Week 2 Kukui cup design

In the 2nd week of the design process I've looked at more dorm room competition sites to get acquainted with the common things. This Kukui cup is a competition that tries to educate users about energy conservation. This week in our meetings, we have nailed down some fundamental ideas for what the competition is about. We've discussed prizes, scoring system and cohesion within the dorms. All our discussions have led to small changes in our wiki pages in the project site. http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/w/list

Prizes are an issues because of funding and being able to still maintain excitement for the competition. Right now we're not sure what the prizes will be, but it seems we do need to give out individual small ones and also a reward for the winning dorm and floors. I just wonder whether giving too many rewards will dilute the enthusiasm for this competition and keep students from thinking about the main competitive spirit for the rivaling dorms.

Scoring is based on energy consumption, reduction and something we call kukui nut points. The KN points are something that can contribute to energy literacy by rewarding individuals who participate beyond just using electricity. They are doing things that can teach them what energy conservation is about.

Lastly cohesion is an issue because we realized that the chosen dorm called Frear Hall may not be a good candidate for the competition due to the demographics and setting. It seems Fear Hall is more of a conservative dorm that doesn't interact as much as the other towers in the UH Manoa campus. This is very important because participation depends on enthusiasm for this competition and to get students interested in energy conservation early.

I'm planning to look over more competition this week and work on the goals our group has set for this week. I'd also like to mention that I've been granted a license for using a mockup tool called Balsamiq. The staff at Balsamiq has been generous enough to give me a free license in order to work on this project. You can take a look at their site here. I'm still playing with the program, but I've created a page to show as an example.


Overall, I'm still struggling to think up ideas. I'm not sure what I can contribute to the design yet in a significant way.

Kukui Cup Competition

I'm in a new class ICS414 and a new project. If you think dorm rooms are tough as it is, wait till the students compete for bragging rights and a reward.

The Kukui Cup is a dorm room competition that pits different dorms against each other by recording their electrical usage. My groups role in this project is to design the competition and it's rules, the web applications and how information that will be displayed.

My initial thoughts about this are that the site has to have both an utility feel and a colorful scheme. Since this is a competition I think it's appropriate to make the site colorful. It's because I'm interested in the aesthetics of the site. So I took a lot at some of the other dorm energy competitions from other universities. Here is a look at the MIT layout of information from their competition. MIT In brief, it appears to be lacking in content. For example, it has charts for different dorms, yet it does not offer information with granularity in a small scale. My professor has suggested it for our project and it is very important in my opinion as well. Students need to connect their actions with the meter system. Being able to see your own usage data will really encourage participation. Each student can see what electrical appliances can do and it can even fun to play around them to see sucks the most electricity.

I have done research into the look of these "utility sites" by tallying up the colors of sites. I studied sites like the HECO site and Hawaiian Telcom. It seems blue is a really popular color, and the look somewhat better than the dorm room competition sites. I also looked at these pages specifically to get an understanding of how sites should look. I have some ideas for this design project.

There also needs to be planning of the design. A good hierarchy is also important, which is why a "web" diagram should be created to clearly show how the all the pages relates back to the home page. I've installed Balsamiq a software tool that allows anyone to creative mockups of sites or any Graphic User Interface by just plugging in objects the user wants to have in their project. It works pretty much like powerpoint, where you create text boxes and insert images, and dragging them around to suite your tastes.

This is where I'm at right now. Expect updates on our group work soon.
Here is the link to the project site.
http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/