Morning: Today was very rewarding in a sense. I was really impressed by the projects of my classmates, for for some of them this week has been the first contact with coding. Throughout these projects, the concepts and theories from the readings are presented in an interactive and animated way, which contributes to a much better understanding of the studied phenomena. My favourite projects today were the illustrations of our experience in Shanghai and the study of a “eyesight defect”vision, mainly because of their added art dimension. What I mean is that these projects are slightly more concerned about the artist’s intention than merely about the code or the phenomena (as was more like my case). Thumbs up! Despite we have had only a week-long crash course in Processing, I believe that an outsider would be really impressed by our combined works and effort. Only the collection of all the projects reveals some of the possibilities we have learnt so far.
Afternoon: I really enjoyed seeing the hackerspace. I was a bit confused (and still am to some extent) about why are these places called with such a pejorative term. In fact, hackerspace is simply a space for like-minded people that want to create and innovate, often in an unprecedented ways. This is almost the opposite of my previous perception – couple of hackers gather to take down a website. The experience made me appreciate NYUAD’s IdeaLab even more, despite as an Economics major I am jealous that such a space is provided for the engineers and scientists. Additionally, I realized how stereotypically I perceived Shanghai as I was really surprised Xin Che Jian was the first place like that, which opened more or less recently! It is, however, possible, that there are many informal establishments like Xin Che Jian and Xin Che Jian was Shanghai’s answer to the trend of making hackerspaces open for public.
Two things worth noting were the fact that the manager was a woman with little prior coding experience (did I understand correctly?), which makes Shanghai unexpectedly progressive. Second, that the Hackerspace is not sponsored (does not accept any funds from) by the government and is quite open about the reasons why so – they respect that a lot of members are foreigners and would find that dangerous.
Evening: My food place ran out of dumplings!
Night: While the light scene in Shanghai has presented itself mostly as the lit up financial center’s skyline and flashing shops’ signs, one, in fact, can never escape the light pollution, flashing lights, or bullet-like beams. I am slightly concerned about myself regarding the impact the course had on me so far – when I entered a club last night, the first thing I analyzed was their light programming!
