Make It Simple
In the space between the KISS principle and DIY philosophy

'David Cuartielles David Cuartielles

“There is something obscure in working with electrons, and it has to do with their ability of being always negative … it can become a little depressing sometimes.”
D. Cuartielles on the concept of the electron at Konstfack, Sweden, 2006

Upgrade your Knowledge

Simplicity in knowledge doesn’t aim to take away the beauty of complex structures. It looks for easier ways to bring that complexity to people. If we look into learning as an iterative process of acquiring knowledge in a certain field, simplicity would mean to take small steps at a time, upgrading our understanding of the system at each step. When looking back at the staircase of our knowledge, after climbing up hundreds of simple steps, we would still see the same system, and its complexity wouldn’t seem such to us. However, the system would still be the same.

Initiatives like Arduino, OpenFrameWorks, Processing, or Python focus on the idea of upgrading our understanding of the world through small steps, making the complex simple. Through the development of different projects, workshops, talks, and performances these projects’ creators show how it is possible to open up knowledge areas by using the right message and proper dissemination models.

As creators we constantly find ourselves in the situation of making new systems that should be simple to operate and use; we try to follow the KISS principle. At the same time, we are constantly willing to learn new things while studying the possibilities of different sensors populating our everyday gadgets. Technology evolves at an ever-increasing pace and we need to upgrade our knowledge continually. Since there are plenty of contents available online in our connected existence, we can become our own teachers if the knowledge is packaged in the right way. The DIY philosophy, inherited from the hacker culture, populates the Internet with “how to” guides that help us to learn as if we were following a recipe while baking a cake.

It is possible to become part of this flow of constant creative consciousness. Electronic Artists and Interaction Designers share their experiences and talk about how they do things openly on the web. Their secrets are unveiled in front of a mixed audience of academics, practitioners, casual surfers and students.

Simplicity concentrates on ways of simplifying the technical aspects surrounding electronic arts and interaction design creation. It looks into the latest upgrade to the system: how to interact with the physical world. This upgrade will definitely not be the last.

People for People: Designing Systems

We live in a universe of electronic appliances that interoperate with each other, augment our cognition, and enhance our lives. All those hardware and software pieces have to match seamlessly for users to be able to access content and information in general.

At the current level of development, machines are made by people. So are interactive artifacts, whether in computers, phones, or embedded systems. The landscape of digital technology driven devices is becoming too complex. We have to distinguish between phone, PDA, computer, smartphone, console … in terms of the type of operating system they run and the type of hardware. However, the way we interact with them is becoming more and more standardized, bridging the understanding and ways of using those the-same-but-different artifacts.

Therefore, hardware vendors develop specific toolkits for engineers and designers to learn how the new technology will work. This will allow them to anticipate market changes, and create future products. Designers are those that create for people. They stand on the other side of the line between the object and the user. In particular, the young discipline of interaction design has started to analyze hardware as if it was the missing link between users and systems. The crossroad of electronics and education was, until recently, a domain reserved for engineering students. This situation has changed, and many universities have decided to teach the future designers about the relationship between form and function.

Suspension of Disbelief: Interaction Design

Interaction designers are the filmmakers of contemporary everyday artifacts. Their work consists in creating the illusion of devices that will later be manufactured for a bigger audience. They create interfaces, physical or virtual, which run on machines made by electronic engineers, wrapped in boxes by production engineers, and based on ideas by industrial designers.

The goal of the interaction designer is not just to convey certain aesthetic principles within the form of the devices he/she creates, but to study new ways of aesthetic interaction forms. Current technology allows us to easily explore fields like palpable computing where the physicality of the interaction rules how the device will read the input from the user.

This field of design has brought a different way of looking into the use of electronics within academia. Suddenly microchips, resistors, wires and sensors become the new paint of this new type of design. Circuit boards become canvases on which to paint new ways of interaction, and not just relationships among volts and bits. Prototype is the new black; the mock-ups from industrial designers are now populated by half-functional pieces that are capable of illustrating concepts in new ways.

A Way to Try it out: the Prototype

A prototype is a product wannabe. When designers want to test whether an idea could sell in a mass market, they make prototypes that are tried out on a group of test persons. Prototypes are the suspension of disbelief of product design. On some occasions designers will just look into small details regarding cognitive interaction for a certain device. At other times they will want to enhance the physical layout of an artifact including a simulation of the real functionality. However, a certain understanding of electronics is needed in order to prototype future devices.

It could also be a small-scale version of an art installation, not fully finalized. Electronic Artists are moving beyond the desktop experiences. More art pieces require direct interaction from the user at a cognitive level, and artists learn how to master electronics as a new material.

Whether in Art or Design, this hobby-like way of looking into electronics has a name that has been around for some time: Do-It-Yourself. The new creator likes to experiment him/herself whether it is possible to make things work. In a way, the original hacker’s philosophy has infected these fields.

Also the vehicles for knowledge sharing are becoming an important tool for communities of artists/designers. Online forums, email lists, wikis and blogs report hundreds of experiments and workshops where creators meet to build up their knowledge together … sharing.

Dare to Share: Collaborative Knowledge Creation

One of the key issues behind the DIY philosophy has always been the so-called “how to” guides. Step-by-step guides populate thousands of Internet websites, inviting people to try things out and ‘Do-It-Themselves’. Knowledge sharing has always been one of the most challenging ideas from the hacker’s philosophy.

On the other hand, the world of design and art has always surrounded the author with an aura of magic and mysticism. If a design or an art-piece is good, the creator is elevated to the status of a contemporary god. The production process has to be hidden in order to protect the author’s intellectual property rights. This model doesn’t really apply to our newly constructed collaborative universe of DIY authors. They try things out and discuss their findings in a distributed-always-connected network. Collaborators solve problems around the clock. Authorship is questioned through the process of creation. Not only has the world of ideas changed the physical location where the prototypes take form. The laboratory used to be a closed space for engineers and scientists. With the new toolkits, anyone can afford a small laboratory at home.

Laboratory: Back to the Physical World

The idea of the laboratory has been transformed thanks to the introduction of alternative ways of production linked to the current demand in new media. We could define a laboratory as a place where people meet for creating as a community. In order to create such a space, the people, ideas and tools are needed.

One of the main constraints within this definition of laboratory is the need of tools. Until recently, tools have been reserved for those counting on the economic power to acquire the right ones. Since the appearance of open source, followed by the more recent birth of open hardware, the laboratory has been transformed. Alternative licensing models allow access to toolkits for those with fewer resources, which has produced unforeseen results.

There have been many successful attempts in creating toolkits. During the last few years we have witnessed the growth of Linux as an open source operating system, while many of its derivatives are like parasites on our computer systems, and convince more and more people of the need for a self-supported open source software community. Within the arts field we saw PureData and Processing as powerful interfaces for multimedia production. From the programming world we adopted Python, and the most recent of them all, OpenFrameWorks, a collection of libraries for simplifying the creation of computer vision based art pieces. One of the first successful tools ever made as an open hardware tool for prototyping computerless interactive systems is Arduino; initiated as a collaboration between two European universities, it has infected the education system all over the planet within one year of coming into existence.

Don’t Conclude: Upgrade

The term “upgrade” has been taken from technology. Knowledge evolves together with our way of looking at the world. All the variables that compose our insignificant time-slot within the general existence of the universe are fed by millions of inputs of data. Our understanding of the world, as well as our own way of functioning as humans, both at a physiological, and at a social level, depends on our ability to update (upgrade) to the latest theoretical framework, getting the latest tools both conceptually, and for more empirical experiments.

Simplicity concentrates on ways of simplifying the technical aspects surrounding electronic arts and interaction design creation. It looks into the latest upgrade to the system: how to interact with the physical world. This upgrade will definitely not be the last.