Travorb
September 2010, Faculty: Philip Van Allen, Team Members: Rubina Ramchandani, Chiao-Wei Ho and Aarti Vashisht (me)
There are multiple facets to traveling and to a traveller. Pleasure, explore, business are many of the few reasons, similarly, the kinds of traveler range from family, single, budget, adventurous, luxury. Various permutations and combinations of these facets define the unique travel experience. Travob is a concept for electronic travel device that aims to capture this need for a customized experience. Primary audience of the book are single people who travel either alone or with group of friends. You can visit the site documents our process.
Thus the overall idea seeks to appropriately
Inform
Suggest
Facilitate
Trigger
Personalize the travel experience.
There were two areas of research, one looked at the nuances of physical structure and construction of books as a form. We browsed through books to understand and become conscious various extension and embed forms. More so, how these aspects interact with content itself. We also observed that certain books allowed multiple or an undefined entry points and how that altered the flow of reading itself. This made us ponder over how form could stimulate a linear vs. nonlinear flow of content. It also made us conscious that our physical form of the digital book should also strive to compliment the content's structure, thereby acting as an additional layer that helps re-enforce the structural aspects of the content. In the image shown below, we tried to gather insights on content and its structures. Since, we were still debating on the non-fiction book we drew quite a bit looking at various type of books and how their content is structured. Specially the variety in the travel books and the journals was very intriguing.
The group had two initial form directions: the traditional book and single paper. For the next level of form exploration the group chose to go for a hybrid exploration. The hybrid exploration would seek to incorporate the tangible qualities of the traditional book form and the possibilities of physically segregating the information. Just as a single tablet or sheet of paper, it would also attempt to have ease of portability and quick to access.
The final book had three main modes of content.
Travel book - This mode allows the user to navigate through the rich content of the book based on the user's customized filteration. The user also has the ability to map the book in detail (unfilttered content). This mode also allows the user to bookmark pages, tag, highlight, make notes and browse content. It addition to this the user is provided with a feature called map-it through which he may tag the preferred areas areas onto the map, thus connects to the planning and mapping mode
Planning and Mapping - Planning and Mapping mode allows the user to plan across the city and make an itinerary of his stay. He is also given opinions of the local people and can connect with other traveler through orbconnect to gather their feedback.
Backpack- Backpack mode is a collection of notes, media data such as videos,photos etc... It also has other feature like orbconnect and orbit. Orbconnect is a network based feature that allows the traveller to connect with other traveller within the orbconnect network. Orbit is a feature that provides the traveller with an opportunity to explore the city in a random uncharted way.
