Context & Challenge

The Carillon (a type of bell tower) was gifted to the United States to express gratitude for freeing the Netherlands during World War II from the Nazis. It is the only monument in Arlington National Cemetery from a foreign nation. The Netherlands Embassy was looking for solutions surrounding the Carillon to:

• Promote the friendship and economic/trade connections between the Netherlands and the United States

• Provide a self-sustaining supply of funding for maintenance of the bells, structure, etc.

• Promote the Netherlands to visitors of the Arlington National Cemetery and the DC area at large

• Raise seed funding of $1.2 million for the refurbishment of the bells

My Role

I worked in a team of six people. I focused on leading insight creation and idea generation because I was the only team member who had prior design experience.

Discovery and Insights

My group conducted research activities including:

• Interviews with

  • Passersby at the Carillon and other nearby memorials

  • Military personnel

  • Teachers

  • Diplomats at the Dutch Embassy

• Observation of the Carillon

Based on this research, the team created four personas:

Idea Presentation

We categorized each idea based on each of the four solution categories the Embassy had mentioned (listed above) and we also assessed risk/mitigation strategies as well as implementation timelines.

Prototypes

During our presentation, my group showed a few visual prototypes of some of our ideas as shown below:

Challenges

Due to the short length of the project, we were not able to test our prototypes with users. This would have allowed us to present a stronger case for our ideas to the Dutch Embassy.

Results

We presented our results to the Dutch Embassy, and our ideas were well received.