Blog + Essays
Anti-Homeless Architecture: Project Essay
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y64qBAJlYhnX66yUn5L6dBiv1fIvlPZ6/view?usp=drive_link
A small written and visual piece on Anti-homeless Architecture and its effects to the public and those it is designed for.
"Hostile Design, is an intentional design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to guide or restrict behaviour in urban space. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, like people who are homeless” - Cara Chellew, 2019, Canadian Institute of Urban Studies
The 1980s China keyboard crisis
Historical Synopsis: After Mao Zedong died in the early 1980s new premiere Deng Xiaoping realised if China was to prosper it needed to join the growing computer industry. The only problem was how to fit a 50,000 + character based language on the western 80 keys QWERTY keyboard you are most likely using right now. The answer lay in an alphabet created 30 years earlier called Pinyin.
Flashback to the 1950's Mao Zedong wanted the Chinese language to be more accessible and raise the literacy of the country. He initially wanted to scrap the Chinese written language altogether for a Romanised system and was interestingly persuaded against doing this by Communist Ally Joseph Stalin to keep Chinese 'Hanzi' or Written Language.
However Mao Zedong still keen to promote literacy introduced 'PINYIN' in 1957 as the official Romanized system to translate Chinese (winning the small struggle of which of the multiple Romanised system would be used).
Pinyin is basically a phonetic way of sounding out Chinese words with English letters. for example;
我 is the character for 'I'.
我 when spoken, literally sounds like the sound "wo".
So you type on your english QWERTY keyboard the letter 'w' and 'o', to create the word 'wo'.
So 'wo' is how you say 'I' in Pinyin.
我 [Chinese character]
wo [pinyin]
I [English]
So in the 1980's the Chinese government pushed developers to create a system that uses pinyin on western QWERTY keyboards to construct Chinese characters. Thus saving the written language from digital extinction. The system they created was good but slow, typing in english letters to make chinese sounding characters, so in the 90s a predictive based algorithm was created to take the inital 'root' character of the pinyin word and predict what character you were typing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#:~:text=Unlike%20the%20Pinyin%20input%20method,on%20a%20standard%20QWERTY%20keyboard.
Traditional chinese
using BPMF
Structurally different in construction.
new 20th century invented alphabets and languages of PINYIN and BPMF.
China 80S lagging behind west in computer - a national crisis of how do we break into the computer world with Chinese characters.
Will real artwork become a sign of luxury for brands and companies ?
Will art work for companies, wether graphic design, become a place to flex by using real or non real artists. Generated work for now looks terrible. Also we know the thinking that goes behind it is. Well it seem likethey couldn't afford to pay an artist or want to. So they created some crappy generated work.
A call back to the luddites, craft movement and industrialists in the early 19th century. Will the artisan or master of craft become a valued and prusoeply chosed commodity for companies in the future.
I was speaking to "taiwan brand guy for asus" that he was leaving the graphic design game because now work can be generated and iterated 1000x fold.
AI and Education: LLMs Regulation
and Misinformation
*I have written this without the use of Open AI's ChatGBT
Inspired by VOX's journalism video on Education and AI, I started a research project to further investigate some of the questions I found interesting, stemming from the statement if 'ChatGBT can do your homework for you ', then "how do we know when someone has learnt something" and "do educators have to cite the source of the AI now?".
AI 'tools' are integrated into nearly every professional software from Google Docs, Grammerly, Notion - it seems redundant to ban these tools in education if it will only disadvantage the student from adapting to using them later on in the work environment. It seems educators are at a crossroads of whether to integrate LLMs into the educational system or to ban them outright. I ask what measuring sticks must we now use to 1. know someone has 'learned' and 2. for educators to know they have 'taught'.
My goal through this research is to help teachers, educational institutions and Policy makers think, make and enact new regulations about AI in education systems for 11 - 18 year olds. I have written a manifesto of 6 goals for this project.
1. Do not leave the responsibility to children to self regulate the tempting use of AI to pass the current education system.
2. To not add 'policing the use of AI' to the workload of teachers.
3. To not disadvantage students futures by not embracing the obvious rise and ubiquitous integration of AI in professional working world.
4. Teach children how to use AI to enhance their learning and not to indirectly teach them how to specifically enhance their ability to cheat the current education system using AI.
5. Prepare a new generation for the complexities of misinformation (or inaccurate cited information) created by AI and LLMS - by giving them them thorough critical thinking and digital observational skills.
6. Reduce the impact and effectiveness of misinformation per person by updating the current education system to
Pancake Recipe: How LLMs are changing the face of the search
Yosuke Ushigome makes a great point about how chatgpt will change the very foundations of the internet and how we search for things.
Pancake recipe: It's a sunday morning and you decide to look for a pancake recipe. You would normally 'google' the recipe.
I find myself now using chatgpt more often for mundane things as I'm frustrated with googling something like a recipe and the first things that come up are two 'sponsored ad' pages a half covered google ai recipe. Finally a article on pancakes which I usually have to scroll past a whole story or pancakes to find the recipe.
Chatgbt will become the new "google it" term.
What are the implications of this ?
It will entirely change the face of what the internet looks like and unsure wether for the best.
Is the language and graphics of 'magic' used for AI tools...
1. Unhealthily disconnecting the user from the fact theres a real material process behind that digital function and that its facilitation has tangible environmental impacts due to growing need for data centres (it feels similar to the meat industry, using words like pork to disconnect us from the process)
2. Perpetuating an unhealthy concept of limitlessness - because its 'magic'.
3. Furthering the gap between people who know how it works and those who dont. Making people apathetically dismiss trying to understanding this new AI phenomenon as it seems like 'magic' - which is dangerous due to AI being such an important thing for our society to grasp.