Feedback on thesis ideas

I showed my Potential Thesis Ideas to Michael and Anıl and they gave me feedback:

Michael

How can you move beyond an artifact based approach? How will this be a research project? What is your research question? What methodology will you use to answer your question?

Suggestions: Look at critical design (Bardzell) Look at speculative making (Christina Anderson) Start at the ideas and work back to the questions... then work your way to new ideas Are there latent themes in the ideas/questions Annotate with sources your ideas

Favorites: Gamelon Inspired Synthesizer Ideas because it asks the clearest question and touches on community The question of aesthetics and sustainability

By the end of the semester: - Have a thesis advisor - 2 paragraphs that concretely describe your thesis project

Anıl

Who are you building these things for? How do old computers (low power computers) get on the internet? Is there a combination of Eglash's work with Eurorack... artisans making things, modular design, how do you target one of the problematic aspects and make it better? Are web based DAWs multi-user? Where can you find videogame controllers lying around? If you aren't making your own hardware

Suggestions: - look at Garnet Hertz - What do you want your showcase to look like? - look at case studies: Daisy platform as a case study, Monome as a case study, Eurorack as a case study - look at gibberwocky - narrow it down to something you can do in less than a year - look across your ideas and try different combinations

Additional Ideas: - prototype of a language... different input paradigm... young people give a performance

Favorites: - DAW as interaction paradigm for livecoding...

how do i answer the methodology/research question

I want to build things but its clear that building things is not enough - some new knowledge must be produced. How is this knowledge to be produced? I don't want to stop at critique. I really don't want to do sustainability theatre or pretend to solve a problem/pretend to create knowledge. I want my work to be useful to others. This sounds like engineering new technology but I don't think that is sufficient as so many of the issues at hand have cultural/social components.

On the one hand I'm impatient and this seems like its pushing me away from building the things I am interested in building... On the other hand these questions are encouraging me to be rigorous in defining my project and making sure that it does real work.

How will I evaluate my own work?

I read a paper by philosopher/chemist Joachim Shummer about the epistemology of knowing though making in chemistry and how it contrasts with technology and physics. He argues that theoretical physics applies a kind of armchair epistemology that is inappropriate to science. He outlines a history of knowing though making in the sciences. He argues that, to know something you need to analyze it and synthesize it. You must be able to describe it and then use that description to make it out of whole cloth. This process has to alter the ontology that you had going in in order to create new knowledge. He lays out weaker versions of KTM that learn by modifying or learn technique and craft by doing. By completing any of the projects within the technical/social guidelines I lay out proves that it can be done and provide knowledge on how to do it. People like Joachim Schummer argue that this is technology not science and that this kind of Knowing Through Making (KTM) is trivial know-how.

What are sociological/anthropological ways of knowing? Is there a way to frame the project so it explores David Graeber's epistemological idea that knowledge is created through dialog.

What kind of knowledge am I trying to make? There is part of me that is instictively interested in the kind of knowledge that Schummer calls trivial. I want to prove the vitality and viability of systems that circulate value while providing means for art. This is not a commercial kind of knowledge but a social and cultural one.