NextStop is an analog and digital experience developed as a part of “The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility,” an exhibit at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum. From December 2018 through March 2019, visitors could fill out cards that contain one of ten questions aimed at eliciting their perceptions of how future mobility options will impact societal transit equity, access, and utilization. In addition to specific questions, the back of the card provides an open-ended prompt to enable visitors to elaborate on their responses.
After filling out their cards, exhibit visitors could drop them into a scanning slot that feeds live updates of a digital visualization of responses. This visualization displayed on a touch screen in the exhibit and is available on the web at www.nextstop.mit.edu. The visualization allows visitors to dig into responses of the questions they fill out as well as the responses of all other exhibit visitors.
Within the visualization, each question has its own sub-section where swarms of cards represent each possible response to that question. The size of each swarm corresponds to the number of times respondents have selected that answer. Visitors can tap the swarm in order to see the open response portion of a randomly selected card from that question. In this way, the visualization allows visitors both to see how the entire exhibit-going population has responded to different questions as well as see how they are thinking about the future of transportation.
Developing this project required several rounds of iterative design and user experience testing. During that process, team members tested a variety of different input cards, scanning techniques, hanging surfaces, and question design.
