The service is an omini-channel platform that takes teachings from what European cities are doing to manage street performances. Hat Circle connects municipalities with artists and artists with their audience and local gear shops.
Buskers are an inherently complex cathegory to manage, partial reason is the desire for freedom and nomadic lifestyle, and also for rigidity of institutions and different regulations of the various cities around Europe.
We focused on on-field research and interviews, supporting our process by researching potential competitors and municipalities' initiatives around the topic. Our intention was to find overlaps and common directions in the different parties to develop a service that could be relevant in the day-to-day lives of the stakeholders involved.
Including event organizers in the conversation and interviewing competitors and local shops gave us a clear perspective and a vision of a cohesive and multi-national service that would have increased quality of life of all parties involved in the street performances eco-system.
Hat Circle offers a web based digital platform that doubles as activity manager for the municipalities, and validation system for the buskers, to be recognised as artists in their city or for a price in all the cities of the system. In it the buskers have a community space and a chat to interact with each others, a feedback space to communicate with cities, and a profile page to share themselves with their audience and get their digital donations. Police uses it as a tool for controlling documents in an efficient and friendly way, having access to the necessary informations on the app.
Our group of designers focused on insights and research to identify paintpoints in the street artist ecosystem, interviewing artists, municipalities, shop owners and event organizers. We started working on existing methodologies in regulating and offering services to buskers, to focus our efforts toward convincing directions.
We created co-creation tools and prototypes for conducting interviews in an effective way, creating a dialogue that felt close to heart from both sides. On field interviews and shadowing coupled with our fast prototypes allowed us to gain important insights, that we used to shape the outline of a service that satisfied both municipalities and artists alike. We then evaluated our startup concept from an economical point of view, developing a service that based its existance on the buskers' audience, facilitating its tipping to the artists themselves.
Our close and continuous involvement with members of the busking community allowed us to create something that people cared about, bringing us constant insights and refining our solution.
