Week 06 - Untoolkit Electronics Inputs

What's under the hood of blackboxed electronics components? Where do the words we use for electronic computing come from anyway? We're reading the chapters "Button" and "Analog" from Software Studies

Written by : Thijs

What are we doing this week?

What to do about words we don't know? --> Discuss them together and gather them in a word cloud.

Buttons

Andrei: people expect rewards when they press a button. Something will happen when you press a button --> continuity. Is there always an effect? There are different kinds of buttons --> physical vs metaphoric, screen-based, digital, virtual, graphic.

One click will trigger many actions behind the screen.

Mechanical buttons are connected to a mechanical system. There are also simple click buttons that work totally digital.

How does a button become desirable? -> Color, size, 'don't click this button'. --> design

Control

Feedback is important -> you want to feel a response

Affordance -> make buttons recognizable.

What is the goal of the text?

Who is the target audience? --> designers of all kinds People who are interested in culture and psychology

Culture philosophy --> thinking deeper

What is a computer? How do you answer such questions? How many parts can you remove from a computer until it's not a computer anymore? --> deconstruction

How do you know what is good? Is it personal or widely accepted?

Ethics -> stand behind your norms and values. Why participate in actions you don't support?

What are criterion? --> terms of quality?

Why is it important that texts about buttons exist? --> for looking up patterns --> history --> affordances

What is it called when you don't care about how something works, as long as it does what you want? --> instrumentalism

Dangers of instrumentalism: --> not idealistic, like bitcoin. It was a payment method, and now it is an investment

The danger of being too philosophical --> thinking too much

Proprietary versus open source / generic

When you create something, you have copyright. All rights are reserved. You can also say : as long as you mention me, I'm fine. You stay the author.

Licenses --> you buy the right to use something

Open source --> you can see and adjust everything. It is public domain, it can not be closed.

Proprietary --> you have no acces to the source code, only the surface (product) what you paid for.

When you buy a table, it is yours and you can do whatever you want with it.

Analog

Second world war airplanes -> balistics

Mechanische computers --> imitation game

Why is analog music better than digital?

Synthesisers stayed an

Digit : 1-9

Binair: 0-1

Analog is better than digital for music, because analog has an infinite resolution. All information is contained. Digital has to stick to a grid, so information is lost.