Football Explained

Impact: Calling an Inclusivity Audible#

Key Concepts: Data Analysis, Productive Group Facilitation, Public Speaking

Tools: Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Google Slides

Roles: Designer, Facilitator, Presenter

Duration: 2.5 hours

Team Members: Amanda Bao, Sun Min Kim, Lizette Hurtado Garzon, Xinkai Chen, and Umut Soysal

My dad swore that the best way to experience a baseball game was to listen to it on our local radio station. He believed this so fervently that he would bring an FM radio with earbuds to the baseball stadium with us to listen to the caster describe what we were seeing in the ballpark, explaining the rules of the game to me along the way. This is how I learned to get into baseball, but if it weren’t for someone like my dad showing me the ropes, I very likely wouldn’t find watching games games broadcast on TV, filled with dense jargon, enjoyable at all. Sports viewing needs an onboarding experience, and that’s what our team found when we picked apart the viewership data for a fictional football league at a Deloitte design jam.

Football Explained is a feature proposed to be embedded in live-streaming applications to provide dynamic audio switching that would bring immersive sports experiences for viewers of all experience levels. Opting in to a setting that requests additional foundational knowledge about the game switches your audio feed to a simulcast of the game catered towards a beginner audience, describing rules, strategies, and storylines in simple, easy to digest ways. Depending on your setting, these audio tracks might interweave differently, perhaps giving viewers who are more familiar with the game fewer rules explanations but more information about recent developments during games they may have missed.

After two hours of data analysis, brainstorming, refinement, and a five-minute pitch to a panel of judges, Football Explained won 1st place at CMU’s Deloitte. InsightStudio Studio Jam out of over a dozen teams at the event.