The Playful Entrepreneur by Mark Dodgson

Author:Mark Dodgson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300233926
Publisher: Yale University Press

Digital craft

Digital technology profoundly affects the world in which we work and how we behave, and it has huge consequences for how, as well as why, we play. Whether it is playing with Lego bricks or using computer-aided design tools, craftspeople use their tactile and visual skills to explore, build and demonstrate using instruments. In recent years, new virtualization technologies have enhanced the ability to play with a range of tools that allow skilled people to craft imaginative and innovative new products and services. The tools include multi-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD), 3D printing and virtual and augmented reality. What these tools do is provide a highly sophisticated capacity to collect, visualize, navigate and represent data. The digital imitation of the real world simulated on computer models allows fast and cheap experimentation. One of the major challenges in prototyping ideas and then developing innovations is getting quick feedback at low cost. Stefan Thomke, in his book Experiments Matter, refers to the way these new technologies allow companies to create more learning more rapidly, and that knowledge, in turn, can be incorporated in greater numbers of experiments at less expense.11

Digital tools can make complex data, information, perspectives and preferences from diverse groups visible and comprehensible. Many of us will have attended meetings where we thought we’d reached agreement about something, only to learn later that our understanding about the whole matter was completely different from others’. In 1983 Richard Feynman gave a BBC lecture entitled ‘On Thinking’ in which he argues the importance of effective imagery: ‘The images people use when we think and converse can be entirely different, which explains why some people have difficulty seeing things that you consider obvious, and vice versa.’ Many of the new digital tools are visual, and – as half of the human cerebral cortex is devoted to visualization – where everyone sees the same image, they help us to understand issues better.

The new technologies that provide vast computational power and the ability to visualize can open new opportunities for science, improving the ways discoveries are made. Michael Nielsen says these technologies can actively amplify collective intelligence, and ‘new computerized tools can help us find hidden meaning in all that knowledge’. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and ex-president of the Royal Society, says of his research that he works and thinks in pictures, not using vast computational capacities, and ‘we can predict before we observe’. However, he says that ‘without the technology and the symbiosis of science and technology, we wouldn’t have got anywhere’, and that ‘computer simulation of extreme phenomena [provides] a boost of the virtual world of computers to do experiments that are more and more realistic’.12 Some leaders in the field of AI, such as Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, believe that the technology will significantly increase the rates of scientific discovery.

When designers work with digital technologies they practise a form of craft by manipulating digital symbols and models, navigating within datasets, finding new relationships and recognizing new patterns. They also help communicate with and engage interested parties.

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