Proof of Concept for a Street Sport Built Around Accessible Movement, Competition, and Creative Play
Word on the Street
January to April 2021
UX/UI design · Game design · Experience design · Systems thinking · Concept development · Insight-driven pivoting · Health and wellness design · Location-based experience design · Iterative prototyping
My Role
Experience Designer
This was a student concept project responding to a design prompt about health and wellness in 2020. I owned the full experience design process — from initial research and concept development through game mechanics, scoring systems, and interaction design. My own behavior during the pandemic became a key input that shaped the final direction.
Project Summary
Word on the Street is a proof of concept for a new kind of street sport where players spell out words by walking or running letter shapes with their GPS-tracked routes. Every street becomes a playing field, every time of day is a valid start time, and every age can play at their own pace. Designed during the height of the pandemic when traditional sports and fitness options were inaccessible, the concept proved that a fully scalable, asynchronous, competitive, and collaborative sport could be built entirely around how people already move through the world.
The Challenge
In 2020 the world shut down. Gyms, fields, and arenas closed. Traditional ways of staying active disappeared almost overnight, and the isolation that followed created its own health crisis — physical and mental. The design prompt asked how to address health and wellness under these new constraints.
The challenge was designing something that could work for people regardless of where they lived, how fit they were, or what equipment they had access to. It also had to be genuinely engaging — not just a fitness tracker with a leaderboard, but something people would actually want to play.
The Question
How can we reimagine sports as an interactive platform to encourage an active lifestyle, competition, and creativity within unprecedented health, societal, and economic constraints?
The Strategy
Start broad, then follow the real insight.
Initial exploration focused on using Radical AI to track micro-movements — gestures and small body movements — as a way to earn points and compete. That direction had potential, but a more accessible and scalable insight emerged from an unexpected place: my own daily behavior.
Let personal behavior inform the pivot.
During the same period I was exploring gesture-based tracking, I was also tracking my own walks every day as part of a pandemic-era work-from-home routine. Looking at the maps of those walks — the shapes the routes made, the patterns that emerged — revealed a completely different design opportunity. Shifting focus from micro-movements to macro-movements (walking and running) made the concept accessible to almost anyone with a smartphone, anywhere in the world.
Design the system, not just the feature.
Rather than designing a fitness app with game elements, I designed a sport — with its own rules, scoring mechanics, skill progression, and social layer. The difference mattered: a sport has inherent competitive and creative logic that a feature does not. That system thinking shaped every subsequent decision.
Test by doing.
Every design iteration was tested by actually taking walks. Routes were planned, traced, trimmed, and scored in the real world — not just prototyped on screen. That daily practice generated honest feedback about what worked and what didn't.
The Execution
Developed the core game concept.
By studying the maps generated from real walks and envisioning different letterforms within street grids, I created the foundational scoring mechanism: players spell words by tracing letter shapes with their GPS routes. The letterforms became the game — each one a unique spatial challenge shaped by the streets around you.
Designed the full scoring system.
The scoring system was built around three dimensions: accuracy (how closely the route matched the intended letterform), skill (complexity of the letter and added stylistic features), and distance (mileage multiplied against other scores). This created a system where casual players and competitive players could both find meaningful engagement.
Designed the interaction flow.
The full player experience was mapped from challenge selection through route planning, walk execution, path trimming, and social scoring. Each step was designed to feel intuitive while supporting the layers of strategy and creativity that make the game replayable.
Extended the concept to tourism and community.
Beyond individual play, the concept scaled to hosted championships where players travel within geographic regions to complete location-specific challenges. Walking new neighborhoods drives foot traffic to local businesses, and players can drop tags on points of interest — turning the sport into a platform for community discovery and exploration.
Project Outcomes
Word on the Street proved the concept was viable as a scalable, asynchronous sport that required no equipment beyond a smartphone and no designated space beyond the streets players already use. The proof of concept demonstrated a complete game system — mechanics, scoring, social layer, and expansion model — built from a single insight about how people were already moving through the world during the pandemic.
The concept showed that accessible design does not mean simplified design. A sport built for every age, every fitness level, and every geography can still be competitive, creative, and deeply engaging.
What's Next
As a proof of concept, Word on the Street identified a real market opportunity that still exists. Location-based games and fitness apps continue to grow, but few have cracked the combination of creativity, competition, and genuine accessibility that this concept was built around. The natural next steps would be building and testing a functional prototype, validating engagement and retention with real players across different geographies, and exploring partnerships with tourism boards, local businesses, and fitness communities who benefit from players actively exploring their surroundings.
What This Demonstrates
This project shows that my design process works even when the brief is open-ended and the resources are just me, my phone, and the streets outside my door.
Listening
The most important decision in this project came from paying attention to my own behavior rather than committing to the original direction. Noticing what I was already doing — tracking walks, looking at route maps — and following that signal led to a stronger, more accessible concept than the one I started with.
Simplifying
A sport needs rules, scoring, social dynamics, and a reason to keep playing. I designed all of those from scratch and made them simple enough that anyone could pick them up in minutes, while leaving enough depth that skilled players would always have something to work toward.
Solving
The prompt asked for a health and wellness solution under pandemic constraints. Word on the Street solved for physical health, mental health, social connection, and creative engagement simultaneously — using infrastructure that already existed everywhere in the world.
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