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.