Interaction Design

Monday’s class was with Todd Cochrane and we talked about interactive design.

I never really thought about it before this class but afterwards I couldn’t help but look at everyday items and think about how they are designed. Using good design on a tool or object can make using that tool or object so much easier for the user it also invites the user to use it. For example, with Todd we looked at some elevator buttons, they looked alright from the start but when we really started analysing the design of them we realised that they were designed badly, the actual buttons were next to the symbols whereas if the buttons had been part of the symbols then people wouldn’t have been so confused using them. A good design invites the user to use it e.g. a door handle invites you to turn it by the way it is designed, same with the handle on a cup invites you to hold that handle.

One very good designed object I came across a while back was in the toilets in the Richmond mall, no it’s not the obvious thing ‘the toilet’ which itself is good interaction design but it was this:

The Dyson Airblade.

At first when I seen it I thought what the hell is that? but after seeing the yellow strips at the top I realised that it’s for your drying your hands,  something about the shape and colour of the Airblade gave an obvious affordance for me to use it. After using the Airblade I realised they have the instructions on the top on how to use it, but it was designed so well that I didnt even need to see those instructions.

Affordances in everyday Items

There are many things around our environment that have affordances such as: A door knob has an affordance for you to turn it, A seat affords you to sit on it, Gloves afford you to put them on your hands because they are shaped like your hands, A cup has a handle that you grasp to pick up, you probably don’t even think about these actions before you do them and that comes mostly down to the affordance of these items. These objects invite you to interact with them in a certain way. I think the best affordance or the most relevant to me is a game console controller, you instantly know how to hold the controller even when you haven’t used it before, This is becuase of the affordance of the design.

Our group of 4 was ‘the holograms’ and we designed a Portable wristband watch holographic image maker (p.him). The p.him is a portable holographic image making device which you wear on your wrist, it has a d.u.v (deep ultra violet) laser light transmitter built into it. There is also a beam splitter mirror attached to the device which can be deployed when the device is in use. The beam splitter has holographic paper stored into it so they work as one unit. When using the device all you need to do is point your arm or p.him in the direction of the image you wish to capture. When you are ready to capture your image you press a button on the device and it emits a laser beam. The image can then be recreated holographically whenever you want.

 

 

Copyleft

Our class with Clare Atkins was a wrap up on copyright which was named copyleft. After the session we were asked to answer a couple of questions.

Do you think that copying is always theft or not? explain your reasons

I don’t believe that copying is always theft, I believe copying something is not harmful to the owner like theft is. When you steal something you are taking something from the owner for yourself,  the owner is then left without that stolen item. When you copy something you are generating a duplicate of what the owner has, the owner keeps their item and you get to have a duplicate for yourself aswell, everybody wins!!. Copying ideas creates innovation and creativity which helps us improve and evolve products and creates even bigger and better ideas, this can only be good can’t it?.

Who was Aaron Swartz and what part has he played in the copyright debate?

Aaron Swartz was a computer programmer, writer, political organiser and internet activist. He was involved in the creation of the organisation creative commons which created a type of licence which allow creators to communicate which copying rights they reserve, and which rights they wave for the benefit of recipients or other creators. He was also instrumental in the campaign to prevent the passage of the S.O.P.A (Stop Online Piracy Act) which sought to combat internet copyright violations but was criticized on the basis that it would have made it easier for the U.S. government to shut down web sites accused of violating copyright and would have placed intolerable burdens on Internet providers.

I chose to add a CC licence to my blog using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Copyright, is it right?

Copyright is a very complicated issue, especially when it comes to digital copyright. I believe that copyright is essential in giving the creator rightful ownership and credit of their creation and to protect their financial interests in such a creation. One of the biggest issues with copyright today is companies trying to prosecute individuals who used the web and websites for breaching their copyrights.

I think one of the biggest problems with digital copyright are the legislations that are attempting to be put in place that give the USA power to prosecute websites and individuals outside of the US who they believe have breached copyrights or are helping people breach copyrights. The CISPA legislation which is trying to give technology companies legal immunity for disclosing users information and activity to the US government and NSA is also very worrying, is this not just spying in disguise?. All these legislations put power in the wrong hands and ruin internet freedom, people’s rights to privacy and freedom of speech, also the secrecy that surrounds all these legislations are making things worse.

Another big problem with digital copyright infringement is accurately identifying the person who actually breached the copyright, how can they know exactly who breached their copyright? currently they are claiming this is done simply by identifying which I.P. address that the breach came from but how can this be accurate?  I believe that trying to prosecute people using this method is wrong and is in no way accurate. It’s like prosecuting the Internet Service Provider because the breach was made through their ISP, Is that correctly identifying the person responsible for the breach of copyright? it may have narrowed down the breach to a large group of people but it does in no way identify the person responsible for that breach, It’s like someone taking your car for a drive, crashing it and killing someone then you getting prosecuted for murder because the car was in your name, it’s just not right. The same goes for the account holder of the I.P. address, The group is narrowed down (even more than the ISP provider) but the person who breached the copyright is not truly identified. How many different people use your internet at home? you? your partner? friends who visit? family? friends of family? work colleagues? and that’s only some of the people you know about. What if someone uses your internet connection without permission? If someone hacked your password and illegally downloaded copyrighted material? should YOU the owner of the connection be prosecuted for that breach? I should think not, but the legislation says otherwise.

The biggest problem is that all these legislations and acts don’t actually protect the creator or owner of the copyright but are more about protecting the media giants and distributors who are trying to make money off of the creators work.

I think that the internet being the World Wide Web that it is today, in order to create fair protection and legislation for everybody we need a World Wide Organization that openly deals with such issues. An organization made up of representatives from all countries, businesses and users associated with the internet and copyrights to come together to find and create a legislation that will work for all people, businesses and countries involved. We can’t let a few U.S. politicians dictate what should happen on the internet otherwise the entire World Wide Web will be controlled by the USA, which isn’t really World Wide at all is it?.

I do not agree with the copyright (infringing file sharing) amendment act 2011 (a.k.a 3 strikes) legislation put in place by the New Zealand Government mainly for the reasons described above about identifying who actually committed the copyright infringement. The whole legislation is in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 which states that one of the minimum standards of criminal proceedings is the presumption of innocence ( innocent until proven guilty). Clearly the copyright amendment act 2011 states that “allegations of copyright infringement made against you (account holder) by the copyright holder are presumed to be correct unless you give evidence or reasons why you aren’t guilty”, which is in complete opposition to what the bill of rights states must be done in order for any criminal proceedings to take place. Therefor they cannot legally prosecute you for copyright breaching until they have evidence of you personally breaching that copyright.

Fair dealing Examples:

One example of Fair Dealing is when a student or tutor copies a small part of text from a copyrighted book for a class project. The student/tutor is not in breach of copyright laws because the laws of fair dealing allow for people to use a small amount of text for educational purposes. I believe that this is fair use (fair dealing) of the copyrighted work because the person using the material is not making profit from its use and it is solely being used for teaching and learning which is very unlikely to cause the publisher of the work to lose much (if any) potential money from the use of the material.

Another Fair Dealing example is if I were to write a review about a copyrighted book, it would be considered to be fair dealing because writing a criticism or review about a copyrighted product is allowed. I think this is a good part of fair dealing because I believe without the ability to review and criticise products, consumers would not have the ability to see how that product performs and is rated, which could mean the consumer/customer is not getting a fair deal when buying that product. I think it is the customers right to be able to see a product’s review and I think having these reviews is important ito encourage and motivate the creator of the product to refine and improve that product.

Our Treaty of Waitangi

This week Craig talked to us about our history and the treaty of Waitangi.

I think that my understanding of New Zealand history was quite limited at the time we started this lesson. I knew the basics of what had happened in the 1800’s between the Maori and the English in regards to the treaty of Waitangi but nothing of any real depth. I had only skim read information at this time so most of my knowledge on the subject was through hearsay and the media mostly.

It’s hard to think of how I feel about our history, being of mixed European and Maori race myself I feel I should have a neutral view.  I do feel annoyed at the way the English went about with the signing of the Treaty, they purposely didn’t tell the Maori of the full nature of the agreement. I don’t believe my opinion is an us vs them opinion. Even with the difference in text I believe the Treaty of Waitangi is an important document for New Zealand because it set out what obligations and responsibilities both Maori and English cultures were agreeing to when the English settled in New Zealand.

I read all of the documents but  the document ‘all about the treaty’ was the most interesting because of the different understandings of  a lot of the terminology used in the Treaty. The way the Treaty was written caused a misunderstanding between the two languages due to the different interpretations of what each word ment, the meanings were lost in translation if you will. In saying that, I’m positive the English would have known that the Maori would not have understood a lot of the terminology used in the treaty and had used that lack of understanding to their advantage. I think the English feared that if they had told the Maori the true meaning of some of this terminology, that a lot of the Maori chiefs would not have signed such an agreement, though maybe some of the blame of this translation should be put on the language interpreters themselves. A good example of this misunderstanding is the interpretation of the word ‘Government’ – how could the Maori have any concept of understanding of an English term such as ‘government’?, in a time when the Maori didn’t have any type of government or similar system. I also found interesting the fact that most of the Maori only signed the Maori version of the Treaty (530 chiefs) with a very small number signing the English version (39 chiefs), I thought why would they have signed the English version? would you sign a document written in a foreign language that you didn’t even understand? Most likely not, I know I wouldn’t.

Because of the difference in text, the treaty itself cannot be used as a legal document, so it was decided to refer to the treaty of Waitangi in 62 separate acts of parliament. Most of these acts have no reference to the treaty itself but refer to the ‘principles’ of the treaty, Lord Woolf describes these ‘principles’ as “the underlying mutual obligations and responsibilities the Treaty places on the parties. They reflect the intention of the Treaty as a whole and include, but are not confined to the express terms of the Treaty.”

New Zealand fits in with what was happening globally.  The Treaty was signed instead of the English dominating New Zealand because the English were moving away from the imperialistic views of the past to a more democratic global society. I think they seen that imperialism wasn’t working and that the whole global situation needed to be approached from a different angle if the british empire and the world was to prosper and live in peace. This lead to the Maori wars because land confiscations used to punish tribes that fought against the Crown had left a long legacy of grievances and the Maori had decided to fight back against this injustice.

Thinking of the New Zealand from a global prospective will allow us to realise that we are all human and we are all after the same thing ‘peace’, which we will never achieve if we look at each other as the others.

After the United Nations created a declaration on the rights of indigenous people. The UN then created a report about New Zealand, the Treaty and how the government should correct the wrongs that were committed against our indigenous people (the Maori). This report was then rejected by the New Zealand government.

The Treaty is still relevent today because all of the rights of the Pakeha under the Treaty have been honoured, yet the rights guaranteed to the Maori have largely been ignored, this ignorance has led to social and economic disadvantages for Maori. In order to correct these disadvantages we must effectively redress the historical breaches of the Treaty and improve relationships between Maori and the crown and also Maori and Pakeha.