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quentinquaadgras · 3 years

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272 --- The Property Crisis

I’ve been thinking about the gameplay mechanics of Realm of Order and in particular, borders and territory and how players will be able to claim them. There are some challenges with this and It’s not obvious who has the ‘right’ to build a new city at any given location. The thing is, now I’m thinking about real-world property rights (which began after I spoke to a friend of mine who is saving up for a house) and I’m rather uneasy about the topic. In Auckland, the city I am living in at the moment, the median cost for property is more than a million dollars [1]. Ouch. That is a lot of money and in order to get a loan for this it is going to cost you a quarter of a million dollar deposit on average [2]. That’s quite some saving to do. Also I forgot to mention, almost 1 in every 10 properties in Auckland are unoccupied [3]. That must be close to 1 in every street! Well with so many unoccupied property in the City, perhaps there just isn’t a very high demand to live or work in Auckland, which I would be tempted to believe except for the fact that both the demand and price for land continues to ‘sky tower’ (as Aucklanders would say). However, that’s not why I’m uneasy. I feel this way because of a much more sinister situation at play.

The Property Crisis

Property is, at its core a term used to describe things you have the exclusive ownership right or control of. What I am realising, is that it is fundamentally wrong for any entity (except the crown) to have any kind of ownership right to, or control of, any territory that they are not actively occupying and/or otherwise using for residential or commercial use. This is due to the fact that land is fundamentally different from other forms of personal property. Vehicles, clothing, furniture and other goods can be transported and consumed where as it’s impossible to transport or consume land (because it’s defined as a fixed location). This means that at a fundamental level, renting out property to another party is in fact a violation of the renter’s property rights because if a renter has any kind of ownership or control of the property (such as moving in their personal belongings and restricting who may enter the property) than they must be recognised as the owner of that property. I’m honestly astonished that in the 21st century, the private property rights of millions of people are being breached and worst of all, the state, who are meant to be protecting private-property rights are actively enforcing the breach of these fundamental rights. I don’t think many people realise that this kind of large-scale natural-rights violation could be possible in modern society. Fortunately, there is no need for a civil war or revolution to fix it. There is a precidented method for resolving large-scale gross human-rights violations. In 1833, the UK introduced the Slavery Abolition Act that outlawed slavery and then in 1837 with the Slave Compensation Act ‘purchased’ the freedom of more than 800,000 slaves in order to protect their rights [4]. One thing to note here, is that none of the money went to the those who were freed, instead it was used to cover any losses to any entities incurred by the act. The loan the goverment made in order to cover these payments was not paid back until 2015. Therefore with this precident, a similar act could be introduced today in order to address the Property Crisis. The crown would draft an act to use a loan to purchase the land from any landlords who are not a rightful occupier of that land. The crown would then give the land to the active occupants of the land or if otherwise unoccupied, reserve it as ‘public’ or ‘protected’ land where the crown may sell it or give it to any rightfully occupying party at a later date. To be clear, this would not prevent anybody from selling/buying land but they must vacate/occupy the land within the reasonable timeframe enforced by the crown. Motels and Hotels can still operate as long as they are staffed by people hired by the business. Apartments and any other multi-tenant property would be co-owned by all of the occupants and they must establish their own organisational body exclusively owned and/or operated by its occupants. If land would become unoccupied for any reason for an unreasonable length, that land would be surrended back to the crown. People can still go on holiday and/or homeswap as long as they do not aquire the rightful occupation to a new property.

I believe there would be very positive economic ramifications for these changes. Capital would be freed up and flow into other areas of the economy creating a much wealthier society. Property supply will correspond to occupational demand and therefore land prices should be much more affordable. People who previously rented will have significant surplus cash to spend in the economy and/or save. I expect wages to likely go down by some extent and for industries that rely on the wrongful ownership of land to either adapt or go out of business. The goverment would also need a department to provision land that it reserves the rights to.

I really hope that others will come to understand and/or accept that the current property model for land actually violates private-property rights. If enough people do, the goverment will have the mandate to protect their rightful private-property.

References

[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/124177179/average-auckland-home-passes-12-million-qv-says [2] https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2102/S00100/new-loan-to-value-ratio-lvr-restrictions.htm [3] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-council-wants-to-fill-thousands-of-ghost-houses-but-may-have-to-get-around-privacy-concerns-first/S42YSJRWJP6OJZVTOWEAIQSVLI/ [4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act

#property #land #ownership #realmoforder #roo #auckalnd #housing #crisis #rights #peaceful #politics #renting #landlords #tennancy #occupation #skytower #territory

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quentinquaadgras · 3 years

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271 --- Hi, who dunnit!?

I’ve been making an effort to share Realm of Order with the world, it’s a citizen-driven multiplayer city-builder I’m working on and I have just recently setup a new website, and a collection of social media pages. Find everything on: https://realmoforder.com There is also a downloadable alpha available on Itch.io: https://splizard.itch.io/realm-of-order I have a server setup for the game and so far only me and my partner have built cities on it. However I was surprised to discover the message ‘Hi’ waiting for me when I reconnected to the server!

The thing is, I have no clue who this was! It’s quite a mystery. Since the game is in such a early state, anybody can join and build whatever they like on the server..

#realmoforder #roo #gamdev #citybuilder #multiplayer #alpha

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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270 --- Interaction and Play

This is a collection of my work on the Interaction and Play paper. Presentation

(https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yjQOSKMqTfvu0TgUi30qCHGBG2Fius5076B_xTv1TCg/) Blog Posts

Initial Team Organisation Efforts https://quentinquaadgras.com/post/186551240583/263-notion

Time Management https://quentinquaadgras.com/post/187043788628/264-outta-time

My Design for BCT (this was a test of mine, creating a multimodal design proposal) https://quentinquaadgras.com/post/188464537338/265-a-better-bct

Distributed Design https://quentinquaadgras.com/post/188486811188/268-distributed-design

Extended Brief Report https://quentinquaadgras.com/post/188491192618/269-voteria-design-month

Multimodal User Testing

youtube

#voteria #interaction #play #hub #submission

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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269 --- Voteria Design Month

Distributed Design should be open, inclusive and exciting. This is why I am proposing an Aotea Square ‘Voteria Design Month’ (pronounced vote-area) where the square is open for anybody to display their designs for a future Aotea Square.

The Concept

Designs are submitted online and the designers are able to promote their designs in person at Aotea Square. For example, it would be encouraged for a designer to build a model of their design and to showcase it in the square or at the Aotea center. Designs can be simple, such as adding a new sculpture or adding greenery in certain locations, or they can be a complete overhaul of the space. The idea is to give the designers freedom and the designs are meant as statements of intent for the space and are not required to be final or polished. Participants have a month to collect feedback and to iterate on their design.

At the end of the month, there will be vote on the best design. People can register for this at Aotea Square either during the Voteria Design Month event, or before the end of the following month when voting closes. Registered voters will receive an online-voting link and will be able to vote for any of the submitted designs. Voter turnout is on the decline in NZ (LGNZ, 2019). To address this, a lottery will accompany the vote and afterwards, one lucky voter will receive $1000 cash (just for voting). This will be promoted on the website and with signage for the event. Voting will be incremental over the month with the designs sorted by vote total. This helps to filter votes towards the designs that are popular. In order to win, a design needs to collect more than 50% of the vote. It is also possible that no single design gets 50% of the vote (as there may be many designs being voted for splitting the vote between them). In this case, the executive of the space (Auckland Live), will need to form a design coalition and group together a number of designs together so that their vote total is greater than 50% (much like an MMP coalition in NZ politics).

In order to do this, Auckland Live will require the assistance of a connectologist (aka. a creative technologist) who will decide on the strongest coalition from the designs and form a new design that encompasses the spirit, direction and outcome of the original design coalition. For example if a design for a new sculpture had 20% of the vote and a complete overhaul of the square had 40% of the vote, the sculpture would be incorporated into the overhaul in way that stays true to the intent behind both designs. The final design will be presented to Auckland Live who will then have a social obligation to implement it.

The Journey

My group and I have been looking at how distributed design can be used to reshape and redesign spaces. My initial idea was to explore the field of co-design. Sanders, (2000) talks about participants using components and tool-kits to articulate feelings about a design. I was hoping that a toolkit could be created for large-scale feedback about a space such as Aotea Square from the public. So the initial idea was an app where users could post emoji style reactions on various parts of Aotea Square. The reactions would inform the designer responsible for reshaping the space. After much consideration, we came to the conclusion that the information portrayed from emojis would be too poor. The concern is that participants will not feel included in the design process and that they cannot accurately express their desires for the space. The other members in my group decided to explore how to improve the accuracy of feedback from participants. This involved asking people to respond to a question with clay and with spoken/written language and then comparing this result with responses that are exclusively clay or exclusively spoken/written language. The experiment here was asking whether multimodal communication is better than single mode communication. B. Hedges & M. Gordon (personal communication, 2019), concluded that yes, multimodal communication is a more accurate way of communicating intent than unimodal communication. This is consistent with Gellevij, Van Der Meij, De Jong, & Pieters findings on the multimodal versus unimodal instructions in education.

I was left with the query of resolving a sticky paradox. More abstract forms of feedback are scale-able but are not accurate and therefore not inclusive to the participants. Conversely, multimodal communication is accurate but difficult to scale (imagine sifting through hundreds or thousands of multimodal designs). There needs to be an accurate scalable multimodal method of design. Voteria Design does just that. By allowing open submissions, everybody is free to submit multi-modal designs and then the burden of filtering them is distributed among the general public. The process is inclusive as voters know that their vote will be directly influencing the winning design. The process is exciting because participants are emotionally invested in the outcome of the vote and because of their vote they are also in the draw to win cash.

The Context

The term "Voteria" was created in 2004 by popular cartoonist and comedian Lalo Alcaraz. Alcaraz has reprised the Voteria cartoon series every four years since then. Based on the popular Mexican "Loteria" or Lottery, a bingo type game which uses tickets with pictograms of iconic Mexican images. (Alcaraz, 2004).

The idea of having a lottery to encourage voter turnout is not new. A randomized control trial in the UK showed that having a lottery increased voter registration (Sanders, 2015). There are instances of lotteries being used in local elections to encourage voter turnout (Shepelavy, 2017; Plummer, 2015). Voting for designs is not new either, this happened in the 2015 New Zealand Flag Referendum. It is common practice for organisations to allow people to vote on various designs for future products, buildings and/or policies. What Voteria Design brings to the table, is an improved system for choosing the winning design. A lot of voting systems simply pick the design with the highest number of votes. This introduces a risky voting meta, where voters are incentivised to vote for primary candidates instead of who they really want to vote for. This is because many split votes for smaller similar candidates can create an unfair advantage to a popular unique candidate. Voteria Design resolves this in a similar way to how coalitions in MMP operate. Smaller similar candidates are able to combine, allowing voters to vote for whichever design best represents their preferences. Where it differs from MMP is how the coalitions are formed. In MMP, the policy designers negotiate a coalition. In Voteria Design, a connectologist (aka. creative technologist) is responsible for forming the coalition and consolidating the designs.

Potential Issues

There are some potential issues with Voteria Design. There is a common theme in opinion pieces about voting lotteries being unethical and anti-democratic. Best summed up by Munger, (2014) who says that the practice will “induce people who are uninformed and confused to vote”. Well this may not be the case in practice. Shineman, (2014) found that information is endogenous voting and that encouraging people to vote actually motivates them to inform themselves. I think a greater challenge with the voting lottery is that malicious voters who have no emotional stake in Aotea Square will purposely vote for poor designs. Without the lottery it could be argued that this is less likely to occur (but still possible, as people may just as well vote maliciously without an incentive). Another risk is that a large number of voters will vote for satirical or offensive designs that would be poor in practice. For example Merelli, (2016) reported on the MacDonald's build-your-own-burger promotion that had to be closed down after participants submitted racist designs. Since a connectologist (aka. creative technologist) will be reviewing the vote. I would hope that satirical or offensive designs would not receive more than 50% of the vote. The issues above are largely affected by voter turnout, the lower it is, the larger the effect of any malicious voting. This is why it is important to get enough engagement during the Aotea Square Voteria Design Month. There is a risk that people are not interested enough in redesigning Aotea Square. The lottery vote may not be appealing enough and/or the prize amount may be too low. These parameters are difficult to simulate in theory and difficult to measure in practice (it is not trivial to isolate or repeat an effect on large-scale voting results because they are affected by many inseparable factors). Solutions to this will require further investigation, exploring further methods to increase voter turnout, or to discover means that make the voting experience more enjoyable.

Final Remarks

Voteria Design is a framework for Distributed Design that combines a creative technologist, with a lottery and vote in order to discover a design that suitably represents the preferences of its participants. Aotea Square ‘Voteria Design Month’ is an interactive experience that engages the general public to collaboratively design a better Aotea Square that better suits their expectation for a public space.

References Alcaraz, L. (2004). About Voteria. Retrieved from https://svrep.org/voteria/about.php Gellevij, M., Van Der Meij, H., De Jong, T., & Pieters, J. (2002). Multimodal Versus Unimodal Instruction in a Complex Learning Context. The Journal of Experimental Education. Volume 70. Issue 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220970209599507 LGNZ. (2019). Preliminary voter turnout 2019. Retrieved from https://www.lgnz.co.nz/vote2019/voters/preliminary-voter-turnout-2019/ Merelli, A. (2017). McDonald’s created a build-your-own-burger website, and the internet used it to make racist burgers. Retrieved from https://qz.com/738361/mcdonalds-created-a-build-your-own- burger-website-and-the-internet-used-it-to-make-racist-burgers/ Munger, M. (2014). What’s The Difference Between a Lottery and An Election?. https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/09/ whats-the-difference-between-a-lottery-and-an-election/ Plummer, M. (2019). $25,000 goes to LAUSD board election lottery winner. Retrieved from https://www.scpr.org/news/2015/07/18/53195/ 25-000-goes-to-lausd-board-election-lottery-winner/ Sanders, E. (2000). Generative Tools for CoDesigning. Retrieved from: http://u.osu.edu/sanders.82/files/2015/02/ GenerativeToolsforCoDesiging_Sanders_00-15u9m90.pdf Sanders, M. (2015). Using a lottery to incentivise voter registration. Retrieved from https://www.bi.team/blogs/ using-a-lottery-to-incentivise-voter-registration Shepelavy, R. (2017). It pays to vote ... again. Retrieved from https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/voter-lottery-philadelphia/ Shineman, A. (2014). If You Mobilize Them, They Will Become Informed Experimental Evidence that Information Acquisition is Endogenous to Costs and Incentives to Participate. Retrieved from http://ices.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ If-You-Mobilize-Them-They-Will-Become-Informed-Experimental- Evidence-that-Information-Acquisition-is-Endogenous-to-Costs- and-Incentives-to-Participate-by-Shineman.pdf

#aotea #square #design #redesign #reshaping #spaces #public #vote #voteria #coalition #election #lottery #creative #technologist #connectologist

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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268 --- Distributed Design

As part of my interaction and play paper, my group is exploring the feasibility of large-scale design where hundreds or/of thousands of people can be part of the design process in a fun, interactive way. In particular, we are looking at the process in the context of redesigning a space such as Auckland’s Aotea Square. It is in the public’s interest to have a say in how the space is designed. There will only ever be one Aotea Square, therefore the users of the space (the public) should be able to decide on how to format the place. This is easier said than done and almost certainly leads down a path of some sort of voting system. A successful Distributed Design process would surely be useful in other spaces, such as governance, product design, game design and pretty much any other place where decisions or designs are made that affect a large number of stakeholders.

Lets look at a case-study. The New Zealand Flag Referendum is great example of a poor attempt at Distributed Design . The New Zealand government created a website for the public to contribute designs to. Each flag design could have a short text accompanying it. When the 2015 deadline passed, a total of 10,292 designs had been submitted.

The open submission process was actually a very positive part of the referendum. What followed was not. The Flag Consideration Panel cut down the designs to just four. Two of the designs were the same but with different colors and the other two were black and white flags. This caused some controversy among the public - who felt like they had had no say in the final four designs. A social media campaign introduced the Read Peak flag as a fifth option on the referendum. Ultimately, the country didn’t pick a new flag and the entire referendum was a waste of time with John Key (the prime minister at the time) recently reporting that he would simply change the flag without a referendum given another chance. We can learn from this. There is no need to resort to a design dictatorship. There must be a better way to do Distributed Design.

#flag #design #distributed #voting #referendum #interaction #play #aotea

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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267 --- Ducks

During kiwijam2019, I was one of the developing ducks who created the video game Ducks. This is a game about defending your bread from an onslaught of hungry ducks and geese. This game likely served as the inspiration for the untitled goose game (we are not too sure). The theme for the game jam was Chain Reaction. Whenever a duck quacks, nearby ducks will quack and another duck will be summoned. This can cause chaos quickly.

Your computer is not powerful enough to play this game.

Download Now (Android, Linux, Windows)

#kiwijam2019 #debeaking #ducks #untitled #duck #game

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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265 --- A Better BCT

There are two core themes in the Bachelor of Creative Technologies (BCT) at AUT and they are entwined in a bitter conflict. Developing a synthesis of these themes is the key to a better BCT.,

Innovation

Innovation is a core theme in the BCT, each year there are two Studio papers where students are free to work on projects of their choice. The idea is, students are creating something new, they are innovating.

Connectivity

The second theme is more difficult to articulate, it doesn’t yet have established terminology and even the faculty staff have trouble describing the idea to people. I call it connectivity. Students are encouraged to connect different fields together in order to create new ways of looking at problems and organizing solutions. Connectivity has a theoretical component which is grounded in mathematics and a practical component. For example, one practical use-case of connectivity is enabling better communication between technical people in an organisation (programmers, engineers) and non-technical people (designers, office workers).

The Conflict

The issue is that even when both themes are encouraged and promoted by the BCT, neither of them are being achieved. I mean the connectivity theme doesn’t even have a formal definition in the degree, so I don’t know how it is supposed to be taught.

The students in the BCT are composed of a diverse background - everybody has different skills that they bring into the degree. Due to this, I suppose that we are supposed to put the principle of connectivity into practice here. Connecting our skill-sets together and enabling better communication between ourselves.

This sounds good in theory but in practice it raises several issues that get in the way of learning about connectivity. In a group only one person can really act the connector and when the group establishes an idea, it may be innovative as a whole but feature mundane tasks. This can leave members of the group completing menial production tasks that are neither innovative nor connective .

The programmer will be wondering why they didn’t study computer science. The designer will be wondering why they didn’t study design. The electrician will be wondering why they didn’t study engineering. The ...

The studio format has a big focus on the end of year showcase and this causes students to be very outcome and practice focused. More theoretical projects tend to (either implicitly or explicitly) discouraged.

The Future

I envision a BCT that successfully synthesizes innovation and connectivity. To encourage innovation, the elective papers should be replaced with lenses. A lens would be a side-paper of the BCT that asks students to take a critical look at a project of theirs within a certain framework or subject. This project can be a studio project or any other project that the student is currently undertaking. Lenses

For example, instead of a the current Interaction and Play paper, which requires students to work on a brand new throwaway project in order to learn about interactivity and play. The paper would look at one of the student’s existing projects through a lens of interactivity and play. Taking a critical and theoretical look at the interactions and play of the project.

As another example, instead of the current Emerging Practices paper, which requires students to analyse, evaluate and synthesize a commercial robot chosen by the lecturer. The paper would act as a lens, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing an aspect of a student’s project.

All lens papers would have project time allocated to them in addition to the time required to produce reports on their projects. This would encourage innovation by allowing students to work on projects that they are passionate about. University is a special time for students and is a rare opportunity for them to explore possibilities, discover new things, attempt to change the world whilst in a safe, open learning environment.

For many students, after they leave university, they will no longer have the time or energy to spend on personal projects. Most of their time will be spent on their jobs and family. Many of the projects that the students had will be frozen after they have left the university. This means it is incredibly important for students to be able to pursue a divergent set of projects during the BCT. To get these projects on record and to help the students identify what is worth continuing,

There are currently elective papers in the BCT that are frankly a waste of time. They ask students to create throwaway projects for specific situations and there is no need to do this. Students will have the time for specified briefs and rules when they are in the workforce. The BCT needs to give students the opportunity to work in an unstructured environment.

Theory

To accompany the lenses, there needs to be a focus on the theoretical underpinnings of the degree. Creative Technologies is not a suitable name for the theory. This means that the notion of connectivity needs to be defined and taught in at least one paper.

Looking at the theory, examples, cases and practices of:

Enabling successful communication between fields.

How to create a synthesis out of a contradiction.

Breaking down ideas and concepts to more fundamental components.

Conclusion

To improve the BCT, the degree needs to successfully connect innovation and connectivity together. Currently they are in conflict but this can be addressed by changes to some of the papers and electives that make up the degree.

Resulting in a better BCT. A Bachelor of Connectivity.

#connectivity #bct #creative #technologies #aut #radical #changes #conflict #resolution #connection #innovation #future #lenses #lens

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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264 --- Outta Time

Notion is not enough. My last semester at University is a mess.

These are my weekly activities (and the minimum time I am *expected* to spend on each one) (please keep in mind that this is different than the actual time spent) (the actual time spent on each activity can vary day to day and week to week) Quentin University (40 hours) Work (10 hours) Soulcafe (3 hours) Travel (8 hours) Sleep (60 hours) --- 8.5 hours is reccomended amount of sleep per day. Eating (10 hours) --- 3 half-an-hour meal breaks per day. Cooking (2 hours) Chores (1 hour) There are 168 hours in a week, my activities take up 134 of these hours. Leaving 34 hours of free time. I have checked with a couple of my classmates to understand their weekly breakdowns. Both of them live further away from University and I was surprised to see how little free-time they had. Bligh University (40 hours) Work (20 hours) Travel (20 hours) Sleep (60 hours) Meals (10 hours) Chores (2 hours) There are a total of 168 hours in a week, Bligh’s activities take 152 of those hours. Leaving 16 hours a week of free time. Melissa University (40 hours) Work (20 hours) Travel (15 hours) Sleep (60 hours) Baking (2 hours) Meals (10 hours) Cooking (7 hours) Chores (4 hours) There are a total of 168 hours in a week, Melissa’s activities take up 158 of those hours. Leaving 10 hours a week of free time left.

No time for innovation & independant research.

Traditionally, the time I have been spending learning within my field and working on innovative projects has been a blend of my University allocated time and free time. The unstructured format of the degree allowed self-directed learning to occur. I have found myself hopelessly attached to the self-directed independant and unstructured learning that I have been doing for the last 10 years.

Now, in my final semester, the papers have suddenly become very structured. In Studio, many of the students are assigned on industry ‘design’ projects. The first few weeks of my Interactivity & Play paper has been asking students for 14 hours of work in 12 hours of time (when we are only expected to be doing 10 hours a week). In Emerging Practises, the lecturer has assigned everyone a different technology in the field of robotics to then write an essay every three weeks.

Both of the secondary papers I have been taking this semester started with a disclaimer that they used to be run as a mini-studio. Apparently this was unsuccesful in the past so now they are run as structured papers centered around the lecturer’s research interests. Hours that was previously spent on self-directed learning is now spent completing structured assignments.

What I have learnt about Creative Technologies during this degree is a result of my unstructured self-directed learning. I believe that every studio project I have worked on has been innovative and powered by this type of learning. Yet what I tend to hear from staff, is that student work is not innovative enough. This is incredibly frustrating. I have a number of innovative projects that I could be working on:

Qlovaseed, Island, ‘i’, Realm of Order, Aplexcity, Kamakai, Grate, Connectivity, Duplex Numbers.

Yet I have very little time to spend on these projects. University is the sort of place where people should have the freedom to innovate and research. In my final semester, I want the chance to really push these projects for results. Yet by bringing in structure, innovation is stifled and the course is reduced to menial production work.

I believe the The Bachelor of Creative Technologies fails to encourage innovation. It also fails to teach students the theory and practices of ‘communication between fields’. It does espouse the right principles but the structure of the course works against these principles.

In my next Blog Post, I will be covering my ideas on how I would envision a Bachelor of Creative Technologies of the future.

PS: It took me almost 4 hours to gather my thoughts, think about and write this blog post, hence why I have been light on blog posts recently, they take too much time!

#ctec708 #bct #auckland #creative #technologies #time #learning #management #innovation #research #freedom #university #school #education #structured #unstructured #self-directed #student-directed

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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263 --- Notion

In one of my classes last week, we were given a google form to submit for next week with various checkboxes and tasks we were required to complete. I thought it was a really neat idea until I realised that google forms are not persistent. So when you check a box, it is discarded when the page reloads. So when I discovered Notion, the realtime collaboration space. I was rather excited. Persistent checkboxes, text and other embedded content. Although it’s not quite suitable for passing to students so that they can keep track of their progress, it is a fantastic collaboration tool for teams.

I am also impressed by Samsung Bixby which allows me to schedule reminders by talking to my phone. Hopefully these tools will help me to stay on top of things this semester!

#notion #organisation #planning #reminders #samsung

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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262 --- Documentation

Yesterday, the Qlovaseed documentation was tested for the first time (Qlovaseed is an app-development framework I am working on). Completely unprompted, my girlfriend tried using the framework and stumbled right into an issue. She couldn’t display an image in an app she created.

To add an image to an app, you need to have it in an ‘assets’ directory inside your project.

image.AddTo(App, "image.png") //This loads the image ./assets/image.png

The fact that this issue came up, clearly shows that the current documentation is inadequate (There are plenty of other undocumented features of the framework). Software frameworks that are written in Go (and hosted on GitHub) have their documentation automatically generated on godoc.org. Sourced from comments made by the developer within the code. For large projects though, Godoc has some pretty apparent weaknesses. Take a look at the GitHub API documentation:

Currently, Qlovaseed is using Godoc and while it may be great as a quick API reference. An app-development framework needs something better. Perhaps Sphinx, which I discovered because it powers the documentation for the Godot game engine (which I have been impressed by before).

Sphinx offers free documentation hosting for open-source projects and allows documentation to be written for a project in a custom format. I am currently investigating Spinx along with my team to establish whether or not it is a good choice for the Qlovaseed documentation.

Looks like I have some documentation to write.

#documentation #qlovaseed #qlova #software #app #development #framework #sphinx

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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261 --- Reddit Being Reddit

I took the plunge and decided to announce Qlovaseed on Reddit. To prepare for this, I added a license to the project, created a website and updated the Readme for the project on Github so that people knew how to install and use the project.

I posted it on the /r/golang subreddit, as this community is familiar with the programming language Go and are the most likely set of people who would understand the project and find it useful.

This stirred up a controversy straight away, one user requested me to update the title because calling it an app-development framework is misleading. This is harsh. They are trying to say that ‘webapps’ are not apps.

Of course they are apps! Next generation apps to be more precise. Apps that transcend the barrier between client and server. It doesn’t get better than that. Well so far, these are the only two comments about the project. I’m a little disappointed that there hasn’t been much of a response, hopefully, someone will stumble upon it and find it interesting. I mean that is what open-source is all about.

#reddit #qlovaseed #opensource #framework #announcement

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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260 --- To Scale

Amazingly, I think I may have discovered a semi-practical use for Virtual Reality! Keep in mind that not too long ago, I felt quite cynical about the technology.

Imagine a rock-climbing and treetop designing tool in VR. The entire environment can be modeled using various shapes, so handholds can be placed, ropes can be strung etc. The rock-climbing gym or treetop course can be virtually scaled before any real-world construction has taken place. I have been developing this very app in my VR paper. So far, it only has basic shapes and simple climbing support. We got to test this with the other people in the paper last Tuesday and it was interesting how they responded to it. Most of the participants were just creating things for fun, some of them didn’t even climb what they created and when they did, they didn’t get very high. So at least, in theory, there is a practical use there but even then, the users treated it like a game. So I am not sure what that says about Virtual Reality as a practical set of Technologies. I am yet to be convinced.

#climbing #vr #scale #app

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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259 --- Clickbait

So I was linked this video recently and I got rather excited, thinking this could be another Sunspring-esque short film.

youtube

I was wrong, it's complete sensationalist garbage. Sponsored by ‘Squarespace’ (who don’t appear to value integrity), the video features an animated short that Gregory Austin McConnell who claims it’s ‘entirely written by AI’. Apparently, this guy has stumbled upon an open-source AI platform called Botnik and fed it a load of stories. This resulted in the computer spitting out the script for the animated film featured in the video. Turns out this is absolute rubbish. The only app that Botnik has on the website is a predictive text writer that will provide AI generated suggestions like a mobile phone keyboard does. In order to make any sense from it, the suggestions need to be hand-picked. Now, I will admit that the video had its funny moments but I feel cheated now that I realized it wasn’t written by an AI. I was a tad skeptical throughout the film though, context was flowing correctly, there was a pretty solid plot and dialogue between the characters made sense. If this was real, it was light-years ahead of Sunspring. Sure, OpenAI recently refused to release its text generator for ethical reasons but come on, even that wasn’t as good as McConnell’ fiction. People are already concerned about artificial intelligence and its capabilities. The continued fear of job losses and the eventual replacement of the human race by robots. Isn’t it irresponsible to create something like this and to let it drift around Social Media until people believe that this is where AI technology is at.. Clickbait I tell ya. No good.

#clickbait #film #ai #truth #lies #botnik #squarespace #animation #future #fakenews #sunspring

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quentinquaadgras · 5 years

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258 --- Choose a License

So, my project has pivoted to Qlovaseed (a framework for building apps) and I have decided to release it. In order to do this, the project needs to be licensed under an appropriate open-source license. DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Just like any other product, service or creation, a license is required to allow people to use your copyrighted work. Open source licenses are neat because they allow code to be available so that people can build upon the project. There are plenty of open-source licenses around including:

GPL One of the most well-known licenses, the GPL requires that any modifications made to the project are also released publically (AKA copyleft). It is not suitable for Qlovaseed because it would also mean that any Apps created with the framework would also have to be open-source (some companies will just avoid anything GPL for this reason).

BSD A very permissive license, the BSD license is fairly short and simply requires the original copyright holder to be acknowledged and a notification that there is no warranty. Other than this, people are free to do what they like with software under this license. I don’t want Qlovaseed to be modified by another organization without them giving anything back, so BSD is not a great choice. Apache Similar to the BSD license, the Apache license is permissive with an extra clause that stops people from patent trolling an open-source project. In New Zealand, there is no such thing as a pure software ‘patent’, so this is not high on my list of concerns (Although I probably want the framework to continue to be legal internationally). Artistic License One of my favourite licenses, I am already using the Artistic License for parts of the ‘i’ programming language. It has a sort of ‘Choose your own Adventure’ feel to it. With permissive options and copyleft options that can be chosen from. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a good fit for Qlovaseed.

After much searching, I discovered the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) and it seemed to meet all of my needs. Modifications made to any of the projects files need to be released back to the public but separate code can be licensed separately. It can ‘pretend’ to be GPL code if needed and it has patent-trolling protection built in too (why not). It was almost perfect. There was just one little thing bugging me. Modifications are kept track of per file. That means people can create a new file inside of the framework and add a new feature without releasing it back to the public. This isn’t quite right because in Go, code is organised into ‘packages’ (folders that contain code files) and these packages can talk to each other in certain ways. It is essential that modifications are tracked on a ‘package’ level.

So I forked the MPL and created the Qlova Public License (QPL). It can be found at https://license.qlova.co.nz It’s not too drastic, it just has a new ‘Package’ definition and replaces the previous reference of files with ‘Packages’. That’s the other neat thing about the MPL & the QPL, they can both be modified as long as the name is changed and the references to the old ‘license steward’ are removed. However, Mozilla & Qlova strongly discourage you from doing so, please just choose a license.

#license #open-source #mozilla #gpl #bsd #artistic #apache

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