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.

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.

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.

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.