Objective
Create a technical description poster for an astrolabe to educate university students on its uses and history.
Process
The process of designing this document can be broken down into three main steps:
1. Identifying audience and objectives.
2. Finding design precedent for successful technical descriptions and performing a sample analysis to determine what elements to include.
3. Using these insights to develop the technical description.
This is my realization tree: each part of the astrolabe is represented with a corresponding abstraction. Each individual abstraction was an attempt to represent the meaning behind the component, for example equal and unequal hours should be logical as one is an equal sign and one is an equal sign with the top line flipped perpendicular; this is the type of logic that went into producing all of the individual abstraction components.
This comparison matrix allowed me to analyze the sample technical descriptions for content to determine the frequency of different information blocks.
Technical description samples were collected to analyze the content.
to ensure the proper audience was being targeted, I completed a moldboard as well as a user-persona. A persona like this helps guide the final project by keeping the user's objectives in mind.
Outcome
The outcome of this project was a fully realized technical description guided towards the target audience of university students. This technical description includes the tasks that university students would find most enriching. By analyzing design precedent I was able to determine what elements and information blocks are most important for a technical description. It is important to keep in mind that writing on technical documents like this should be concise and clear.