The coolest set of designers and devlopers you'll meet

Man it seems like Brendan Dawes has an insatiable curiosity. Throughout the course of these readings and discussions I’ve found myself trying to picture what his home must look like. I have it figured out to be a mix between my Great Aunt Louise’s house and the workshop of a toy inventor; shelves loaded with pictures, antiques, archaic technology, broken toys, miscellaneous projects and a thin layer of dust. It sounds hellish, but maybe that’s the mark of someone very interested in physical computing.

In these few chapters, I got the sense that Dawes is grounded in the physical world and is interested in how technology can improve his real life experiences. For instance, he created a device that would ring a real doorbell when someone moused over and off of an image on his website. And why would anyone do this? I don’t know his answer exactly, but in my mind it’s a re-affirmation this intangible websites we spend so much time creating are in fact being used to real, living people.

In another chapter he discusses a talk he gave that involved using Play-Doh as an interface. He created a setup where users could change the shape and amount of Play Doh seen by a camera, and that would change the speed at which a movie was played. His audience had mixed reactions and a few people questioned his motivation, since it had “no real use”.

It’s shocking that some people can only understand something in terms of it’s use; doing something awesome isn’t good enough unless it has a purpose assigned to it. This example is a great reminder to any and all designers and innovators not to let naysayers stop creativity. Good ideas are good ideas and without innovation, curiosity and experimentation we would be where we are technologically today.

Although this KRS-ONE quote is about Hip Hop, I think it has a broader application and I wouldn’t doubt that Dawes would agree.

You know, if you’re still using the technology the way the manufacturer intended, then you’re not doing Hip Hop. You have to take the technology the way the manufacturer intended and flip it into a representation of the streets, and then you’re doing real Hip Hop…