One thing that was interesting and mentioned on the kick-off lecture was behaviours of the light and what it can communicate to its surroundings. As lights are everywhere around us, it’s hard to not notice them but they can be crafted to represent the context more accurately. It is argued that the role that the lights/LEDs have are trivial and hardly used to their full potential.
This got me thinking of the 2 LEDs on the arduino and when a sketch is uploaded one of them are rapidly blinking. That state seem like a classic thinking or processing state to me as I have seen it on CD-rom drive when loading a disc and most recently on USB flash drives to indicate transfer of files. I guess it makes sense that they have put those leds on the arduino. As I upload a sketch to it it just says “uploading…” in the software window, if no leds were indicating I might have thought the software had freezed up or that some lags were happening. There’s a difference with the CD-rom drive and the USB flash drive as they are coupled with either some visual progress bar or sound in combination with visual progress (the mechanical noise when reading a disc in the CD-rom drive).
This experiences above tells me that the context plays a big role and where the LED is placed. Also different outputs in conjunction with the blinking can enhance the understanding and make it more obvious but for this module we can’t use any other outputs than one single red led. Nuance is the challenging part although I believe we can find a context after a couple of iterations, I think we will run into to problem with the nuance. How can the behaviour of the LED be nuanced? We are strictly constrained with brightness and duration of it. From a design perspective it seems to be harder to craft something when the design space is heavily scaled down or restricted.
It is going to be interesting to see how we will provoke and further probe the design given its restrictive and scaled down nature. Methods and approaches do always interested me and will be an appreciative addition of valuable learnings in this module.
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