How to make the experience of The Unity Express 100% awesome
I couldn’t have chosen a better time to graduate: just when I committed myself to one of the biggest projects I have ever done (and I think that many people can say the same for themselves), the time arrived to pick a subject for my final assignment. I chose to intertwine the two to keep doing both. Here’s how.
Boy did I have to keep this under the radar for a long time! While the preparations for the project already started in February 2010, and my graduation plan was handed in around a month later, I couldn’t really blog about it, because we wanted to pick the best moment to go live with this. That moment was Monday last week. After that it has been a crazy ride, but I won’t elaborate on that in this blogpost.
Work, Unity Express ánd graduation? Impossible!
"Impossible" (photo by mathoov)
I was in a seemingly impossible situation: I have my own company called shift happens, for some freelance work in web development, which is basically my main source of income. This crazy train project that I really liked to be a part of presented itself. And last but not least I would like to graduate somewhere soon as well… How am I ever going to fit that in just 24 hours a day?
I decided that it should be possible to combine my graduation with the project. After a short talk with my tutor, which was one of the first people to know besides the team (and my mom, of course 
). He absolutely loved the idea and after some talking we came to the same conclusion: this is all about experience. I should do something with Experience Design.
What is Experience Design?
XD (the abbreviation of Experience Design) is basically the process of creating or shaping the experience of the user when he uses a particular product or service. Experience can mean a lot of things here. It can be about the image of a product or company (branding), or how users experience and enjoy an amusement park, or how users perceive a music festival in terms of excitement. An Experience Designer is often called an imagineer, coined by Disney, which is a combination of engineer and imagine. He engineers imaginations. Read here what Wikipedia has to say about XD if you want to read more.
Information, interaction, and sensorial design disciplines combined; from A unified field theory of design, by Nathan Shedroff (1994).
Experience Design and Multimedia
OK, so now we have a name for the most important aspect of the project. We are shaping experiences. Now: how can I fit that in my study? I’m not studying Event Management nor solely Experience Design. I doubt if that even exists…
I needed to have a relevance with multimedia, since I study Communication & Multimedia Design.
Of course, the link was obvious; entertainment is often done by multiple forms of media, the train is emerged in different media and experiences are almost never a single medium layer anymore nowadays. My final graduation subject became this:
How can I, by using multimedia, enrich the experiences and memories of
1) the passengers on board the train
2) other participants in the cities
3) and other interested people for the project
before, during and after the event, so everybody can remember this as an unforgettable journey?
Quite a mouth full, isn’t it? I think it covers all the bases though.
How are things going so far?
If we are talking about the project in itself: great, and it keeps getting better every week. If we are talking about the Experience Design for the journey: it gets buried under all the other work that is involved with the project most of the time. Because I am the project manager of The Unity Express, I’m doing a more than fulltime job right now managing the whole thing and making sure everybody is happy.
I am focussing on redirecting as many tasks that are on my plate as possible to newly acquired team members and volunteers that came in the picture since the launch, so I can finally devote some serious thesis writing time.
The planning is still to be finished around October, November at most, so I’d better get to it. It basically has to be finished by then, because the idea is that the work from that thesis will be implemented into the journey and actually executed. And the departure time of the train knows no mercy… 
Click here to go to the official Unity Express website »
2 Responses to “How to make the experience of The Unity Express 100% awesome”
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Ga vooral zo door Coen, je kunt nog veel meer dan je zelf soms denkt en je hebt al veel goeds gedaan tot nu toe.
Ik kan er over meepretane want ik heb bijna dagelijks contact met je.
En als iets niet lijkt te kunnen, moet je het in een groter perspectief plaatsen, dan kan het vaak wel weer!.
Groeten,
Michiel
Fantastisch dat je dit als afstudeerproject gaat doen! Ik wens je veel succes en hoop dat je er een geweldige ervaring aan over houd!