Chuck Neudorf, week 5

“You say ‘they’ – aren’t you ‘they’?”

It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question made him uncomfortable.

“No. Not anymore.” (Makers. 359)

A new question arose this week when Tinkercad became unavailable. What happens to the human/machine interface when the machine breaks? In this case the problem was obvious, access to the software was denied. Some people found work arounds that ranged from signing in to Autodesk to going to an entirely different design program. But what would happen if the system were complex enough so that errors were beyond our senses? If operators rely on the system to self-diagnose, are they responsible for creating the diagnostic strategy? This question is important to me as a maker because I hope to make increasingly complex projects and I need to have a feeling for the limitations.