Recently, I’ve been on a journey to get back into some of my less academic hobbies. As people on social media say, twelve-year-old me kind of had it right when she did things just because they were cool and interesting, instead of worrying about whether it was cringe or not.

Growing up, I loved arts and crafts. I would always end up at the after-school arts and crafts activities in my elementary school while I waited for my late pickup. Those activities pretty much lit up my day, especially since I was a shy but curious kid. I always got a rush of satisfaction when I finished any random project I stumbled into. Following the instructions and ending up with a physical thing didn’t just feel like, “here’s proof I worked hard,” which was already satisfying; in my head, the whole activity was like a little system.

Ever since then, I have been interested in space as a system. My room was not just my room. It was a representation of my mind as a space. It was the one place where I had control over things, and building it as I did with paper and glue seemed like the ultimate expression not only of me, but of the lifestyle, and the philosophy, I lived by.

Making it with paper, glue, and whatever supplies I could find felt like the ultimate expression of not just “me,” but of a whole lifestyle and the philosophy behind it.

Since that time, I expanded my repertoire and got into things such as drawing, graphic design, photography, etc. While I have never stopped taking photos, I recently began posting some of them to Instagram.

While I was doing work last week in M5, I decided to take out my phone and capture these photos. With the lights turned off, I thought it would be interesting to snap some images of the dimly lit room around me before I headed out for the day.

What fascinates me, and many people, about M5 is how people oriented it is. You can tell the space has been lived in, in a good way. When the lights go off, you can still see how alive the place must have been during the day. The equations scrambled on the wall with kettle empty from the many cups of coffee made for the tired students that it sees every day create the scene.

While the people aspect of M5 is what most people see, I find something else fascinating too. When I look up at the ceiling, I see geometric shapes, as many ceilings tend to be. The ceiling and walls themselves are like the breadboard for the M5 circuit. They stay the same while the things on top of them are switched around, taken in and out, and together they create a wonderful machine.

The liminal, geometrically structured room itself is the support for the human activity, and seeing the contrast of the two reminds me of the contrast between human and machine that ECE students like myself learn about on a daily basis.

In ECE and M5, humans use the structured, constructed, and mathematically aligned parts to create something that shows evidence of human life, human creativity, and the drive to create something new.

An image of M5 I took while writing this post

I feel like that contrast is the same one I felt when I was making my paper craft model room in 3rd grade, because the space itself reflects the systems that go into designing and the thought process it takes to understand the systems that create electronics and machines. The activity is a system itself, which is what, at the most basic level, a circuit is, and the walls of M5 reflect that.

In M5, I finally feel like I have a space to rediscover the passion I had for those small-scale systems, but in a structured, academic form. Now I can make cool stopwatches with it, and hopefully much, much more.

- Aleksa

The Wall Aesthetics

Is This Thing On?