This week, our group really focused on understanding each component of the ethics assignment and how our project is applicable in real world scenarios. Out of the two case studies, I thought “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” by Langdon Winner was especially interesting since this is a perspective that most people wouldn’t consider merely looking at a piece of technology. It is very eyeopening to see how things such as a bridge design in Long Island had such symbolic meaning behind it, truly reflecting the creator’s political viewpoints and opinions. While this is applicable to inventions of things to resolve societal affairs (keeping the lower class from using recreational resources), another category of these inventions involves those that are part of political relationships. I liked taking a current technology that is hot right now and applying these types of concepts to it since this really helped me realize the design and ethics components behind each step of the design process. In terms of considerations for public health, public safety, and public welfare, the added perspectives from the case studies will definitely inspire us to pay more attention to these details to ensure a safe and friendly product for our users.
In terms of the web application, changes were added to include public posts for users to interact with each other. This was inspired by the realization of public welfare and the negative effects they may cause for users in terms of mental health and body image issues. The globals page is in attempts to promote an environment that is inclusive and encourages positive self-image where users can voluntarily choose to post their food consumptions and add a caption to it as well. While for MVP, this feature would only be useable for those who share the product in the same household where all the food inventory is gathered, we envision there is a lot more potential on a global scale for it to become something more impactful and makes our product something beyond a food tracking tool.
From the previous week, while OAuth was set up to work properly, some debugging on the registration page had to be done to ensure all the information was rendered properly on the profile page. An issue that emerged was displaying the uploaded profile picture is that we have to take into consideration the file size and file format compatibility of the image users choose to upload. A large image could potentially consume too much bandwidth, so either limiting file sizes would have to be implemented or we could use a content delivery network to improve our website’s performance and speed. This approach can be particularly more beneficial since files can quickly be uploaded from any part of the world, and this is something important to consider since we want our application to be used on a global scale for more user interaction and positivity promotion. I would still like to do a bit more research on this approach since it can be more costly as opposed to other methods such as using the web server’s file system or cloud storage that would also come at an additional cost.
I look forward to seeing more of our project flesh out as Surya gathers the physical components together and more progress is being made on the ML algorithm with the data I collected with Steven last week. I envision a user-friendly product that will really be an application beyond merely calorie tracking and a food inventory.