Exercise 1

Problem: A Disappearing Language

Ian Larson wanted to help preserve the Passamaquoddy language from extinction.

Solution:

I feel that Solution B best fits with the idea of many-to-many. Having members of the community, that being kids, come together and create their own database of words and definitions creates a voice for the community as a whole. This voice, as spoken by the many in the community, would be reachable from anyone in the world with an internet connection. This is a strong example of the principles that come with many-to-many.

Problem: Neglected Ruins

Evan Habeeb wanted to make people aware of the beauty of abandoned buildings.

Solution:

Again, solution B best fits the premise of many-to-many. Having the community create a narrative around the abandoned ruins in their town and creating a digital space together to share with the world through an online solution would be a fine example of many-to-many. The stickers allow for others to come along later on and experience the images and perspectives of explorers before them. Over time, this web of connectivity would produce an online community of explorers similar to geocaching.

Problem: Misunderstanding Computer Animation

Ryan Schaller and Jason Walker wanted to help people understand the many layers required to create a computer-animated film, including wireframe, textures, and light effects. As a case study, they created an animation depicting a cartoon archeologist digging for ancient artifacts.

Solution:

Solution A is the better of the two options here, although I do feel that neither of these truly exemplifies many-to-many communication. Solution A does allow a sort of collaboration between the user and product, where the user can actually interact with their experience to change it to fit their own needs. However, this is about as much interaction as a user with a HiFi audio system would have with a radio station; they could alter their listening experience by stripping away high-end or low-end to reveal parts of the broadcast that exist as a sort of layer of frequency. However, radio is still one-to-many, in that there’s only one speaker and many listeners. The user, in this case, would only be able to strip away layers of the animation in their own “session” but after they walk away, this collaborative experience would be shortlived when another user interacts with the project. A true many-to-many solution to this would be a system where many users could come along and interact with the experience, but their interaction would leave a lasting if not permanent, impression upon the experience as a whole… many people creating an experience together to be interacted with by many other people.

Problem: Broken Fountain

Danielle Gagner wanted to renovate the waterfall fountain under the skylight in the middle of the University Union, which had fallen into disrepair.

Solution:

Solution A is the clearest example of many-to-many in this sense. Allowing members of the community to both collaborate on the creation and benefits of the exhibit would allow for a mutual creation that is less technologically intensive, but none the less still a many-to-many communication effort. Simply making an exhibit that people could only look at but not alter or contribute to would, again be one-to-many and not make any strides to a community effort.

Exercise 2

Problem: Newspapers are losing subscribers and ads.

As it stands, print has faded over the years in favor of online news. Trying to maintain this dying medium of information would hardly represent the potential for many-to-many communication. However, to create an online forum of sorts, where members of the community could come and report the news that they see as relevant, and engage with other members of the community about these things could lead to a more personalized and realistic news outlet. While many people would still need to get the weather or world news in a more traditional way, allowing a community to come together and document the experience that they share would certainly attract the attention of many more people.

Inevitably, this would likely lead to people posting and sharing opinions that are less than agreed upon by the masses, but the back and forth that would likely form as a result of this would certainly bring in more eyeballs which could more easily find their way to side-bar adds.

Problem: Oceans are Dying

Encouraging people to learn more about something they otherwise would have no interest in is no easy task. There are plenty of people in this country that don’t think that climate change is even real. Many of the individuals that don’t know or don’t care about the slow death of the oceans are led to believe that the problem must not really exist because any information they consume is from a source they don’t know or don’t trust. One possible solution would be to encourage students to document the aquatic habitats in and around their communities and create an online database.

At first glance, this would likely not produce much of a reaction. However, as time went on, and individuals continued to post updates and engage in conversation about the changes they are noticing, it will be hard to argue with the evidence of climate change that exists in ones own backyard. It would also be helpful for scholars and researchers to comment and conduct conversations around documented changes in order to encourage further exchange between students and members of a community. With a strong scientific fact-checking system like this, people could learn about the changes that are going on around them, and be able to contribute to a large cache of data that could produce very important information regarding oceans.

Problem: Religions are Diverse

Much like the Newspaper problem, having a stable forum for healthy interaction between individuals would likely lead to an expansion of their perspectives. Religion has always been a rather touchy subject: it is something that many are as sure of as the light of day but is extremely disagreed upon at the same time. Creating an environment where a conversation can occur will not be an easy task for this reason.

Users of a forum, solving this problem, will be encouraged to speak their mind, but be aware that hate is never the answer. People would be encouraged to post about their experiences and be open to feedback. All of this would remain public, including the user’s identities. Very often, it is easy to hide behind a user name when one is blasting away on the internet. People feel that there are no ramifications to their actions when nobody knows who they are. Having this forum be open to the public and as representational of the users as possible will force people to speak freely, but to create a dialogue that would be akin to the type they would have in person. This forum would be cataloged and automatically indexed based on criteria like perceived intensity, subject, and writers. This catalog would be available to the public as a source of inspiration and reference when trying to understand the similarities, differences, and potential hostilities between people in different religions from across the world.

Problem: Visual Art is too Static

This one seems rather simple. If the idea that visual art is too static exists, it is likely due to the lack of overall interaction. You may walk through a museum and see hundreds of paintings or sculptures, but for many, most of these will be less than memorable. One possible creation would be a public canvas. This has been done before, in the sense that members of a community could come along to a busy street block and contribute to painting it and forming an art piece that is representative of all people in that community. This is already a fantastic example of many-to-many. To expand upon this, I propose a reactive visual art piece.

As people walk by a large walled panel of LEDs and cameras, the wall would change to reflect the people walking by. Microphones would pick up bits and pieces of conversations which would combine to a symphony of sorts, representing the voices and sounds of the community. From this, people could create their own piece of art, that would constantly change and take on new forms the more people interact with it. At any one time, someone could scan a QR code to save the current version of the art piece, but even then, it would not exist as just a static image. People don’t stand still or stay silent like they are in pictures. A user saving the current state of the mural would be able to zoom into looping sections and listen to moments as they occurred. They would be able to explore a time in their community as it was for longer than just a moment like they would experience from a photograph.

Problem: Student Films are Always Set in Dorms

One really productive way to move student films out of dorms and into a space more diverse would be to have the students themselves create and shape said space. It would all start with a building – the set. The building would consist of one large, warehouse-like space. This space would contain many walls, on hidden wheels which would be moved about the space to form different rooms as desired by the students making the films. These walls would vary in size, shape, and color to fit the array of different sets that can come with making a film. Importantly, these sets would need to be easy to put together and just as easy to breakdown and move around. There would be no ceiling, for the most part, so the lighting would hang from a moveable truss system that would allow students to hang and position lights as needed. As it goes, this would likely take the most time, so students would be encouraged to use the lighting arrangements that are already assembled.

Students could now have a space where they could assemble the sets they need and collaborate on the function of these spaces. Multiple students could be working on the same assignment and wind up needing the same set layout. This system would allow for multiple students to form a room or space that would be used by them but could stay up and be used again in other films made down the line. Over time, as sets become more used more and more often, it may become desirable for students years down the line to rebuild the same sets again for their own pieces. This collaborative space would allow for endless possibilities for sets in their films and could lead to a greater conversation between students and more rich and novel cinema-spaces.

Problem: Stock Photographs Cost too Much

Stock photos are extremely useful for a nearly endless array of applications. For students, they can act as an example or simple backdrops for presentations or simple video assignments. However, it is well known that many stock photographs are very expensive, thanks in part to their creators. Many photographers from around the world depend on the sales of these photographs as a source of income. It follows that the better the photographs, and the more relevant and useful, the more expensive they tend to be; supply and demand. For students, however, stock images often come up that would be perfect for the message they are trying to portray, but it usually is far out of their price range.

I propose a system where students, professionals or not, could capture images on their own and upload them to a website, which would be accessible to other students. Students would be rewarded for creating useful images. There are two very weighted points in that statement. For starters, students would be rewarded through credits that would go towards dining funds, textbook rentals, and transportation needs. This money would likely come from the school as a result of the increased quality of work coming from students as a result of the high quality of images. To avoid people abusing the system, payment for images would come from the inevitable success of the student using them. To do this, the image site would be tied to the student records office. If a student uses a particular image in a piece of work turned in through the University system, the system would wait for the grade given on that piece of work. If it is a good piece of work that gets a good grade, the original photographer would be rewarded.

Problem: Educational Books are Boring

I personally am going to respond to this prompt in a different way than was requested. For starters, there is a reason educational books are boring – they are dense and they are often technical. Educational books, such as textbooks are designed to contain a large mass of information in a short amount of time. Their purpose is to provide information in the most efficient way possible. If you were to treat a textbook on biochemistry the same way you treated a comic book, the result would be thousands of pages long. Educational books are not meant to be entertaining to read, they are meant to educate in a way that students will understand the information that needs to be gained. For many students, there simply isn’t enough time in a semester to waste any of it on formalities like how entertaining the class is. The focus should, in my opinion, be shifted away from making education more entertaining, and more towards it being useful.

I propose a textbook that would exist online, but that could be annotated by any reader. All too often there are textbooks that have hundreds of pages, many of which can just be glossed over in order to hunt for the information needed during a study session or during research. Annotations by readers could lead to better retention and a deeper focus on important information. A student who just finished a unit in mechanical engineering could go back through the pages and passages of their textbook and “highlight” the ones that were helpful on the exam, and what is really important to know in general. As more students come along and highlight the same passages, there will be a greater and obvious focus on the information seen as most pressing by the students. Over the years, textbooks will become something that thousands of students can collaborate on and make learning far more useful and efficient for the next generation of students following them.

Problem: You Never Have a Camera When you Need It

I am going to keep this one rather short because the answer has already been spread far and wide: the smartphones. At this point, the vast majority of Americans have a smartphone, and every single one has a camera slapped on the back. Since we always have these things strapped to our sides, it should go without saying that if you need a camera, it is always with you. As phone cameras get better, the need for a more traditional digital camera will shrink farther and farther. Just this year, a smartphone company from China came out with a smartphone with a 108 MP camera, an all-time high for the class of cameras.

Problem: The Spatial Dimensions of Sound are Underappreciated

I propose an audio installation containing a sphere of speakers. The sphere would be entirely lined with sound insulating foam, with spaces for mounting brackets for attaching the speakers. Each speaker would have its own respective audio channel, each of which would route back to a central computer. The point of this installation would be in no way visual, so the only light will come from a single strip of dimly lit LEDs at the base of the dome. This dome will be able to hold as many as 20 people at once, each of which will be encouraged to sit near the middle of the space, on a pillow or bean bag chair.

Spacial sound is all about realistic directional propagation. To make this most effective, it would be important to record settings that lend to this sort of directional effect. One really good place to do this would be on a busy city street. Having one microphone for each speaker, a recording setup could be placed in the middle of New York,  picking up the sounds of the city. As a car goes by, the listener would be able to follow the car as the sound moves from one speaker to the next. Many people could share in this experience and communicate about their mutual findings together, as they would all have a relatively similar experience.

Problem: Centralized Economies Are Unstable

This problem presents a lot of very promising opportunities for consumers and investors alike. Decentralizing an economy would likely start with forming a block-chain between the users of a crypto-currency. Access to the currency would be granted by using each connected device as a checksum, which would maintain the security of the entire economy. There is a reason why Bitcoin itself has never been hacked: the SHA128 Hash Algorithm. Decentralizing the economy would require a level of security higher than what is currently standard. Being able to hack the system and magically “produce” money out of nowhere would be devastating to the economy. That is where the algorithm comes in.

Because the currency would be decentralized, and thus exist as a public record, the odds of a successful hack would be essentially nill. Every transaction would exist on a public ledger, so any differences which would be created through the changing or creation of fake transactions would be detected right away. In the end, the participation of the userbase as a whole would lead to an incredibly secure system whose fluctuations in cost would only be determined by the side effects that come with all cryptos.