 Hi everyone, welcome. I'm Amal Ondraus, I'm the Dean of the school and delighted to have all of you here today. This event has been in the making for some time now and I'm very excited that it's taken shape and the way that it's taken shape. A few years ago, actually soon after I became Dean, we decided to join forces with the new museum and the new ink experiments at the time to learn from new ink and launch our own incubator as a way to find, to kind of thicken the transition between inside and outside, between the school and the world out there, extending it just enough to allow people to, our graduates and kind of recent alumni to sort of find new ways to engage, to practice, to hybridize, to bring things together, to not draw a line between the commercial and the artistic and life and practice and and that's what kind of new ink members were already doing and it was kind of very interesting to think about the two models operating, operating together and so this past summer we graduated our third class already and I think it's been exciting to see some of them just start up architectural practices in the kind of very standard way we think about them but others kind of defining new forms of activism, designing apps to think about the city in new ways or you know all sorts of kind of interesting experiments all of them with spatial, social, environmental kind of applications or you know trying to engage again in new ways and so I think the event is a way to frame a larger context for this notion of incubating practices today, creative practices and practices that are engaged and I'm particularly thankful for Karen Wong and David Benjamin for having put their heads together in terms of who we might learn from this afternoon and so thank you both for all your efforts. Tonight's keynote will be given by Evan Sharp who is alumni of the school but also someone who has kind of led the way in terms of taking design thinking and visualization and in all kind of new directions but before tonight I want to welcome David Benjamin who will share further about the event this afternoon. My name is David Benjamin I'm director of the GSAP incubator and also assistant professor here at GSAP and I'm very excited to welcome our guest speakers to the school from seven diverse labs incubators and colonies around the world so the idea of today is kind of to discuss the current excitement and in a way explosion of incubator spaces in a broader historical and disciplinary context to compare incubators to labs and colonies to think about innovation from the perspective of both art and industry to consider different cities and different parts of the world and ultimately to see if we might look with a fresh and critical perspective at what each of us is doing and at what we're doing collectively and to start off the event I'm not going to describe the GSAP incubator at this point I'm going to speak a little bit later in the event about that more specifically but I wanted to offer just a pair of my own hypotheses so these are not speaking necessarily on behalf of the school just you know on behalf of me as a as a person who's been thinking about this kind of space and teaching at the school and the first hypothesis is that one of the themes that might bring together these diverse groups you know these diverse labs incubators and colonies is new ideas and in a way I think we could say that all of these labs incubators and colonies are about in some way creativity and innovation about giving opportunities to small organizations early career individuals people with a kind of fresh take on things in some ways people like taking a risk on a new way of doing things and of course there's a long history of these kind of spaces and this kind of thinking spaces for creativity and innovation but I think this event may be a good occasion to think a little bit about whether there's anything different about this moment than you know in the history of these kind of spaces and this kind of thinking in their book called Whiplash Joy Ito and Jeff Howe describe what they call two revolutions at the heart of our current era of accelerating change the first revolution is technology and by this they basically mean Moore's law you know well-known law about exponentially decreasing costs for computation and the second is communication and by this they just basically mean the internet and what's important to me and relevant in this context about that is that they say in the book when these two revolutions joined together an explosive fire was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation relocating it from the center governments and big companies to the edges a 23-year-old punk rock musician and circuit board geek living in Osaka Japan so I think that's an interesting provocation we might think about whether we agree with that whether that's true or not but I think it is worth asking like what is our current context what are what are our times like and what are spaces for innovation look like now in addition to that idea about two revolutions these authors Ito and Howe describe three conditions that they say define our era and those are asymmetry complexity and uncertainty and they say again you know this is a quote and again they're they're kind of provocation the biggest threats to the status quo come from the smallest of places from startups and rogues breakaways and indie labs so I think that captures something of the spirit of these incubator spaces these new spaces this idea that you know big ideas might come from small places and with this in mind I think you know in some of the discussion today we might want to think about what is the role of incubators for the individual members in this context for the supporting organizations and institutions and also for society you know what is the role of these institutions for society and of particular interest to us here you know in this space at this university at G sap I think we might want to reflect a little bit about what is the role of incubators for education in the university and so the second hypothesis and this is the last thing I'll say before introducing the other speakers is that you know if the first hypothesis is maybe what brings us together about you know new ideas and places for new ideas the second hypothesis is one of the things that might distinguish us or that might be different about these groups is our ways of measuring success and on the one hand I think measuring success you know can provide clarity can provide guiding principles in uncertain times the kind of times that ito and how describe it may allow for a shift from opinions to more evidence based discussion and reasoning but on the other hand measuring success I think we should recognize is a loaded topic that may be more complex than at first seems and as a quick example I want to talk about you know the well-known measure of success called gross domestic product GDP you know so I know this may seem like a tangent but I hope you'll see the connection when I get through it so you know GDP as you all know is a measurement of a country's economic output and for many years it's been like a single data point for how a country and its citizens are doing and in fact you know if you read about the history of GDP some people think of it as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and I think they they think that because it had the capacity to create a common understanding a common ground for what's happening in very complex situations and a way to navigate policies that have you know real bottom line impact on the lives of people and that in effect can the claim goes improve the well-being of nations around the world but I think there are good reasons to be critical of GDP as well as a single measure of success for example what about different single measurements you know could we replace GDP with something else like some people are already working on something called the human development index which adds education and health to economic output as a single measure of success or a happiness index and you know there's been a recent buzz about happiness as something that we should be thinking about and even optimizing for so a happiness index might add to those other terms measures of people's social and emotional lives but also in addition to just thinking about a single metric what about multiple measurements so in addition to just measuring economics maybe we should be measuring independently things like health education environment inequality crime energy carbon emissions infrastructure housing you know the list could go on and maybe we shouldn't just be thinking about combining them into a single score but thinking of it as a kind of multidimensional data set possibly a kind of dashboard rather than a single number to help keep track of complex trade-offs you know such as a scenario where you might get a better score for productivity but you get a worse score for environment so how do you make that decision you know and continuing the the kind of critique which is a critique with the kind of body of people working on it now critique of GDP what if the whole idea of measurement is is not is not the most important point what if there are qualitative factors of human life that should be considered that are you know almost antithetical to the idea of quantifying and I think an interesting example of this in in relation to these critiques is some recent thinking around the circular economy where people are starting to imagine that you might have a beneficial economy without growth and that itself is I think a challenge to GDP as a metric and finally bringing this back to our discussion here today and to being at an architecture school and a design school should a system of measurement be considered as more than just a kind of technical decision more than just an equation but maybe should a system of measurement be considered an act of design something that is iterated on that's critiqued that's debated that you know kind of involves a community a discussion and creativity so it's it's in in kind of these ways that I think the example of measuring GDP could be an interesting analogy for measuring success in our incubators and so I think it could be interesting to hear you know from each of our speakers like in this kind of intangible world of creativity and innovation how do you measure the success of your projects how often do you measure it and do you measure it numerically or do you measure it in in some other way and and maybe maybe most importantly or most broadly I think it's that in this spirit of kind of questioning and reflection that I'd like to kick off the event today I think this is a an event in a space for a dialogue but also some questioning and and reflection from all of us and certainly from the perspective of the GSAP incubator so a little bit about the event we'll have four pairs of speakers this afternoon and we'll have a brief introduction to to each panel followed by two speakers and then a kind of conversation between the speakers with the chance for the audience to ask some questions so our first pair involves two well-known institutions that have been working on creativity and innovation for a long time but possibly from different perspectives they both have an incredible legacy and I think at the same time are both responding kind of proactively to current issues and technologies so our first speaker will be Marcus Weldon president of Bell Labs and CTO CTO of Nokia Experiments in Art and Technology and our second speaker will be Cheryl Young executive director of McDowell Colony so Marcus please thank you hopefully I do this right um that was a fantastic introduction because we actually think about a lot of those things oddly enough in in Bell Labs but so let me remind you what Bell Labs did we actually built the transistor that led to Moore's law and and then built the internet so sorry sorry about that but but actually there's um it is it does actually perplex us a bit in a number of ways that because and we looked at this from a GDP standpoint and that it hasn't produced much value this is the interesting thing if you look at economists look at and this is booked by Robert Gordon called the rise and fall of American growth and the big dilemma is the first and second industrial revolutions which were more physical revolutions physical infrastructure revolutions trains cars planes roads etc produce massive amount of productivity growth and GDP growth and pretty much everything since then has been downhill now downhill in an upward way what I mean by that is everything is growing still but growing at a less fast rate and so what the book says is we haven't done as well as we did in the first and second industrial revolutions which are these physical revolutions who have built this internet and it hasn't really done much and I actually agree with that but I'll explain and but that's so they're depressed most economists are depressed that we're going nowhere good it'll never be anything good ever again is actually roughly what Robert Gordon says he alludes to things that might change this but he doesn't do it with confidence so so it is perplexing to us that we built this thing that should be good we invented all these technologies that should that actually run the internet unix c c plus plus all those things and and it hasn't produced any value so bell lab struggles with that because we actually want to do good let me talk a little bit about why would an industrial lab want to do good it seems odd well actually I would argue to the point about do small things do good and big things not do good I actually don't think it's right I think big things AT&T when it was a monopoly was actually a fairly noble thing it it was the parent of Bell Labs back in the day and it treated Bell Labs as for the good of mankind because it could because it never had any threat to its economic survivability or its its profitability so it could do noble things because the cost was acceptable and you could argue that ever since then the parents have have actually struggled a bit more to justify its existence because they had less money equally I think a startup on the other end of the spectrum starts with a very noble intent you only want to disrupt something for the good of normally humanity but quickly becomes driven by VC money and what what the VC's demand of it to become profitable according to their statistical metric of success which is one in ten of you have to make me a billion dollars right so so I actually think it's not good or it's not large or small that results in good it's it's something but it's actually probably the culture so what's survived in Bell Labs so Bell Labs are now 92 years old you win the age contest not you personally but but McDowell is older 92 years old still alive we have still a thousand PhDs what has managed to survive is the culture and I don't frankly know why but so we'll skip that part because I wish I did and it makes me sound smarter but I'm going to explain to you how we exist today and that it's not to do with being a part of a big thing or a small thing it's a culture that survives that believes actually doing good is the right thing to do and that's a human need thing so I'm going to talk about human need so actually a few years ago we started reflecting on this problem we've caused by inventing all these things that create the internet and then realized that that you could reduce it to a mausoleum's hierarchy dilemma and you all probably know this it was is quite well known in sort of pop psychology circles of this is what humans want fundamentally you want to get to the top transcendence where you can teach others you have time on your hands you can teach others and you can sort of educate the world about better betterment and at the bottom of the basic things that you mostly want to spend less time doing so the hierarchy is you go up to the top you're satisfied you're ready to to feel like you're an accomplished human being and the only way to get to the top logically is to spend less time at the bottom you actually still do the things at the bottom you have to you know have safety security exactly love and belonging but you you spend sufficiently optimal existence where less time at the bottom more time at the top that's what the Ts are here but actually we started thinking about this so our goal if we're doing noble good things should be to help people spend less time at the bottom so they had more time to spend at the top and you could argue that the internet might have tried to do that it might have set on a quest and certainly the first and second industrial revolutions produce mechanical systems that gave mechanical advantage or transport systems that decrease the amount of time taken to do physical tasks or a physical task is also moving from A to B giving you more time to do creative things you could get goods faster you could get raw materials faster you could actually do more most spend more time producing the internet probably was trying to do that trying to actually get information to flow faster so you could do things but it hasn't achieved it and I think the problem fundamentally is because sort of got off track a bit and started becoming trivialized and my thesis is because actually we let consumers run the show people as individuals running the show is probably not a fantastic idea because it's a bit chaotic and disorderly and you end up with apps and social media flames as essentially your metric I think we need a bit more structure and purpose to that and the good news is I think it's coming because the big new phase of the internet and this is what we think about Bell Labs is actually automating infrastructure the physical world which if you think about it we haven't really done automated media content journalism a bunch of other stuff have been digitized but not the physical world and if I can do that then maybe I can create a new reality where there's something more substantive I do with the internet and that produces real value so that's going to be the the quest run but what we are going to say and why art and technology is the right answer of course is that I produce something that actually has attributes of all these layers it saves me time but it also produces something cognitive and aesthetic so we started on this quest to say maybe it's not one or the other I do this and someone else does that right because you could argue companies could be down at the bottom here or they could be at the top but in fact the ideal company or product would actually do both save you time and allow you to spend time on something creative so that's what we're going to talk about a little bit so I first of all quotes I love these they actually confine them anywhere but they to me they're absolutely spot on about art and technology art challenges technology technology inspires the art absolutely right it seems trivial to say John Laster is a famous animator and so he worked on all these sort of CGI animations and lifelike animations this one of course might be the best or coming from Steve Jobs it's technology married with liberal arts married with humanities leads the results that make our hearts sing I absolutely agree with that you could argue the iPhone is a manifestation of that its problem is it stuck being an iPhone and they don't seem to have a next idea beyond that but it absolutely is that is the right way to look at things this of course the famous one any fish sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic magic also has the sentiments of aesthetic and creative and cognitive right it's something that makes your heart sing and then this one of course another famous a certain high level of technical skills achieved at that level science and art tend to coalesced in aesthetics by system for the greatest scientists artists will absolutely agree with that this is blending though the breakthroughs happen when you blend the the artistic and the technical so I want to these are eminent people who have done amazing things and I would agree with this so that's really our quest the quest of Bell Labs going forward and the experiments and art and technology that we do is the quest is to find that mix the mix for the future not from the past so how did we get there I mentioned we invented the internet we actually vented a whole bunch of other things as well accidentally we did stereo sound we've got a Oscar for that we did the talkies we actually did voice and and sound synchronized for the first time which was called the vital phone it actually ran all early movie theaters we started a company that spun that out and that was the origin of talkies by the way the machine looked like this we did this first text of voice and it did look like that actually there was a at the time a secretary who was trained because of the she was the only one capable of actually operating the pedals and the keys that actually took phonemes which were RF frequency combinations she would press the pedals and things and she could make those phonemes into into into a voice so it was text of voice she would type and it would speak and it actually exists and we have one in Bell Labs and that's roughly you see the key things and there's foot pedals and you tune it up and unfortunately there's only one person could ever operate it so probably didn't take off then then we then of course a lot of computer-generated graphics and this actually is going to be foundational to to where I'm going because you know we did all the early OSes a UNX to C++ etc but we worked on computer-generated graphics to see where that would go and and then that led to this thing and this is important so we started in 1966 something called experiments and art and technology between New York based artists and we're based in New Jersey now we were in New York at the time on West Avenue but now we're in New Jersey and and it was the foundational artists were Robert Rauschenberg John Cage or Robert Whitman and Andy Warhol and they were and then the experiment was the following analog art was meeting digital technology so they did these wacky experiments there you can see the videos on YouTube we've never watched them they're wacky one of them is a tennis ball that every time you hit it sounded a gong and that was that was it I mean it's all that happened so this tennis match they played in the armory just sounds a gong and they did it by an RF transmitter on the racket that when you hit the ball they there was no point to it it was an experiment to see where digital technologies and art could intersect to do something new but so that was nice it was vanguard it was actually amazing things they did uh in the vanguard of art and technology and then it sort of did this it went away for a bit there actually were EAT communities and chapters and they existed but it was so avant garde that that not much happened for a while but then this happened we woke up and realized 50 years later we it was time to resurrect it um so we relaunched EAT it hadn't gone away but we we sort of re-energized it put some money into it and so we now do that uh and we actually fund art and technology experiments and New Museum and New Inc is actually one of our favorite partners in this the quest is what i've explained the quest is to explore that intersection of art and technology now not to be in the vanguard to actually try and solve human humanistic problems that that sort of understands how it is we can improve the future of human existence and i'm going to give you some clues about how we might be thinking about that uh so here it is oh by the way these are our collaborators a whole bunch of them that we've done various different things we've built an anti-chamber which is in New Jersey there which is a whole experimental space of AR VR and uh and and uh and complete ambisonic sound environment as the speakers you can see there so we've got a whole bunch of spaces these are New Inc collaborators with Sogwen and Lisa Park and Hammerstep they came from New Inc that they are art and technology experiments and i'm happy to talk about each one and this is a beatbox they're called Reeps One all of them are doing different experiments in art and technology but here's what i want to explain the journey we're on so if you think about where we come from the internet that hasn't helped us uh we've been on a Star Trek journey but we haven't completed the journey so i like to always use science fiction as a bit of a way to think about the future because often the best science fiction tells you because it resonated why did you like Star Trek you didn't like Star Trek because of William Shatner you like Star Trek because it was telling a story that you actually found credible so the smartphone was the was the communicator the virtual reality that we're ever now is obsessed by is basically the holodeck and then the replicator which actually was they they represented just producing food for you is actually sort of a 3d printer and 3d printers produce food as you know so but that was sort of technology dominated part of Star Trek and here's the part of where we're going so the transporter what was the point of a transporter it was actually to take you to places where you could or down beam you down so you can actually have a physical world interaction you could have stayed on the start as a uss enterprise and watched the world or you could have teleported to interact so we think that's important the tricorder was actually health and vitality right it was the one that scanned you tell told you whether you were vital or not but this is a really interesting one there was a famous episode called the empath in Star Trek where the idea was that the empath the woman there would actually take and feel what is you felt and even could absorb your negative sort of physiological experiences so she could actually take the burden from it so I'm going to argue that these three the journey that we haven't yet completed are dominated by art and technology steam obviously science technology engineering arts mathematics and therefore experiments and art and technology enabled because these are much more sentient and cognitive and aesthetic and complete forms of human communications than the ones that we have created so far so this is my answer to the question of what comes next we have created technologies that have done something but they haven't done what their ultimate purpose is which is to do this so that's what I'm going to stop and hand over to Cheryl and then we'll chat about stuff I can't compete with Shatner I'm sorry so McDowell I just wanted to say thank you for inviting me to participate in this and I really enjoy thinking about what the next step is in terms of how we can let's say improve on the model and so I'll say a few words about McDowell and about how it came to be and some of the principles it's based on and then a little bit about what we've learned about creativity and sort of the ingredients that you need to make the next steps it's really just postulations it's not scientifically based but it's based on observation and the reason this is important is because whenever you create an incubator or a lab or a colony the human ingredient is the most important this morning when I opened my phone I read about the evolution of computation and it its impacts and then I looked at 3d printed lifeguard stations on Miami beach that were redesigned by architects after the hurricane when all I really wanted to know was what time I was supposed to be here thus why we need McDowell the magnificent rabbit hole that is human curiosity occasionally needs to be shut down and focus is on the work at hand I'll talk to a little bit going back in history so come all the way back to the turn of the century uh the McDowells were artists themselves and the McDowell model is not the academy model Edward McDowell was a composer he was the founder of the academy in Rome which many of the architects and designers aspired to go to Mary and McDowell was a pianist and she ultimately was a driving force behind the colony because Edward died young they felt that America could create a new paragraph only if they broke from Europe and so going to the academy was about learning from the old masters but from the beginning McDowell felt that America was ready for to make its own art and that their vision for the colony which was the driving force was that the arts had something to say to each other uh he was a teacher at Columbia so in some ways Columbia had a part in this because he was kept so busy on the faculty in the music composition department that he didn't have time to make new work new compositions and he observed that when he was away in the summer he could um focus and uh get his own work done but the vision wasn't about collaboration a single work as much as it was about taking an idea to the next level through discussion in a non-competitive environment not everyone is working on the same problem at a place like McDowell but they can still help each other spur new ways of looking at an aesthetic problem also important to this model is that everyone is a peer no master apprentice or student system as was the European tradition ideas are equal no matter the age or the training there can be no no when you are trying to break a paradigm the democratic ideal that no social distinctions should be used to determine who works at the colony was written into the mission 111 years ago the working man alongside the elite women alongside men all aesthetic side by side it came to fruition as the peter bar experiment and it is the first purpose built artist residency program as we know it so we could look at some slides I just brought 10 slides just in case you didn't have a chance to look online at our website which has great photos of the colony architecture that is suited to creative work does not necessarily mean having the latest technology the log cabin this in essence was the first artist residency studio in the country it was built by mr mrs mrs mcdowell so edward could get away from the house and away from all the distractions and just focus mcdowell gives artists a place in 32 studios on 450 acres in new hampshire for two weeks to two months artist work in solitude and lunch is delivered to their studio in the evenings everyone gathers for dinner and come together afterwards to share their work play pool and relax the work is not workshopped it is respected as it is as a work in process and there is no no there are five design components to the facility that fit the mcdowell model first privacy in your own studio building this is the main building second a view to nature and i'll explain why that is important later third a day bed for rest fourth the work space has to suit the task and fifth the common space preferably around food and play this is a ice house on the farm property where it was built that was made into a sculpture studio and this is the interior it has a great chain fall where you can work inside or outside this is our new library building