Potsdam has undoubtedly a lot of historical buildings, offering visitors one charming building next to another. Consequently, tenants and especially new residents struggle to keep up with the broad offer of cultural options. 

Theoretically, there is the dubious App „Discover Potsdam“ but let's be honest this App won't show you the truly amazing places in this beautiful city. People rather tend to discover adorable cafés or astounding house facades by pure accident.

So we thought:

Why not combine local businesses with socio-cultural places and condense them in an App?

The Discover Potsdam App

Our goal is to help young people discover socio-cultural places in Potsdam while supporting local businesses and offering the opportunity to meet new people.

More precisely, we wish to connect the existing culture with people living in Potsdam and lead them through the city, giving them the chance to learn more about exciting history while connecting with other locals. Especially during a certain pandemic, strolls to various locations can be a chance for purposeful exercises like walks or runs.

We help people to go outside, nudge them to learn about history, and provide motivation to meet new people.

After conducting interviews with our target demographic, we came to the conclusion most people are overwhelmed by the cultural possibilities in Potsdam. We asked them to draw a „mental map“ which represents a mental vision of their immediate surroundings. This task often reveals over-/undersupply of cultural, economic, or social possibilities.

Maps we received lacked most historical buildings near their personal residence. We asked for clarification and noticed our interviewees plainly didn't recognize a lot of buildings as historical – which they were.

Your maps

Considering the widespread usage of smartphones in our demographic, we decided rather quickly to create an App and tie its challenges or tasks to real-world objects and places. We hope to offer an alternative to most other Apps for city-discoveries, focusing more on custom-created content for Potsdam. 

The variance of tasks motivates users to discover different places while implementing relaxing leisure time in cafés, book stores, or swimming pools.

Interactions

NFC Coupons are placed near interesting locations, requiring the user to be physically there in order to collect the coupon. Almost every modern smartphone covers this technology and only needs to be close to the installed NFC-Tag.

Image Points pull users into the real world again, our App rewards images of predefined buildings with points that can be spent in the shop later on.

Markers are available for every conquered point a team could manage to convert. After enough interactions by one team's members, a location can be captured. At these locations, team members can add markers and comments, bragging about their ownership.

Team Fights can conquer places for another team through interactions taking place at the location in question. Enough activity by an enemy team can lead to converting the location to their own team's territory.

Removed Interactions

Following interactions are included in our concept, but were abandoned during later progression-stages.

Quizzes pose an easy solution to earn points while learning more about a historical place. Users read a short text about the place and have to choose the correct answer from four possibilities about the learned information.

Audios are Input-only Interactions, narrating background stories about nearby places and historical persons involved with them. Completing one audio story is rewarded with shop points.

Further options include user testing with our prototype and iterating its content and structure according to our target group's feedback. The process could then be to continue the development and prepare real-world interactions like the NFC-Tags and usage of coupons. The latter need to be negotiated with shops, cafés or libraries.

The cooperation with local businesses poses a crucial aspect of this project since their implementation proposes users a motivational goodie for participating in our activities.