Crafting a cultural spacial experience to connect Volvo with a younger generation of Tokyolites
Here's the story of how I took my spirit from Sweden to Tokyo to create an immersive cultural learning experience for young Tokyolites exploring Volvo's heritage
Visual Direction, Experience Design
2023 | Millipede AKQA
Many young people in Japan are just not interested in owning a car
In 2022, Volvo moved their flagship store from the trendy Harajuku to the up and coming Aoyama, and reintroduce what it means to own a Volvo car.
We wanted to shift the idea around what being in a showroom meant — by bringing in elements of Volvo's Swedish heritage and culture and changing the idea of the showroom into a concept showroom. A concept showroom where you can purchase products, book to charge your Volvo and gain more immersive educational insights to learn about the benefits of the upcoming and sustainable XC40 lineup.
The challenge
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Discovering new things
To make sure we are designing for the right platforms, and what issues to address, we researched consumer behavioural and market reports. We discovered IOS devices are more commonly growing in use by our target audience.
2016-2023 saw an increasing adoption rate of smartphone devices amongst Japanese people. IOS devices were increasingly becoming adopted by younger audiences who value brand and identity.
source: モバイル社会研究所 [January 2023]
Additionally, sentiments and lagging uptake around EV cars were revealed to be costs, lack of confidence in the purchasing process, and the fact that the average Japanese consumer will just gravitate towards whatever is more familiar to them. So to counteract that, we decided to use emerging technology and the new showroom space to create an interactive and educational AR experience — we would build a playful and engaging space for customers to learn about Volvo and the benefits of EV cars, not to sell them immediately but to kickstart the idea of owning a Volvo EV car.
Costs and lack of confidence in the purchasing process were top 2 reasons for dwindling uptake around EV cars.
source: Deloitte Tohmatsu — Japan Consumer Survey on Next-Generation Automobiles [2022]
Bringing the space to life
As part of the research, I looked up what interests our target audience, millenials of Japan around 25-35 range. There wasn't budget to go to Japan but I wanted to explore it another way. Around late 2022, I noticed a lot more younger Japanese people and businesses settling down in Melbourne. I took myself to Japanese owned cafes, pantry stores etc, and I noticed a variety of magazines, particularly the Brutus and Popeyes magazine, a monthly fashion and culture magazine from Tokyo, in a cafe on Swanston Street.
Magazines are a reflection of culture. They are weekly and keep track of trends and sentiment — an appetiser for people to explore and learn new things in a 60-page lightweight booklet. Brutus and Popeyes had a strong bold sense of photography,and had pages and pages of handy tips for travelling and DIY, camping and recommendations of places to visit and stay at.
These also sparked a potential idea of showcasing a benfit of owning a car for rural and convenient travelling. Additionally to that, I explored the landscape of Volvo's Swedish heritage, looking at textiles and atmosphere that could be brought into the AR experience and started to categorised those into concepts for interactive elements.
Explorations of textiles and inspirations for the visuals and interactions for the AR experiences.
Coming up with ideas
As a team of 6 across the Melbourne and Tokyo teams, we engaged in workshops with ourselves, engineers, designers, project managers on what creative ideas and "what-ifs" we could explore. We narrowed these down to actionable activities that we could use on mobile devices.
Brainstorm of ideas with our development and creative team across our Tokyo and Melbourne team.
One of the ideas we executed from this ideation session was a Zen garden experience which was a creative exploration of meshing the idea of a Japanese Zen garden and Swedish stone stacking games. The idea was that by dropping stones in place, pop up cards would show how seamless and convenient EV driving can be, such as:
- Quiet engines — Volvo EV engines run quiet, allowing you ease of mind while driving
- Stress-free connectivity — you can connect your calendar and itinery to your Volvo.
- Simple driving — One tap key start and go. You can also ask google to take you to your destination through "OK Google" voice commands.
With both Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetics,the activity harmonises as an interactive floating zen garden, evoking the simplicity of EV driving.
Futher ideation development for the BEV experience.
Low-fi sketches for BEV functionality.
Testing the experience in Tokyo. Our Tokyo partners were testing the experience for us and sending us bugs and feedback to action.
Bringing the visuals to life
Bringing the UI and the visuals to life in an AR space was a new and exciting challenge for us. We couldn't rely on buttons or text solely to pull us through the experience as it would be on a camera so we had to create enticing and reactive elements that gave more expressive feedback loops, including sound design and more intentful use of animation.
Animation states for scanning, holds and taps were used to give feedback indication of events overlaid on the camera.
Visual concepts for the illustrations in-app. We honed in on the stronger line-width that emulated Volvo's font family we used in the app and also appealed better to younger audiences because of its playful characterised look.
We needed a marker map that visitors could use to see which activity they are at and where the markers for the AR activity are to scan with their device. The look of this area was based upon on of Volvo's earlier clay-like visuals that emulated a mini, toy-like world.
