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EaaSI Pedagogy:

Historical CAD Software in the Classroom

Zachary Furste

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Software Curation

Carnegie Mellon University

furste@cmu.edu

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Presentation roadmap

Course background
Logistics of Emulation as a Service for the classroom
Survey of student projects
Questions raised by the course

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Course background

Special Topics in Computational Design: Experimental Archaeology of CAD
Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach
Emulation co-coordinated with Prof. Eric Kaltman, CSU-CI
Course consisted of 1 undergrad, 1 MA student, and 2 PhD students, all with professional background in design
Offered in CMU’s College of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Computational Design Program

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Course background

“Computer-aided design (CAD) systems are artifacts of cultural and technical significance which shape the intellectual labor and professional identities of many architects, engineers, and other designers. This project-based course explores them as territories of both historical and creative inquiry.”

- Syllabus

Treats CAD software systems as primary sources for historical research, as well as inspiration for creative practice
Readings and discussions emphasized tacit vs. explicit knowledge

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Special Topics in Computational Design:

Experimental Archaeology of CAD

Reconstruction of a historical system
Emulation of a legacy software
Development of a speculative system

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The logistics of emulation as a service

Loading target software into EaaSI

Good chance to test ingestion workflows
Excellent crash course for bootstrapping environments
Gratifying to have specific use case in mind

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The logistics of emulation as a service

Using EaaSI

UI menus for environments/virtual machines/objects not necessarily geared towards user
Mouse acceleration, mouse lag (improved in recent EaaSI update)
Lack of simple file output from environments
Authentication procedures

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Publically available student emulation projects:

https://medium.com/@ulberge/detail-and-computational-aesthetics-an-analysis-of-vistapro-4-0-1999-c0c4b2372c03

https://medium.com/@jprzybyl_35578/understanding-how-evolution-of-software-affects-design-a5454bb47fcf

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Questions raised

How to structure user-friendly metadata for computing environments
Permissions and access for platforms like EaaSI
Range of use cases for software preservation—rather than just rendering historical files, legacy software as an interactive environment can be fruitful ground for research and creative practice

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