Design project: State of the local environment

As our design project, we are creating a concept for gathering people's opinions of their local environment. The project is made for the Ministry of Environment, and this concept will hopefully lead to a prototype created in the spring during the course Dynamic Visualization Design 2.

The design task here is to create a visualization of the two areas involved in this opinion gathering task:

1. Visualizing the data gathering method, e.g. a survey which the ministry hopes to be a cross platform app to use with primarily mobile, but also desktop devices.
2. Visualizing the gathered data, meaning the answers given via the app used to gather opinions.

Getting this project started has not perhaps been the easiest task. It is natural that as a team with all members having really varied backgrounds we all start to do our own things without paying that much attention to the big picture. This is well described by the fact that only a week after first hearing about the assignment we were already discussing what colors to use and where to add what kind of dots, though we hadn't even began to envision why anyone would actually want to use the app.

So, we needed to take a step back, create an outline and a scope for this project, and start putting the user before our what's-your-favorite-color discussions. Below is how we restricted the scope of this project, and divided it into relevant phases. 

I find this project espscially challenging because I have no prior experience in mobile app development and I don't have adequate knowledge of the GIS (Geolocation Information System) technology on which our visualizations should be based on. I don't think anyone in our group has good knowledge on this, so it will require a lot of effort to make this app happen.

But then again the less you know the more you learn, and fortunately our contact person from the ministry seems to be very motivated and willing to spend time on creating something that everyone is happy with.

We'll continue next week with a group meeting where we will discuss the user motives, and meet with our contact person to present our ideas.