Switches

I think most people in PComp this week was confused as to what we were supposed to document. There are a few labs assigned, but some of those are just looking at your electronic components. Do we respond to the readings? Tom Igoe’s class, apparently, has to do this. I chose to document the switch lab, since that one was fun. Here’s a video of that first one. It’s very short.

And here are shots of two other parts of the switch lab. I have a video of the last part, because it was the most complicated part of the lab. I am clearly excellent at elucidating my thoughts.

I also did a creative switch, or an attempt at it– I wired my book to turn the LED on when it was opened or closed. I had grand designs for using graphite to do a switch drawing, but I forgot my graphite sticks at home and had to steal lead from Koji. I’m sorry Koji. The drawing wasn’t enough drawn to conduct electricity. On Wednesday, I tried with the graphite sticks, but the payoff of graphite on the page still didn’t conduct electricity. The lead stick in itself conducted pretty well.

The readings were very lengthy this week, and honestly kind of confusing. I had to google “affect don norman” to figure out exactly what Don Norman meant when he referred to “affect”, because he never defined it in his piece about it. In my understanding, he contrasts cognition with affect: cognition is conscious thought and interpretation of the world, whereas affect is unconscious judgement of the world. I’m not sure if this is correct.

Also, I felt a bit of shame with his precise definition of affordance, since I used that word in my last pcomp blog post in the sense used by graphic designers that he derides. Woops.