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As several folks out there know, I did an Industrial Design degree rather than the computing one that most people assume I did. This puts me in a position where I frequently get to see the web design world break new ground and discover whole new methods and approaches... that other designers have been using for decades.
There are also several other folks out there in LJ/Facebook land who did the same degree, or one remarkably similar to it. Most of you did it at least a year or two more recently than I did, and so I now call upon you to be my surrogate memory... There was a creative method discussed, which I think was called something like "critical faces", which was based around understanding the key surfaces required for a product and experimenting with orienting those surfaces in different ways... I didn't take the creative methods module, so it was discusses prior to that, or at least in a different final year module as well.
Can any of you lot remember if that was indeed the name for it? I've tried to google it but have got nowhere.
The reason I'm asking is that there's an approach to web design called "AOF strategy" that seems to be pretty much the same thing for the web. It's not exactly the same, but the similarities are so striking that I want to research it and see how similar they are, and indeed if I can learn anything useful from the differences.
For reference, AOF strategy is "Activities / Objects / Features". To my industrial design brain, this translates into something like "Context + Critical Faces".
Activity = Context = the core "thingness" that immediately tells you what the thing is and what it's for. (eg: the context of a fire extinguisher is that it's for putting out fires. If it doesn't immediately convey "put out fires with me" then it has missed it's context.)
Objects / Features = Critical Faces = the things you interact with and how you interact with them. (eg: on a phone, you have the bit you hear from, the bit you speak into, the bit you type on, the bit you read off of, the bit you put a sim in, the bit you plug things into, the bit where you connect the battery, etc... Note that each bit is a thing that has a verb associated with it.)
So, Brunel design folks, or other people with similar brain structures, do any of you have any ideas that might help me explore this correlation further?
There are also several other folks out there in LJ/Facebook land who did the same degree, or one remarkably similar to it. Most of you did it at least a year or two more recently than I did, and so I now call upon you to be my surrogate memory... There was a creative method discussed, which I think was called something like "critical faces", which was based around understanding the key surfaces required for a product and experimenting with orienting those surfaces in different ways... I didn't take the creative methods module, so it was discusses prior to that, or at least in a different final year module as well.
Can any of you lot remember if that was indeed the name for it? I've tried to google it but have got nowhere.
The reason I'm asking is that there's an approach to web design called "AOF strategy" that seems to be pretty much the same thing for the web. It's not exactly the same, but the similarities are so striking that I want to research it and see how similar they are, and indeed if I can learn anything useful from the differences.
For reference, AOF strategy is "Activities / Objects / Features". To my industrial design brain, this translates into something like "Context + Critical Faces".
Activity = Context = the core "thingness" that immediately tells you what the thing is and what it's for. (eg: the context of a fire extinguisher is that it's for putting out fires. If it doesn't immediately convey "put out fires with me" then it has missed it's context.)
Objects / Features = Critical Faces = the things you interact with and how you interact with them. (eg: on a phone, you have the bit you hear from, the bit you speak into, the bit you type on, the bit you read off of, the bit you put a sim in, the bit you plug things into, the bit where you connect the battery, etc... Note that each bit is a thing that has a verb associated with it.)
So, Brunel design folks, or other people with similar brain structures, do any of you have any ideas that might help me explore this correlation further?
