ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder
1125 18th St, Boulder, CO 80309

ColoradoATLASInstitute.EDU

"Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Each of us is a cloud. Each of us is a collection of entities, some biological, some technological. Some of these we define as our bodies, some as our families, some as our jobs, some as our societies. And some we define as tools, as technology, or products of technology. These entities can be in conflict with each other. We have never thought or acted in isolation, but our autonomy may have never been as cloudy as it is today.

Networked digital hardware and embedded AI have shifted the cognitive science notions of distributed and embodied cognition from metaphors to physical realities. Our tools increasingly embody near-sentient AIs, and distributed networked services continuously saccade our attention between information sources and fragment our cognition. Augmented reality can erase boundaries to the point where we don't know where we begin and our tools, networks, identities, and bodies end. We may no longer be able to identify where the things we know, think, decide, and do come from, or if we're willing actuators and processors for a distributed system that we neither control--or whose boundaries we can see.

This is obviously for the better and for the worse.

Sketching in Hardware is focused on the design of tools for design with and of digital hardware. This increasingly results in the design of webs of intelligent actors that include edge AI and people. As creators, educators, and advanced users of tools with the capacity to fragment our intelligence across space, and to focus its products into action, we have a responsibility to design and use those tools responsibly.

In 2023 we will explore the tools that create nodes in a network, points in a point cloud, the edges in edge computing, and hybrid combinations of all of the above.



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ThingM is a device studio. We design and manufacture ubiquitous computing / Internet of Things products that combine user experience design expertise with a deep knowledge of cutting-edge technologies. We create useful tools for designers and innovative products for everyone else.