Author: admin

By now many of you have heard that Steve Jobs has passed away. When I heard this, I felt incredibly sad. If there was one individual who could justifiably be referred to as a towering genius of our time, it was he.

What amazed me about him wasn’t so much his influence on technology (which of course was transformative and profound) but his influence on design. I remember thinking, in 1998, right after Monsters Inc came out just as Apple was launching the first iMac, that here were two design interventions that were simultaneously dominating our cultural landscape: A completely new way of thinking about the look of animation (together with the equally visually daring Toy Story), and a completely new way of thinking about the look of computers.

Visually, they were both sending the same message: Sophisticated and elegant, yet also joyful and childlike. These designs charmed children while, at the same time, inviting adults to indulge their own inner child, to enter a world of highly self-aware playfulness.

And of course both companies, Pixar and Apple, had something else in common — their CEO, Steve Jobs.

In no time this playful-yet-sophisticated, endearingly retro-futuristic aesthetic seemed to be everywhere. Volkswagen launched their reimagined Beetle — a car that might as well have jumped out of a Pixar film. Even the U.S. Mint got on the bandwagon. Our newly revamped paper money, with its large sans-serif numerals within simple ovals, seemed like something that Apple could have designed.

And of course about a year later, the famous Google logo appeared, continuing this theme of “playful, yet grown-up and elegant” as a new visual identity for the internet. After almost two decades of darkness, the public’s idea of “What the future looks like” had finally been wrested from the dystopian vision of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and replaced by something far more hopeful and filled with joy.

In a sense, what Steve Jobs had wrought was a bridge from the baby boomers to the generations that followed — a way to allow older consumers of culture to tap into their nostalgic childhood memories of The Jetsons, or even Playskool, while inviting newer generations to join in the fun.

There are many critical things that one could say about Steve Jobs. Yet he has undeniably brought us a world of visual pleasure. Apple’s iMac, iPhone, iPad and other innovative designs have not only changed the way we think about information — they have helped remind us that “the future” can be a place of optimism and delight.

Following on from some thoughts of yesterday, what would it look like to have a “platform” that would make it easier for people to use their computer and their 3D printer together to create prototypes for new kinds of useful devices?

A microcomputer (like the one in even an inexpensive cell phone of today) is very good at computing, but it’s not very good at making things happen in the physical world. For that you need components like motors and solenoids.

But there’s a problem. While a modern microcomputer contains many millions of electronic switches, the cost of motors and solenoids is not going down. So any mechanism that needs to use lots of motors and solenoids for physical actuation is going to hit a serious wall of cost.

I’m thinking that we will need to create a general prototyping architecture which will allow lots of different parts to be activated using only a small number of motors and solenoids, by using the same motors/solenoids to actuate different things. For example, imagine an animatronic prototyping board (APB) that looks like a phonograph turntable, carrying a solenoid which travels around in a circle. As the moving solenoid comes into contact with different parts, it pushes each part up or down (all under control of a microcomputer).

Since our future home 3D printer will be able to print any already-assembled arrangement of gears and mechanical relays, the right 3D printed mechanism should be translate the simple up/down movements made by this APB into pretty much any robotic action we need.

This is also the layered way that computer software is built — a general purpose compiler at the lower layers, and then more special-purpose application software built on top of that.

I’m not sure that an animatronic prototyping board will really look like a turntable carrying a solenoid. But I’m pretty confident, just as we now take general purpose microcomputers for granted, that future made-and-designed-at-home robotic devices will be built using some kind of APB.

I really liked the answers to yesterday’s question about what people would do if they had a 3D printer. But I think there may be an entirely different aspect to all this. Consider the analogy of the telephone.

For most if its history, the phone was just a device for calling people. For the last two decades or so, the inside of a phone was of course much more than this. It was in fact a computer. But we were not allowed access to that computer, other for one very narrow use.

Then, mostly in the last several years, the phone opened up. Not only has it now been revealed to be a complete mobile computer, but it has become a platform to write software for all sorts of purposes, and that software is written by all sorts of people. Most of those software writers do not work for the phone company, or for any particular corporation.

This is the arc followed by many information technologies: The transition from authorship by a small official priesthood to authorship by the general populace. When this happened to pop music a little over half a century ago, it was quite a big deal. It was called Rock and Roll.

When it happened with books in the early sixteenth century, it was an even bigger deal. It was called the Protestant Reformation.

When everyone has a 3D printer, I do not think they will just be printing little sculptures. I think they will also be printing apps. Eventually there will be easy to use software development platforms, allowing people to print out complete working mechanisms — at first toys and games, but then more serious apps, little robots that do things for us in custom ways and in custom situations. They will clean our car or our refrigerator, iron our clothes, open our curtains in the morning, neaten up our desk, polish our shoes, water our flowers, as well as many other things we’re not even thinking about yet.

It will be part of a general movement — a movement which started with the mobile phone — to move computation into the real world, the world in which we live.

As long as combinations of computer smarts and robotic mechanisms are expensive to produce and to market, they will exist in an invention economy of scarcity — much as the telephone did until recently.

But when future versions of 3D printers, together with easy-to-use authoring kits, make such invention accessible to millions, then we will arrive at a far more exciting situation — one we already recognize when talking about books and pop songs and SmartPhone apps — an economy of abundance.

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the little 3D printer I have at home, and have come to realize I use it just about exclusively for inventing things. Mostly little parts that are used to make other things. For example, the last few days I’ve been printing out fixtures for optical experiments, to hold things like mirrors and lenses in place.

I am quite happy with this 3D printer, and am finding it to be an invaluable part of my process of trying out different ideas. In its way it can be as useful as a whiteboard.

But I realize that this pattern of use doesn’t translate to anything that would likely be relevant to millions of people — any more than millions of people are going to find it useful to spend lots of time scribbling math on whiteboards or writing graphics programs in Java.

Which means my own use is not providing any insights into the following interesting question — and it would be great to hear someone else’s opinion on this: If everyone had a 3D printer at home, what would they use it for?

Yesterday’s interesting encounter with “social street theatre” got me thinking — how much of our everyday, moment to moment experience of life is actually a kind of theatre? When people laugh, or act surprised, or share an moment in a social situation, how much of it is actually a performance of a laugh, or of a gesture of surprise, or of a “shared moment”?

We are such social creatures, interacting with other people day in and day out, that we might not actually notice when our behavior has slipped into performance. After all, our interactions over the course of a day are bound up in many rituals — saying good morning, going to get a coffee, ordering at a restaurant, queuing up for a movie.

In many social situations, too much spontaneity would actually break the social contract. If our dinner companion were to suddenly sing their order to the waiter in a loud opera buffa baritone, we might start to consider looking for other dinner companions. Similarly, we might not be happy if a coworker were to respond to our innocent “How are you doing?” with a detailed play-by-play of their recent gall bladder operation.

In this sense, all of our social interactions are a finely calibrated balance between the genuine and the performed. Being able to function in society is a matter of negotiating the path between — and having a good sense of where the curb is on either side.

This evening, walking home after a lovely dinner out with friends, I was approached by a young woman, nicely dressed, who looked to be about twenty years old.

“Can you tell me,” she asked, “how to get to the train…” at which point she doubled over and started coughing, somewhat theatrically. A moment later she straightened up and looked at me as though she were about to speak again, only to double over and begin coughing again, in an even more obviously fake and theatrical way.

I waited patiently until she was done, which seemed like the only polite thing to do. After she was finished with her coughing act, she looked at me and said “Hey, what are you looking at?”

I decided discretion was the better part of valor. After all, this was her show, and who was I to be critical? It was obvious by now that I was witnessing some kind of performance or experiment — one that was clearly still under development. “You asked how to get to the train, but you didn’t say which train,” I replied.

She looked surprised for a moment, then said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“In that case,” I said, “go one block that way,” pointing toward the nearby A train station.

“Thanks, you have a good night,” she said.

“You too,” I responded, and continued on home.

Afterward I couldn’t help wondering, what kind of performance had I just witnessed? Was it some sort of clumsily executed stealth cultural survey for an NYU class? Or just a new kind of performance art?

Any change in the technology of communication brings about concomitant changes in language. For example, the twentieth century saw the gradual introduction of television as a preferred medium of public discourse. TV has gradually replaced the written word in parts of our culture. And because TV is more constrained by time, language has become streamlined.

Similarly, the rise in popularity of texting and twitter into the culture have now clearly led to a generational shift in vocabulary and language use. But none of this is really new. Examples of the influence of changing technology upon language can be found throughout history.

Perhaps, as I described in my eccescopy posts, we will some day soon be able to augment our communication with each other by digital objects, images and whatever else turns out to be useful, appearing to float in the air between us. I’ve been wondering what sort of effect this would have on language.

For one thing, linguistic gesture may gain in importance. If our everyday gestural communication can be reliably augmented by digital information in useful ways, then general language use might shift away from predominantly verbal, and toward a more balanced mix of verbal and gestural.

It is not clear what impact such a shift would have. For one thing, I suspect it would be bad for blind people and good for deaf people.

There is a joke going around in physics circles the last few days that has become so iconic, it has already been written about in the august scientific journal Nature:

The bartender says “I’m sorry, we don’t serve neutrinos.”
A neutrino walks into a bar.

This joke is so funny, I was laughing even before I heard it.

There will probably be lots of jokes in response. Here is my humble contribution to the forthcoming collection:

A neutrino walks into a bar.
The bartender says “You told it wrong.”

Playwrights can easily become well known, even immortal. For example, Shakespeare and Molière remain iconic, centuries after their deaths. But that doesn’t seem to happen with writers of screenplays. With very few exceptions (notably Charlie Kaufman and William Goldman) films are not associated with their screenwriters.

Even when you think of masterful examples of screenwriting, such as “Casablanca” or “Bringing up Baby”, you probably don’t think of Julius and Philip Epstein or Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde. If you are like most people, you probably haven’t ever even heard those names before. You are far more likely to have heard of those films’ directors — Michael Curtiz and Howard Hawks, respectively.

It occurs to me that screenwriters are hidden from our view, because they are obscured by the single bright shiny object that resulted from their work. Because there is only one such object — the movie that was produced — we associate the result with the production itself, and therefore with the film’s director.

In contrast, there is no one production of “Hamlet”, but rather countless thousands of productions, down through the centuries. “Hamlet” stagings form a vast cloud of produced objects. And the only thing all of those objects have in common is Shakespeare’s play in written form.

The extreme mutability of a play, or any authored work that can lead to many different creative artifacts (other examples are songs and musical symphonies) — gives it the ability to achieve a kind of transcendent cultural power, amplified rather than obscured by its many interpreters.

 

 
            I, boldly, outraced
            A beam of light, and arrived
            Before I had left.

            This upset people.
            Next time, politely, I let
            The beam of light win.