ceci n'est pas Massimo Banzi!
talking about tinker.it
especially tensions between the design consultancy and academia
"I have to come up with a definition that makes people outside this room comfortable, that uses physical computing and interaction design without using those words, because they scare people with money"
working with jacks of all trades
go to daytum/com/tinker_it for more details
unfortunately they are best known in the UK for the stuff that doesn't make them any money, like Arduino or workshops they run at cost
they run the workshops so that people can understand what they do as a company
[shows "crappy videos"]
code.google.tinker
"the project that doesn't want to die": the Tinker Kit
www.tinkerkit.com
looking for collaborators on building documentation
"documentation is the bottleneck. it has nothing to do with engineering."
"it has to read like a book for kids. you want to inform them, but you don't want to scare the shit out of them"
I care about academia
- interaction design: how many programs are there, and how many little businesses exist, and what does that mean?
- are we completely nuts?
- where do the students go?
- are they creating businesses?
- why might students not be making their own businesses? is it too difficult? too scary?
- are we creating an industry, or just a set of academic bubbles?
- how are we selling this field to the outside world?
- "we never come in with the deck that says, 'this is what we do." instead comes in with sample ideas "this is far more than any web design company would need to do."
- what types of budgets -- tinker_it often deals with marketing, so it gets cut in a downturn. also R&D. Trying to make it seem more relevant to sales, which doesn't get cut.
- is this just the cream on top, a "Nice to have" -- until people see "what we do as innovation...I am not going to have a business in the next 5 years"
- are we supposed to be creating designers who are also engineers, or are we supposed to inform the designers enough so that they can have a conversation with an engineer "I look at code and I want to puke, but I know how to talk with Peter...and I have realistic expectations of what can be done because I've been staring at this stuff for years"
the goal: skills for the new century, not crutches
a BBC article asking whether we should be teaching programming to all kids
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