Design Paradise--Brainwaves

This section allows you to follow the brainwaves of the Design Paradise Think Quest team as they created this website. Oooooo. Included in the brainwaves are excerpts from 'chat' sessions, excerpts from email mesages, and diagrams the te am drew as they worked on the site. Enjoy!

In order to create this website, the Design Paradise Think Quest team first identified characteristics of effective websites. Before Jeff joined the team, Dawn and Darren had been using the 'talk' feature (similar to IRC) on the kalama server to brainsto rm (Dawn was on the island of Oahu and Darren was on Kauai). Shall we tap into their phone line??

They then decided to focus the content of the entry on Hawaii.

They then merged their brainstorms on interactivity and their brainstorms on ancient Hawaiian land use policies to come up with the idea of a simulation game about land use and balance. At this point, however, the ideas were only content based. The team members knew what they wanted, but weren't sure how to get there.

Dawn and Darren then asked Jeff to join their team. With the addition of a programmer's perspective, they could see whether their concept could be transformed into a functioning, web-based simulation game.

cartoon map of the website The Design Paradise web team held their first meeting at Borders. This meeting involved just talking and note-taking (and sipping on the official Design Paradise drink, coffee). During this meeting, the team discussed the programming, size, and browser issues that are associated with putting a simulation game on the web. In addition, they came up with the idea of creating a resource section running parallel to the game, allowing use rs either to look at the resources or to play the game or both. the team also mapped out a sample game--the map screens, the status bars, the data entry frame, and the feedback frame. This helped the team in writing a clearer proposal.

From there, Darren returned to Kauai and began scheduling preliminary interviews, all of which he conducted. Dawn began constructing a skeleton for the resource section and Jeff began reading up on programming. picture of the tam meeting

When summer began, the team started meeting more frequently. Dawn traveled to Kauai where both she and Darren conducted more interviews and began major work on the resource section. They also gave Jeff data (price of hotels, number of employees, etc.) to plug into the game. This involved poring over the data books and statistical abstracts, recording numbers, and using those numbers to calculate other numbers. This process consume d an entire pad of Post-It notes and was especially agonizing for Dawn aka the "English major."

In mid-June, both Dawn and Darren returned to Oahu for summer school. This allowed for more frequent team meetings and phone calls. Major construction of the game began at this point, which involved a lot of clarification and more brainstorming. And, o f course, the last-minute calculation of more statistics. At the same time, Darren began creating the 10 pixel by 10 pixel tiles used in the map. This involved creating the icons, uploading them, coding them into the program, consulting with the team, and then making any revisions needed.

Dawn began composing messages displayed within the game. These messages were triggered by location and relationships.

They also started mailing out letters to writers on Kauai and Oahu asking for permission to publish their work as part of the entry.

Toward the beginning of August, the website began coming together. The majority of the programming had been completed as well as the majority of the resource section. The Design Paradise team began to test the site.

The team emailed a list of people with the login and password for the site, asking for feedback on both sections. The testers gave valuable suggestions and brought up good points that aided in the debugging of the game. One tester suggested that the re source section be more closely tied to the game section. This prompted the construction of the Demonstration, a third method of browsing through the site.

In early August, the entire team traveled to Kauai to put the finishing touches on the entry. They stayed up into the wee hours of morning playing the game, debugging, and working on the resource section and demo. They also had time for sightseeing and showing Jeff the island that had only been a bunch of tiles and numbers until then (it was his first trip to Kauai).

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