Assignment Page
You will create a Web-based project that is meant to inspire and facilitate some kind of physical action from the online audience.
This target action should entail more than simply clicking, navigating, and skimming your web pages. It should require the visitor to perform an action that has consequence in the physical world.
- to attend an event,
- to buy something,
- to print and read something,
- to donate money,
- to write an email,
- to add his or her name to an online petition,
- to sign up for a service
- to participate in a collaborative online project (that might entail physically collecting, posting, creating, or writing some kind of material)
If this project is created for an individual, club, or business who has an existing web site, you should make this project a companion site or sub-site to the original, and consider to what extent you want or need to make your project echo its visual styles.
Beyond Knowledge Space
If the action is accomplished through online means (such as filling out a form), it should involve providing information or original material from Pierre Levy's physical, anthropological spaces: that is, earth, territorial, and/or commodity spaces. The action may also sometimes require a series of steps or sub-actions, but these steps should also result in a clearly defined, single action.
A Capstone Project
This project is intended as a capstone to the course, bringing together skills, techniques, and concepts from the previous assignments and readings. Your commentary should explicitly refer to earlier principles of expressive identity, community, and digital theory.
Target Action
As in the AIPE and Glocalization assignments, the Action Project should be focused: everything you include (and how it is presented) should serve a specific, clearly defined goal: to inform, motivate, and enable your intended audience to perform one specific action or sequence of actions.
Commentary
Write and turn in a 500-word commentary following the standard guidelines, using MLA citation and documentation format. Your commentary should also
- clearly define why you created the site, on whose behalf (if not just yourself), and for what intended audience
- explicitly specify the action that is your target, and why that action matters
- quote, correctly cite, and discuss three different texts from our unit of readings, relating ideas and examples to your project
- on two occasions, suggest connections and parallels between your project and a skill, technique, and concept learned in the two earlier assignments, including details of your own earlier projects or examples of those projects used in class.
- quote, correctly cite, and discuss two principles of usability from the Nielsen/Tahir book and how you employ them in your project to achieve your target goal of precipitation an action.
Usability and the Home Page
In class, we will discuss principles of usability and home-page design from the Nielsen and Tahir book. Your project should reflect a thorough understanding of both the details and the philosophy of these principles.
Resources