common usage of the term differs from this meaning. The OED also defines amateur as “one who cultivates something as a pastime, as distinguished from one who prosecutes it professionally; hence, sometimes used disparagingly, as dabbler, or superficial student or worker.” It is this second definition, a rather condescending view of amateurs as inferior dabblers, that often prevails in our culture. However, that has not

also shared a common view that doing
science as a “trade” was demeaning.
Anyone who accepted money to pursue
knowledge would compromise their
integrity— who paid the piper called
the tune. Isaac Newton, as professor of
mathematics at Cambridge University,
was not paid to do physical or math-
ematical research but to teach. The
19th century’s most famous scientist,
Charles Darwin, was never paid to
do science. And Einstein’s three great
papers of 1905 were not part of his
nization of the paid role is less than a
hundred years old; the word “scientist,”
coined in 1840, was not in standard
usage until the early 20th century [ 4].

• Spectacle Computing: air Quality balloons (Stacey Kuznetsov, George noel Davis, Eric Paulos, Mark Gross, Jian Chiu Cheung)

• air Quality Sensing: Wearair T-Shirt (Sunyoung Kim and Eric Paulos)

 

always been the case. For example, the world of today’s professional scientist, shaped by peer-review journals and the priorities of funding institutions, would feel foreign to many early scientists. In fact, historically, many of these early scientists were simply curious amateurs—lovers of science. As noted historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin writes:

Well into the 19th century, and even
into the 20th, doing science was typi-
cally more of an avocation than a job.
In the 17th century, the great chemist
Robert Boyle not only financed his sci-
ence out of his own deep pockets but
job specifications: He was then a pat-
ent clerk in Switzerland. True, over
the course of history, many scientific
researchers were in academic employ-
ment, but with few exceptions, before
the 20th century, the job of a science
professor was not to produce new
knowledge but to transmit and safe-
guard existing knowledge. Until quite
recent times, the number of people in
the world paid to do original scientific
research “for its own sake” was infini-
tesimally small. The transformation of
science from a calling to a job happened
largely during the course of the past
century. Indeed, science is arguably the
world’s youngest profession: The routi-

ing and ingenious computing artifacts. In nearly every case, these individuals and groups operate entirely outside of the officially sanctioned academic and industrial research communities.

But how have we as “expert” practitioners been participating in this discussion? By constructing a practice around the design and development of technologies for task-based problem solving, we have unintentionally established such work as the status quo for the human-computing experience. We have failed in our duty to open up alternate forums for technology to

January + February 2012