Assignment One – Dhairya

#Mastery and Mimicry

I found Sep’s article an inspiring manifesto for how our tools should be.

##Self-Limitation
His first section about Self-Limitation, was ideologically empowering for me. I have always pondered what happens when our life is so full of technology that we loose control, how much is enough, should we the technologists start imposing ethical reasoning on our work. This self-debate has led me to a cyclic argument of ‘it will be when it will be’. With his examples of the bacteria and the body, I found a beautiful analogy to technology and humans – that in chaos peace will find its way. Having rested this argument with myself, I can move on.

##Accessibility
This section talked to me of the ripple effects our tools can have outside of their intended use. Specifically his example of Gandhian DIY loom and its effects on the socio-political mindset of Indians was interesting, partly because thats is my heritage and more so because I could find some similarity in my past project – ThinkerToys – which started out as a hack but had educational and environmental impact. It was a good reminder about the nature of tools I should keep building – upstream and accessible.

##Cyclicity
Particularly his argument about metrics struck me, how I should re-evaluate my work and re-measure it in terms of its qualified purpose and not its quantified goal. Lots of learning here for me.

##Heart and Head
Oh my god, this was poetry, I was tripping through each word. Sep doesn’t paint an ideal unachievable vision but rather dissects into the heart of a builder. I am still trying to soak in parts of this. I found beautiful his idea of what our tools should serve – connection, intuition, gift, purpose. I feel like taking longer walks, getting back to analog photography, sketch with charcoal more, and write more poems – connect to myself to make the tools in my most pure image.
#Augmenting Human Intellect

This was a rather heavy read an interesting one in terms of its historical perspective. Overall I found Doug’s motivations for augmenting human intellect still valid today, although written in the 70s, many of the things he envisions aren’t a functional reality today. I liked his approach by proposing his H-LAM/T model of an operating system-like workings of the mind. Having established his model made it much easier to then digest his proposal. Something I felt we do less often today, there is less ground theories that aid our explorations, mostly hunches. Yes discovering by doing is good and more often leads to breakthroughs; but having a model to go by is more systematic wandering. I still haven’t made complete sense of his proposal, but to me when I build tools I now would like to spend more time investigating the problem from a psychological and evolutionary perspectives.