#questioninglens

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition #7: Shopping

As the year draws to a close and things start wrapping up, I post my final submission for the Mission Ignition blog series.

University ended last week and I came home after my final presentations. On Saturday I went shopping with my mother. The stores where full as it was just after the 15th, 'payday' for some. We went to a clothes store and I browsed around for some work clothes, as I'll be starting work soon. When I was done, I decided to stand in the line while my mother still browsed the store. When my mother was done, she joined me in the line and we proceeded to the pay point.

While standing in the line, I thought about this process. I decided to do a QuestioningLens Ignition regarding this. Considering my technological focus, I thought about how this process could be made more efficient with the use of technology.

image source: wikimedia.org

Relevant Question: Is a completely wireless shopping experience possible? Can the integration of current technology be used to eliminate queues in a store?

Potential Solution:

This solution has probably been proposed before but I will expand on it. All products could be equipped with RFID-tags. These Radio Frequency Identification tags can be used to determine which products you have put in your shopping trolley. A simple screen on the trolley could display the total of the items in your trolley. This could also be connected to a phone app which totals up the prices and shows the cost.

Another problem is finding products in a store. The overhead boards in the isles are often too vague and you can't determine where products are (if you do not frequent that particular store). I remember hearing about Indoor Navigation by Google Maps which could make this process much more efficient. You could therefore add in your shopping list (on your phone), download the specific map for the store you will be visiting and the application will plot your path through the store (ensuring that you pick up frozens last). Extending this, payments could be made more efficient with the rise of wireless/mobile payment. At a recent music festival I attended, they had NFC wristbands that were connected to an app which you have granted permission to bill your credit card. This Near Field Communication tags identify you at the till point and by tapping the NFC-bracelet onto the receiver, the amount is deducted from your account. NFC can also be a feature of a smartphone.

You therefore simply walk into the store, follow the navigation on your phone and grab the items you want. You simply tap your phone at the exit and off you go. An all-encompassing shopping app.

This system does however bring with it security issues. The biggest probably being stolen phones. Security measures will have to be put in place, such as authorising payments, which might slow down the process once more. The implementation of such a system is a very big project and during the transition to a system like this, the current system will still have to be supported.

It will therefore be more effort to implement if ALL stores don't implement it at roughly the same time. This could very well be one version of our future.

Mission Ignition:

This blog series is based on the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation’s Ignitions program. This type of ignition is known as a Questioning Lens Ignition. The Questioning Lens will help you look at the situation more critically, with a view to practicing the identification of inefficiencies and thinking of solutions. Imagine you are wearing a massive pair of glasses, called the Questioning Lens, through which you view the situation.

After identifying a potential inefficiency, ask relevant questions that will lead to a potential innovative and realistic solution to address the problem. Apply your thinking to provide a potential solution.

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition #6: Portfolio Connect

University is the perfect time to experiment, expand and grow. 

There are so many students who are looking for any opportunities to build up their portfolios. In the Film and Media department, during my undergrad, there were a lot of students who were creating short films just to build up a portfolio. At University you are surrounded by a group of people who's willing to do the work in order to create something, anything, that shows off their skills.

Sometimes I would be working on a video just for the fun (or perhaps to learn a certain skill). I often require the help of other artists to make a 'good looking' final product that we can actually show. It will therefore be more exciting to work with passionate artists who want to collaborate as opposed to paying someone to do it. There is however no way of knowing about other artists who want to work on fun side projects.

Relevant Question: What is there was a way to connect to people with different skills/talents in order to collaborate?

Potential Solution: Enter Portfolio Connect.

The goal is to put artists in contact with one another, especially at a University level. In a previous post I explored the possibility of a "Portfolio" system. In this post I will expand on this system by including this "connection"-method.

I would therefore post on this site that I am interested in creating short/funny videos in a UCT setting and that I'm looking for a cinematographer to join my project. I could then upload a 'request' to the site explaining the type of project I am working on and what I am looking for. This could be a video or text request. I should be able to upload images, sketches, video or audio that give the other users an idea of what I am working on. 

Before choosing to CONNECT, the users can view each other's public profiles using the existing Portfolio system. The addition of a 'rating' feature could be explored as a security measure when choosing to meet people. The Portfolio system will have to be adapted to account for 'shared' work.

An example of how the 'request' page of a user could look.

The nature of the system, prevents it from being implemented intuitively on existing social media networks such as Facebook or Twitter. It could be implemented by having a certain hashtag but that might become messy quite quickly as you would have to sift through a stream of tweets to see what people are doing. The format of a website with profiles would be more intuitive to use.

Mission Ignition:

This blog series is based on the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation’s Ignitions program. This type of ignition is known as a Questioning Lens Ignition. The Questioning Lens will help you look at the situation more critically, with a view to practicing the identification of inefficiencies and thinking of solutions. Imagine you are wearing a massive pair of glasses, called the Questioning Lens, through which you view the situation.

After identifying a potential inefficiency, ask relevant questions that will lead to a potential innovative and realistic solution to address the problem. Apply your thinking to provide a potential solution.

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition #5: Photo Overload

The past few weekends I attended some events, such as music festivals, where there were no shortage in cameras. Besides simple smartphone cameras, there were DSLRs and GoPros and video cameras and iPads. Some of the times you would even pose for a picture with a group of people who you have just met. I've often wondered how I would get the pictures from these people. How much trouble am I really willing to go through for one picture?

Image Source: heresthethingblog.com

Inefficiency Identified:

At massive events a lot of people take pictures. These pictures get stored on the multiple different photo sites across the web. Some post their albums to Facebook or Google Plus, some simply post pis on Twitter. Others might have blogs or tumblrs filled with concert/event photos. 

What if there was an easy way of tracking down pictures taken at a specified event from all over the internet.

Possible Solution:

The solution lies in the storing of metadata. It would be easy to store a unique tag for each event with the photo. This tag can then be searched and all of the pictures will show up.

A very easy to implement tagging system already exists. This is known as hashtags. Mostly used on Twitter, but slowly growing on other social networking sites such as Facebook, hashtags are used to tag posts or content for easy access via search.

The hashtagging systems of each site is still however fragmented. This means that I will have to do seperate searches on Twitter and on Facebook if I want to look for pictures with a certain tag. A universal tagging system would fix this problem. This would require something similar to Google, which manages search keywords. When a tag is searched, all results from across the web needs to be pulled in.

Seeing that many websites already use hashtags for their own internal archiving systems and Google already provides a really good search algorithm, it would be better to implement a Standard for Tagging rather than create a tag management system.

If a tagging standard is specified, all content should be tagged with hashtags. This would make it easier for search providers to look for data that is public and from different sources.

Mission Ignition:

This blog series is based on the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation’s Ignitions program. This type of ignition is known as a Questioning Lens Ignition. The Questioning Lens will help you look at the situation more critically, with a view to practicing the identification of inefficiencies and thinking of solutions. Imagine you are wearing a massive pair of glasses, called the Questioning Lens, through which you view the situation.

After identifying a potential inefficiency, ask relevant questions that will lead to a potential innovative and realistic solution to address the problem. Apply your thinking to provide a potential solution.

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition #3: Introducing "Portfolio"

My ignition this week was very linked to my own interests and therefore I went a bit overboard with the "solution". This week's "academics"-theme in conjunction with my current job hunt lead to a questioning lens ignition which proposes a new service.

Inefficiency Identified:

Now I do not know how things work in other departments but this inefficiency is very applicable to my major(s) Computer Science (especially Games Development). It may be applicable to other departments in certain ways.

While looking for a job in the game dev. industry, it has become clear that having a portfolio is essential. This portfolio, in the case of games, would display any coding projects which you have done. As I am quite proud of some of the projects which I coded during my academic years, I would like to display them in my portfolio.

The only method to do this currently, is to copy the code onto an online repository, such as github, where it can be publicly viewed.

Relevant Questions:

What if each student had a public online web page from the University? What if you could choose certain projects to show online on your public profile? What if the University can host your assignments (private and public)?

Potential Solution:

Introducing a concept service called Portfolio.

Portfolio is a service that sits between the University's online coursework management system (Vula if you're at UCT) and the public. As the University already stores the project files for assignments that you have submitted, Portfolio only has to load these files and format them nicely for public display.

Portfolio will need to be connected to Vula to gain access to your data. This will allow Portfolio to automatically load your projects and present them to you on your profile page. You can then decide which projects to make public and which to keep private.

figure 2: Portfolio pulls data from Vula and displays it on your public profile as per your settings.

The system can be generic and fit onto any grading book system. It will pull projects from the grading book system. This will only happen after projects have been marked. Students will be able to log into Portfolio and select whether or not a project is viewable by the public. 

figure 3: An example of the 'profile edit' page where a student can set the status of an assignment.

The Portfolio Website will host the profile page of your publicly viewable projects. It should take into considering different types of media that can be displayed. Students get an address that they can add to their CV's in order to show off their academic work.

figure 4: An example of how the Profile Page could display projects.

This solution is probably best suited for departments that have visual artefacts as part of assessments such as game dev, animation and graphic design.

You can go and view my academic portfolio (still in the works) that I set up manually here.

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition Brief #3: Study Vibes

Being an honours student has completely thrown me out of sync with the rest of the university. Our schedules work differently, our terms work differently... It's just so different to undergrad.

I therefore have no idea how far into the final weeks we are. If I take an educated guess however, I would say that the end is near. The library is always full and I always see people in a rush to get back to studying. I therefore want to focus this week on lectures and academics.

So this week I shall let you get back to studying and keep it short.

image: varsitybreakout.com

Here is this week’s Mission:

What processing regarding academics are you frustrated about? Look at how technology has changed the lecturing process. Is there anything that you would want handled better?

an example question could be: "What if students could ask questions anonymously in class?." How would this work?

Good luck :D

Ignition:

For this mission, you could do a Smart Questioning Ignition. Many great change-agents through history have needed to lift their gaze to see beyond the world around them and picture a different scenario with different norms and changed rules. It allows you to practice thinking the unthinkable and to exercise your ability to form credible scenarios for unseen circumstances and to envision different potential futures. 

After asking a smart question, explore a potential relevant, realistic and sensible scenario analysis. A possible answer to a Smart Question must aim to discover the unseen and have the potential to lead to innovation.

You could also try a Questioning Lens Ignition. The Questioning Lens will help you look at the situation more critically, with a view to practicing the identification of inefficiencies and thinking of solutions. Imagine you are wearing a massive pair of glasses, called the Questioning Lens, through which you view the situation.

After identifying a potential inefficiency, ask relevant questions that will lead to a potential innovative and realistic solution to address the problem. Apply your thinking to provide a potential solution.

[ridhojeftha]

Mission Ignition #1: Cellphone cameras that flash together...

During this past week I attended quite a few events. Most of these took place during the evening. As these were events that we would like to remember (e.g. my brother’s Matric Ball), it is no surprise that the cameras were working overtime.

I took this week's mission in mind and observed what happened during these events. Even though there was an actual camera, a lot of the times pictures got taken on camera-phones as well. These were pictures snapped for the means of sharing on different social media sites. The type of phones that were used varied from feature phones to smart phones, depending on the user. The camera capabilities vary just as much. There are some phones (like my mother’s) that does not have a flash. On the other hand, my phone has two LED lights that act as a really bright flash for my camera. 

image: gawker

This lead me to ask the following relevant questions:

What if there was a way for a cellphone without a flash to utilize one from a nearby capable cellphone?

Can multiple camera flash lights be synchronized?

Seeing that smartphones are all the rage at the moment, an app would be ideal for this solution. A camera app that is compatible with multiple phones can be created. The app should connect all of the phones in the room. This can be done by choosing one phone as the main-phone and having other phones connect to it through the app.

When the main-phone therefore takes a picture, all of the other phones' cameras are triggered to go off at the same time. This will create one huge flash from the various phones and everyone will get a picture from their own perspective.

This helps phones that does not have a flash to get light at the right time for taking a picture. Apart from this, I reckon that the app would be quite fun and creative to play with.

I submitted this as a Questioning Lens Ignition. I hope that this week's Mission is going well. Remember to keep an eye out for the ways in which smartphones are used in daily life.

peace

ridhojeftha ---

Reminder of this week’s Mission:

Throughout your day, stop for a moment and really think about what you are doing.

If the action does NOT involve a cellphone, think about how the introduction of a cellphone would change your interactions.

If it does involve a cellphone, think about what part of the action is annoying, hindering or just unintuitive to perform.

In doing this, you should be able to identify an inefficiency. Thereafter, think of a realistic or innovative solution for this problem.

Ignition:

This type of ignition is known as a Questioning Lens Ignition. The Questioning Lens will help you look at the situation more critically, with a view to practicing the identification of inefficiencies and thinking of solutions. Imagine you are wearing a massive pair of glasses, called the Questioning Lens, through which you view the situation.

After identifying a potential inefficiency, ask relevant questions that will lead to a potential innovative and realistic solution to address the problem. Apply your thinking to provide a potential solution.