Week 5 Readings

In the article Open Sourcery by Harrop was really great. I think that with all of the new technology that is being developed, it is going to be a great resource for there to open sources of information and how-to's to learn how to develop different products and self-made technologies. 

I also thought that the article about by Gaver, Boucher, Pennington, and Walker about Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty I really enjoyed reading about one of their favorite projects that they had done named "Dream Recorder". I found myself thinking about this idea and really connecting with it. Everyone has dreams, right? So it's not excluding in any way, which is really great.

It might be just because I just finished watching the Inception movie trailer where they talk about how dreams are filled with our secrets. They can be subconscious thoughts or memories of periods in your life. There's also research showing that we really only dream in a succession of images (not videos), but what we interpret from the dream and how we morph it into a story from the images can tell us a lot about ourselves and the way our brains are mapped. 

I think that a lot of people struggle with strange dreams or unusual dreams. How are we supposed to interpret these images? this experience? this message? We all strive for this knowledge of what does it mean? but really I think that the authors of the article are on the right track. It isn't about what it means necessarily. Part of the appeal is the uncertainty. 

Without truly knowing what it means. With this separation from the creation of the dream. How do you interpret it while you're awake? While you're conscious? What does it mean? How can it help drive inventions and creations to be more modeled for and targeted towards the consumer. It creates this new niche of study they call "probology". To study the Probes, or the volunteer subjects of this great human experiment. 

Even with the temptations as a scientist to analyze hard data and search for correlations and theorize causation, I think there does come a point where life can't be put into categories. It just is and you have to be able to interpret that or extract some significance out of that.