Interdisciplinary Developer Role Description

The Train of Thought

The objective is clear

Can you talk, listen, see, feel touch, smell, taste?

Can you precisely control your movements? Moving your eyes to look at different things. Breathing slow; breathing fast. Change how hard you push something. How accurate are your hand movements? Consistency of posture? Turning your head? Listening or tasting intently?

What are your body's limits? Reaction time? Strength and fatigue rate of your muscles? Resistance to heat and cold?

What is your mental model for perceiving and interacting with your environment?

How deep do you take your mental model across the width of different fields? What does the feeling of hunger convey to you? Are the concepts energy and biological batteries acknowledged? What does the feeling of cold or hot convey to you? Is the transfer of thermal energy and the relevant physical characteristics of matter taken into account? What context do you consider when perceiving works of art and music? History, philosophy? Electronics? Health and pharmaceuticals? And the interconnections among all these different things?

What tools do you know how to use? And what functions do you use them for? A computer with a web browser for accessing the internet? A smartphone as a flashlight? An extension cord as a rope? A metal power strip as a makeshift hammer? Are the abstractions of unique functions reconsidered through a lower-level perspective like how bedsheets can be used as a makeshift particulate filter for safe breathing in a storm of dust particles? The bedsheets are just fabric woven into a pattern with small holes that only tiny particles can pass through. Tensile strength determines how easily it will rip if stretched; thermal resistance determines how warm it will keep you if you wrap it around yourself.

Given the tools you can access given the social models you share with others and the technical knowledge you possess, what kind of energy transformations and storage can you do? How fast and effectively can you communicate, process, and record information?

Simple mechanical tools. These are require no energy except what you put into them with your body. Hammer; bam! Tap. Impact, under kinetic energy. Needlenose pliers; grab and place and bend. Precision holding, mechanical advantage to compress harder than your fingers, long reach to get where your fingers never can.

More complex mechanical tools. These involve more mechanisms. Measuring tape. Measure distances with a standard unit of measurement- eases communication and referring back to dimensions from the future.

Suddenly... start involving different phases of matter... gas, liquid, plasma... involve the various matter assemblies from nature- under the category of biology... the complexity of embedded electronics systems, from relatively large resistors to tiny transistors within semiconductor integrated circuits. Optics. Radioactivity. Solar energy to electrical energy to chemical energy and back to electrical energy but with different characteristics such as varying voltages and currents and frequencies...

Going from how to make something into the ability to make everything. Into... genuine research for exploring the universe while performing collaborative production. Enjoy the spirit of such times... Consider the order of the projects you undertake and the time and risk involved with each given the situation for you and collaborators at the moment. The most important general factors are:

The people you interact with

The personal knowledge you accumulate and process

The software you communicate, process, and store information with

The hardware you do tangible things with

A Fruit Smoothie

What do you get when you blend a fruit and a drink? A fruit smoothie.

Now, eating fruit is one thing, and drinking a drink is another, but a fruit smoothie- that's something new, something exciting- and potentially useful!

Past the sheer wonder of exploring the unknown or discovering something new, there's a great practical benefit to be gained from understanding the world from different perspectives- at the same time.

You can combine different things in ways you never thought of before! Mmm... fruit smoothies.

Learning the Ingredients

Great fruit smoothies call for great experimentation!

We'll simply need to know more ingredients to try out more combinations.

But it's not like we're going to try out every possible combination. That's too slow.

So we'll listen to what others say is a good smoothie combination, and try a few original smoothies for ourselves.

And so we'll learn bit by bit what makes a great fruit smoothie, and prepare our next experiments so they end up tasting at least decent.

What's a Great Fruit Smoothie?

In order to make a great fruit smoothie, you'll need to learn what makes it great. Tasty. Healthy. Easy to make. Good, good.

But let's be more specific. How hot or cold should the smoothie be served? How are we going to change the fruit smoothie's temperature? How do we know that the fruit smoothie is at the right temperature? How do we set up an alarm that tells us when the fruit smoothie is ready?

When do we know our body is ready for the fruit smoothie? All these questions and more, to be answered in the next episode of-