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needs of the country force design graduates and most design companies to work in a context we might refer to as out of date.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.

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.