Artful Design Chapter 5: Reading Response
Before I reflect on Chapter 5 from Professor Ge Wang’s Artful Design, I want to say Fillup Glass made me laugh out loud. The name alone is just delightful. I really hope Philip Glass knows there’s a simple computer-music instrument that’s his namesake. Anyways, this was a large chapter, but I’ll try to pick a few things to talk about.
First, let’s start with blending the user and artifact into 1 system, with the idea that our bodies are a kind of interface to the world. This idea is fascinating to me, and it relates to something I learned in a neuroscience class two years ago. Our brains are capable of integrating our tools into our cerebral cortex such that they become an extension of our minds. Think about driving — we almost feel like the car is a part of us. We know exactly the boundaries of the vehicle and how turning the steering wheel affects the movement of the entire entity. We are able to do this because we, in a sense, become one with the car. It becomes like a new appendage to our bodies and our minds.
The same thing can be said for an instrument or a computer. Consider the theremin mentioned in the text, which allowed players to interface with the instrument by positioning their hands in 3d space. Because computer music abstracts away from how the physics of how an physical instrument might have to behave, it can decouple form from function, enabling a whole new set of interfaces with our instruments. The text refers to these interfaces as “fantastical”; there’s an awesome opportunity to explore the myriad of ways we could create music.
While this opportunity is really vast, it might not always yield an intuitive instrument. From principle 5.9, we learn that smart instruments are often not smart. When you see a piano or a xylophone, you can kind of get a sense of how those instruments work. Pushing buttons or hitting things to trigger sounds. If I saw Romaineraca, it may not be as intuitive to use at first. Coding our music may also suffer from not being incredibly smart. On page 252, we see a comparison between computers and humans that explains how computers must follow clearly defined instructions. My thought is that in some cases, the computer can require such granularity that it may take away from the big-picture of music — the forms, themes, and structures. This is where Perry’s point about not always building entities from top-down is valuable. Building top-down (or bottom-up, I’d add) alone might not be enough. By building in both directions at the same time, I think you can achieve something magnificent. It’s like learning to play the instrument while you build it, adjusting from the side of the creator and the user. In that way, I think you can achieve something that’s both creative and unique, but also elegant and playable.
I want to end by talking about the marriage of technology with the arts and humanities by quoting from the text: “Our present-day separation between engineering and arts/humanities seems largely to be an artificial one”. The things we do often just arise out of curiosity, and hyper-specialization has the potential to make us myopic, ignoring our curiosity in the process. Often times, I hear on campus, “I couldn’t ever do [insert artistic thing here] because I’m doing [insert STEM thing here].” I mean, could you imagine if Benjamin Franklin said that to himself? “I couldn’t possibly invent bifocals because I’m too busy being a politician.”
What if Alexander Borodin had said “I couldn’t possibly compose music because I’m a chemist.” Today, we’ve developed a tendency to pigeonhole ourselves into specific fields by convincing ourselves that there exists no overlap between the things we do. I’m not saying we shouldn’t focus on the things we do, but we should allow ourselves the opportunity to think and be curious. Designing gives us the opportunity to embrace all facets of our existence, technological and artful. Think about the SLORK speakers, for example. This was a huge interdisciplinary design process. Woodworking, circuitry, and sound design, all with aesthetics! Now, aesthetics shouldn’t be an element of luxury products, as stated in the text. But I’d like to add that it shouldn’t be a luxury in our lives either. We don’t need to pigeonhole ourselves into a technological life without art or an artful life without technology. If we let our curiosity run free, we can achieve things that marry technology and art and include aesthetics.
