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.