Capstone Presentation

Last week we presented our Capstone Project Process to three professionals, Patrick Keefe and Steve Mahn from HLK Agency and Christina Hughes from BigWideSky.
I presented my research, the beginning of my website and the progress from beginning of the project to what I have now. It went better than expected.
They were extremely excited about my research and how I used it to inform all my design decisions. They also appreciated my type and other aesthetic decisions.
But they did have a few suggestions. They enjoyed the video but they suggested spicing it up a bit by taking different shots from different angles and using those new angels through out.
The best suggested was about the movements of my website. The movement was one of the only thing that didn't have a clear validation. The suggestion was to use movement to communicate to the user what part of the website the user was currently experiencing. The website moves through several different sections, the introduction, the history, the future and the opportunity to support. Currently there is no clear indication that the user has moved into a new section so movement became the perfect solution. Each page of each section will move in the same way but each section will move differently.
My presentation went really well, better than I could ever hoped. They gave me great confidence and excellent advice that will improve my project and make it even better.

Washington Theater Research

What I have learned this semester is researching before designing can help your design and design process highly. The more I research on the Washington Theater Project, the more informed my project becomes.
The best research I have come upon lately is the report the Washington Theater Committee gave me. When they gave it to me, they thought it might possibly help me. Because they didn't seem so confident about it, I avoided it for several days and researched in my own direction. When I finally felt I should look at it, I was floored.
What they gave me is a feasibility report of the Washington Theater: 155 pages of in dept information about the competition,  the demographics, the audience, and how the theater would work. It uses both qualitative and quantitative facts to show that the Theater would be very successful as a theater and at helping the city of Quincy if it was successfully restored.  It told me that the theater has no competition and this is a need in the city of Quincy, as a way to generate revenue and to expand the arts and cultural experiences. This has become my bible of research because it tells me everything I need to know about how to build my interactive experience.
What surprised me the most, was how I feel this information is gold, and the Washington Theater Committee just sees it as a report. The Committee has fallen to Curse of Knowledge, a term used in the great book Made to Stick, that describes a person or business that can not get their idea out there because they don't understand what knowledge of their's is powerful. They get lost because they don't understand that their audience is not on the same level as them, they don't have the same knowledge.
I am going to use this information to my advantage and try to help the Washington Theater show the world what they're missing.

Capstone Beginnings

Since November of last year I have known what I wanted to do for my Capstone. I was researching the city of Quincy when I came upon this magnificent and very old theater, the Washington Theater. The theater had only been reopened a couple of years after being shut down in the 1980s. The theater was built in the 1920s with beautiful architecture that you can only find with buildings built from that era. But it had been abandoned for 30 years and now needs a major face lift.

Because of the Festival going on that weekend, they were letting people explore the inside of the theater and what I say when I went inside took my breath away. I automatically had the over-welling sense that I needed to do what ever I could to make the rehabilitation of this theater happen.

After research, I found that their current website was out dated as the theater: this was my opportunity. I knew this would make an excellent Capstone project because I had the passion but I still needed to learn everything about it. It had the potential of making not only a great story, but also a beautiful website.

After being excited about this project for two months, I finally began the process and came to my first problems (to be figured out). Who was my audience? How do I get my audience to care? How do I get my audience to react? How do I tell this story with a website?

With the help of some close students and friends of mine, we discussed how I could use story to have my audience care about the Washington Theater. We decided the best way to do this was to show them why bringing the theater back to life would be good for them and their city of Quincy.

As I continue on this project this week, I intend to do more research about my audience and the best way of telling a story through a website.