Week 13 - Website is Shaping Up

So the website is coming together!





As you can see above the website is taking shape and it's got content on most of the pages. The content will be updated and added to as the website evolves into something bigger and more followed. Right now it's at a point where we can fine tune it and see how it functions.

Nick completed many of the graphics for the website as I was building it so it was a parallel development if you could call it that. This collaboration has gone quite well having us both with similar visions that guide the project in various directions. In past projects I've been very adamant that somebody needs to lead the project, whether it's me or not somebody needs to have a single vision. This project proved that that doesn't necessarily need to happen all the time. We might've been less productive because we often had to stop and make sure we were still heading in the same direction, but it made the environment of collaborating different. It felt as if we had a shared responsibility and so we both pulled our weight in what we had to do. The project was ours, not mine, not Nicks, but ours. It was a developing vision that grew inside both of our heads as we went, which is rather refreshing.

The project will definitely continue into the future after this subject ends. We need to now present our project and talk of possible future developments. Hopefully we can get a bit more work on the website done before we present and have something the class can look at.

The reflection for this project will be interesting to see what we've learned not only from the project content itself, but how we learned about the way we interact with people in projects. I find I'm probably more relaxed than I used to be. I'm not so tense and tied up with projects. I feel like I've let go a bit and come back to an artistic developmental manner than one that is restricted as design studies sometimes makes you.

Week 10 - Slowing Progress

Progress has slowed again for the project as I've had to devote a lot of time to my final studio, however we're finalising some designs for the website and how the website will be structured. We decided to go along with trying to promote the rock stars of science in Australia, alongside those that are already known from the USA. We are hoping that this will align them with well-known scientists and carry over the theme to Australia.

The visual development of the website is a bit slow as we aren't too sure whether to go with a space theme, or to go with something more simple and colourful; along the lines of which Scishow uses to market their Youtube Channel.



The Space Federation logo below is an example of what we've been considering with our logo design, but we're not sure if it will suit our target market as it is too suited to the nerdy/Star Trek demographic that not everybody will appreciate. For now we will use it though as it is something we like, and the theme can be changed later.


Source: http://www.isa-hq.com/corporation/documents/certificate_incorporation.htm

Week 9 - Collaboration Progress Reflection

The collaboration thus far has been an insightful journey. So far I've learned a lot not only about working with somebody I've only just met, but also about what it means to work on a collaboration while you have several other collaborations going on at the same time. I was involved with three other collaborations with people I had only just met.

Working with people you're not too familiar with puts you in the deep-end a bit. This is because in the past I've always been grouped with people I knew quite well and what their strengths and weaknesses were. In this case it was simply meet somebody with a common interest, and dive into the project after splitting up responsibilities.

It taught me a lot about not worrying about what others were doing and simply doing my part of the project as well as I could. This made focus more on my responsibilities.

Looking at the way we've been collaborating it's been pretty smooth. I think the reason for this is that we're both personally engaged with the project; we're both interested in the cause, the topics, the intentions and the overall project. This is what we've identified as an "Interest-based" group model as talked about in week 2 of semester. If could relate this to the way my final studio project is going where we had to pick an issue we were passionate about and then develop a project from there it helps to make the project more engaging. I feel the same thing has occurred with this project which is why it has run quite smoothly.

Another thing that I've noticed is that if we can't find a collaborator out there who has the skill-set we need, we have been able to make-do with what we've got until we find somebody to fill that space. I have no explanation for this for, however I think it might be due to necessity. The old saying "Necessity is the mother of invention", seem to ring true with this project as we've been able to find a piece of software that helped with the web design.

Week 8 - Interesting Developments

This week has been a slow week having a series of other collaborations take front-seat, such as UNSW Cookbook and UNSW Sunswift solar racing team. As a result development on the website has not progressed much. However Nick has received some emails from Neil degrasee Tyson.

The contents of this email informed a new direction, or at least another facet to consider, for our entire project. Neil degrasee Tyson suggested that contrary to our original understanding that people don't care as much, and that we should try to inspire them, the truth is really that people simply don't know. If the information was there for them to understand and absorb they would learn more simply because humans are intuitive.

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This makes our job a lot easier. We don't necessarily need to convince people that science is important, but rather just put it out there in a palatable manner for them to understand. The next job is to spread it through social media and public avenues so that more people can be exposed to it.

With this in mind, and the intension to create not a science network, but rather a hub that connects existing networks, we decided to look at the way other people have tried to communicate science in an easy-to-understand way for the general public.

We came across such resources as:

Scishow


Scishow is a youtube channel that publishes short videos on science topics that are not only visually engaging but speak in plain terms so that people can get the basic gist of a topic without needing to learn too much. The narrator is funny and charismatic making him a suitable spokesperson for this sort of media.

How Stuff Works


How Stuff Works is a website developed in the early 2000s that explains in a few shorts pages how something works; from nuclear bombs to toasters. If you want to learn about the basic mechanisms that keep our world ticking this is the website for you. It touches on the applications of science and how they're used in every life making it a really useful and engaging source of information for people who don't already know too much about science. Another useful thing this website does is that throughout their articles, they include hyperlinks on keywords that might be prerequisite knowledge for a topic, so that if you don't already know about something, you can quickly jump to another link, and get a basic understanding.

The Theoretical Minimum
This is a book I was recommended by the PhD candidate I'm collaborating with. It's a bit more mathematically demanding, but with high school maths you can cruise through this book and learn some more complicated ideas that will help you better understand the more intricate topics that scientists talk about. It's a stepping stone that most people can take to get from knowing nothing to feeling like they can join a conversation about Black Holes.

Nick has a few other resources such as books which have "public-friendly" counterparts, which have been "translated" for the general public. he is using them as tools to understand how we can take any information we find, provided we understand it ourselves, and turn it into something easier to understand for the general public.

Week 7 - Science Links

So we've come up with a name for the website. It'll be "Science Links". Nick came up with the name because it works with our new direction the website will take, which is to link, or connect, the community through science and to explain to people the basics of science and how it applies to our every day world.

We've tried to find somebody to help us develop the website but most of the web designers I know are busy with other projects at the moment. This is no problem though as i've found a piece of software which takes the tedious task of scripting html manually, and allows me to create websites as if I was using InDesign; it's called Adobe Muse.



So far the collaboration has been smooth. It's a combination of what nick has already begun doing at the beginning of semester with his concepts of what the website needs to be and his communication with scientists. My side of the collaboration is trying to figure out what the website needs to looks like, what media we should include on the website and how we will communicate the website to people.

I've begun making the website in with rough outlines and structure to see what we're working with.



We've gone with a space theme, because it relates to much of the topics and reasoning behind science advocation. Space is the final frontier, and our scientific knowledge helps inform the exploration of space, and how we interact with it. Furthermore space exploration and the technology that is developed for it, has always trickled down back into consumer technology so there is an inherent relationship between the two topics.

Week 6 - Collaboration Turns

So we've done a bit of research to find out what websites are online that relate to the science community and we've altered the idea of what we'd like to achieve a bit.
We've figured out that there are already many scientific websites for different portions of the community existing online, however they're on different websites, and each has it's own unique purpose or intention.

The problem we see with this is that there is no connection between any of these creating forced barriers between the different communities. We also figured that the point of our website should be primarily in Australia as:
1) it's local for us and a much easier target market to understand
2) there isn't enough of a rockstar-like image given to the scientists we have in Australia - in USA they have people like Michio Kaku and Neil degrasse Tyson who are science advocates and communicators who sell these ideas to people and inspire people to be more interested in science. We decided we need this kind of thing in Australia so it's more relatable to people who we target

Nick is collaborating with some people he knows doing PhD's at USyd, while also writing emails to Neil degrasse Tyson, amongst others to not only see what their opinions on the matter are, but to get some advice about how to go about this.

I'm collaborating with a friend of mine who is a Psychology graduate and has experience in marketing industry for help with the way we will market this product to the people. The other persons I'm collaborating with is a PhD candidate friend of mine at UNSW on matters of science, the scientific community and more specifically why there isn't that same rockstar-like vision for our Scientists in Australia.

We need to now decide how this website will function and what it's purpose is, seeing as there are already many scientific communities online. We will also need to figure out how to make this website more enjoyable to the non-scientific community so that they will engage in the information we provide them with.

Week 5 - Collaboration Begins

So myself(Michael Diedricks) and Nick Wachman decided to do our Nexus collaboration projects together. We both gave our collaboration proposals the other week and his project, which was something to advocate for science, seemed appealing to me as well as I'd considered something similar before. My project was simply too big an undertaking for this short period of time and nobody seemed too interested in working on it with me so the collaboration aspect didn't quite work.

So we've begun so far by trying to figure out what we want to do. Our common intention is to create a website that acts as a network for people to learn about science in a new way that isn't so boring and dry. We want to make the topic and the way we engage with it more interesting so more people can get into it.

That's all for now so we'll see where things go.