All students should have the opportunity to be creative with code
This is a useful initiative, despite its narrow focus on engineering and science. It would be great to see the companion film which profiles creative arts and design professionals who regularly use programming as part of their practice/work.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Design Principles and Practices: a knowledge community
SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES, Japan
Proposals for In-Person Presentations Due: 6 December 2012
"The International Conference on Design Principles and Practices, its associated design journals, the On Design Book Series and the Design News Blog are sites of discussion which explore the meaning and purpose of design. Participants in these forums also speaking in grounded ways about the task of design and the use of designed artifacts and processes. The Conference, Journal, Book Imprint and News Blog support a cross-disciplinary knowledge community, bringing together researchers, teachers and practitioners to discuss the nature and future of design. The resulting conversations weave between the theoretical and the empirical, research and application, market pragmatics and social idealism.
In professional and disciplinary terms, the conference, journals, book series and online media traverse a broad sweep to construct a transdisciplinary dialogue which encompasses the perspectives and practices of: anthropology, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, business, cognitive science, communication studies, computer science, cultural studies, design studies, education, e-learning, engineering, ergonomics, fashion, graphic design, history, information systems, industrial design, industrial engineering, instructional design, interior design, interaction design, interface design, journalism, landscape architecture, law, linguistics and semiotics, management, media and entertainment, psychology, sociology, software engineering, technical communication, telecommunications, urban planning and visual design – to name some of the design disciplines."
(Common Ground)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Udacity: open courseware for software engineering
"We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth. Udacity was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for very low cost. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.' The class was twice profiled by the New York Times and also by other news media. Now we're a growing team of educators and engineers, on a mission to change the future of education."
(Udacity, Inc., 2012)
Fig.1 "CS253: Web Application Engineering. Learn about engineering web applications with Steve Huffman! By the end of the class, you will have built your own blog to share with the world."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Equator: interdisciplinary research centring on the integration of physical and digital interaction
"The IRC brought together researchers from eight different institutions and a variety of disciplines which address the technical, social and design issues in the development of new inter-relationships between the physical and digital.
A series of experience projects engaged with different user communities to develop new combinations of physical and digital worlds and explore how these may be exploited and how these may enhance the quality of everyday life.
A series of research challenges explored (a) new classes of device which link the physical and the digital, (b) adaptive software architectures and (c) new design and evaluation methods, which draw together approaches from social science, cognitive science and art and design. Equator involved over 60 researchers, with a range of expertise encompassing computer science, psychology, sociology, design and the arts.
Equator aimed to forge a clearer understanding of what it means to live in an age when digital and physical activities not only coexist but cooperate. This is the age we are now entering, and it promises radical change in how we communicate, interact, work and play – that is, how we live. But to fulfil that promise requires more than new technology. We need equally new ways of thinking about technology, and thus also about ourselves.
Everyone recognises that the computer is moving beyond the workplace. As digital systems (like the Web) converge with computer networks and cellular phone communications, new devices and services proliferate – many of them mobile, or embedded in the environment. Yet few people fully grasp the potential impact of such technological fluidity and ubiquity. Most current research is still rooted in the workaday world of the desk-bound PC. But look at the possibilities – for our home life, our schooling, community care, even our city streets.
These are just some of the areas which Equator explored, through the development of coherent new systems and devices. Ultimately, however, we were less concerned with solutions to specific design problems than with the bigger picture these solutions entail. This is what united so diverse a community of researchers. For it is only by sketching the bigger picture that we can begin to fulfil the promise offered by our new age, and so improve the quality of everyday life in years to come."
(Equator)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Women in technology: Limor Fried
"Limor Fried was the sort of third-grader who took apart VCRs for fun. Gradually, she discovered that a hobby could become a degree -- a bachelor's and then a master's in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Finally, she discovered it could become a business. During her student years, Fried would post photographs and detailed instructions of her latest experiments in hardware hacking. First, she built an audience, and then a company, Adafruit Industries. ...
Fried's approach is sometimes called 'open-source hardware' -- similar to open-source software, but instead of the source code being open and malleable, the source materials are. Is there something anti-corporate in the way that she likes to encourage the hacking of consumer products?
'Absolutely not, I'm totally a staunch capitalist,' she says. She just thinks hardware hacking is good business. Adafruit has become something of a business incubator itself, inspiring others to start similar businesses."
(David Zax, Fast Company)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
