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@juliandv-creativetech
Ducks in a row
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
Recommended reading for anyone wanting to know a bit more about the foundation which the modern internet was built upon.
The ARPANET was an early packet switching network and the first to use TCP/IP. It’s a very good read to learn about how the network came about, how it actually functions, and the many challenges faced along the way in the early computing era.
Google talks and free swag
Farming, speciesism, local solutions.
Questioning normality is often faced with backlash, as the questioning itself is felt as a personal confrontation. The health benefits of meat and dairy has been shaped by generational layers of social constructs and maintained by marketing by industries who are focused on the bottom line.
After considering the ethical qualms around dairy consumption around a year ago, I decided to omit it completely for a while to see the effects, opting purely for a plant based diet. After having more energy and being healthier I saw no reason to change back.
My studio team began exploring and unrooting the topic of speciesism, that is the idea of humans having higher moral rights than other species. One interesting initial project idea involves manufacturing photography film, using human gelatine.
Gelatin used in food and products comes from the protein collagen, which is sourced from ears, hides, bones and skin of animals. Note, in this context, animals is referring to sentient organisms with a central nervous system other than humans.
The interesting question with this topic is whether it is a better moral choice to use human gelatin, from deceased and consenting humans. In this way, the collected protein involves no torture or unnecessary death. and uses less natural resources.
A further question to ponder is whether human gelatine could be accepted and what reaction would this be met with. It’s a morbid topic and I’m not sure how I would react using a product made from human material, or say, eating food which is substituted with human gelatine. It’s a very strange line.
If I am for the use of ethically sourced human gelatine, then by that logic should I be ok with consented cannibalism? This thought is repulsive to me. With this being the case, the progression of the argument concerning moral rights and perception of animal welfare is circled back upon itself, as my own repulsed thinking of consented cannibalism is confirmation that animal consumption is generally not given a second thought. This is especially true when the food product is not directly reminiscent of the animal of which it is made from.
After the vegan film idea passed, mostly due to the complexities of the manufacturing process, we decided upon a different approach to the problem. Rather than addressing the issue from an animal consumption and ethics point of view which can be quite confrontational, we are showing and promoting alternatives, specifically in the area of self sustainability with fruit and vegetable gardens.
Our current goal is to explore garden alternatives for urban environments, and present a proposal for an AUT community garden.
For the alternative urban gardening research, a prototype vertical garden will be constructed. Vertical gardening is just as it sounds, with the primary advantage being the extra space that can be utilised. Imagine a small garden on an office desk for example, to brighten up a workplace and provide access to healthy food anytime. The implementation of affordable tech is also going to be explored. This can be in the form of an Arduino powered automation system for measuring and acting upon PH levels, nutritional and water requirements. However before diving too deeply into this we have been getting our hands dirty learning about gardening. Curtis has managed to secure a garden bed in the CBD and resources for us to experiment and further our practical knowledge in this area.
Finished up reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
Having played Second Life many years ago and just getting into VR now it was the perfect fun book to get me excited about developing a VR environment. With every sort of 80s reference under the sun it made it extremely entertaining too!
After reading I learnt that a film adoption is in development, directed by Spielberg, with a planned release of early next year.
1 week back. Time to revive the blog!
The past few months have been full on - balancing an ecommerce store, a videography position, and web developer position. But it’s paid off, especially with my intern web development position ^office image above. Being my first time working with professionals in the industry for longer than the duration of a hackfest, I was not too sure what to expect. Thankfully the team I worked with were extremely friendly and the company culture was a great fit.. It definitely was very difficult having to leave that position just before uni.
However, I’m really looking forward to the projects I’m working on this semester, and all the challenges that will come along with them!
Papers I’m in
Studio with Andy - Working on a project concerned with animal welfare and ethics
Virtual and immersive environments (my first time doing any VR)
The Texture of Time - Working with Bolex cameras, hand developing and physically editing short films
#mobime
When you start a new job and the team is using terms and acronyms you don’t know
Reflecting on Flattie
Flattie was a rough journey. There were up and downs, many challenges and many successes. Wrapping up the projects i have 2 main takeaways:
There is so much more to data visualisation than it appears
What looks like a seemingly simple project or visualisation is the combination of multiple datasets, crazy amounts of manual merges and reworking of data. Looking at some other data visualisations online show slick simple user interfaces with the bare minimum of information necessary to convey the datas message or insight. This is an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish, and i like to think that we reached some level of this simplicity with Flattie.
Always consider the users needs
The biggest way in which we managed simplicity was by stripping out unnecessary user input. How would a student know what their minimum/maximum price per week would be if they do not know what it should be, based on average prices? How would they know whether to prioritise internet access and speeds over access to transport? From a users point of view it is confusing and will lead to inaccurate results.
We aimed to create a web app which would be a first step to finding a place by educating the user on price fluctuations and linking to live available rooms on Trade Me.
I feel as if the above 2 points are fairly obvious when you think about it. However they mean so much more after going through the failure process and learning first hand.
2 highlights from the project would be:
Meeting with Figure NZ
My teams meeting with Figure NZ showed how much work goes into planning projects with data. It’s easy to get carried away with deciding tech stacks (node, react, angular, blah blah) when the important parts are the higher level aspects. The way in which Figure discussed their proposed API and the way they handled the meeting was an eye opener to the efficiency possible when everyone is on exactly the same page and are asking specific and relevant questions.
Weekend hackfests
48 hours of sleep deprivation + work + fun (got to have those nerf gun battle breaks) = an insane amount of progress. We had 2 hackfests for Flattie, which really got the ball rolling, and allowed us to push out a first release weeks before the due date giving plenty of time to squash bugs in the app.
Overall it’s a project which I am very happy with. A lot more refined than my previous studio projects (live online and very usable). Workloads were well spread out between Matvey (front end, back end, making it actually work) Walter (UX, UI and project management) and myself (UI and data wrangler). I learnt a lot about Auckland suburbs too, and have a good picture of areas which i had no idea existed beforehand.
Studio: Trickster - Weeks 7 -10: Where have I been?
At the end of mid-semester break, Lara, Julian and I, formed a team to create Sarah Trotman’s wearable tech dress for the AUT Excellence in Business Support Awards 2016. The idea for this year was a Twitter dress; a dress that when someone tweeted using the hashtag “#AUTBizAwards” would make the dress light up.
This idea came about from my experience of NeoPixels (LED based lights) and Julian’s experience with Arduinos and media co-relation. By using technology that we had worked with before, we were able to quickly assembly a wearable tech dress that would usually take a few months. The key for this dress was multiple interactivity. We wanted to create a garment that many people could view, and trigger, at once without the need to be in close proximity to Sarah. Twitter and NeoPixels allowed us to do that. Donna helped us with the actual dress and used the silk from the last dress, meaning that we have this light material to put all our NeoPixel circuitry on. Unfortunately Donna then fell ill, which is when Marlies took over everything material wise. Since we had to work with silk, we needed use clever circuitry to connect the NeoPixels and still keep the flow of the material. To solve this problem we used conductive fabric to make the tracks, and sewed the NeoPixels to the tracks with conductive thread. We used this method because we wanted to make the technology almost invisible and didn’t want Sarah tripping on any wires. We found out during this process that after a while, the conductive thread would loosen because of movement and therefore not making a connection. Making us re-sew all 48 NeoPixels in a more secure way.
While Lara and I were working on the NeoPixel circuitry, Julian was working on the Arduino Yun and responding to Twitter. Since I had worked with NeoPixels, I coded the NeoPixel side which caused them to twinkle. Julian and I then combined our codes to make the final code. This took multiple attempts to keep the communication between the Arduino/Twitter and the NeoPixels working. It then took a few days to de-bug the NeoPixel connections.
What was interesting about making this dress was the switching between actually sewing the dress and doing the circuitry. We needed the skirt to be flat to do the circuitry, but then needed a certain bit sewed to move onto the next part. It’s a project that requires to be very carefully thought out.
We were just finishing the very final details on the day of the awards before getting ready to head on over. Since we used a phone hotspot for the Arduino wifi, I was on sticking to Sarah where ever she went to make sure it didn’t lose connectivity. The night went amazingly, the dress worked perfectly and actually made people tweet about the awards just to see it light up. It was almost weird to talk to these successful business people about how much they loved the dress, when to us it was just something we (sort of) always do in BCT.
From this project, I realised that e-textile and wearable tech is what I want to do in the future because it combines my passion for design/art, problem solving and creating pieces in an industry that is only just beginning. It was risky to have this many weeks off from studio and my elective, but it has definitely paid off and I do not regret it. What helped was that I came in during mid-semester break to do studio work and got myself in a position that I could take this time off and not be behind. This project also benefitted my project because it is a wearable tech project, I was furthering my practice. It taught me a lot about the relation between technology, fabrics and the movement of the human body.
Some GIFs proposed to Creative Mornings Auckland, for a Visual Communication in Business design paper.
Currently working on some other motion graphics for Flattie using similar animations.
Flattie v1.1 is live!
After last weeks successful soft launch, the team has been busy testing, logging, and bug fixing.
The current iteration can now be viewed at http://www.flattie.space
We decided upon a soft launch as it let us easily test and work on bugs at the same time, rather than testing before the initial release. This seemed to work well as we discovered many bugs which caused quite severe usability issues on some mobile devices.
Now onto Trello for the next round of bugs to squish!
Conforming & Merging Suburbs | GeoJSON, Trade Me & MBIE for Flattie
Trade Me requires a suburb ID to return suburb specific rental listings through their API.
Through a query I managed to return a list of localities, regions and suburbs in New Zealand, as well as their corresponding Trade Me ID.
Firstly I sorted out some of the JSON by stripping out the localities and regions, leaving the suburbs which (should) match up with our sorted MBIE dataset (government data of average rental prices).This data was in JSON format, so the next step in processing the data was to convert it to XML to match up with the MBIE data.
Unfortunately after running some comparison scripts between the 2 data sets their were many anomalies. We discovered that defining suburbs was harder than initially thought of. Some areas on MBIE for example are broken up into north south, east west. Some use the abbreviation ‘Mt’, others use ‘Mount’.
The efficient long term solution was obvious - create a process, or cron job, to match these different definitions using a defined joining method/table. Unfortunately this would take a long time to implement and was way out of scope.
For the sake of getting an MVP we decided to rather spend a day manually filtering the data.
This process involved expanding and condensing, shifting and redefining, merging and interpolating. At one point the data was over 100,000 lines long... :o
Thankfully this was eventually condensable.
We did have to manually define suburbs using a third dataset, some GeoJSON data @matveycolab worked on.
With the data sorted, we could move on to implementing it and visualising it all on a map!
Property Tools Galore
In recent months residential property pricing tools have become increasingly popular in New Zealand.
Currently popular online tools include RELab, Homes.co.nz, QV and the new Trade Me tool: Trade Me Property Insights
A common question which seems to arise is one around the validity and accuracy of the valuations (Winter, 2016).
I believe that our web app will be less concerned with this issue than the other tools available as we are presenting pricing data on a per suburb basis.This, compared to other tools, means that any discrepancies in our data will be averaged out because of the quantity of data we are utilising.
Another main point of difference is that tools like Homes.co.nz provide housing data meant for either house owners, or buyers looking at a specific property. We on the other hand are targeting students who are in the initial stages of seeking a place to rent, who are not sure which area to start looking in and want to understand what price range to expect to pay.
References
Edmunds, S. (2016, October 12). Trade Me launches new property information tool. Retrieved October 14, 2016, from http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/85233659/trade-me-launches-new-property-information-tool
Homes.co.nz Property Insights. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2016, from https://homes.co.nz/
QV.co.nz. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2016, from https://www.qv.co.nz/
Trade Me Property Insights. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2016, from http://www.trademe.co.nz/property/insights
Winter, C. (2016, October 14). Differences in house prices on free valuation sites. Retrieved October 14, 2016, from http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/85332793/differences-in-house-prices-on-free-valuation-sites
When the prototype is full of bugs but you still have to present
The MBIE dataset is now accessible through a website.