 Okay, so we can get started with the talk and I would like to see a few hands Who of you has managed to walk around the Congress Center without seeing a 3d printer? That's one hand there. That's what I thought because they're doing absolutely amazing practical stuff and we will hear a little bit about some background on this kind of technology today, I think and Also, I read a tweet earlier Saying suggesting something for a cause communication Congress bingo and in the up left corner there was something like 3d printed sex toys and I was like, okay the relevance of this talk is a pretty obvious to me right now so Sasha Frisike is going to talk about what we can learn about creativity from 3d printing and he studied industrial engineering in Berlin and did his PhD in St. Gallen during this time he also did a lot of research research at Sanford and currently he's a professor at the University of Würzburg at the Jesus, sorry, he's a professor for management and entrepreneurship and He's just Being in Würzburg for three more days and then he's moving to Amsterdam Continuing his work there. So let's please welcome him Yes, hello. Good evening. Thank you that some people came at this late hour. I appreciate it My name is Sasha as we just mentioned as she just mentioned This is it's kind of an unusual talk for me because usually I don't go to conference where they talk about 3d printing I usually go to conferences where they talk about creativity and For my research, I looked at 3d printing for the past couple of years And I thought this might be a good opportunity to kind of give back and talk to the people that actually are involved into 3d printing and I bucked many of them and my students bucked many of them and asked them questionnaires And maybe someone interviewed you for a study and so on and I thought maybe this is the chance for me to tell you What we're actually doing well This is all about and why anyone should care So whenever I talk about 3d printing what I mean is basically household 3d printing. So this is not like What you have at your big manufacturing? Facilities and I'm not looking into how we can make aircraft slider and so on I look at like the tabletop 3d printing and I look at Communities that use 3d printing and I want to understand how they how they deal with creativity But to jump back a couple years ago We started with the phenomenon looking at 3d printing because everybody told us that this is going to be the next industrial revolution This was actually a cover on the economist They said next industrial revolution and there was a book by Chris Anderson And he said that in a couple of years we will basically not go through the supermarket anymore We will print everything because that's the thing it's going to be and when we looked around We talked to people this was absolutely not the picture that we saw So the first thing that we did was trying to find out what do people use 3d printers for and that was a horrible research question And the results was scattered all over the place and the only interesting Anecdote from that research on what people use 3d printers for was that a lot of people that have 3d printers Print things for their 3d printers spare parts and so on and that we spend like a year on it And then we said well screw it. There's nothing coming out of that and we're never going to publish anything about that and then I Changed jobs. I went to Vilt's book and I found a new group and they were also into 3d printing And they had the same issue that they said well, this is a really interesting phenomenon But we need to find like an interesting angle in this and we we couldn't and at the time I was writing a book on creativity and In 3d printing we looked at the platform platform called Thingiverse the world's biggest 3d printing design platform And they have one interesting thing and on the platform you can upload a design and every single design is under an open license So anyone else can download the design change it upload it again But has to quote where it's from has to reference the original design and this is in in creativity When we talk about creativity We think this is kind of this divine thing where you give like an artist a white sheet of paper and this artist will come Up with something great out of nowhere and we have this concept like an epiphany or in Eureka moment And when we look into the literature the literature just pretty clear about where creativity comes from and what it is And it is usually the recombination of known building blocks in a way that wasn't known before So we consider very creative if something is deeply rooted in things We know and someone brings something into that deeply rooted thing that has never been connected in that way That's what we consider as very creative And the problem is if you go somewhere and ask people well, how did you come up with that? They will either not remember or they will have kind of fear over Interlectual property issues and tell you well I came up with that on my own and nothing has ever inspired me or I don't recall and so on so for people that try to Study creativity. It's really hard to find out where ideas come from because we don't quote the sources as Directly and then we looked at 3d printing and We looked at the platform and what we found is that we can basically look at all all the things that people upload it and see the connections between them and The black here. This is not from me. This is from the talk before so you have to kind of Think that is out of sight So we see is this is basically like a network structure On thingy verse of all designs in one category in the credit Corey is fashion So these are all designs in okay Just up my Machma irgendwie weg hat mich niemand verstanden Okay Gucken mal ist nur weil ich meine Hände so viel bewege Und das soll ich ja nicht okay Okay, I try to be a bit louder than we'll see So basically, okay, this is this is fashion. This is the first thing we looked at and Seeing of us has a couple of categories I think like 11 to 12 different categories where people can upload designs and they basically pick a category Where this design is in and then people can remix them and upload something else also And what we saw is simply by looking at those categories that they are vastly different So this is the first one was fashion and this is the category 3d printing What people upload for instance spare parts for this for this 3d printers And what you can see is simply by looking at this universe and we had one that actually looked like a death star But it doesn't fit the storyline so I can't put that in but So simply by looking at the structure We saw that there's something happening and between the two what's interesting is that the fashion category is very Hedonistic so people that upload something in fashion want to have something very individual They want to have like for instance a ring that says their own name or something that has that nobody else has And that's why you have those big clusters in the middle was simply people Change things slightly so it fits to so it's an individual solution Well, this year is very much the opposite. This is the 3d printing category and the solutions we see here are very utilitarian So basically you have those little scattered things all over the place You have oftentimes these things were only a couple are related to one another So someone developed a solution someone else saw it thought well that could be done a little bit better We could tweak that into something I would rather have and then they kind of had a final solution And that was fine and then they went on to do something else So simply by looking at it We found out well the universe looks completely different so there might be something to that in regards to creativity so and then what we did is We interviewed roughly 80 people we had Questionnaires out for a couple hundred and we looked at the entirety of all designs on the platform This is a couple hundred thousands and then the first thing you do is try to find out Is there is there anything special to the process that people do so it's the creative process in any way Remarkable and and the creative process that we found basically has four aspects that we can talk about the first one We called a trigger so any kind of creative process kick started by some form of a trigger And what we found is that when we when we look into a literature those triggers are often described as a problem So people have a problem and that starts off the creative process What we found is that that's only half the truth Half the people basically started because they had an actual problem the other half started out of some form of Creosities for instance that went to learn something that wanted to get better that we're interested in something so that kicked start The process the second thing we we found is kind of the inspiration phase This is this epiphany moment and this is what we'll deep dive into when we talk about Remixing a little bit more because remixing seems to what be one of the cornerstones in those creative communities in Which way people come up with novel solutions? And then what happens is interesting is when we talk about it's probably not that interesting for people in this room But it's interesting for us as social scientists because we don't develop software often So what happens is they distribute very early if we think about physical object It used to be very hard to have a form of distribution So distribution was always the bottleneck if you produced a CD album You had to find someone who does the distribution for you while here. It's it's very easy to distribute And because it's very easy to distribute what happens is that kind of changes the process people distribute earlier? And they distribute even when they aren't that finished yet in order to receive feedback on on the basis of that feedback Allow an iteration of the process of the design of the of the object that they that they did so Basically in like an analog world you would have the distribution at the very end of the process Well here when we talk to the people they say well, even if I'm not that sure if that's the correct way I simply distributed I asked people I gather feedback and with that I iterate and make it better So the platform the way the interaction that we found in the communities changed the creative process in In in a way that made distribution earlier, which we kind of found remarkable But if you look at it and say well, that's probably what we do in software development for 20 years. So but it's It's interesting in a way, so And now when when social scientists look at a problem One of the things they oftentimes try to do is to categorize the problem in such a way that you can say well This isn't just one problem This is actually a couple of things and this is a neat trick And if you are in if you are a management scholar What you usually do is you come up with a 2x2 matrix and that oftentimes solves problems and explains what it is And in this case we found we kind of zoomed in and wanted to find out those remixes How do they look close up? Can we kind of find patterns of how people? Combine things into something new and what we found is that there are actual patterns and that would that with a couple of patterns we can explain basically the entire universe zoomed in and The first thing we found we call that linear Linear evolution is this basically you have one design someone takes that design and Remixes into something new so you have this bottle Someone sees the bottle and makes a longer bottle That's kind of like a boring story and then we had more more complex ones and the more complex ones fall into two categories So the first category we call them convergent So what happens is several ideas are remixed into something new the first one is It's what called a merge. So this is basically you see several ideas in the case You see two ideas and you combine them into one new one. So one example. We always use it's Someone designed a debate coin So they had a logo of a donkey and the logo of an elephant the US Mascots of the parties and they merged that into a debate coin and you can flip the coin and that kind of decides What you're going to vote or so on The the second one we found we call that retrospect and it's kind of interesting. So what we have is There's like a Grandfather basically and that grandfather has a child and that child has also a child But the child's child inherits something from the grandparents that was not in the parents So this is basically going back in its own history and finding something that was left out in a generation before and then bringing it back One real-life example that people told me was theirs in a Microsoft Windows apparently They brought back the start button after they abandoned it. So basically it wasn't in one version and then they Brought it back. This is also something you see currently in innovation management a lot I don't know if you've ever heard of Lego Gronki wonkeys So when I was a child Lego used to be like just bricks and you built whatever you want And then they started to do like Star Wars and dragons and every kind of story-based things and last year They came out with like a new box and in this box. There's only Bricks and you can build whatever you want and they call that the new thing It's called Gronki wonky and was like a big advertising campaign and that's exactly that So it inherits something that wasn't in the last generation but in the generation before Next thing we found we call siblings and siblings basically is several people Looking at a couple of ingredients and coming up with vastly different solutions So they are not directly related the two things on the left and the right but they have the same ingredients and to think about that as something you would for instance see in a Cocktail bar so in a cocktail bar you have a very limited amount of ingredients But you come up with completely different cocktails even though You might not look at one cocktail and say well, I could do something completely But you look at the ingredients and based on the ingredients you come up with something new and The last one we called in this section We called compilation and the compilation is basically a best-off people look at a couple of things and then turn them into One a compilation one example We found is oftentimes they're called like the ultimate something like that So someone looks at an entire collection of things and then turns them into the final version of it So one thing we found is like the the ultimate Batman symbol So someone looked at every single Batman symbol that was on the platform and then combined them into like the ultimate That's the one we don't need a Batman symbol anymore. It's solved So we found those So all of these patterns Convergent take several inputs and turn them into something new and the other patterns that we found that were convergent So basically what convergent means is Several people look at the same thing and come to different conclusions. What to do with it The first one is it's a fork So two people look at one thing and have a completely different idea what to do about that. This is I Don't know. This will for instance be you have an iPad and then you have an iPad mini and an iPad Pro In the second generation because people have a completely different usage on it Next one we found is it's related to the fork. We call it the bouquet It's when one thing turns into a lot of things and oftentimes this happens when the thing in the middle for instance is a Gear or a tool or or wheels and so on so something that you can have multiple uses for next thing we found and that's Very important for the platform itself. It's called a customizer so customizer is a toolkit on the platform where people with no CAD knowledge can simply tweak a design in a way that they want and Customizers were kind of kick-started The growth of Thingiverse because many people that don't have any knowledge on CAD can very Simply come up with their own designs and customizes also the thing that we saw in the beginning of the fashion slide The big blobs those were customizers where people could do something very simply on the platform with their designs to Individualize it so then we found and we found an eighth one and the eighth one is very much related to the customizer but it has like it has a parent and Someone looks at it at a design and says well That's a cool idea and it would be even cooler if other people could customize it and once the Customizer is kind of call it a template builder once someone turned that into a customizer You have a very successful design because people can very easily tweak it Okay So when I tell this story there's always two questions that come up The first one is well if creativity can be broken down into patterns Can't we simply use AI to come up with new ideas and the emphasis is always on simply And I thought about this a little bit and I have kind of like my relationship to AI is a kind of a mixed back And I don't see it anytime soon. So if you have that question I feel free to try I think the naughty secret about what I just told you is that yes those patterns can explain how creativity how reuse or Recombination works, but it cannot give you The input things the things that you actually remix it can just show you the patterns in which remixing is done So I don't think that creativity will be outsourced by AI anytime soon The second question I always get when I give this talk is that people say well You kind of compare apples to oranges because some of the things that you talk about are very very simple to do you have for instance The customizer you give them Toolkits and a very simple website to customize something for instance They write their name and then that name appears on a ring and that's not really as creative as someone who combines Multiple objects in a very complicated way. So isn't there like a threshold for creativity? should everything be called creative or is creativity only like the divine complex thing and That's kind of a hard question for me to answer because I have a hard time like finding a cutoff and saying well Below that cut of it isn't creative and afterwards it is but what I can do again Categorizing looking at all the things I see and then kind of describing are those creative or not or are those Complex or not and what we found is that basically those the designs we can Group in two on two axes. The first axis is to look at the parents and we'll look at the parents those parents can either be from the same category They cannot also be from fashion that can be from a different category So someone actually made the effort to transfer knowledge from one category to the other So that seems to be more complex or it could be from multiple categories. So people don't simply Merge all Batman signs, but they merge something from fashion with something from 3d printing which is more complicated because you need to find a need to find a way to combine that and Also, we can look at what's the origin of the remix so a very simple thing would be a Customizer you simply have those toolkits you drag and drop write your name in very very easy to do the next step Bit more complicated would be if you only have one parent Use that one parent and turn that into something new and the more complex thing would be if you have multiple Parents and combine them into something new. So we try to group them into a way to show that If you go to the upper right, you have an increasing level of complexity and what what we found is that the when the platform allowed people to customize that that basically kicked-started a lot of traction on the platform and what we also saw is that The idea of customization is a way like like a foot in the door policy So people start customizing and once they learn customizing that kind of hooked on the thing It's a very easy way to get in they get more complicated over time They'll learn more and basically it's a way for them to get familiar with with remixing. It's it's a way of learning One interesting saying I wanted to mention is a transfer remix that we found so someone someone designed Little signs for potted plants so one would say like rosemary one would say time and Someone else looked that out and said well, that's an interesting idea But I don't have potted plants, but I do have an issue like this often times in my office and basically redesigned those Signs for potted plants into paper clips and the paper clips now read please read Please sign may be interesting and so on so basically the person saw design in a completely different category and transferred it into something that Wasn't that that wasn't intended for completely different category and that's kind of what we consider to be more creative than simply Also making potted plant signs, but they are round and not rectangular Okay, that's one more thing We need to talk about and as the initial question that we had what do people use three prayers for and one thing that we now are currently discussing is That it might be interesting to look at the role that remixing plays in that and we have this little little graph Again the black lines are for me So you have on the x-axis. We simply have all the problems on the world I don't know why axis we have the amount of demand for a solution for this problem And what we argue is if there is a lot of demand for a solution for a problem Then someone will probably mass produce it. So you have kind of like a mass production threshold and The argument with this industrial revolution of 3d printing often times was that people will not go to the store anymore But simply go to the 3d printers and what we found is that that is not really The entire story that's only part of it What we found is people design all kinds of things and many of the things that people design in 3d print They 3d print because they cannot buy them It's like an individual solution that only a few people have maybe only them and then they print it and that allows them to have a solution at all and this is very much very much comparable to what we would have if we have a workshop and we simply Don't use a 3d printer, but create something out of let's say wood You would also have an individual solution to a problem that wasn't available before and what we see with remixing is that People use those solutions that someone else did that might not be as Interesting as something that can be mass produced and then remix them into something that also Only a couple of people will will need so when we had the the figure with the From fashion with those lots of little little dots those were an a multitude of solutions That only very few people needed but allowing all those people to very simply remix them Allowed them basically to have a little barcode in an area where prior that would simply be no solution You would have that to do that by hand. So maybe that is One answer to the question though I had at the very beginning what the hell do people with 3d printers for use 3d printers for Maybe it's not as elegant as I thought in the beginning four years ago What might come up, but it might be an interesting approach to that so It's two more things. I wanted to talk about So to wrap it up when we talk about creativity Maybe the interesting thing is is that creativity in itself probably isn't as chaotic as you might have thought before the talk It follows in a way a couple of clear patterns and we can see those patterns all over the world and maybe that will help us organize hopefully in the future creative processes and Making it easy For people to have like a foot in a door to make it very easy to start a creative process Is like a gateway drug to more creativity? And if we want to have people engage in some form of creative process that it might be useful to have a very simple First step for them to do that And on on 3d printing the interesting story that I think is that we found is that We have in 3d printed an extremely creative community and the process that we saw that people follow there Might be something that other communities can learn from and given that here's are a lot of people that are active in 3d printed It might be interesting for you to use the next couple of days and talk to them and maybe get engaged there And if you are if you are already engaged in those communities then please keep doing it And if anyone sends you an email with an with a question about an interview and maybe to fill out a question there and be so kind and do that For us and that is all that I have for you today. Thank you very much for coming out even though it was that late