Physical Computing

Reading Questions

Following are a few questions to consider on the readings. Pick at least one of the suggested readings and give a response of around 1000 words. Use this first response as a chance to define your initial position and to express your assumptions about the work we'll be doing in class. These questions are intentionally broad; don't feel the need to answer them exhaustively. Feel free to diverge from these questions if you have other issues about the reading and discussion that you'd like to write about. Feel free to cite material from other authors as well.

In The Clock of the Long Now, Stuart Brand and the Long Now Foundation are proposing to build a series of 10,000 year clocks and a library as tools to get people to think more deeply about time and responsibility over time. Are such public reminders effective? Are there long-term (or short-term but cyclical) trends or changes that would be useful to track and display in a public way, to complement and enhance their plan? How would you do it?

In Information Design, Jef Raskin makes the claim that, strictly speaking, "there is no such thing as information design." Only means of information transfer can be designed, he claims, and designers should keep in mind a clear difference between information and meaning. Given that, what is meaning, what is information, and how do they differ? And how can you use design as an approach to create, or influence, meaning (or information, depending on your definition)?

In Information Arts, Stephen Wilson offers a quiz (p.4), laying out a range of projects, and asks the reader to pick which projects are the work of artists, and which are the work of researchers. Noting the difficulty of drawing a line between the two, he cites the work of critical theory in deconstructing the notions of truth and objectivity in science, and of any elevated sensitivity to art. How are your personal standards for a given work shaped by where you see it falling on this line, between artistic expression and research? Are they different from one end to the other? How and why?