Teaching Technology with Technology PDF

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TEACHING TECHNOLOGY WITH TECHNOLOGY Kevin Henry Coordinator and faculty/ Product Design Columbia College Chicago IDSA ABSTRACT I use a lot of digital technology in my day to day teaching (CAD/CAM, graphic design, high quality printing, databases, animation, etc.) and yet I maintain that they are all...

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TEACHING TECHNOLOGY WITH TECHNOLOGY

Kevin Henry Coordinator and faculty/ Product Design Columbia College Chicago IDSA ABSTRACT I use a lot of digital technology in my day to day teaching (CAD/CAM, graphic design, high quality printing, databases, animation, etc.) and yet I maintain that they are all just tools like any other tools. Having grown up with drafting tools and two hands I understand the importance of exploiting whatever is most efficient and fastest and yet my students begin to believe that computer tools will do the design for them. I have begun to use the digital tools in two very different ways: First to document hands-on types of processes (sketching, rendering and model making) and secondly to explain manufacturing processes that I never had explained to me while I was a student. Utilizing these tools has allowed me to create material that emphasizes hands-on skills in a format that can be viewed over and over again. Much of this came out of my own frustration with the dearth of how-to material out there. The other impetus was lack of time. Once I have created a tutorial (on a hard drive somewhere or on-line) a student can go to it whenever and where ever. The students also begin to realize the emerging importance of communication in design. Kevin Henry, IDSA, received a BFA from the University of Kansas in Sculpture, an MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Industrial Design.from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to working as an industrial designer he built custom furniture. He teaches design theory and technology in both the product design program and the graduate architectural studies program. He can be reached at 312- 344-7381 or [email protected]. The web address is http://www.colum.edu

“Literature is the fragment of fragments; the least of what had happened and of what had been spoken was written down; of what had been written down, only the smallest fraction was preserved.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I begin with Goethe’s quote because it evokes a sense of loss in the process of transition. This loss for me goes to the heart of technology and some of its paradoxes: the first is that technology opens and closes possibilities because it generally supersedes other technologies, and the second is that technology itself has a physically determining aspect to it that intervenes with the content it is intended to provide. In Goethe’s mind the act of writing eliminated those experiences that could not be translated into written language while preserving those that could. Language becomes a container for recording experience and the first external technology for remembering. Friedrich Kittler the German media theorist calls this phenomenon the alphabetic monopoly. We have entered a new era of technology and the new monopolist is algorithmic rather than linguistic. The linguistic signifier has held sway over knowledge because of its ability to transform thoughts into tangible and transferable packets of information whether in the form of a book or a scrawled message. All direct communication began with either language or writing except of course that of mathematics, science, and the mechanical and fine arts. The information from these areas could not be parsed by the alphabetic system and as a result grew apart establishing their own rules, conventions and subtleties but in a way analogous to language. The escalation of change brought on by digital technology will in the coming years challenge the wealth of knowledge amassed through writing because of its ability to synthesize all media regardless of structure. However, if we just step back and define what technology actually is in the broadest sense it really comes down to an encoded system for doing things: for Goethe writing was a technology that compromised the less exact technology of speaking. Technology usually revolves around a system and the tools to implement the system. Drafting is in this sense a technology and as such it changes the way the technologist thinks/visualizes. Durer’s development of orthographic projection allowed the draftsperson to more accurately create projections and sections of any object while Brunelleschi and Giotto were codifying the rules of perspective that the Greeks had already demonstrated. Erwin Panofsky dedicated an entire book on the symbolic aspect of perspective arguing forcefully that it profoundly changed the way we see. This change is both intentional and sometimes unintentional. Friedrich Kittler recounts the purchase of a typewriter by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche when his eyesight began to fail. The apparatus was designed by a Danish pastor named Malling Hansen for aiding the blind and was quickly adopted by writers and journalists in part because of its mechanization of the writing process- something begun by Gutenberg’s moveable type. Nietzsche

subsequently wrote in his journal that: "Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking." P. 196 Discourse Networks 1800/1900 Friedrich Kittler. Nietzsche could already see that the change from stylus to machine was affecting the relationship he had to writing; let us say a certain self consciousness or self reflexivity had crept in. The change in technology allows the user a small window in which to reflect while the foreignness of one medium is slowly erased. Andrea Branzi goes so far as to claim that the avant-garde owes its existence to the unified reaction to technology and its effects on the fine arts. Technology’s paradoxical effect on the thing it is intended to assist is not new. McLuhan cites the acceptance of the typewriter as an example: “It was the telephone, paradoxically, that sped the commercial adoption of the typewriter. The phrase “Send me a memo on that,” repeated into millions of phones daily, helped to create the huge expansion of the typist function”. P. 231 Understanding Media. Email has changed the way we use the phone as well as how we write letters. The immediacy and simplicity of the medium makes it susceptible to frivolous correspondence and the illusion of connectedness much as the VCR’s taping capability initially gave us a sense of empowerment and possession even if we never watched what we had taped. The nature of word processing has not only speeded up correspondence it has also led to a ‘cut-and-paste’ sensibility in writing styles. This paper is a perfect example of what I am describing; I have “saved as” eight times with new names, used control “x”, control “v”, control “c” and the drag and drop option more times than I can count and I still want to make changes. What would Naked Lunch look/read like if William Burroughs’s had had a word processor? If technology exhibits such complexity then it merits serious consideration as to how it is used and incorporated into curriculum. It is a paradigmatic shift much like perspective was. Content and container have become more inseparable than ever. The old dictum ‘form follows function’ was useful for the early part of the century but it is now so internalized as to seem commonplace; of course form and function are related but what is more important is that the process of creating form and explaining form and communicating form are merging into one medium creating a new visual language so rich and interconnected that it will become the lingua franca of this century. If the process of design and manufacturing has adapted to the digital era then educators must use it like we once used a pencil: to describe everything. A BRIEF PRECURSOR TO CONVERGENCE Technology should not be used merely for the execution of things technical, but should instead become part of the explanation process. Technology should also be a visible component of the development process. The freshman class of 2000 is computer and Internet savvy, and they have grown up surrounded by this technology. It does not scare them and in fact it is an intuitive part of how they think. The virtual world is plenty tangible for them.

They do, however, need to be reminded that once upon a time there was no hypermedia and that certain people imagined a way in which multiple media could make a richer experience. Without some of this groundbreaking work, it is hard to say if visualization would have progressed in the manner it has. McLuhan’s own ideas about communication evolved until they finally took a very visual turn in The Medium is the Massage. This book breaks the alphabetic monopoly by communicating visually. The self-published books by Yale statistician Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations) add sophistication and depth to the understanding of the rich history of visual/textual information, and his earliest work actually predates the desktop computer revolution. Barbara Stafford has written extensively and persuasively on the richness of visual languages and knowledge in defiance of linguistic supremacy. But the two designers who still represent the most complex exploration of visual information are the Eames. The office of Charles and Ray Eames worked the then rigid boundaries of design with a fluidity unimaginable for the time and yet governed by an allencompassing philosophy that did not distinguish between information, furniture design, architecture and manufacturing. I mention them because of the films they made to help explain their design work. The Eames felt a need to explain what they did and how they did it. They also found willing clients interested in letting them visually explain many abstract concepts. They used media like they used fiberglass or plywood to explore formal possibilities in the execution of consumable products that would make life better. They also established through their practice some of the precursors to interactive multimedia- more in their exhibit design work but also in the layout of some of the films. The Power of Ten still resonates with younger web-savvy students because of its visual interface which allows multiple stories to be told on one screen. Charles and Ray Eames seemed to intuitively understand the monopoly of the alphabet; they seemed to understand that to grab the attention of the young people IBM was addressing there must be a synthesized narrative with visuals. Certainly the Internet would have opened their possibilities 1000 fold and they would have hailed Tim Berners-Lee as a pioneer in the campaign to break the lock language has had on culture. The hyperlink is perhaps the most profound innovation of the last halfcentury and yet like Goethe’s quote the full effect cannot be assessed. The hyperlink has done for the Internet what moveable type did for personalizing, dispersing and democratizing the book. And what is more profound is the fact that the hyperlink breaks the monopoly of the alphabet while still liberating language to go places faster than it had ever been allowed to go. It could be argued that all innovations go back to precursors and that the hyperlink might simply be an overactive footnote or that the use of sidebars facilitated browsing within traditional formats of written text but this would be selling it short. The hyperlink breaks the paradigm in part because it takes full advantage of a new medium that finally is able to combine all things – through the new monopoly of binary code and the speed of electronic switches or circuits.

THE MECHANICS OF CONVERGENCE Convergence occurred for me over a very long period of time. It came through experimentation and accident- one of the paradoxes of technology; it also came after excruciatingly long hours of learning a variety of programs and becoming familiar on a technical level with what the computer was actually doing. It didn’t hurt that in a former life I was a furniture maker and the shop tools (machines and hand tools) became extensions of how I thought about material and process. For some reason I never imagined that there might be a similar approach one could take with software; that there might in fact be more similarity between the kind of hardware I was accustomed to (tool steel and cast iron) and the other type (silicon). I began a lengthy process of looking at all the programs I used and testing out how they could be integrated. Graphic designers quickly learn the difference between vector geometry and raster images but industrial designer don’t always realize the distinction. All CAD software works with vector geometry but allows raster images to be mapped onto the model. CAD commonly comes equipped with some type of animation software that allows for flythroughs and these files can be saved in an .avi format which can in turn be dumped into a large variety of programs. The graphics programs that I use (Adobe Photoshop 5.5 Image Ready and Illustrator) have evolved over the past five years to have web options and animated gif options. With just a small arsenal of software programs and a fast computer a lot of simple interactive presentations can be created. I like to present design history with animated charts and graphs because it warms up cold data as a lively component of the narrative. I build simple spreadsheets in Excel and export them into Power Point and then animate them and intersperse them between a parade of images scanned from books to help visually tell the stories that people like Arthur Pulos or John Heskett have written. I expose my students to the art of presentation by using the medium for most of what I teach. The lectures become like miniseries that I have produced and they can be copied for viewing at home. I learned long ago from magazines like Fine Woodworking that technical information can be conveyed very well with images, illustrations and text and when animation is added the whole thing comes alive. Most of what I have just described is really history with the bells and whistles. The most important way I teach technology is through the use of a CAD database like Solidworks. I had found that in order to teach students how to create certain geometry with the program I would look around for a part that had that geometry and I would reverse engineer it. The CAD files could be inspected step by step which not only helped students to learn the program, but gave me a library of parts that could be rotated and zoomed with a laptop and a projector to help explain the design intent. Using the animation program for Solidworks I could also create exploded views, working models and a variety of other presentation materials for lectures because again these files were compatible

with many other programs. I could also go the extra distance and machine the part or a core and a cavity mold to help explain injection molding.

This not only breaks down the inhibitions a lot of students have with manufacturing processes it also shows how profound the CAD database has become for a wide variety of applications. I have also begun experimenting with rtv molds cast from cnc master patterns from which cast urethane parts can be produced. This kind of simulation is common practice in many large offices with good in-house facilities. I feel student’s need more than a rudimentary knowledge of these processes: they should be part of the skill set they leave with. Michael Schrage’s latest book Serious Play How the Best Companies Simulate to Innovate makes a very cogent argument that prototyping as an iterative process must be shared and understood by all interested parties: it cannot be a process that only the technician participates in. Making foam models based on 2-D control drawings is not prototyping. Learning to leverage the power of a CAD database and the other downstream processes helps students to learn about design iteration. I even use technology to get a point across because it is fast and accurate.

We have in-house cnc capabilities, which allow us the option of quickly modeling parts for testing and then machining. With a group of first year students last year I was able to put these theories to the test. I had assigned a pull toy project and required them to make a working prototype. In the first year no computers are used only traditional hand skills and shop equipment. Many of the students expressed confusion over the working parts even though I had brought books in with technical drawings on a variety of common mechanisms. We were already three weeks into the project when I realized that they needed to be able to manipulate these models to fully understand them. I took the black and white measured drawings and built the models in Solidworks and where there were elaborate cams represented with grided drawings, I scanned the images, cleaned them up in Photoshop and placed them in Adobe Illustrator. I then ran the outline operation to extract the shape, copied and pasted the vector geometry into Solidworks and had a one-to-one image that I could in turn extrude. I took these parts and nested them into a cam file and machined them the next day- this took an hour. The next day we had four mechanisms: two built using CAD/CAM and two using traditional methods. One model consisted of two traditional spur toothed gears, which would have taken considerable time to produce by hand. The cnc mill cut it while we waited and located the hole in the exact center. With these in hand the students could move along to the next step.

While I was not trying to get them to understand the intricacies of CAD/CAM at that early stage, I was able to document the whole process and show it to them at the end of their first Solidworks course so as to whet their appetite for its capabilities. I am now beginning the process of video taping demos and editing them down to short QuickTime videos that can be placed inside a database with interactive buttons and search options. This will finally allow for real instructional video readily accessible from a desktop machine or burned on to a CD-ROM. This will replace or augment the web pages I have designed in Dreamweaver that serve as a step-by-step tutorial. Even when doing my own demos it pleases me to know that as my students watch these they recognize the familiar shop environment and know that this has come out of a place they are familiar with; they also better understand the importantance of creative presentation. So many aspects of Industrial Design happen in remote places and that is a reality designers have to face. Digitalization is now making those distances seem less important and reinforcing the idea that design is increasingly taking shape over a network undefined by distance but unified by the common filter of binary codethe new lingua franca....