a framework for toolmaking
I came to decide that in order to build tools with lush, complete
interaction styles, the tool maker will need to synthesize kinesthetic, material and logical intelligences and that the three need to be emphasized equally. This lead to the terms used in the title: body/object/code
These three serve as the primary colors that are then mixed to introduce more elaborate skills.
We are people living in body. We use it to communicate, to help us think and to help us understand points of view. The current tools that help artists take advantage of technology are mostly geared towards sitting slumped and stationary. Why is this a problem? Well, try to imagine Jackson Pollack doing his monumental splatter paintings sitting at a desk in a cube farm.
The body skills concept covers a phenomenological1/embodied mind view of tool design rather than a dispassionate “lets fit 95% of the population” commercial anthropometric approach.
Increasing your “body skills” means developing your bodily awareness from a very first person point of view. The idea here is to do activities that make you think about how your range of movement or position relates to your attitudes and ideas. The over all implication is when you physically open up your ideas open up as well.
Things and tools are tangible real and heavy. We can see them, relate to them, change them. We have associations with textures and materials that something clean, extruded and mass-produced can’t always address. The term object is being used to cover material intelligence, the ability to make things.
For tool-makers this is at 2 levels:
One level would say, be using a paint brush and oil paint to create an image, like Jan Van Eyck learned to do at the beginning of oil paint as a medium. The next level would be making the brush itself – like the panel making4 and brush making5 guilds of the same era.
Exercises and resources in this area will hopefully expand the artist or designer’s ability to “hack” found objects or make their own. They should also help the artist understand what forms, textures and mechanics will help them develop their best work conceptually as well.
Code, or logical intelligence, is about learning how to harness the processing power of the computer brains we have at our disposal. Computers can whisk through numbers, sort and manipulate massive quantities of data. We can have multiple versions, edit, change, twits, prototype and store on a level that is not possible with objects. The internet gives us access to so much rich information for inspiration and patternmaking. Miniaturization can put this ability almost anywhere in anything.
While writing code can absolutely constitute a medium in and of itself, the exercises that fall in this category are about using it to help you make something that will make something. The final tool may or may not require the designer to ever look at code while he or she is using it.
Developing knowledge in this category is not just learning the programming-language-of-the-week, but acquiring a facility with organizing and breaking down information.
Musical notation and religious iconography are both examples of code making. Widely considered the grand-daddy of computers, the Jacquard loom created complex patterns without actually needing an “Intel Inside.”
At the secondary level one begins to see how the three separate skill groups interact and feed on each other. It is interesting to start to see that there are defined disciples that slide into the overlap points.
This interaction seems less direct because it is actually still mediated through an object. This is learning to translate code processes into something intelligible to a person. It also relates to generating algorithms for interpreting movement and sound back to a program. Dan O’Sullivan has an interesting quote on the subject:
New calls for “broadband” refer to bandwidth between machines and not to the bandwidth coming back from the person into the computer. This results not from shortcomings of the technology but from an impoverished view of people. We should not be looking at the computer but at the person. Imagine what a limited being the computer sees when it looks back at you, an eyeball and two ears for input, and fingers (probably the most consciously controlled part of our body) for input. That looks more like a Tralfamadorean than a person.6
Behind the scenes vs. actively monitored processes, feedback and error message design, motion detection, voice detection, Using other “mark-up languages” (writing, music, dance notation, maps) as a way to help learn to translate between man and program.
This is the classical Human-Factors, Ergonomic area of inquiry.
How do the person and the object interact: using sensors, using signals, size, weight, portability, surface, iconography, difficulty of mastery.
The electrical engineering questions are in this area. How do you get things to create electrical waves that can be read by a binary brain? On a high level, this is the area you are having trouble in when you can’t find a driver for your scanner or printer.
Electricity to information to Electricity, analog vs. digital signals, buy a part or write a program, serial communications.
The same way the three primary colors can lead to an infinite array of shades, blending body, object and code can give you a huge variety of results. An individual can use this mental map to plot the goals she has against what she already knows how to do. The result is a better ability to establish a useful plan for progress. I am using it to make sure that the lessons and exercises I develop (see Appendix) are in good balance.