What Happens If You Design Your House Like a Web App?

Yelp co-founder and the father of RSS David Galbraith was formerly trained as an architect, and so decided to see if he could combine his two careers and design a house as if it were a web app.
By Vicky Teinaki on

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His blog post shows him map out various interactions, and their resulting spaces:

House Study

House Study

 

A new type of space from the diagram: Maker Space

A new type of space from the diagram: Maker Space

I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points (he believes that web apps are primarily linear), and also agree with one commenter pointing out that he didn’t have to use a webapp as the concepts of flows in architecture have been around for decades. Still, it’s an interesting concept that puts the A back into IA.

I also noticed one of his points in his rationale.

the web is not a graphic design medium but a product design one.

The correlation between web and product seems to be becoming noticed as of late (for example Jeff Croft’s ‘In 2012, Let’s Stop Talking Web Design and Start Talking Product Design’ or Smashing Magazine’s ‘What Successful Products Teach Us About Product Design’).

Above all, it’s a reminder at how we can not only draw inspiration from other disciplines, but also feed it back the other way.

Vicky Teinaki

An England-based Kiwi, Vicky is doing a PhD at Northumbria University into how designers can better talk about touch and products. When not researching or keeping Johnny Holland running, she does the odd bit of web development, pretends her TV licence money goes only to Steven Moffatt shows, and tweets prolifically about all of the above as @vickytnz.

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