Client: Lab Director - Nassim Jafarinaimi
My Role: Website Design and Development
Skill: Research, Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Javascript

Design and Social Interaction Studio brings an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students together to examine the experiential and participatory dimensions of digital media and their relationship to establishing and supporting democratic forms of social interaction.

The Plan and The Goal

I met weekly with lab director to present project update and collect feedback. Based each meeting, new requirement is proposed for next week. Every weekly task is completed on time with high quality. The goal of this project was to design and build a website for the lab to showcase various research projects with a focus on simplicity, professionalism and playfulness.

Mind Mapping

Two questions were asked during this phase. who is the owner of this website? who is the audience of this website? Those are very basic yet important questions. By thinking about them and then answering them fundamentally helped initiate design criterias for this project.

Research

Researched websites in a similar academic field such as MIT Media Lab and Human Computer Interaction @ Georgia Tech to gather requirements about content and technology. Collected 8 good example websites to get inspirations from.

Initial Design

Came up with three design variations for client review and feedback. Seleted one of them to continue developing with combined design elements from the other two variations.

Details

After the main design is decided, some accent elements and details are explored to give the website a fine touch to make it distinguished and memorable.

Final Design

If I recall the initial goal: design and build a website to showcase various research projects with a focus on simplicity, professionalism and playfulness. I think this design did accomplished the goal well.

Responsive Layout

The website is built based on web frontend framework - Bootstrap with deep customization. Responsive design is one of the big challenges during the implementation process. It was finally overcome with lots of try.