KCarlton Designs

View the interactive campus map here.

This project was in collaboration with Sarah Mild of Mild Designs for our Senior Studio thesis project. Senior Studio is a capstone course where senior Media Arts majors choose to pursue a topic or skill and build a thesis around it in order to learn new skills or bring more awareness to a situation.

We decided to keep the overall design clean and simple. Our inspiration came from amusement park maps such as Kennywood or Hershey Park because their maps are abstract, but each illustration identifies the characteristic of each location, building or ride without going into too much detail. By doing this, we were able to show each building based upon the most commonly viewed angle it is seen by students, faculty and staff without worrying about building orientation regarding North, South, East or West. The map even includes the newly planned UPMC Event Center that will be replacing the Sewall Center and the new Student Recreation Center that will be replacing the North Athletic Complex building.

The user interface is simple. If a user wishes to learn more about a specific building, they may click on the building and a side bar will toggle and share information about offices and functions of the building. A user can then click another building to find more information or click the white space to remove the side bar from view.

Problem

Robert Morris University’s current campus map is a PDF document that focuses primarily on the parking lots and roads across campus. For new students or campus visitors, the map tends to be overwhelming and confusing, especially when tours have visitors walking around not driving around campus.

Purpose

The purpose of developing a walking friendly interactive map is to provide students and visitors with a map they can access on their digital devices in order to determine the most opportune paths of getting from point A to point B. The map also delivers the user information about the purpose of each building and what can be found there.

Objectives

• Create a user-friendly interface.
• Provide an easy to use digital map.
• Increase knowledge of jQuery and JavaScript.
• Create illustration work usable for web and/or mobile application.

Target Audience

• Incoming students/visitors.
• New students, new faculty and staff, new transfer students.
• People who are lost or live on campus.
• Visiting scholars.