27.DecathlonDesign3

The design aspect of the Solar Decathlon system was fairly difficult. With limited input from the lead management, we were left to guess what we thought would be relevant information to be displayed to a user. What do we think would be important to know? Where should the system's priorities lie? These were questions we had to consider while creating the balsamiq mockups. When our team met together to delegate what jobs we should do, I was assigned the Aquaponics and Lighting systems. These two features and the desired design will be explained in the following paragraphs.

Since the engineers had not given us specifications on each particular system, we all had to do a bit of research. For my particular case, it was necessary to research a bit about aquaponics and they key concepts surrounding it. I had to figure out what chemicals and attributes typically need to be monitored. I also had to decide upon what things a user realistically has control of. In the end, I made my best guess and hopefully it wasn't too far off the mark. I decided the picture visualization of the health of the fish and the plant would be a very straightforward indicator of the current status of that particular system.

In terms of the lighting system, it was hard not to reinvent the wheel. I tried to think of some new things that would be nice to set from the web interface. Color seemed to be an important feature of the LEDs explained to us by the engineers so I wanted to set up a way that the user could interact with such lights and set their respective colors. I ended up going with using an interface much like that found in adobe photoshop (almost exactly hah!).

I originally added to function to completely disallow certain lights to be enabled. However, I ended up revising this due to lack of creativity on my part. In our particular design, the user should be able to intuitively click areas of the house to light up key areas both inside and outside the house.

Both features, aquaponics & lighting, have the option to be automatically controlled by the house systems, or to be manually set by the user. Since the house should be self-sustaining, the system should have the option to promote this ideal as well.

Design is hard. Making good design decisions takes a lot of work and a lot of testing. In our case, my team and I simply consulted with each other on what would make for good features for our system. I believe we ended up taking an approach that was very similar to the "Apple" design concepts with the way we tried to make intuitive visualizations that any type of user could quickly understand. The KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach was another concept we tried to keep in mind.