A7BairdCunninghamSmith

A7BairdCunninghamSmith

To Do

• please work as a group (3-5 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• Be prepared to give a 5-10 minute presentation about your project in class so the other students and the instructors are aware of your plans

Task

Please post in the Wiki:

• the project chosen and your description of it
• initial objectives
• why is the project of interest to you?
• how do you plan to approach the research?
• what do you expect to find out?
• what do you consider the major challenges?
• references identified
• questions you might have

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Will Baird, Dara Cunningham, & Matt Smith

2. Project Description

We plan to read multiple papers and articles published that are relevant to information spaces as well as conduct a small scale experiment regarding selection and what factors tend to be the trend for social selection of objects. The following is directly from the project description:
This project would develop a social curatorial mechanism that allows all participants to choose and criticize the models and to ensure the quality of user contributions (with tagging and rating). The curatorial mechanism will introduce new roles that can be assumed by any user. Critics can review and comment on other models, and such critiques will be assembled and integrated to provide guidance for other users to view the most suitable model. Critiques can be used as an alternative social validation mechanism to the current process in which the model to be displayed in Google Earth is chosen by the professionals at Google.
(DSSF Wiki, DSS-projects-suggestions, Fall 2008)

The major intent of our work on this project will be to examine the "social curatorial mechanism" possibilities for users to give input to building models within Google 3D Warehouse, Sketchup, and Second Life or Open Sim sites. A potential alternative approach would be to facilitate user tags on the built environment, as represented in Google Maps or Flikr, to use the information gathered to inform new building designs or building adaptations. The project is of interest to our group for the potential benefits to all members' graduate and undergraduate research interests. Dara is a PhD student whose work is concentrated on applying information design methodologies to the design of buildings and other environments, focusing on usability and user-centered design.

In his paper "21st Century Graffitti: Detroit-Tagging," Jeff Rice describes using tagging in Sketchup and related programs to help re-define a city in decay. Rice describes the process of "digitizing" the city as follows:
Detroit, like the urban experience in general, has become non-referential. Its empty spaces, or "ruins" as the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website declares, don't refer to anything anymore. Tagging allows us to transform that non-referentiality into social experience. The lesson of Detroit is a lesson for all urban sites. Digital space becomes social space through assembled meanings, and that assemblage actualizes the popular logic of social software. Tagging, then, marks a place where new media logic informs our understanding of space and the urban, fashioning a sense of the "social" not yet accounted for in urban studies. Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags. Residents, who tag themselves simultaneously as writers or non-writers, mark the city through memory maps, weblogs, del.icio.us tags, and other related tools in order to reconstruct the city's sense of urbanity as a digital experience. The tagging generates a number of assembled taxonomies, some recognizable, many not. Through the assemblages, we find new Detroits to engage. We find new Detroits emerging out of our own discursive constructions. This reworking is social in ways capital investment has failed to generate. By making these cities cyber -- that is, by putting them on the Web -- the tags used to develop these spaces will inevitably be linked to other similarly named tags for other cities, for other, not yet imagined, encounters.
(Rice, 2005)

3. Empty Field

From our experiment results, we expect to find common features that would help determine the most popular building models and elements versus the unpopular building models and elements. In addition, it is hoped that the experiment results would be applicable to user testing of building simulations as a tool to assist in discovering usability flaws before the buildings are actually built. We believe the major challenges are going to be:
• Determining the generalized common factors that would promote the popular versus unpopular features;
• Determining which categories to use to sort the collected data;
• Finding willing participants to participate in the research; and
• Determining and implementing the programming necessary to add tagging and user comments to Google 3D Warehouse, Sketchup, and Second Life or Open Sim sites.

Questions we have that could be answered by undertaking this project are:
• How effective are building simulations as a metaphor for the "real world"?
• Will users be willing to provide feedback on building simulations?
• How will user feedback on building simulations translate to real world changes to buildings?

References:

Rice, Jeff (2005) 21st Century Graffiti: Detroit-Tagging. CTheory.net. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=484