Design Brief for the 24 Hour Online Challenge

The topic for the online challenge is "Find yourself in Melbourne: the future of maps"

Background

With the revolution of online caching and tiling of maps, today digital maps have become ubiquitous. The concept of mapping is continuously pushed further, for instance by community-driven layering, the photographic recording of physical street layouts, or augmented reality way-finding on smart phones. Now, we are entering the next era, where the boundaries between digital maps and the real world dissolve.

Task

Your challenge is to design the future of maps. For your concept, you can use tools that are already available, or envision technology that might be developed in 20 years. You can imagine the realm of possible media, desktop, web, mobile, virtual, physical, multi-modal. Be creative and consider innovate applications of maps. This can involve future uses or implementations. Maps are not necessarily always used for navigation. Consider the experience. Oh, and you need to demonstrate your concept for the city of Melbourne, Australia.

Criteria

The design criteria are the following: 
- People have to be able to receive new insights into the city of Melbourne
- The map has to allow some form of user interaction
- The application has to integrate digital technology

Submission

Document your concept, prototype, user scenario or design process in a video. Anything from animation over screen grabs to acting is valid. This means that you don't have to implement the system. The maximum length of the movie is 3 minutes. Include at least a title and your team name somewhere in the video. The video has to be submitted on the OZCHI24 website, embedded in a blog post. The blog post should also include a short description of the concept (not more than 400 words). We have your contact details through the profile you generated on the OZCHI24 website. Submission will be open until Sunday 13.09.2009, 8.30am 9.30am (AEST), late submissions won't be accepted. 

Judging criteria

Your submission will be assessed by an international panel of judges (see below) according to the following criteria:
- Quality of design process and use of interaction design methods
- Design quality, innovation and originality of the proposed concept
- Considerations into user experience and user interaction
- Design quality, sophistication, and clarity of the submission (video and blog post)

Panel of judges

Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology
Jinghua Zhang, Mozilla Labs
Jürgen Spangl, Vodafone Australia
Jesper Kjeldskov, Aalborg University

Prize

Travel scholarship of up to A$1,500 for the winning team and A$500 for the second team to (partly) cover travel, accommodation and/or conference registration. The top three teams are invited to write a 2-page paper, which will be included in the official OZCHI conference proceedings. You will have 2 weeks time after the results are announced to write the paper.  

Online support

You can post questions in the website forum or on Twitter through direct tweets to @ozchi24. There will be real-time support in the first 2 hours after the start of the challenge, as well as 2 hours before the end. Questions posted in between should be answered within 3 hours max. 

Coverage and documentation

Apart from blog post and video that your team has to submit for the challenge, we would love to see as much 'behind the scenes' coverage as possible on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog posts, etc. Please use 'ozchi24' for tagging any challenge-related things. 

Conditions and other information

To participate in the Online Challenge and be eligible for the prizes mentioned above, you must be currently enrolled as student at a university or other institution of higher education. You further agree to make your submission publicly available by posting it on this website. You further acknowledge that the travel scholarship can only be used for attending OZCHI'09, ie to (partly) cover flight, accommodation and/or conference registration. You will have to provide receipts for flight ticket and accommodation and register for OZCHI'09 before you will receive the scholarship. The scholarship is independent of team size or number of students from the team attending OZCHI. Cash disbursement is not possible.