bytesandbricks.com

Bytesandbricks.com, a blog that explores the relationship between information architecture and real-world architecture and explains their relevance to website and urban design, is a student enterprise that requires external funding to realize its potential. Pamela Livingston, an Interactive Communications student in Quinnipiac University’s online master of science program, is sole proprietor. She seeks $X in private funding to support research necessary for continued publication.

Executive Summary

Bytesandbricks.com may be the only blog of its kind on the Internet. Still in its infancy, the blog is intended to explore the relationship of information architecture to real-world architecture and the possible effects of that relationship on the design and construction of virtual and real-world structures. In exploring these effects, it will also explore the effects that these structures have on user experience — how people feel about using a system (e.g., website or building), whether they value it, and whether it meets their needs.

Problem Statement

New and upgraded consumer technologies, such as smart phones, personal computers, personal digital assistants, and global positioning systems come to market at an ever-faster pace. Similar technologies that can enhance the function and utility of buildings and other structures are available or will be soon. Technology manufacturers need designers who understand how to design the navigation and organize the content of the devices they sell. Without these features, their products will fail in the marketplace. City and community planners need architects who not only understand and design for people’s needs and preferences, but also employ the latest technology to make built structures easy to navigate and a pleasure to use.

Free online content on these topics is in short supply. A search yielded a few websites and blogs with relevant content. But worthy as they are, none deals exclusively with this topic. ICM students and people at large who are interested in how the design of virtual and real-world structures affects them would benefit from a blog that provides this information.

Project Description

Bytesandbricks.com is a student blog created as a class assignment for ICM 501, Introduction to Interactive Communications, and continued for ICM 506, Writing for Interactive Media. ICM student blogger Pamela Livingston chose this topic because it aligns her career goals with her personal interests.

Ms. Livingston will use available online and print resources to research her topic and report her findings in her blog.

Online resources include:

• Interactive Cities, a video featuring Jeffrey Huang, professor of Media and Design, Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Adaptive Path Blog, by the user-experience consulting firm, Adaptive Path
• Interactive City, website for the Zero One San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge
• Interaction Design, a blog about interaction design and usability

Print resources include:

• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, 2^nd Edition, by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella(New Riders: Jan. 22., 2009)
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3^nd Edition, by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (O’Reilly Media: Nov. 27, 2006)
• Interactive Cities, by Anomalie Digital Arts*
  *Depending on price

As she has done with previous posts, she will also visit new and noteworthy sites in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to learn and write about them in the context of her chosen topic.

Ms. Livingston will work on this project alone. She will measure success from the feedback given by her professor and peers in her ICM class.

About Us

Ms. Livingston is an HFI certified usability analyst and has worked in the field of usability and user experience for five years. She architected sites within an intranet portal serving a large professional services firm and organized and wrote content for help systems used by this same employer. She also worked as a technical writer and editor and briefly as a print journalist.

Ms. Livingston is a fan of architecture, HGTV, and urban history, especially from a structural point of view. She was among the first to purchase a loft space in a vacant 130-year-old factory in Nashville, and she is pleased to see the building (on the National Register of Historic Places) restored and its surrounding neighborhood thrive.

She is working toward a master’s degree in Interactive Communications and will apply what she has learned in class to the bytesandbricks.com blog.