After coming back from the Christmas/New Years break I have started putting together the prototype system for use in the revised BBsC303 Digital Craft course. The paper I am writing for the CAADRIA conference will be describing the methodology and once that is complete (this Friday) I will be putting a more in depth breakdown of the proposed concept online. In the meantime I have picked a name to call the system by: Reasonate
Its a play on resonate and reason because the two ideas are fairly closely tied to my concept. 'Resonate' in the sense that there is a continual reverberation of ideas within a project until some harmony is reached and 'reason' because at the end of the day it is hoped people will turn to the system to understand why decisions were made (pretty clever eh). I have bought the reasonate.co.nz domain name but unfortunately someone has 'parked' the reasonate.com address space (damn GoDaddy and their $1.99 domain name reservations). There is no logo yet but at least there is a moniker to refer to it by.
An early prototype of Reasonate (click to enlarge)
For the BBsC303 prototype I have invented two imaginary design firms that the students will be working under, Red Light Designs and Black & Blue Architecture (which gives us a red team and a blue team sort of like Survivor). I am writing the application in Ruby on Rails which is a bit of a learning experience as its my first real Rails app. I must say it is a whole lot better than writing in Java, even after a week I have made two or three times as much progress as what it would have taken in Java. I will be using Java a little for the document indexing side of things (using LUIS, a Lucence front-end API) but apart from that everything will be in Rails with a number of snappy AJAX/CSS tricks to get things looking really slick.