YDSHINTO.
About
The ItaliaDesign Field School is an intensive one year legacy project based on the study of world-leading design and innovation. The field study selects a number of dedicated and passionate students, who want to gain a better understanding of Interaction Design and learn why the role of a Designer is becoming a need among many agencies. These individuals have the opportunity to interview and learn from designers such as Andrea Branzi, Enzo Mari, Paolo Rizzatto, and Stefano Giovannoni - companies & firms like Bialetti, Industreal (One-Off), FLOS, and Parco della Musica. Each year the group is responsible for contributing and adding research content onto a 5 year long web database, which is a massive web repository that forms the baseline for each new group.
Process
During the first four months the group starts off by researching the Italian history, culture, and contemporary side of Italy. Through this research phase, the team develops a surface level understanding of the Italian culture, the different neighborhoods and cities, and ideologies from the designers and firms. Once in Italy, the team executes ethnographic research studies to further enhance their understanding of the culture, which will be used during interview sessions with the Italian designers. After all the information has been gathered in-field, the team returns to Vancouver to synthesize the content and put into web format.
Each member has a specific role during the synthesizing phase; my role during this phase was the project director: to manage all the content in my group, edit the raw video interviews, and develop wireframes for additional sections for the website. My additional roles were UX designer and content editor, where I mainly worked with the field school director to work on the web interface, choreograph the video content for interviews and tours, as well as building the core navigation for the website.
Delivery
Given a 3 month period we were able to launch the 2008 ItaliaDesign Field School website at its launch date. We have improved the quality and quantity of the research done from the past 4 years and we have also introduced a whole new ethnographic research section to the website. With the increase in quality on video interview, we have also developed a new video interface playback, which the next group would be able to use for their legacy.
Client
SFU: ItaliaDesign
Category
Web Design
Role
Web Developer
Project Lead
Media Editor
Interface Designer
Tools
Illustrator
Photoshop
Dreamweaver
LightRoom
Final Cut Pro
ProTools
Collaborators
ItaliaDesign Research Team
