10 August, 2003:

Posted at 10h13. Permalink.

Exploring Cornell's Digital Library of Kinematics [via wood s lot] (the image library is as beautiful as any cathedral, watching the machines move they're as graceful as any animal) you get a sense of how the engineers must have felt they'd found the secret of how we move/how the universe works. Graceful movements, minimum friction and effort, the correctness of the form: just by choosing appropriate fixed points and shape. What I like most about mechanisms like this is their casual ease at object orientation. The interfaces are the handle and the rod, the internal complexity is hidden. But if you want to extract extra movement (transformed transforms) from the innards of the machinery, you can do that too. Object orientation now (and by that I also mean anything to with the conduit metaphor: the industrial mindset and Fordism, nouns/verbs, cause/effect, declarations of meaning) is cack-handed. APIs are grafted onto the form. The handle, on the other hand, is part of the machine, not an abstraction of it. How on earth did we lose this?