Skip to main content

First Lecture

I attended my first lecture for the module Design, Development, Creativity yesterday and I found it fascinating and I am very much looking forward to engaging with the module over the course of the semester.

What stood out for me from yesterday's lecture was the activity we carried out in small groups on Buxton's avalanche case. The case described an event whereby friends skiing got caught in an avalanche and one of their friends, Saul was missing.

During their avalanche training, the friends were given instructions on which of their survival tools (probe, shovel, transmitter) to use in which order and how to go about the rescue triage (rescuing the most able individuals first before moving on to the least able).Having not followed the sequence of  their training in exact order, the group of friends still managed to save Saul within 10minutes.

What stood out for me from this exercise was the fact that systems are complex entities which comprise of many independent factors linked together. In the case of the avalanche, it was a mixture of tools, training and trust which led to Saul being rescued safely.

The exercise also taught me that although systems often have pre-defined instructions or rules for use, humans may not always see fit follow the rules correctly, meaning that systems need to be flexible and be able to adapt to human factors and unforeseen events. In this particular case, had the friends followed their training correctly, they may not have saved their friend in time.

The case also led me to reflect on the human versus machine debate and the notion of machines being able to out-smart humans. One wonders whether the friends knew that following the rules correctly would have led to an unsuccessful rescue of their friend Saul and so they used their intuition as well as the training they had learned to save their friend rather than relying on the training alone. Had they relied on the rules alone, they may not have been as successful in their rescue efforts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Iona Technologies

·        Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Anrai O’Toole ·        The company progressed from a Trinity campus company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997 ·        Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and communicate with one another ·        Their research was initially supported by Trinity and then the EU ·        They took a brave leap from academic to the commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking and telecommunications embracing networks and internets ·        Iona found that their c...

Exercise: Prototyping and Creating Mock-Ups

We were tasked with designing a test-free search page mock-up for individuals who were unable to read. We were first required to create a paper prototype and then use an online tool, Balsamiq. I found the exercise very interesting as it forced me to refine all my ideas into one, single representation. It also involved selecting the most important requirements as we were under a time constraint. I found the paper prototype process slightly easier a using Balsamic introduced constraints, in that I had to create my design choosing from the icons within the Balsamiq tool as opposed to creating my own. I found this exercise very useful and I will aim to introduce quick prototyping in my future roles when applicable.