with a new challenge, to find a more achievable and believable idea. The guiding factor was to find a scenarios where the birdsong design outcome would be useful and not an inconvinience.

With starting points from our tutors that included locations of places that have been affected by urban encroachment for example petrol pumps and wetlands, we opted for bus stops as our areas of interest.

The number of birds in the London area has decreased. Common garden bird populations have declined, making them become red list species. People in the city may not have noticed the disappearance of these birds. We may have heard their birdsong but never seen them. Among these include:

• Starling
• Sparrow
• Greenfinch

We hoped to change that in-order to bring people's attention to these disappearing habitats.

Finding a location or a group of them that is man-made, urban, in open space and some-what close to nature was a daunting task until we placed the dots together towards bus stops. Here are the reasons why:

• A bus station is where people gather and experience a moment of stillness in the urban rush, giving us the time and space to draw their attention to this cause.
• They are evenly distributed across London roads.
• Bus stops at the same time, are a space where you would not expect to encounter birds and the bird house and the bird song should work well as a distraction from the urban rush, focusing the attention of the commuters to our disappering habitats.
• The corporate branding culture would give us a perfect balance between our physically crafted and the digital designs.
• They are out in the open with some situated close to nature's birdsong and they are everywhere, which makes this a good space for the installation.
• They are quiter, a bit dull and relatively ’leisurely’. There is not as much rush or as much need to pay attention in comparison to other transportation means like tube or rail stations.
• Bus stops are easily accessible and executing this project does not require lengthy installation. We will only hang the bird boxes on them, and since there are so many bus stops, they are not monitored tube is much more ’observed’ space, which makes the installation of the bird houses possible.
• Even if one were wearing headphones and unable to listen to the environment, the bird house is an unusual visual element, that we are hoping will attract the attention of commuters.

Our goal

To build bird houses, place NFC tags on the posters which on tap launch a birdsong awareness website for endangered birds and place them across bus stations in London.

Designing posters

These were the canvas portraying the outreach message while housing the bird habitats. Stuck underneath would be NFC tags which on tap launch our awareness website.

Habitat design

These would be our attention grabbers, the ones to look odd enough to catch the one's attention without being necessarily out of place so as to be easily torn down or disposed of. Special thanks to Charlie's (Changlin Hou) gifted hands.

The website prototype

This would be the destination after successful NFC tag contact. Weiting acquired NFC tags and programmed them to automatically play birdsong on launch for the three different bird categories.

It is unbelievably hard imagining how these briefs could have gone without the incredibly helpful online tutorials from the ever amazing Tonicha Child, one who made sure we always thought about it without overthinking it.

The final designs were presented to our fellow students and tutors and we could not have been more proud of the accomplishment.

Here was the feeback from ’The Last Birdsong’ project:

• Could have explored more use cases of the NFC tags.
• The NFC tags were not easily accessible.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/starling