Programmable Forms
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PROGRAMMABLE FORMS by Louis Sherman Tomaino Bachelor of Fine Arts Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island SUBMITTED TO THE MEDIA ARTS AND SCIENCES SECTION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE MASTER OF SCIENCE INVISUAL STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June, 1988 c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1988 The author hereby grants to M.I.T permission to reproduce and to duplicate publicly copies of this thesis document in whole or in part. Sinn~tur~ of fh~ ~Hthor L Louis Sherman Tomaino Media Arts and Sciences Section February 10, 1988 Certified by .1 Seymour Papert Professor of Media Technology I Thesis Supervisor Accepted by &I Steven Benton Chairman Departmental Committee for Graduate Students JUN P- 1988 flotch Programmable Forms by Louis Sherman Tomaino SUBMITTED TO THE MEDIA ARTS AND SCIENCES SECTION ON FEBRUARY 10, 1988 IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE DEGREE MASTER OF SCIENCE INVISUAL STUDIES ABSTRACT This thesis is a record of work accomplished in building and studying concepts associated with a new construction material. Two types of prototypes for this material are described. These prototypes may serve as useful models for further work in this area, and each stands alone as an artifact that successfully embodies certain aspects of this materal. The model for the completed form of this material is as follows: It is to consist of modules whose size and shape may both be changed and set to change by a person using it. These modules are to be primarily triangular panels. It is planned that interconnections between these unit shape-changeable panels will allow the person using this material to make specifications for shape transformation to effect groupings of panels, causing them to change as a single unit, without the necessity of specifying the task that each panel is to take in this transformation. This work is done in the belief that this material, through great flexibility and directibility, will offer an extremely effective expressive and constructive medium. This study is in three parts. The first is a description of the evolution of methods and materials for building in space, and is shown in a history of construction toys. The second is a description of the two types of prototypes mentioned above. The third consists of thoughts about the implications of this work for a constructive environment for children. THESIS SUPERVISOR: SEYMOUR PAPERT TITLE: PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGY 2 Acknowledgements Many people have enriched this period of my work. I would like to thank: Those people of the Epistemology and Learning group whose sense of play and simplicity has helped me to settle into this work. I would like to especially thank Edith Ackermann, for sharing her interest and enthusiasm in dialogues that have contributed strongly to building an environment here for me in which new ideas can grow. The people with whom I spent an entire summer during the beginning of our study with Montessori materials for pre-school children. Special qualities of each of my classmates and teachers contributed to establishing a rare subtle feeling of acceptance, respect, humor, and affection between us. The children at the Hennigan School with whom I have worked and played for the last year. I wish the best for each of you. Thank you Ellen Liao, Linda Okum, and Leon Grossier for moral support and clarity about administrative issues; for offering the place I could go for help. Maire Deverell, for emotional support and wonderful, clear insight into the relationship between the child and adult; for her understandings of the child in me, through the acceptance of the child in herself. To my brother, Fred Tomaino for his company. To my father Michael Tomaino for bringing his enthusiasm about form and his sense of play to his child. To my mother for being my mother, a relationship I don't know how to describe. To my friend, Susan Stemm, a co-worker in the process of understanding and feeling. 3 The work reported herein was supported by InterLego A/S 4 Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Contents 1. Construction Toys in a Cultural Context 6 The Materials of Froebel A Learning Environment 7 A Variety of Ways To Build 13 New Forms 23 Montessori An Environment of Objects and Empathetic Observers 33 Access Through All of the Senses 39 Sensitive Periods 42 2. Prototype for a Constructive Fabric 45 Goal 46 Shape-Changeable Triangles 48 Building on a Lower Level 55 Specifying Form Change with a Program 59 3. Thoughts About A Constructive Environment 62 A Model for Altering Models 63 The Computational Trellis 65 Pictures of Materials 67 Bibliography 78 5 Construction Toys in a Cultural Context 6 The Materials of Froebel A Learning Environment In 1837, Friedrich Froebel founded a learning environment for children and named it the kindergarten. In this environment an empasis was placed on song, dancing in groups, gardening, and building with construction materials and methods that Froebel invented or appropriated. Education on specific topics was to proceed in an atmosphere conducive to personal creativity. He did not have a fixed conception of this environment, and once remarked that it would take 300 years to work out. He believed that people "should, at least mentally, repeat the achievements of mankind, that they may not be empty dead masses, that judgment of them may not be external and spiritless."[E.M. 282] "Could we but perceive what a burdensome mass of accumulated, mechanical, far-fetched knowledge and training, we already possess, and are foolishly striving day by day to augment; and on the other hand, how very little knowledge we have that has been developed out of ourselves, that has grown-up in our own souls; it would be well for our children, and for the saving of future generations, if we would but cease to be proud of our foreign thinking, foreign knowing, even foreign emotions and feelings: cease to set the highest fame and success of our schools therein, that they stuff our children's minds and hearts with all this far-fetched, veneered, knowledge and skill."[E.M. 230 - 231] "To give firmness to the will, to quicken it, and to make it pure, strong, and enduring, in a life of pure humanity, is the chief concern, the main object in the guidance of ... [a child] ... in instruction and the school."[E.M. 96] To Froebel, play seemed to define learning: the more that something is play, the more total the self-initiated and creative engagement and discovery there is of 7 something. He saw learning as a naturally occurring activity. This led him to examine the methods used in schools, with the assumption that from those methods came forces inhibiting, restraining, or in other ways not in tune with a child's predisposition to learn. Froebel saw that schools could become environments rich with areas for a child to turn this disposition. To this end, he developed a set of about twenty interrelated sets of objects and activities. The theme of these activities was the construction and transformation of form. The most famous of the materials he developed are four small boxes of building blocks. The idea of these objects was to give a child media for independent work. Froebel also developed sequences of activities to play out with these objects, meant to lead a participant through short narratives of geometric form transformation. Apart from their subject matter, these narratives were seen by Froebel to be similar to the types of songs and games traditionally sung and played by mothers with their children. Froebel saw his work to be, to a large extent, in the same tradition as nursery rhymes. He sets his description of the value of this work in the context of descriptions of spontaneous dialogues between infant and parent. For instance, a parent may sing to a child to communicate her attention and affection, or as a response to a child's interest in language and sound; a parent puts the palms of her hands out against the feet of a kicking child to offer the child something to press against, a way to engage with a responsive environment. The narratives of form description and transformation that he devised were meant to be ways to enliven possibilities for a child's engagement with the materials that he supplied.[M.P. 74] However, the development of these suggestions for the use of the materials caused his work to take an unexpected turn. Much of what he had initiated and sustained under a protective aura of attitude towards childhood and play, soon ground to a halt in a relatively lifeless set of exercises based on the narratives he 8 recommended. Concepts initially derived during exploration with his materials were frozen into presentations for how the materials were to be used. These presentations were, unfortunately, widely imposed on children in place of more spontaneous use that would have resulted from play as he defined it. Froebel was working with the question of structure for a child's environment, a question that all people interested in creating learning tools must ask, and it is not at all clear that he had developed in himself a clear answer to it. He considered himself to be in a process of experimentation. This turn of events happened in much the same way that the attitudes and ideas of Pestilozzi, Froebel's elder and teacher, were developed into object lessons. Object lessons were meant to help a person develop discriminative abilities by the process of mentally extracting attributes from everyday objects and then relating or classifying those objects based on their attributes.