This week

This week we were introduced to the course with assessment items, learning outcomes and more. I attended the UQ Innovate induction, which was very useful. In addition to this, I completed all the required online tutorials pior to the session. I understand that these provide important information regarding safety in the makerspace. Day 2 we spent ideating and discussing the challenges, which was very interesting.

I had the challenge of ethics, security and privacy which is highly relevant for any technology (and most aspects in life, really). We found the challenge to be about the different concerns around the topics, specifically regarding IoT, Online Social Networks, Big data, Healthcare Technology, VR, intelligent environments and Cybersecurity. An example of this could be the different ethical considerations and concerns that comes with new technology such as smart homes. I found it very interesting that healthcare technology is considered its own category here, as it covers a broad specter of different technologies. We found that government regulations had not been coverend in the paper, which we feel like is a very relevant topic. We also discussed how there should in general be a bigger privacy focus and how you can actually design FOR privacy, instead of considering it afterwards. An example of this is installing cameras to monitor a person with alzheimers. This can feel uncomfortable for friends and family visiting, and rather one could design for privacy by thinking of what the monitoring is needed for, and for example design a wearable device like a watch instead.

For the ideation section we used Awais method of different sets of card with different factors. I really enjoyed this method as it forced us to think of very specific scenarios that we would not have thought of otherwise. It was similar to a method he has indroduced me to before, the twist cards. One thing I found to be slightly cumbersome/confusing in the task was step 3: We were supposed to select an idea that we liked and build further on this. The process of selecting an idea was a bit difficult as we yet didn't know everyone's ideas. The solution was that everyone quickly read their ideas from the silent round out loud, but I did not think this was sufficient enough to put our minds in the ideas. The method was really useful to spike our creativity, but just this step could use a little more work, e.g. develop a method for how to present the individual ideas.

For the idea generation for next week's assessment I chose to come up with specific interaction scenarios and think of different ideas for each. In addition, I tried to break down each word of the assessment description so understand what the task was asking for. I discussed this with a tutor to get some clarity, which was really helpful. My breakdown is in one of the photos below.