 So hello everyone. Welcome to our next visiting car to send lecture series. I'm Patrick Nobleauheim running the MA Future Design Program at the School of Art and Design. And I'm pleased to announce our next speaker tonight or in the afternoon in Michigan and maybe in the morning somewhere else in different time zones. Carla Diana. Carla is a product designer who's focused mainly on interaction products, interaction design and robots. She's also a design educator. She's running for the design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She's also a well-known writer and author. She's been writing for periodics such as New York Times and she currently published her second book, second right about robots. Yeah, that's the book. And she should speak today about what Fordy means about the program at Cranbrook and also about her new book. And I believe that she will also walk us through the facilities at Cranbrook. So please welcome Carla and Carla, all the audience is yours. Thank you. The story of a new beginning. And it's very appropriate because Petra and I actually met as students in the 2D and 3D design departments respectively at Cranbrook Academy of Art. And I still remember our first, we were given a project in first year and we made this box and we collaborated. And it was a box that had a motor that spun on the inside so that it became this drum that also could glow from the inside and show messages on every side of it. I don't think we even have pictures of that. So in 1997 I came here to Cranbrook Academy of Art, and as many of you are students and you know the school experience is a journey, and it's a journey in finding yourself. And I was very excited about design and looking at things the way that a traditional product designer would and then remembered that I had this love for code. And as a kid, I had the benefit of being in a program where I learned to do some computer code. And so at some point during my graduate school education, those things started to come together and I started exploring ways of having objects that just appeared virtually, and we're programmed or ways of thinking about a future where we would be able to program physical objects, they had digital behavior. And I remember our professors are called artists in residence at the time, saying to me, Oh, what you're working on is not just a new project it's a new way of being as a designer. And that was really something that even though I didn't fully comprehend or understand, I really latched on to and sunk my teeth into and decided to run with. And so built a career around this focus, always just looking for opportunities where the physical and the digital intersected. And they weren't always the most available opportunities and they weren't always the most lucrative opportunities but for me, I knew that they were my opportunities and where I wanted my focus to be. So I wound up working for a number of great design firms at one point I worked at Karen machine's office I worked for at frog design, I worked for many years at a firm called smart design where I also started an interaction lab. And this need a robot vacuum is an example of the kind of thing that I worked on where I led the interaction efforts that of course included thinking about the physical presence, but also really included a lot of methods and thinking about how does it sound how does it move. At one point we have a design that where the the robot itself has messages that glow through the shell of it. So thinking about the, the, that light that typeface, and I really think about, you know, hear me talk a lot about three modalities light sound and movement, which become the material that I love to work in. After my time at smart I started my own studio where I work with clients but always continually challenged myself to do projects that involved this intersection of the physical and the digital. And in particular, I love also thinking about alternative materials and how we might have electronics work in materials that are a little less expected for an electronic device so this is a thing that I call the clever coat rack. One of the things that I was talking a lot about and I had started teaching at this point as well, was how we have the potential to have a lot of capability and a lot of features and all of our products, but I wanted to question, should we have it. So this is an internet connected coat rack that could potentially have a Facebook feed and stock market quotes and a whole bunch of other things, but I really wanted to focus on context. What is the, what do we need from an internet connection at precisely the moment you're interacting with this product at precisely that place and time, and it's just simply the weather. So the high weather, the low weather and something about the conditions is it going to snow, or is it going to be sunny. So it's going to rain, so that you have this communication with the object and can make a split second decision of what to grab. The next thing I want to show you is, I don't have that video. This is a project that I love to show, because it really speaks to the importance of exploration in my studio and it's called the liquor strut, and it's an ice cream orchestra. So I was collaborating with a food designer named Emily balls and a musical composer named Aaron dire. And for me, again, it was pushing the boundaries of how we interact with our physical world and we're used to thinking of swiping on screens or touching buttons, but could we actually have licking be the thing that was the interface so in this project. What we did is we conducted an orchestra of ice cream performers, and I have sensors that are embedded within the cones, these plastic cones, and we asked for volunteers to emerge from these boxes so that they actually couldn't use their hands, and then the different parts of the music play through the act of licking the ice cream, which then triggers a capacitive sensor. So my career wound up being focused on robots. I was a visiting assistant professor at Georgia Tech, where there was a new lab that was being developed that was called the socially intelligent machines lab. And it was a lab that was focused on an entirely new field that I wasn't familiar with it's called social robotics. And that field is all about studying how we might interact with our machines in a totally intuitive way, meaning that all we need to bring to our interaction to operate the machine is what we know from our behavior as a human being. So, I worked with a professor whose name is Dr Andrea Tomasz on a whole series of robots that I've written a lot about. And this is one of the robots that's more abstract and some of you might recognize the connect camera I mean it's essentially a robot arm that can walk around well it's actually on wheels with a connect camera and an arm that can move up and down. For me what's really particularly important is communicating to people how you use this robot and so exaggerating the ears emphasizing the field of view. And letting people know that something you can talk to it's something that can see was really important for me. Since that time, some of my collaborations with Andrea as well as her socially intelligent machines lab which moved to the University of Texas and Austin included developing an entire company, which is now. I don't actually know they have their, they are burgeoning their growing company in Austin, Texas called diligent robotics. And what the company's been developing is a hospital robot. And the real benefit of the product is its ability to be a social robot. And, you know, we might think of this as kind of like, well, it's kind of a doll why do we need something like that. But the benefit is really again, taking the cognitive load away from having to operate a machine and particularly a machine like this, it's complex to train complex to use, and is going to be in this really really busy environment where you don't necessarily have time to put in a code for stop anything like that. And so this work was really built on a lot of research it also I am part of a team with fantastic engineers, both software engineers as well as mechanical engineers, and a whole team of researchers that are constantly talking to the nurses and technicians and the patients and everyone else in the hospital setting. And the bottom line is that the nurses were exhausted. They were hiding out in closets because they were forced to be assembling kits, and it was things that a robot could easily do, and then give them back time, and pleasure in their work to work with patients. So that's what I do. And then a big part of my practice is actually outreach so as Petra mentioned I've written for a number of publications. The Atlantic popular science asked me to do a piece around autonomous vehicles and some of the ethical considerations there and the importance of design. So, try to have projects for myself that challenge me to think about what I see as emerging technology in society so at one point I knew that 3d printers were starting to become ubiquitous, and I worked on a children's book where everything that appears in the book can be downloaded and 3d printed I'm actually wearing the the necklace from this book that is 3d printed and then cast in silver. My latest book is called my robot gets me and it really is a summary of all of this work that I've done with these great researchers and thinking not so much about robots and some of the robots that I worked on literally have eyes and arms and can can walk around. That's not my vision of what we need in our everyday lives, but what was super exciting as a designer was the potential to have those types of interactions show up in our everyday objects so for example, there was a conference room. Camera a meeting camera when I was at smart design that would do this simple gesture of turning around and then it and it just had what we would call two degrees of freedom in the robotics world, it could spin, and it could pivot its head up and down. But what I noticed from that is that it would do this really human gesture of turning itself itself around, and it was just a cylinder on a spindle, it would spin around and then it would, it would tilt, and it really felt like a person turning around and bowing their head as if they were taking a nap and looking away. So that's really the premise of the book and really the focus of a lot of my work and the focus of a lot of my work with clients is this abstraction and thinking about and learning from researchers I also do a podcast it's called the RoboPsych podcast where I work with a PhD psychologist and we talk about all of the ways that these kind of abstract gestures, tug at our heartstrings so to speak or make us feel like we're interacting with something that is alive, even though we know full well that it's not alive and there've been, you know, a number of research studies around things like the rumbo that as soon as it's autonomous seems autonomous and seems like it's moving around the space, people want to give it names people attribute human behaviors to it. If you go on some Amazon reviews, and I was surprised to see it up until this day, because I had first researched this over 10 years ago, and I would read things like people said, I feel so badly for Stephen he stuck under the couch. And when I was writing the book and I finished it this summer. I looked back at the Amazon reviews and people were still saying this kind of stuff. I really admire my helper Clyde and I hate when he doesn't do a good job and you know just talking that way is really fascinating. I think from a psychological point of view and something that we as designers want to think about. So for the book, I put together a framework because one of the challenging things in my work and really one of the most challenging things for 40 design and we're going to visit a few of the students today is the fact that you have to keep so many things in your mind at one time. You really are thinking about what the physical form of the object is, you're thinking about the light and the sound and the movement you're thinking about what messages are being expressed. And you're also having to, you know, coordinate all of that with the technology so it's pretty challenging. And in being so challenging it's easy to lose sight of what's important. So the focus of the book that's called by robot gets me is really using the idea of social interaction as the core value that unites everyone on a design team, as well as helps the designer to constantly remind themselves what the most important aspect of what they're creating is. In order to do that I developed this framework that is kind of like an onion, where one thing builds on the next. And so we start with presence, which is the physical form and how important that is. And then it goes on to expression, or the way what I keep calling sound light and movement. And then we have interaction like what are the sensors how does that thing it can give us messages, but how does it understand messages from us. And that happens through microphones, sensors, camera systems radar, you know, a whole host of that and I talk a lot about it in the context is really one of the things that's most challenging for robotics because it's really a very, very human thing, understanding not only the how. And the where kind of like the coat rack, but also in a sense the why so understanding what the state of mind of the person is, and that includes taking information from calendars taking information from that person's personal history. And there's a there's a lot to that. And then finally ecosystems, when we have a number of devices that can communicate like I might have a fitness tracker that can communicate with my scale that can communicate with my bicycle, etc. And there's also just a core way of thinking about products that I encourage in the book, and we're used to and traditionally in product design, thinking about the object as a thing into which we put messages that are kind of pre bait. And the designer writes this, this script and then the script comes out with the instructions, but what we're starting to see is the product as an entity unto itself so that it has artificial intelligence, and we're only feeding it with a set of rules, but it's actually starting to come up with its own script and how do we think about products in that way. So, animators do this exercise, it's called the flower sack exercise. And I liken this to what we do with sound by emotion, where we're not again literally looking at a head and eyeballs but we're thinking about how something can be abstract and you know something like light, we might have a that can even a single light can have a lot of expression. It can be a number of different colors, it can be brighter or dimmer. It can blink flash as opposed to glow. And then once we start getting to multiple lights, then that can be animated, and we get even more expression. When we get more lights we get a small kind of matrix why use this sometimes in the faces of my robots and then, of course, ultimately we have a screen, and the ecosystems is something I've already mentioned, and the other thing that I, you know, really stress in the particularly at the end are thinking about the ethics of our product relationships and what we want to consider are the implications of what happens when we have products that we have a relationship with that can then persuade us to do things and it can persuade us to have unhealthy habits, it can persuade us to purchase things that maybe are not good for us. And as designers, I really encourage us to think about what it is and have an understanding of what the goal of the relationship is and think about vulnerable populations, as well as so many of the other technical considerations that have a big impact on ethics, including privacy including vulnerability hackers, etc. But I ultimately, we are just at the beginning of thinking about designing all of this. And so when I said that the story starts at Cranbrook and ends at Cranbrook with a new beginning. What happened a few years ago, three years ago is I was contacted by a friend who didn't realize that I had been a Cranbrook alum, and she said I've been asked to seek out people in industry who might be a good fit to create a new program, and the program is being called 4D Design, and they're looking for someone to come in and bring a vision. And I thought of you immediately. And I had just started a new job at Parsons School of Design. And she said maybe you don't want to look at new opportunities and I said probably any other opportunity I would not even consider. But to start a new program at Cranbrook is really a fantastic opportunity and really a perfect fit and a chance to bring this intersection of the physical and the digital that I've been working on this idea of social interaction and bring it to a place like Cranbrook that has a rich history in the arts and design. The Eameses were here doing all of their vast exploration and creating new materials and new manufacturing methods, many sculptors such as Harry Vertoya, Carl Millis, Marshall Fredricks, Sarenin was instrumental in starting the campus, as well as launching the first architecture program, and there were many, many others. So I felt like it was a place that was really rooted in thinking about the physical presence of an object, the importance of materiality, the importance of the relationship to the humanity and the human body. And, and it was exciting to bring technology to that place. So we have a really fluid curriculum. The beauty of the Cranbrook curriculum is that we don't have a set number of courses that get written at one point and then they just run for decades. But we have the ability to be very nimble and respond to what I call today's shifting perspectives. So we're, we just wrapped up actually a group discussion, we have a group check in typically once a week or so, and we were talking about a lot of these things that come up around robotics around how they're starting to show up in our everyday lives, even though we didn't necessarily consent to them and what do we think about them and what kind of decisions do we want to make as creative people. So we're looking at product behaviors, we're looking at software, expressive coding, embedded electronics, mixed reality, voice control, conversational interfaces, certainly AI is part of our conversation, 3D printing, prosthetics, telepresence. And the way that we do that even though we have no classes we actually I think of it as one big class where we have a number of workshops and visitors who come in so there's intensive learning experiences, and then the core of the education happens when students are developing their own projects, and we meet for in depth critiques to discuss those. So we start out with a culture of tinkering so everybody gets a workshop from me around Arduino, and thinking, and learn and just the basics of the code, and not so much about that technology, but around resources and how do we go and look for examples, how we modify code, why would we want to look for examples what kind of examples could we look for. And then we've had a series of really great workshops so we had a fellow named Timmy Oya Deji, who came in, and along with Alana Morales, and they did a workshop around gesture and machine learning, and how we might use that to control the objects in our environment. And so all of the students learned about how the computer vision sees our bodies, sees our faces as I will let us our hands, and how we might use that as an input to control the world around us we also had some really interesting discussions around camera vision as the pros to Timmy's been using something called Project Soli, he's now a researcher at Google, and Project Soli involves using radar as opposed to cameras so there are some benefits in the privacy realm around that. There's lots to talk about. We also recently had a fellow named Motomichi Nakamura come in and do a workshop around projection mapping so all of the students did, we did want and and we're all virtual. This, well, no, we're all physical this year, but doing everything in our hybrid way so our visitors have come in and they've done the workshops with us remotely so Motomichi, Timmy was in the UK. Motomichi is in, and I think Alana was, I don't know if she was in the UK or she was in Spain. Motomichi was in New York. Some of the others you'll see have been in different places around the world, but we've been able to do a lot with remote learning. And then, but the students are here because we are a studio based education, as opposed to sitting in classrooms next to one another, the students have been working in their studio spaces and again we'll see some of their spaces in just a few minutes so I'm going to race through this so that we can get to that because that's the really the interesting part. This woman named Sophie Khan do a lecture with us in a discussion. She has built a career as an artist around scanning and 3D printing around the human form and looking at the history of representing the human body and represent and how we take that representation and express it back and how we think about particularly the female form and what ways that we can manipulate things like she'll do things like take a 3D scanner and actually move it around while it's scanning as part of her artistry. We had a fellow named Matt Kenyon who's actually at the University of Buffalo, and he did a really fantastic lecture with us and some of these are online so I might be able to share those with you. Petra I know that you have your vow of visiting artists lecture series is phenomenal and everyone's getting overloaded with talks but there's some really great talks in our, in our archive, as well. So some of these were recorded and I think Matt's and Sophie's were. And I think to me as well. So Matt came and he also did virtual studio visit so he met individually one on one with the students about their work, but he's really looking at some some critical ideas around commerce and capitalism, and how we can use created impacts to get people to think about things that might otherwise seem invisible. And then ultimately we have this exquisite campus so we're part of a larger educational community that has 318 acres. And so a lot of the students think about doing projects that are outdoors actually one of our second year students Steve Kuiper's has a construction, a giant construction LED sign that he's having people contribute to as part of his degree show, and it's actually located up here, right on this bottom of Peristyle, we also have a science museum that's part of our campus so I'm particularly excited about 40 being this hybrid of science and art. And I want to talk a bit about the students and I go check on time. So, we have a number. We've been doing as much as we could when it was warm and it's getting warm again where we actually had critiques and group field trips as part of way to do our discussion which I think are some things that we might keep in beyond pandemic times. We did some seminars outside you know this is Meryl Norlander, who I think is part of our discussion. I think she's online right now with us, I think I think the zoom is so weird I just see the screen I don't see you guys when I'm presenting. But I want to talk a little bit about student work before we even had full time for these students, I brought in a couple of electives so Cody Norman was one of our electives he's been working with the community locally here in Detroit, which is actually very robot rich because there are a lot of robots behind the scenes in the manufacturing environments, and they have an enormously steep learning curve in terms of being able to operate them. And so they've started bringing in artists so there's a place called Ballard International that brought in artists to work on ways to interact interface with their factory robots so Cody is one of those people. So he's continuing to do research around that he had to show. So this was one of our field trips before the pandemic. Well also part of our first group was a fellow named Michael Candy, who builds large scale robots with that feature light structures so this is walking robot. This is part of a bianali in Australia so he's in Australia this year and it's going to be joining us again. He was in Australia during the pandemic and will be joining us again in the fall. But he is really very interested again in this relationship between the human human body and the robot is kind of a creature or an entity. Right at the pandemic time we were in the midst of prepping for a group show where we were going to show a number of pieces. This is his little sunfish robot where he had seen a robot that was part of goping out the Fukushima disaster. And it was a scouting robot and he recreated it, but not for the purpose of using it for scouting but actually to use it as a character in a film. And to think about this robot breaking away and bringing some radioactive material with it. I really sort of spoke to this is and he then showed it and he's got some great scenes of the robot interacting with sea creatures, but it really kind of speaks to the potential for narrative between machines and people, and how the machine itself becomes an actor, a social actor we would say, and I think it's important for us as designers to talk about that. This is then a scene of Merrill who's one of our first years, and she brought some of her practice that was is a very thriving art practice around gender and sexuality, and thinking about identity, but, and also using folding structures as part of the form with which she works. And she then brought some of those and started to use motors and started to automate, and then started actually looking at some of these objects that were part of her performances that became these hybrid sex toys with new identities. That's a scene from one of the performances. She also worked on something during this pandemic, where there was a friend of hers this is called the Brock emotional support tool. So a friend of hers was in Paris in a high rise, and really suffering from the isolation. And here we were working on these objects to help people be more social so Merrill started working on this way of thinking about what we had learned from our gesture workshop of how her friend could actually be affecting something that Merrill or somebody else could be wearing across the other side of the world. And these are just some more experiments around a wearable device. And then taking that further and thinking about creating again a narrative. And this one is called the journey to Uranus. Chen is one of our second year students who's currently showing in our degree show. These might be a video. Oh, yeah, here we go. So this project is called second skin and is thinking about the ways that robotics become prosthetics, and then kind of we take cues from our human form and bring those cues into the robotic world, but then the robots actually start to come back full circle and affect us. So he's looking at that whole circle of interaction. This is a project from Jerry Lee one of our second students it's called the emotional hat. So one of the things that we really think about is, how is technology affecting us as humans affecting how we interact with one another, just as I'm feeling like actually pretty isolated just talking to a screen. He's thinking about you know what happens when we are just looking at our devices. And then express emotion for us so he's got this hat that you wear that does the job of expressing. And is really getting us to you know question like what are we expressing through our technology and what is that doing to us as humans. This is a piece from Chris Kay that is around the phenomenon of light and thinking and it's, it's a exquisite mechanism that spins and will actually transform the room around you. And there's a bunch of stuff online around the 40 program and the sense of what 40 is, but I want to get to and there's lots of ways to get in touch with me, but what I want to do is make sure I have a chance to walk around. And I'm going to stop sharing, and I'm going to pop into a couple of students and say hi to them so I'm actually going to switch out of this screen and go to my other identity here. Here we are. So this is the 4d space we actually have a gallery here where we can show some of the videos you see girls video there. This is our studio. This is a crit room that also doubles as a projection mapping studio we have a grid on the ceiling, where we can hang projectors and cameras Emily just showed her work that is a soft robot. Can you see it. It's it actually Oh it's doing its little thing. You know it's a shot it's programmed to be a fearful. Well, we had a hour long discussion, and there's a lot around the emotion of the robot but there is a sense of shyness. So, the robot needs you to be still, and then it will actually emerge and do its thing. We have a number of soldering stations here. We have Chen who is experimenting with ferrofluid. This one this one is this part this this piece is kind of not work that perfectly but I have a small working sample. Ah, don't watch out. Chen's got a piece in the museum right now he's one of our second years all of our second year show museum. So chance of experimenting with ferrofluid. And so is his piece in the museum he has a number of motors that move a magnet behind the screen okay you do it from behind. Okay. And he's particularly interested in this as a means of expression, and the, how this connects to the way we do ink and mark making and ephemerality. And I can talk about a lot of other things. Thank you, I'm going to pop into the chrome. Hey, what's up. I can show you what's going on. Show us like what a studio is like. There's a big hand here I don't know what that stuff. What's the hand of God stuff here desk computers pretty important for the work that you do here. I have a 3D printer just because because the ones in the lab to keep it busy, and I got a VR headset recently. It's like a station for something like Uh huh. Um, and it's a depth snacks. Um, a lot of wood and other materials that I keep further just so that I can quickly build things and stuff. Uh huh. Just other supplies. You recently can you talk about the drawing robot. Oh, this is it's not set up for that's used for like a car machine. So I have two motors loaded here and a pen that would hang off of them, and it can actually draw images that I feed into it. Um, I don't have a school like that. We, um, we have a lot. Thank you, because we have a lot of our projects on Instagram these days. So that's a great way to learn more. We have a lot of projects that's called God forsaken that shows us. Hi Emily. Can you tell us a little bit about your studio and what your work on. Maddox and soft robotics. And a little bit of sculpture too. Right now I'm working on Steven's call to entry. Oh yes, for his big. Right. Yeah, I'm just writing a message that's going to be included as part of Steven's work outside the museum. Awesome. Emily also does really lovely sketches as research for her projects that she's working on. And does a lot of mold making she molded. She did enormous experiments around the soft robot and molding. And we've got a couple of other students back here. Oh, we have a kitchen, which is a big part of in pre pandemic and post pandemic. I'm sure a little bit of the lab, but I want to make sure to leave time for Q&A. This is our 40 lab. And we do have a number of 3D printers. This is our larger format maker bot. We have a couple of presses. Joseph presses brilliant and very responsive company. We've got a form labs for doing resin prints. A mini vacuum former we also have a main studio, a main shop, centrally at school. We have a desktop CNC for being able to carve out PC boards, got a vinyl cutter. Everybody wants stickers. Who doesn't want stickers. We also have a room here that's a little isolated for a laser cutter. And lots of bits and electronic hearts and one of the visions for the three, the 40 program is also to be a digital hub for our whole community. So the fiber department has a digital jacquard loom that you see here. And it's housed here in 40, even though it's part of the fiber department. And some of our 40 students have been using that so you can program it, and then you are weaving the thing that you outside. So what we have here is, this is the Dubai robot arm got more soldering, just some simple hand tools wearables of course or something that I want to encourage and it's sort of a big part of making the physical and the digital these days the relationship to the body so we have sewing station mannequins, and things are all kinds of messy here right now because we're in the thick of things Steve our second year, half to this. One of these claw vending machine toys and allowed artists to then contribute. And I think that's about it. So I'm going to end this part. Here we go. So I'm back. I know we started 10 minutes after so if we were going to if we do have an hour, we still have time for questions. We would like to hear about the book Carla. Oh yes. Yeah, so I taught me I talked a little bit about some of the principles in the book it's a lot of what I talk about in the 40 design program. My robot gets me. It is really kind of a combination of stories from the last 20 years of working really I mean more really the last 10 years but what I talk about in the book is how you know we've been at a point where there's a lot that we can do technologically but which should we do and we can make things incredibly complex. And that just makes them more difficult to use so how can we focus on the thing that lets the technology get out of the way. You know, in a sense like that's really the goal of what we're thinking about with this 40 design stuff is to have the technology get out of the way so like I said a little bit of my presentation. There's this. There's this core framework that is the framework that is the the five you know the presence expression interaction. And, you know, I really come from way back when you and I were students petter, really understanding the importance like that physical presence is really the sort of not that is the most important thing that everything kind of hangs on. You know, even though we talk about technology disappearing and becoming invisible. Really, we still want to think about the material that something is made in the shape that something is how that shape communicates to us. I've got a number of interviews in the book with folks who are head of design or parts of different organizations and one of them is with a guy named Rocky Jacob, who was the lead creative director for the nest camera when they were developing an outdoor security camera, and he talked a lot about this, you know what would seem to people like it's just a decorative thing, which is the little shield that that goes on top of a security camera right like security cameras have this sort of little shield right and he said that he really pushed his engineering team hard to try to get rid of that little shield because that that little shield felt like a police hat, and it made this device. And they wanted it to be for consumers for their home to think about all kinds of things to think about. I'm waiting for a package or I want to, you know, be able to greet the people who are coming to my door or, you know, and security is certainly part of that, but they didn't want that to be your core relationship around this sort of aspect of fear. So, he, he said it was really important not to have the police hat and I really I use that story in the book, because it really speaks to the importance of presence, and you know there's another project that I was recently there recently got the patent on that I worked on with a drummer whose name is Conrad Meissner, and he's a drummer and he said, every metronome I operate is this sort of like little thing he's like I'm there and I'm performing, and then I have to go and like these little buttons like this on this like this little plastic thing, and he said, I think there's a better way. And so, together with him and Ted Booth, Mike Laser, we worked on a device that can be an operated entirely by the drummer in the midst of his performance. It's called the click brick, and it has a mount so that it mounts to the drum kit like just like a symbol or other drum, and you operate it entirely with the drumstick. So you turn it on like this you turn it off like this, you there's a dial where you can dial in tempo but you can also actually hit the tempo and have it match. And he's been taking it on the road and you know people say like what is that thing that's great how can I get one and and it's a whole. That's a whole company that was launched that is so the whole company business part of it is a whole other story and Ted and Conrad are the core of that company and they are handling. Because I get a lot of people who after I do talks like this and they go I want to buy one of those and we're just starting to produce them soon, but manufacturing is a whole other project unto itself. So that's the stuff around the book yeah it starts with presence and then it goes to interaction and then it talks about AI and how AI can be used to help us understand our state of mind and then have an object respond appropriately. Any questions guys. And you guys in the audience can you turn your cameras on that Carla can see the faces behind the names. These zoom presentations are driving bananas I just did a book launch, and it was a webinar format and it was great because it was with a journalist and we had a great conversation but I couldn't see any of the people. I see a couple of my students who are also on the screen like I see Chris K and I see Ryan Janina. I see Merrill, although I also saw Marilyn the kitchen stuff. If no one has questions, I have some. I would be curious to hear me or your son is preschool kid now right. So, and he's in this fantastic environment of Cranbrook and 40 design facilities. Do you think it is influencing him in some way, because he's the generation of kids which are absolutely natural with the technology and all the mobile devices. How do you think it can influence him to be in such environment and around the people who are in the campus. Yeah, I think the term is digital native right so. So, first of all, I do have to say with the pandemic. Mimo is not allowed in the studio. So, and that's a big sadness for me. Small sadness in the larger context of everything else that's going on with the pandemic but I've, I've been very excited about him. You know when you and I were here. I think that's when they had their kids in the studio all the time and I always thought what an amazing experience to to see everything that's going on, but even kind of small things. I think even even if he's not coming here physically I definitely see that he is being influenced by the work that's happening here at 40 like we did just have the projection mapping workshop with Motomichi. And so as part of that, a lot of us I was just communicating with Chris about projectors. A lot of us were just doing a lot of experimentation with projectors and so I brought a projector home. And just to like that's now one of his materials like he'll just say, can we use that thing where we make it big on the wall and you know we think about and and and we'll do things like look, look at photos that way and so I think it's really changing the way that he thinks but you guys have any questions for my students. Yeah, I can hear or see some. Me Tanchu who's here on zoom is asking AI robots are going to take over most of the jobs in the future, and with the increase in population, large amount of population is going to be unemployed. Don't you think it's going to next major problem that humans are going to face. Wow, there's certainly, hey, I said, there's certainly. I mean that's certainly a big discussion and a big economic political issue that we've already felt look, we're here in Detroit, I mean it was even just you know manufacturing really completely change the face of economics here and and hurt a lot of people in terms of being suddenly not prepared. I think that there will always be something that is replacing the jobs before us and we do we use robot I mean the core for using robotics is around what we call the three D's dirty dangerous and that's the third one. Deadly. So deadly is dangerous. Oh, somebody help me out here. Anyway, undesirable things. So I do think that like the moxie robot that that I work on like the nurses are actually here in the US very short staff, very exhausted. They're landing up in the hospital themselves because of the ways that they have to work. So I feel really good about working for a company like that that I feel is giving the nurses the ability to do the human part of their work, and doesn't take away from their opportunity they're not getting opportunities taken away. And that said, I think, so I also think you know we could look at something like when I was in my first job. One of my first jobs work for the Hearst Corporation in a very fancy building in Manhattan, and somebody's job full time was to operate the elevator. People all over New York City had that job, and they lost that job. And so I, I don't feel like the answer is bring back the job of press of sitting in a box. All day pressing a button. And I think that the answer is continually finding creative ways for there is, we always humans always create something new, we can look back and say, how do we think that we would have done anything beyond the telephone and then we, you know, and then look at what telephone means to us today or look at what communication means to us today. I think that we need to be forward looking. I think that things like a universal basic income are interesting ideas for I do think that work, all of the constructs around work are, of course, constructs of our creations as human beings so how can we create a new construct around the eight hour day. Super. Thank you. There is another question from Facebook, which is related kind of how do you think the robotics could have helped to manage the pandemic in any way. You know, the, I mean, they were, there's actually a thing that I write about in the book at the end, where I think the, there have been a lot of robotics helping the pandemic there's been a lot of disinfecting robots delivery robots, even you know moxie the robot that I helped create delivers COVID tests because there's just like so many more COVID tests and they need to get delivered right away and and so I think I think the pandemic was helped by and not to mention telepresence robots right there was a lot of like, all of a sudden, our, our nieces and nephews and grandparents are on that wouldn't normally be having this virtual presence and so I think that I think that actually we didn't have enough like true telepresence robots that are like roving around our spaces and giving us a better experience and this experience that I keep complaining about, but I what I actually talked about in the book is how a little bit sad that made me, because I started seeing all of these articles about like, robotics are going to do this for the pandemic robotics are going to do that. You know, I think there's, I think that think that there, it was the, the right time for robotics to explode, but I don't want to see us rely on robots out of a sense of fear. And, you know, I think that that their tools that can help us but I don't really want to, you know, I don't want to see everybody in their own little autonomous vehicle afraid to like be sitting next to somebody else like I want to see public communication. And, you know, I don't want to see people not wanting to touch each other and touch things and anyway, so there's my little right, but And I think that's it so far. Any other questions to Carla. Hi Carla, and Lisa. Hi, Lisa. Hi. Where are you in the world. I'm in Prague. Okay. She's one of our second year students. Yeah, I'm pet that actually recommended your book to me a while ago. I can't remember, but when he did. It was not available yet. So, you know, I kind of slipped my mind but, but now I absolutely intend to buy your book, but just in case. Well, what I want to ask you is it maybe you talk about. Because my project is about. It's a virtual experience. So I'm not really doing anything physical right now, but it's about it's about the future of smart homes. So in this virtual experience I'm just designing this well hypothetical scenario that the AI system is fully integrated into your house and everywhere you go you can just interact with this, you know, your digital housemate. So in this process, I've decided to like open it to the public so that they can tell me, you know what their preferences are what they think about this type of technology. And so far it's been mixed reviews I would say mostly positive. I mean I haven't gotten a lot of responses yet but my question is, you can you think about like an example where you actively engage, you know your end users. What sort of process that is for you, or your students, if, if any. So the is the question around how do you active, how do you use AI to know like how do you, how do you approach your end users like. I'm thinking kind of like on a human centered design approach in that. Well it's kind of like, let's say doing a focus group and how they would maybe like this project or this technology or not. Is it something. Yeah, so I talk about that a little bit, a little bit in the book I get into methods, and you know there are some specific methods that I use my clients I mean in non pandemic times I'll actually fly out to diligent and awesome and and I what I do is a series of workshops, and the workshops are really around thinking about the product as, again what I would call a social actor, and doing what we call body storming exercise so we try to mimic the environment of the hospital setting or if it's the pharmacist, let's say, visiting the hospital, we'd have some shelves we'd have some. We have some pieces of cardboard that represent the things that the robot needs to pick up, and we actually have someone literally play the part of the robot, so that we can have the relationship be the focus of the design activity, as opposed to thinking the materials and the tech tech and the coding and all of that kind of stuff, like first have it guide the whole process and then what I do from those exercises is I'll take video or stills, and then turn those into storyboard scenarios that then become a document for the whole team to use around specific situations so one specific situation might be pick up and delivery of medications so like what does that scenario look like what's involved in that and, and what emerges from that. So I see there's something in the chat. Oh, it's a question from person. I used to work together and she's got and we haven't caught up. It impresses PhD in what's what's, you've been focusing on medicine and healthcare. Yeah, human informatics I run a lab and in a hospital medical fabrication lab and I've actually met moxie. Oh, hospital. Yeah. Oh, how cool, how cool. Yeah, my question is, what's the difference between a robot and a device. Is it like an anthropomorphizing or is it agency is it because we're considering it more like an entity or are they replacing human functions. And that's the difference like obviously a robot is a device but I'm sure that all devices are robots like it seems like it's a semantic distinction. I love what you just said social actor, is that the difference that there's like a social component but I'm not sure because the cuckoo machines the arms are not necessarily social. So, right, right. No it's an interesting question right sort of it's I mean it really is a semantic we talk about it a lot in in 4D I see Chris and Ryan are still on the screen with us. We had an interesting discussion once where one of our students said, you know in Chinese the word robot means humanoid robot, and I don't consider anything that's not a humanoid robot. And, you know, it really sort of to me, the more that I work in this and do like the podcast and writing and stuff, the more I think that science fiction and culture affects the way that we think about our devices and because we come from the science fiction that has things like kick the autonomous vehicle or, you know Rosie the robot that was supposed to help us clean up that we're like, our minds are fixated on that relationship but you know one of the people who worked on this book a lot with me as a woman named who's at Cornell Tech, and she like to say we just have this discussion as well right because I don't know so like it's I think it's, I think it's a semantic and I think it's really different for every person even you know each of my students has a different point of view of what constitutes a robot you know as a rumor really a robot, because it's programmed to bounce off the walls. I mean it feels like a pet. So yeah, I consider it more a robot than just like a cleaning device you know, I don't know if I can consider my computer robot. I consider that more of an extension, but I guess the Roomba is also an extension, doing the things I don't like. It's a funny thing because the Roomba is so much dumber than your computer. Yeah, the amount of smarts are in your like they're I mean the Roomba like the needle that I worked on at least has some sort of LiDAR so it maps out the room and like the Roomba at least the earlier versions of the Roomba would was programmed to bounce off the wall, move 10 degrees, and then go somewhere else until it bounces so if you look at these maps of the Roomba it just like makes this I'm sure you've seen these images. The fact that it's on wheels and roves and like makes its physical presence known in your environment, you know, I think the fact that it moves makes it and has some decision making ability. So Wendy likes to say a robot is anything that does something for us on our behalf. That sounds pretty broad though. Yeah, it's pretty broad right like is a dishwasher robot. Yeah, why is a Roomba a robot and a dishwasher not, you know, because they're essentially like, it's because it moves. So, yeah, I think it has to do with the embodiment. Yeah, the embodiment. I think it has to do with the dynamic aspect of embodiment right. And so, once the body is able to move, because even we have some things like even just the Jibo didn't move around but it, but it tilted its head or the Echo show does this thing where it moves. Or even the thing that I talked about the Polycom camera felt like it was it had a body and had a body that but it's not but we have I mean I would call would you call an Amazon Echo a robot. I think it's really, it's really different in different contexts and it's really different for different people. Thank you that I think that I like that dynamic embodiment that. Yeah, we'll go with that. What about you guys what about you guys, Ryan and Chris you guys have questions for the, do you have like things you want to say about 4D. Tell us some gossip about Carla. Specifically. I don't know. I'm putting you on the spot. I'm sorry but it's fun to have you here. Thanks. I think the last question that you that was asked, I mean we specifically talked about that question for, I think, like, like an hour multiple days, at least, and even offline it was, it was definitely a topic that was of heated discussion. But I was like to think about it like, you know, it's kind of the whole idea of what is art, how do you define art, what does it mean, and it's it's an internal internal situation, also with cultural, it's kind of cultural as well. But, you know, about 4D. There's, there's so much stuff that I've learned here that I didn't think that I was going to learn. I didn't come in thinking I was going to learn, and it's really great. I'll just say that. It's different than what graduate schools different than what what one walks in the door, expecting it to be I think I have a question about the program. Something which we have been experiencing here at the future design program. How difficult is for you guys, because people are coming from different cultures, different environments, different countries, different languages, how difficult is to somehow and how fast you can find the common language, you know, because if you speak about some terms like, let's say human centered design, or even art or robot, etc. I think it has unique mind and unique perspective. So, we've been experiencing that it takes a while to somehow find the same language and being on the same page. Yeah. Yes. Okay, if that's a question for me or is that a question for Carlo. No, I think you guys, you guys, Yeah, more students. Okay. So, I think, whether you're from a different country or not you're going to, you're going to struggle with that wherever you are. It's, I think, just giving people extra. Just understanding that people are on the same page that you're going to be not agreeing on every single thing. I mean that's that's the obvious straightforward answer. I think also coming with an open mind and realizing that you can learn things that you may or may not have had exposure to, especially if somebody's from another culture country, or just generally social background. I think, because we have a lot of international students here, having a wide variety of cultures has really allowed us to expand our social identity way more. So I think that's cool. I find this, this is a question that I ask myself often I think about ever since coming to Cranbrook it's really shined bright in my mind as far as like language linguistics and sort of a universal language we can speak together I come from a bad industrial design background a traditional industrial design background so we rigorously studied the methodology and the process and my classmates and colleagues and work, you know we spoke the same language, the same jargon so here, what Cranbrook is to me, and it's, it's bigger than the department. We're like a cultural hub of contemporary art. And I believe that this is one of the most progressive places I come from California, Oregon, West Coast, primarily and it's considered, you know, progressive, for lack of a better term and and the, the effectiveness of Cranbrook is like next level. Like we're, we're talking about future. We're developed in my mind, we're developing language for things that there, there really isn't language that's being spoken about. And it can be controversial subjects like, you know, some things in regards like what is allowed in the museum and what isn't there's some, you know, topics around censorship and like how does that influence language and then there's subjects of like personal identity and, you know, but this is, to me, it goes past just the department. Now when it comes to 4D, we're also creating a language because this is a new field you mentioned you're working in futures design we had a lecture recently with someone who really linguistically impressed me, who was in the field of future, Elliot Montgomery is his name. And, and, and so the, the language is evolving and I guess from my, from my opinion, all we can do is try and like it may get more we can pay, we can contribute our efforts to try and in what I would consider elevate the conversation to try and get deeper to get deeper we need to have the vocabulary we need to have the concepts, and that's been happening since day one, I think it's just a process. It's worth noting too that we experienced the time during the pandemic like we, many of us basically live together, you know my dorm is right upstairs. My next door neighbors are the same next door neighbors in my studio. So, it's like a big social experiment that we're experiencing at Cranbrook. Chris Petra and I lived in Sally's house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 1998, 1999. You know, I want to mention one thing too, I've been to Prague a few times and one thing that really impressed me about Prague was how international students visit the city. I ended up going clubbing in the five story famous club in this downtown area and it was a bunch of international students from all over the world attending conferences and like all kinds of language really English was the primary language of discussion but everyone was from everywhere it was truly an international environment which I was very impressed with when I was visiting Prague. Thank you for answering it. Anyone. Any more questions for Carla. I was going to say that the biggest asset to going to grad schools your peers. So, beyond language. You know, you have professors and you know you have tools that are available to you but what you will have that is unique is the people that study with you at that given time and where their careers will branch out to because what's true about the idea art and robotics and human computer interaction is that you can be a web developer you could become an industrial designer again you know you can become a researcher. You can go off and do so many things and so it's beautiful to connect with those students and you know see your opportunities multiply by friendship. I would like to see on Carla and me that some of the relationships from grad school can continue for decades. So anyway guys we should also think about some collaboration between those programs. Yes, we have to find some way, definitely. Yeah, I would love that. I don't know. Any more questions I would like to thanks Carla it was fantastic also see the facilities not only hearing about all your work and work of the studio. And I hope we will really find a way how we can do something together between the schools. Yes, let's keep talking. Thanks for making me part of the lecture series I was I posted for my students so like, it looks like you've been having some great and you have them archived so there's some great lectures there. Great to have you. Okay. Here's this is the awkward zoom moment. I'm hitting the red button.