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Del med…The push and pull of the 5 main aspects
- in the production process
Af Pia Jønsson, METAFOR
04/12 2000
Design og Usability - Konference-resume.
Nicolas Roope held his speech in English. Since June last year, he has been Managing Director in the multimedia and Internet company Oven.
Nicolas Roope claims that the main thing, when working with interactive media, is to give the user an experience. Oven focus on the process involved in the production and how to engineer that process and identify individuals that see those processes through from start to finish.
Nicolas Roope divides the production process into 5 main categories. The actual quality can be discussed from these issues: Concept, content, composition, aesthetics and functionality.
Concept
The concept is the idea that binds everything together. It is the first clue, so to speak. From that the next will follow, so it kind of gives us all parts of the project and it glues together all the parts of the project and creates bridges to other entities.The concept will largely form the following considerations.
When you have the concept, you will have to decide what to do about it. This brings you to:
Content
When we are talking about content we have to be particularly aware of:- The preconceptions of how that kind of content is displayed.
- The nature of this content, it's relationship to itself and to other content.
- What form the content takes.
Composition
Composition can be regarded as an arrangement in 3 dimensions, like architecture, where forms are working together. In interactive productions we talk about information architecture - or structural composition, seeing it as a given form, in which we are aware of how things should fit together.It can be broken into two main areas; the spatial or structural composition, which covers the area of site structure, navigation and layout. It must be logic and since there is much precedence we have to think it through.
Aesthetics
The concept as well as the content might influence the aesthetic choice. We kind of dress the other aspects up with aesthetics. You can have different skins and different kinds of animations, explains Nicolas Roope.There is a negotiation between aesthetics and functionality, though. Quality is built into the other categories.
Functionality
Functionality is a key aspect to what we are dealing with. The functionality is the flow that must occur.Typically speaking, in the work that an agency like Oven are involved in, the functionality is the key driver of the project. It is critical that the design builds to optimise transaction efficiency.
Functionality has to enable the passage between the user and the system. When you invent your products, you can't just count 1-2-3-4-5, when you think about process. We can only separate it in our minds as all the elements involved. If e.g. the content does not fit, we will have to look back into the concept phase and so on through the chain. Anybody involved in the development process has been through this circle, even if they have not been aware of it.
All in all, the five categories does not follow each other in a linear process. You can separate them and have them in your mind in the developing process, but they are of course closely related. You can look at it as a circular process or a process where you go forward and backwards between the categories.
When using this production process you will have to identify people who are strong in each area. The team should know that they can make something that has not been built before, but build on old experiences.
The best conceptual designers are the very undisciplined artists. When you have gone through all the ideas and are able to make an accurate drawing of everything you are going to make, you need a different kind of person, because the rest of the process is pure engineering.
