Cory Doctrow publicó ayer en el New York Times un ensayo llamado Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips (algo como “Delirios maravillosos sobre chips flexibles).
Comienza así: “La época de plástico creo la era de formas caprichosas. De repente una radio se podía parecer a una vaca lechera. Una silla se podía parecer a un huevo….Los diseñadores exuberantes podían explorar toda las formas e ideas locas, no practicas que podían asumir objetos domésticos.”
La idea que explora Doctorow es como la proliferación de chips baratos y programables esta inaugurando una era de “logica caprichosa” whimsical logic.
Señala como ejemplos el sitio Tokio Flash que vende relojes absurdos; el Fab Lab de MIT que permite diseñar objetos con un “cerebro”.
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8.12.05
Cory Doctorow pt. 2
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December 7, 2005
The Home Laboratory
Flights of Fancy on Flexible Chips
By CORY DOCTOROW
PLASTIC created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.
Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of "whimsical logic," chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever.
Take timekeeping. For a decade, it seemed that every alarm clock had the same crummy user interface, regardless of the manufacturer. Practically every digital clock used the same chip, a type known as an application specific integrated circuit, which is designed once and then manufactured by the millions. Those cheap chips flooded the market, turning clocklike functionality into a commodity, like the equally ubiquitous uncomfortable folding metal chair.
Application-specific chips could do just one thing. New programmable chips, called field programmable gate arrays, can do anything you dream up. What's more, programmable arrays can be whipped up in tiny batches for just a few dollars.
Soon, you will be able to do that at home. The new chips can be created using basic programming languages. Then, with XESS's XSA-200 logic board (xess.com), you can turn your designs into logic. Step up to XESS's pricier, more professional gear, and the designs can be burned onto blank chips, just as digital songs and videos are burned onto blank discs. The chip blanks cost $2 each in bulk.
Cheap programmable arrays have made timekeeping an area for experimentation. Casting aside the notion of digital clockworks as utilitarian machines, a watch can now be as absurd as the notion of time itself. There's no place more hospitable to absurd machinery than Japan.
Tokyo Flash (tokyoflash.com) is a Japanese Web site specializing in selling watches of great beauty and ridiculousness. I have a watch that tells me the time in binary, using two rows of light-emitting diodes. I have one that shows the time in a display reminiscent of a 1980's ghetto-blaster equalizer readout. I have one that blinks time in Morse code. One appears to be warning of imminent nuclear catastrophe, with a radiation trefoil that lights up to tell me that I need to add six to the number of hours in the throbbing bar on the right side.
Strangers come up to me on the street to ask about these watches. What do they signify? Are we going to die in a terrible nuclear accident? After I explain how the watch works, they laugh a while. They ask why I would wear such a ridiculous thing. Then they ask where they can get one. The oppressive one-size-fits-all approach to logic has left everyone with an unsuspected hunger for impracticality in our devices.
The experimentation with low-cost logic has taken root in the do-it-yourself and academic worlds, too. Neil Gershenfeld's celebrated, visionary FabLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fab.cba.mit.edu) enables anybody to design and execute one-of-a-kind objects complete with brains, yielding, among other ingenious projects, an alarm clock you have to chase down to prove that you're awake.
All invention starts with the impractical. The Web turned information interfaces from gnarly blinking cursors on library terminals into seizure-inducing salads of animated graphics, eye-watering color combinations and type set in teeny eye-strain-o-rama. It allowed an entire generation to experiment with ways of retrieving and presenting information, brute-forcing the problems and cherry-picking the best methods.
Once information systems moved beyond card catalogs and legal search systems, they were was free to take wing. Information interfaces may be crazy these days, but they're invariably more thoughtfully designed than their predecessors from the dumb-terminal Cretaceous.
Today, information design is a chi-chi professional trade that is so rarefied it has split into a series of subdisciplines with names like "user experience design," "library and information design" and "user interface design."
In 1977, Kenneth H. Olson, the founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, observed that "there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." He was right: nothing computers were used for at that time was useful at home. Home users rarely needed to crunch actuarial tables or take care of weekly payrolls.
But in 1979, the Apple II+ hit the market, and suddenly it made a lot of sense to have a computer at home.
I spent the summer of 1979 waiting to enter the fourth grade and learning to program in Basic, keying in programs from magazines and writing my own. Not one did anything remotely practical: they told dumb jokes, displayed bad art and played annoying, shrill tones. Each new impracticality was a fresh delight. I was hooked through the bag. Though it was years before I did anything practical with a computer, my fingers have hardly left the keyboard since.
Having a microchip factory in your household might seem like a ridiculous idea. Then again, you might already have one. If your children are playing with Lego Mindstorms - the popular programmable robotic kits - they're already writing logic, which is uploaded to a dedicated processor that makes their creations go. If you are ambitious enough, you can come up with something like the full-size, fully functional pinball machine made from Lego blocks (http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/10/lego_pinball_machine.html) that was displayed at Lego World 2005 in the Netherlands, using 13 programmable logic elements. Lego deserves credit for putting easy-to-program logic into the hands of children years ago (the Mindstorms robots appeared in 1998).
Once you are ready to graduate to toasting your own chips, you can get into projects like the one that Natalie H. M. Jeremijenko, now an assistant professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, began at Yale University and later ran with Bronx teenagers. They built "feral robot dogs" by modifying cheap toy robot dogs with custom brains that enabled them to sniff out chemical contamination in Starlight Park (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots). After a brief period of instruction, the teenagers could program the new brains, burn the programs into a chip and mount them.
The cost of a desktop chip-toaster has fallen to less that $200, and the software tools for programming a chip are free - but today, you need to be the kind of person who can write code in the Java or C languages to make a chip do much. Hardware hackers evangelize like crazy: Andrew Huang's excellent "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering" is a cookbook for anyone thinking of learning to make hardware sit up and beg. Ms. Jeremijenko's feral robots are lavishly documented by their builders on the Web. And M.I.T. has posted instructions for reproducing the FabLab for less than $30,000 - and FabLabs are popping up all around the world, including in rural parts of developing nations.
In 1979, my parents got rid of the teletype terminal that connected our house to a DEC minicomputer at the University of Toronto and replaced it with an Apple II+. Suddenly it was possible for a motivated child - me - to write code that made the machine dance. Your children may or may not be hacking microchips today - but give it a couple of more Christmas seasons.
Just imagine the presents.
Cory Doctorow is co-editor of Boing Boing, a Web log, and author of three science-fiction novels.
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