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Invention, Intellectual Property & Income

Week 18

Another week I got to work on my final project full-time. I took several days, and many prototypes, before I finally created a top plate from wood that I liked for my puzzle box. With that final part completing the exterior of my project, I could get quite far with the drafts of my presentation slide and video.

Assignments

Our tasks for this week are:

  • Individual assignment:
    • Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
    • Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory

Presentation Slide & Video Drafts

The draft slide of my final project
The draft slide of my final project

And here is my draft video. I have basically no experience with creating videos, but I tried my best.

The draft presentation of my final project - Music from BenSound

Final Project Dissemination

I actually had to search for the definition of “dissemination”, because I didn’t know what it meant exactly. I hope I got this right, but in the Fab Academy context I believe it means to explain the results of the design, creation, and usage of my final project, and how I will make the results available to be used by others.

On my Final Project page you can find, in elaborate detail, how I came up with the idea of my final project, how I designed it, and eventually created it. I’ve shared all the steps, the mistakes, the iterations and alterations on there (or have linked to specific weekly write-ups that go even deeper).

I have no intention of taking my final project “to the next level”. I don’t intend for it to become a product, to start a company for it, to optimize and scale it. Instead, I wanted to create this puzzle for myself, as a fun way to combine the skills that I’ve learned during the Fab Academy. Therefore, there’s no need for me to look into funding, nor patents (nothing in my final project would even warrant a patent).

Licensing

During my work as a data visualization designer I’ve been “harmed” by people claiming my work as theirs, from companies using my work in their own dashboards and all the way up to copycats participating in design competitions with my work. I’m sure I haven’t caught on to all of the copycats. It was thanks to other people being aware of my work and notifying me of the copycats that I even know of them.

However, it made me more aware about sharing my work, my code, and how other could use it. When I started out, I shared everything. Anybody that asked was free to use it for whatever they wanted. However, these days I only share the underlying code/design to tutorial examples that I create. All of my other code is now private (up to a point, but I won’t dive into those details). And if people ask to use project X, the answer is usually “no”, or, “yes, but clearly attribute me” (usually depending on the type of usage they have in mind).

In that sense I also want to approach the licensing here. Since this was one giant learning path, I’m happily sharing all the underlying design files and code, but if anybody wants to use it, they should attribute me.

I will be sharing my final project, both the physical design and the code, under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license where others are free to share, copy, adapt, and redistribute it. However, they must give the appropriate credit (and indicate if changes are made), they must use this same license, and it may not be used for commercial purposes (read more about it here).

Wrapping up

I had hoped to have made a good start on the programming by now, but that top plate took until Friday to finish, with another day for the video and slide. Although I’m happy that I got the bulk of both the video and slide finished now.

One more week to go! Fingers crossed I get my programming ready ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

Last updated on Jun 01, 2021