Intro

LG Electronics Headquarter in Iran held the first LG Global Challenger in 2017 as a part of LG company’s social responsibility program. This contest was to encourage and facilitate students to achieve their goals in their desired fields. The students were required to pursue and complete a scheme during several stages and to finalize their solutions.

I had the chance to be the leader of the team Euphoria. The team consisted of four designers, including me, and succeeded in the first levels and continued its way to the top five teams among almost 400 teams. After going on a two-week research trip to Italy, financially supported by LG, team Euphoria was awarded the $12,000 grand prize.

The scheme we proposed was “Design for community wellbeing through cultural emotions”.

Proposal and Destination

With virtual communications and social media growing increasingly, people are getting more connected and alienated at the same time: cultural alienation is a byproduct of emerged technologies. Meanwhile, studies have found that Iran is the second most angry/sad country in the world. This shows the necessity of designing solutions to reduce anxiety and increase community wellbeing in Iran. 

Returning to one’s culture and stories implies a strong sense of belonging and inner joy. This factor could be helpful in achieving this project’s goal. This project also benefitted from positive design concepts and guidelines. 

Since Italy is known as one of the main cultural centers of the world and we could be supervised by Prof. Salvatore Zingale, Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, we chose Italy as our trip destination.

Milan Trip

We were chosen as one of the top five teams and won a two-week research trip to the destination we had proposed: Italy. In Milan, we studied under the supervision of Prof. Zingale and his assistant, Dr. Anna Riboldi, at Politecnico di Milano.

As a team of four designers, we were curious about cultural activities in Italy. Therefore, we visited several museums and sightseeings. We gathered a plethora of insights and ideas.

The Interactive Museum of Cinema in Milan played a critical role in shaping our ideas and mindsets. The combination of these experiences and the useful guidance of Prof. Zingale helped us come up with various ideas to tackle public anxiety and increase the community’s wellbeing in society.

Final Design

After several demanding design sessions and field research, we finalized the concept of a new way of interaction among people in public places, using LG Curved Dual Display.

In this concept, two groups of people stand on both sides of the display. The display acts as both a mirror and a see-through screen, allowing people on side A of the display to see people on the other side, next to each other, and vice versa.

By engaging in this experience, they realize they have to invite other people to come to the display to make it complete. Where there are enough people on both sides, they are encouraged to sing a song in karaoke style and download their voices as a memorable token.