Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad MIT thesis was covered by Create Digital Motion after I posted the video clip from MIT’s New Media Reader featuring Dr. Alay Kay from Xerox PARC give a lecture on Sketchpad. The video clip has since garnered over 10,000 YouTube views and other “instances” of the film on video sharing sites — so appropriate given Sutherland’s contribution of the idea of a “master” and “instances.” His contributions to computer aided design history extend well into its origins and beyond its final outcome.

Peter Kirn says it best — what I think, he was able to say about this…

Additional Demonstration Footage Also Emerged

This Sketchpad film on YouTube: Part 1

The computer has been, in a sense, nothing but a very elaborate calculating machine. But, now we’re making the computer be more like, almost like a “human assistant” and the computer will seem to have some intelligence.

It doesn’t really. Only the intelligence that we put in it.

{Emphasis added.}

Professor Steven Coons
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT
Co-Director of The Computer Aided Design Project

It has been awhile since posting to mercurious. However, we’ve been hard at work updating our academic site. This site now documents recent student work:

• Freshmen Processing work
• Muzzi, the digital pet —music player hybrid
• Info Wraps, a mobile informatics research project

It also now features a commercial work samples page that highlights an eight-year career in the interactive media industry. Perhaps the most interesting additions include ancient works from the vault, some almost a decade old.

In fact, getting this site together in this manner has been long overdue.

» New and improved professorial site on parsons.edu

Is this any way to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday?

We are appalled with Congress. In a huge victory for the Bush Administration, the Senate passed the revised FISA bill to grant sweeping government spying powers and shield the telecoms, especially AT&T and Verizon, from the legal action they deserve for breaking laws to build a universal Internet and telephone “wiretap” for government agencies with impunity.

These Democratic Representatives are still on the fence with the House version. If you’re also outraged, check the list and see if you know anyone from these states, and ideally, these districts and have them make their voices heard.

There are several moments in very recent history that we will later reflect upon in total disgust. These laws of fear will come to emblematize our national degradation towards fascism. This will be one of them. In the meantime, we can elect as many change-agent presidents as we want. Until we dump all the Senators and Representatives who voted for this criminal bill, having a brave new president is just the start of any effort to prevent us from moving towards the fear-driven desecration of our national values.

We warned about the dangers of the AT&T secret server rooms earlier. Today, we take a step closer towards the police state of China with its Great Firewall that censors and monitors telecommunications traffic. A big win for corporate power, a big loss for the 1st Amendment and the principle of privacy.

Just imagine how this post has been cataloged, indexed and red-flagged for being critical of the government its favorite corporations. Is this really what we want?

Space Time Play — Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level

» Book Website (spacetimeplay.org)
» Table of Contents (PDF)
» Introduction (PDF)

Available to the US in November 2007 from Birkhäuser and edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, Matthias Böttger, Space Time Play — Computer Games, Architecture and Urbansim: The Next Level offers readers 62 concise essays and interviews interspersed between 64 game, film and science-fiction book reviews, and 48 game research projects, all brilliantly organized into 5 ascending levels, sequenced into topics that build upon the theory of the editors, that video gaming has come of age as one of society’s most crucial and influential cultural artifacts. Richly illustrated and well populated with important and influential theorists, designers and academics, Space Time Play multi-tasks as a scholarly tome, coffee table guide to gaming, and manual of pop culture memes driven by gaming industry.

Steffen Walz, friend and editor of the collection, generously sent me an advance copy, and I’m thrilled to share the news of this exciting addition the growing library of scholarly treatments of gaming on culture, art, media and urbanism. The text is especially unusual in the way it will appeal to gamers and scholars alike, exemplifying how the subject matter is no longer relegated to fringe discussions of gaming’s profound influence on contemporary humanity. Every reader will find at least one game review that resonates within him or herself, whether it’s Katie Salen’s perfectly worded analysis of Alexey Pajitnov’s timeless classic Tetris or the de-mystification of the first alternate reality games (ARGs) to emerge such as EA’s Majestic reviewed by Kurt Squire, or The Beast reviewed by Dave Szulborkski, used by Spielberg to promote A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Readers will enjoy remembering classics such as Asterioids through Jesper Juul’s reframing it as a “forgotten futurism” or considering if SimCity informs and influences notions of urban planning and governance or simply reveals itself as simulated simulation.

Levels 1 and 2 situate the history of computer games as interactive play spaces and connect these basic ideas to the framework of the Ludic Metropolis, or City of Play. Along with the physical representations of space in video gaming, the urbanist modes of exchange and social intercourse are examined with many specific game and research projects. In the end, we discover how narrative environments like World of Warcraft shape identities through an interconnection of an architecture of play, socially immersive design, and timeless storytelling.

In Level 3, Ubitquitous Games: Enchanting Places, Buildings, Cities and Landscapes, the Ludic City is crafted as an actual real-life play space, broken out of the computer console, but no doubt influenced by its tendencies, parameters and tools. Examples like geocaching, locative games, ARG advertising, augmented realities, mobile media, Parkour, and others evoke an idea of gaming within true social space, the city as a game board, and the separations between game and life fully blurred.

In Level 4, Serious Fun: Utilizing Game Elements for Architectural Design and Urban Planning, the Ludic City is envisioned as a proving ground and design tool. Architects and urban planners, embracing the organic, player driven models of gaming, employ its modes towards generative and evaluative instances of complexity management and design research. Here especially, the editors posit the newly respected role of game technologies for the social causes of urbanism and design towards the common good. Skeptics of the value of gaming will certainly be challenged in this chapter, their views perhaps not resistant to the well articulated examples of how game design and technologies have already proven their value off the living room couch.

In the final chapter, Level 5, Faites Vos Jeux: Games Between Utopia and Dystopia, the editors collect examples of how games and war play an uneasy partnership on the battlefield for hearts and minds across societies, present and future-minded. This chapter also examines virtual economies, such as the Chinese Gold Miners of World of Warcraft, and in-game advertising’s rise to importance.

The book begins and ends with references to Spacewar!, the very first recorded instance of a video game design, a creation of MIT students in 1962 for the PDP-1, the first device with a graphic monitor, instantiating the language and context of video gaming for many years to come. In reflecting upon how quickly computer games have infiltrated the collective and individualized societies of yesterday, today and tomorrow, we cannot help but imagine their inevitability in the human condition and the importance of play, time and space.

Verdict: An indispensable addition to the library of any interaction designer, game designer, social theorist, architect, urban planner, futurist, student or scholar, casual or fanatical gamer.

Sporting provocative bullet points, this essay may not be new news, but it speaks refreshing truths while standing the test of time.

» Download essay [PDF]

This scholarly paper by was originally presented as a talk for the conference Mobile Communication: Social and Political Effects, held on April 29-30, 2003 in Budapest, and is collected in Mobile Democracy: Essays on Self, Society and Politics. We’ve come upon this text during regular research in pursuit of an interesting range of academic treatments concerning critical viewpoints of mobile media and electronic culture. The “Global Nomads in the Digital Veldt” essay stands out in the collection for its succinct expressions that thoughtfully document complex social changes in deceptively simple terms. Despite the arcane literary device in the title, the writing is downright accessible and the core message articulates a cogent framework for thinking about mobile technologies and society.

Meyrowitz’s use of the Veldt to encapsulate his message is regrettable. He plays off Marshall McLuhan’s coinage of “global village,” contrasting it with a reconceptualization of cyberspace as a primordial hunter-gatherer society. We agree with the idea, and we can even visualize the metaphors. But we’re belly-aching on the word-play, the sprechen-spiel. Perhaps it feels hokey and detached while attempting to persuade us with trite McLuhan soundbyte style textual imaging. Our cover image◊ might suggest our frustration with attempts to photo-illustrate the idea of a global nomad in the digital veldt. We also succumb to the tendency to pepper titles and blurbs with metaphors that amuse with clever yet esoteric cultural literacy for readers — something catchy that sums up an idea with a wordy picture.

Even for an academic paper, however, the reference is unnecessarily obscure, and diverts readers away from the simple elegance of his central point. That said, his word choice motivated us to conduct some cursory research into the term veldt, and so we sidebar now in order to reveal subtle ironies that redeem his transgression. Our electronically nomadic research trail begins with the Wikipedia→, jumping off to a copy of the Ray Bradbury short story→ of the same title, off to a quick cheat using a study guide→, and ending up at veldt.com→, which upon closer look, manages to poetically reinforce Meyrowitz’s metaphor. When you perform a View Source on the empty page, you discover the anonymous author’s epitaph embedded as a comment in the HTML source code:

veldt.com is dead.
old, useful content may come back to life, when i find the time.
i may post at veldt.vox.com
but no guarantees.

it’s not been all that fun, blogosphere.

Clearly, the proprietor of veldt.com has wandered on to greener pastures, perhaps disenchanted with the promise of online social networks only to find the veldt a hostile playground of disillusionment rather than the abundant network of social connections and benevolent discourse. There is rewarding irony in this discovery when you connect it linguistically with the use of Veld, the low German form of the word, which means, according to Wikipedia, at retrieval:

[...] a place that is generally overgrown or has gone fallow, such as a thicket or a field that has become overgrown from lack of maintenance.

Comparing the term “Digital Veldt” with the vernacular that emerged through unfortunate force of popular lexicon — “blogosphere” — we can’t decide which is worse. In fact, no one has even come close to coming up with a quality term for describing the electronic human condition, and do it with a pleasing aesthetic and semiotic.

Now this diversion aside, it’s still not clear after re-reading “Global Nomads” why the author selected the Veldt to image the lonely wasteland of electronic communications. Despite misgivings with the literary references, the essay still stands as an important discussion of how electronic media fundamentally alters humanity and its societies. We’ll get over our squabbling and get to the point by quoting the core passage of the essay where Professor Meyrowitz states his uniquely succinct observations:

From “Global Nomads”

A key feature of the electronic era is that most physical, social, cultural, political, and economic boundaries have become more porous, sometimes to the point of functionally disappearing. This seemingly simple proposition has far-reaching significance and implications. The relative products, services, and channels of communications have been leaking into each other. While the key change is literally happening “at the margins” of all social systems, the change is not simply something happening “out there.” As the margins change, the contents of all forms of human organization change. As a result, we are experiencing a dramatic shift in our sense of locale, identity, time, values, ethics, etiquette, and culture.

The increasing functional permeability of boundaries — combined with the continued physical existence of most of those same boundaries — explains the contradictory feelings we have in the early 21st century: Many things still seem the same, and yet everything is somehow changed. In our electronic landscape, we have thinner distinctions:

• between here and there
• between now and then (and yet to be)
• between public and private
• between male and female spheres
• between child and adult realms of experience
• between leaders and average citizens
• between office and home
• between work and leisure
• between business and customers
• between users and producers
• between news and entertainment
• between one field or discipline and another
• between different media genres
• between simulated and real
• between copies and originals
• between direct and indirect experience
• between biology and technology
• between marginal and mainstream

Your thirst for additionally succinct world-changing bullet points will be quenched, as the author delivers another set of bullets that further illustrate twenty-first century living. At least scan for the passage where he connects his idea of global nomads to September 11, 2001.

Response

More than any other essay in the collection, “Digital Nomads” provokes us enough to seriously consider undertaking the multimedia production of photo-illustrating all of these bullet-points, a sort of electronic media peer review. Or at least, we’re interested in annotating the quotation with commentary hyperlinks. We’re not through with this one yet. Too many unresolved considerations remain.

Credits

Essay quotations © 2003 by Joshua Meyrowitz.
Photo by Teseum via Flickr. Photo-illustration by mercurious via Creative Commons licensing.

Between 1962 and 1964, Dr. Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications System, arguably the world’s first computer graphics system, and non-procedural programming system.

Video

In this video, Dr. Alan Kay, from PARC, discusses Sketchpad and its significance in determining the nature of Object Oriented graphical interfaces.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/v/495nCzxM9PI]

Geneology

In this Computing Family Tree diagram◊, note how Sketchpad is considered the origination point for the modern operating system, as we know it.

Links

• Sketchpad, PhD. Dissertation, .pdf (3.9 MB) ↓
• Sketchpad, Wikipedia→
• Sketchpad, YouTube→
• Sketchpad, Archive.org→

See Also

Lecture: The Origins of Interactive Media ↑

Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly→, “As We May Think→” (July, 1945), a member of the Manhattan Project proposes the [tag]Memex[/tag]↔, a sort of microfilm-based knowledge desk. Many consider the Memex to be the pre-digital precursor to the idea of the Web and Internet as we know it today. It may reflect the dawn of the information age.

I am constantly referring to the Memex in my [tag]lectures[/tag]↔ and research as a significant historical precedent to modern informatics, information design, hypertext and interactive media.

A diagram depicting “Computing’s Family Tree”◊ sources the Memex at the root of all modern operating systems. See also Dr. Ivan Sutherland’s [tag]Sketchpad[/tag]↔ for the world’s first interactive computer graphics system.

Links

• Original article, Atlantic Monthly→
• “As We May Think”, Wikipedia→
• ‘Memex,’ Wikipedia→
• ‘Informatics,’ Wikipedia→

See Also

Lecture: The Origins of Interactive Media ↑

The Origins of Interactive Media.

交互式多媒体的起源

A brief examination of two influential American scientists who pioneered the idea of interactive information systems and graphics. Dr. Vannevar Bush, The Memex↑ and Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad↑. Their research accomplishments resonate through every aspect of modern computing. A lecture given on Thursday, June 21, 2007, 13:30, Room B413 at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University.Sponsored by Information Art & Design in collaboration with Communication Design & Technology, Parsons The New School for Design.

Lecture downloads available below.

Lecture Images

Lecture Downloads

» Download Lecture PDF↓ (6.5 MB)

» Download Lecture PowerPoint with QuickTime video ZIP ↓ (135 MB)

» Download Lecture Poster PDF ↓ (780 KB)

» View Lecture SWF in a Popup Flash Player → (20 MB)

See Also

• Memex, The Dawn of Informatics↑
• Sketchpad, The World’s First↑