Senior Product designer in London
Senior Product designer in London
My virtual sketchbook from University
One of the activities of the week was to create something to do with geometrical shapes. My group was set the task of creating a geometrical language to represent different rooms on the same floor that are classroom was. Every room was named with a combination of letters and numbers. Since we had to represent these classrooms with geometrical shapes we decided that every number and letter should be represented by a shape. However, we came across the issue of rooms having the exact same number but a letter was involved. We thought we could use 3D shapes to represent the letters of the rooms but by doing this we could of overcomplicated this problem. Instead, of translating the names of the rooms with shapes we decided to use different symbols for every room.
We created a map with all are geometrical shapes arranged in a top to bottom order and followed the pattern of going around the rooms clockwise.
(These pictures are taken by me)
The picture on the left is a draft of some of the symbols we could come up with. We made the symbols very simple but abstract enough for the user to differentiate between the rooms. However, we included lines into most of are symbols to symbolise the relationship between the rooms that they were all on the same floor. We produced a map and placed every symbol next to each classroom door.
This activity opened my eyes to how the real world deals with a situation where there is a language barrier. For example, signs in airports. They have to have a symbol representing what the sign is clearly otherwise it can be misinterpreted. This could lead to unfortunate incidents.