jonathanTheDavis

Epicenter: The point on the Earth’s surface directly above the focus of an earthquake (WordWeb)

Epicenter was a term used in the 37signals “Getting Real” to talk about defining a project by a single, minimal core, and building outwards from that. I like this definition in reference to my project, because it implies my project is a groundbreaking (pun intended), earth-shattering (ditto), revolutionary event that is going to ROCK THE WORLD. Welcome to the internet of the real.

I decided that if the most minimalistic goal of my project was to connect students of the University of the Arts,

then the epicenter of my project should be the Profiles. If the users can use this site to more easily find that collaborator in the University they have been dying for, and they connect with that person offline, then I would still feel like the website had been a success. The close-knit community of the site (applied to UArts) is also what I believe makes it more unique than anything else on the web. This gave the project map of the site more focus:

So then I thought about how the other aspects of the site could build upon the Profiles. That’s when I realized that the Forum and Link Reference modules of the site could be combined into one easy reference. They both are divided in roughly the same categories, and if a user is interested in subscribing to one, chances are they would be interested in subscribing to the other.

The Articles module, I felt could be played down and integrated into the Profiles themselves as a form of user blog. In this way, if a user is interested in what a particular student has to say, they would logically go to their profile page. Thus the project map had streamlined to the following:

Each Profile has restrictions on what is public and private: