Innovatively Creating a Culture of Sustainability through Interactive Design

The Iona team and myself as the Lead Designer recently completed an interactive design for Richland Community College’s Center for Sustainability and Innovation Building (CSI Building). The interactive was to convey key concepts related to the green CSI Building and its use of SMART building technology. The Iona team of Jeanne Foster, Mark Tovey, and Jeff Idleman brought their expertise to the project. Having such a great team allowed Iona to achieve a successful solution to the client’s needs on the Define and Design phase of the project. The “big idea” of the project was to create a sustainable, innovative community-regionally through interactive media.

The two key points and objectives of the project were to demonstrate how the CSI Building meets the LEED criteria. In addition, it was to demonstrate some of the career skills and people who worked together to make the CSI Building. The client was very adamant in having a “wow” factor. We created the following milestones to meet the client’s objectives:

•Strategic Plan – Define the purposes of the interactive, identify key messages to be developed, identify the communication goals to be achieved, identify the audience, define how the new programs will support Richland’s long term goals, identify the results expected from the interactive and how they will be measured.

•High-Level Design – Determine conceptual design. Identify narrative story lines that will be developed. Identify the “look and feel” that should be used. This will include: fonts, color and other graphic standard issues; music, narration, screen composition, navigation, user interface styles, etc.

•Content Outline – Define project content and assets and how they will be formatted for these presentations.

•Navigation Outline – Organize the content and outline a navigational structure.

Iona suggested that Richland Community College would use higher media production values and enhanced interactivity to increase the dramatic impact of the display. This approach will add video commentaries by virtual guides to increase the human aspect of the interpretation. In addition, this would be complemented by allowing visitors to manipulate high-resolution images of certain key features by dragging the images with their fingers and zooming in for greater detail. The project will be created in Flash and will use CMS plug-ins for the image manipulation interaction. In addition, the project will use Flash video to provide testimonials and key green features of the building.

Overall, the project was well received and gave Iona the chance to really use our 4D Process to its greatest achievement. Below are some of the Graphical User Interface Designs from the project.