 Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us here on Lakeable Science on Tinkta, Kauai. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and we're all about how science is as high a lakeable, like vital, and an interesting and exciting part of everyone's life. Science is not something to be feared or stuck away in a cabinet or stuck up an ivory tower somewhere. Science is all around us every day, every way. We use it all, and we should all learn to love it. With me today to help me explore very interesting parts of science are Ian Kinajima and Ken Jung from Oceanit. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you for having us. So Oceanit is an interesting group. What would you call it? It's a tech, a high-tech company, basically. It does all kinds of interesting work. Yeah, so I think people would describe it sometimes as a technology developer. We develop all kinds of variety of technologies. Sometimes when I describe Oceanit to people, I'll say if you ever watch Big Bang Theory. Kind of sort of, not so maybe that's socially awkward, but more like James Bond. So James Bond has this guy named Q, and Q invents all of these really cool things. He has a lab of engineers and scientists. So that's kind of what I think of like, like Ken is kind of like Q for us. His group in a lot of the different parts of the company creates new technologies and innovations for maybe not spies, but really for different customers of the world. Yeah, you've got a huge range of people who you work with, including, I guess, the department of finance, among others, but also commercial concerns of various sorts, I guess. And yeah, I know you guys do all kinds of stuff. I know Leslie Owl who I interviewed some years ago, then later on I talked to her and she was into some sort of... Special clouds? Yeah, exactly, exactly. That could be used for spy work. There we go, right. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So they do all kinds of stuff. And plus, Ian, you're on the Hawaii Workforce Development Council, which really speaks to Oceanit being a very innovative company in a way they organize, the way they work with their staff. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Sure. So Oceanit is a group of very highly educated, very creative, very passionate group of people trying to solve some of the most difficult problems in the world. I mean, that's probably one of the things that attract people to come to work at Oceanit is the ability and the opportunity to solve really difficult problems and work with really great people, like fantastic people like Ken and others and Leslie, and do it from Hawaii. So it's kind of like the trifecta of like really great things, doing things that are super meaningful, working with really great people and doing it from Hawaii. And so we do get us quite often, you know, what kinds of jobs and careers are happening at Oceanit and so people went to our website and visited our website. You would see the various types of positions we're hiring for today. And then as part of the Workforce Development Council is providing guidance and feedback about what we see for the future. How can we create a diversified economy which includes innovation and technology. And so, of course, people ask us about what these jobs are. And at the same time, we are also trying to work with educators and education systems. Instead of just asking us and other tech companies what kinds of jobs are we creating? Because there's a real big lagging factor, right? So what I tell you today is probably going to be obsolete in maybe two or three years. So to say create more of this is maybe very dangerous. So what we're trying to do is change the conversation where we're asking people to think about, and for ourselves, what are those amazing, what we call super power skills, that we can teach and give experiences like what kind of skills and experiences can we give young people so that they can be prepared to most likely create their own careers. And more attractively maybe create Hawaii's next great technology innovation companies. So instead of looking to ocean it and waiting for us to do something really, how do we empower these young people with entrepreneurial skills, design thinking skills, coding skills, digital media skills. So they actually could create their own companies. So that's way more empowering I would say. Right, and you guys actually train your own staff in this whole design thinking process. They can go out and both think better themselves but also teach their kids and model this for other people. And again it's a great model for the other workforces around Hawaii to realize we live in a very different world today. It's not a world where you sit there and put a widget together in the same way day in and day out. And I'm sure again the folks who you work with think very differently. They do very different jobs each day, right? I'm sure we try to take people who are trained in a particular major or expertise area and try to turn it upside down and have them kind of unlearn what they learned in school or their previous career and become kind of persistent students. And they're constantly learning new things because like Ian said, the world's changing, technology's changing. So we're constantly doing new things and asking people to become really versatile. Yeah, I was going to say that one of the things definitely that is super important for us to create in school and students or just in people is like a love of learning. Because today is maybe we're doing this today, but in two years from now we'll maybe be doing something very different. So if you don't want to learn new things or not curious about things, about how the world is changing or new areas, then it really is a hard thing to keep up. You could become obsolete very quickly. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really key thing of course that a good education should do is teach a kid to love learning. You'll realize that they are a learner that they do it well and they love doing it. And then you can teach them about rocks or rocket ships. It really doesn't matter because they'll learn what they want to learn and they'll explore. Exactly. So that's one of the things we look at for people at Ocean. It is people who are intensely curious, who love to learn new things. So if you hate learning and don't want to learn anything more, then Ocean is not like the place to be because it really is. It's always changing. And that's kind of the environment we're constantly living in. It is for us. It's kind of accelerating. But again, always learning. And beyond learning too, I would say have a nature of creativity. So the same way that artists and musicians create, we create in the physics realm. Right. So the whole design thinking process is supposed to help build that kind of, it gives people at least a chance to practice their creative thinking skills, right? Yeah, exactly. And so Ken was mentioning, part of it is this idea of reframing. Sometimes we keep looking at a problem and so we keep looking at it at the same way. And so we keep asking the same questions but we still get the same answers. Right. And so you feel kind of stuck. And the thing about design thinking is asking questions that are kind of outside the box. When you start with what you already know, you're kind of starting with, you're kind of starting inside the box. And so in design thinking, it's so much around how do we ask questions that are outside that box. And the questions tend to be, and here's the secret to all of this, I think, around the design thinking piece is when you ask user-centered questions, like we're just talking about riding motorcycles and the helmet you wear. So you could say, ask people, redesign the motorcycle helmet. So tell me, Ethan, what do you like about your motorcycle helmet? And that actually starts you off already in a box around something that goes on your head, physically that goes on your head. So I like this, I don't like it. The thing I don't like is it gets hot, I get helmet hair. And that's good information, but that starts you in the box. When you ask questions outside the box, so Ethan, why do you ride motorcycles? Why do you ride? And tell me about the last time you went for a ride that was really enjoyable. That actually starts you outside the box and helps you to imagine potential new types of ways to allow you to ride with great freedom, but safely. And so there's a company in Sweden, we always share, that they actually invented a helmet that doesn't go on your head. You wear it around like a collar around your neck. It is airbag technologies that deploy, if you start to fall, accelerometers detect your falling and it will deploy an air balloon helmet. But it's a helmet that doesn't go on your head. You wear it around your neck. Right, right. So thinking about things differently, it's very good practice for people. Years ago I was doing a little education workshop for a bunch of artists. So I gave them each three sheets of paper, which of course artists want to draw on or whatever, and then you gave each of them a fresh egg and you said now your job is that 10 minutes from now you're going to drop your egg from 18 inches above the table surface and I don't want to see broken eggs here. And they had to start thinking about how this paper could be used differently now, not just the surface to draw, but a structural element of a three-dimensional, and lots of interesting things come out of that. People will now sit down there to catch it, people wrap the egg and protect it. One group did a beautiful funnel that actually stood up and cut the egg and then dumped it out carefully. Wow. That's very interesting to see. And that was a team thing too. Yeah, yeah. And I suspect you guys must do a lot of your work. That's a new one. I haven't heard about that one, but we'll try that one. It'll be a little bit messy, but that sounds really great. It's a lot of fun. So again, as you say, getting people trying to think a new horizon, frame the problem a little bit differently for them. Yeah, that's really critical. And it's great to hear you guys are doing that. And you do it in these tremendously diverse fields and industries from, I mean, from how to get graffiti off a wall, which we have video for a little later, to how to get condensation not to stick on and rust away. Right, exactly. Yeah, so there's, I mean, that's kind of the beauty of, I think, where we work is we may start here, but where we end up, it's a lot of times, many times, it's hard to know where we'll end up. And a lot of it is, again, inspired by being in the field, into customers. You know, this is the beauty of, I think, the kind of work we do. It is kind of like being an artist. It's maybe like also what a jazz ensemble is, too. They start a tune, and then from there, as people become part of it, they're building on it. And as people, different people come in, they bring different points of views. And they bring different inspiration or different factors of pulling this idea or technology into different places. So I think one of the important things we have at Ocean 8 is we've created a culture of experimentation where you can try things and it's really collaboration among groups is very much encouraged. And so part of it is we just went through a redesign of our office space as well. So space is actually a very important element in helping to foster, I think, creativity and innovation. So literally physical space can make a really huge difference. And so our kitchen is about five times bigger now. There we go. Right. Just because that's where a lot of the creative sparks are happening. Have casual conversations, bounce around ideas, and suddenly they're looking at their doughnut thinking, huh, I wonder if I could. Yeah, exactly. So now we're expecting like five times more innovation happening because the kitchen is so much bigger. Excellent, excellent. Sounds very exciting. And yeah, there are, of course, there's a huge movement these days about building good learning environments, environments that will encourage learning learners and not keep it all in a box of the traditional classroom design of teachers, desks, and rows of neat little chairs sitting there for the kids. And actually design, a redesign of our office was actually a major design thinking project because if you think about you have to incorporate all of these different needs. So somebody in HR has very different needs than somebody who's doing nanotechnology work or somebody who's doing biology work or doing marketing or the design thinking stuff we're doing. So you have a real variety of needs and stakeholders. So it was a great, in a way, design thinking exercise to incorporate all of that learning and needs and then design out a facility. Right, how you build the openness to really encourage a collaboration, but also the privacy and quiet time people need for some parts of their work and all that. I'm sure that must have been a rough one. Some of us have stand-up desks now. A bunch of us have stand-up desks. Our programmers like to be in a dark corner. They like the dark. When I do grant writing, I really want to be in my own space, my own quiet room. That's what I like. But then, yeah, when you're bouncing ideas on how to get a project done often, you want to be sitting around and talking to your peers and even people just wander by, right? Because sometimes some stranger will wander and have some great idea. It doesn't know anything about your project. Yeah, excellent. Well, hey, we're going to explore this more deeply. We're going to look at some of the specific applications that OSHA is doing when we come back. Right now, we're going to take a short break. Again, I have Ian Kirojima and Ken Jung here from Oceanit. And I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and you're going to be back in one minute on Lake. I'm Jay Fidel, and I'm here with Pete McGinnis-Mart to talk about HIGP and research in Manoa. What about that show, Pete? I think it's great, Jay. Research at Manoa really provides faculty members at the University of Hawaii with an easy way of explaining some of the research activities we're conducting on the campus. For example, I do a lot of space research, whether it's the moon and Mars, but many of my other colleagues do other interesting kinds of work, whether it's exploring the ocean floor in submarines, studying earthquakes and tsunamis, or other activities. So research at Manoa really provides us with a way of telling the general public some of the activities which we're involved in, as well as communicating to our colleagues and students. This is a fun science, and we really appreciate the activities which Research at Manoa enabled us to talk about. I love Research at Manoa. Come around, join us. It's Monday, 1 o'clock p.m., every single Monday. Be there, or be square. And you're back here on Legible Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. We're with you today in the Think Tech studio with our Ken Chiung and Ian Kibijima from OceanIt, and we're talking about the amazing sort of environment that OceanIt is. It's an interesting learning space. Ian's experience with the Hawaii workforce development council and what sort of the lessons that design thinking has to teach. But I wanted to dig maybe a little deeper now into some specific project, and it was sort of a hard choice because you guys do so many different things. But I saw some video that really intrigued me because it tied back to the days when I used to work in the Center for Nanotechnology University of Washington. You do some work on hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. I think, do I understand this was originally sort of targeted? Somebody came to you and said, how can we get the water off of our heat, make our water not stick on our heat exchangers or something like that? Actually, before that, we started doing this work for the US Navy on some of the surfaces, like ship hulls. So this, if you can repel water, then you're able to maybe mitigate some of the biofouling and corrosion that occurs associated with water and salt water in particular. And then we kind of pivoted and took that technology and looked at other things like pipelines and heat exchangers. So today, we're looking at a myriad of applications for this technology. Sure. Let's run the quick little video. The first one is on sort of a de-icing and how ice behaves on these very hydrophobic surfaces, right? So I think on the left, yeah, you get an uncoated surface. And what I thought was intriguing about this video is how you see the drops in the middle one here are higher and rounder. And then when you look at the drops on the anhyzer, they're almost perfectly spherical. It's just been squashed a little bit. Then these go on into a freezer and after some time lapse, right? The freezer is open. So the original work around this was reducing icing on heat exchangers for aircraft. So if these heat exchangers start to ice up, it's kind of like your air conditioning system starts to freeze up. It won't perform so well. But yeah, what you want is you have that ice all right off, right? So lately, we've tried this on airplane wings. For both icing and corrosion applications. And we've also looked at power cables. When it rains and it ices, it can be heavy and pull them down. Again, it's an interesting example because it has these other implications too. Because right now, the icing planes, they spray chemicals all over it, right? And then you've got to clean it up or drain it away. But where it's a permanent de-icing coating would be very clean. Exactly. All fast. There's no time for that. So maybe closer to home since we don't necessarily have a lot of icing anymore. When we run these anti-icing tests here in our labs, one of the things the guys did is what they do is they will throw these test samples into our salt fog chamber. And I was noticing one day, I was looking at the samples in eight hours in the salt fog chamber with a steel coupon. I mean, it will look like it's been in there for months. That's what it feels like. It really just corrodes, it's accelerated. So it's a salt fog chamber. So imagine there's like a salt mist. And it's just like this chamber and it's just misting over. You almost can't actually see the samples that are in there. It's like a fog in there, but it's a fog of salt. And it just corrodes things really quickly. But then when I was looking at the samples that were coated, they looked brand new. Right? I looked at it and went, oh, these are the anti-icing samples. But then I realized, yes, of course, it's preventing from moisture and water from getting into the metal. So this would maybe be a really great anti-corrosion coating. Which we have lots of issues here in Hawaii. Sure. Right. And so we work with our friends at Kyoya, at the Shartan Waikiki, and some of these hotels, including the Moana surf rider. And anything that's near the ocean will just corrod and rust away in a matter of months. And so at the Moana surf rider, they have beautiful light fixtures. They look like big bird cages. But they start to corrod very quickly. Even after being refurbished, they will start to corrod within three to four months. They start to turn brown. And so we actually just completed last year, early last year, coating about 12 or 13 of their light fixtures. And they still look brand new today. So it's incredible anti-corrosion coating. Excellent, excellent. So that's part of the discovery and learning. It's like, oh, it's trying to make these connections. Right, right. How do you take this and apply it to something different? And again, this is why I think this background that you talked about and having people sort of unlearn and relearn is really important. So take somebody who's trained as an electrical engineer to sort of get them looking at a biological problem. So they have to really start stretching their brains and not bringing a typical biology background to the problem. Yeah, excellent, excellent. Very cool. So there was some more on this, another video on the hydrophobic stuff here, right, too, that was looking more at how liquid water behaves, which is actually not dissimilar. I love when these drops hit, and you can just see they stay as virtual perfect spheres. They roll down. Yeah. And then the superhydrophilic, I think it just spreads the water out evenly. And it just kind of creases the bubble. Yeah. And again, both of those are interestingly different ways of dealing with how do you stop droplets from forming on glass? Yes. And sort of two different strategies, right, the one you have it roll off, the other you spread it out into thin, even film, you know? Right. But perfectly valid, maybe different uses for different ones, you know? So actually out of this work, from the hydrophilic side, I work around cementing and creating cement-filet coatings. One of the things that is, can be an issue, is when you, when two different materials come together, a lot of times they don't like each other. Right. Yeah. So in the case of like a steel casing or steel pipe, cement, when you cement, put cement around it, those two surfaces don't really like each other. Right. We're able to create a coating that, you can coat the exterior or interiors of a steel pipe. And so when you cement, they have this very, very tight, kind of, they're hugging each other now, versus before they would kind of be pushing from each other. Yeah. And maybe the same thing in biology, right, to make biocompatible materials. So your body doesn't scar up around them and try to sheathe out with a sheath of scar tissue, but actually integrate cells into it. Right. You've actually coated some surgical instruments. Uh-huh. You've coated them in wine blood and fresh, sticking to the metal. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So both ways are good. There's actually a lot of medical things that we tend to work on, which probably people don't realize. Yeah. A lot of medical applications, including some new materials. So when a soldier gets, you know, I'm fortunate if you get shot, many times you'll bleed out. So the military has created some really great bandages that will basically stop the bleeding. And so we're kind of creating the next generation of those kinds of materials to instantly stop the bleeding. Wow. So, but the commercial markets become, yeah. So bandages that you have today, especially for people who have compromised immune systems or somebody has diabetes, don't have great circulation, or some autoimmune disease. And if you get a cut, it may take a very long time for blood to, because there's a very little circulation. Right. It may take time for blood for these areas to basically stop bleeding or to even heal. So we're kind of creating the next generation of those blood clotting materials, but also next generation of skin materials that almost act like skin to help the healing process. Yeah. Yeah. This is critical stuff. This is how we've got to work. So those are just a few of the areas it seems like. And I understand your CEO has interest in all sorts of other. And I saw a TEDx talk. He did wanting to have something with roadways. It was very ingenious. Maybe that night? It's probably around that night, I would think. Yeah. We're developing a smart concrete. Okay. I don't think the concrete is being either smart or stupid. I think it has been concrete. Actually, it can be a really stupid, you know, kind of common building material. But we're adding nanomaterials to it so that it can become a sensing material. So maybe a smart highway that can tell if there's damage or cars, trucks going over it. It can be used to weigh vehicles. Okay, right. It'll show the stresses and strains so you can see if a bridge is in need of repair or something before it. Or maybe somebody's stepping into, you know, we have big problems with people stepping into sidewalks when they shouldn't be, especially elderly people. So you can imagine having this material. I mean, it looks like it's cement. I mean, essentially, any place that's cement, or you could put cement, could become a sensor. So imagine, you know, an elderly person kind of stepping into the crosswalk. But it's that place they're stepping is actually made out of this material. And basically, you know, maybe lights are flashing, signals are flashing to let people know that, you know, you have a person stepping into the sidewalk. And so the drivers kind of wake up. Instead of just see green, the lights are flashing to kind of wake them up, that there's somebody walking into the sidewalk. No, that can be very useful right now. I've seen it on some bar streets. It's that kind of thing happening now. People just wander out. That's, again, I see all these nice, practical, everyday applications of science. This is really wonderful. This is what we've got to do. And you never know, right? You never know where your product is going to go, right? You get this great idea. You develop some new phenomena, some new technology that allows you to do something. And then, you know, then you just begin to go in this discovery process, right? Right, exactly. So like even in Hydra things, we're starting to code wings for UAV aircraft, for testing because a lot of UAVs will have icing issues and things. So we'll do that. Some of our smart guys and gals are going beyond just water and looking at how you can repel oil and mixed substances. And one of the things we're looking at is maybe can you treat glass, the glass on your iPhone so that it doesn't smudge with the grease on your fingers? That'd be great if it would, yeah. Repel that oil? It would repel the oil. Right, exactly. That could be amazing. I mean, you have a huge market for it. Yes. Everyone's got these things and everyone has to clean them off constantly, right? Exactly, exactly. And actually, the family of those coatings as well, I think you have a clip as well around some, we've been testing these, some of these, and they're kind of an omnophobic coating. So you've seen super hydrophobic coatings and super hydrophilic coatings. But those things, but actually we're creating coatings that will repel both water and oil. So this is a nice little demo here being shown. There's a coating on your stone or cement or whatever that basically makes it impossible to permanently graffiti it, right? Yep. So you can, you'll be able to, as it will show, you'll be able to scrub the treated side off very relatively easily. I think we need to brush it out and try and scrub that off. Right, you know how hard it paint is to get out of either rock, front finish or cement finish, right? Because it's gotten into a porous surface. It's very, very difficult to... Exactly. But... And so, you know, there's been studies that, you know, the sooner you can get rid of the graffiti, the more you help to prevent future incidents. Because now they, you know, they know that as soon as it goes up, it's gonna come down. Yeah, excellent. Hey, well, this conversation could go on for hours, very clearly, but unfortunately, we're out of time, so it can't go on for hours. And so I'm gonna have to wrap it up here. Ian Kibben, Ken Jung. Both motioned. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on Think Tech Hawaii. Please join us again next week.