Week 22

Lectures

In this week’s lectures we looked at tech for good and the UN’s seventeen sustainable development goals. These lectures were delivered to us to get us thinking about how our work can be used in the future to help others and encourage good in the world.

The first lecture was on the UN’s seventeen sustainable development goals. We were introduced to what each of them were and why they are relevant to our work. We then considered how creative industries can be influences and decided that they can raise awareness, design sustainable solutions, and be used to prototype solutions. We then discussed three of the SDGs further and how creativity can help reach these goals. We felt that creativity can be used to encourage community engagement, show representation, make people think, engage people, and be used for creative solutions. This lecture was a very thought stimulating session as it encouraged us to consider how we can improve the world with work we currently do or work we might carry out in the future.

The second lecture was about tech for good. In this lecture we considered whether technology is being used for good or for bad. We began by considering if we leant more towards a utilitarianism ideology or a deontology ideology. After this we began by thinking about the first example of tech for good – the world wide web. We concluded that it is dependent on how it is used and thought about if the world would be better or worse without it. We then looked at another example of technology that can be used for good or bad an discussed our opinions on it. The conclusion we drew as a group after these discussions was that technology is not intrinsically good or bad. 

Overall, I really enjoyed these two lectures as they both made me consider how I can use my skills to help others and the good and bad of emerging technology.

Workshops

This week, I developed the program to use a webcam to capture images and classify them into one of three predefined labels. I trained the model using a dataset composed of my own images, making the system recognise specific categories relevant to my dataset. After training, I tested the code to ensure it could accurately identify and label new images in real time. This work combined hands-on machine learning with computer vision, resulting in a functional prototype capable of live image classification.

Trip

In the afternoon, we  visited Laboratory Media’s studio in Hellesdon, Norwich. This visit was a great opportunity for me to explore a creative technology studio and gain insight into how such environments operate. It will support my work on the Industry Folder project task by giving me a better understanding of industry practices and inspiring ideas for my own projects.