We started off Friday with some more discussion on assistive technology as well as more general feelings/concerns about the creative process at SFPC with Sara. All I can say is that she is remarkable. Each student had the chance to spend some 1:1 time with her as well. I was initially really nervous about this as I am with most interactions with amazing people, but she was so incredibly sincere. I felt pretty comfortable from the moment she started asking me questions. I focused my time with her on discussing 2 main tracks for project ideas that I have: crocheting + code and language + code. I started with my crocheting + code idea, and explained to her my concern of it falling flat with it being hard to create anything more substantial than an image crocheted in the shape of a rectangle. There’s been some projects with knitting machines that will generate complex patterns but that takes a lot of the hands on work out which I wanted to preserve with my idea. My idea would be to have the user submit an image and the tool would abstract the image in some way based on parameters that could control the difficult level: how detailed, number of colors, scale, etc. After all this was specified then the tool would generate a pattern and list of instructions so that the user could hand crochet an image. Sara didn’t seem too concerned with the final piece always being in the form of a rectangle and mentioned that they could just live as tapestry projects.

I also shared with her my idea to make language more math-y. There’s been a huge focus in this class on education - I like this. There’s a culturally imposed divide of skills that people can have: If you’re good at reading/writing then you’re probably not good at math; if you’re good at math then you’re probably not good at reading/writing. Most of the focus is centered on improving the way we teach people math/programming and making technology more accessible to them as its use becomes more prevalent in the world. I was lucky that math always clicked for me in school and I enjoyed it enough to study it at university. However, knowing that I liked math imposed an inherent lack of ability to write - I was terrified of english and lit classes. It was weird though, because I loved to read. I didn’t really understand this disconnect fully until I came to SFPC. I made my circle visualization that I presented at the welcome party before coming or even knowing about SFPC based on pure curiosity. I didn’t really have a clear intention of why I was doing it at the time. But after thinking more about it during my time here, I realized it was my attempt to make writing more math-y. This was the only way I could be comfortable with it. Thinking back, it also explains why I was so interested in my previous work experience at a startup whose products were built with natural language processing and linguistics concepts. IT’S ALL STARTING TO MAKE SENSE! So one project idea that I have is trying to make language more math-y, to help people like me and also other engineers for whom writing a paper was freaking huge deal in university. I guess this is my perspective on a ‘new audience’. Sara was super excited about this idea which made me really excited. I was nervous about this one falling short and so that’s why I started to think about doing something more hands on like crocheting. She mentioned that it was a unique perspective and challenged me to focus on younger audiences. She thought it would be interesting to create a few pieces that could live as ‘pretty’ visualizations, but also serve as a teaching tool to make language more accessible to technical people. She mentioned to approach it from a space where I wasn’t claiming that this is an answer to problems in education, but rather a study to see what we can learn from making language more math-y.

Moral of the story: Sara is awesome and I felt really empowered after speaking with her. She gave me the confidence I needed to really dig into this idea. Thank you Sara!

I’ve also documented these ideas in more detail here.