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Arduino Forum Wearable Tech - What's next?
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Wearable Tech - What's next?

morgaine
morgaine over 12 years ago

I'll elaborate a little on the points raised about combining art with technology, specifically about assessment.

 

Although art/craft and sci/eng can yield very interesting results in combination, it's worth pointing out that they are so dissimilar in nature that they are almost entirely unrelated to each other, and so the perceived properties of the end result stem not from their combination but from each individually.  Let me explain.

 

The perceived merit of an item of art lies completely in the eye of the beholder --- one and the same piece of art can be seen as wonderful by one person and dreadful by another, and neither of them is right nor wrong.  Not even the opinion of the world's top expert in fine arts will make it good when another person's judgment finds it bad.  In other words, appreciation of the artistic qualities of an item is completely subjective.  (Note that many items of art have functional aspects as well --- that's separate, and dealt with now.)

 

The merit of a technological mechanism is entirely functional --- it either does the job for which it was designed successfully or poorly or not at all, and this assessment is measurable and objective.  Of course, different people may have different requirements and they sometimes shift the goalposts when assessing whether desired functionality has been met, but a mismatch between the assessor's requirements and the design requirements is no fault of the device or the technology.  Assessment of the item's merit measured against its own design goals is always objective.  (Note that many products of technology have artistic aspects as well, but those are only by coincidence related to the function and should be assessed on their own merits.)

 

This essential difference between the artistic merit and the technological merit of an item that combines both is so stark that they don't really affect each other --- the technical term for this is orthogonality.  Sometimes people think that some particular functionality is ugly or beautiful, but this is actually wrong because it confuses two issues, the function and the implementation of that function.  The same functionality could in principle be implemented in many different ways, and it could even be hidden entirely, so ugliness or beauty cannot be a subjective attribute of the functionality whose degree of success can be determined objectively.  Instead, the chosen implementation of the function usually has a physical aspect, and it is this physical aspect that may attract subjective merit or criticism.  Functionality actually has no artistic dimension at all.  (If we say that something "operates beautifully", that's really just a metaphor.)

 

The latter statement needs some elaboration, because scientists, engineers and technologists in general often use terms that are undoubtedly subjective when assessing a technical design:  for example, we often say that a good design is elegant, or efficient, or minimalist, and we might say that a bad design is convoluted, or inefficient, or over-engineered, and so on.  Doesn't this mean that the merits of our technology are subjective as well?  Not really, because again two things are being conflated, the functional merit (how closely it meets its design requirements) and how well it fares on secondary figures of merit that are not design requirements, eg. our individual concept of elegance.  (Requirements have to be measurable, otherwise compliance cannot be determined).  As was mentioned earlier, changing the goalposts does not make sense in engineering assessment.

 

This finally brings me back to my opening point about how to assess an item that combines elements of art and technology.  When adding a technological element like LEDs to a wearable, it's tempting to think that LEDs add artistic value.  They don't, at least not directly.  They add light, and it is the light that may or may not provide artistic value, and this same light could be generated by other means.  The LEDs can be assigned nothing more than a functional figure of merit based on whether they are working or not, whether they are bright enough or not, whether they are the desired colour, whether they use too much current, and so on --- and all of these properties appear on the datasheet.  They are objective, not subjective.  If you chose particular LEDs but you didn't find the end result artistically pleasing, this is not a failure of the LEDs --- functionally the technology is perfect (unless they're faulty) --- instead, it's a failure of your choice of light for your design.  Of course, somebody else could express surprise at your disappointment, because to them it looks beautiful.  The artistic merit is not a functional property of the LEDs. image

 

In summary, I'll answer Leslie's point #2 in this way:  if you've combined art with technology then you have inherently added function, so it can never be not functional (unless it's faulty of course).  The function may be nothing more than to add an effect for artistic purposes (for example light), but you can't sensibly apply artistic judgements to the function.  If the light that is produced is exactly that intended by the design then it's functionally perfect, even if the end result is artistically ugly as sin to every living being on the planet. image  Even when combined, art and technology live in inherently different spaces, and what they each contribute cannot be judged by a single measuring stick.

 

Morgaine.

 

 

Addendum:  The above has the rather curious consequence that despite combining them together in the same item, artistic and technological design are necessarily separate because the goal of one is a desired value judgment and the goal of the other is correct functional operation.  The mind can try to maneuver them both towards a common goal, but they're essentially different occupations.

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  • morgaine
    morgaine over 12 years ago in reply to johnbeetem +1
    For the purposes of this discussion, canaries and humans can be considered identical in their use of acoustic perception to process incoming sound waves. (Not surprising, since all life on Earth has extremely…
  • johnbeetem
    johnbeetem over 12 years ago in reply to morgaine +1
    Morgaine Dinova wrote: A species on a different planet could in principle look at some utter rats nest of code that I would never dare release because it is revolting even to me and releasing it publicly…
  • zengirl2
    zengirl2 over 12 years ago in reply to fustini +1
    I really like this and it reminds me of the work of Hi-Low Tech at MIT. I see that Jesse also follows the work of Hannah Perner. She is one of my faves working with soft circuits and I met her two year…
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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 12 years ago

    Hi Morgain,

    Very well communicated...I love that you looked at both sides thru out the your feedback. I appreciate that. It allowes the reader to view this view thru a prisim.

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  • e14 Contributor
    e14 Contributor over 12 years ago

    Hi Morgain,

    Very well communicated...I love that you looked at both sides thru out the your feedback. I appreciate that. It allowes the reader to view this view thru a prisim.

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