MUSIC 256A : Week 8

Chapter 8: “Manifesto” + Coda

Wow! Final reading response! It’s been a long and strange and tiring and exciting and eye-opening quarter!

Principle 8.11: Design is the embodied conscience of technology

I feel like I keep returning to this idea that “design” is a term that doesn’t really have its own concrete definition. It’s like a liquid in a container — it just takes the shape of whatever it’s surrounded by. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a bad thing, it just emphasizes the idea that design and morality and human-centered thinking kind of just need to be the basis of any engineering or technological education. Maybe engineering undergrad fundamentally doesn’t make that much sense when so many engineering students don’t feel the need to learn how to think about humanity unless they have to. There’s such a weird superiority complex in an engineering degree, especially at an elitist engineering university. Maybe we need to take more years to just learn how to think. My artistic passions have always taught me new things about the world and humanity and history — not my STEM classes, no matter how interesting I find them. I barely feel like I really know how to really really think, but I’m grateful I have those interests and those communities to continually push me. All of this is kind of an expression of my saltiness towards shitty, condescending, exclusionary, anti-arts attitudes in engineering education, but there’s so much lost in this attitude of finishing homework and copying answers and scraping by that I see and feel so often. There’s so much lost when students are overloaded with so much grunt work that they can’t process or think for the sake of supposed “rigor.” I feel like there needs to be more of an emphasis on the design principles and morality in this book as the basis of tech/engineering pursuits, not as an after-thought or an optional add-on.

Principle 8.23: Pause, for the small good things

All in all, the most impactful thing I took away from this book was an appreciation for useless technologies, in the same way I’ve always appreciated little nuggets of beauty in the mundane. There’s so much subtle beauty to appreciate in little bits of technology and design choices that I forget to notice the way I’ve learned to notice beauty in nature or in friendships.