Background

Team Brainstorm, a multidisciplinary group of designers, engineers and business students worked on this project in collaboration with SkyEcho research group and an early-stage start-up based out of Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

SkyEcho is working on building weather intelligence systems designed to help cities become more weather resilient. In this regard, the outcome is expected to, primarily:

        - Improve trust on weather data for urban applications

        - Improve urban weather awareness to the end users

From the team’s perspective, the goal is to gain an overarching understanding of climate-compatible urban development, city resilience and sustainability, both on a theoretical and practical level.

Therefore, we would attempt to address the problem and their prospective solutions from in as holistic and multifaceted way as possible.

Outcome

Gamification has been a buzzword in recent years, which has proven its abilities to drive desired behaviours in several arenas. We might all as well remember Pokémon Go’s runaway success back in 2016. The game swept over the globe overnight and millions of people got hooked in an augmented reality battle over Pokémon collection.

With people jumping off their sofas and hitting the road, what the game has done is simply impressive: it resurrects good intentions through fun. Much inspired by the game, our team set off on the journey of gamifying the weather.

With our ultimate objective being raising the awareness of climate resilience in building safer cities, we believe that through gamification we can render such an intangible subject as the weather and climate change in a tangible way. In fact, gamified activism is not a new concept. We have seen several popular games gravitating towards climate change activism.

Planted is a simple gardening game that makes use of high-resolution weather data to grow your plants in the virtual environment. The users are able to plant a variety of seeds which then eventually grow into large plants. We provide information about the plant growth, which is largely dependent on the rainfall. As we all know, plants need water to grow. In the case that the plants were not able to get enough water from the rainfall, the user is also able to make use of automatically spawned water buckets.

The user can then harvest the plants for various benefits within the game that can be developed further. The integration of the rain map allows the user to see the patterns of rainfall up to 48 hours in the past – seeing which areas might have seen the greatest or lowest amount of rains. Moreover, this also offers a direct link between the rainfall data and the game itself, bridging together the educational and entertainment aspects of the game itself. In the future, the users will be able to grow various varieties of plants, collect various items, and alter their in-game experiences.

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