A misconception mostly brought about through movies is that computers are leading a social revolution. I beg to differ. Humans dare to build machines that allow their dreams to come true.
Computing knows its inception through the military but was soon adopted by governments in statistical exercises, and later embraced by big businesses for commercial applications, broadening the scope gradually via more powerful hardware.
As soon as technology made it to the home market, computing had to keep up with the vast array of possible applications, initially adapting business software to personal use and then redesigning it to the home users’ skillset.
This stage had barely been achieved that the emergence of the internet necessitated the re-invention of computing, adapting and extending existing applications to take advantage of the web.
New languages, paradigms and approaches had to be invented, designed and made accessible to the global community. Sure enough, the world of internet computing had just reached stability when smartphones hit the market. Since the web had been designed to be multi-platform, porting it across to smartphones was initially acceptable. Eventually, due to the smaller screen of devices linked to the owner, custom apps and websites began being developed to be smartphone-friendly.
So what glass ceiling will be shattered next? Will a combination of speech recognition, artificial intelligence and robotics create the next Alexa/Home/Siri in articulated form? Will we shop in virtual reality for clothes we wear in real life? How will stadium and home fans experience Qatar’s World Cup 2022 with augmented/virtual reality technology?
What’s lurking in the research laboratories ready to take the world into a new paradigm of computing?
University academics and students instigate such questions and attempt to shift the paradigm of computing by pushing the boundaries in partnership with industry. The BSc (Hons) Creative Computing programme, born in 2005, has introduced an unknown branch that is set to prepare computer scientists to creatively find solutions to new challenges.
A robust and academically sound undergraduate and postgraduate degree does not simply teach how to tackle problems now, but rather offers a Swiss-army knife solution of innovative techniques that will collectively enable emerging technological breakthroughs. Read more about the ‘evolution towards creative computing’ and how it already has and will continue to revolutionise the future far from the familiar present at https://bit.ly/2JeDApy.
Jonathan Barbara is the resident Creative Computing and Games Design lecturer at Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education. Read more from Jonathan at https://medium.com/@jbarbara_50043 .