For this assignment, we were to read two readings and comment on three passages from them. The readings were:

1. Culture + Technology – Jennifer Daryl Slack & Macgregor Wise
2. Values and Valuing – Adapted from Carl Mitcham, ed., Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

The first passage is the following:

We are persuaded by progress because we are persuaded by the logic (logos) of the argument that it is better to be efficient, rational, and scientific. We are also persuaded by the logic and ethic (ethos) of the argument of evolution (we trust science and scientists) that progress is inevitable, And finally. we are persuaded by the deeply emotional argument (pathos) of the sublime; persuaded by our own feelings of fear, awe, and expectation.

What I am interested in within this passage has little to do with logos and ethos and most to do with pathos or the sublime. I feel as though humans inherently have addictive personalities. I think that this is an addiction to the sublime. At a point in time, we changed from a species of hunter / gatherers (which metaphorically, all other species on earth are) to a species that would take control our their destiny through creation. As creators it is seen that we were taking the role of god (whatever your interpretation of that is), and god is something that has never truly been understood (if it were, I don’t believe that there would be religious wars). Thus, there is a sense of fear in that we have never actually understood the repercussions of our creative mind.

Despite the fear associated with creative developments, and despite the reasoning behind them (survival, utopia, progress) we have always maintained a tendency to create. I feel as though this tendency is an addiction. As if the apple on the tree of knowledge was laced with something that we cannot let go of, and if it will lead us to the demise of humanity, we will continue to create until that time. Not that it will, but I just feel as though our addiction is that strong.

I don’t feel as though this addiction should be seen as a negative aspect of humanity. I also don’t feel that all people are addicted in the same way. The things that we make can substitute the feelings of sublime, for example cigarettes give a feeling of fear (the may harm us), awe (they enhance a moment by altering your sensory perception of that moment), and expectation (the result of smoking may be harmful, but it may not, you won’t know until it does or you die). Thus, people feel vicariously sublime through the objects that we create.

I would agree that the persuasion of progress in it’s current state is as Slack & Wise put it, but I feel as though the sublime is stronger than we are lead to believe. The logos and ethos may change, but the pathos will not.

Second:

Langdon Winner explains that technological determinism is a belief that depends on two hypotheses:

1. that belief that the technical base of a society is the fundamental condition affecting all patterns of social existence and
2. that belief that technological change is the single most important source of change in society.

1. Our only true understanding of anything is through a moment. Anything beyond the current moment is modelled though our perception or our memory. The moment is a multiplication of sensory experience, pragmatic rationalization, and historical referencing. At no point in time have we been able to recreate this experience for a moment that is not the current one. Thus, we don’t truly understand the past.
2. History is communicated through an event based narrative. It reinforces the notion of linear causality, and though we can rationalize it pragmatically, we cannot understand it. We can make attempts to re-create it so that we have have better visual references to make sense of it, but we still cannot experience it.
3. The further that you move away from the current moment, the further or more different the experience would be. Thus, the farther back in time that we think about, the less we can understand.
4. Our social existence has been documented upon the technical base of society, beyond that even our rational is speculation about how that moment would feel.

Third:

If technology is conceived as a matter of control and dependence, of Master and Slave, it is set apart from human culture, treated as autonomous, then either blamed or praised. Either we have control over technology, or it has control over us; the effects in either case can be conceived as either worthy of praise or blame.

Throughout history, I really wonder if this conundrum has been so prevalent as it is now. When new tools were more explicitly beneficial, did people still blame them? For example, when the carriage was invented and people discovered that they could carry much more and much faster than ever before, did they dispute it and say that they liked walking with a heavy load? Did they blame it for taking away the pace that they were so used to or was it embraced as a welcome alternative to the ways that they were used to?

To me, it seems that this invention would be hard to blame, but it is hard for me to understand their experience. But, on the chance that the notion of blame did not always exist, I wonder if it something that is increasing. The blame and praise of our inventions is possibly an artifact of the intent that is put into them. For many reasons, we make things for betterment, but for many other reasons we make them for other reasons. The other reasons often have more to do with ego and self than betterment of their environment. I sure hope that we can achieve a level of culture that create things only for betterment, and in which the things that we create are considerate to every aspect of their environment.

That sounds like a long road, and I am sure it won’t be bricked with gold.

New Scientist writes about a patent filed by George Stetten, utilizing a miniature camera in conjunction with machine vision (algorithmic pattern recognition), to provide clues about the environment to partially or fully blind people. Spotting an obstacle, the fingertip-mounted device would give tactile feedback (vibration) to guide the user around it. It could also help the user locate switches and controls.

I think a new age is dawning for sensorially challenged people. In 2004, I worked together with an international group of designers to build a wearable device that deprived its’ user of her visual sense, and replaced it with auditory feedback. It was an experiment in pseudo-synaesthesia, but the technique could easily be applied to empower visually impaired people.

I visited the Austin Makerfaire this weekend. One day (with a late start) was not nearly enough to experience everything, or to participate in any workshops that were going on all around, but I did get a good idea of the makings and craftings going on around the U.S. and the world. Below, I’ve listed the people and projects that inspired me the most.

MIT FabLabs (article, video) are labs that make available to the public d-i-y fabrication of atoms from bits. Nublabs, a Cambridge, MA brainchild of three MIT students and alumni, is an independent effort to use the fablab model to empower the local community and “solve socially significant problems”. By hosting lecture series and afterschool programs, nublabs hope to spread the spirit of do-it-yourselfness to people and grow a small army of socially responsible crazy inventors. I wish these people the best, and hope to see something similar start up in Austin soon!

In terms of sustainable design, a couple of solar-energy companies were present. Sustainable Waves brought their fire truck converted into a stage powered (at least partly) by solar power. Austin EV and ACE Technologies were showing off Electric Vehicle conversions, and Austin Sun and Wind had solar panels on display.

Instructables.com had a table at the faire where they promoted their DIY Halloween Contest – anyone can enter with a project from one of many categories. Examples are “hack-o-lantern”, “green halloween” (scarily repurposed items), “gizmos that go zZapp”, and “scary food”. Enter by November 9th!

There was a lot of craft-related exhibitors as well. Brandy Davis of Pigseyart makes journals out of vintage books, and she will custom-make journals from books you send to her. She makes sure to keep a few pages of the old book in the journal. Some of the pulp sci-fi journals made me want to read the whole book!

Maker Store was selling DIY-kits for Make Magazine projects, and inventor Mitch Altman’s TV-B-Gone and Brain Machine. There was a workshop area where you got help putting the kits together by soldering parts and programming microcontrollers. This is an awesome idea, both in terms of business and getting people started with DIY electronics. Where do I sign up to be an instructor?

I do have some critique to offer for the event organizers. While new subscribers to Make or Craft Magazine received a free day pass, no discount was offered to current subscribers. It was hard for me and my wife (both subscribers) to afford coming in even for a day ($25 each), and we felt bummed that our support for the magazines wasn’t recognized. It doesn’t make sense to hunt for new customers while ignoring your existing ones. Come on, O’Reilly!

The branding inside the event was consistent. Each exhibitor had a standardized MAKER sign with a picture, description, and a weblink. There was also a lot of workshop-type booths where you could make something – a kite, a lunch bag, or blinking clothing, for example. What I found lacking was clear signage of WHAT you could make, INSTRUCTIONS how to make it, where to START, and WHO you could ask for help. (Some of) the volunteers helping out at the various stations did little to engage the crowd. Perhaps this was because we visited the faire late the second day, but I believe that this great part of the event (actually making stuff) could be made even better by just a few simple measures.

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

It is not that often that you find something on the internet that has been created (or partially created) by a very talented professional, with a very distinguishable, thought provoking name, and a log in form with no explanation. I even asked Google, but no help. There have been a few times in the past two years that I have re-visited the orb, checking to see if there was any progress. But all visit came up to be a disappointment. The SpaceCollective had disappointed me, that is, until today.

Following a link from Smashing Magazine, I once again was acquainted with the SpaceCollective, only this time no to be disappointed:

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

A while back, I made a post about crowdsourcing, an internet buzzword that identifies the productive path of online networking. Recently, I stumbled upon CrowdSpring, a site set up to align creatives with clients. It is providing a great entry for any designer or client that wants to get involved with a creative endeavor.

CrowdSpring works a lot like a competition. The only thing different is that revisions are allowed as well as client – designer dialogue. As a client, you post your project, say how much you are willing to pay, and then as the submissions start coming in, you can ask the designers to modify it in any way.

Designers can come onto the site and see which projects interest them, and then submit as many concepts as they would like. The downfall for the designer is that if you don’t win the contract, you could end up putting in a lot of time for not much return.

We have not used the resource yet, but if anybody has any experience with it we would love to hear how it went.

A couple of months ago, Radiohead released the separated “stems” (vocals, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums) of their single Nude, announcing a remix contest. It is a difficult song to remix at 6/8 timing and 63 bpm, and Tom Yorke + co. apparently had a blast making fun of all the generic 4/4 entries.

James Houston had a bit of a different idea of using the stems, which were available for $.99 each in the iTunes Store. He reconstructed the original song by forcing old printers and hardrives do acoustic tricks and play the stems as an orcestra. Fast forward the clip to about 1:15 for the tune (after the jump).

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

The “band members” are:

• An array of 10 dismantled hard drives act as speakers for vocals & sound effects
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitars (rhythm & lead)
• HP scanjet 4c – Bass Guitar
• Epson LX-86 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
• Finlandia TV & Mark-I 9a SLK Oscilloscope – Visual stuff

I admire anyone who can think of a project like this, and actually go through with it. It’s a cool use for old hardware, artistic rather than practical. It must have involved some rather gritty low-level programming, but Houston still pulled it off. The video suggests that the sinclair is controlling the “instruments” with custom software, loaded from a cassette (oh! the old times of Commodore 64s, MSX Spectravideos and other home computer systems). I’d love a description of how it was actually done.

[via NYT|TheMoment]

I’m not an active user of Facebook web pages. I don’t have the time or interest to participate actively in the community, but I do take advantage of the Facebook network.

Without the events posted there by my friends, I would be locked inside for most of the month. Since I don’t want to log in to Facebook.com, I sought a way to get the events listed in iCal on my Powerbook. The solution is called (somewhat uninspired) fbCal, an application that lets you subscribe to your events to Google Calendar, Apple iCal, M$ Outlook, or Mozilla Sunbird.

As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.

As an art, this inherent knowledge within the robot can create a poetry that cannot be recreated with inanimate objects. The Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan is a great piece of work in which the chair falls apart and pieces itself back together. The strong metaphor relies heavily on the self awareness of the object.

As an object, the chair has been a constant and trustworthy partner in the history of civil society. We depend on the chair to support our bodies as we depend upon the earth beneath our feet. The Robotic Chair stands in for the individual and a society over the course of a lifetime – falling apart, falling down, gathering oneself together, picking oneself up, again and again. The Robotic Chair articulately and concisely reminds us on a grand scale that there is magic – that there is hope.

Despite the potentially scary outcome of science (in the wrong hands) taking artistic ideas to create a apocalyptic science fiction thriller, this robotic chair reminds us that we are good at adapting to unfortunate situations and whatever bad situations we create, we have the means to piece ourselves back together.

Check out the video on their website as it is much more dramatic.

For a relatively small membership fee, you can be a part of a local maker community with access to advanced tools and a large pool of knowledge. TechShop is “like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…or a Kinko’s for geeks. Started in Silicon Valley in 2006, TechShop is now expanding to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, LA, San Diego, Austin, Orlando, and Durham, some locations opening in the summer of 2008, some later.

BoingBoing has visited the SF location. Check it out!

For many of us, in thoughts or dialogue about the state of the world and how it can be changed we reach a wall that is made up of a political system intertwined with corporate economics. You can try to climb the wall but it seems that the wall always manages to be bigger. You can try to break the wall, but people have spent their entire lives breaking the wall without making much change. Lawrence Lessig has been trying, again and again to fight with this massive obstacle but recently, he has decided to try a new technique. He is now attempting to change the wall. He will inject a virus of good into it with the goal of morphing it from a looming, impermeable form to a road with signs and maps.

Maybe a bit abstract. This might be better:

Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using our tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. Our community will link candidates committed to a reform with volunteers and contributors who support it.

The basic changes that can be pledged for are:

1. No money from lobbyists or PACs
2. Vote to end earmarks
3. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
4. Support publicly-financed campaigns

I cannot do this subject justice in a small post. This video is from his talk at Harvard Law School, I would highly recommend watching it. The outlining of the Change Congress movement happens more towards the end of the video, but if you are interested at all watch the whole thing.

The Change Congress Website