Char Stiles Explores Tools for Expression and Experience

DEVON: One of the descriptions that I read that you gave about what live coding is is like you’re coding a graphics program where everyone can see the process, they can see your body language as well. And that’s really interesting because it… Usually, the way we interact with software is on our phone or it’s on our computer. We have no idea who made it, we have no idea what it was like to make it. And it’s just really hard to empathize with that person, which means in turn, it’s hard to imagine yourself making that thing. CHAR: Exactly. Yeah. And I want to kind of loosely quote an artist, Melanie Hoff, she talks about teaching computation in an artful way. She says, “What if the person who wrote the code loved you? What would that code look like? What if you loved the person that wrote the code that we’re using today?” DEVON: That’s very interesting. How would software be different if all programmers took that to heart? CHAR

I think that if all programmers coded with love and intention, there would be less centralization. There would be more personal experiences and more tailored experiences on smaller scales, more… Maybe it’s a little bit more, I guess, dispersing. But I think that it’s… Honestly, I think scale is something that is kind of an antithesis too, or being like a huge entity is kind of like an antithesis to computing with love, because love is an intentional action and it’s hard to tailor that to any specific person if you’re just trying to create this broad experience

Another way that this extends food is that we consume things that people code every day. Right now, using the computer, we’re consuming code in a way. And I also like to think about it in the way that like in Ratatouille where that main chef guy is like, “Anyone can cook.” That’s the way I feel about code, it’s like anyone can code. And it’s just something that… It is such a personal journey and a personal experience. And the way that you approach learning to code should be as different as the people who are doing it. So I think there should be so many different routes into learning how to code. And as of right now, there’s really kind of like a definitive path that is recommended for you to learn how to code. And I think part of my work is that I really want to create these alternative routes into learning tech, if you so desire. DEVON

I’m not a math person. I can’t really learn math.” There’s this quote he has where he’s saying like, “Yeah, sure. People in math class often don’t really learn math, but it’s also true that if you are in French class, you’re not really going to learn French, but we don’t say you don’t have the aptitude to learn French. You say like, ‘Oh, they didn’t grow up in France.’” And so he has this idea of, “What would it look like to create Mathland?” A place where just everything around you sort of has math embedded in it and you’re just kind of coming across it in a lot of different diverse ways over the course of your day

Yeah. They go through the effort of making up scenarios that will never happen so that they can teach you these super abstract concepts, when there are in fact extremely concrete examples of fraction stuff. It’s not like the classic of like Timmy has 12 bananas and 13 apples and then takes both of them away. It’s like, “Why do you have 13 apples?” It’s literally just take a little bit of creativity and think about what 13 of something that you would have anyways. DEVON: Right. And also, how can you connect it to something that people can feel and have emotions about? Music is a perfect example of that