Redesign Assignment

The goal of this project is to redesign Brown Student ID.The Student ID is one of the most common cards in students' lives. A normal student card contains information such as student ID number, photo and so on. Most of information is displayed in words. This project is to discuss the feasibility of using meaningful images(Icons) to replace words and represent part of information on Student ID card.

Ideas

The idea of this project was inspired by the paper "Improving Recoginition and Characterization in Groupware with Rich Embodiments"(Stach, 07). In this paper, it introduced how information-rich embodiments works in groupware. The information-rich embodiments can maximiaze the amount of informations that an avatar or telepointer can provide and beautify the interface, which I believe is also an good idea that can be used to redesign the Student IDs. Images have more superiority than words in visuality and representation. It can make interface simpler ,beautiful and easier to understand. Currently, the normal student ID usually uses words to represent informations(Figure 1).

Figure 1

Tranditional Student ID cards looks crowded and lack of personality. In the following part, this project attempt to redesign the student ID by using meaningful graphic icons to replace words and represent information.

Process

A tranditional student ID card should contain information such as student name, photo, student ID number,major and so on. Among them, some information such as student name and ID number are hard to be represented by images, so they will be keeped.Then some new information, such as major and grade year, will be attempted to added as appropriate icons.

After searching and comparison, the images(icons) in the following table were chosen to represent grade years and majors:

Table of Grade Icon

Freshman
Sophomore
Junior
Senior
Master First Year
Master Second Year
PHD

Table of Major Icon

Computer Science
Electronic Science
Math
architecture
Music
Medicine
Civil Engineering

A redesigned Brown Student ID card template was provided in Figure 2, and an end product was shown in Figure3. Besides original information such as student ID number, name and photo, extra information such as major and grade year and signiture was added. Also a DIY zone was added to display more personality and make cards look better.

The new card was seperated to three parts. First part is the area of top-left, it contains Brown university's badge and name. The second part is area of right, it contains student's photo and name. Compared to original card, the student ID were moved to the area of bottom-left. The third part is the main part. It was located in the center of the card. It contains images of grade year, major, diy and signiture.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Research knowledge Relevant

During the process, some knowledge from HCI research are used to improve the redesign.

Analysis

Compared to the original card, the redesigned card have advantages and disadvatages as following:

Advantages

Disadvantages

Conclusion

The goal of this project is to redesign the Brown student ID cards by using images to repalce words and represent information. In sum, the project achieve this target. However, there are still some flaws.

Because of the limitaiton of art ability, all the images that were used in this project were from Internet. If this topic can be studied further, original images should help improve the feasibility of this research.

Also, the combination of images is not prefect. Because of the same reason, though every single images works to represent information, the combination of all theimages doesn't look good as expected.

Reference

All the images and icons that were used in this project were collected from Internet. Some modifications were made to part of images.