Designers should code
The first week of this course has been exhilarating and tiring all the same. Thursday started with an introduction to programming, with the question “Should designers code?” A class that started with this question was certainly made for me.
Following the discussion, we spoke about the ‘Mother of all Demos’[1], a presentation made to exhibit the working of a computer and a mouse. I watched a part of the video where he showed a shopping list he had made for this wife — he arranged and re — arranged it, based on what order he thought he would buy the things in. I drew a comparison between this, and Microsoft Excel, that we use today to make lists. Following this, we looked at one of the first touchpads ever made, by Bill Buxton. We also looked at the Crosspad[2] that imitated a present day Wacom tablet. It made me think of how technology related to screens and human interaction had changed so much over the years. How the job of a simple scanning machine was done using such a long process few years ago, how the need for a certain kind of technology was discovered years ago, only the hardware had made an advancement.
Next, we worked a little with Command line, and learnt a few commands. It was a step back into the technology of the computer, because commands didn’t just take place with a click, you had to physically type out each command.
On Thursday itself, we started working on our A1 assessments — we decided to make an interactive device for the N5 canteen, which would make ordering food simpler for the students as well as the person taking the orders.
On Friday, we started the class with a few logical reasoning riddles that needed the understanding of binary to solve. It was very interesting to see how with the powers of two, one could find multiple solutions to a very large number, using a very small number of outputs. We watched a video on Eliza, one of the first chat bots, which responded to questions simply based a “pattern matching” — the conversation with her on the website seemed like she could understand what I was saying.
The first week of this class itself has got me rid of the slightest doubt I had in the beginning, and I’m eagerly looking forward to what the world of coding has got for me.
[1] InnovationSRI. “Part 2 of 10: Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing: SRI’s 1968 Demo (Highlights).” YouTube. December 11, 2008. Accessed July 29, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xptc6f3Daoo&list=PLCGFadV4FqU2yAqCzKaxnKKXgnJBUrKTE&index=2.
[2] “CrossPad.” Wikipedia. July 14, 2018. Accessed July 29, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossPad.
