Teamwork is a feature of the designers, often they use a wall to share ideas, research, opinions. But today designers are travelling a lot and they have trouble working in a team so they use online tools to maintain contacts with their colleagues.
Research
we start looking how designer works in team, when they meet face to face to discuss a project and what tools they use.
The question is: how do designers work when they are far away from their office?
Nowadays the members of a working team exchange messages and files using communication and information sharing services (as Gmail, Twitter, YouTube), or services given by the company, the intranet. These systems are limited because they are dedicated just to team management and to file storage. They do not allow you to manage content and relationship between team members flexibly.
Design principles
The Internet is a medium with great potential, but it can not completely overcome the problems of teleworker designers.
Now the web offers many 2.0 services, tools to share media like photos or videos, but also network dedicated to share ideas, suggestions or comments. There are even the traditional systems of communication like chat or email with which you can exchange information.
Shortcomings of these services stand out when designers use them, because they require some special features which they unfortunately have not found a solution on the web yet.
So, does not exist a service which use internet to collect in a single interface all the aplications needed to support the designers creativity. This is the main distinctive characteristic of WallStation, a revolutionary platform for a very specific target: designers.
Designing from the inside-out
From careful observation of the technical work of many designers, it was noted how often they use a wall to share ideas, researches and presentations, to record and make available to everybody, the material produced during the creating process of an artifact. For these reasons we decided to carry on with the metaphor of wall transposed on the web together to all those tools used by designers during the development of a project: Post-it, documents sheet, media like picture or video etc.
Who is it for?
The Internet offers many systems dedicated to sharing and communication between users who work from home or away from the workplace.
WallStation is instead for those who collaborate on the same design project, but not in the same place.
How does it work?
WallStation takes the metaphor of the pinboard, using representations of pictures and documents which can be grouped visually and viewed by members of the team wherever they happen to be.
After login, a user can put Post-Its, sheets, images, videos on a shared virtual wall, allowing the whole team to keep track of progress.
WallStation – Applicazione web a supporto della progettazione from webenito on Vimeo.
WallStation also allows the use of existing networks like Blogger for the project blog, Delicious for sharing the bookmarks on the wall, Flickr for pictures, Google Calendar for timetable management, and Vimeo for videos.
WallStation encourages supportive advice and criticism.
Interface
Menu
Tool Post-It
Tool Document
Tool Insert media
.. menu
WallStation’s instruments are accessed through three menus.
1. Main menu: Post-It, document, stack command, insert media (picture, video from your PC/Mac), edit brief project and background wall, choose a wall or work phase.
2. Shape menu: text on the wall, highlighting square, arrows, sketch.
3. Mashup menu: Blogger, Delicious, Flickr, Google Calendar, Twitter, Vimeo.
.. graphic code
Documents are represented ‘photo-realistically’ to make the interface a more friendly and immediate.
Here is my final presentation
HereHere is my report in .pdf
Here is video of the prototype
Here is the prototype
Here is my website