Week 2 Memories: Prof. Peter McNeil

This week’s lecture given by Prof. Peter McNeil investigated the city over a 200 year span- paying particular attention to who owns the city, the people of the city and their influence upon the city. McNeil commented on the role of fashion in the city. The example he provided was Bryan Boy- a fashion blogger, who has followers from all over the world. His opinion is extremely influential and he is responsible for current and emerging fashion trends all over the world.






Bryan Boy


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


The 200 year delve into our history explored the city as a space, experience and a body. McNeil highlighted the concept of the 'city, progress and aspiration'-- which immediately related to designing for the city as it is constantly changing and being recreated through our design ideas, the combination of new technologies and new aspirations. I took a lot away from this lecture, but most importantly the idea of context and by forming the correct research questions first we can ensure the most appropriate design ideas are put forward.


After discussing the lecture, our group presented our research and design ideas from the previous week:

‘How can we use advanced, distributed technology to enable everyone to pay their fair share for parking?’- MX 30 June 2010

As a group we came up with a variety of ideas in relation to the 'Inspector Watcher' iphone application which warns users where parking inspectors are to help inform where to park their car to not only reduce chances of an inspector but to also cheat the system and only pay the meter when they have to.We came up with a number of ethical issues as well as design solutions, shown in the mind maps below;

In the article ‘The Internet of Things’, the authors write that “…the challenge of improving connectivity requires neither gigabit speed nor gigabyte storage but rather the opposite: dramatic reduction in the cost and complexity of network installation and configuration…”. (Gershenfeld et al. 2004) This concept can thus be related to our new design ideas about how we can enable everyone to pay their fare share for parking, as it’s not about creating the most complex system so as to avoid fining at all costs, but rather, to create a system which is simple yet effective – maybe using pre-existing systems and creating an ‘add-on’ feature – so as to enable this advanced, distributed technology to work alongside an already established network.

References:
Gershenfeld, N., Krikorian, R., Cohen, D., ‘The Internet of Things’, Scientific America, 27 September 2004, p.76