Smart Pod: Moving Beyond the Flags
UX UI
Surf Life Saving Australia
Capstone Project
Improving Public Safety Interventions at Unpatrolled Beaches. Smart Pod aims to enhance beach safety for new migrants in Australia through culturally integrated education and innovative digital solutions.
Client
Surf Life Saving Australia
Tool
Figma, Photoshop
Year
Feb - Jun 2023
Role
UX UI designer Model designer
Many newly arrived migrants in Australia face serious risks when visiting unpatrolled beaches due to limited access to safety education and unfamiliarity with local signage or coastal conditions. Traditional beach safety messaging often fails to reach linguistically and culturally diverse audiences.
To design a speculative, interactive archive system — SmartPod — that fosters inclusive, accessible, and engaging safety education for new migrants, while respecting local communities and Indigenous knowledge.
📊Success Metrics
👥 My Role
As a UX designer and researcher, I led the site research, user journey mapping, ideation, content strategy, and interactive prototype design, with additional involvement in physical experience mapping and collaborative concept development.
Project Overview
SmartPod is a speculative digital kiosk co-designed with Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) to reimagine beach safety education for migrants.
Unlike traditional signage that relies on the red and yellow flags system, SmartPod offers place-based, multilingual, and interactive learning experiences for unpatrolled beaches — empowering new migrants to understand risks and engage meaningfully with their surroundings.
2.Research
We visited three popular but unpatrolled beaches — Coogee, Clovelly, and Gordons Bay — and surveyed new migrants to identify key safety gaps.
Our research uncovered:
🟥 Limited understanding of beach warning symbols
🌊 Unfamiliarity with local ocean conditions, including rips and tides
🗣️ Language barriers when interpreting signage
🙋 Desire for culturally relevant, engaging education formats
These findings helped us reframe the problem: how might we design a safety system that informs without relying solely on existing flag-based visual cues?
2.1 Field Research
2.2.1 Our Approach
Driven by these insights, we have reframed our approach based on our How Might We questions from simply spreading safety awareness to embedding a culture of proactive safety within the beach experience. Our revised strategy encompasses:
Developing targeted educational initiatives that address the specific needs and knowledge gaps of new migrants, ensuring that these key demographic groups are well-informed about the dynamics of beach safety.
Encouraging active participation from local communities in safety education and promoting collaboration on areas that can enhance safety awareness of new migrant groups.
Designing visual and intuitive signage that effectively communicates safety information, taking into account the diverse linguistic backgrounds and ways of knowledge comprehension in new migrants.
2.3 Design Principles
🎯 Awareness over Control: Provide context without enforcing behaviour
💬 Empathy over Fear: Avoid fear-based messaging; promote dialogue
📍 Place-based Interactions: Make use of physical environments to enhance learning
🌐 Cultural Inclusion: Use multilingual content and real migrant stories
We ideated around speculative formats — from augmented signage to solar-powered kiosks — before selecting a modular, self-contained unit for unpatrolled beaches.
3.Ideation
With our principles in mind, we explored a range of speculative concepts — from dynamic signage to ambient sound installations. We asked: What would a non-invasive, curiosity-driven safety system look like?
📢 Responsive signage
🌊 Passive audio installations
🗺️ Interactive map overlays
📦 Modular digital kiosks
The idea of a modular kiosk quickly stood out. It offered the potential to:
Deliver interactive content directly at the beach
Blend into the environment without disrupting its natural beauty
Encourage learning through play and exploration
This led to the creation of SmartPod — a speculative intervention that rethinks beach safety as a participatory, cultural, and situated experience.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
We built the user flow first to get better understanding on how the structure works. Based on the sketches we wanted to explore the meaning of the dashboard, the coherent design, the clean surface to interact with, think about how to encourage conscious seaside safety awareness learning, and take the design a step further by incorporating the necessary weather conditions.
Final Delivery
SmartPod features a dual-screen layout to support both passive awareness and active engagement:
Upper screen: Continuously displays real-time social information, weather updates, animated safety signs, and beach warnings — making it visible even from a distance.
Lower screen (kiosk interface): Offers hands-on interaction, allowing users to:
Learn about beach flags and hazard symbols
Explore beach maps and find safe destinations
Play interactive games to identify rips and strengthen situational awareness
This layered design ensures that users receive essential safety cues at a glance, while also encouraging deeper learning through exploration and play.
🙌 Reflections
This project taught me to approach public safety and inclusivity from a systems perspective.
I learned how to:
Balance speculation and practical interaction design
Conduct cross-cultural research and translate insights into inclusive solutions
Design physical-digital experiences that communicate meaning in low-intervention ways
Most importantly, I realised that effective safety design isn’t about control — it’s about empowering people through empathy and understanding.
