My Role

Brendon and I worked together conducting ethnographic research, coming up with ideas and concept design. My primary role consited of storyboarding, illustration, filming/editing, and creating posters with our findings.

Initial Observations

Over the course of 13 weeks, we used various design ethnography techniques to really understand the core values, needs and wants of our participants at Axé Capoeira martial arts group

From initial research we found out that capoeira much more than the physical aspect of the martial art. It’s really important for each member of the group to understand the history, learn the language, immerse themselves into the Brazilian culture and strive to develop the proper capoeira style of the group. Most importantly, the role of the Mestre Barrão and his sons really define the culture and the direction of the art form. The teachers at Axé Capoeira really prove that capoeira is real martial form that can be used to defend yourself and fight in the ring.

Diving Deeper

In the next part of our research, we wanted to dive deeper into understanding our participants by conducting interviews and creating cultural probes. Cultural probes interactive objects that are meant to be taken home by capoeirstats for a week, and used on their own time so we can gain more understanding about each one of them. We used our insights to create personas that represented the different types of capoeristas in our group.

Importance of Music

Through our research we discovered that one of the most important aspects of capoeira is music. Capoeira heavily involves music and it’s unique in each capoeira academy. Capoeristas spend a lot of their time outside of their training time learning how to play drums, berimbau and singing songs. Most of the songs at Axe Capoeira are entirely composed by Mestre Barrão - the founder of this group. Learning these songs in Portuguese is one of the mandatory challenges you needed to face as a capoeirista.

Challenges:
- understand Protuguese lyrics
- memorize lyrics & melody 
- Sing along with the music

There were very few resources provided by the group and that exist on the web that allows them to learn the lyrics, read the translations and play the music in one place.

We started to design a solution that could help capoeiristas to learn Axé Capoeira songs and develop confidence in singing them in class. We created journey frameworks and storyboards to learn more about the process of learning music to find out the various pain points our participants encounter along the way and where our design could help. We presented and shared our initial ideas with the group and received their feedback which further helped us finalize our design.

Final Design

Axé Sings is a mobile app that helps Axé Capoeira students learn songs in order for them to become more comfortable singing and playing in the roda. It provides onscreen lyrics, translation, and history as well as singing along mode. By providing various levels of learning, Axé Sings helps supplement the learning of Axé Capoeira’s songs outside of class, while also empowering students and making them more comfortable singing the songs.

Results & Takeaways

I really enjoyed using the various design research methods to learning more about our participant group, what their needs, frustrations and wants are. Who knew how important music is to capoeira! We originally wanted to design a capoeira training app for them, but after we realized that its not what they need.

Our participants and the main leader at the academy were really looking forward to using this app. They asked us to look into how much it would cost to develop but unfortunately it was way too expensive for Axé Capoeira at the time, so it was never realized.

This project was presented at the SFU Surrey Campus Open House for the university's 50th Anniversary Celebration.