Scoping is the concept behind how values of variables, functions, and other expressions are made available in a program and where they can be accessed from. A good understanding of scope can avoid bugs or unexpected results in a script.
Scope Areas
Scoping can be thought of having three areas, the global scope, a function scope or a block scope.
Global Scope
The global scope is where values that can be accessed anywhere in the script and tend to be defined at the top level of your program. For example, if you had a script.js …
The Web’s most common interaction is retrieving HTML pages via requests that are identified with URLs so we can access pieces of information. When we enter a URL on our browser, a request is sent to a server which will work out what sort of response to send back, and most of the time it will be HTML that our browser can parse and display so we can read its contents.
However, web applications can do a lot more today than returning HTML to the browsers, they can allow for instance, products, users and other records to be created, we…
Ruby on Rails is a framework that includes a lot of tools to structure and develop dynamic web applications.
Rails is a good choice to create an application where a database is required to store information and provides functionality to display, change, remove data and add more as needed.
For example, it could be an app where users register and can write their thoughts for others to see as posts. Users can follow each other and like posts. …
Introduction
“You are addicted to your phone” is a project focused on the exploration of the provocative assumption that people are attached to their devices resulting on the development of a prototype for an installation themed around the topic, whilst using a speculative design approach (Dunne & Raby, 2013). The report describes the research process and how the prototype development is informed by it.
Research and Ideation
From an initial brainstorm session, ideas (Appendix A.2) were generated on what topics the prototype could focus on. …
This week we have conducted research on the relationship people have with their phones with the aim to formulate questions. We have also refined the plan of how we are executing our prototype.
Findings
After interviewing other students on their relationship with their phones, we have found that the majority feel attached to their phones or use them too much. That notification engagement depends on their content and what they prompt people to do. People find it annoying that they have to connect to Wi-Fi all the time and are afraid of breaking the screens of their smartphone. …
We are approaching the time where we have to start prototyping our idea, so we spent some time making final decisions on our approach. Subsequent to sharing our ideas with other teams, we have got feedback and insights from our peers that helped us further define which direction we could go with the project. Although we thought we would have to go with one or the other, during the discussion our idea ended up being a mix between the two.
Which idea should we go with?
Discussion between the teams was inconclusive from the point of view that either idea could be executed and would be…
Adding clarity to our project by committing to a theme.
As our research continues, we have been focusing on defining the question or statement our prototype is going to be built around.
Research highlights
Most of the research the group presented seems to stem from a topic that emerged from our thematic research, that our attention is increasingly turned to our phones as well as interactive artefacts that take place in a physical space.
This ranged from buildings that change colour to celebrate certain dates, escape rooms that bring the outdoors indoors and interactive installations.
People’s attention are turned to screens
Today more than ever people spend long time with their devices, with an average of over 4 hours a day. A substantial amount of this time is spent on social media with Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram when using smartphones.
The investment in the development of self-driving vehicles from both governmental and private organizations is rising with the UK government investing £20 million in research and development of self-driving cars (GOV.UK, 2016). Market predictions assume the possibility of a dramatic increase in self-driven traffic in the next decade (Business Insider, 2016), making autonomous vehicles a more significant percentage of the predicted 21.5 billion IoT devices for 2025 (Lueth, 2016).
Despite the fact that a percentage of car manufacturers in the market already offer autonomous technology at some level (Woollaston, 2018), there is an argument to be made that the pervasiveness…
For our second project we were asked to think about what important issues impact the current relationship between society and technology. We aim to create a hi-fidelity prototype to explore questions that stem from the research around the topic.
Briefly looking back
Before starting this project we have discussed what worked and what we could have done better. One of the aspects we contemplated was that our research could have had more effort put into. This made us realise it might have been why we didn’t really enjoy the idea we were working on that much. …
