This project is one that has changed quite a lot during its implementation. At the end of last semester I had put together an approach diagram which can be seen in the background here. Since then, the project has changed quite a lot again. Today I am going to be talking about the outcome and how it is in fact a solution to the issue at large.
I would just like to make it clear at the start that today I am not going to be talking about the specific interactions that went into the project, but instead I will be talking about the outcomes and the realisations that I think are the most valuable parts of the project.
1. For the sake of this demonstration I have chosen to look at design as the convergence of a number of influences which I have referred to as Social Context, Practical Insights, and Project Specifics. I will go into more details in a moment but just to get things clear; 2. Social Context refers to the mythos of the project and the elements that make up the current knowledge of the participants in a team 3. Practical Insights are the insights that will be needed to generate good outcome. Particularly, these insights could be seen as the knowledge needed to amend the Social Context, such as research and data mining. 4. Project Specifics are the elements of the project that are externally defined such as a brief.
1. Here, I am showing an elementisation of the previous concept in which aspects have been advantageously subdivided and described based on context driven methods. 2. Social Context is being described as the combination of an Existing Knowledge Cloud of everything that most people know and Specialities, or things that only particular parties might be aware of. 3. Practical Insights have been categorised in two ways based on the designer's role, Research as a process and Target Contextualisation as a process that leads to a specific outcome. This will be detailed in a moment. 4. Project Specifics has detailed to be a function of a brief and a "Voice of God" element which will also be described further in a moment. 5. It is important to note that while this is just one of many ways to break down generic design methodology on a meta layer, for the sake of the argument in this presentation I will assume that it is correct.
6. So, "What Can Be Collaborated?" There are a number of elements, but we need to work out a way to use these in a way that collaboration is not a problem. Just telling people to share their information is not a suitable method. We need to give the right context for the information to be shared well. 7. Firstly we will talk a little more about Social Context.
1. The notion of specialisation in the context of generalisation is a useful one because it lets us represent the idealistic information environment of new media and new web. In this model, everyone is singularly a specialist while everyone is collectively a generalist. 2. We can not share specialisation in the same way we can share generalisation.
1. IDEO talk about the concept of a T shaped person. That is, a person who has a good general knowledge and a wide verity of interests and background for their context, while also having an extreme speciality in a specific area. 2. The combination of a series of T shaped people is similar to the notion of "Social Specialisation with Generalisation" I have been describing. There is high value in specialisation but a lone specialist node has no value without good context and good generality.
1. Again, this demonstrates the notion of the speciality and how, in a collaborative system, the specialities will be distributed while the general ideas will be everywhere. At the same time, however, it is in the interests of the system to minimise the number of common factors to get richer design output. 2. It is important to note here that the value of a specialist in this context is only "Best in Bunch" or the best among the local competition or team. Usually better than best in bunch is not needed unless external referencing is going to happen. More about that later.
1. Due to the nature of the development of this relationship, I suggest that as a system like this is used it is going to tend towards an increase in speciality and a decrease in generality. 2. It is important to note that it is still just "Best in Bunch", but that specialities will increase in tandem. It is, systematically speaking, not sustainable to have disproportionate talent in this kind of context.
Now we will talk a little about how practical insights can be collaborated better.
1. I see practical insights as having a few distinct inputs and here I have included to of the more representative ones: Research and Target Context. I see these as good examples because they are based on relatively different information-gathering schemes. 2. I find that the specialist methodology can be used to help contextualise any point of research and in this model it seems to be the right approach to value the larger system of the World Wide Web. 3. Crowd Sourcing is a great way (already used by some groups) to provide better Target Context for an audience. It involves harvesting data from user interaction in any way possible. The important thing here is not that this can happen but that it can happen much more effectively in the new web paradigm. Crowd sourcing in a distributed design group would be an incredibly rich experience and would be likely to have a lot of fresh data and insights into users. 4. Both of these notions are benefited hugely buy web implementation.
1. Now we will talk about the Project Specifics concept. 2. Just a note on the "Voice of God" notion. This is a socially abstracted notion based on what is seen as common thought. The notion is that the client has a huge power of influence and this can be damaging if misused. In other cases however, the Voice of God notion helps the client find context and use for there skills.
1. Client interaction and dealing with project specifics is really a "go no go relationship". That is to say, the client and designer are mutually dependent and can not exist without the other. There are only two states of being functional, and dysfunctional, once the money or need is gone, so is the industry. 2. This is a really vast generalisation but in a similar vane to the Voice of God notion I think it is an important implication and not really a representation of the real world.
1. In the new world where the Voice of God is not as revered as it once was, and where more and more people are overcoming the lack of answers of the past, there needs to be a change to the classic model of interaction between clients and designers. 2. On the left is represented a very abstracted model of the current model in which there is a pseudo one-directional information flow. 3. On the right is a model in which negotiation is possible as a backbone of the system and is in fact the only way things are dealt with. 4. Nowadays, new media such as blogs are so flexible and easy to interact with that simply by writing one's opinion on a blog, one can influence the opinions of many people. The notion of openness is one that is really strong in this model. 5. I advocate the use of dynamic contracts that are open and continuously flexible. I think that, as demonstrated by many P2P systems and blogging structures, openness will increase the average contentedness of all involved parties.
1. I see designers as enlightened doers because they a people who can either implement or create, or even develop, the ideas of others. Sometimes they use purely their own ideas but this notion is not one that I will talk about here. 2. Designers are a cusp personality because they can act on either side of the creative fence. They can create an outcome or create a problem. On some level however, I am assuming that they cannot create the greater context.
3. The designer here is the specialist generalist, the person who makes things connect in the right way. 4. We have talked about each of the aspects leading to this so called design convergence but there still is no design. Design has to happen when these things actually come together.
1. Here I have a very much simplified diagram of workflow stages with some possible details represented inside each stage. 2. In this model, the meta layer approach to design problems, I think there is a reliance on a kind of interaction that is hard to see in distributed teams.
1. One example of design input is something like this context where people are working together to create value. 2. This environment has low latency input with very high throughput communication, to deal with the small input to large audience issue.
1. Here I am showing a picture of the Taiwanese Parliament and how they make decisions. I would argue that this is not the most effective manner. 2. I think for collaborative decision making to work well you really need a very organised decision making framework and workflow.
1. In implementation, we need a lot of value. We need roll-out, handover, maintenance and singularity 2. What I mean by singularity in this context is the notions of specific value and interdependence. Like a framework that is reliant in specific ways on specific components. Without them it would not work. The components have singularity. Redundancy is something that exists on a lower level, for instance at the physical implementation of a design result. For the sake of process management however, singularity is very beneficial. More about this in a moment.
1. fileTree is a tool I have been working on for a while and recently decided to engage in this project. fileTree works with the notion of taking specific elements and connecting them in logical ways so that the system will pony up the ideal result naturally. 2. Here the elements of a design process are shifted into a working diagram. Please note that these steps are purely examples.
3. fileTree is a location to model and implement workflow ideas. It connects data with management in a way that has not been done outside of specific closed systems. 4. It works on a "one file, one resource mechanism" the notion that nothing needs to be represented in workflow more more than once. Perhaps in implementation there can be a lot of refinement stages, but on the workflow level there is not a redundancy of methods per se.
1. Here I am using a package called Shake made by Apple Inc. It is a compositing tool (i.e. a tool that helps combine different parts of a shoot into one video stream). 2. The input method shown here involves the elementisation of content input. Each element has a specific location and value, whether it be an image, colour, or text.
1. Here I am showing the middle of a Shake file in which many decisions are being made about how to treat a decision. 2. This is a way of mixing and linking content to build up a decision making logic and context 3. This is also a visualisation of the workflow of the project, the assets and the process.
1. Here you can see the output nodes at the bottom of the image. 2. This stage is all about content placement and sharing. 3. Information is no longer alone. It is always part of a active workflow based on well defined rules.
1. Just a recap on the meta layer images we have seen so far.
2. In the end I really just want to create a system for good decision making of a distributed nature
3. The work that I have done is the place where the aspects of design converge and everything comes together to create good design output.
This project was to work out what the new web could do for design.
