Planning

We began by brainstorming ideas as a group, we took the initial idea of bringing people together as our groups favourite of all our early concepts and began to work on it.  Slowly over time we developed a concept; based on a mobile web app, available to be expanded across all mobile smartphone platforms, but being focused on the iPhone throughout early development.  The idea behind this web app was of course to bring people together, however we developed that broad idea further, and narrowed it down to a particular format. Using that idea that board games bring people, especially families together in that strange awkward, forced and sometimes false situation, the situation usually early evenings, weekends, times in which the family unit feels it needs to reconnect together. We decided to take this concept and apply it to another part of peoples lives; specifically the situation of a family unit shopping. Obviously this is not applicable to all families, requiring smart phones for all users, however, this was just a starting point, to help us further expand our ideas.  We wanted to create an app, which in essence is functional, however it is deeper than that, it is a platform on which people can have fun, without being 'babied' by the application, hardware, or software.  The idea behind this app, was simply just to bring everyone, be it family of a group of friends who, when out shopping are separated into a single location, to unite the group together.  We decided to use a geo-location based functionality, but take that further, due to the fact that geo-loaction is not accurate to an extremely close radius, this would be used to bring people closer and closer, and then another functionality would be brought in using 'blip's sending a sound to the other persons mobile device, to aid in getting people even closer together if unable to find. This app, which begins as a functional 'friend-finder' can easily be seen as a game too, in which hide and seek, could be played on a city wide, and even greater scale.

One of the hardest things when designing anything is to come up with a name. Which we decided on incredibly early, we narrowed down our many name ideas to Rendezvous and Beacon. These names like the others we talked about, embody some of the concept for the app within the name, they are simple and short, easy to remember and catchy. Eventually deciding on Beacon, we started to develop this project from an initial talked about idea to an actual concept.

Our first plan drawn out, a brainstorm developing as it was written.  Not only did we take our idea and refine it making it better and more coherent, but we made it more realistic and a goal, reachable, by looking at technical limitations, and taking on board time and budget.  This is our simple story board for our first concept, bringing everyone in the groups ideas, thoughts and suggestions together into this concept.