Music
Applause
All right, thank you very much.
So when I think about creativity and about making things,
I would think about the relationship that you have on a physical level.
I think that's because my firm designs media installations for museums and for public spaces.
But you think about this relationship that you actually have with what you're creating.
And I think in some ways this is challenging, obviously,
for all of us who are working with digital tools.
It's just a very famous piece, not just because it's Jackson Pollock,
who's demonstrating this incredible improvisational dance
that he's using to actually create and compose this work of art.
For example, one piece of film launches his entire career,
meaning nobody actually understood what he was trying to do until they saw this,
until they actually saw it in motion.
And he too has this way of talking about it about the way in which the painting,
the actual physical act of it, the thing that he's creating has a life of its own.
It's sort of outside of him.
And so I think about that all the time when we're making work,
the ways in which the things that we're creating have this second life.
Improvisation, which is the theme of what I'm talking about,
is obviously big in comedy.
Jonathan Winters just passed away.
And there's a really famous clip of him.
He's actually apparently the one-time jackpaw laughed openly on television.
It's because he uses one prop that's stick to basically draw a character after character after character after character.
He makes it into an arrow.
He plays the violin with it.
He's actually fishing with it.
He makes his way through it.
And obviously, when you think just to get it out of the way about creativity,
improvisational comedy has a lot to offer.
This is no less than Tina Fey making her way through Brownie Husband.
It represents 500 servings.
But just to make the sort of easy comparisons in terms of creativity,
brainstorming obviously has a lot to do with improvisation.
And so the three classic rules that she cites and that many cite,
the first is starting with yes.
As people give you ideas, never shut anything down.
You always start with yes, and then you build on it.
So you make statements.
You don't ask questions.
You don't sort of open things up and just let them hang out there.
You make statements.
You move things forward.
You propel them.
And then the last rule, which I think is really important,
is there are no mistakes, only opportunities.
So you build and you change things as you're learning from other people's errors,
and those are actually opportunities to fix things.
And a lot of times people ask me, you know,
how do you get such great projects?
And the answer really isn't that third one,
meaning there actually aren't really bad projects.
There are good projects.
There are sometimes bad or challenged or challenging projects
that you turn and twist and transform into great projects.
The last thing I want to show, as an inspiration,
I spent time when I was 17 at Berkeley College of Music.
It's a jazz, a very famous jazz school in Boston.
And they teach you all this theory.
They teach you all this incredible advanced technical information.
But they have a couple of sort of old, wise teachers
who always say the same thing.
They say, you know, after you're done studying and making your way through,
you just need to forget it all and just play.
Right?
And there's this way in which I think for us,
in terms of using the structures, right?
So this is John Coltrane playing a few of my favorite things, right?
And there's actually something there in terms of these structures
that bring out creativity.
That's actually how jazz improvisation works.
It's not actually Jonathan Winter's free association.
It's not coming from nowhere.
You're actually playing off the structures themselves.
And the structures are both what constrain you,
but in some ways what propel you to go beyond.
And most of all, what the audience is actually enjoying and listening.
What your brain is listening for is the patterns
and the ways in which the improvisation is actually playing
and tickling these different patterns up and down, right?
So this idea of actually structure versus creativity
is really, really key to how all of these things work together.
So the first project I want to show, which deals with this,
I showed some of the original concepts for last year.
And that's work that we did called Gallery One
for the Cleveland Museum of Art.
And so just to put it in context,
Gallery One is part of a large-scale $350 million expansion
that the museum is going through.
And a very specific board member said,
you know, we're spending all this time building new gallery space.
We need to actually build new audiences, right?
They're not in Paris or London, they're not in New York.
They need to actually engage with the community
in order to grow a whole new generation
of people making their way through the museum.
And so we got on board to basically think about
how technology specifically could help them with that challenge.
And so you can see here, original concept
was to use technology in a way to augment the traditional art gallery.
And so this is a big fear and debate and struggle
within many institutions, particularly within art museums,
is how do you retain the classic gallery experience
where you have this communal one-on-one experience with an artwork
where you can meditate directly with that artwork itself in its presence?
But how do you then use technology to augment that experience
and not necessarily distract from it?
And so our solution was essentially to take the technology
and pull it away from the individual artworks,
lower it so that you could see over the technology
to the artworks themselves,
everything on the screens predicated on looking.
So you can see it in its final installation.
If you click on any individual artwork,
you'll see it in its original context.
So that's the first part when you think about improvisation.
This actually adds a whole layer of improvisation
to an art museum itself,
because the visitors themselves are able to change and alter
what it is that the museum will actually tell them
about the individual works themselves.
Just because this is actually my favorite part of the engagement,
I'm going to show you a couple more of these contextual pieces.
So that work of art, it's from 1300 BC,
but you'd never know it just sitting in the gallery itself,
or actually see where it's from.
This puts gold leaf in a whole new context
in terms of its role within interior architecture from that time.
This is the original castle that that tapestry was made for
and that it hung within for hundreds of years.
Now it's sitting within the Cleveland Museum of Art.
This is one of my favorite pieces, because you see the studio that Rodin used
to actually create this factory for human expression, one to the next.
This one, just to go back to Picasso,
like only someone in that state of mind could create something that audacious.
It's just incredible.
And so we were playing with all these ideas.
Suddenly when you're looking at this lineage of creativity,
you start to really think about it as a sort of base and core human expression,
which is not something that art museums typically engage with.
And we start talking about how literally for tens of thousands of years,
humans have been making other images of humans.
In fact, that's the first thing that we made when we could create images.
And so we made this interface, which uses facial detection algorithms
to actually connect with the artworks themselves.
So as you make different faces, it's drawing forth exact images
that are connecting with the expression.
You're literally able to, in a way, play the collection like an instrument.
You're able to actually connect with your own emotions.
And it's taking these individual images together, one to the next.
Suddenly the gallery transforms because it's a social space.
You have all these people who are gathered around watching the performance.
And then these images, these connections, you can email to yourself.
And that's when you can get information.
So it really extends that experience much deeper,
way past the actual moment that you're in front of that artwork itself.
We spend a lot of time talking about this idea that it's hard to get people to think about
the fact that people drew or people painted these objects,
that you shouldn't take it as a foregone conclusion.
And so with Zach Lieberman, we created this work,
which allows you to search the entire collection by drawing.
So as you make different shapes, it's connecting it directly
with shapes from within the collection, one to the next.
And as you can see, we built it. This is in the family gallery.
It's really, really low.
We made this and the curators were so hilariously addicted.
We couldn't get them to focus on anything else.
So we have an adult version, which has lots of information in it
because apparently adults like information, although I'm not quite so sure about that.
But in this case, it actually draws forth all of these different parts of the collection
through kids' own creativity, one to the next.
This is one other piece I'll show where you can actually sort of the opposite of the face.
This uses body detection and actually gives you a percentage
on how well you're matching different figurative sculptures from the collection.
Knowing that there's something new that you can discover about these artworks
by literally inhabiting the pose.
That was where it originally started, was the curator saying,
it's so hard to get people to think about people's own bodies and the expressions.
And obviously it still plays out, yes.
Lots and lots of social ways it plays itself out, one to the next.
Lots of expression happening.
And then this piece is an iPad piece that we built for the entire museum itself.
So it allows you to navigate either through maps.
It's location-aware, so it can tell you about whatever is around you.
You can take different tours, both from the director,
but also from literally anyone else inside the museum.
I'll talk about that in a sec.
And then this last bit of functionality uses an image recognition algorithm.
So you can pick it up and you can point it at an individual artwork.
It recognizes it instantly and points out different parts of the painting.
The curator is actually there showing you different parts of it, one to the next.
So the last thing I'll show you from the engagement,
this is actually a concept of it, is the collections wall.
So I talked about this last year,
and I wanted to use this as a way to sort of go into the process and how we make work.
I just want to sort of open it up from the beginning.
It's not a particularly happy story.
So you'll understand a little bit about how we've been evolving our process
and really learning in the same way that you can sort of structure things,
learning from how we're actually able to create.
So these were the concept sketches I showed last year.
And last year I talked a lot about designing something crazy enough
from the beginning at the pitch stage that then you have to live up to.
And we certainly did that.
We talked about different ways to visualize parts of the collection.
And some of the core features were that you could go up
and you could select any individual artwork
and you could see different connections
or you could add it to your tour, one to the next.
So this idea, these blue lines,
I was like super obsessed with this for a really, really long time.
I held on to it for a very long time.
But while we were doing this, we got a little anxious
about a bunch of different interaction problems.
One is obviously, you know, where do these points overlap
and where do they begin and end for different visitors?
Because this is something where people can ostensibly stand shoulder to shoulder.
So we said, okay, well, let's try a different tact.
What if we actually based it on the eight iPad stations?
And we had a sort of continuous scroll of these different paintings,
one to the next, they were sort of moving forth.
And as you actually put down different iPads,
you get to open up new scrolls.
So really, it's a highly defined and articulated space
that the individual visitors are sort of owning
and they can filter different things.
So it's a continuous scroll all across,
but the filters are different depending on who's using it.
You can jump into individual artworks,
but it's very, very segmented, one to the next.
And so we'd like the scroll idea.
So we did some early sort of visioning prototypes, one to the next.
And that seemed interesting, but it seemed a little bit busy.
And so then we went to this version, which is much simpler.
It's based on a grid, but it still has this sort of segmentation
into eight different spaces based on the iPad locations.
I think you can start to see where this is going, right?
So then we were like, well, maybe we should just go straight for the timeline.
And you can see it's the grid and it's working out one to the next
and you can still open it up,
but we still have this problem of how to delineate
between one visitor to the next.
So we went back to the original idea that we really liked
and we looked at some of the other ways
that we were visualizing these individual pieces.
This is a timeline version again.
It's calling out where the wall of China was built and things like that.
This is portraits all at eye level,
so they're looking you directly in the eye.
This is tapestries by size.
This I thought was an interesting idea,
actually making things full scale directly in front of you.
This is organizing the collection by color.
And so as we were moving through idea after idea after idea,
you cannot surprisingly guess that we were burning through months and months
and months and months of time and effort and good graces
and things were getting very, very challenging between us within the team
and with the client, right?
And so if there's any, there's sort of two villains within this talk.
The first one is this.
So if people don't know what this is,
what is this?
Waterfall.
That's right.
So the waterfall is a highly toxic, I feel, structure
when you think about structures,
when you think about what jazz musicians play, right?
Like this thing doesn't even play the blues.
It just plays like most horrible canned music.
It's the only type of music that comes out of waterfall.
And the reason is essentially it's different siloed pieces.
You get sign off, you lock it down.
The people who hate waterfall, most of all,
are actually probably people in this room are developers
because as they say, all the shit runs downhill.
And then the developers are there trying to fix all the problems
that should have been fixed in previous stages.
So it's a huge issue.
In our studio, like many others,
we're using this at the time and we couldn't get our way out of concept
and out of wireframe.
We couldn't get ourselves to a point where we could pull the trigger.
But in fact, I finally just said, forget it.
Let's just pick one.
Let's just start making.
And I, in front of all my peers and the incredible people at IO,
it's embarrassing to admit,
but I swear we fixed the core interaction problems in 18 minutes.
It took no time.
And the reason was this prototype was right in front of us, in full scale.
We could suddenly imagine all the main ways to solve.
So this is not actually what the final thing really looked like.
It's the idea of these individual zones, which we called irises.
That came through loud and clear.
The individual carousels were really working.
The way in which the individual irises could map one to the next
and that if you chose an individual tile in between them,
it would just move to the closest iris.
All of these things that now feel very, very intuitive
really reveal themselves here.
And it was because it was full scale and we were all gathered together.
We could finally just hash out exactly what was going to really happen
rather than project ourselves into what we imagined was going to happen.
And from there we made prototype after prototype.
So we're basically iteratively moving through.
He's using his magical finger to point at things, right?
It's like faking it as we're clicking on stuff.
So we're making film after film for the curators so that they could understand.
And one of the biggest challenges of this level of iterative prototyping
is what's called confirmation bias.
So if you know the term,
it's essentially a way in which the mind is trained on a neurological level
to look and confirm what it already knows.
So this works really, really well for evolutionary biology.
And in particular, it's looking for things that it's experienced previously.
Those things are written particularly deep into your memory.
So as you're going between prototype to prototype to prototype,
it's really, really important to actually be able to diminish
the strength of confirmation bias and to look at it with fresh eyes.
It seems, you know, intuitive, but it's actually very, very, very hard,
particularly when you're looking at something for the 17th or 18th time,
to not just look for what you told someone to fix
or not just look for what you thought would be there,
but to actually look fresh each time.
And so this is where we started putting in a back button.
This is where we started putting in the like button.
We took out the back button.
We literally had 18 different versions of this.
And so it became really important to develop a criteria
by which we would judge the prototypes that we were building
as part of this making culture that we were developing within our studio.
So here's the criteria that we use.
Yes, this is a cliche, but it is true.
The capacity for technology to have some magical presence is really, really important.
And in fact, isn't something you really concept.
It's something that you build into the software itself.
The ability for the innovation to have a point, though.
Nothing, nothing ages worse than bleeding edge technology.
Right?
If you want to take a gizmo and put it into an installation,
that's great if it's going to be in a convention center
and you're going to take it down four days later.
But if you put this into a physical space that's meant to last a year,
multiple years, or actually, you know, God willing,
stand the test of time, it needs to have a point to it.
It needs to be deeper than just being the latest and greatest
because it will never be as thin as tomorrow's new technology.
And so a lot of what we're looking for, for that, is essentially this idea,
this idea of experiential learning.
So the ability to, with your body, with your senses,
with your friend, with your family,
to actually experience things that embody ideas themselves.
So this is it a month before we opened.
Right? And keep this image in your head
because the final installation didn't look much like this at all.
Right? And so the capacity to be improvisational with technology,
and it's intuitive, right, because it's software,
so you should be able to change it, is also really a matter of nerve.
You have to be able to look into these things with fresh eyes
and say to your team, to your client, to your collaborators,
this can be better, just take a deep breath,
but we're going to make it better and we're going to fix it in different ways.
And so what we do is again and again get in front of new people,
see how they're using it, right?
This is a curator at a lot of trouble actually clicking
figuring out different pieces, but we spent a lot of time
so we're rushing up showing her how to swipe.
It's very exciting.
But the ability to be able to do that and to see, right,
so she still isn't in the swipe. She's like clicking.
She's like, do I tap? No, you swipe. Do I tap? No, I swipe.
But the ability to actually be able to listen and to watch
and to empathize with people who are using your technology
is the most important thing about iterative prototyping,
one to the next.
And so here it is in its final installation.
This is what it finally looked like.
It has all of these different themes, top 50 favorites,
love and lust, which is a favorite.
Color, it's actually the entire organization all by actual chroma.
It can be used by any number of people who sit shoulder to shoulder,
one to the next.
We spent a lot of time actually massaging all the data itself.
That's another thing we did in the last month is rewrite all of those titles
for all 3,000 artworks.
But the ability here is really to use the iPad to save individual artworks.
You're authoring a tour of the museum itself
by making your way through the wall.
So it becomes this way to essentially see a vast,
sometimes random cross-section of the entire collection
and then use that to map out your journey inside the museum itself.
And so this was the final blow to us in terms of our process.
At the end of this, I had a long talk with everyone at the studio.
I said, you know what?
We're actually going to redesign our design process,
which I never was interested in previously.
I always did everything intuitively.
But I'll talk a little bit now about the ways in which
we're essentially using what I call prototype-first,
which is the process that we've developed
that gets us into code as fast as possible.
So this next engagement that used prototype-first
to interesting results, shall I say,
has to do with the telescope.
It started with the idea that the telescope and the microscope
were these two transformative technologies
because they allowed people, again,
to have tangible experience with scientific phenomena.
For the first time, you could actually see directly something
very, very small or something very, very big,
much beyond the human eye itself.
And that form of learning, in this case, for Galileo,
led him to concretely understand and unlock the solar system.
Here he is actually explaining and defending his views.
Sadly, the Inquisition made him recant his views.
He was under house arrest.
So this is actually, you know, the dark side,
if you will, of confirmation bias, right?
This idea of seeing as believing that there was a whole society
of people who were unwilling to literally see with their own eyes
what was actually happening with reality
and just constantly referred to their own understanding,
the structures within their minds, of their own belief systems.
Just as an aside, I mean, it's kind of horrifying to imagine,
you know, living in a moment like that, right?
Like, that would be really terrible to just think about,
like, can you imagine what that would be like
to live in a society like that?
So this is actually exactly what my next project is about,
not specifically climate change,
but really about science at its core
and raising up a new level of scientists within America in general.
There's a movement called STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math,
and we're part of a larger coalition.
We're collaborating with the New York Hall of Science
on a project called Design, Make, Play.
So I'm going to play a quick excerpt of a movie that we made
that just introduces some of the ideas itself.
I don't know, it's sad to think that you can't change the world.
If you grew up thinking that you couldn't create something
and make something, then that was always someone else's role.
Kids don't feel connected to what they're learning.
They don't understand why they're learning it.
They don't know what the long-term goals are.
They don't see themselves in the process.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math is really the future,
and people always say this, it's the future of a competitive America.
STEM is important because that's where the jobs are and will be.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
Too few students are going into those fields.
We show kids that they can be creators of the world,
not just consumers of it.
It takes them out of the role of kind of passively absorbing information
to actively creating information.
They learn the things they want to learn to solve the problems they want to solve.
That is incredibly empowering.
They start to take ownership over problem solving in the world.
It's not about doing your own work and hiding it,
but rather it's about building off of what everyone else is doing
and getting their input and making something better based on that.
The important problems are all about solutions that aren't obvious.
In a design-made play curriculum, they're learning by doing something.
They're making something.
Right off the bat say, oh, I made that. I didn't even realize I could make that.
Well then I can probably do this other thing.
You're putting the learner in the driver's seat.
They want to learn more.
That's what learning should be like.
Designing as the task, making as a product and play as the way that we get there.
We're at a crucial time in education that we need to shake things up a little bit
and design-made play definitely does that.
I think a lot of the thinking from this is actually playing within our process
in general, as you can see.
Again, this is the microscope, one of the first microscopes themselves.
We were talking about the smartphone.
The idea that the smartphone is all these new sensor sets
that suddenly we carry in our pocket that are unlocking the capacity
to have direct, tangible relationships with different scientific phenomenons
and different mathematical principles.
This is what, with people from New York's Hall of Science, we started developing
the idea of using forced perspective to teach different ideas within mathematics.
They have lots of amazing people there,
but the people who were partnered with Peggy Monahan and Dorothy Bennett
had this idea of basically looking at internet culture
and the ways in which kids are already making these different joke things
that are being spread around, but actually unlocking different principles,
in this case within math, using these different ideas.
The idea is that a smartphone could be used to actually register these different ratios
using forced perspective.
In fact, within forced perspective, there is all of this math, one to the next.
We had this idea.
These are all the original inspiration pitch documents that we put together
for a foundation grant from the Gates Foundation that we put together.
The idea is that you can cut out individual pants, for example,
and actually fit them onto people.
That's the task, is getting them to fit exactly,
but once you do that, well, that's math right there.
Actually, the smartphone, because it's using image recognition,
knows the exact distances themselves,
went to the next and then can reveal them to people.
You're basically making things and then you're learning on the backside
in terms of how these things actually fit together.
That's where the instruction comes in.
That's also where the ability to make things and to share them comes in.
We started at the Maker's Fair in New York City
by actually cutting out what we called stick picks,
just to make sure people are going to have fun, people are going to use this.
I think it worked out pretty well.
People have fun.
People know how to use these things.
We had literally hundreds of these all over Pinterest and all over Twitter.
We called them stick picks.
People were basically taking them and transforming them
into all these different stories back and forth.
Under the guise of this new process, prototype first,
we jumped right into structuring the actual piece itself.
This is literally, instead of a massive deck of wireframes,
we laid out what the basic tool sets were.
The basic structure was sort of like Angry Birds.
It was meant to be a series of challenges that you would level up,
one to the next.
We actually didn't want to spend a ton of time
with a complicated deck of hundreds and hundreds of different wireframes.
We went to jump right into the prototype.
We took this idea of structuring it based on a series of challenges
that would pay off with different types of education.
We had this classic sort of learn how button,
this big level up button,
once you actually understand the principles themselves,
and we jumped right into prototyping.
This is the prototype.
It's using image recognition.
You can actually put the pants on people.
We have this sort of viewfinder on the left-hand side.
You're able to take photos.
The photos is what you use during the reflection point.
You can go into the gallery and see all the different photos
that you put together.
That leads to this sort of learn how space,
where it's the voice of the teacher that's telling you about things.
There's some ways in which you can manipulate it,
but it's really trying to show you exactly what happened.
I'll never forget.
I was on the phone because I was out of town,
and we started going through to get their feedback from the prototype.
They're like, the prototype is so great,
because it really confirms a lot of the ways in which
we thought we would really love it.
It really shows all the parts, actually, that we don't like.
I remember being like, oh, I'm sorry, were you breaking up?
I couldn't quite hear.
Is that what you said?
As it turns out, it was a very awkward phone call.
In fact, the entire structure that we had built out,
this whole idea that there were essentially series of challenges
and a series of explanations when we built it,
even as they had signed off on it,
even as we had talked about it for over a month,
even as we had diagrammed it very, very diligently,
each one of these is a very, very specific moment in the experience.
When they held it in their hands, they recognized this is totally wrong.
We actually have to change this entire thing.
To a certain extent, it's very ironic,
and on a deep level, it is really humbling,
both to talk about this here,
but also in front of your client and collaborators,
the first time you institute prototype first,
it's used to essentially dismantle the core approach that you have to a project,
but that is, as they said to me, exactly what it's there to do.
That is why you put these things fast in the front
so that if they are going to fail, they fail then,
before you have a massive investment in them.
This is second nature, to a certain extent,
for products, particularly digital products,
but for client services or for architecture, the worlds that we live in,
we have to find ways to put this forth.
The rules that we need to follow in order to make this work,
the first is to find smart collaborators.
You actually need people both on your team and the clients themselves
to actually really know what they're doing,
because you need to trust them,
because they're going to give you feedback
and they're going to dismantle things before they're finished,
and that has very, very big consequences in terms of the project
and the people and how it's working.
This is actually literally my favorite part of the entire process,
that it lets you resolve differences through prototypes themselves,
meaning all those slides I was showing you, the collections wall,
all those conversations, the back and forth,
that really burned through a lot of goodwill on our team.
It was very personally challenging,
because everyone cared so much,
but couldn't come to any agreement on what this thing would be like,
because it was still in the wood stage?
What would it be like?
So now we just make things, and so constantly in the studio,
also with clients, also with different collaborators we have,
including some very, very high-profile architects,
I just say,
I don't think we're actually going to resolve this on a theoretical level,
so I'll tell you what, I'll build it one way,
or my way, and we'll just see which one actually works,
and that's fine.
And I am more than happy to be humbled and proven wrong,
because at the end of the day,
what we ended up with here is not radically different,
but it's very flat.
It doesn't have any gateways that you go through.
It's actually much more like some of the work that I was showing from Cleveland,
it's essentially an instrument that you play.
It's something that you can use to take these different photos,
so you can turn on and off the different calipers,
and different ways that you can measure things.
All the different ratios are actually built into this,
but it doesn't have gateways, and it doesn't stop the experience.
I think that's a key part of this,
is that it's not based on the broadcast model,
where it's in charge of you,
but on the tool set that you can use and reuse.
And if and when you do want to actually author something,
in this case, we have this comic book tool,
so you can upload different photos,
that's where some of the math can seep in,
and it can actually show you the different ratios themselves.
But this is a really, really radical move from the original concept,
which was much more the broadcast model.
You're on the rails, and we're going to tell you what you need to know.
In this case, it's open, you make things, and you share things.
So just to show you, this is literally hot off the presses,
we just did this prototyping this Monday.
So this is what kids are doing when they're actually using it.
I love this piece.
I mean, just look at the level of conversation
that's happening with technology itself.
In fact, I don't think there's a single shot of only one person
using the iPad itself.
It's actually a really different use of technology
when you think about it in it itself.
So moving people forward and back,
the conversation that needs to happen to actually establish
themselves, and then these are some of the cool things
that kids are actually able to meet.
That's the giant Monty Python foot that comes down and squashes you.
That's the Eiffel Tower, of course, that's falling on you.
That's terrible.
But the ability to actually make something,
and we didn't know or weren't affirmed about this
until we got in front of these kids,
that we were making something that was much bigger
because it was creating these social relationships
around the learning itself.
And this came out of the blue,
that they were actually charting things not on the technology,
not on the pad, but they were actually using
and intermixing it with the general curriculum
and with the ways that they were using the school.
So that's the first of two projects for Design Make Play,
the second one, which we're building with David Cantor.
He got a huge grant from the Federal U.S. Department of Education
to think on a sort of large level about formal education
and informal education.
So informal being anything that's basically outside of a school.
And in this case, the concept is essentially to look at playgrounds
and to look at the ways in which playgrounds
actually have physics lessons built into them.
So if you think about jumping, if you think about the vibrations
on a jungle gym, if you think about a slide.
In fact, what kids are doing there
is actually applying force and acceleration to their own bodies,
which has huge benefits for learning
and for transforming their bodies themselves, just for play.
But it actually has all these really cool aspects of physics
built directly into it.
And so our concept was essentially to create instruments
out of the playground itself,
allowing kids to use their time on the playground for experiments.
And so this also is hot off the press as we shot this on Sunday.
These are, this is the playground at the New York Hall of Science.
And these are kids using a wholly separate system
from the first one I showed you,
where you basically choose these different mats.
They have different properties in terms of friction coefficient.
So they go up and down the slide, or they go down the slide faster or slower,
generating more or less heat, or transferring heat differently.
So you load up a different app, which has a traffic cop filled
with different people who are going down.
And then what these kids are doing is essentially experiments.
They're actually trying out different mats,
measuring different levels of acceleration based on their own mass.
And so because we know what their mass is and we know the coefficient,
we actually have data not just on the runs,
but on the total energy that's actually being created by each individual run itself.
So they're literally building up a laboratory based on their own experience.
And when you think again about confirmation bias,
about the capacity to believe and to connect
and the things that you experience, this becomes very, very powerful.
This is no longer just physics as an abstraction
where you're looking at a little diagram.
This is, oh right, I was on that slide and I did that
with those different mats themselves.
And all that gets built out of here.
So there's different badges that are encouraging you
to maximize thermal energy, maximize kinetic energy,
but essentially it's just getting you to experiment
with a lot of different runs themselves
and to build up a massive data set.
And then when you're inside the classroom,
so that's the other part of the grant
is to look at how informal learning then connects with the classroom itself.
So this is even more forward-looking in some ways,
because this really is there hopefully to replace in some ways
the textbooks that we're working with today.
This might actually be the future of education.
And so what you're seeing, that's an actual run that someone went through.
You can go through all the logs themselves
and call them at one to the next.
And then furthermore, you can actually manipulate all the variables.
So you can change the start height,
which changes the quantity of energy inside it.
You can change the rider's mass itself.
And of course you turn into a robot,
because a robot's very heavy, I don't know if you knew that.
But all of these ways are ways in which kids can manipulate
then the different variables and start to understand
the actual physics, the math,
underneath the experience that they went through itself.
So we have different ways of actually putting together the math
and visualizing it.
These are meant to be very, very simple visualizations.
But just very easy comparisons, one to the next.
You can load up any of the new runs that you made
or the runs that you yourself made,
or the ones that you created based on new variables.
And then you get all the way into the actual math itself.
So again, you can pull out something that you yourself did,
and it'll show you all the math directly built into it.
So one to the next.
And I think that, you know, from our standpoint,
when you think about the future of education,
the future of learning, it really is something about that,
about making things in that experience,
and then one to the next.
So like I said, last year I talked a lot about pitching
crazy ideas and living up to them.
I also wanted to close out another project.
Last year I had talked to you about this idea
that we were going to have a robot arm
that was going to work with a 3D printer.
This crazy idea, if you remember this,
this was the idea of like a robotic,
a robotic thermal burner that was actually going to burn holes
in our client's walls.
Not surprisingly, they didn't sign off on that one.
They didn't work out so well.
This was actually, and then I said, you know,
they had actually a green lit one that I couldn't show you.
So now I can show it to you.
This is the one that they actually fell in love with enough
so that we built a couple different versions of it.
This is a robotic whiteboard plotter.
So this company is like obsessed with whiteboards.
It's like a very engineering driven company.
And so we were interested in actually networking together
a number of their different studios in the labs
using essentially a digital whiteboard.
So the capacity to send messages back and forth
in ways that are utterly tangible and direct
and that are erasable.
Very important.
And we had ideas that we would actually be able to visualize
a lot of the energy in the movement
through the actual studio itself and through their company,
these visuals that would actually build over time.
So all of these are these different sort of organic visualizations
that we're building one to the next.
And this is the final one that we built for them,
which has to a certain extent a life of its own.
And in this case what we really learned was that
even as you're making things changeable,
in this case we had a challenging time with the client itself
to really define what it was that they were looking for
and how we would finally make it.
But we did get the chance to actually create it,
which was a real feat and it was really exciting for us
and actually led to us producing a lot of the other physical work
that we're building at this point.
So the last project I'm going to show
really I think does define to a certain extent this idea
of seeing as believing.
I talked about it two years ago
and this is certainly our largest engagement to date,
the 9-11 Memorial and Museum.
So we've been working on it now for seven years.
We originally partnered with Think Design
to win the international competition to do the master plan
for the institution and then to look at the media design
that we're producing, all of the media for the museum
which opens in 2014.
And so you can see here, it's a very, very raw site at this point,
but even these individual pieces,
like that's what they call the original slurry wall,
which held back the Hudson on the days after 9-11,
that will remain exactly as you see it here.
And part of the reason is that the site itself,
beyond having a sense of sacredness and of witness to history,
also needs to be raw, I think,
to accommodate those who literally ran out of the buildings themselves
who know so much about 9-11
so that it doesn't feel like it's been fixed up or prettified.
And a lot of our conversations early on in the project
was how to satisfy between two different groups,
those groups who made history on that day,
and then young adults, people who are maybe 15 or 16
at the time of the opening,
who know nothing about the event.
And so our original pitch, way back to the first first days
before we had the project,
was literally to use the stories from one group
to tell them to the other group.
That we wouldn't actually have the voice of a curator or historian
that it would be a platform, if you will,
a space for people to share their stories, one to the next.
Now, again, that worked really well in the pitch.
And from there, it took literally three years
to move the client towards thinking in that way
and to be being open to the possibility of testing that idea.
Now, just to put it in context,
it's a very complicated project.
It's a highly politicized project.
It's a very challenging project.
And it's a very recent project,
which means that the stakeholders
have an incredible amount of ownership over them.
So I, again, went to the client
and pitched this idea of prototyping.
I said, well, let us test it.
Why don't we just make a platform?
And so we launched this, Make History, on the eighth anniversary.
So this is now about four years ago.
Open Worldwide System,
where anybody could tell their 9-11 story.
And they could upload photos and videos,
and we had hundreds of thousands of people telling their story
about 9-11 itself.
And the amount of vandalism was almost negligible.
It was amazing.
It was actually really surprising to us.
We built all these sophisticated white and black
and gray flagging tools for different keywords
so that they would be looked at.
And in fact, because we had set up a platform
with a level of integrity,
and because we asked people to sign off
on the fact that what they were saying was true,
again, we got an amazingly low percentage of people
actually typing in any sorts of crazy stories
that were questionable.
We coupled that with this story booth.
It's really the simplest one that we've ever made,
where you locate yourself on a map.
It's in six languages,
and it's actually your 9-11 story itself.
And so between these two pieces,
the museum, in terms of seeing as believing,
started to trust in this notion a little bit more,
that they could actually let go of control of the story
and actually think about the museum as a place
where people would tell their stories to each other.
And they started to actually think about it
as a way that would have its own level,
both of authenticity, but also of connection,
and maybe even catharsis for some visitors
who would come and actually participate.
So our vision for this first haul
was that you wouldn't hear from a curator or a historian,
you'd actually hear from other visitors
telling their 9-11 story.
Not surprisingly, we prototyped it
and prototyped it and prototyped it.
We made multiple different versions.
I'm now going to play for you the latest one,
which is a full-scale mock-up,
which really gives you a sense of what's it like
to walk into this experience that we call We Remember.
September 11th, September 11th, September 11th, September 11th.
I was in Honolulu, Hawaii.
I was in Cairo, Egypt.
In college at UC Berkeley,
I was in Times Square in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
I was in Miami, Florida, in West Virginia.
It was probably about 11 o'clock, half-nought.
I was driving to work at 5.45 local time in the morning.
I was actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said,
Oh, my God, that plane has just crashed.
It won't land in the plane.
Can you get to a radio?
When I heard it over the radio,
I got a call from my father.
And you move from that experience
into this chamber of remembrance,
where you're seeing all these raw pieces of archaeology.
The actual story itself from inside the towers
are told within these audio spaces,
where you're also hearing these overlapping voices
really making their way out of the tower
and talking about what it was like to actually survive the event.
We had this idea of projecting directly onto some of the steel
that was actually excavated from the site.
And sure enough, when we were actually looking at the footage,
we were convinced this would be a good idea,
but the museum at first told us they thought it was a terrible idea.
And then told us, again, the acquiesce
to actually go out to this site
where they housed all of the steel itself
and to just look at a test.
Sure enough, the head of the museum, who later admitted to me
she thought it was actually a categorically bad idea,
later told us it was just incredibly moving
because it really felt, as she described it back to us,
that we were evoking memories from the steel itself,
as if things that had happened to the steel were just coming forth,
one to the next.
And so at the end of this experience of the 9-11 museum,
we then again turn the questions back onto the visitor
and allow them to really reflect
on what I feel are arguably unanswerable questions,
the types of questions that 9-11 itself brings out
for all of us to reflect.
It really starts to change the nature of the museum experience
where at the end, instead of being told what 9-11 means,
you're offered a microphone and asked to actually talk
about how a democracy can balance security and freedom,
or about how 9-11 could actually have happened,
or how did the world change after 9-11?
And what's amazing is even as visitors are answering those questions,
we have spent the last number of years going out and filming
people like Bill Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Rudy Giuliani,
Eric Holder asking them exactly the same questions,
and then when you go into the final museum,
you'll actually see their answers cut together
with different visitors' answers.
So again, it becomes this place that is a platform,
it becomes a place for you to go into struggle
and to think and to have a direct experience
engaging with these exact reflective questions
about 9-11 itself.
So it took an incredibly long time to build an institution
and to build momentum so that they could really consider
the museum as an open platform in this way.
I'll just play a short clip with some of the voices from the museum
that I think really underscores what you gain with a system like this.
9-11 was not just a New York experience.
It's just something that we shared and it's something that united us.
And I knew when I saw that people who were there that day
who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them
was something that would pull us through.
All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country
was something really that will forever, ever stay with me.
Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives
and those who gave their lives to help others.
But I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country,
the love, the compassion, the strength,
and I watch the nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy.
So the museum opens early next year.
I'm really excited to have shared with you the different ways
that we're thinking about technology and improvisation.
And so I'll tell you whether or not you're thinking about making technology
as an instrument that you can play,
as an instrument that your visitors can play,
as a system, as a structure that creates creativity itself.
I'll give to you the advice that was given to me.
Forget exactly what you know and play.
Thank you.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
