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.

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.

Review One

Yesterday I had my first formal review. It was not too bad but I think it could have run a little smother. For some reason I had decided to do it from Compendium early in the afternoon but I had not done everything I needed to to update my compendium database. My Compendium layout is pictured to the right, you can click on it to view it at full size.

During the review a few interesting things were brought up including some aspects of my reasoning for the project and my reasoning for the specific sub projects. Though I had answers as I always will I think these issues are things I should revisit.

In addition to this I was asked a bit about the review methods that will be used at the end of it all. This is something that I have thought about before and had included in my gantt chart however I think I may try to make it a bigger part of what I am doing. One point in particular concerning how people from these fields like working in this kind of environment and how the like being driven by an industrial designer. Especially in regard to the Copyright project.

One other issue of concern was the name of the copyright project which may need revision. I will be talking this over with my Lawyer later in the week.

Last but not least after this was all done and so on I was talking to the editor for the second project's brief and she was quite interested in some of the methods it proposes. To me, as a design student, they are nothing new or interesting, but to her they were really interesting ways to look at issues. The think she liked was the three teared approach to solution storming with a worst case, mad max case and likely case solution set. This interest, however, brought about an awkwardness when she asked ways to apply this method, specifically the mad max case to problems she deals with. I was not sure of the best way and I think I misrepresented the method. I am going to seek council with Soumitri on this matter tomorrow.

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