Physical Computing

As for the next installment of our discussion meetings, here is the run down about what you will see.

Matt reports to the group what he found to be the strongest points within the reading.

First he explained to us how Dawes actually hooked up his doorbell to go off every time someone visited his site. Although we could see how that was cool,
at the same time we realized how annoying it had to be. The message though wasn’t about the end means but the process to get there.
Start from the very beginning with something simple, and then work your way up

Another Strong point was to not try to reinvent the wheel. Multiple times it was discussed how that is true and helpful. If you’re not spending all your time
trying to restart from scratch you have more time to focus on other things like details.

The next topic was a little bit controversial. The section was label Jazz and Computing. The message was if it works go with it, even if it’s hacked. It was argued that enjoy happy mistakes, but from a developers view accidents only mean trouble down the road. With code it’s really black and white with no gray, if something in your code is happening that really shouldn’t you’re probably going to run into an app issue down the road.

Finally Dawes stresses bringing in real life experience into what we do. For example with designing a game, people have a tendency to move around depending on what they do in a game. That gave way to the idea behind the Nitendo Wii.

This was a longer discussion then last time.