The Human Aspect of Design

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I mean, just because the audience is... This is an audio podcast, you can't see it, but it's way beyond just a set of pictures of you talking with some graphs. I mean, you really obviously put a tremendous amount of effort into the design in terms of background images and fonts and angles and things like that. It was a ton of fun, a ton of work, and there are over 1,600 photos in the book, 1,300 of which I either took or few of them I generated,. And the other came from public domain, Creative Commons, and that's a shout out to Wikimedia when I write my books.

Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emotionally or aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function come together in things is what we call "Design." Today's guest, Ge Wang, is a computer scientist and electronic musician with a new book called Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. It's incredibly creative in both substance and style, featuring a unique photo-comic layout and many thoughtful ideas about the nature of design, both practical and idealistic. Ge Wang received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University, and is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He is the author of the ChucK programming language for musical applications, and co-founder of the mobile-app developer Smule. He has given a well-known TED talk where he demonstrates Ocarina, an app for turning an iPhone into a wind instrument. Stanford Web page Artful Design home page (and Amazon page) TED talk on the DIY Orchestra of the Future Stanford Laptop Orchestra Smule Wikipedia page Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.