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needs of the country force design graduates and most design companies to work in a context we might refer to as out of date.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

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.

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?

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.