Last year each student was given two large boards about 3m x 1m each on which to display their work.

As such there has been some illustration and concepts about what the exhibition space will be like for the three projects there are to exhibit.

RSA – 4 x A3 boards, 1 x A4 board
Collaborative – 4 x A3 boards, 1 x A4 board
Final Major Project – 6 x A3 boards, 4 x A4 boards

Read on for a concept for the presentation of the exhibition area. It consists of the two large boards, papered in white with the project boards stuck to them.

On the left is the RSA project and the collaborative project. On the right is the final major project. In front is a table (probably one from iLab) with a white table cloth on it.

On the left side will be the sketch books and logs for the RSA and collaborative projects. On the right will be the sketch books and project report for the final major project.

In the center will be a laptop with a flash application running. The app will show the screen split in two to depict the two sides to the large boards. Click on the left side and you will see the video of the collaborative project in action. Click on the right and you will watch the screen recording of the final majpr project demonstrating how the toolbar would function. When the videos finish, they will fade back to the selection screen.

The aim is to create something that makes the process more seamless, or make the experience better for a specific user group. There may not be one BIG idea that does this, maybe there are a few smaller ideas that can be used to create the same effect. Only more research will tell which steps need to be improved or perhaps more importantly, which steps can be removed.

Recently I had to create a paper portfolio and went for a simple way to convey my projects with as little distraction as possible. Unfortunatleyit ended up looking a bit corporate but I would not have been happy with the final result anyway as I like things to be perfect. And lets not mention the “best” printer in college apparently has very poor colour reproduction of blues *sad face*.

Anyway my point is that my blog and online folio look nothing like it. I have no consistency with any of my online presence except that my Twitter picture is the same as the favicon on this site.

Design consistency is important in creating a whole entity. For each project I do I create a ‘brand’ if you like, that tries to show a little bit about that project but now I’m worried about showing them all at the same time for the final presentation where people sit and decide if I get a degree or not.

I would like to think that, while my designs may not be as good as a professional illustrator, they’re good enough to look nice and convey what they need to. I guess that’s the whole idea about good interaction design. Keep it simple and don’t distract.

I like that – I think I’ll bare that in mind.

The theme is data organisation and navigation which has been focussed to digital media and so far has been limited to the online environment.

For the presentation today the media selected was images and portrayed as ‘the life of a photo’ and a side-by-side case study was conducted for Picasa, Flickr and Facebook with regard to uploading and editing.

Post-it notes show what features each site has so common themes could be established. This also allows for a contrast between them detailing the differences.

The feedback from the presentation suggested that the focus needed to be more broad and look at profiles of users of the systems such as a Flickr Pro user. This will refine what it is the project aims to look at.

The answer then is to profile a Flickr pro user and their ‘life of a photo’. What do they use Flickr? How do they use Flickr? This is the approach that needs to asserted before the project can enter fully into detailed analysis such as what was presented today.

There is a problem with the concepts selected for the fete in that they have all been developed by the ‘regular’ people that attend lectures and seminars. This means that it will essentially be an individual project as the ‘creative directors’ will not be able to rely on many others turning up, knowing what they’re doing or even caring.

Hopefully it will go well never the less.

Flo also wants us to create a sentence to describe our project so I might add that in to one of the first slides. The very first tag line I came up with seems to work ok in this context so here it is again.

“Real-Time Route Planner: Saving The World, One Stop At A Time”

Here is the presentation. I have to say thank you to Fraser Ferguson for stepping in last minute and being an actor for us.

With this information we have decided on 4 things to prepare for our final presentation (even though they are slightly off brief).

1. Plan a route through multiple points (done but with manual if statements).
2. Create a flash animation of what the interface will look like and what information it displays.
3. Have a small demo video showing real-time implementation of an SMS text based system.
4. Have an image map that allows the user to select the route directly (might have to be a flash file rather than php as I can’t get the selection to input the data into a ‘$_GET’ field.

Here’s the presentation we used for the formative anyway.