This title has a dual meaning as I reflect on this past week and look towards my next goals. One, what design am I approaching? I’ve accomplished a variety of goals and see that I have a good bit of work to go for a decent presentation in the Studio dress rehearsal, one week from today. So, in that sense, design is approaching! It’s time for me to pull a number of my isolated concepts together into one cohesive product, as well as shining it up so it doesn’t look so prototype-ish.
The second connotation of this title is exploring my own design approaches, as in, my approach to solving the problems I’ve laid out. In Footholds for Design, Gal describes a rock-climber as a metaphor to the design process by relating the climber’s choice of footholds on a path to a designer’s choices and accomplishments towards a goal. Each foothold grounds the climber/designer as the next step is sought, attained, or abandoned. I definitely can relate to this as I develop my project in bite-sized pieces. My approach is sometimes tedious and when I view all the files I output, it seems a bit excessive. Nonetheless, as a professor of mine taught me years ago -- start simple and make it work. This mantra carries me through. For every change I make, I usually create a new file. In that way, I can always go back and see what the difference was between the two. This creates many go-to points (footholds) in my developing project that I can return to if I abandon the successive iteration or decide to pursue a different route with a future problem. By doing this, I create a million files that, when observed much later after completion, are hard to tell apart! This time, I’m using this journal to keep me on track, at least for the major decision points and concept proofs.
I also can relate to the concept of the computer as an image foothold. I’ve been mulling over how to introduce a number of items for the user to choose from, essentially trying to figure out how to develop an interface for the map. In collecting my data, and looking for a solution to manage the data collected, I came across two items that have inspired me. First, the data that I’m using comes from a database that currently has a user interface. For the user to interact with the data, they must make choices from a number of form lists. I know that I can dynamically create some sort of form action in Flash, and was considering using the duplicateMovieClip action to create a drop down menu. When I try to think of accomplishing this, however, I know it is a daunting task that I don’t think I am up for at this time. I reviewed an older project of mine, the SBOF CD project that populated dynamic text fields with HTML formatted text. The crucial part of that solution was the ability to call Flash functions with a link. After running a few tests, I think this is my solution. I can control the information in the dynamic field and create a function to appropriately control the linked item. Plus, this has a scrolling feature, which will help maximize my file's visual space.
At this point, I have a few more concepts to test and then it’s time to bring it all together. I’ll try to keep up with my progress over the next week, to add more to my personal design footholds.
Project testing this week:
References:
Gal, S. (1996). Footholds for design. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 215-227). New York: Addison-Wesley
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