Reflection on project design process

My group (consisting of myself, Juno, and Courtland) chose a traffic system simulator for our project. We have begun the process of designing the system and refining our design to a point where it can be implemented without ambiguity. Our design is as follows:

• A finite number of road pieces that can be connected together to form a traffic system
• Traffic flow tokens which start a flow of traffic into the system, each of which has an adjustable amount of traffic
• Traffic displayed onto the system and interacting with the system in real time
• Traffic simulation that starts when a traffic flow token is attached to another token, and stops when no flow tokens are attached to another token
  
• Behavior of the simulation so when traffic reaches the end of a road, it fades out as to indicate it continuing on in that direction indefinitely
• Traffic that is modeled as a flow with a set speed such that each type of road piece has an effect on the speed of the flow moving through it

Other possible design choices we could have made are:

• Using a start button to begin the simulation instead of having it start automatically when the traffic flow tokens are attached to other tokens. We chose to avoid this as it doesn't seem to fit with the goals of a tangible user interface.
• Behavior such that traffic would react to an end of the road, either as a destination or as a blockage. Also perhaps requiring the system to have sources and sinks on all ends. We chose to indicate continuation to avoid the complexity of requiring sources and sinks and to convey the idea that traffic systems are not self-contained, but rather they connect to other traffic systems in a larger continuous network.
• Traffic modeled at the individual car level, or with a more complex and realistic representation than a simple flow. We feel that even with this very simplified model, this project will be a lot of work to implement. Therefore, we avoided more complex traffic representations to limit the possibility of having the project be too difficult to complete within the time constraints of this class.

Difficulties we encountered while designing the project were mainly confined to coming up with the ideas listed above, and deciding between the various options we had. There were many different ways to go with this project, so coming up with the basic assumptions was the most difficult part of the design process.

Here are some of the design sketches we came up with: