Innovating University Education

At Unconference Canberra,on Saturday Dr Shayne Flint from the Australian National University discussed new ways to teach students a wider range of work relevant skills. One of these is "ANU TechLauncher" where students work on a project in a team for a real client. Students have the option of doing their own business start-up through the Canberra Innovation Network (where the conference was held). To help, I am preparing a module on "Introduction to Innovation" which students can do on its own or as part of another course.

Augmented Reality Bus Shelter

Greetings from Unconference Canberra, where I took part in a session on "Climate Adapted People Shelter" (CAPS). This is a project to design better bus shelters for Western Sydney. This project seems misdirected to me. The bus shelters installed in Sydney are not hot and uncomfortable because no one knows how to design a comfortable bus shelter. The priority for local government is to maximize the advertising revenue from the shelter, not the comfort of the bus passengers.

Shelters with advertising are made transparent so that the advertising can be see from the road, while the passengers waiting can see the bus coming. Unfortunately the result is a shelter which is very hot in the Australian sun.

I suggest it is possible to design a shelter meeting both the needs of passengers and advertisers. As an example, a low tech solution would be to use perforated advertisements, so that those waiting for a bus could see out through them (just as some buses have advertising wrapped over the windows).

A high tech approach would be a translucent electronic display or virtual window on the bus shelter. Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) consist of active material sandwiched between two sheets of glass, there is then a white sheet of translucent plastic behind to diffuse the back-lighting. It would be possible to replace the translucent sheet with a transparent one, so you could see through the screen from the back.

An approach using off the shelf equipment would be to install a camera outside the shelter and display the street scene on a screen inside to make a virtual window. This has been used as a marketing gimmick as augmented reality in a London bus shelter in 2014. The London unit used a screen the full size of the advertising panel, down to ground level, but a practical unit unit emulating a window needs to only use a screen of about 100 cm. Rather than just a simple video display, the screen could also show the bus timetable. If the unit showed which buses were approaching and indicated which were going to stop, that would be particularly useful for the passenger. Such a display could also include advertising, to offset the cost.

For those who want to take the alternative approach of removing advertising from the bus shelters, the challenge is not redesigning the shelters. The challenge is to redesign local government political and financial arrangements to compensate for the loss of revenue. Can the political benefit to elected officials of a more comfortable bus shelter be shown to be sufficient to compensate for the loss of revenue?

Lego and Government Websites

Greetings from Unconference Canberra. I just talked about "Online Colombo Plan". Now there are two sessions which seem to be about Lego and one on GovCMS. The latter is an implementation of Drupal from the Australian Department of Finance, configured for use by government agencies. This has been a little controversial as another government agency, Digital Transformation Office in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, has been working on a new improved GOV.AU website. In my view the two agencies activities are complementary, not competitive. Finance are working on the details of how to implement, whereas DTO are working on what to implement.

Canberra Unconference

Greetings from Unconference Canberra. About fifty people arrived on the top floor of the old ACT Health building in the middle of the city for a conference on a Saturday morning, with a completely blank program. The idea is that the attendees volunteer to talk about anything. First there was a warm-up exercise run by Kinnford Consulting, then first session was on photo composition and the next is on "How to Write a Gender Neutral Conference Talk". I will be speaking at 11:20 about the "Online Colombo Plan".