2010 Sketching in Hardware Workshop

Art Center College Of Design, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

Sketching in Hardware is a three day workshop to be held July 23 - 25, 2010 at the Encounter Restaurant inside the historic LAX Theme Building at the Los Angeles International Airport. The focus of this annual meeting is on the design, use and teaching of physical computing toolkits. Current electronic hardware is enormously powerful, but much of that power is out of reach of people without a specialized formal education in electrical engineering and computer science. Sketching in Hardware brings together leading international representatives from a variety of fields to discuss digital hardware prototyping for people with little or no engineering background, and to identify how to advance it. The meeting presents new ideas, identifies challenges and opportunities, and introduces people who go on to collaborate on new methods, techniques and technologies. The workshop aims to continuously lower the barrier to entry into working with digital hardware by creating a dialogue between disciplines (such as hardware manufacturing and industrial design education) that rarely interact directly. Its goals are to: 1)Encourage development of new toolkits and expansion of existing ones; 2) Support the interconnection of existing toolkit technologies; 3) Create software that support explorations of electronics hardware exploration by non-specialists through interfacing with familiar software creative tools; 4)Identify common challenges and create opportunities for collaboration in solving those challenges. Sketching in Hardware is the only annual gathering devoted exclusively to the discussion of digital hardware tools for non-specialists. The information shared at the meeting creates opportunities for cross-toolkit functionality that broadens users' access to technologies, shares experiences and techniques for designing with these tools and teaching with them. Toolkit designers and manufacturers use the information they share to build on each other's work, and get direct exposure to educators and users at the leading edge in terms of using their tools. Educators find new tools to work with, guide the development of existing tools, and share techniques and resources for teaching. By creating a discussion among people working in this field, the information shared at the meeting helps keep toolkit makers from reinventing wheels that others have already developed, creates opportunities for cross-toolkit functionality that broadens users' access to technologies and shares experiences and techniques for designing with these tools and teaching with them. The workshop regularly leads to the development and dissemination of new tools for working with electronics and encouraging computational thinking. It regularly leads to the creation of new techniques and the cross-pollination of important information across disciplines.