CollaboRITorium

What is the Immersiblog? Simply put, it’s a synergistic fusion of collaborative goal-oriented computing teamwork in a cross-disciplinary backwards-compatible paradigm. Now with 50% more Web 2.0! And here I am, Alex, your humble blogger, burgeoning Internet celebrity, coming to you with even more Web 2.0 via an updated, forward-looking modern blogosphere. Log on, humble user, and join me in the World Wide Web revolution that will dynamically and cross-culturally change the world through leveraging the growing proactive global network. This is by far the most innovative revolution in explanatory technology of the twenty-first century. Grab your European carry all, slip on a clean fitted graphic tee and some low-rise slim-fit bootcut jeans, jump in your Prius and buy a dual core Macbook Pro with a Pentium Centrino 2.0 gigahertz dual core hyperthreading RISC MIPS processor capable of over nine gigaflops so you too can be a member of the communication innovation sensation. It’s free! Easy! Innovative! Windows- and Mac-compatible! How does it work?

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Last Saturday, RIT hosted the first annual Imagine RIT Innovation and Creativity Festival the dream-child of our new president, Bill Destler. Our guess is that we had hundreds of visitors to the CollaboRITorium on Saturday and it was great fun for us to share our innovations and inventions with the public. So much fun, actually, that we may decide to host more public presentations and discussions in the future.

Once we all catch up on our beauty sleep, we hope to be posting more stories about the event. In the meantime, check out the awesome coverage that was generated live by the Open Publishing Lab’s Innovation News team.

And for descriptions of the projects we shared at the festival, check out our projects page.

For four hours a week the students of Jon Schull’s Innovation and Invention class come together in the Collaboritorium (again, henceforth referred to as the “Collab”). This is obviously a fair deal- four hours a week for four credits at the end of the quarter. What happens during this time? Meetings, interaction, demonstrations, status reports, and housekeeping. Once all that is through, people split into their working groups and then (in the words of one Bilbo Fraggins), “go forth and perspire”- creating, innovating, designing, and learning. Every once in a while, a group will have a “Eureka!” moment, after which they will excitedly share their progress with the other groups. It is in this time when the sundry elements of a project are pulled together into a coherent package.
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The phrase “rat hole” is common among software project managers. It describes twisty tunnels of problem solving that lead to nowhere.

It’s an incredibly pervasive syndrome

A key to our success (when we do succeed) is in celebrating “cheap tricks” that get the job done. These stand in stark contrast to “by the book” solutions of the kind we are taught within disciplines.

It also helps to grab people by the ankles, and haul them out of the ratholes they are happily digging themselves into.

I learned this quarter that ratholes are not unique to information technologists. Industrial designers are perfectly willing to spend hours tinkering with photos in order to get a mockup of some building just right…while an entire campus full of buildings is in need of a first pass.

Cross-disciplinary collaborators are really useful Rathole Protection Agents.” Lacking “Proper Training,” they will often look say, “can’t you just do X?” where X is an incredibly naïve but effective way of getting the job done.

Nurture X-sayers. Treasure Xes.

They need support. Because they are often scorned by their more expert collaborators.

I tell my IT students they need to learn usability testing because they are “brain damaged” by their affinity for, and familiarity with, modern computer technology, and the pleasure they take in solving problems in their discipline.
The metaphor may be deeper than I thought.

“Anosoagnosia is a condition in which a person who suffers disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her handicap.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia (I’ve heard of a patient who routinely dressed and shaved the left side of his body while denying there was anything wrong with the his unkempt and unclothed right side.)

You may have read some of the internally-produced propaganda attempting to define the Collaboritorium (herein referred to simply as the Collab, since Collaboritorium is nearly impossible to type quickly and correctly), or you may not. Somebody might have attempted already to describe it to you, or they may have not. You may have stopped reading this post already, or you may have not. If you’ve made it this far, then I by all means encourage you to sally forth into the depths of this post as I try to explain this - thing - that is the Collab, encountering strange metaphors and long (yet grammatically correct!) sentences at every turn. You may finish this post feeling you’ve learned something, or you may not. [Read more →]

Back in March, Industrial Design students from my Exhibit Design class worked on concepts for the Rochester Museum and Science Center (RMSC). The project mission was two fold: 1. to increase visitor traffic between the museum and the nearby Strasenburgh Planetarium and 2. to celebrate the 4oth anniversary of the planetarium.

Working in the Collab allowed us to navigate and manipulate images and sketchup models of the site in, what felt like, full scale. This way of working gave us visual, spatial, and time-based sense of the user experience throughout the RMSC campus.

We are using special imagery captured by an RIT research group to show on-campus sustainability challenges. The images above and below will be overlaid in Google Earth to create a qualitative display of on-campus energy usage.

So what’re we looking at here? The image above image shows short-wave infrared or “thermal” infrared radiation. Regions which appear “dark” in this image are absorbing the most infrared radiation, whereas “light” areas are reflecting the most. Areas such as parking lots, water, and certain building rooftops are absorbing the most short-wave infrared radiation and appear nearly black.

These images were all captured during the summer. If you were to touch a parking lot, you’d feel the heat! Many buildings with dark roofs are visible; these buildings would require powerful air conditioning systems to stay cool. A simple change to the building rooftops, such as thermally-reflective foil, has the potential to drastically reduce RIT’s energy bill.

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