Description
This project is an iteration on the design and the business plan of ISLE, a startup co-found by both Partheniadis Konstantinos and Kordatos George. The new version of ISLE was co-developed with the marketing specialist Christina Strimbakou and with the phd candidate Anna Gardeli. The team of four collaborated since September 2018 with the following achievements:
Athens Innovation Festival 2018: Exhibitor at the AIF2018 with the support of the University of Aegean and the Cyclades Chamber of Commerce.
Aegean Startups 2018: 1st prize in Tourism-Culture-Environment category, 3rd in overall rank of the competition.
NBG befinnovative 2018: Among the top 20 in the 9th innovation competition of National Bank of Greece.
Pitching to investors: VC Metavallon and The People’s Trust with valuable feedback to further develop the application.
Flutter android application: Currently developing functional application in Google’s new Flutter framework for both Android and iOS platforms, with Google Firestore database.
Reflection
The ISLE service is inspired by Stuart Walker’s and Simon Shuttle’s ideologies about creating products that create value to the life of people. Walker, in his latest book underlines that modern day products eradicate elements that help in reflection and awareness (’Design for Life’, 2017). Shuttle has been talking since 2005 (’Engineering Emotional Values in Product Design’, 2005) about products that produce value to users by stimulating emotion - through experimentation, expectation, mystery, reflection - and logic - through understanding, clarification and recognition (Kelly Goto, 2015).
ISLE addresses the problem of digital isolation by taking travelers out in the wild, in the unknown. It tries to excite users rather than give them the information asked to consume. It addresses the problem of mainstream traveling by helping travelers detach from tourist groups and explore on their own. It intrigues the curious ones by letting them step into the shoes of a local person with the Personas. To put it simply, it enables them experience how a local person takes charge of their day. It gives them more contextual and relevant hints about the foreign culture that they can return it back to their country in the form of exciting experiences that took them out of their comfort zone. It promotes reflection and engagement with the different culture.
Ultimately, we hope that this small service can strikes social change, ideology swift and create a new need: to explore more Personas from different lands across the globe. It could be that ISLE is the beginning of a new way to take a step deeper into cultures we have only heard of before.
