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From One Butterfly
Welcome to the One Butterfly Wiki
This is a place to communicate ideas freely for those involved with and interested in the One Butterfly project. I have designed this wiki to serve as storage for my work products, design inspirations and thoughts about the One Butterfly project and ultimately my Capstone and Master's Report.
The One Butterfly project is expanding to encompass my Professional Experience Project at the School of Information. This PEP is often called a capstone and is a requirement for each student at the iSchool. My capstone will begin this summer under the direction of Dr. Geisler. That capstone experience informs a Master's Report in progress as we speak. This report will reflect upon the One Butterfly's progression as well as investigate user interface and interaction design of a union catalog at the Smithsonian.
Phase 1: Individual Study - One Butterfly UX & IX - Fall 2008
The One Butterfly project began as an Individual Study. During the fall semester I set out to design a user interfaces to be applied to an information retrieval system at a large cultural institution. Consulting several Readings and building on course work in Information Architecture and Usability. I created Sketches of Overview and Detail interfaces for evaluating search results. This interface was influence by Pad++ as well as an assortment of other Inspirations. These sketches were formalized into a User_Interface_Designs.
Phase 2: Capstone work - Literature Review & Environmental Scan - Summer 2009
The objective of phase one is to complete a literature review and an environmental scan. The purpose of these two assignments is intertwined; that purpose being to study the work of others and use insights I gain in doing these assignments to improve my work. The literature review is included in order to ground the ideas espoused in the One Butterfly interface in a tradition of information, interaction and systems design literatures; the literature review will include older yet intellectually significant works and recent articles on emerging practices and research topics that describe the current technologies. Reviewing a number of articles I will frame key topics and concepts in a paper and I will both summarize and comment on the literature reviewed with regard to its practical application in this project. An environmental scan is included along with the literature review to afford myself time to collect images of successful, interesting, and potentially inspirational interface and interaction designs. I will organize and catalog screenshots of the interfaces in order to reference the images through this and future design projects. Early in this phase the capstone advisor and I will meet and discuss my progress. Ultimately, the literature review will be available on the One Butterfly wiki, and some description of the environmental scan will be included with examples of the images collected.
Phase 3: Master's Report - Fall 2009
"The Master's Report is a substantive, publishable-quality paper synthesizing a domain or area of investigation that demonstrates familiarity with major concepts and issues in a theoretical and rigorous manner."[1]
Draft Abstract for School-wide Poster Session
Museums can be perceived as stuffy and forbidding; Web technologies allow museum staff to expand access to their collections and perhaps counterbalance these somewhat unfair perceptions. Museums are also looking for new ways to communicate with the public in part to make a case for their relevance in a digital information age. With the emergence of multitouch computing and popularization of user experience design museum professionals will soon be wondering how to marry users' information seeking experiences occurring on multiple computing platforms.
As a means of addressing these issues this Master's Report summarizes the One Butterfly design project. That project's goal was to create a multitouch interface for federated search of Smithsonian collections. The report describes the project's three major phases. First an idea for an interface was developed and then designs based on that idea were captured and clarified. Second, a formal review of related research was taken on to ground these designs in a tradition of museum informatics, as well as interface and interaction design literatures; Third, a evaluation of the design and the underlying idea in light of things learned in the previous phase. A discussion on future projects related to One Butterfly concludes this report.
References:
[1]“Capstone Options: Master's Report (INF 398R).” UT School of Information. Web. 5 Nov 2009. http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/programs/capstone/report.php
Past Projects
Years before the One Butterfly project I began thinking about the Museums and Technology. In my first web project I tackled a small research project investigating User Centered Design of Museum Website using the Museums and Web Conference Papers to cobble together a state of the field assessment. (Created in Fall 2007 as part of Internet Application a School of Information course.) Still thinking about museums and technology I wrote a paper comparing approaches to Semantic Based Visual Information Retrieval of Fine Arts Images. (Spring 2008 as part of Information Retrieval and Filtering another School of Information course.)
Wiki Updates
Check the Updates page for information on recent changes or additions to the wiki.
