So the voting system has a rough plan and model. I have started building it, thus far only doing the front end as a way to imagine what backend is needed.
This mockup is the start to show how the system will work. Thus far I can see that I need a secure authentication system and a database table of users. Then I need a good way to perform the vote interation [the above is non functional ATM] which will submit the results of the interaction into some kind of database struture that will then be processable as a vote.
I am going to build using CakePHP, which is a development framework that should make a project like this possible for someone of my reasonably low level of php skill. My largest problem is the database design and the php script for the vote processing. This I think I will need extra help with, I’m not sure if Sion will have the time or motivation to do this…
The crit ended up going well. I decided to present my experiments as the ‘final’ work, because I felt there wasn’t much point in trying to state that I was in any way near the useful resolution of the product. However in terms of the brief I am ready to put this project on the backburner, but I do need to continue it.
Generally people understood my intentions much better than in the interim crit. I think this was because the work I showed actually communicated them in a much more real way that the terrible mockup of before.
I made clear that I intended to keep this project going and refine it some more, this was accepted as being a good idea.
However I am not totally sure what my next steps would be… I think to make the printed paper a little less rough might be a good idea, and perhaps to create multiple options that I had previously thought of, such as the lite, culture heavy, sunday edition, etc.
Yesterday I proposed to the first degree show meeting of the year that we should run [some of] the executive decision making though a electoral system. And I proposed not to use normal ‘First Past the Post’ because I don’t think it would be appropriate for the context of our show.
Our degree show project is unusual for many reasons; in terms of organisation it is unusual because of the impossibility of a power structure. There is no way in which any one member of our course could say that they had more power than another member. Members of our course are all equals and the opinion of any member of the year group is never more or less valid than any other opinion. So how can the decisions be made that are necessary for the show event to occur?
A few people steamroller other people into basically doing what they want or think should be done [v likely]
Somehow though collective roundtable discussion a consensus of opinion can be decided upon [seems unlikely considering the 180 people in the year]
People could vote on all decisions that need to be made and live by the results
An elected group is formed and given the mandate and power to make executive decisions
I’m sure there are others …
I was concerned that basically the first option will happen, people will take it upon themselves to make decisions and later people will ask:
“when did that happen? – no-one asked me about that”
This happened pretty much countless times on the popupshop project. It pissed me off that decisions were made that I totally disagreed with and yet I heard nothing about them and couldn’t present an alternative until too late. It also pissed me off that parts of my contribution to the shop project, such as logo development, poster design and website were criticized at a later date, as I had no intention of misrepresenting anyone or just doing my own thing when I was working on them. I feel that the lack of communication and of a mandate to make executive decisions really hampered the effective collaboration of the group.
SO
My solution is to create an online voting system that uses a more fair voting system [PR/STV/AV/whatever] that can be used to create a mandate for action inside this project. If more than 50% of the year group officially and formally agree on something it is hard for people to grumble at a later date. They would have known the options and expressed their opinion and not been in the dark.
Also Sion wants to create a collaborative platform for task subdivision and other parts of the show project that would perfectly match with a voting system to make important decisions.
This was another experiment in a different format. I wondered if you could have the paper read out to you as a kind of on demand radio. This way all consumers of the newspaper would experience it at the same time. I input the content created that I would have printed into a text-to-speach program. This was strange as the voice was very mechanised. If you listen to the end of this utube you will see that the bullitins and normal news stories are almost gibberish, but the blogpost read at the end was good because the use of language was more like the spoken word.
This is the first useful prototype I made for this brief. For some reason last week I spent a long time indesigning a mock up of this item, it took me less time to make the actual thing. Never mock up just DO IT. Utilising some pretty easy PHP [Simplepie RSS] and decent CSS I created a webpage which when printed comes out with a personal newspaper containing 3 sections of the Guardian website [UK/World news & politics] and a selection of cultural blogs that I generally consume on google reader.
We tested it over breakfast and found that it ended up giving us the same problems that the iPhone app did, the person not reading the paper was still excluded and I even ended up on my phone looking at twitter.
My current brief is critical prototypes. It is set by Sadhna and is about using prototyping process so take a break in the design process and ensure that design work truely reflects the human interaction with a product.
I am doing the newspaper, and this has ended up including the iphone news app I use and some of the blogs I read.
In the first week I made a mock up proposal of a newspaper printed at home that was created on demand from internet based news sources and included both newspaper content and content from selected blogs. My mock up was pretty crap and didn’t communicate my intentions to the group in the first crit. So I’ve taken a step back and started again pulling at the newspaper consumption form.
I wrote these guideline intentions:
<CLEAR INTENTIONS FOR DAILY CUSTOM PAPER>
~ READING THE NEWS[PAPER] ON MY PHONE AT THE KITCHEN TABLE EXCLUDES THOSE AROUND ME FROM MY NEWS CONSUMPTION. I CANNOT EASILY AND SIMPLY SHARE THE NEWS ARTICLE WITH THE PERSON I AM WITH [EVEN THOUGH IT IS EASY TO EMAIL/TWEET/FACEBOOK!]
~ THIS IS A CONTINUOUS PROBLEM WITH SCREEN BASED NEWS[PAPERS] AS THEY FORCE INDIVIDUALS TO EXIST ON THEIR INDIVIDUAL SCREENS. WHY NOT JUST EXIST IN THE SAME ROOM SHARING A PHYSICAL ITEM
~ SO I DONT WANT TO GO OUT AND BUY A NEWSPAPER. I AM AT THE START OF MY MORNING ROUTINE AND NOT READY TO GO OUTSIDE. I DON’T WANT TO SUBSCRIBE BECAUSE THERE WILL OFTEN BE WASTE. I HAVE A PRINTER SO WHY NOT PRINT MY OWN?
~ ALSO I DON’T READ ALL OF A NEWSPAPER AND DON’T WANT OR WASTE MONEY OR RESOURCES ON THE PARTS I DONT WANT
~ AND SOMETIMES I WANT TO READ WRITING BY JOURNALISTS [OR PEOPLE] WHO ARE NOT PUBLISHED IN THE SPECIFIC PAPER I READ
~ BUT IT IS ALL THERE ONLINE, I CAN ACCESS THIS STUFF THAT WAY. BUT WE ARE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM OF A PERSONAL BUBBLE THAT EXCLUDES THE PEOPLE WHO ARE IN THE ROOM WITH ME.
~ LET ALONE THE CONSTANT STRAIN ON MY EYES FROM LOOKING AT MY IPHONE SCREEN.
The first thing I did was to produce a paper-sharable version of my iphone news app. This was made by not scanning [because u cant scan a iphone!] but photographing and laying out what I chose to read when I used the app. Here is a grab of what I printed:
