Livecoding for leverage

Design Guild NSW invited guest talk

I’d like to acknowledge and celebrate the First Australians on whose traditional lands we meet, and pay respect to the elders past and present.

who am I?

outline

| 11:05 | intro: livecoding (yay) | | 11:20 | but why? | | 11:25 | leverage in a cultural domain |

intro

but why?

leverage in a cultural domain

a lever is a (designed) interface

language = leverage (process design)

My topic is the shift from ‘architect’ to ‘gardener’, where ‘architect’ stands for ‘someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made’, to ‘gardener’ standing for ‘someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up’. I will argue that today’s composer are more frequently ‘gardeners’ than ‘architects’ and, further, that the ‘composer as architect’ metaphor was a transitory historical blip.

Brian Eno, Composers as Gardeners

First, programmers are trained to seek maximal and global solutions. Why solve a specific problem in one place when you can fix the general problem for everybody, and for all time?

Second, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale for being selfish… We are used to the idea of bootstrapping ourselves into a position of maximum leverage before tackling a problem.

Maciej Cegłowski, The Moral Economy of Tech

control & communication in the (livecoding) animal and the machine (Wiener)

ANU School of Cybernetics

come partner with us to help us figure it out

fin