Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Missing Pixels

Lite-Brite should have patented color pixels.

I have a hiptop communication device that I carry everywhere. I think I've dropped it at least a hundred times over the course of a year, and it's kept on ticking. Unfortunately though, the device is telling me that the end is near. Its method of communicating its own demise is displayed on the screen. Not with some sort of indicator icon (like the 'check engine' lamp on some cars) but instead as a full-frontal disruption of all information on its display screen.

Sometimes the screen is reversed. At other times its colors flip around intermittently. And in its most misbehaving state of mind, the main image appears scrambled which makes it awfully hard to type or dial on the device. I understand that it has something to do with a little cable inside the device connecting flippable display to its central processing unit that becomes understandably stressed after use. But I've lived with this device through difficult times, and I am willing to ride out its useful lifetime until the very end.

At MIT as an undergrad, I took this course on digital logic design fondly referred to as .111 ("one-eleven") on campus. My team project was a vector graphics display system where my partner fed me lists of points over a communication line, and I was to display those points onto a bitmapped display. The analogy is to be tossed little plastic numbers at you, being careful to catch them, plotting the pixel intensity changes represented by the numbers on some sort of whiteboard, and then being sure to catch the numbers thrown at you subsequently and so forth. It was 1986 and I wasn't a terribly good catcher. So whatever my partner threw at me, since fumble-fingers-me wasn't managing to catch anything, wasn't like anything at all that ended up being displayed.

I was up for three days straight that time, and I recall how my partner was shipping me numbers to display a rotating cube, and instead my system was plotting everything but a rotating cube. I was incoherently tired, but happy to see something so beautiful! My partner of course didn't agree. But in the end, we got an 'A' so my life was spared.

So while I see my little hiptop in its last moments of life, I sense that it has discovered how to create beauty at last. We should all hope to achieve what this hiptop has achieved in its lifetime. And in the same way that after my final project in .111 I slept for 28 hours straight, I will soon honor my hiptop with a similar state of its well deserved rest in gratitude for its services.

I have decided to discontinue posting on Sundays, and will pick things up on Monday with a week focusing upon one of my favorite pet topics: the iPod.

Posted by maeda at March 19, 2005 09:17 AM