Current students

A piece by Mark Scott in the New York Times states that efforts by the American alt-right to support Marine Le Pen's campaign for President of France have fallen flat.  Tactics that worked in the American campaign for Donald Trump do not "translate."

One tactic has been to spread memes, that is, posters featuring a picture, often of Emmanuel Macron, Ms. Le Pen's rival, and a clever caption.  Such efforts have encountered two problems.

In a Wired article, Sam Lubell describes a building that incorporates emojis into its exterior.  Dutch architect Changiz Tehrani decided to enliven the facade of an apartment building in Vathorst by having emojis molded in relief in intersections of its surface elements.

No particular message was intended, says Tehrani: "Because the building is very strong, even severe, we wanted some funniness to lighten it up." 

The scales of justice/Government of PEI.

I recently wrote a blog on the lack of transparency in e-voting as proposed for adoption in many Ontario municipalities.  Traditionally, it is not enough to correctly identify election winners.  The process must be open to inspection and challenge, thus legitimating the result.

Many Ontario municipalities are currently involved in debates over the adoption of e-voting.  I recently wrote a report that I submitted to the City Council of Guelph (where I live) urging against its adoption here.  I also delegated to the Council on this issue (24 April).  Since other speakers were covering matters such as security and accessibility, I decided to use my five minutes to raise the issue of transparency. 

My new book is now out!  The full title is, "Design and Society: Social issues in technological design."  The book was written for the STV 202 course but is also suitable for a general audience since it is non-technical and assumes no previous familiarity with the topic.  It is also brief, at under 250 pages, and contains numerous, practical examples of concepts discussed.

The theme of CSTV's Design & Society course is "good design".  When I ask students what this expression means, they tend to think, first of all, about technical matters, e.g., efficiency, cost, usability, and so on.  However, as the course progresses, we come to ethical issues, e.g., is the design "good" for people, and in what sense?

Although the ethical aspect of good design has always been important, it is becoming ever more immediate.  I think this is because fewer designs today are simply objects while more are really services. 

An interesting piece by Matt Reynolds in New Scientist describes work that aims to make algorithms fair.  A team of computer scientists at the Alan Turing Institute in London defines a fair algorithm as follows:

[a fair algorithm is] one that makes the same decision about an individual regardless of demographic background.

Mark Sullivan at FastCompany reports that Apple is planning its entry into the augmented reality market.  In rough terms, augmented reality (AR) involves layering computer-generated graphics over live views of a given scene.

An interesting post by Áine Pennello in CityLab discusses how disabled passengers may find seating on public transit.  There is often not enough seating for everyone, so the matter of who sits becomes an important issue. 

Ben Coxworth at New Atlas recently posted a short piece about a bicycle going by the name of the Camard LZR.  One look at the design shows that the bike is meant to be distinctive.