Week 1

Day 1 and 2

As someone who has never really explored coding, programming seems like a big, scary word, something I was wary of exploring because of how daunting it was. While I was eager to understand it, the fact that I’d never done it before made me nervous.

But once we started learning Cygwin, I was surprised by how intuitive the process was. The logic behind each code, the simplicity of each command, and the joy when I figured out how to use a function myself made the entire process so engaging. I found it much easier to somewhat paraphrase and define every function in my own words, it felt much like learning the vocabulary of a foreign language. It took a while to get the hang of it, but the satisfaction when I could explain it to another classmate made me more confident.

A quote from one of our readings said, “computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters.”, and this really simplified the idea of programming for me. It’s just another material for makers to creatively explore; malleable, mouldable and with so much potential. Like Steve Jobs said in one of the videos we watched, it’s a tool that teaches you how to think — these thoughts really fascinated me.

However, my favourite part of these two days was learning the history of interaction design and computing. To learn that it dated all the way back to when people used these computations and calculations for things like astronomy, and its real debut in 1968 with the Mother of all Demos really surprised me as I assumed this field was one that dealt with advanced, modern technology and was just beginning to be discovered. What was even more surprising was that hints of concepts we use now were already in the works at that time, like social networking. I also came across a lot of terms that I was previously unaware of or unsure about, like Natural Language Processing, hardware sketching, and prototyping (this one was especially interesting to me, I learned that it’s very different from actual making and that it’s alright to think of completely radical ideas that seem impossible, because coding will eventually catch up.)

While reading about these ideas has been interesting, coming up with our own for the first assignment has been a bit of a struggle. It’s been a challenge to come up with a holistic, competent, relevant conversational agent that actually adds value to the given context, but I look forward to trying the Wizard of Oz method.