During the college application process I wrote four substantial essays, and I am proud of each of them. But two in particular I enjoyed writing for their own sake, and I would like to share those here. The first essay was my general essay for the common app. It did not have many formal restrictions, except that the minimum length was 250 words. The second essay was for a specific college I applied to, and had to be more than 300 words, but less than 750 characters.
Often, I am forced to follow a circuitous path through arcane workings of a computer. Similarly, I am regularly frustrated by poorly-formed sentences or nonintuitive rules of punctuation and grammar. In short, I am dissatisfied with many of the interfaces between myself and the rest of the world. Recently, however, I have come to realize that I am not alone in my dissatisfaction with commonly accepted interfaces, and that it is an enjoyable and rewarding task to make the interfaces I use more intuitive and aesthetic.
As a tinkerer in a family of engineers, I frequent the local computer surplus store, where I can often uncover bizarre artifacts from the history of personal computing. One such item which has held my attention since I first found it is a three-buttoned computer mouse. At first, I did not understand why someone would make such a mouse. One button selects things, and a second button brings up a menu; a wheel can scroll up and down, but what use is a third button? When I returned to my computer, however, I began to think of uses for a third button: a third button could be an easier way to "double-click", an action difficult for the elderly or unpracticed; a third button could allow me to work in two layers of an image-editing program simultaneously; a third button could bring up a second type of menu like the start menu; a third button could keep a specific program always at hand; a third button could be keyed to a function such as copy or paste. Thinking about this led me to realize that human interfaces, the tools and conventions that allow us to interact with the rest of the world, are malleable. They can be improved or changed to suit the task at hand.
This revelation has affected many of my projects, but it has most directly inspired one of my current projects: a mouse with improved scrolling. The mouse I use on my computer is a standard two-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, my scroll wheel is broken. After a failed attempt at repairing the wheel, I thought it would be more useful in the long run to improve it instead. A standard scroll wheel only works in some applications, and only moves up and down, which makes horizontal scrolling annoying. To remedy this, I am building a mouse with a miniature joystick in place of a scroll wheel. The miniature joystick, called a navigation (nav) switch, is attached to the arrow key inputs on the chip from an old keyboard. This is a work in progress. So far I have changed the design to include a solid-state switch between the nav switch and the keyboard chip, I have obtained all of my materials, and I have mapped the inputs of my chip. The next step is to connect everything for testing. Then I have to find a suitable mouse to modify with the assembly. There is work left, but after the project is finished, I hope it will be more intuitive and useful than my current mouse.
This project is original in its design--I have not seen another mouse like the one I am building--but it is not unique in its motivation. Since I came upon the idea that human interfaces are imperfect, evolving constructs, I have encountered many communities that share this view. To me, this world view unifies the goals and values of many fields: design, which values creativity and clarity; engineering, which values simplicity and efficiency; and assistive technology, which values accessibility. A growing community of tinkerers promotes the idea that advances from all of these fields should be available for use by whoever wants them.
I find the community of tinkerers inspiring because of the participatory attitude: that anyone can fix problems as an alternative to coping with them. A publication that both reflects and promotes this attitude is Make magazine. Each issue of Make contains general primers in working with different materials and technologies, as well as instructions for specific projects. The projects in Make that I enjoy most are those that rework accepted human interfaces: an alarm clock that knows the train schedule and resets itself for delays; a one-handed portable keyboard; a cable with interchangeable ends; and many other projects that are born of necessity or convenience.
The growing community of tinkerers, found both in Make and elsewhere, and the diverse fields that see the world similarly, lead me to believe that this desire--to facilitate use and to improve the mundane--is more widespread than I first thought. This is encouraging to me, as I hope to live in a future where the interfaces I use every day improve and where I can help improve them.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist. Our religious education program was rigorous: we learned Old Testament stories; we learned the scientific method and humanism; we visited houses of worship of other faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism, and various Protestant sects. I was exposed to faiths in my upbringing, but the only faith I held was that whatever I believed was probably OK. And the only understanding of faith I had was that of the First and Second Great Awakenings--a personal revelatory experience which is an end in itself.
From this background, I could not understand how faith influenced history so much, and how it still affects current events. Why do people fight wars over differing interpretations of the Bible? Why is so much beautiful music about Christianity?
I could not reconcile these ideas until a few years ago, when I toured York Minster cathedral in England. I learned that the cathedral took more than 500 years to build. Five hundred years is a long time: five centuries, half a millennium, many lifespans and more generations. The city of York was swept up in wars; the enlightenment came and went during the cathedral's construction. The stained-glass windows in the cathedral attest to this, not uniform, but reflecting changing styles and technologies of the eras in which they were made.
The kind of faith that York Minster cathedral speaks to is entirely different from the temporal, personal faith of the Great Awakenings. It is a timeless and communal faith, one that leaves a mark on the landscape; that inspires artists and musicians and poets; that can pit one community against another. It is at once a beautiful and terrible faith, and its reach is everywhere now that I can see it: from the music I sing to the news every day.