Dronemergency

DronEmergency is the result of a semester's worth of research, over 100 interviews, and hours of ideation.

The goal of the semester was to create a technology based solution to help combat violent extremism. The prompt was very vague and allowed for flexibility on the part of the teams. The journey that my team went through will be detailed below.

Stakeholder Map

Our team began our journey with trying to get a better understanding of the combatting violent extremism (CVE) space. We decided to map what human interactions can influence a radical extremist. If we would be able to find a way to intervene, maybe we would be able to stop the person from radicalizing.

Interviews

We began interviews with a very community based approach and aimed to talk to community leaders who could help a potential radical. We spoke to firefighters, psychological counselors, teachers, and business owners.

Journey Map

This journey map is a day of a non-US citizen who was caught up in a protest on the UC Berkeley campus. UC Berkeley sends its students alerts about happenings around campus, however, the alerts are often delayed and do not extend past the campus boundaries. This is just one instance of a lack of information causing confusion and fear. We decided to explore this further and try to solve this information disconnect.

At this point we uncovered a major need in this space, to connect individuals in the wake of a violent event with reliable and immediate information.

Currently resources include being told by law enforcement where to go or what to do, however, numbers are limited and many police have other tasks to perform other than give information. Our goal was to provide an alternative resource for affected individuals.

After countless hours of ideation, we decided to narrow down to two ideas. This is the first of them.

We wanted to create a way for individuals after an attack to talk to each other, give each other updates, and generally help each other on the road to recovery. From our interviews, many of the affected individuals felt lonely and scared after an attack. This affected their school/work performance in the following months and often led to depression. Our app was our initial solution.

There were several major issues with this as the communication of information directly after an attack could not be addressed. People would have to search and download the app during the attack to be of help at all. This idea eventually changed into a rehabilitation app. It was an important issue but we decided we wanted to solve the information disconnect problem and hopefully help individuals from feeling hopeless and alone as a result.

The second of our ideation solutions was a plugin for google maps to help bridge the gap between first responders and community members. The first responders would be able to compose realtime messages and send them out to individuals in a particular area.

This idea worked in the already established google maps app and would accomplish our goal of the information disconnect.

Issues are motivating first responders and community members to download the plugin.

Value Proposition Canvas

We really believed that our second idea was on the right track and wanted to pursue that idea further. We created a value proposition canvas to try to get a better idea about the needs of first responders and if our product would actually alleviate the pains.

Beneficiary Exploration

Looking at the beneficiary needs, we believe that we need to provide a product that can better and more easily help first responders do their job. Performing their job better would allow them to more quickly and more efficiently serve the community.

Pivot

Now that we have a better idea of how the product will help its beneficiaries we needed to go back and analyze the issues of our initial idea and try to better encapsulate the idea of solving a problem.

We knew that we needed to change our idea to better help our beneficiaries. At this point first responders were our main beneficiary and our product would help them reach the secondary beneficiary, community members. We decided that it would be important to step back and consider community members as our beneficiaries.

With out new information it quickly became clear that an app would not work in an violent attack scenario. We listed what the key components that our product would address and decided we needed to figure out how to get the information to people if not through phones.

We considered a variety of options on how to get the information from the first responder to the affected individuals. At this time we were most intrigued my drones as the mode of transportation. We needed to conduct some tests of various models to make a decision.

Re-evaluating

We looked back at the CVE space as a whole and what we needed to know to make our product work. We then set out to test these assumptions with interviews.

Primary concern:

How people would respond to drones?

User Testing

We conducted tests with participants and asked about comfort with drones flying during a violent event. In our tests, we discovered that people felt that they needed personal space from the drone but otherwise, it would be reassuring.

With the idea of using a drone to bring messages to people during a violent event, we now needed to consider how to get the messages across to the people.

Possible options: projector, screen, speakers

Testing

This is a test of the drone flying with a speaker attached to it. We needed to compute how loud the speaker needed to be to be heard in a chaotic situation. We also needed to take into account weight capacity of the drone and stability.

Impact vs. Difficulty

As the semester was coming to an end, we needed to consider what additional features needed to be added to create the best possible product.

The priority was always to provide a resource for first responders to help the community. It was clear then that the find feature of the product needed to be an easy to use UI for the first responders.

Our final product included a drone with a speaker on it. The drone would be controlled using the UI above on a tablet, with text to speech capabilities and autonomous driving.