Blaze:
How might we get 18 to 25 years to interact with green spaces during the winter.

The concept is a park that is installed with lights with the purpose of the user running along side them in a race. The user goes through levels, as they get faster they progress to different colours. The user’s colours will be displayed with their name. There will be leaderboards for their colour band as well a friendship leaderboard, and will be encouraged to upload their times to their social media channels as well as challenge friends for points.

The bottom of the colour band will be represented by the “blaze” if the blaze beats the user they will go down a colour band level.

The user has to always beat the “blaze” which represents the threshold of each level. The idea is to run through the park before the park is “on fire”. A playful attempt of getting the users to think about the planet warming up and the increased risk of forest fires globally.

Gamification will give the chance for the user to invest and gain an emotional connection to the activity by receiving points and rewards, giving a sense of personal achievement. Particularly framing the rewards around “bragging rights” for the user to be able to say in a social group that they are the fastest runner.

The concept behaviour steers the user to run through a park, racing moving lights; steering the users behaviour to the activity proposed.

There is an element of feedback; as the app will push the user at checkpoints to prompt them to push themselves; however this isn’t essential to the behaviour.

Participants ran the length of a rugby pitch and were timed and ranked on coloured cones, they then ran again knowing how much faster they would need to run to get given a better coloured cone, knowing what colour the other participants were running as well.

The participants felt like this pushed them to run that little bit harder, they liked that they had improved the second time round.

There is the potential to cause harm as new behaviours change peoples lives.
There is a potential for the interactive park to be overused by an individual and take over their life which could have knock on negative effects. Safeguards could maybe be put in place to make sure damage isn’t done as, for the most part, running should be fun.

Making sure the user has an opt out and choice is essential. That all kinds of use are examined before launching to make the intentional use not overshadowed by a misuse. That the behaviours are good and not going to be harmful to people.

The concept could potentially discriminate against people who can not run due to disability, and so an option on the concept could be use of the lights without the running activity and maybe a leaderboard for walking and lower level lights for wheelchair users.

The app won’t ask for a profile image and giving a choice on nickname they can run anonymously, Sharing the running data will be the choice of the user to feature on the public or private leaderboards.