“Social innovation refers to new ideas that work in meeting social goals.” Pol, E and Ville 2009 Social Innovation. This was the quote that formed the foundation of our app Hide and Seek. My group wanted to create something that was not only relevant for our age group but that was also benefiting a niche market. This is why Hide and Seek has so many features.
These features portray convergence culture. Henry Jenkins describes convergence as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted.” Convergence culture is the combination of multiple media platforms into one, which creates an easier platform for one to use. It is the emerging of different forms of media to enhance technology and social media. Hide and Seek aims to better enhance the health, safety and social goals of festival goers.
We came up with this idea by discussing what part of festivals really make the experience difficult and then formed a solution to these problems. The first one, and most major one for all festival goers, is the lack of reception at the event which, after much research we decided to use Facebook Aquila Drone service. This enables our app to differ from other media platforms which may also cause digital disruption. The reason for this is as our app has no connection issues, we are placed at a higher level to other media platforms that heavily rely on internet connection, 4G and 5G.
Other issues we came across was losing friends at the event, injuring yourself and trying to find a safe ride home after the festival has ended. This is where the mapping aspect to our app comes into play. The map on this app is a live app that not only allows users to find their way around the festival but also track their friends, so they know their whereabouts. On top of this, the QR coding system enables users to send codes to emergency services to help an injured individual or someone in danger at the festival. Also, the message, call and video aspects of the app ensure that communication at the festival is seamless without the hassle of wondering if the connection will fail halfway through a call or text. Not only this but to actually attend the festival, a ticket must be purchased and so to really tie the app together we decided on having a ticket storage function. We truly believe that this function really brings the whole app together and achieves our goal of creating a space where all festival needs are in the one area and so there is no need to go from one app to another.
Overall, I truly believe that my group has created something that we are all really proud of. The app has enabled us to solve a social problem and has achieved goals of meeting health, safety and social needs. We really tried to guarantee that the app was realistic yet never heard of before.
REFERENCES
Jenkins, H. 2006, ‘Welcome to Convergence Culture’, Henry Jenkins Blog,
http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_culture.html [accessed 16 June 2020]
Jenkins, H. 2006, ‘Convergence Culture’, MediaWiki
https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDDMedia/Convergence_Culture [accessed 16 June 2020]
Losinno, R. Pickering, S. Schembri, C. Smith, H. 2020, ‘Hide and Seek’, Google Forms,
[accessed 16 June 2020]
Rouse, M. 2019, ‘Digital Disruption’, Tech Target Network,
https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/digital-disruption [accessed 16 June 2020]
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