May 3-7, 2005
Thesis Presentations
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| vizDoc in ArchChive | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Anjali Arora | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://www.artbrush.net/archchive/ | |
| Keywords: | emotional design, information visualization, document management systems,knowledge management, collaborative tools, interaction design, web-based applications | |
| This is an exploratory design prototype for vizDoc, a tool for visualizing documents & files in a larger project & document management application,ArchChive. | ||
| The overarching question I hope to answer with this endeavor is whether it is possible to combine the twin & seemingly contradictory goals of practical functionality with the sublime & the emotionally-fulfilling in a digital application targeted at the business community (architects / designers in this case). | ||
| Personal Statement: | I have chosen this particular area of inquiry namely exploring playful, innovative ways of data visualization & information display as I have been fascinated with this area of study within the larger context of interaction & experience design.
I would bring to this project my experience as a painter as well as a professional interaction designer. The former prods me to explore lavish, lush visual means of communication, while the latter constantly nags me to keep the end-product meaningful & useful. I welcome the dynamic tension between these two poles, & expect rich & surprising results to arise. And both these disciplines have taught me the value of economy: every mark made, whether on the canvas or the screen is deliberate, purposeful, non-superfluous. I hope to bring the same economy & restraint to this project. For my target audience too, I have chosen professionals in architecture & design: fields that typically synthesize scientific & artistic thinking. Also since these fields are highly visual, my users herein will provide the ideal opportunity to test out visually rich ways of interaction with the application. | |
| Context: | This project will be in the shape of a web-based application that enables this user community of architects / designers to collaborate remotely by facilitating the sharing of files, such as drawings, blueprints, sketches as well as other text & rich-media based assets. These users will be further enabled to annotate these, again using a variety of media, & both synchronously as well as
asynchronously. The other major aspect of this project will be visualizing all of this data & presenting it to the user in novel, rich & playful ways, without compromising on the integrity of the information. I will be exploring innovative visualization techniques that reveal the substrata in the available information, hidden patterns & meanings that only emerge when the data is arranged & juxtaposed in a certain way. With my application, I hope to extract much more meaningful & relevant information than is possible using regular ways of displaying data. On this subject, I draw much inspiration from Edward Tufte, Ben Schneiderman & others. | |
| Audience: | My audience is the global community of architects & designers who need to collaborate remotely on projects, & which professional doesn’t? As the world shrinks into one, & projects as well as people are scattered all over the globe, digital collaboration & project management assume prime importance. The added advantage is that entire projects get archived in the process, giving further impetus to the ability of an organization to harness & harvest all of its digital resources. We are seeing far-sighted companies investing hugely in digital archiving of all of their resources currently in physical format, & with good reason: it is widely accessible, it makes for better knowledge management & dissemination, it offers protection against accidental loss of data through fires, earthquakes, etc.
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| User Scenario: | Check out www.artbrush.net/archchive/user-scenario/ | |
| Sources: | Ben Schneiderman, Edward Tufte, Readings in Information Visualization, Malcolm McCullough, Readings on Ontological & semantic metadata.
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| Conclusions: | I believe this is an on-going journey, & it\'s really hard to draw conclusions at this point. | |