Tech beyond the Myth¶
We had two weeks hands-on time with electronics.
Week 1 - Forensics of the Obsolescence¶
We spent the first one doing a forensic study where we did a detailed examination of a non-working device.
In our case, the device we chose was a conference call camera, which had a satellite microphone unit. The camera sits on a gimbal that turns it to the direction from which the loudest voice comes.
It was a lot to unpack and dismantle. For me it was very enjoyable, to explore the inner workings of such a complicated device. From an engineering perspective, there was a lot of detailed work that went into this device, not only in terms of electronics, but also mechanically, to make a movable device controlled by the input of sound. And making sure that no cable is visible to the end-user, which they seem to have spent a lot of energy on.
We took it apart to find out lots of different electronic boards, a camera unit with many optical pieces, microphones, motors to move the camera, individual lenses, and many screws, cables, and supporting materials. We were lucky to find many parts which were good candidates for reuse.
While breaking it apart, we had some interesting conversations, about the design decisions they made, and how difficult they made it for the consumer to use this device in the long term.
This device which originally costed more than 3000, was now available for 10 on the second hand market. We elaborated on the reasons for this, the engineering choices made the device unusable after a few years, due to propriority elements that are needed to keep this device functional: The camera unit was useless without its own server: It didn’t work with any other computer. We couldn’t even connect it to a computer to try it, because even the ports they used were proprietary.
At the end of the day, a microprocessor chip on one of the boards costs more than the price of the whole unit: which is a good sentiment to what happens if you don’t work on the longevity of a design…
Leaving aside the politics of how corrupt the engineering on this device was, as a team, we had a good number of parts to use for our second week.
The forensic report of the first week is available on this link.
Week 2 - Almost useless machine¶
In the second week, we were supposed to recreate a useless machine based on the parts we had from the first week.
Our instructors wanted us to follow a “Tinkering” process to ideate: Play with what we have to see what emerges. I found the process interesting and refreshing. In my professional practice, I utilise different ideation methods, and I really enjoyed trying something different than a structured ideation process.
It might also be due to the fact that in our group it worked quite well. While it was difficult to let go of the usual way of brainstorming at first, we were then able to just tinker, try a few different things and come up with a concept and narrative that our team was happy with.
From then on, it was about trying to make things work, and once it does, see if it works as we imagined it to be and fine-tune and adapt. There were cases where we had to adapt the machine based on what emerged rather than what we initially imagined.
Overall, I appreciated the improvisation aspect of the workshop and had a lot of fun: in my opinion the idea of reutilising parts from an old machine to build something new (and imperfect) was the perfect recipe for bringing together creativity, satisfaction of making things and hard work as a team.
Once we assembled all the pieces in a system that constituted our useless machine, we shot our video, and enjoyed watching the never ending clockwork of our machine that fulfills no purpose.
Here are our final presentation and video from the workshop.