ENOSIS

THE CHALLENGE

Enosis was developed during a project called the Joy of Connecting which takes place along Road 363 and the Vindeln River Valley, which is a sparsely populated countryside area and a designated Biosphere Reserve in the Västerbotten region in Northern Sweden. The project challenge is to find sustainable and feasible mobility solution for visitors and locals in a sparsely populated.

During our project we discovered that to have sustainable mobility solutions you need people to be using these services. We saw that the people who live in these regions truly care about the nature and environment but there is a growing concern about the younger population moving out to bigger cities for work opportunities. This triggered us to find solutions towards bringing people back into these regions. We saw this as a way to create a kind of ripple effect that would lead to development in these communities and help them sustain

THE OUTCOME

Enosis is a system that connects people to rural communities and enables them to make the shift to a new desirable life close to nature. It facilitates this lifestyle change by showcasing rural communities and helping people develop personal connections that can assist them in this transition to taking an impactful life decision.

COURSE

General Product Design ( 10 Weeks), Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden, 2019

TEAM

Ilse Pouwels, Evgenia Kateroudaki, Zena Corda

ROLE

Interaction Design, Film Making( Concept Video), Graphic Design(Website), Service Design

Enosis is a system developed to help rural communities grow by facilitating remote working and by helping people to find the communities that match their desirable lifestyle. It is a holistic service that is focused towards supporting people as they looking for new places to start a life as well as, connecting them with people of these locations to help them with this transition and enable them to integrate them into these communities.

How can we challenge the mobility of work and enable a lifestyle close to nature?

EXPLORING COMMUNITIES ALONG ROUTE 363

We spent around 5 days along route 363 and stayed with people from the different communities. We experienced the lives they led, understood their struggles and celebrated moments and activities that made then happy. Our research trip enabled us to meet people from various industries like tourism, Hospitality, local businesses and even understand the micro-systems that are present in these communities.

These locations have so much to offer in terms of great quality of life, with locals that care about each other and the natural surroundings.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

We saw a trend of the younger generations going off into cities looking for potential work opportunities due to the lack of opportunities in their towns or near by towns. There were a few examples of people that had ventured out into the big cities but truly valued the way of life in these towns and moved back to support small businesses in these regions. This also made us realised that even though there is a need of people to become inhabitants of these places there is a greater need to connect with people of similar values.

DESIGN OPPORTUNITY

We started questioning the concept of work and opening our minds to new ideas. Why do we have to go to our job in the morning? Why doesn’t our work come to us? Doing this we wanted to facilitate a calm lifestyle close to nature where a desirable job can be done remotely. Remote working promotes people to work from anywhere in the world giving access to recruiters to have the best talent. Remote workers tend to be happier as they can indulge in flexible work lifestyle thus motivating them which results in better productivity.

There is a clear need and offering between the two users. Creating a platform that supports this exchange is the way way we chose to solve this design problem.

FINDING A COMMUNITY THROUGH QUALITATIVE EXPLORATION

We wanted to take our users on a journey as they look for a new community to move into. We started the experience by presenting the users with triggering questioning, to open their minds to new possibilities. The platform is used by communities to post and show a glimpse of their community to the rest of the world. The concept here was to enable users to explore the stories of these communities and trigger an emotional connection with the place

EXPLORING THE PLACE

Community users can upload small glimpses of different events that are going on to give potential residents a tiny view into what this community is about.

Using a VR experience people can explore the place and find stories from community users and learn about the the place. Thus showcasing a place for the people and their stories.

YOUR COMMUNITY MENTOR

Deciding to move is quite a hard step for most people because it involves not just logistical work but also emotional stress as it requires building of new relationships. To make this transition easy people from communities can be mentors to potential residents to help them understand the community, learn about the people that live there and form connections before they start this journey to ease the moving process

TOGETHERNESS AND CARE

THROUGH CO-WORKING COMMUNITY HUBS

Connecting people with remote jobs that can be done from any location to enable people that desire this lifestyle to move into such locations. We see that the technological advancement of these places allows for this to take place. Remote working enables people to live a life close to nature where they can do the job the love from a place that they love as well. Such working conditions also lead to more motivated individuals and in-turn leads to better work quality.

These communities have a number of unused spaces or community homes ( Also known as a Wärdshuset ). We saw this as an opportunity to create co working hubs in these communities where people can come together.This would also become a common meeting place where skills could get exchanged as well as a space to discuss new ideas and work on community projects.

ENABLING COMMUNITY INTEGRATION

THROUGH A COMMUNITY INITIATIVE BOARD

Community participation is a big part of the ways of life in these regions and these communities take pride in this. Taking inspiration from that we created a system where people of the community can post different initiatives that would be displayed in the community hub. Our aim was to create intentional systems that can facilitate integration in a community. To build strong bonds through care and participation.

IMMERSIVE RESEARCH ALONG ROUTE 363

We spent 5 days across various locations along route 363 learning about their ways of life, the struggles they go through, and being apart of their days to understand their mindset and the context that we were designing for.

By living with people from these locations and being able to experience the pleasant hospitality from them we formed relationships that enabled us to understand their needs, lifestyle and desires of how they would like their community to develop.

RESEARCH TOOLS USED

We mapped out the research to understand the length and breadth of opportunities that were in front of us as it was such a complex project we felt that the biggest need was to get people to move to these locations and that will help them build. We created templates that would help us in capturing our research as well as conversation tools to help capture insights from conversations.

CONCEPT IDEATION

We used moments of creative time where we made physical mockups to engage in discussion and have a more concrete vision of the proposals.