Memories
Today we began the first major projects of the semester: Graphical User Interfaces. These projects are meant as vehicles to teach us programming and graphic design skills. As we work on the projects, we’ll be taking skills courses concurrently. There are two projects: Touring Turing, and Memory as Information in Motion.
The common thread between the projects is that of memory. The Touring Turing project deals with developing a graphical user interface for the Turing machine. I’m not in this group, so I can’t describe in detail what a turing machine is, other than to say it is the basis for all modern computational thought. It is the theory behind the practice of computing. So any computer works along the principles described by the Turing machine.
The Memory as Information in Motion project is much broader and less well-defined. I’m in this group, and, well, I can’t really elaborate on the project because it’s still in its nascent stages. Whatever we come up with has to involve memory, and it has to offer a graphical user interface to observe and interact with the project. Yeah, it’s vague.
A quick note that Graphical User Interface in this situation does not mean we’re dealing with widgets in the Windows operating system, or something of that nature. Instead, we’re dealing with the principles of the Graphical User Interface: how do you display information? The widgets and windows you see on the Mac and on Windows machines are based on Graphical User Interface principles, and they are expressions of those principles. We are to develop a set of principles to express our ideas of memory. I’m working with a partner to brainstorm and develop some ideas for Thursday’s class. Tomorrow and Friday we have a skills class focusing on graphic design (in my case) and on programming for those not familiar with programming.
We have four weeks to develop and build this thing, so I can imagine we’ll be working pretty hard. Still, I’ll make an effort to keep up with the blog during this time. I don’t know how much I can or will be able to describe of my project work during the process, but I’ll certainly be happy to share the results, whatever they may be.
For those technically inclined, we’re using the Processing programming language. Processing is a thin layer over Java (or so I’m told – haven’t actually used it yet), and it was developed with designers in mind, so it’s easy to grasp and allows you to do powerful things without having to know too much about programming. The website probably has a much better description of its capabilities, if you’re interested in learning more about it. I’m just excited to be learning about design principles…