Filed under: Design, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Social Software, Unix
MyDesignIn: Social home renovations
by Ryan Sullivan Feb 4th 2007 at 12:00PM
Hold off on calling up that architect before you start your next kitchen renovation, and save the gas of having to drive over to The Home Depot to talk to a design consultant. Your first stop should be MyDesignIn. Now in public beta, MyDesignIn takes renovation and redesign to the next level: online social planning.
The way MyDesignIn works is you go around the Internet and start "collecting" different products that you like. With my test I did a Target run and picked out a couple things really quick. When you find something that you like, you then add the item to your design. You then add all of the information about the product in tabular form for the 2D representation of that product. After you have all of your items bookmarked in the system, you then create the room you wish to put them into. It is a pretty elaborate design model that they have in MyDesignIn. You can create multiple rooms and have them saved as their own file, or you can create one whole floor of your home (to scale) and save that as well. Once your room is done, just drag and drop your products into place from the side bar that has all of your bookmarked products in it. The design of the room/floor also includes dimensions for everything that is not the products that you put in. For example, if you have a wall with a window in it, there will be dimensions for the overall wall as well as dimensions from the corner to the window's edge on both sides of the window and then a dimension for the window itself. But there are not any dimensions for product placement within the room.
This is in public beta. So you just have to fill in the forms to become a member. The zooming and maneuvering around the view window was a bit clunky, but that is just my Auto-CAD background talking. The biggest problem I had was the way that the products are placed in your room. Some products seem to have a generic image while other odd products do not. In the case that you do not get one of the generic images, you are left with some text and that's it. This caveat can be solved, some what anyway, buy having a library of products that may have had better rendering success. This is also only 2D. I think it would be great to see some 3D walk through capability, but that would perhaps be made available for paying users. All in all, it is a fantastic concept and, even though I do not have any plans for renovations in the near future, I plan on making use of it. Another problem with the site is that the product information is based on the site that you get it from. Apparently none of the product information is stored locally. So, if the site decides to either pull the item off the site's catalog or even move it to a different place on the manufacturer's site, you might lose some, if not all, information on the product. MyDesignIn is still a great site that will get a good workout from me, so I suggest you go ahead and give it a try.