 Welcome to Design Legends from Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Technological developments in design and digital fabrication are pushing the boundaries of what's possible today and designers are using robots, 3D printing and other digital tools to transform craftsmanship and production. Joris Larman is a pioneer in the development and use of these new technologies. So, I got a ping-pong table and people are playing ping-pong. Oh, you do it? Where is it? Oh, you want to play it? Ping-pong table. I'm pretty good though, so it's... That was cool. Congratulations. Real feet. Joris, welcome to Cooper Hewitt. Welcome to my office. Well, great to be here. I'm curious about how you grew up. What did your parents do and what sort of made yours? I come from the sort of the rural countryside of the Netherlands and it's hard to find any rural area in the Netherlands but basically the middle of nowhere. And my parents just had really normal jobs and came from a sort of a lower middle class background. Nothing special basically. Besides that my parents are like super creative in their own way. I just got an enormous amount of freedom. I now live in the city and I have three kids so they grew up in the city. I had just an empty world in front of me and I had so much time to be bored and I see my kids now having much less time to be bored. And more restriction, right? Yeah, but they are also entertained. People are entertained in the city, right? If you have nothing to do, you just go to some... There's classes, right? But you get it, you know, it's... So you're 38 today. When was the germ of the idea of I can be a designer? When did that idea enter your head? Were you 16, 17, 18? I'm still not really a designer to be honest. I never knew what it was. I never knew that it was a profession at all. I just went to the design academy in Eindhoven because it was a really great place to be. What's happening at Eindhoven that's creating such design genius? We have so many people from Martin Boss to Wiki Summers. What is it about Eindhoven that is so unique as a place of creativity? I guess it's the teachers for a large amount. And it's not like a strict university type of school. You don't get to be trained there to become an industrial designer. You get a framework, a philosophy. You get to know who you are, what you want in this creative profession. And for everybody that's different. And you see that with a lot of people, especially from my generation, that most people have this very distinct sort of work and way of thinking. In the beginning I was not really a brilliant student. Anyway, I was young so I didn't know too much about what was expected for me as a design student. And Gijs Bakker made it quite clear to a lot of students there. And it's not only him, it's also Louise Schaunberg, who is one of my teachers who is a philosopher and design critic. Especially Gijs was very much about conceptual design and a sort of design as a puzzle part with parts that fit together conceptually. Like a layered object. I remember very well that at a certain moment in time I just got it. It's like, oh, so that's what it is. And you then immediately also see all these other objects around you and they make sense and the reason why they make sense. And that was a good moment in time. Because it was really like a magical place where people would actually work really hard to make interesting things that people could use. So to have five years of freedom and experimenting with form and material and having all that feedback from your teachers, that's really luxury. I guess that's why that's cool, so good. What do you do now when you just need to not think about the robots, not think about the lab? What is your escape? How do you play? I am mostly writing. I'm writing this science fiction story. It's one of my greatest hobbies to create a type of future world. And it's something I can really escape into but also use as inspiration for all the other things that I do. Of course, that makes sense. But if you give me the choice, I would probably be in my atelier and think up worlds. That's what I really like to do. Well, that makes me turn to the bridge, right? Absolutely fascinating project. It'll be finished in 2018. What have you learned from that process as far as other things in our world and our built world that might use these processes? First of all, the bridge is quite a stupid thing to be doing because it's so hard. At the same time, after we are done with the bridge, we are also able to do anything, basically. So we are sort of diving into the deep immediately and see where it goes to. We are now thinking a lot about what would be the next step and creating these industrial purposes, like for instance ship propellers or smart nodes for architectural purpose. I like to work with the limitations of the technology to push it to the next level. So it's a study in aesthetics, but it's also a study in technology. I usually think of these things that are terrible to make just because they are super hard. But then I sort of push the company to do it anyway and when they figure it out eventually it's usually a very big step in their technological progress. And is the hope that it becomes practical? Because right now it's very expensive, it takes a long time. But you've talked about how once you do this in Amsterdam you'll be able to do the same sort of bridge form in other cities, which is fantastic, right? And eventually wouldn't it be great if different cities could have this technology and it were pretty simple to do? To really help people and be a tool. How far away from that are we? I think we are far and not far at the same time. Compared to the developments in, for instance, software development in the virtual world, we are far away. Right. Because the virtual world is evolving much faster than the physical world. On the other hand, I see so many things happening now and I see what we are able to do. It won't take long before it has real economic impact. So in the case of a ship propeller, just to mention one, we did a study where it showed that it could potentially save like 40% of the cost and the lead time would be much shorter to create such a thing in a specific sort of size. So we have a long way to go in the sense that we have to figure out the certification process and that it's all approved and tested And is that your hope being the futurist that you are? Is the hope that we'll have 3D printed bridges in Venice and Paris in New York City? Yeah, definitely. It's not my hobby to create these industrial applications but I have other guys that are really smart and have the concentration and the patience to be doing that. I remember when I first came to your lab and I was looking for you but there were just these moving robotic arms everywhere. How much of the bridge is relying on the robot and how much is the algorithm? How do they weave together to make this bridge? It's very much a combination of things. So you will see, if you look close to the bridge that you can see the limitations of the technology also. You see the limitations of the algorithm. You see the limitations of my creativity in that thing because we had to work with so many constraints. But it's very much a balance between those forces. When you first approached the city of Amsterdam about the idea of the bridge, was it welcomed? Yeah, it was immediately welcomed actually. It was quite to our surprise because Amsterdam is very protective of their historic city. But they are also embracing innovation a lot. And Amsterdam is quite an experimental city. They are doing a lot of research on becoming a smart city by tracking traffic, by guiding people to other touristic areas in the city to also make more space in the city. The same goes for the bridge, by the way. It will be filled with sensors that track stuff. Like if it's eroding, if it could handle the stresses, how much people will walk over it. So Amsterdam will be a very smart city pretty soon. I think you're very patient because the bridge takes a long time to produce as does a maker chair, right? Yeah. What do you foresee as far as acceleration of the process? You know, I would love to print one of the maker chairs, the mini one, for example. And I think it takes four days. Wouldn't it be great if you could do that in two hours? Yeah. What's needed to do that? You need a... In the specific case, you need a thousand printers that are working together. And it would have kind of the same cost as an injection mold, I guess. Only it would be much more... It would have much more freedom to make every time a new type of thing. And I've been talking to companies like IKEA about it and we are still thinking of a way to make it happen. But we would need a really big industrial partner to do so. Right, okay. It's on my mind because we talk about democratizing design for people and how the maker chair makes that happen. But until it's easy, fast, and cheap, it's not doing that, right? Yeah, yeah. So there's the rub, right? I always like to be... Either it's going to be fully available for free to everybody online, for instance, or through a company like IKEA. Or I work on these really beautiful experimental works. So anything in between to me is kind of... I don't know, it feels like a waste of time or something. So I'd like to work on the one side of the spectrum or the other side of the spectrum. But it's not easy always. The Dragon Bench looks spectacular in Cooper Hewitt's Great Hall. And we're getting a lot of questions about how it's made. I would love to dig into how did you ever think that up? It's robots are working in mid-air to come up with this curvaceous, beautiful object. Do you remember when that came to you and how? Yeah, it was by plane experimenting. We'd have no clue before we started that if it would at all work. So we just placed a welding machine on top of a robotic arm and had them work together by welding dots on top of each other. And the first hundred tries were just stupid little blobs that fell apart with air bubbles and stuff. But then at a certain point, if you try to tweak the settings and you just keep on trying, it appeared to be working and it didn't work just like common 3D printing where you print in horizontal ways but it also worked in printing horizontally from the wall or even from the ceiling of our workshop. So after we figured that out, it was really like a wow moment because then you know what is possible. Then you have a whole new world of opportunity in front of you. Well, I remember when I first visited you being struck by the skill set that you had under the same roof and such different skill sets. There's the adage of always hire someone smarter than you and that knows something that you don't. Well, you've certainly done that in the hundredth degree but what I find is it's such a renaissance lab with this mosaic of skill sets. How does that all work? How do you communicate with one another just from a structure standpoint to get together daily and say this is what I'm doing and this is how it relates to the bridge? No, very much independent to be honest. I have a creative brain but it needs a lot of computation time. I'm really bad in fast thinking so I need a lot of time to come up with all these things. I tend to work at home a lot and then I draw and I sketch and I go back to the studio and say, hey, is this possible? And then I get feedback from the people who have to do it like they know everything about the material or they have to do the programming and usually it's like this game where I try to push people and they will get back to me and say, oh, it should be done differently or Jesus, can't we ever do something simple? Has anything ever been smooth? One of my favorite pieces is the aluminum and resin bone chair. I just, every time I see the finish I want to massage it, I want to sit in it. With that chair, how many iterations were there? What was the process? Well, that chair started off with generating the chair with that algorithm that we used and then because I didn't know if the result was also nice we actually always make these mock-up models and then we go back to the CAD drawing. In this case, we had to order this ridiculously expensive 3D printed mold because there was no other way to make it and that's a huge... I remember that was a big deal. You have to order this thing and you don't know what the outcome would be and eventually that worked out and the first casting we do is never right or it cracks or the material is not right exactly. Right, I had some testing and testing. So we had to go back with the material, testing the colors and the finishing. So these big themes of human bone growth and nature and now the wonderful bridge project in Amsterdam and sci-fi when you have a moment what are things that inspire you? So if I want a clear mind I just walk in nature and I don't think about anything but then if I want to be inspired I usually just go find stuff on the internet and usually they take place in universities and research that people are doing but also just beautiful form. You know I tend to look way more at art than I do at design just sculptor-wise and the research that I do for the writing is really inspiring. I'm working on this timeline which for instance is also in the show and I read a lot about futurism and there I usually also feel the limitations of design so I try to work with design and push it so that people get inspired about the future and I'd like to give people a peek into the future so that they think it's also a nice world instead of this evil terrifying future because if you read a lot about the future it's usually terrifying and that was a great experience by the way at the Groningen Museum where we had our first show that the people, especially the kids and even just mothers who came into that show were almost emotional to see that the future could also be nicer than they would have expected in form and in just the joy of making things and how digital fabrication makes it possible again to just make your things and start creating stuff without such enormous upfront costs that we had before. Anyway, but the inspiration usually comes from form, futurism, that sort of things. Well, we're thrilled to be the first U.S. museum to celebrate your work in such a major way and then thrilled that I'll be traveling to Houston and Atlanta. So congratulations. Thank you.