Www Site Design For Internal And External Audiences: The Smart Engineering Project

Abstract

The Smart Engineering project seeks to develop a model for training engineers with interdisciplinary skills and experiences. It involves an interdisciplinary course and a demonstration highway bridge. An associated WWW site provides course resources including tutorials in topical areas, exercises promoting team interaction, and guidance for collaborative activities and bridge documentation which facilitates industry access to current research and field applications in smart structures. It must accommodate a well-defined internal student audience and a general external industry audience. The site objectives are to effectively inform both audiences and to exploit the capabilities of the WWW. The design philosophy stresses the close interaction of content providers with media programmers and the careful consideration of audience characteristics. It follows comprehensive guidelines for modularity, circularity, and commonality and balances contrasting goals of simplicity and complexity. The former concerns the site hierarchy, usage, and navigation. The latter concerns usability verses interactivity and consistency verses adaptability.