Learning Testimonial

Throughout this project I have kept a blog and gone to class every week. I feel that I have been engaged and I have been quite interested in my own work for the duration of the semester. I do however, feel that my communication with the lecturer, Malte, and other staff or classmates was not as defective as it could have been. I think also, in retrospect, I feel that a project with a more well defined outcome would have been a little more engaging and certainly a lot more simple to communicate about. That said I am happy with the outcome as a set of theories and a way of looking at issues in the future. I also feel that my learning and development throughout the last year has been positive and subject of the interaction with the teaching staff. I do however feel that my interaction with staff inside and outside of the class has also been of great benefit. In this case I should thank Malte as well as people like Soumitri and Scot Mitchel.

I think the issue of abstraction was not the biggest problem during this year. I feel that one of the things I had a hard time with, which has not been an aspect of my engagement as such, is the lack of structure in the definition of requirements. What, for instance, the specific requirements of a Major Project actually are is something that has only recently become more clear to me, after attending the GRC. Similarly the I think the projects proposed to this class were in general either too large or too small and for most people there was some difficulty in trying to apply the expected level of rigour. This is obviously an important point of learning for students at this level however I think with more structure there could have been better attempts made and hence more well done projects would be the average outcome. This is not something I care about too much though as I think in the end, the presentations of people in the class represent their interaction well and the feedback they go helped resolve any ambiguities. Though this kind of feedback could have been usefully earlier on it seems like a more structured lesson and hopefully a more distinct instance of learning. In particular I think there was a failing of rigour on the level of a thesis in some of the more practical projects. I think this is quite a serious failing as it seems, from my point of view, to undermine the nature of the class completely. I think for the sake of the students involved this could be better controlled.

The Book and Outcomes

This website is a representation of all things involved in year long project for the final submission in a four year design course. A large portion of the working content is included as well as links to all of the articles and resource materials used in the process. As the project was divided into two sections, the first semester and the second semester, and there has already been a submission for the first semester, this blog centers on the developments and activity during the second semester. That said, there is coverage of the first semesters findings and all documentation and workings are included as links.

This website also represents the book as it attempts to abide by the greater ideology of the project, singularity of information and collaborative systems. The book that is to be submitted is a link to this knowledge base. A way into the project at large. There will be no reprinted information as I see it as fundamentally outside the appropriateness of this structure.

The core project undertaken to lead to this work is one involving a reasonless and structureless view of integrated collaboration for large scale and isolated networks of people. However, as the project has developed over the year and many aspects of the amorphous nature of the project were put to test and eventually finite and specific set of outcomes was reached. These outcomes are similar in many ways to observed conjecture and are not based on strict reality. Instead, they are based on the notions expressed by impressions from all sorts of medium including but not limited to: designers' voiced experience, presentations and seminal talks, papers and colloquiums, blogs, online videos, social media and context from interactions within the community. As a specific methodology of study was not a feature of this exploration, the approach to information finding was kept as flexible as possible.

I think the outcome is most clearly represented in the Final Presentation but just to reiterate, I think the most valuable finding is the methodology to solve the issue of finding collaborative possibilities within a workflow. This was done though tools like fileTree and the Design as Convergence as outlined in the presentation, for more information on these tools, please see the References post.

Studio Project Summary

This image is a direct port of the project summary poster.

The Final Presentation

Here I have transcribed the presentation directly, to offer a better context to what the presentation was designed to mean. Also, here is a link to the online presentation stored as images with the presentation transcript in the comments. Click here to see the image library in situ.

Note there is an embedded presentation. Click on the comment button in the bottom right hand corner of this widget to get the slide information.

Retrospective on Personal Insentives

I have put together a series of thoughts on why this project came to be, in some ways as a reflection to my final presentation today as I think it was not very clearly represented:

In 2006 I worked and studied on exchange in China. Apart from learning some Chinese and a lot about the Chinese culture I was exposed to many of the wonders of integrated design workflows for small and large teams. In addition to these things I also visited a lot of manufacturers and worked in a design consultancy during the year. Despite the expectations many people often have of the Chinese education market, I came away with quite a different impression. My exposure suggested that the general education service (keeping in mind my experience was centered around the design context) is quite admirable. However, the industrial needs of the country force design graduates and most design companies to work in a context we might refer to as out of date.

The demand for fast industry is not affecting the education content or outcomes, but instead is simply providing an informal de-education for the design workforce. Though this is a great example of the oft overlooked truth - that there are many fewer design strategy jobs in the world than there are for grunt product designers - my immediate reaction was of quite a different nature. Because I was so impressed by the impeccable work ethic and mental stamina of my Chinese colleagues and because I had visited a few of the many thousands of great Chinese universities teaching design, my first thought was to find a way to enable these people to work on projects needing their skill and to avoid their de-education to work as "reverse designers". This is the idea that has lead my project.

As time rarely stands still I originally decided to take a naive approach to this problem. My hope was that I could use the growing Internet world to create a competitive and global design marketplace which would use standardised tools to ensure a simple interaction and contextually aware design service for interesting clients with interesting projects. I thought I could generate competitive leverage and force the standards of design implementation to improve, hence increasing the likeliness of good employment for designers in places like China. Since then my intentions have swayed significantly to a embody a project hub that can be used by designers and design clients everywhere to connect and ensure a good, contextually conscious outcome. The project as a formal for RMIT started in early 2007, at which time I was quite interested in the prospect of helping clean up the design engagement issues of the world.

It is also important to note that I feel that I have a difficulty in choosing project for a series of reasons, but primarily because I am very interested in a range of different areas or forms of study. In fact, the reason I chose to study Industrial Design in the first place was because I saw it as a study that would allow me to work in many contexts and on projects in many other areas of study. This project in particular was chosen because it was representing a real problem I had experienced in China and heard about in other parts of the world and I was really interested in making a development in the area of collaborative systems. It is not that I do not like, or am not interested in, working in any alternative manner - I just find the generality of a project like this one a great asset, as opposed to a conscious decision to make a specific solution to a well defined problem, abstract or physical.

This project hoped to be a solution set for an amorphous problem, and one that hoped not to have a specific definition or outcome. The background on why such an ambiguous area of research seemed attractive, apart from the mentioned lack of clarity, is its meta level similarity to many of the wonderful innovations in systems architecture and thought problems, something which I am beginning to see is one of my strongest interests. I think it could be said that in choosing this project as my major project, I struggled to try to mimic the core values of many of the new world organisations and their approach to global issues. The approaches to this project developed in emphasis from:

1. importance to humanity in China, to
2. being of interest because of its strategic thinking potential, and finally
3. selected as an individual project when I had to make a decision for a seemingly reasonless choice.

Abstracting the Final Solution

As part of the requirements I was informed I had to create an Abstract to be visible at my final presentation. After finishing almost everything else inside the project I quickly wrote one which can be found below.

This project is an introspective by trial and research into the possibilities of distributed collaborative design systems, especially aimed at participants that work on a passion basis, whether paid or unpaid. In its embodiment the project has become an effort to create systems that provide more happiness through more interesting work for more people a greater percentage of their working time - essentially, making work more efficient at large by increasing the potential that it is interesting and engaging for the worker doing it.

The nature of the project has been determined by a series of influences. Although there has been some scope creep during the process, there is a continual regard to the potential of Internet tools and their use in modern social systems. For this reason the project has essentially become a endeavour to find good methods to enhance the working experience of designers through new web technologies and standards. While the outcome is a look at various aspects of a generalised design methodology in the context of these new technologies, the final idea framework is highly applicable to almost any area of collaboration or distributed decision making.

I think this brief passage clearly summarises the project at large but especially in the context of its most recent developments. I think shifting the project to become a methodology of approaching design issues to work out how to extract collaboratable issues was a good way to finalize a potential train wreck of a problem set.

New Counter Projects - Many little interactions to Build Collaboration

For this half of my project I have not really done a project and a counter project per se. I have more just done a bunch of little interactions or approaches to projects. For instance, the competitions, the external collaboration, the workshops and seminars. I think the counter project for me has been the working near but not exactly on the topic in many frames of reference and on many examples of collaboration. I think during the time, doing these interactions, I have come to provide a clearer definition of collaboration, or at least in the sense that I have looked at it here. The way I have come to think of collaboration is as any form or interactive decision making, for instance, the interaction to work out how to make really simple decisions, such as what to have for lunch with a friend, is an important example of day to day collaboration. I think the same fundamental rules apply regardless of the complexity and context of the desiccation being made.

After coming to realize this I was able to put my project in finer terms by simplifying definitions and clearing up some of the confusions I still had about what I was doing.

The Things I Read to Know More (References)

Another aspect of my Research Methods class was to create something like an Annotated Bibliography to help recognize the influences on the project of that class. This was a great experience because I looked at how many different articles specifically dealt with the problems I was interested in. It also made it clear to me how far from academic this whole experience has been but how that may not really matter at all. I think I was intrigued by the fact that on a large scale most of my sources and the information I was using to help me think of solutions to the problems at hand were completely informal, even as poorly demonstrated as things like online tutorials to do "Lifehacks" or optimize ones living method. In any case, the real point of interest to me is that the things I read for these two projects were in almost every way shared assets, due to the project's vague similarity and due to the similar notions of user and creator that are involved in each one. What I mean by that is that I read many many hours worth of content that influenced my project though the interest I had in the content, more than though the value of the content for its own right.

Here is link to the Annotated Bibliography as a public document noting my interaction with a small selection of the articles read. Here is a link to the project ReBlog, the entirety of my references throughout the project.

Proposing Alternatives, Designing Solutuions

To solve some of the odd circumstances that appeared after returning from China I had to do Research Methods in my final semester. This meant that I was working on learning how to do research and construction, in the context of a large year long project, as I was doing the large year long project, this one. That caused its own set of problems, however, I found the outcome interesting. The project I chose to center my attention on for the duration of the Research Methods class was a development of the Design 2.0 system based around the prospect of creating it as a business system. In particular I was interested in creating an attention economy supported system, as it would allow for free user interaction and better user information. In any case, I think the most interesting thing about this project is that I was not actually doing it, I was just thinking about it in an attempt to get some good insights on how toy make it into a better business and subsequently a better solution to the collaboration issue at hand. After some time I realized that the best way to develop in this manner would be to embody as many as possible of the actual final decisions in the theoretical mock up I would hand in at the end of the semester. Thus I did and found a rather new solution set which has actually effected my solutions for this project as well. In particular I realized I could use a solution called fileTree, something I have been working outside of school for a few years, to help support the information management. This proved to help me describe the decisions that would be made to discuss the information level of both projects quite amazingly.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the project proposal for Research Methods. Please note, it is done in the form of a business plan as my situation was not similar to the rest of the class. Because I am potentially interested in utilizing some of the ideas held in this plan it will require a log in to view. If you are my teacher you have already been invited, otherwise leave a comment and we can discuss this.

More Competitions and Images

As I previously noted, I have recently been involved in collaborating in some competitions of various kinds. Here I am just going to post a link to some images from this collaboration.

Reporting Failure, Being Refused

Last week in class I reported to Malte that my project was sort of failing and that I would be talking a different approach from now on, as previously mentioned on this blog. Later in the week I also told Soumitri the same thing. In both cases however the disagreed, on at least some level. This was no surprise really, I think calling it a failure was asking to be told I was wrong, there is a lot of other stuff for me to do and a lot of work still to be done.

Malte suggested I do a few things:

1. Get involved with lots of competitions - He thinks this is interesting because it will evoke design results as part of a large system. Something that I suppose is quite important part of what is done in this project
   
2. As he has previously said, I should take part of collaboration projects lead by others - As explained earlier, this would help me understand the positions of people taking part in my project. My response was of course that I am sort of doing this already with a few things I am working on.
   
3. Treat competitions as short run projects - I think the idea here was to do a competition as a short run project with some other members, local and or remote, to get a quick incentive driven team. He feels that the lack of developed incentive might be what caused some of the failed issues in this project.
   
4. From there we talked abstractly about why people want to take part in collaborative systems - This is something I have addressed on numerous occasions however I think revisiting it may be quite important. We talked about the incentive as a context centric asset as opposed to an absolute value thing. That is to say, working for passion as a commodity as opposed to working for money or, a lack there of, which seems to have been a problem for the system.
   
5. In particular, Malte suggested time swapping with colleagues to get collaborators - This is quite an interesting suggestion. I am not sure how well it will work because I traditionally have no faith in how other people value their contributions to a project. I think I would happily stay up 3 days to help people finish projects but most people would not do that for me. I am not sure why, perhaps because I love this kind of work or because I treat it as a form of social interaction, and others do this less so. In any case, I am not sure how this work swap system will work but I am going to give it a shot.
   

Soumitri also gave me a few comments however I had no pen and pencil in had at the time so I think I have forgotten them all. In this case I am just going to write a few things that he might have said.

1. Not a failed project just a failed group - This was a good point that I did not want to admit might be the case. It is highly likely that making interest driven social design systems is not impossible it may just be that most people in the world do not want to take part, or moreover, the people I chose are not the right people to take part. Obviously open source development works but I sort of wanted to stay clear of these parties, as I mentioned earlier. I think Soumitri's mentioning of this fact made me thing about what could be called the rules of engagement. There is something more that I need to have, than a group of people who say "I am really interested"
   
2. Give some incentive - I seem to recall he was interested in my re angeling my approach to the participants so that people would have more reason to be involved.
   
3. Use the same popularity that leads people to use computers, the internet, and facebook - We talked a little about this and I think the outcome was that some sort of "fun" needs to be had for people to be involved. This concept of fun is pretty vague as in some cases it is not really fun at all but just useful. With no other incentive mechanism, I think this is a decent goal, applying it may be more difficult though. I think this may even be associated with the concept of social interaction. For some reason I want to engage with people to work and I do not care who that much. Other people however, do not seem to see the same thing as good.

Ok I think that is it. If Soumitri or Malte read this blog it would be nice if they could correct any misunderstandings I have from their critiques in the comments.

Thinking of Buiness

So I was reading away, as I do, and I came across an interesting little piece of modern web which acts as a business objectives and management solution. It seems decent and looks like it would be a great back end for a more populated version of this project.

The project is called PlanHQ and it has a pretty decent tour.

Internet Startups and Failures

I came across a silly little game called Sim Web 2.0 representing some of the dynamics of internet startups.

Today I have decided that at least some of the core aspects of my project have failed. Namely the active part that never really got clear of the ground. I believe this to be the case because although I have a collection of "interested" users there is not a sufficient throughput of information and activity on the project site. This is of course quite sad but it is also could be quite informative.

In reaction to this failure I think there are a few potential developments. Firstly, I am considering trying a number of much smaller projects on various other network driven systems, perhaps based around packages like facebook or some of the ready made collaborative systems. I think another potential development would be to send out some review content asking people engaged in this system to give me more context. The hardest part of this of course is that I need to find a way to help people overcome the fact that they are sorry that they could not be involved because they were too busy. One last thin is the prospect of making the design stages or process secondary to the act of collaboration. Perhaps the "network of friends" structure that I always talk about should be valued more and the friends aspect of it should be made more realistic...

Any suggestions?

Carve Out and Passion for Participaton

As some people know I like Chinese things and recently I came to know a small group of Chinese students working on something they call a "carve out", which is basically a small project that is fairly specialized and that is based on participating with friends and colleagues a like. This really interests me of course because some of the driving things behind my interpretation of good collaboration are that it is based on the "network of friends" system that I have previously discussed and that passion driven participation is rampant, which I think should govern the world. So this is great and I think this might just fall into the category that Malte had suggested I create. One in which I am participating in someone external's project. In this case it is not so much that I am actively part of their project more that I am helping them with decision making on some aspects, however I think the general thing is there. I am working with them and being governed by them. So far it is not very developed, we are just talking about ideas at the moment but I think it could become something engaging.

Mid Semester Further Review

A week after my Mid Semester presentation I was given formal feedback from my lecturer Malte. This went quite well and we talked through some of the issues of it all. Here are some of the things that were brought up.

1. Clarify what is going on more at the beginning of the presentation next time.
2. For whom and why and what - Basically he was wondering if I could demonstrate the answers to questions like these in my presentation. I think he though I was a little bit confused about whom and why.
   
3. Become part of another team. Join another project that i can be part of. I think this is a great suggestion and I hope to be able to do it. Currently I am trying to get people in my community to host a project, even if it is just between the two of us but most people are pretty soft core in this regard.
   
4. My lecturer things that I should have 3 components
1. Set-up getting collaborators - Design 2.0
   
2. Real collaboration - The competition work I am doing with Soumitri et al.
   
3. Part of someone else's project - Non as of yet but hopefully one soon.
   
5. He would like me to find ways to succinctly suggest my background and the project as it is.
   
6. He also found my presentation too conversational. He suggests bring in some fundamental images at the start to allow people to fit in better. Perhaps a map of the project approach or something along these lines.
7. He then suggested that a map like this is in some ways what could also be the final design outcome for the overall project
   
8. He asks, Counter project and major project work together but how? Outline direct pros and cons and related materials. I think this also extends to the 3 types of collaboration outlined above.
   

Copyright Ideas

As a development from the talk given by Elliott Bledsoe the week before last at that workshop I have written um a few thought on the matter of open copyright.

1. The person that puts something online should be responsible for its rights. This can take care of a lot of issues of allowance of information.
   
2. New media should NOT have local copyright laws. The internet is global. New Media is global.
   
3. Human readability in licensing is essential. Without this the problem will not actually change
   
4. Licenses Stacking is pretty good. This means that people creating licenses can customize them quite a lot.
   
5. Creative Commons being too structured and requiring too much Attribution. This is a major issue. CC is for dorks. There is no system to work around your own needs. This ether needs to be made more easy or absolutely impossible, like a blanket clause.
6. Attribution is needed but it is ambiguous how this can happen well. In a lot of cases it is impossible to enforce and on some media it is to hard to do at all. This is a major problem, perhaps situations where attribution is not occurring could by default become commercial uses.
   
7. Two Problems with people in this market.
   
1. People do not implement copyright and do not care about it. These are most people who like doing something and care less about money. Passionate individuals who do not have a reliance on money.
   
2. Those who do, do not do it nicely. This group are people who are involved in some industry and do not think enough about the users. People like Metallica and Prince for example but also many other media sources such as the New York Times.
   
8. Look at for some notes on things of interest http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Main_Page
9. Humanise Copyright (this might be the big issue) A huge problem with copyright now is not that it is that bad but just that it is not understood. There is nobody who really understands all the rulings in the Copyright act in the united states and this is quite problematic. This issue needs to be simplified more than anything else. So it is predictable and understandable, well known and respected.
   
   
   

Trickle

So the whole design 2.0 community is moving pretty slowly. I am going to shift things back another week. Which is still fine because I have some extra time but it is a little annoying.

Today I have started posting more items in the design requirements section for project one. I think I will get to do more of that tonight and perhaps add some stuff to the similar section in project two. For the time being things are close to at a stand still but I think as the design aspects come in people might become a little more engaged.

Lastly, my time is being spent mostly on external things now. For instance looking into the success and failures of other systems. More on that later.

Avanoo

Recently there have been major updates to the strange new online question tool, Avanoo. The updates include a rethinking of the whole model of the product and now it seems a bit more like a glorified Pownce with some extra stuff. In any case and whatever it is like, one of the biggest changes is that Avanoo now supports things a bit like collaborative projects. Not quite in the same way that I would like to but interestingly open none the less. It seems like the network topology would allow this sort of collaborative project doing to be very large scale very quickly and perhaps would play well with the concept of the design 2.0 system. For the next few weeks I am going to look at being part of this community and perhaps post a few projects that I am interested in to see what happens. 

Does anyone else participate in this network?

Still/Open - Copyright

As I wrote yesterday, the workshop I attended last week included a number of areas of interest, including a talk on Creative Commons and alternative copyright initiatives by Elliott Bledsoe. This issue is obviously quite closely related to the work that is taking place within the second project of Design 2.0 however it is relevant to note that as of yet there have not been any serious mentions of Creative Commons on the project forum. I will summarize the goings on here and then post it on the forum.

Elliott is a young lawyer form some part of Australia that is not Melbourne and he is part of a research project which is aimed at representing the Creative Commons (CC) rights system in Australia and making a development of policy to represent the CC in a court of law. This is quite nice because it means that now CC can be used by Australians on Australian things and they can sue people who breach the rights within Australia. There are a few other advantages but I do not really care about those. Being Australian, the organisation Elliott represents chose to also implement ethically natured aspects of the policy when they composed it. Subsequently other countries did the same, but he suggests Australia was the first. This is of course not a surprise as that is how people here do things. 

In any case, Creative Commons as many people are well aware is a system that allows average people to have slightly more say in how their work is death with from a copyright perspective. The initiatives of CC institutions include creating "human readable" versions of the policy which can then be used to help people select the appropriate license for their content but also can be used to help potential breaches understand where the line is drawn, something which is obviously a problem with many other aspects of copyright today. 

Despite the great work done on CC I am still quite dubious of it as it completely does not deal well with commercial licensing and it does not offer any kind of rights management if you intend to achieve commercial compensation for your work. This is a bad thing because though artists are passionate about their work, they still need to eat. The CC solution to this problem is, in my opinion quite undeveloped. However, when I posed this issue to Elliott and mentioned that I was running a project in this regard he quoted a project called No Ank which is said to be the answer. At the moment it is just a budding project but they are thinking about it on some level.  Having partially reviewed their methods I feel they are not offering a solution per se but they are offering a method to handle the issue.

I do not support the localisation of new media copyright schemes however I appreciate the work that Elliott and his colleagues are doing. 

Still/Open - Open Source Magazine

On Thursday and Friday last week I took part in an interesting workshop called Still/Open conducted by Anat. The underlying topic of the workshop was open source thinking however each of the four presenters covered vastly different materials. To my luck a few of the aspects of the event tie very closely into my work on this project. In particular, the first presentation, on open source magazines and zines, the third presentation, on creative commons and alternative copyright systems. 

Firstly, the look at magazines of the open source variety was a great way to interact with the group and experience what collaborative systems could be like. For the first hour or two the specialist, Alessandro Ludovico, lectured on the intricacies of this matter. After that he broke us into teams and set us each a task. My group had the task of creating a strategic pitch for a open source culture magazine which we took on with a lot of vigour. At this point I also use Compendium to Discourse Map the entire conversation. Our output is shown above.  For a number of obvious reasons this was a great task ad we had a really good time. We also gave a compelling presentation which it seemed everyone appreciated. Our pitch ended up being essentially a Mothers Group inspired index of localised open source minded services and establishments. Our intention was for the magazine to represent the scales of localisation up to global, for the time being, that would be relevant to a specific reader. We were also interested in rendering it as a map or collection there of, that exist as pages with localities specified for the readers convenience. This and a number of other traits of the product make us think of it as a any web or post web solution. In any case we managed an interesting bout of collaborative though, specifically some that could not happen in a distributed team as easily because of the lace of connection. That said there are identifiable notions that could and did not exist in this instance of the workshop. One in particular is full understanding and explanation of posed ideas. Of course some barnstormers would suggest this is a bad thing anyway but I think regardless it is something that adds certain powers to a distributed team, even if the understating is only minor it may be enough to warrant more justification in the typing of a post or submission of a suggestion.

Other aspects of the workshop were also of course interesting and I am really grateful for Boo Chapel for giving me the opportunity to take part in the whole thing. 

Mid Semester Presentation

On Tuesday this week I gave my mid-semester presentation. We had 10 minutes for presenting and 10 minutes discussion. 

I had started my presentation about 2 days before hand but most of the final content was done the evening before. It ended up being relatively clean and, I think, information rich. In any case, I used Keynote 4.0 from iWork 2008, which is really lovely, and I made seemingly good use of a few of the tools within the package. I think the efficiency gained was largely due to a pipeline for incorporating work into a presentation that I have been working on recently. This process includes subdividing a project into key issues of approach and then building an informational needs plot to drive what is included in the final presentation.

The presentation started with a quick introduction of the project in general and its sub projects. Then I talked about the tools used for the current website and some areas to grow this and deal with issues. There was then a section on Crowd Spirit, the Beta software similar to mine. For a few moments I discussed the counter project, which currently is to engage in some different kinds of collaboration. Lastly I talked about academic developments needed to continue this project and finished with a review of the projects future. 

There were not too many questions apart from needing further explanation of aspects of the work in general. Feedback did, however, provide the suggestion that I not spend too much time on psychological explanations for the projects developments and instead simple try understanding what is happening. This I found vaguely helpful as it allows me to concentrate on the design issues of my work more. 

Here is a PDF of the presentations. Sub page animation is not represented. 

The Free World and the Open World

I think, in the world of things and the world of work and play, there are a number of grate players, participants of the systems and providers of service. With all of these members, however, there is economy. Fundamentally speaking this is not a problem, economy is a great example of complex system design with flexibility to cater for emergent trends and the ability to deal on a global scale with mission critical issues. This is our world. 

There are a multitude of economies and perhaps my interest in this area shows through in my work on the Copyright Project, however, that aside, the greater reasoning and perhaps the driving notion which lead this endeavour to exist is that of social systems and the shift in economy our little earth has recently noticed. A few years back now, a then budding Internet company, Google, released AdSense, that day, the world experienced perhaps the most successful implementation of the attention economy. 

Open source, and closed source are two of the players I referred to previously. They are often seen as characteristic mindsets that separate humanity into two distinct groups. I do not believe in this however, instead, I think there is a part of humanity that lies in between and provides things out of love and passion for the society of beings it takes part in. This is what drove Google, firstly to exist and secondly to revolutionise advertising, it is also the thing that drives the open market economics to need to trend away from monopolise. This is where my project sprouted from and where I suspect the future of humanity lies. My dreams aside, Open Source is NOT a solution, passion is.

This may seem like a convoluted argument, especially when it is actually pitched to demonstrate why I chose the tools I do and why this project will use what people need to use to contribute. We will not use open source. We will use free to us, because that is what we can afford. It may include cases of open source but will be built on and grounded with add supported tools. These are the tools built with incentive and used with passion, this is in my opinion the greatest model of all. 

Real users never pay!

Related Online Content Feed

I have jut put up a feed of things that are related to the stuff of this project. This feed will be aggregated from selectively tagged items in my Google Reader list. Here is the page representation of this list and a mini feed is now displayed in the blog sidebar. 

Competitions

Over the past few weeks I have started working on a few competitions with Soumitri and Liam and yesterday when talking to Soumitri about one we are just starting Malte suggested in passing that I should include observations from these collaborative activities in to Design 2.0. He also suggested I include these things in my review next week. We will see about all this. It is likely I will put up some posts on these matters within the next few days. I think they will be kept separate from the larger work of the Design 2.0 community though. 

A Book on My Sorts of Things

Today I was alerted to an interesting book but my feed reader and a person called Luca. The book is closely linked to my topic of study on this project and would be a really good read I think. The book, "Higher Creativity for Virtual Teams" has been reviewed by Core77 here.

Drops are starting to drip

Today the site had its first posts from outsiders. Jenny posted some stuff on her experience with guitar platers.

Hopefully there will be more of this sort of thing in the coming week.

On that note, I have extended the schedule for finding need for one more week because we have the contingency alowance and it is needed.

Questions and Answers on Interviews

Today somone sent me an Email on how they were not sure how to do interviews and were having a few other problems. I answered and also told them they should post issues to the forum. I think made a long post on the forum describing some details on how to conduct interviews for this kind of project.

I am not sure why but it seems people are really scared to write on the forum. I wish they would just put everything on there.

Anyway. I think it will start moving a bit more soon.

New Brief and New Interview

Tonight I posted the Project 2 Brief on the forum and then posted a recent interview with Rob from our class. 

I think this second project is a bit more likely to run though the system well because it has a stronger supporter base and it is a little more familiar to most people. We will see and hopefully there will be some interesting differences to make changes to the product pipeline.

The interview, I think, will help inspire some more activity on the forum. Outside of one person in particular who I know is interested and but has not had a chance to submit, there has been very little activity so far. Hopefully this will change as failure is not the nicest way to win. 

ReBook

On Tuesday, after my review of my review, I was talked to in regard to my book resubmission. It is my strong belief that we should not have to resubmit the book as we were responding to our teachers comments when we submitted the work that we did at the end of last semester. His expectation was that we should provide an extensive context and dialogue of our research and findings during the first semester however when everyone in the class talked of doing a much more interesting document he seemed in agreement. However at the time of grading he was insubordinate to our discussions and gave the majority relatively low marks. In fact I got my lowest mark of my entire university carer. 

After stating my point of view I was dissuaded from this plan and convinced that submitting a simple soft copy of an updated version of my original book would be acceptable. The updates requested are inclusion of contact profiles, statement of case and reasoning where needed and background on other elements of the project. Specifically there was a comment during this discussion that my presentations during the first semester reflected more work than my book so my intention is to include some of those ideas in the revision. 

The submission will be next Tuesday.

Review of Review 1

On Tuesday this week I had my review of my first review presentation from last week. A small sheet of paper was handed to me with the following text printed on it:

"Good Progress: It is reassuring that the project is starting to move. You have conceived of 2 sup projects with quite a different focus (sic). You need to consider how you will use these to inform each other and the larger project. There will need to be a conversation between the 2; you also need to elaborate why you chose these to (sic) projects to test you ideas or hypothesis. That said you need to clarify what your hypothesis is."

At the same time a discussion was created around my project including a the few present members of the class. The specifics are not a whole lot more interesting that the review comments however a few things were identified to me. Firstly I realised that the project that I am doing needs to be done, that is the project that I originally set out to do, still needs to be considered. Which is to say that I really do have to come out with some kind of realisation at the end of the semester. A point of learning about collaborative distributed systems or similar things. What that point is, I need not claim now, however some sort of hypothesis is expected to be in the workings and will need to be unveiled at some point. Hopefully before the Mid Semester review. 

Secondly it was made obvious that though involvement may or may not exist it is important that I document my thoughts and reasoning on all the aspects of this project. Not that that is a new idea however it is something I have not done as well as hoped. I need to start writing about every element of choice that has been part of this project to date and that will be part of this project. Especially I need to talk about why I chose the projects I chose and why I should be able to do them. Also I need to look into why this is a valid thing to do not so much what my drive is. 

Review One

Yesterday I had my first formal review. It was not too bad but I think it could have run a little smother. For some reason I had decided to do it from Compendium early in the afternoon but I had not done everything I needed to to update my compendium database. My Compendium layout is pictured to the right, you can click on it to view it at full size.

During the review a few interesting things were brought up including some aspects of my reasoning for the project and my reasoning for the specific sub projects. Though I had answers as I always will I think these issues are things I should revisit.

In addition to this I was asked a bit about the review methods that will be used at the end of it all. This is something that I have thought about before and had included in my gantt chart however I think I may try to make it a bigger part of what I am doing. One point in particular concerning how people from these fields like working in this kind of environment and how the like being driven by an industrial designer. Especially in regard to the Copyright project.

One other issue of concern was the name of the copyright project which may need revision. I will be talking this over with my Lawyer later in the week.

Last but not least after this was all done and so on I was talking to the editor for the second project's brief and she was quite interested in some of the methods it proposes. To me, as a design student, they are nothing new or interesting, but to her they were really interesting ways to look at issues. The think she liked was the three teared approach to solution storming with a worst case, mad max case and likely case solution set. This interest, however, brought about an awkwardness when she asked ways to apply this method, specifically the mad max case to problems she deals with. I was not sure of the best way and I think I misrepresented the method. I am going to seek council with Soumitri on this matter tomorrow.

The Brief Second Project

Today I started the brief for the second project. According to the Gantt Chart it is not due for more than a week so I am getting in early. I am also getting at least on member of the team to proof-reed it before it's committed. 

The document is not yet public so I have not linked to it.

Charting Key

Last night I added a key to the gantt chart and also added deadline dates and a section at the bottom that outlines all of the school related deadlines.

Here is another link to the chart.

Mindquarry

I have come across an interesting open source package called Mindquarry that is designed to help groups work together online. It is not quite ideal for what I am doing however it does seem like it might be a little more specifically designed than they system I we are currently using.

I think if I were to do this project again I might try using software like this as the backbone.

Writing on the wall

Recently somone in the community found something interesting and then emailed it directly to me. This is nice but an issue as it should have been posted on the community. This problem is a psychological one, I think, and I hope it can be ironed out. If not it may be the downfall of the entire project.

Why the World is Not a Better Place

Last night I came across an interesting movie including the head of the Pirate Party in Sweden. It is part of the Google Tech Talks which are often really good and free. In any case I think though the talk is a little ungrounded it offerers a good introduction to the next branch of my project.

Talking and Not Talking

Today I went to the same talk as yesterday except for it being held at RMIT. It was quite interesting yet again but more so was a talk I had with the guy beforehand. I think it is likely we will stay in contact which is quite nice.

Today I also posted details about my recent talk with Luca. I think it is nice in theory but I am sort of getting cold feet about how to deal with all the issues of this project. Of course I will keep pressing and submitting something every day. If for no other reason, to make people aware about this market spot.

Also. I have realised that using the online interface with Google Groups is a waste of time as it has lost my files a few times. Instead I have started submitting items by sending them to the address. This is good and bad but it does mean I can use Gmail to write up the articles. In this regard I have also removed the prefix which was coming in with the emails because it annoys me that it does not compensate for that in the naming of threads on the groups site.

The Wealth of Nations and P2P

Today I went to a really great talk by a guy called Michel Bauwens who spoke on the implications of various kinds of topology, especially P2P, within various aspects of humanity. He is an interesting man and had a lot to do with the development of the P2P Foundation. I think this is applicable because his talk was really about the benefits of getting people to work for passion not for profit and how that inspires people to do things of much greater value. Obviously this is integral to my Design 2.0 project so at the end of his talk I discussed some of the related issues with him. He encouraged me which was great and also gave me some advice along the lines of seeking interested individuals to take part in my system.

On another note, during my conversation with Michel another member of the audience became involved and we later discussed this project as well as a few similar things. He was a Melbourne University Law student and seemed interested in this area. It is possible that I have found yet another member for the copyright system project.

Luca the Guitar Designer

This afternoon I spoke with Luca, a member of my Individual Projects class, for a short while about the Practicing Guitar Project. His opinion is valuable in this area as he is a guitar player and has done a number of related design projects during his stay at RMIT.

His initial response was that this was a very active market sector however as we dug deeper it seemed that the project is proposing something that is not quite so common. During this I realised I would need to fix the brief as it was not quite clear enough.

We talked for about 20 minutes and he gave me a number of leads and drew some pretty pictures. We also took our quick discussion into some of the issues that would hinder and add value to my embodiment of this concept. I told him I would be really interested in speaking again about this and he seemed willing. I think I will try to do a proper interview in a few days.

Brief Practice of Guitar

This morning I issued the first brief.

Project 1 Brief: Practicing Guitar

I found that there were a few issues with the Groups client so from now on I am going to write all documentation in Google docs before submitting it. I am still unsure about the issue of continual update in this regard.

Primary Gantt

The preliminary gantt chart has been finished. It is online so changes will be active and viewable by all members.

Update: The in line gantt chart was removed because it took too long to load the iframe. Here is a link the the live document: Gantt Chart

Grouping in Google

I have started the Google group and invited the core team. Hopefully a few more members will filter in as the society of friends network gets moving.

Below is the invitation letter that was sent out:

Hi,

This is an invitation to take part in something I am doing for my final year
project at RMIT in Industrial Design. The aim of this group is to help inspire
people who are interested in design and social sciences work together in
capacities that are usually dificult, given issues of locality and resources.
The idea involves gathering groups of students to work on projects in a
realistic fashion and toward real outcomes as an academic and extra curricular
pursuit. Details of the specific process will be outlined in the coming week

I invite you to take part if you are interested. If you do, you will be
working with a collection of other people around the world on one of two
problems both relating to user centered design however stressing industrial
design and high complexity problem solving respectively.

There are no beneficiaries and there are likely to be no animals hurt during
any of the involved projects. Though for the sake of my project I would
appreciate as many members as possible, I would like to stress that there is
no advantage gained by me or anyone else by your involvement, except
potentially your, if you have a good time.

Many Thanks,
Mark Whiting

Digital Sheets of Analog Music

Today I decided to drop the Digital Sheet Music from my future documentation unless unexpected circumstances lead to time for another project.

I think this will make things clearer and make expectations more exact.

Also, today is my twenty second birthday.

A Second Proposal

This is the revised project proposal as requested by the project deadlines.

Update: I have removed the inline rendering of the document because the iframe was sluggish. Here is the file: Revised Project Proposal

The First Counter Project

The counter project undertaken in the first semester was to engage in a collaborative cross-disciplinary government initiative called Greenhouse Challenge Plus. Our team consisted of myself and two other final year students from Engineering and Management courses. The goal of the team was to work with RMIT’s Property Services to provide a better solution for the RMIT computer labs. We took a triple bottom-line approach in an effort to give the most utilitarian outcome.

During this project I worked in some ways harder or at least in a more directly applicable way than I have had cause to in most previous projects. At the same, time we had to regularly hold meetings with industry professionals and eventually provide a solution that may become implemented at RMIT.

At the outset I was not aware of the value of this endeavour. By the end, however, it helped me realize that not only is a core value of what I am doing in the collaborative efforts but also the actuality of coming to new and exciting projects for no other reason than interest. With this realization I had found a key mantra for my second semester’s work: to initiate interesting projects and help people work on them from wherever they are, in an academic sense.

Notes on Preproject History

This post is just to give context for the project as it stands now that the beginning of its actual functioning nigh.

The first semester of the project was spent purely trying to understand the scheme of the problem I was trying to solve. I did not actively engage in developed collaborative systems as I expected that would be similar to my implementation of the project in the second semester. Instead, I spent my time reading on and understanding the notions of the service system behind collaboration tools. This meant looking at a large number of systems and tools and trying to find some sort of set of standard attributes which would be representative of collaboration tools in general. Though this was not a completely futile exercise it did not lead the the enlightened understanding of the world of collaboration I was hoping for. It did lead me to realise points of engagement and helped me eventually put together a ontology for design collaboration.

In addition to sole searching design collaboration I spent an excessive amount of time trying to understand acceptance and the market for the kind of tools I though I may eventually propose. The acceptance I was interested in was not to see how to get people to use the tools, however, but to try to find a rational for how to engage the market of design. This in many ways proved quite fatal to my work as it inspired me to try to give reason to any form of interaction that would appear in the final system. At this point I was looking at creating things like collaborative design driven support systems, collaborative design pyramid schemes, a collaborative design language to surpass global boundaries, an IDEO like design structure that would work in a collaborative context and even a scheme specifically designed to help engage designers in difficult situations around the world. The actual business model, so to speak, of the design scheme I hoped to implement was completely undefined and eventually this lead me to depart from a specific structured outcome later in the project

At the start of the project, I laid out a set of milestones for each semester. In the first semester, I hoped to do a number of research practices which would help me improve my understanding of collaborative systems and methods. After a preliminary understanding was achieved, I would go into looking at a few specific methods of interacting to trial theories about project distribution. Eventually, I planned, I would have a best practices document which would then help me work in the second semester. What happened in reality was quite different but I think it was to the project's benefit.

After spending some time researching the general practice of collaboration I realised that there was quite a lot of specific detail in all sorts of areas that could be quite interesting to the project. In the context of web based collaboration alone, I found there were countless interesting papers and previous projects on how to deal with almost any aspect of sociological engagement. At the same time, some such systems were even starting to be represented in web services and software systems for distributed local use. This finding was slightly daunting, as I though it indicated that my target sector was already crowded.

Around the time I was getting sunk by the overwhelming popularity of collaborative systems all over the place, there was a week long project swap. I reviewed the project of one of my classmates: a project on the matter of creating customised knowledge bases with a chronology independent information value and research management. As part of my review, I offered some samples of methods and systems to deal with the necessary problems. In particular my work in this regard involved the disambiguation of a workflow to deal with the associated problems. This was quite interesting to me and allowed me to start thinking of contexts for information systems. Specifically, I advocated the use of tools like Google Reader and RSS information syndication. In addition to this, due to the nature of the other project, I became more familiar with the intricacies of business models and added a business concept to a design idea. The classmate also reviewed my project and came back essentially suggesting I needed to niche my project more to gain better context value. I did not disagree but I still did not have a good answer for this issue.

With a world full of companies like Google, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo there is never a lack of free online information management resources. RSS is one such technology that companies like the afore mentioned are continuously generating systems to give less technology minded users more power. Now days anyone can create relational databases that can control hundreds of thousands of variables and most computer users do so every day with products like Google web-search and image management systems.

The internet is the ultimate breeding ground for social systems and for this reason it is very important to consider the implications of one's social profile. With this in mind, we can imagine that services using the internet as a playing field can offer greater interaction and opportunity than those localised by physicality.

As the project went on, it seemed to evolve on the business model level and, as I mentioned before, it went though a series of ontological models which eventually resulted in the conclusion that an approach could be considered to be a good one which valued interest and centred on academic interaction. I proposed to use no specific tools but instead to engage the complete market place of tools and their various assets currently available on the internet. My aim at this point was to provide a system to reduce interaction costs and create a benefit system around network of friends structures. I think it is important to note that, as I presented the project in my final presentation at the end of the first semester, I discussed two distinct driving forces:

1. I have a lot of globally distributed connections I would like to work with; and
2. while there is a severe gap between the first and third worlds when it comes to percentage of internet users, the actual number of users is not that dissimilar.

My view was that there are a lot of people worldwide who would benefit from a good cross-cultural collaboration system. I note this not because it was a great realisation, but because when I found myself starting to work on designing the practical side of things for the second semesters work, my impressions of need changed quite substantially.

In addition to taking a strictly humanitarian approach to the project, as the semester came to a close I began to give context to the scope of method I expected would be helpful to the project. I had spent some time looking at the work of various very large and rigourous collaborative groups which were using the Compendium Institute's tools of Compendium and the Issue or Conversation Mapping techniques they advised. I found this work to be specifically interesting, not because it solved the problem of collaboration but because it reduced the complexity of some of the aspects of collaboration. The Issue Mapping structure because the context of discourse I thought would be appropriate for the implementation of the project.

From Economic to Open Source to Interest Driven Resources

In this project I have moved quite far and realized many things about systems involving distributed working agents. One thing that has been a continual bother has been the driving force of the community. Early on I thought a good businesslike approach would be close to ideal, but I quickly found out this is quite troublesome. I am a long time negativist towards Open Source so I shied away from that notion and started thinking about a non-economic way to drive interest while not relying on a specific ownership paradigm. The resulting system is what can be called the Interest Driven Resource model in which actors take part out of passion and passion alone. Experience and value added repercussions are also significant to users but the core instigation is completely interest or passion.

Moving and Shaking

This place has been changed to the place about my last project and perhaps the place about other similar things. It will be kept as firstly a personal account of what happens during the process of this project and secondly as a significant contribution to my book in the compilation stage.