CITYFILE
For this project, I worked with my classmate Robert – aiming to create a new way to encourage people to get out and explore new or old areas in Dundee.
To begin with, we brainstormed quick concepts to give us a foundation to work upon. We came up with ideas such as a fictional story surrounding the city of Dundee, using the actual streets and layout of the city as a template for the story, and a compass that led you to a randomly generated location. In the end, we decided to pursue a story line driven app as we felt the aspect of audio was interesting and would appeal to a wide range of people. To develop the concept, we began considering what type of person we wanted to target our app towards. Eventually, we decided to focus on tourists as we thought it would be exciting for them to experience a new city in a fun and unique way.
Over time and deep thoughts, we realised that our concept of fictional stories degraded the actual history of the city and the areas within it – so we rethought our idea. Me and my partner were still adamant we wanted to retain the audio aspect of our app, so we looked at ways we could make the actual history of Dundee more exciting to learn about.
Next on our agenda was to look into the app layout and design. To begin this part of the project, we looked into colour schemes that we felt worked well and complimented our overall theme of historical yet interesting information. In the end, we opted for a monochromatic scheme with a light blue accent colour to make buttons and important areas of the app stand out.
After our colour scheme was decided, we began sketching quick thumbnails for the layout of various pages of the app – such as the menu, map and information page.
Through the process of elimination, we decided on a layout and began creating digital DTP publications of numerous screens.
Once we were set on the design of our app, we began looking into how users would interact with the interesting places in real life.
The idea of ‘unlocking’ stories and fact-files struck us so we looked into QR codes and other ways that we could make information only accessible from the area itself.
Aiming to avoid QR codes – as they fail to excite many people – me and Robert came up with the idea of using installations as centre points for tourists to physically discover and explore. The structures were also connected to the app, showing up on a map that you can use to decide what direction you should be travelling in.
Deciding on the form of the pillars came easy as me and my partner were both interested in making it look worn and historical. This allowed us to come up with basic shaped sketches that eventually developed into stone castle-like arches – which are simple yet interesting to look at.
To convey the form and shape of the ‘beacons’ in a more realistic and easy format, I created a 3D render of it using the Rhino software.
To complete this project, me and my partner went to find a high resolution picture for the background for our A3 presentation board. We ended up choosing the rail bridge as the back drop because it had a spacious – yet interesting – composition and left enough room to super impose the CAD render into the setting. Finally, we added images of our app layout and some text to explain briefly what our app does and why people should use it.
