cambu-manifesto

3. The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.
from CE

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” is the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws. In many cases, the work of artists, designers, and others who deliver ‘human-experiences’ use technology to create this ‘rich user experience’ magic. Of course, those doing this art & design work are often their own engineers, doing a type of engineering themselves (even if they’re using art-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks or Processing.) If by extension we then say they should adopt the mindset of Critical Engineering, the point at which the show is over and the trick can be ‘revealed’ is one of contention.

I think the very existence of the open source software movement in conjunction with GitHub has shown that many artist-engineers are freely willing to share what they make and how they do it. Even companies like Disney and Microsoft reveal a great many of their tricks through their large research organizations which publish findings regularly.