Week 8 Readings

This week, we read two pieces. One was Awakening to Maker Methodology by Jay Silver and the other was A Design Methodology for Deconstructing Networks by Jonah Brucker-Cohen.

The first gives a lot examples of things that he has tried to make and how he has implemented them or what the context was without giving too much technical background. I really enjoy reading pieces about projects that people have completed and directions that they are looking to go.

I think that Jay Silver had a lot of great points about what characterizes makers and it wasn't complex. I feel that often this field gets a little bit too caught up in the syntax (or at least that's what I've noticed in my relatively short time in our classroom). There is so much nitty-gritty detail to what distinguishes one term or coin phrase from another. There are tiny little nuances that make your contextual use incorrect and I think that that in and of itself can be very frustrating to people who don't have a lot of experience in this field.

Being a maker is about curiosity and being willing to be wrong. Breaking things and re-making things. Makers "recycle, upcycle, double cycle, dumpster, and cruft. They scavenge and reclaim materials not to “save money” but to manifest the urban nature as a toolkit [2] and supply chain." I love the new terminology that he uses, because it's fun and hip and beyond everything else, it makes sense! It's logical and easy to follow and it references pop culture so that it's something that everyone can easily pick up. For example, "frankentype:  prototype Frankenstein style to get the fastest barely working monstrosity of a model". It's brilliant and it's so easily and concisely explained. The reader isn't lost.

I really appreciated this reading and the way that Jay Silver explained himself and his work. I also found that the work that he was doing had a lot of similarities to Makey Makey that we'd looked at earlier in the quarter. There were a lot of applications that the same system could be used for and it was easily manipulated. It was really cool to see the different people that he collaborated with or created on-the-spot for and how it changed his designs and ideas.

The latter talks about an overarching project that wants to deconstruct the networks that we use and how people interact with them. There were four main points (1) emphasizing multiple methods of connectivity (changed the way the user interacted with the network and made it physical so the user was forced to think about it); (2) challenging factors of networked interaction (changing the locations or environments/surroundings of the network and thus messed with social circles, public access and inhabitants of the space); (3) amplifying metaphors to deconstruct conventions (changing the names and perceptions of networks terms by making them more relevant to their purpose and function); and (4) altering the rules of networked interaction (changing the rule-sets to question the user's previous experiences in dealing with the network and related functions).