iWorkshop Booking System
Hello everyone,
We have a great Interaction Workshop with tons of items, devices, gadgets, tools and such. Since we started the workshop 3 years ago, it’s been a struggle to keep track of the stuff, what we have in stock and what students/staff are borrowing. Last year, we started using paper lists, but it’s really far from a good solution: the lists become really messy and pens don’t write that well on vertical sheets!
I had this Booking System in mind for over 2 years now, and I’m quite happy to release it to the world today. It aims at solving a few needs we have in the Interaction Workshop:
- Have a master list of what we have and its value. For insurance and administration purposes.
- Keep track of what students/staff take out of the workshop. A booking system that allows people to see our list of equipment/devices and what is currently available for borrowing.
- Show what similar items are available if the selected one is not available.
- Provide information, support, links or other data for how to use a particular piece of equipment.
- Manage bookings (create/edit/return) fast and efficiently with RFID tags on items and users’ access card. Swipe-Swipe-Click-Click => You are done (or something like this)!
So the first public version is now online at http://www2.dh.umu.se/iworkshop. As you will notice, I didn’t spend much time on the visuals. My goal was to first have a functional system out and ready for use. This project has been under my TODO list for so long, I had to get it out in whatever form. In my opinion, it is missing a few key functions/things like images of the items, and a few other nifty things, but this will have to wait for a later version. I’m not in UmeÃ¥ this Spring and integrating a webcam functionality from abroad is not trivial. Also, I want to see how people use it and adapt it to what people need or want.
The system is web-based using the CakePHP framework, and it uses AJAX and Javascript extensively. The dedicated station in the Interaction Workshop has a RFID reader hooked to it, and tag values are sent to the browser via a Processing + AppleScript + Javascript bridge.
At the moment, guests and students can not create and return bookings. This has to be done by staff (anyways most of the stuff is locked). We’ll see how it goes like this and adapt along the way.
Send all your feedback to me. And let me know how enjoyable or painful it is to use.
