On March 24, 2011 the MaRS Cleantech Practice hosted Rooftop Solar – Best practices. The half-day event was filled with presentations for solar developers, installers, integrators, and aggregators.
While the event’s focus was to facilitate a cross-pollination of best practices among rooftop solar developers and services providers, MaRS also used it to pilot a new tool for accessing and documenting event information. We commissioned Lex Lamey of Knotworks to capture the knowledge shared at the Solar Event and publish it online in a way that would maximize its accessibility.
We are pleased to officially roll out the completed version of the innovative web tool that we’ve used to document Rooftop Solar: Best Practices for developers. It is composed of interactive diagrams, videos, and slides.
Despite almost two decades of hypertext, online documentation of live educational events has largely remained linear: a video stream; a slide sequence; a series of paragraphs. This linearity simplifies not only the collection and presentation of content, but also its consumption. With few decisions to be made by the consumer, information is served like a multi-course meal, with dishes delivered in sequence.
What we’ve put together is more like a buffet.
Lex Lamey holds a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, and recently started an information design consultancy called Knotworks. He can be reached at lex@knotworks.org