My understanding of this charge of "modularity" is that we are to guide this project so that we can maximize the flexibility and repeatability of the room-sized units. We also want to organize the system so that we can do as much work in the factory as possible and that we can implement the ecoMOD system on a variety of sites with or without certain elements (ie. basement/crawlspace).
We want to be able to negotiate a compromise between choice of options for the user and assembly line logic for the factory.
ecoMOD is an amazing collection of students who are all excited about and dedicated to producing a wonderful house for a family who would otherwise not be able to afford a well designed and environmentally conscious home. Being involved in this effort seems to me to be a very potent way of ending my undergraduate career at UVa. I can't think of anything I would rather be doing in my final year here.
First I want to say thank you to Garett and Kyle and anyone else who helped get this together. I also want to say thank you to Marilyn who spent a lot of time on the website stuff last semester. Looking at the site, it really looks great; I just have a few general comments:
1. When you get to the ‘OUTin’ opening page from the ecoMOD welcome page (which is great), once you click on a link like 'mission' you cannot get back to the OUTin front page through a link. I think this is important and even though it is only an image right now, you should still be able to get back to it without having to use the browser 'back' button.
2. Under the research, when you click on the PDF, it opens within the frame in the same window. It has all the acrobat tools with it too which makes the window look very funny, not to mention small. I would suggest that when one clicks on this PDF or any future PDFs that they open up in a new window to prevent them from being bounded by the ecoMOD frames.
3. I know last semester Marilyn had developed some stuff for the 'people' section. I think she had some hierarchy setup that worked well to order the headshots. She also started having little 'mini-bios' of each person as you either clicked on the headshot or as you rolled over the image - either way I think works. I would stringy suggest bring this idea back to the website if you have not already planned to do so.
The website really looks good and I think it is a good face for the ecoMOD project.
-Ben