Building a low-pass filter at the #synth meetup.

Come join us at Svartbäcksgatan 65 in #Uppsala for Open #Hackerspace Day, the fun is still going on!

My Saturday started early, and my field work ended with unplanned hands on porcelain clay. My PhD is a dance between exhaustion and absolute marvel.

Another week. Another museum. This week the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm. I came here largely to see this one tool chest.

It's the Mästermyr toolchest. A 1000 year old chest filled with blacksmithing and woodworking tools. It's an incredibly important find. Beautifully preserved in the bog. The tools are wonderful. I'd seen pictures and read about these tools, but to see them up close. That hack saw is exquisite.

I wonder how the chest ended up discarded.

Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.

#neuhier
Wir sind die Forschungsgruppe Human Computer Interaction also Mensch Computer Interaktion! An der TU Wien, als Teil des Instituts für Informatik, forschen wir daran wie Technologien unser Leben und unsere Umwelt besser, gerechter und nachhaltiger machen können. Ausserdem gestalten wir einen wichtigen Teil der Lehre, der unsere Verantwortung als Techniker*innen reflektiert. In unserem Physical Design Lab basteln und bauen wir mit Studierenden an der Zukunft.

Unsere Forschung ist großteils in englischer Sprache, wir versuchen hier aber im Sinne der Wissenschaftskommunikation hauptsächlich deutschsprachigen zu posten.

Also, hallo, wir freuen uns auf spannende Gespräche