Create Your Own Space

[This site is no longer active]




I came across this "fun" site (Design My Room) that allows the user to set up and furnish rooms à la "Designing Spaces". You are given a huge selection of furnishings and furniture, as well as colours, window treatments and lots of doodads and knickknacks.

Be an interior designer, or recreate your parents' living room. Students can be creative and imagine a character's house or use this as a jumping off point for a short story.

While you need an account to save your creations for re-editing later, you can build and design without an ID. Keeping a record of your work can be done by simply taking a screen shot.

This would be a fun way to work on vocabulary, talk about colours and textures, and even look at "art and design" issues for older kids. Have fun!

Polyvore: design your life.

So my latest find is actually one of my daughter's current favourite sites: Polyvore (She's crazy about it and loves to create.) You can design "window displays" and create interior design or fashion design layouts.

The interface pulls objects from the internet (taken mostly from on-line catalogs so each object stands alone as a cutout image.) and you can then resize them and put them together collage-like. Take a look at this"artsy" example.

Layouts can be printed, saved, embedded etc.
(The vendors make their money by having every element you choose appear on the "shopping list" showing where the item can be purchased.)

Students can have fun designing displays on assigned themes, dreaming up a layout for another student after a fashion "interview" and using their creations to add to their virtual portfolio, especially if they hope to apply to a design program.