Don't Let the Simulation's Beauty Convince You It's Real

The architecture faculty who designed Project Athena�s Garden dreamed of transparent understanding of design process; today scientists are reconciled to opacity and seeing only a CAVE�s shadows. Over the past twenty years, simulation has introduced its dazzling environments and we have been witness to our own seduction. A mechanical engineer instructs his students: �Don�t be fooled by the graphics.�17 Luft says that beautiful codes promote the �illusion of doing really great science.� Kinney ...

 Loss of Legacy Programmers Means Loss of Systems Understa...

At Livermore, a legendary senior weapons designer is about to retire. At the Spring 2005 MIT workshop, his colleagues discuss this retirement and refer to it as �a blow.� They are anxious about more than the loss of one man�s ability to make individual scientific contributions. He has irreplaceable knowledge about the programming that supports current practice.10 His colleagues fret: �He has such a great memory that he hasn�t written down lots of important stuff. How will people know it?� Th...

 Where's Transparency With So Many Layers of Abstraction?

Some older scientists, for example, justify their use of opaque software by pointing to the infinite regress of computer representations. After all, they argue, it doesn�t really mean much to know how your simulation is programmed if all you are looking at is a high- level computer language. The �real guts� of the program is in assembly language and in all that lies beneath that, and no one wants to go to that level with today�s complex machines. In the 1980s, Professor Barry Nilo= insisted t...

 The Danger of Black-Box Abstraction

When I was a graduate student, if you were going to convert some data or something like that, you would write the FORTRAN code to convert the data yourself. That�s how you would do it. Now there are these programs. There are these windows and you click. I .nd with my students all the time, they don�t know why something isn�t working. I�m like, well, did the data convert properly? Open the .le and look at it. It is so black box and it is going from the time when you knew how the data was conve...

 Top-Down VS Bottom-Up Approaches to Design in Software

One of the hallmarks of the Athena project was that faculty were asked to build their own educational software. Most worked with a set of assumptions about learning: students begin by learning �fundamental concepts�; formal, mathematical representation is always the best approach; students would use simulations the way designers intended. As Athena unfolded, none of these assumptions proved true. To begin with, students approached simulation with a wide range of personal intellectual styles. ...

 Students Reliant on Computer Simulations Lack the Technic...

In the 1980s, alternate visions of computers and the future of design were expressed in competing views about programming. Some architects believed that designers needed to learn advanced programming. If designers did not understand how their tools were constructed, they would not only be dependent on computer experts but less likely to challenge screen realities. Other architects disagreed. They argued that, in the future, creativity would not depend on understanding one�s tools but on using...

 Immersion in the Simulation Makes it Hard to Question It

Individuals become immersed in the beauty and coherency of simulation; indeed simulations are built to capture us in exactly this way. A thirteen- year- old caught up in SimCity, a game which asks its users to play the role of urban developers, told me that among her “Top Ten Rules of Sim” was rule number 6: “Raising taxes leads to riots.” And she thought that this was not only a rule of the game but a rule in life.3 What may charm in this story becomes troubling when professionals lo...

 Computers are Associated with Precision, but Really They ...

In physics, too, where computers were used to relieve the tedium of data collection and plotting, relatively mundane applications had significant effects. When calculation was automated and its results instantaneously translated into screen visualizations, patterns in data became more apparent. Physics students described feeling “closer to science” and “closer to theory” when their laboratory classes began to use software for visualization and analysis. As in chemistry, messy data no ...