Day 2: (Thu Aug 28, Week 1) Core Questions

Notes for 2025-08-28.

New Assignments

  1. New assignment, due Thu Sep 4: Exercise: Precedent Research. Please submit to the Assignment 1 Shared Folder prior to class.

Administrative

  1. Please test your ID card on the door lock. If it isn’t working, please both let me know and email help@ideate.cmu.edu

  2. Please remember: if you can’t make any of the usual EH&S fire extinguisher training sessions to qualify for laser access, IDeATe is hosting two locally, no sign-up required:

    • Tue, Sep 9, 2:30 PM in HL A4 Near (near vending machines)

    • Wed, Sep 10, 10:00 AM in HL 106C (Studio B in library lobby)

  3. The first FriDeATe (social free food) event will be Friday, Sep 12 5-6PM in the basement open area.

Agenda

  1. Brief lab introduction from Robert “Zach” Zacharias.

  1. Competing objectives:

    • refine the central inquiry: what questions are raised by hidden agency

    • bootstrap the class into a basic familiarity with robotics concepts

  2. first assignment: Exercise: Precedent Research

  3. Quick exercise:

    • Identify a single ongoing inquiry central to your personal creative practice. This should be unique to you. E.g., I might answer: what is a meaningful machine performance which lasts 100 years?

    • Identify at least one way the course theme relates to this inquiry. E.g., What is an interaction mode which will convince humans to care for the machine?

    • Remember your question. This is a lens you can always use for insight into our discussions.

  4. Non-Glossary

  5. videos

  6. discussion

Breakout Activity

We need to identify:

  1. candidate physical location for an intervention

  2. ambient affordances and technology

  3. characteristic human habit and behaviors

  4. a behavior to influence

  5. a technological interaction, either overt or covert

Can we find more examples which are not biomimetic (i.e. neither anthropomorphic or zoomorphic)?