Info
sfr@media.mit.edu
http://ssfrr.com
MIT Media Lab, Responsive Environments Group / MS2
Expertise
★★ Fabrication & Craft
★ Design
★★★ Electronics
★★★★ Programming
★ Biology
★ Chemistry
What’s your favorite thing you’ve made?
Some of my most satisfying projects were small and made quickly. In 2012 I participated in a “Code Retreat”, where we pair-programmed a Game of Life implementation starting from scratch for 40 minutes, then discussed our approach, erased our code, changed partners, and started again. We ended up re-implementing 5 times, most people in several different languages.
The focus was on writing as deliberately, cleanly and elegantly as possible, so we didn’t actually finish any of the implementations in 40 minutes. The experience of working on something we knew to be transient was extremely valuable and freeing, especially in this age of infinite undo and constant version control.
In the end though, I actually wanted to see something work, so that night I finished it up and added a visualization using ncurses on the terminal. The satisfaction was a combination of finally finishing something that had been aborted so many times, a design I was happy with, and the lo-fi aesthetic of asterisks on a terminal screen dancing around.
What’s the most frustrating object you’ve used?
I rented an upright bass from a music shop in London for 2 weeks of UK shows, as flying with my bass was prohibitively expensive. This bass was extremely frustrating to play, especially being stuck with it for 2 weeks. It was a crappy student bass, and felt like it was working against me. It sounded bad, and felt bad. It was especially noticeable in contrast to the bass I rented from a friend in Prague for our continental Europe shows, which was a beautiful 200-year-old Czech bass that was a joy to play, and was responsive and smooth under my fingers. It was a good reminder that subtle differences in the way an interface feels and feeds back can have a dramatic effect on how satisfying it is to use.
What do you personally hope to get out of this class?
I often fall into the trap of over-abstracting my projects and getting caught up in building libraries and frameworks. In this class I’d like to work on realizing concrete ideas. I’ve also worked in the past with physical controllers for music performance, so I’d like to explore the intersection of control with tangible interaction and interface.
How can you contribute to the class?
My strongest experience is with embedded systems (hardware and firmware), web service development, and audio DSP.