Concept Introduction

The following is a little better description of what my thesis project is, along with some basic user goals. It's not as thorough as I would like to describe it, but for now it's decent. There has since been tons of features that I've made up my mind to add, but those will come in a later post. This is taken pretty much word for word from my Interface Design class statement.

My chosen interface design comes from a field that I have been interested in for quite some time, but never actually pursued professionally or academically. That field is architecture. Personal residential architecture to be precise. Due to my interest in the area I want to develop a website that contains a step-by-step Design Your Own Floor Plan interface that users can use to fully customize and completely control what they desire in a house. It will be dynamic and fully responsive every step of the way so that the users can see what changes they’ve made at anytime and change whatever they want at anytime. They would send off the plans to the website’s administration and architectural design team who would officiate, perfect, and modify in order to send it back to the user for final approval.



The great thing about this system is that the existing floor plan and housing web sites don’t offer this kind of interaction. They only provide you with existing floor plans for a price. You enter what you want and they send you several plans in the mail. It isn’t very convenient. The only other direct user-controlled options are expensive software programs that you must purchase separately and take a lot of time to learn on your own before you start. This website would attempt to cut out that middleware and give the customers something to immediately work with and take shape. In addition, there is no direct competition in this area to worry about as no formal website as of yet offers this service.


User Goals

• Complete a step-by-step guide for designing your own floor plan within several minutes (Modify an Existing Design) or several hours (Design From Scratch) depending on the user’s desired level of complexity
• Save your design in the site’s database to be referred back to and picked up at later dates
• Send design to professional architects for official approval, professional modification (heavy or light) depending on the user’s needs

For the class, I basically finished an interface for just the Modify an Existing Design portion of the system. I only picked the simpler of the two parts for the Interface class since it was all that was required. It, of course, wasn't as detailed as I'd hoped and will definitely be improved upon during my Studio and Thesis classes.

Now that I'm in Studio I, I'm beginning anew on the project. For this, I'm focusing on the Design From Scratch portion of the system and beginning from the ground up. I've already come into contact with some intermediate algorithms and coding techniques, but no unmanageable problems as of yet.

Stay tuned for detailed schedules, addition lists, and my first progress report! Riveting.