This project had two parts: The physical structures and the Digital (AR)

Group Project

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It all started when our professor in Design Principle gave us different sites to do user research. As individuals we all chose to do the Providence Place Mall, which formed our initial little group. Our first task was to do as much research we can to find something on our site. We proceeded to create fun surveys, making boards and standing out in public to gather information in exchange for a DIY sticker we made as incentives. Was able to get a lot of interviews with lovely locals and with that learned a bit about the controversial history of the mall. With that we wanted to dive deeper so we watched a movie. THE SECRET MALL APARTMENT, an educational yet entertaining one. About a RISD professor and how he was able to build a secret apartment in the providence place mall (literally where we were watching this movie). The movie not only was fascinating and inspiring but it also carried a lot of information on the history of the Providence Place Mall. We learned that it was a gentrification project and how it was built with the intent of attracting more travelers to providence after the decline due to the financial crisis. The mall took up a lot of space which forced locals to relocate and move out. The architecture of the mall literally split the city of providence into classes. The most infuriating part was that one of the largest part of the mall was their parking lot! Now in 2025 we realized the mall was in severe debt and rumors of it closing down or getting sold to different companies have been made all the time. This was our clear problem statement that we wanted to tackle. 

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How do we save the mall and address its issues? 

Number one gather more opinions from locals. Which we did and successfully gathered over 100 responses in a spam of less than 2 weeks. How? We made online surveys and posted them everywhere and even handed them out at the mall however we got stopped by security, which made us pivot. I then reached out to mall themselves to explain our project seeing if they would want to properly collaborate on this project. After 3 reach outs we successfully had an agreement. Signed contracts to start building a solution. 

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What our goal was? Bring more Providence spirit back into the mall! 

After many ideation we wanted to gather locals favorite part or thing about providence and turn them into interactive art. Many said the Waterfire events that occurs, infamous providence art murals, and many more. With that sparked the IDEA of Augmented reality! With the basis of the idea of reminding people of the providence spirit every time they were in the mall and also try to improve engagement.  

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AR was a tricky concept since no one on the team has ever really touched it and knew how to create AR filters from scratch. After relentless nights we finally figured it out and started the trial and error process. We ended up using Lens Studio which was an AR tool created by Snapchat. We wanted to link it to social media so that every time someone uses it they could have the option to take a picture next to the filter and within it we had a hashtag of #ProvidencePlaceMall for more of a social media presence and exposure for the mall. This had address both our goals: drive engagement while bringing or providence place spirit back in! 

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Physical part of the project was building structures where the AR would live on or project on. Initially wanted to engrave QR codes into the structure however due to the project being extended till summer we had no access to the laser cutters :( but all went well and we were able to have this up at the mall! 

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Thank you for reading this journey story please enjoy the pictures!