Xuan Wang ©2009-2012
The Adventure of Onion Boy
The Project
My team designed numerous concepts to work as a system for improving cultural tourists’ experiences in the Bloomington Downtown area. We did appearance prototypes for each concept using Adobe Photoshop, and presented them in a cartoon-style story, called “The Adventures of Onion Boy.”
Project Members
Lula Albar, Robert Kariuki, Moe Rafiuddin, Xuan Wang.
Deliverables
Presentation for design concepts with the story "The Adventure of Onion Boy"
The Story
We know that a tourist can encounter many new things while traveling and being a part of new social encounters. It’s an adventure. To best illustrate our concepts we thought about a popular comic called The Adventures of TinTin by Herge. In the comics TinTin is a curious young man who travels the world learning about new cultures while solving mysteries.
Inspired by TinTIn, we came up with our own adventure and characters. Our main character is Onion Boy who loves to travel and has a friend, Professor Bean, who is a professor of history. Another character who you will meet later is a police officer.
The below pictures are the complete story, click one of the images to enlarge it. Read from left to right as a comic book. Navigation is located inside the larger pictures.
My Role
At the beginning of the project, My team and I took documentary photographs to examine what’s out there in Bloomington to celebrate and design for. We decided to focus on promoting Cultural tourism through our design and generated many concepts. Through strategic thinking, we constructed a system that enables a tourist to experience Bloomington before, during, and after the trip. Some of the concepts were picked to fit into the system, while some more concepts were inspired based on the system.
The challenge of the project was how to present so many concepts in a short time frame while letting people understand each concept and its value. After consulting with our professor, we decided to use a story to show all of our concepts. I designed the characters in the story with another teammate, and sketched out storyboards for the presentation. I also made appearance prototypes for half of the concepts.
Lesson Learned
Storytelling is a powerful tool for conveying design. In this project, the use of a cartoon style story had great success in the presentation. The audience had no difficulty understanding every concept and its value, and they enjoyed the presentation. Concepts organized by a clear, systematic structure also helped with people’s understanding.
