blacklog

I’m teaching IML400 at USC again this Spring. So fun. I am extremely grateful that my employers at Wemo Media are letting me do this. I am sure they are aware that letting me keep a teaching front will only benefit my involvement in the company.

The semester kicked off in an interesting way with an event featuring the recent work of two thirds of my thesis advisors from the Media Lab. Reas and NickM presented their book 10 PRINT [babble] GOTO 10 and sustained a long and interesting discussion with a bunch of other digital humanists about the digital text and other [digital] things.

Going back to the subject of my class, I have to say I was very happy with the results I got from the Fall 2012 edition. In this page you can find links to the class websites and their final projects. Some of them are fairly interesting in terms of concept and execution —like this one and this one— and over all I believe we reached my goal of helping them learn how to learn. I feel they got to a point where we could have continued with a next semester of serious design and interactive storytelling work. Perhaps in the future I will be able to teach a season two of creative web production, but I am actually not sure I am ready to push the boat into deeper waters yet, so I will remain teaching at an intro level for a while.

I am excited to have a cool teacher assistant this semester —Adam— a USC PhD candidate who develops awesome games and recommended me a great intro to javascript book [eloquent javascript] that will help us a lot later in the semester.

We are generally familiar with the idea of programming as writing code, but there are many other ways to program, like making circuit boards for example.Using examples like this as metaphors and having alternative ways to represent and visualize the structure of a computer program can be of great help to understand how it works. This alone has been a good reason to inspire developers and educators in a number of efforts to develop computer programming interfaces that provide a visual aid to writing code. Some examples are MaxMSP, Quartz Composer, vvvv, Morphic, Scratch, and the more recent Light Table of Kickstarter fame.

The programmer’s interaction with the program, however, has remained limited to the traditional inputs available to a computer: the mouse and the keyboard. The keyboard might be one day replaced by voice recognition as the best available input device for writing, and the mouse offers a very limited single point input to the graphical user interface. This limitation is likely to have greatly influenced the design of the visual programming systems I mentioned before, and it is interesting to think in which ways new systems might take advantage of new input interfaces. Since it’s inception, the computer input/output loop remained immutable until very recently. Today the emerging trends of miniaturization, mobility and multiple touch screens have completely rewritten the role computers play in society. In the near future, we can definitely expect computers to exhibit a large variety of form factors and input/output solutions.

With ScriptKit, Buza explores this problem in the realm of the touch interface as represented by Apple’s iPad. In his own words:

ScriptKit is a touchable programming environment for building simple mobile prototypes on iPad using native iOS UI components and social media APIs, available via an intuitive drag and drop interface.

This means ScriptKit not just proposes a new way to design programing interfaces in multiple touch devices. It also incorporates native support for experimentation with available web services through their APIS, making this environment stand out as a practical tool to prototype and test viable networked/mobile touch based software designs.

And by the way, the nice logo with the building blocks was conceived and designed in Los Angeles by me ^_^

Coda: Here are two interesting readings on the design of programming environments (courtesy of DribNet): Learnable Programming and Visual Programming, does it suck?

I just finished a new video for MIT CTL with Max. It is basically a continuation of the video featured in my previous post.

My favorite part of the video narrates the story of the horse manure crisis of the 1890s, where a significant group of world class urban planners predicted that 20th century cities were going to be buried in horse shit by 1930 because of horse population growth, failing to acknowledge cars as a legitimate urban transportation alternative, even though cars had already began to be manufactured commercially. Classic.

Last month I worked with BuzaMoto on a website for the MoMA Armory Show 2012. Mud made the website and I provided the content artwork for the main feature of the site: A personalized virtual BobbleHead creation tool.

These BobbleHeads are offered by MoMA as an extra token for people that buy access to the live stream of the Armory Show closing event: a live performance by mexican chill wave band Neon Indian. In addition to this, the collection of generated BobbleHeads will be projected on stage during the performance.

Aside from it being an interesting fundraising participation system, momaarmoryshow.org is an excellent example of a seamless, low-effort online transaction experience. I would probably spend a lot more money on digital content if other online stores made shopping as easy and pleasant as momaarmoryshow.org does.

I designed most of the BobbleHeads based on dead celebrity artists (Frida, Picasso, Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, etc.), together with a couple of celebrities from pop culture, one science celebrity, and a monster made from body parts of several cadavers. This flickr link features the complete BobbleHead collection in the form of a wallpaper, including a famous superhero that didn’t make it to the website for obvious copyright reasons.

Here are the two BobbleHeads I made so far:

Update: Mud’s post in the BuzaMoto blog.

About a month ago, I made a new backup of the data from tinyDoodle. It is available as a text file consisting of 31.2 megabytes of integer coordinates of 2d points that are put together as a very long sequence of line segments. It’s formatted in JSON in a straightforward way. It doesn’t matter to me how silly this application sounds, there is something I still find incredibly compelling about the ability of computers to capture drawing gestures as sets of numbers that can be performed as drawing gestures that are sets of numbers. I think this drawing-to-number quasi-biyection is priceless.

I was recently talking about how different interaction models determine differences in communication, and how interesting it is for me to look at scenarios where a group of humans is restricted to use non-conventional channels to communicate with each other. Like putting two persons in a room and have them play a game where all they can do is make drawings to each other. Blackboard, paper, whiteboard, it doesn’t matter. Their communication will not be very efficient this way, but they will get very creative at drawing, and maybe come across some ideas that they would have never explored any other way.

More recently, Buzamoto launched a cool iPad app called Pendipity that offers a similar functionality to tinyDoodle, only better. It features a more advanced, yet very simple, drawing interface, and it implements a seamless chatting experience using a Node.js server. In terms of space, the difference between both systems is clear. When someone initiates a shared Pendipity session, the system will look for another available user to create a drawing team of two, and TinyDoodle is an open space where anybody can access the same drawing at any given time. So tinyDoodle is like a public blackboard, and Pendipity is like a shared notebook where every visitor is paired with someone else to draw on a single page of the notebook at a time. In Pendipity, a different session means a different drawing. In tinyDoodle, there will always be the same single drawing, around thirty something mb long at this point. The drawing is so dense, you actually have to watch it in chunks to make sense of it.

The following image is a collaboration Buza and I made on Pendipity. We didn’t find out we were drawing together until later, when we talked about it by chance. The idea of collaborating with somebody close to you without knowing who they are is bizarre, to say the least.

Photo by @carrerajj

Last weekend, @paseusted invited me to take part as a speaker in a new technology event called Gira Telmexhub. The first round of conferences took place in the city of Puebla, where I joined an interesting group of people to exchange ideas about technology, creativity, and all kinds of social issues. A couple of projects that called my attention were basetrack.org presented by @terukugayama, and publiclaboratory.org presented by @321adam.

I used my time on stage to tell the story about my days in the MIT Media Lab, how I got there (thank you G), who I worked with, what I learned and achieved, and how this experience helped me reshape my ideas about art and technology. Some time later, I uploaded a PDF of my slides, following a request to share them I got from a member of the audience on twitter.

Sometimes I just feel like making another icon.