01
The attraction
Posters, billboards and social posts: scan the code and make your own music.
Case study 05 / 07
← All workSounds Like Antwerp
The city's sensors, turned into music.
01 The brief
Convince young urban travellers to choose Antwerp. Without a campaign, a slogan or a top ten list.
Visit Antwerp asked for an innovative, digital-first concept for 18 to 36 year olds: a group that distrusts official tourism sources, discovers cities through social media and friends, and has little patience for content made for them by an institution. Antwerp is famous for diamonds, fashion and fine dining, but that isn't what they're looking for. They want authentic experiences and budget-friendly options.
02 The audience
Young Urban Travellers: Gen Z, Zillennials and Millennials, in four mindsets.
01
The Inspired
02
Treasure Hunters
03
The Connectors
04
Leisure Seekers
Key insight
Young urban travellers don't find Antwerp relevant. They know it exists, but nothing has made them feel it was made for them. The city's most interesting qualities are invisible in conventional tourism content.
03 The concept
Antwerp never sleeps. So we let the city make its own music.
Out of Visit Antwerp's five themes, we chose the 24/7 Pulse. Antwerp is a pilot city for the City of Things sensor network, so we connected that live city data to generative electronic music: a real-time soundscape that changes with the city. The platform never tells anyone Antwerp is great. It creates the conditions where that conclusion is obvious.
We didn't just tell people Antwerp is alive 24/7. We let them hear it.
04 Touchpoints
The attraction, the website, the action.
02
The sound map
Every neighbourhood has its own sound, driven by noise, traffic, crowd and heat sensors.
03
The music creator
Patch the city's sensors to drums, bass and synths, no code needed.
05 My role
Experience designer: I led the research and the brainstorms, helped shape the concept and wrote the whole UX site.
01
Research lead
Five interviews, a survey with a buy-a-feature exercise, subculture research and a deficit–surplus analysis of what other cities do.
02
Brainstorm lead
I ran the sessions: quick associations, the 5 whys, an assumption matrix, six thinking hats, SWOT and a MoSCoW prioritisation.
03
Concept
Personas for the visitor and the artist built on Schwartz values, a customer journey, an experience mind map and storyboards.
04
The UX site
I wrote and designed the project site that tells the whole story, from brief to conclusion.
06 Process
Understanding, briefing, ideation, validation, then build, test, iterate.
01
Research
Interviews, a survey with buy-a-feature, and what young travellers expect from a city.
02
Brainstorms
From early associations to an assumption matrix, six thinking hats and MoSCoW.
03
A pivot
Proximity-based music couldn't live on a website, so after a consult it became a GPS-based soundscape that starts when you open the site.
04
Testing
Test rounds with the target audience, where people kept playing with the sound sliders.
07 What we learned
Data can be beautiful (and musical).
01
Data into sound
Mapping pedestrian counts and traffic changes to filters, BPM and bass lines.
02
Working in parallel
UX, visual design and development each ran their own track from day two.
03
What's next
Live DJ sets that react to crowd sensors, sound kiosks at Antwerp Central, and location-based streams.