dan@danixd.com
+44 7837 501 537
My name is Dan O’Connell. I am an Interaction Design graduate and web enthusiast who loves designing immersive, creative & user-friendly interactions.
I hope to one day conquer the world with an Arduino board, a windmill and a modem, but in the mean time, I’ll stick to front end web design + development.
Twitter @daninacan
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Pirate Press
This project brief required us to create a content management system using a type of back-end technology, preferably PHP.
To tailor it to my interests, I looked into creating an online/offline community by amalgamating digital technology with real life interests. My initial idea was to create photo points in various locations around the country. The photo points are physical boxes painted on the floor, which would act as platforms for discussion and interactions. This idea could work well as a brand promotion, in the form of a photographic competition, for a company such as an extreme sports manufacturer. I ended up joing with two other students and after several discussions, the project evolved into a local community project.
We were inspired by local news paper websites, including the News Shopper and the Bromley Times. Each paper had online versions of their articles that had facilities for users to discuss and comment. People had very strong opinions, and often information popped up that others didn’t know about.
We came up with the idea of taking the news to the people it affects and share a link they can access to discuss the issues, creating a viral form of information sharing. At the time the stencils only contained the text version of the url, but in the future QR tags are a music faster way of accessing the information.
A website was created, archiving the news articles and offering a simple web form to post comments on the relevant information. We did some research and came across an article that had not been talked about in any of the local news papers. The article was about road deaths on a road close to home for all of us. We were all shocked when we saw it and thought it would make a large impact on the community. A stencil was placed by a bus stop on the offending road to get maximum viewers. Unfortunately we didn’t get many responses as the stencil was removed hastily by the council, but if the website grew and evolved, moderators/administrators would be needed to help manage the content and eventually we hoped for the website to become self sustained.
