Project Development Portfolio

Outline

• Due: Three Submissions: 31 May, 5 July and 9 August
• Mark weighting: 30%
• Templates: template repo1, template repo 2, template repo 3
• Submission: submit your assignment according to the instructions below
• Policies: for late policies, academic integrity policies, etc. see the policies page

Description

The portfolio will be an ongoing assessment item for term 2. It’s purpose is to evaluate your ability to critically explore a theme through a series of code art and/or code music which will ultimately inform or evolve into your final project artefact. This is a little bit different to last year, where you produced a single, polished piece of code art/code music. Now this might seem like a lot more work than last year, but the idea is that we don’t want each of the code sketches you produce to be polished. They should be very rough implementations of an idea, just like a pencil-sketch. You will have four weeks worth of class time to work on each new code-sketch (You can certainly use time outside class to work on it too). Part of the work you produce for the portfolio will also be research into defining the scope of your design and analyzing the works of other artist, but the portfolio will predominantly showcase your original attempts at designing digital experiences which address the following themes.

Theme one is: a better world.

For this theme we would like you to explore the concept of better worlds: not necessarily utopias, but worlds which would better meet the needs of its inhabitants. You can consider people, or the more-than-human world. Your exploration of the theme should include:

• who is this world better for?
• in which aspect is the world better?
• what does better even mean?
• how do you represent this better world through interaction design?

We do ask that your project meets the following requirements:

• You must select a person, group of people, or natural system to design your world for
• You must identify a value system or a view which the person or group aligns with

Now, we certainly aren’t asking you to get political with this, but we do ask that you pick some value system to design your world around - preferably, one that you personally find interesting or align with. This could be one relating to a community or hobby you take part in. You could even design a better world for your neighbour, who strongly believes cats are our feline overlords. We won’t explicitly judge your chosen value system/view (or your neighbour for that matter). We care more about how you make decisions and navigate the design process using this value system/view as your guiding light.

In this project, you can either explore 3D and shader code artefacts for producing art on this theme, or just focus on developing a concept for this theme.

For Theme 1, use Template Repo 1

You are expected to commit code to your repository at least once a fortnight.

Theme two is: moral intelligence.

AI for Good, AI Safety, AI Fairness, AI for All and AI Ethics are all different attempts to explore ways of safely using artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. What is good, right and fair? Good for whom, right for whom, fair for whom? Who has the power to make these decisions, and who is included in the decision-making process? Don’t forget the more-than-human world in determining “who to include”!

We do ask that your project meets the following requirements:

• You must select a person, group of people, or natural system impacted by the AI
• You must identify a value system or a view which the person or group aligns with

Can we design AI to act morally? The Distributed AI Research Lab and Critical AI are asking some of these questions. Eryk Salvaggio has explored AI and Images in detail through this course.

In this project, you can either explore AI code artefacts for producing art on this theme, or just focus on this theme.

For Theme 2, use Template Repo 2

You are expected to commit code to your repository at least once a fortnight.

Theme three is YOUR CHOICE OF THEME

Options for selection include:

• the compass rose
• entangled life
• the spell of the sensuous
• other minds
• plus ça change
• reimaginaries
• please do not use Clown World. I was unaware of the toxicity behind this phrase.

YOUR THEME MUST BE CLEARED WITH YOUR INSTRUCTOR

For Theme 3, use Template Repo 3

Submission deadlines

Your portfolio submissions are due at 11:59pm on Fridays. The portfolio will consist of 3 portfolio submissions and the due dates for each of the portfolio entries are below:

• Portfolio Submission 1: 31st May (Friday)
• Portfolio Submission 2: 5th July (Friday)
• Portfolio Submission 3: 16th August (Friday)

In your template repo, you will find markdown files for each portfolio submission under the subfolder portfolio\. You might not have worked with markdown before, so we will give you plenty of support with this stuff. It’s a lot like writing in any kind of text file (like MS Word, but without all the nice formatting). Here are some resources to help you navigate markdown, but you can also just ask us in class if you have any questions. Besides actually writing, committing and pushing the code to generate sketches which you’ll discuss in your portfolio submission, you will only need to modify the relevant markdown file for your fortnightly portfolio submissions.

Specification

Each portfolio submission should include the following:

• an outline of your decision making for this portfolio entry, including the WHAT and the WHY. Your decision making should be discussed in relation to the four dimensions of the marking criteria below.
• a history of git commits related to the changes you made for each portfolio entry. Make a new commit for each new idea you try and push your code to git regularly.
• a photo(s)/screen capture of your work OR any sources of inspiration
• you can optionally include a video(s) of your work in your entry Videos must be hosted externally.
• all planning for what you have explored in your each portfolio submission
• links to any external code/resources you used. This includes code you have already developed in association with this course through weekly classwork or assessments.

The portfolio entries should be in the style of an informal blog. Any photos related to your ideation can be a mixture of hand-drawn sketches and code-sketches (screenshots of your browser window), but we encourage you to get comfortable sketching with code this year. You can even include photos of you interacting with your sketch. You will need to host any videos you want to include on a platform like Vimeo or YouTube (it can be private/unlisted) and share a link to it. DO NOT PUT VIDEOS IN YOUR GitLab REPO.

Submission process

You must submit each portfolio entry and the corresponding code by committing and pushing it to GitLab by 11:59pm for each deadline above. You must push it to your fork of the template repo (the same process we use every week in the labs).

Remember: a markdown file is just a file like all the other files (e.g. .js, .html) you’ve had in your template repository every week. You just need to modify the relevant file and commit, then push it up to GitLab as usual.

Once you’ve done that, it’s a good idea to log into the GitLab web interface and check that it’s been successfully pushed.

Conforming to the Specification

Conforming to the specification is a critically important aspect of working in computing. EXTN1019 is about creative computing, which allows a greater variation of exploration of ideas and concepts. Even so, there are certain aspects of this assessment which are critical:

• you must use your gitlab repository for your code, committing and pushing updates frequently.
• you must acknowledge all sources for ideas and code: you are welcome to build on code found in other places, or provided by your teacher or peers - but you must acknowledge these sources. This includes code generated by generative AI systems.
• you must interpret the themes provided: your interpretation can be broad, but you must inform the viewer of your system how this relates to the theme.
• you must adhere to submission deadlines

Non-conformance will result in penalties to your grade.

NOTE: Your portfolio entries will be hosted on the creative computing course website. All of your portfolio entries will be hidden from public view until the marks are released (around the week of 26th Aug), so you can go back and modify any old submissions before this date. After this date, the portfolio entries will be made public. If you don’t feel comfortable having your portfolio entry made public, please let me know and I won’t have it listed on the course site.

Marking criteria

The marking criteria are connected to the course learning outcomes (LOs).

Interaction Design (LO #1 & #2)

• to what degree does your decision making effectively consider some form of interaction between the person viewing your work and the work itself? We say some form of interaction because you can implement explicit interactions where a person clicks, types, moves, produces sound which affects your work, OR you can implement implicit interaction where your work is only viewed by the audience member and your sketch somehow manipulates their expectations.

• do your code sketches implement the most important attributes of the interactive, visual or sonic mechanism you want to explore? Since you are submitting sketches for your portfolio, we care more about your ability to identify (and implement) the most important attributes of the thing you want to implement.

Artistic Output (LO #2)

• to what degree does the artistic output (either visuals or sound/music) of your code sketch enhance your interpretation of the theme and to what degree does it detract from your interpretation?

• do your portfolio entries have—a logical structure, easy-to-follow explanations of your design decisions and their relationship to the theme, including both the what and the why of your design

Critical Exploration of Theme and your chosen value system (LO #1 & #4)

• To what degree have you explored the creative context you are building within? How have you used research and sources of inspiration to explore interpretations of each theme and explore the value systems or beliefs you wish to capture in your work.

• critical discussion of how the “take-home message” of your work is perceived? This could be through your own perspective, through the perspective of someone who shares the value-system or belief you are designing for, or through a person seeing your work in a gallery.

Technical Quality (LO #1 and #3)

• To what degree have you explored and engaged with the technical contexts and approaches we have encountered over the 2 years of the course (including 3D, shaders and artificial intelligence approaches). YOU ARE NOT EXPECTED TO ENGAGE WITH ALL TECHNIQUES FOR EACH PORTFOLIO SUBMISSION.
• To what degree have you developed your own code? Including code from other sources is fine - but you need to acknowledge all sources. You should try to modify, adapt, or evolve the code to fit your interpretation of the theme. Building something new and unexpected from multiple sources also represents creativity.
• Portfolio 1 is looking for 3D or virtual world creation.
• Portfolio 2 is looking for the incorporation of AI-generation of artistic content
• Portfolio 3 is open-ended: you may include any aspect of coding covered over the course.

Note: the mark is for your portfolio entry, not the code itself. However, you must commit and push the code associated with each portfolio entry as well (as stated above) to show us the work that your portfolio entry is based on—if you don’t push the code that will be considered a submission which does not conform to the spec.

Year 12 Portfolio Assessment Rubric

FAQ

“how do you add citations and bibliographies in Markdown”

This guide shows you how: https://arshovon.com/blog/cite-in-markdown/

Your Markdown should looks like this:

Raji, et al[^Raji_2021], discuss the dangers of Artificial Intelligence ..

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**Bibliography**

[^Raji_2021]: Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, Emily M. Bender, Amandalynne Paullada, Emily Denton, and Alex Hanna. “AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark.” arXiv:2111.15366 [Cs], November 26, 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15366.

Jekyll will render this as follows:

Raji, et al¹, discuss the dangers of Artificial Intelligence ..

Bibliography