some thoughts on the cricket construction kit.

so i ran across an article on the cricket construction kit in the tech one day. or maybe it was tech talk. either way... in one of the MIT newspapers. and at first i was like, oh no... i want to do something similar... is what i want to do too similar? and then i thought about it. and i think there are some major differences in what i'm thinking of doing for a thesis vs. what the cricket construction kit does.

1) price. price price price. so expensive for that. $250!! i never would've gotten one of these as a kid. as it was growing up, LEGOs were too expensive to ever get large sets, much less a lego robotics set. with all the concerns over the digital divide between rich and poor, why aren't they trying to make something that everyone can use? or really, something that everyone can afford? call me idealistic, but i really do think that the idea of making a profit gets in the way of any good intentions.

anything i make, i want it to be affordable to anyone, something that can spread, something that can be added on to, something that will grow with the users.

i'm more of a fan of open source, open hardware, creative commons things. the product is secondary to the ideas. and when this is the case, the way you make a living is by providing support, which is much more interesting and engaging, anyway, than continuously working on hardware development. i mean, when it comes right down to it, i am limited by my own experiences and my own imagination, so any design that i come up with will also be limited. but if the design is distrubuted, and people can innovate freely, then everyone benefits from the experience of others. my dad always told me that you never can learn more than your teacher, if you only have one teacher, and i think this carries over into open source logic. with everyone bringing their own experiences and ideas to the table, more ideas get mixed together that might otherwise not have been broght together, and as a result, everyone benefits. and in some ways, a community (of sorts) develops around this. i think it's a strong concept, and more and more, i'm fascinated by the idea of the open source community and things like make magazine.

and this is one reason i like the GoGo Board. sure, it may be kinda blocky and a bit hard to put into things at times. but it's cheap. and it's meant to be innovated on. it may not have the sleek design of a cricket, but i think that's good. it hasn't been black-boxed away from the people using it. it isn't mysterious. you can build your own. you can program it. you can see the parts.

2) black-boxed. i started on point two in the previous paragraph... so carry that down. by putting the picocricket in this slick box with these fancy buttons and surface mount components, you're making it mysterious and unattainable, in some sense. sure, you can program it, but you can't add onto it, you can't see the parts, you can't figure out how it works and adapt it for your needs. for example, i think running the GoGo Board on solar power with fuel cells, like the kids at the South End Technology Center tried to do (i'm not sure if they succeeded... i think they might've), might not have happened if they had been using picocrickets instead of GoGo Boards.

3) it doesn't emphasize construction. it's not the programming that i'm interested in when i'm trying to do this construction kit idea. i want more of, as my advisor puts it, a grammar of mechanisms. building blocks for making a machine. a quick reference. something that gives the basics and maybe a few examples and then encourages exploration and building one's own ideas. i think it makes it more powerful to be able to add some interaction with your machines. but i think that the construction part should be able to stand on its own.

instead of giving instructions on how to build a specific thing, such as LEGO does, i want it to give a way of thinking about design, a way to go beyond one thing. this is something i never found in any of my (many) construction kits as a kid (LEGO, K'nex, erector set, etc), and what is what i really wanted. just some hints as to where to go. when you don't know what's out there, or what the possibilities are, it's hard to start. i mean... ideas don't come out of thin air. inventions and ideas are built out of experience... out of previously seen things... out of combining two random things in your head at the right time... out of innovating on something that's already there. same as in art. imitation does count.

(actually, as a side note, there was this nice section in this book i was reading recently on how all tools and inventions are based around stories. even if the story is "i need to do this, and i have this, so this is how i did what i wanted to do", it's still some form of story. i should remember to explore this idea a bit more.)

so, construction. construction is what i'm after. how do you learn to build things that move? how do you externalize motion from what your body knows? how do you create your own thing? and most importantly, how do you build up experience... intuition.

4) commercialized product. i'd rather it be something that people feel is their own, and i feel that the black-boxed-ness and the price detract from this, although the product is quite nice. there's something to be said for the diy aesthetic. i don't want to build dependence on a product, but instead build intuition and confidence for each individual. i want them to grow ideas. i want them to share ideas.

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so where does this leave me? i want something cheap, versatile, appropriateable (ok... i made that word up. something that can be appropriated by the people using it). something that helps people develop their own intuition about building things, instead of relying on being told what to do. i want to encourage using the materials around you. i want to lower the barrier to starting to work on things. i want it to be fun. and i think that trying to build some sort of community around it is good, where kids share their ideas and experiences with each other, offer advice, etc.

maybe having some questions to ask yourself when you get stuck would be good. advice from people who've worked with similar things. a reference for the grammar of mechanisms, for which things can be soldered and which can't, for which glues can be used on which surfaces, for geometries. a reference. a guide. i don't know. encouragement for kids/people who want to build things out of cheap materials. maybe with some actual physical examples that come with it. a tool to make wire gears. pictures/drawings of real life examples of these things in action. and encouragement to explore your world.

i'm not sure of the best way to go about this. maybe i should ask kids what they discovered through working with wire... and what suggestions they might have for other people doing similar things? sigh. i think i know what i want but i'm not sure how to get there.