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Summary
Stories of Survival is a website featuring an interactive podcast series that fixes the misunderstandings and illuminates the actual risks of rip currents among beachgoers. It addresses this problem for stakeholders such as Surf Life Saving Auastralia and beachgoers by offering a Educational entertainment experience that combines real-life stories, listener-driven outcomes, and interactive live streaming sessions with experts.
Background
Rip currents are strong, narrow currents of water that initiate from close to the shoreline andflow offshore through the surf zone and varying distances beyond. They are a commonfeature of Australian beaches, and can also occur in large bays, with an estimated 17,000 rips occurring on any given day around the coast.Rip currents represent the number one hazard along the Australia coast, contributing to onein five coastal drowning deaths (20%), an average of 25 deaths per year. It is estimated thatone in five Australians have been caught in a rip current in their lifetime, and one in fifteenwithin the last five years.
Client & Design Brief
Surf Life Saving Australia
While general awareness of the rip current hazard improving, a key issue in addressing the issue of rip current drowning deaths is improving the ability of the public to correctly spot a rip current when visiting a beach. Successful recognition of rip currents is low, with less than four in ten Australians being able to correctly identify a rip current when tested. As a result, many people end up unintentionally entering the water in an area where a rip current is present.
There is a need to improve the public ability to correctly identify rip currents when visiting the beach. Previous efforts have attempted to achieve this through the use of static images, however, these methods have poor translation to dynamic beach environments. As such, future efforts should seek to overcome the limitations of static imagery as a teaching tool.
The aim: To develop a new novel approach to improve the ability of the public to correctly identify a rip current when visiting the beach.
Reflection
Situation:
In my graduation studio, our team was tasked by Surf Life Saving Australia to develop a solution to improve public awareness of rip currents and their associated risks. We aimed to find an effective and engaging way to educate beachgoers about identifying rip currents.
Task:
My responsibilities included conducting primary research, data analysis and visualization, ideation, website development, and designing the interface and interactions for the podcast feature.
Action:
Conducted primary research to gather insights on public knowledge and perceptions of rip currents.
Analyzed and visualized data to identify key areas for educational focus.
Developed and refined concepts through ideation sessions.
Built the website, ensuring it was user-friendly and informative.
Designed the podcast interface and interactions to enhance user engagement and learning.
Result:
The "Stories of Survival" project was highly praised for its comprehensive and interactive approach. The website effectively combined real-life stories, data-driven insights, and interactive features, significantly enhancing public awareness and understanding of rip currents. This project strengthened my skills in research, data visualization and web design.Unfortunately, due to our current limitations, we were unable to develop a truly voice-interactive podcast website.
In our background research, we are aiming to discover the major cause within rip currents, as well as the main target audience for our project. In order to better understand these factors, we decided to look into a number of related academic articles and statistical reports, from which we found some rather insightful findings.
Primary Research Insight
People who tend to encounter rip current are mostly males between 20-49 year-old.
Existing campaigns are considered poor practicality & efficiency.
Digital device based solution tend to be of poor applicability towards beach goers.
Interest and awareness about rip current relevant knowledge are commonly low among beach goers especially tourists.
Secondary Research Insight
We looked into different education methodologies and we noticed that the concept “Entertainment Education” can be a potential direction for our problem area.
Based on our research we found that creating immersive and interactive podcast is considered the future of podcasting.
Our team adopted the design thinking methodology as our foundational approach to developing our unique method. Design thinking, recognised for its human-centred approach to innovation, is particularly effective in tackling complex and ill-defined problems such as those related to rip current safety (Interaction Design Foundation, 2016).The design thinking process is typically structured into five phases: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Our adaptation retains the “define” and “ideate” phases, ensuring a focused and strategic approach to problem-solving.
DESIGNED AND CODED WITH CREATIVITY BY IRIS LIN