 Hi everybody, thanks for coming tonight. We're so excited to have you and our three great speakers talk about the revenge of the user. This is the final event in our series of events in relation to our show Beautiful Users upstairs in our gallery, which is engaging relationships between designers and the people that use the stuff that we make. So we've looked at ergonomics and affordances and interface, and tonight we're going to talk about how designers engage the user in the process of design and how the whole paradigm is changing from one of designers really thinking of the user as a kind of object of what we do to creating systems and processes that bring the user in. So that's really, really cool, and this is it. So what we're going to do is we have three wonderful speakers that are each going to talk for about 15 minutes, and then we'll have a conversation up here on the stage with them and with you about the revenge of the user. So our first speaker is Avi Rajagopal. He is senior editor at Metropolis Magazine, where his beat includes design hacking, open design and digital fabrication. He co-edited the catalog for Adhocracy, an exhibition about open design that was held at the first Istanbul Design Biennial, and we're especially proud that he is author of Hacking Design, a book published by Cooper Hewitt, which was a big inspiration for us in looking at this theme of the revenge of the user and design hacking. He studied industrial design at India's National Institute of Design, and he has an MFA in design criticism from SVA's Decrit program, so really excited to hear him do an overview of this notion of hacking and open design. He'll be followed by Eric Rosenbaum, who recently completed his doctorate at MIT Media Labs Lifelong Kindergarten Group, so he is now Dr. Eric, and he is a doctor of kindergarten stuff, right? No, I'm just way more advanced than that. His dissertation was on musical tinkering, so he's interested in improv and play and making and learning, and he puts all that stuff together to create new tools for what he calls playful creation, and upstairs in our exhibition is Maki Maki, and he's going to demonstrate that live tonight as well as talk to you about its origins and why it exists. Finally, Golon Levin is an artist, engineer, and educator interested in new intersections of machine code and visual culture. He creates performances, artifacts, and environments that explore our relationship with machines. As an educator at Carnegie Mellon University, he is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium for personal expression, so he teaches studio artists how to do stuff with code, which is super exciting, and he has a piece upstairs in our exhibition called the Free Universal Connection Kit, and he's going to talk about that, but other great things tonight as well, so welcome our speakers, and Avi, you can come on up and take it away. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming out. You can hear me now. I said hi, and I thank you all for coming out. I can't tell you how much I love the fact that the beautiful user's exhibition has a section called revenge, but I think I want to make it very clear revenge against the global system of mass production is hard. I mean really, really, really hard. In 2009, a Royal College of Art student, Thomas Thwaites, set out to make his own toaster, you know, that little thing that sits in your kitchen and heats your bread for you. And then he realized just how hard it is to actually make for yourself the comforts that we're used to. You know, he acquired metal ore and smelt it in a microwave. He pounded his own copper wiring. He molded his own plastic, and he ended up with that. So even before we dream our dreams of taking revenge as users, let us acknowledge that this is a very hard thing we're all interested in doing. Resisting consumerism, late capitalism, globalized trade, geopolitics, you know, modern civilization. The idea of, you know, letting users like you and me into the inner workings of design and production is not such a new idea. 1974, the Italian designer Enzo Mari created Autoprogettazione, or Autoproject. So if you sent him a self-addressed envelope with enough postage, enough postage, he would send you a booklet with instructions on how to build your own furniture. Please don't make any comparisons to IKEA. The last time a design journalist tried to do that with him, he nearly bit his head off. But this was Mari's way of hacking the contract furniture industry, and rumor has it that the only reason he did Autoprogettazione was because six months earlier, a very big Italian manufacturer that I cannot name, even though I know the name, pulled out and essentially cancelled a project that he'd been working on for almost a year. But you know, this was, he was really trying to create resistance at a time when the Italian manufacturers were sort of ruling the rules to the Milan furniture fair. And he belongs, 1974, in that period of time, you know, where in the U.S., Stuart Brand, between 68 and 72, was creating the Whole Earth Catalog, and you will see that stretch of time, the 60s and 70s come up many times in this presentation, and there's a good reason why. But it has been a really interesting journey from those, you know, days of radically user-centered design and DIY to this, where hacking is the subject of BuzzFeed listicles. So you know, we're on a daily basis, we're bringing down such evil mega-corporations as Pottery Barn or L'Oreal and, you know, Viva La Revolution. There's Makey Makey in that corner, by the way, so I can't let you laugh at everything on the slide. But in fact, Makey Makey's tagline, Ancient Kid for Everyone, is sort of the spirit of my talk today. I happen to think that as we talk of hacking consumer goods, the idea of DIY is actually a limited or even a dangerous one. The image that you see there is actually a fab lab. I don't know if you all know what a fab lab is. It's a worldwide network of fabrication laboratories, essentially facilities that have, you know, tools for digital fabrication and prototyping that are available to local communities of makers or, you know, craftsmen and so on. This particular one is in Dakar, Senegal, and it's called Defco Agnep, and that roughly translates to it with others. And I think that's what's exciting to me about design hacking today, and what I argue will eventually help us realize the true potential of the movement. But historically, I think it's responsible for some pretty neat pieces of technology, so, you know, we know that. This little wooden box was actually first saw the light of day at the Homebrew Computer Club, and the Homebrew Computer Club was really one of those early groups where people started applying what the first wave of hackers were doing, which is to work with software and take that into the realm of hardware, and, you know, that seems a natural transition when you're talking about computers, because software and hardware are so integrally connected. And so the Apple Computer actually came out of this environment where, you know, information had to be free and accessible, and all technology had to be open, and so what an irony Apple today is. Another really great invention also had a remarkably similar story. In 2008, Briepet has formed a hacker space with some other people called NYC Resister in Brooklyn, and together with Adam Mayer and Zach Hogan, he became interested in something that was called the RepRap project, which was going on in Britain at the time. And the project was about making a machine that could make itself. Well, don't all machines make machines. But, you know, the idea was that a machine could replicate itself, and that's how the first makerbot 3D printer was born, and it was called a cupcake, incidentally, because the first thing they used it for was to ice a cupcake. And the only comment that I have about how much things have changed since then is that in 2011, when I first did a version of the stock, I had to explain to people what 3D printing was. Hopefully I don't anymore. You know, now I think everybody knows that you can use 3D printers to make red bunny rabbits, or machine parts to replace broken parts, or guns to main people, whatever. But it's not just the general awareness that has changed. The makerbot started out as an open source object in the spirit of the hacker space that it came out of. And so if you owned an early makerbot, you essentially had all the information you needed to build a makerbot, improve a makerbot, whatever you wanted to do with it. And that is not the case now. That's what the latest makerbot looks like. Also notice, the first makerbot was shown at South by Southwest. The latest one was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show. That's where it was released in Las Vegas. And that reflects not just how makerbot has changed, but also, keeping in mind the name of this panel, how much what we understand by consumer electronics has changed. So more on that in a little bit. But one thing in the makerbot story has stayed, you know, essentially within the spirit of the early days, and that's thingiverse. It's a community of makerbot users who upload their 3D printing files for anyone to use, and who constantly discuss those files with each other, improve on each other's files, you know, so people are teaching each other how to make better iPad docs for their kitchens, exciting stuff. But there's something that's going on here that's a little more important than being able to print your own replica of the Empire State Building. And I think that has a lot to do with this. Ametus is the Greek goddess of cunning, and for those of you who are interested in Greek mythology, the goddess Athena. The French philosopher Michel Certeau contended that in an age where, you know, we're all consumers, and most of us are completely cut off from the possibility of doing anything with the act of production, of actually making the things that we use in our daily lives. Ways of consuming are actually how we produce. So, you know, if you use paper cups to turn your earphones into speakers, if you don't know how to do that, ask me after the talk. That's just not another way of using earphones. That's a way of rejecting the cycle of endlessly obsolescent electronic gadgets, and that's a very different thing. And when we do things like that, he said, we're invoking Ametus, which he described as knowing how to get away with things, hunter-scanning, maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic, as well as warlike. So, when about a decade ago, people began to use Ikea kits in ways that Ikea did not like, or they were using Metis, and they created a movement, hacking some real creativity into what was, after all, an empty simulacrum of DIY. And on IkeaHackers.net, which was founded by Jules Yapp, people were sharing these ideas with each other. So, every joyful discovery, in Michelle said those words, was not just for themselves, it was for everyone. And then, at the end of last year, Ikea deployed their lawyers to squash that. Hacking had become enough of a force for Ikea to bother themselves with suing a Malaysian blogger about it. And then, Jules Yapp, that blogger had enough cultural clout that she was able to negotiate a deal with Ikea and convince them to embrace hacking. That's bad news for everybody. That is the worst news of all. Because the enemy has begun to co-opt as Avengers. So, your revenge just got a lot. That's LG's booth at this year's Maker Faire. I had no clear idea of what exactly the everything was that they were rethinking. And last year, GE opened its own hacker space called FirstBuild. And this is what is happening in the consumer electronics world. They also created a chip called Green Bean that allows you to hack into most GE electronics. So, for instance, if you knew enough programming and you plugged the Green Bean into your GE washing machine, you could program it with your own wash cycles. You don't want a 15-minute soak. You don't need a 15-minute soak. And one of the first commercial products to come out of the combination of these two things, the hacker space and Green Bean, was this thing called Paragon. And this photograph is from the kitchen and bath industry show in Las Vegas. And I was there. And it is one of those horrible things that design journalists have to do. So, anyway, you put that red little thing into a pot and it communicates with your induction cooktop, your GE induction cooktop, to keep the temperature in the pot constant. So, you know, if Yan can hack sweet cooking, so can you. In my opinion, every attempt by design hackers to make a beautifully finished product in some way that's marketable, scalable, whatever, has turned into a betrayal of the aims of the movement. In his definition of a bricolour, which is kind of a French 1960s way of saying hacker, Claude Levy-Strauss pointed out quite clearly that bricolage is about constant toolmaking. If all objects can be opened up and hacked, how can any object be sacred? And that the tool should continually transform to fit the task. So, Jesse Howard, who I know was represented in the gallery upstairs with my earlier project, has new work that I think is more along the lines of what LG and GE should be doing if they really want to let users into the process. Hackable households was a simple set of components that you can tool and transform to create functional appliances. And then there's, you know, little bit smart home kit. The Nest thermostat belongs to the Apple philosophy. It's beautiful, but it's closed. And it's for the kind of people who like to have other people do their thinking for them. This is for the other kind of people. And if you are the other kind of person, this is the smart home product to watch. Another personal favorite is Sugru, a polymer material that can harden into any shape and can be used, as you can see, for millions of hacks. So, if you open tool and the power of communal creativity that you have with Thingiverse and then apply it to the problems we have today, you get Buckminster Fuller. When Buckminster Fuller talks about open ecotopias, what he's suggesting is that the products that we use are really just the local instance, the present form of the plastic and metal and energy that is used to make them. And all things can theoretically be used and modified into other things. And the truly responsible stewardship of this planet would be for us to create objects that allow that kind of transformation from one thing to another. And he was really talking about the similar ideas of sustainability, but it applies in many other ways. Look at the Enable project, for instance, on Thingiverse, where the process of hacking can mean that every person who wants a prosthesis can rely on the collective wisdom of many people and then have a prosthetic that is uniquely hers. Professor Jeremy Myerson, who is one of the leading thinkers in the world about inclusive design, is convinced that this process is one of the biggest shifts in recent times in the disability rights movement. The people at Sugru are also convinced that the idea of an open ecotopia will also make us better human beings. And there are many beautiful things in this manifesto and I'm sure you're reading them, but my favorite is this, people are infinitely diverse and products should be too. And that's the glimmer of hope, I think, for our revenge. Because the best revenge really against this consumerist, late capitalist, mass-produced society is not more stuff, 3D printed or not, but better, more responsible stuff for all of us. Thank you. Okay, that was a wonderful, inspiring talk. I'm Eric, hi, talked. I'm going to tell you some of my thoughts on designing for tinkerability through the lens of one project called the Makey Makey. And rather than try to explain to you what the Makey Makey is and what it's about, actually, first I'm going to show you this kind of wacky video that we made. It's about making anything into a key. So why use your boring old space bar when you can use a banana for a space bar? For Super Mario Brothers, you might play with your computer keyboard using the arrow keys and the space bar, but you can just plug the Makey Makey into Play-Doh and make your own squishy but working game controller. For Pac-Man, instead of the arrow keys, we made a drawing on paper. That's just a regular pencil. The graphite works with Makey Makey so you can touch your drawing to play the game. Why are we filling buckets with water? Well, of course, we wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution in a more refreshing, if somewhat more difficult way. That took a lot of takes to shoot that, by the way. We can make the piano stairs by wiring them up and then playing with the bare feet, the banana piano, the human synthesizer. It works with babies. As soon as the cat drinks the water, that completes a circuit, triggering the button on photo booth to take a cat selfie. Here's just a little trick that we did with alphabet soup noodles and carrots. That's a quick intro to the Makey Makey, but I want to give you a real intro to it. Actually, I would love to do a live demo right now. Right here in front of your eyes, I have a Makey Makey all set up and I'm going to make a human synthesizer, but to do so, I'm going to need some humans. Go on, raise your hand. Come on up and I'll need two more people. How about whoever makes it to the stage first? Okay, great. Now I'm going to have to adjust the microphone situation just a moment. That's just so we can hear the computer making the sounds. I'll just try to project a little bit. First of all, I'm going to take this alligator clip, this wire, and plug it right into the Makey Makey that says earth or ground. I always choose red in case there are any electrical engineers in the audience. Because... Well, no, it's like connecting power to ground. This is kind of a two-hand thing. We'll see how we do. Oh, thank you. All right. So, what I'm going to do is plug another alligator clip into the... Let's do the up arrow. And now, when I complete the circuit by touching those to each other... Technical difficulties. I got a calendar alert. Let's try that again, so you can get it later. So now, the thing is, instead of just touching these to each other, I can complete a circuit through a human. So, I'd like to ask you over here to grasp the metal part of that between your fingers, and that will connect you to the circuit. Now, I am connected to ground, so if you hold up your other hand, we can high-five and... So now, we'll just complete the drum kit. Okay, so now I've connected the other two people to other keys so that they can make sounds as well. To free up both my hands, I'm going to put this in my mouth, I guess, and then put this down. Volunteers. Okay, so as you saw, the Makey Makey is about completing a circuit. The diagram up there shows the person completing a circuit by touching a banana. And the way the Makey Makey works is that it pretends to the computer that it's a keyboard. And so, when you complete that circuit, it thinks you pressed a key. And you can use key presses to do all kinds of things with computers because that's how you normally operate them. And so, for instance, you can use it to make a sound. So I want to tell you just a little bit about how we came to create the Makey Makey. I did actually go to graduate school in a place called the Lifelong Kindergarten. It's all about taking inspiration from kindergarten and saying, why can't people learn throughout their lives in that kindergarten fashion by learning through play, through making, through creativity, through Play-Doh, through snacks, through nap time, et cetera. And so, when I arrived, I met this amazing person named Jay Silver, my fellow graduate student. And together, we did a whole bunch of projects that were about connecting the physical and digital worlds. And Makey Makey is the kind of culmination of that work. On the top left there, you can see the very first prototype of what later became known as the Makey Makey. Jay and I were super excited about this, and we thought, ah, yes, people can make an entire keyboard out of jello, but it's going to need to have like 30 or 40 inputs on it. But fortunately, we were able to simplify it down. You can see that very first sketch there in the middle showing just those six input connections. And then at the top right is the result of our initial collaboration with a company called SparkFun. They're a wonderful open-source hobby electronics manufacturer, and they helped us design and manufacture the very first Makey Makeys. And those now look like the one at the bottom there, you see. So it's got the four arrow keys and the space and a way to click the mouse, but obviously it takes inspiration from the 80s icon, the Nintendo Entertainment System controller. The next step was super exciting. We put it out in the world. We didn't know what would happen on a site called Kickstarter, which is, of course, a crowdfunding site, and people got super excited, and we raised a whole bunch of money, and that allowed us to ship the first 10,000 of the kits out in the world. I just wanted to show that screenshot there at the top of, that's the place to get the open-source files. You can download the code that runs in the Makey Makey and the file that you use to fabricate the board as well. One of the incredible things that started to happen as soon as we got the Makey Makey out in the world is that people were sharing what they were making with it. I've since realized that one of my goals in designing creative tools is to be surprised for people to do something that I never imagined would be possible with the tool. It's a kind of paradoxical goal to design for the unexpected, but that's totally what happened, and people now post every day on Twitter, Instagram, on YouTube new creations. Just the other day I saw someone playing Dance Dance Revolution with baby wipes on the floor, and another one was the Brussels Sprout piano. So I've made a kind of collection of some of those projects focusing in on music because that was my dissertation topic, so I was collecting these examples from the wild. So I'll just show you a few of those. This is a project from Thailand. Those are fresh flowers. A flower instrument. Gummy worms make a sticky piano. Swedish fish don't work, though, it turns out. This is my research. The foot piano, like in the movie Big, kind of. There's the pencil again to make a hand movement. This is actually a score that you can touch to play it. I've been experimenting with conductive paint. This is some paint from a company called Bear Conductive to make musical paintings. This may be the world's first performance of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah on a ladder. Each of his fingers triggers a different chord so he can accompany himself as he sings. Here, each balloon plays a different note as it touches the ceiling. The ground is on the ceiling, interestingly. And here, the student has sewn conductive thread into her jacket to make an ambient fur sound experience. The mini drums, the magical musical gloves, and a duet between the drums and the gloves. Here we're using the shape of an object to make the shape of a musical loop, or just drawing musical loops on paper. So this guy's added additional bass notes to his acoustic guitar using, they're actually coins. So the piano detects which notes you're playing and sings the names of the chords. This video is actually made by Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut Canada. They got super excited and got out some dipping sauces and made some music. And this is a video from an electronic musician named Jayviews. He's done a cover of the massive attack song Teardrop. The carrot goes around triggering sounds and he's got sounds on the kiwi, the mushroom, the eggplant there. So it's wonderful to see that incredible range of projects. Okay, thank you. Thank all those makey-makey users out there in the world. How am I doing for time? Oh my gosh, then I'm not going to show you this three-minute video that starts with, well, there's actually rap lyrics that go with the fork music in French. I love this project. The ingenious juggling gloves that make sounds. I'll just show a few of these. Turning origami into a musical instrument. The sound depends on the configuration. As the train goes around, it triggers different sounds on the tracks. Those are actually not the eggs of aliens in this UFO, but bath beads turns out they're electrically conductive. And the guinea pigs make different sounds as they eat their cucumbers. Okay, I'm going to stop it there. So this is just a little researchy kind of stuff, but my catalogue of the different kinds of makey-makey creations out in the world. Imitating existing instruments, augmenting, adding to the instruments that are automated, play themselves, or radically new inventions like the clever glove that can detect when the ball hits it, or that crazy spiral that you stand inside of to play music. They have different arrangements of musical pitch. It's a way to break free from the tyranny of the piano, say, and invent your own musical arrangement. People create different kinds of connections, different ways of using the makey-makey, beyond just the skin-to-skin and skin-to-banana, as you saw. So I just want to take my last, whatever, 30 seconds to talk about how I think about designing for tinkerability a tiny bit. I want to make it as easy to start as possible. This is actually a deep design problem that I expect to spend most of my life tinkering with. How do you bring people into this world of creative technology when it's so intimidating? It's not just a cultural barrier. Sorry, it's not just a technical barrier. It's actually a cultural barrier of people's perceptions. So how can we get beyond that, but also make things super simple in plug-and-play and really reactive and immediate? All those things are super important. So easy to get started and then as open-ended as possible. So on the left there is a range of different software that you can use makey-makey with, and on the right is a range of different materials. The central to the design is that it's open both in the digital and the physical worlds. And ultimately, why are we doing this? We want to show people that they can transform the world around them. It's full of these designed objects created by other people for their own reasons, but we can repurpose, reimagine, re-create. We can reinvent everything around us. And ultimately, there's an even deeper goal than that, that we can reimagine ourselves, who we are, what's possible, and who we might become. Thank you. Thanks. I'm just going to get my timer. Oh my, I am thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me, Ellen, and to follow a couple amazing speakers like that is really quite extraordinary. So, hi everyone. My name is Golan Levin. I'm a professor of New Media Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. And I'm a member of something called the Fat Lab. How many of you are familiar with the Free Art and Technology Lab? A few of you. Okay, so the projects I'll be showing tonight are just a quick sort of selection of a few things that I've created as a part of the Fat Lab Collective. The Free Art and Technology Lab is a collective of artists and hackers and activists from all over the world who basically release open source tools into the public domain as a way of allowing people to kind of engage with mass media and to kind of become hackers themselves. It's kind of someplace at the intersection of fabrication and punk of software and activism movements all sort of wrapped up into one big pile of bling. I'll kind of talk about where that goes. Today I'll be showing some projects that I've done which are about digital fabrication for expressive activism. And several of these are related to information graphics and one of them as you'll see is related to toys and just kind of as a metaphor for digital life. All of them involve digital fabrication techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing in combination with custom software that's been released to the public and produced from a certain activist perspective in order to empower others. So the first stuff I'll show is some projects that relate to how we get information. As you probably know, our sources of information have narrowed and nowadays only six companies kind of control all the media you get. And so the first part of my talk is actually about addressing this by taking this problem literally to the streets. I want to begin with exploring the impact which infographics can obtain when they're freed from the predictable frame of the business section into the realm of the commons and when information visualization sort of meets graffiti. Evan Roth, who's a member of the Fat Lab, has said, when I look at graffiti artists, I see people who are making their own tools and subverting systems to tell stories. These stories are not sanctioned and this kind of unapologetic subversion is often neither pretty nor legal. So some of the things that you'll see tonight are now are in this kind of realm of somewhere between raising awareness and also potentially destroying public property. But for this reason, I'm interested in infographic messages which though perhaps no less biased originate from outside of corporate and governmental messaging structures. I want to know what happens when Tufti comes here. And so beyond this, I want to explore the possibility of combining actually two really interesting sets of visual language, the visual language of data visualization and the communication strategies of what I'll call urban markup. Why don't we see infographics in public space? These two languages don't necessarily collide, but they should. Messages of protest should be backed by data. This is especially important in an era when people have such a weak grasp of numbers that matter. So here I'll present some new works in the area of critical making or what is sometimes called tactical media which achieve this combination. These are typologies by Ben Fry and Richard Brett respectively. So here's a photograph taken by my friend Scott Klein. It's a photograph on the Upper West Side. A familiar spatial unit, a common sidewalk square and an index of the city skyrocketing rents, a kind of lightweight graffiti. And graffiti doesn't have to exist only on walls. Public space is not the only kind of commons that we all share. There are others. This is a project by an anonymous artist collective which occupies U.S. currency with rubber-stamped information graphics in order to widely disseminate information about the problem of income inequality, one of the most important social issues of our time. It's called Occupy George where we're talking about money. So you can sort of see how income is distributed among the richest 400 Americans and the other 150 million at the bottom. Okay, so now some projects from the Fat Lab which is, as they say, dedicated to the enrichment of the public domain through the development of open-source technologies and media. The motto of the group is release early, release often, and release with rap music. So these are tools that help people engage directly as creative actors. This is kind of pie chart that I've made. It's an adjustable pie chart stencil which you could say is a laser-cut pie chart machine which can easily be reconfigured and reused for different messages. The whole thing comes as one kind of sheet you can download and laser-cut. And so the only thing else you need is a nut and bolt and you can basically reassemble this into an infinity of possible designs. Here's just letters are held in place with scotch tape. And this tool can be used to create automated information visualizations in which the visualization relates in a thought-provoking way to the architectural program of the location where it's deployed. So here it's deployed on the side of a university's power plant building. This is a related project by my student, Maddie Varner. This is a lightweight system of stencils. It fits in a purse along with a couple bits of spray can. And it's particularly good at adapting the visual language of Foursquare and Yelp to all sorts of public services such as public restrooms, bus stops, and drinking fountains which are in the cloud. We've always been confronted with corporate messaging in cities. This is part of life. But they've recently taken a particularly dehumanizing turn intended for reading by machines. And there seems to be no place for everyday people to make their voices heard amidst the robot barf of QR codes. This project that I'm about to show you is sort of a rejoinder to this to allow people to make their own. And it's inspired by hobo codes which I hope some of you know. They were widely used by vagabonds and migrant workers in the United States in the early 20th century. They're actually still used today a little bit. These are from Canal Street on the right. But they're a kind of form of civic markup that are intended to guide vulnerable people warning them about danger and killing them into good situations. These codes indicate things like talk religion, get food here, work available. And they're still used today here and there. They're used to put large scale QR codes into the hands of everyday people. And stencils are a very fast way that an everyday person can make highly accurate images at any scale. But QR codes present unique technical problems for stencils. You have these islands that are kind of floating and you have these kinds of holes that might otherwise mess with the structure. So I developed free software which has been released to the Fat Lab site a couple of years ago. It makes it easy for everyday people my software uses simple image processing techniques to automatically bridge the islands and otherwise make stencils that would be very tricky to design and fabricate yourself. And they were released with 100 free QR hobo codes. Which is a set of urban covert markup tools for digital nomads. These are ready cut designs that talk about traditional classic hobo annotations like Dangerous Dog, Food for Work as well as some new ones inspired by war chalking animations, insecure wifi hidden cameras, vegans beware this sort of situation. And the next one I'll show is also a kind of urban markup project very briefly. It's a project that's inspired by my son but before I mention it, it's actually worth noting in case you don't know it's nowadays possible to 3D print rubber as shown here. And my son was five when he observed that he was able to make his own form of urban markup with his sneakers. He was a 3D printer to make shoe soles with his name. And so also through the fat lab was released a set of software that allows you to put any words into a rubber shoe sole like this and then print it out. We actually have a new version, I don't have pictures yet where these items here are letters and you can put messages around the sole that way as well. Now finally, the last project I'm going to show. This is no longer about information graffiti but another project of the fat lab and it's a set of free tools that were released again inspired by my kid. You know these toy construction systems they allow for infinite recombinations of form or do they? Each presents its own universe but where are the wormholes that connect these universes? Each company would prefer that their kit be your only kit and the others are elephants in the room. So this is what happened, this is real. Here we go. What were you trying to do? I'm trying to this then there. This is what kind of toy? This is what kind? Snipers. And what's the other one? Finger toys. Do they fit together? No, my thing is that I'm trying to make a car that is kind of like this. So what's this kind here? So So you're trying to connect what to what? This to this to this. So that's three different systems, do they fit together? That's what I'm trying to figure out. Oh that's a problem, huh? The problem. And his problem is not really unique to toys either. Today's manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else's. Bruce Sterling famously calls these the stacks. And you buy into a stack, you buy into the Yahoo stack, the Apple stack, the Microsoft stack, the Google stack, and there's actually really hard to combine. And indeed, despite obvious benefits that users would have everywhere, the implementation of cross brand interoperability can be nearly impossible given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, closed software and trademarks involved in doing so. So, challenge accepted. We stepped up. What to do? Well, we wanted to make a way of actually having these toys somehow bridge each other. Some kind of way of adapting them for each other. So my students, Sean Simms and I, started measuring them to kind of reverse engineer these commercial toys. It proved to be more difficult than we had initially expected. Our first attempt just used straight up hardware calipers. It turns out they're only accurate to a hundredth of an inch. And it failed. So we next used micrometers to secure it to a thousandth of an inch. It failed. Finally we found this thing. And it's called an optical micrometer, or sorry, optical comparator which is accurate to a ten thousandth of an inch. And here you see it measuring a bristle block which is greatly magnified. So the bristle block is down here and then it kind of gets inspected and then this thing has got a digital readout in various ways and it's incredibly accurate. And with them we were able to create this, the free universal construction kit developed with my student. It's a matrix of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children's construction toys. By allowing any piece to mate with any other, the kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems. Enabling radically hybrid constructivist play and the conception of here to for impossible designs. And as with other grassroots interoperability remedies the free universal construction kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet and probably by corporate interests. I mean basically we believe that expertise shouldn't be discarded every Christmas when you get a new construction kit. These things should be forward compatible. They actually work and anyone with a desktop 3D printer can download the CAD files for the free universal construction kit and print a copy for themselves. There's even a universal adapter brick which connects all the systems together. It's important to emphasize that portions of the kit are actually factually illegal and could only be realized in this way of hackers sort of releasing reverse engineering these toys and releasing these things online and then releasing them through online grassroots dissemination methods like the internet. No company could survive the legal challenge of attempting to produce these forms. It even brings up the question of what's in illegal form. And some people have told me and I'm very flattered by this that when they see the free universal construction kit they finally understand why you might want a 3D printer because they can see that there are things that you couldn't otherwise buy because they're literally illegal objects that are at the same time kind of harmless. So for me this project demonstrates the idea of reverse engineering as a civic activity in which everyday people create shareable solutions to local problems and creatively overcome the limitation of the media. I have time just to show the one minute advertisement that we made for the free universal construction kit. Hey kids! Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinker toys? How about your Duplo's Bristol Blocks and Lincoln Logs? Now you can and much more with the free universal construction kit. The free universal construction kit and the special universal adapter brick allow you to combine all your old play sets to create something new. Think out some amazing collection of adapters. Connect toys which previously couldn't fit together. Create strange new hybrids, monsters and mashups. Imagine an endless world of designs. The free universal construction kit is available on thinkfirst.com. Be quiet. Thank you very much. I'm going to bring this up to here. Thank you. Hi. That was so much fun. Wasn't it? Illegal toys! What is next? So I know we have so much to talk about. I guess I wanted to, you know, like I'll be on a very serious note with, you know, revenge is impossible and the corporations will squash us in the end. And then we got these super optimistic presentations about pie charts and urban space and toys that let you turn your computer into a hamburger keyboard. So maybe I'll just start with Avi. Why the sad face? I think that might be more a reaction to seeing too many happy faces. I feel like I'm just like, you know, I just think that, you know, I mean, I hugely respect the work that is, you know, that you guys do as you know. But... And I don't think there's a but there. I don't think there's a but there because I think both of your both of your work would fit very fairly into what I think of as creating open-ended platforms for people to use, open-ended tools for people to use. And I think that is really the joy of hacking. I think I'm a little tired of seeing, you know, I love bunnies people. I love red bunnies. But, you know, like I just feel like I'm tired of seeing too many so... And I understand that people have a different process with these things. But I think as thoughtful designers and, you know, I assume that this is a very design-heavy crowd, as people who have taken on the responsibility of shaping our material culture and to take that responsibility seriously, I think we should be thinking of doing things like these guys are doing, you know. I think we should be... Which in a way is the opposite of serious, but it's... May I just add, actually, there's kind of a healthy and I think really important backlash to maker culture, which is really important. And it comes from a couple of different directions. Evgeny Moritzov has famously called some aspects of maker culture, like solutionism, that you can sort of... Well, of course there's a solution. It's that sort of hackathon idea that you can discover. If you get the right people together in the room, they'll just kind of... Of course they'll make a solution to, you know... They'll start it in Africa. Yeah, exactly. There's a great book which is really worth checking out called Critical Making, which is by Garnet Hertz and it's a compilation of articles which go in depth into how and why making like this can have critical perspectives to it and can engage with deeper ideas and with complexities that I think you want to see. Yeah, I mean I think the sort of theme of play was really interesting and one of my favorite things that Jerry Seinfeld ever said is that great comedy is always about something and I really think the way you guys are using play as a kind of weapon of whatever empowerment is cool. So, Eric, you just got a PhD from kindergarten. What do you do with that? Like, where do you go next from... Exactly, first grade. You asked me the hardest question. I hate this question because of course everybody's asking me that but it is super exciting to see this space of possibilities open up now. I just want to keep making creative tools, creative platforms. One of the things that I'm really excited about trying to move forward is the accessibility of the maker movement. I care a lot about accessibility in the sense of assistive technology and that's a super cool sweet spot in another conversation. Really, accessibility in terms of the maker beyond. So there's all these people who have some foot in the door that have some technical literacy that have some cultural familiarity with code, with hacking, with all that engineering culture. There's a lot of people on the outside looking in and there's a question of how to reach those people. Even with Mickey Mickey for example, I think it's intimidating. If you look at the alligator clips you're going to plug something into a circuit board. So one of the problems that I'd like to work on now is making things even more radically accessible. Yeah, I would say like with the free universal construction kit, well in a way it's free. On the other hand it's really expensive to print all those pieces and it isn't that easy to make. No, I mean it costs like a couple grand to actually print out a set and they're really fragile. If you gave them to your kids. We learned that the hard way. The value of the free universal construction kit is as a gedonkin object. As a thing to think about and to kind of remind us it's not even so much as it is about toys, it's about all the different ways in which we need these kinds of shims. And we need people to step up and make them. So I'll be one of the things that you were talking about is how big consumer companies are using being in the green bean and sort of inviting people into getting inside the closed box of the appliance. Why do you think they're doing that and does it disturb you or do you think that's the end of the movement? I think everything's the end of the movement. Well that's your job. No, I mean so two things. I think the reason that they're doing it is because the green bean movement has attained the sort of cultural cache. Not just in the general world of consumers. How GE for instance started that makerspaces because they had a group of industrial designers within GE and engineers within GE who were like we should have a makerspace and somehow convinced corporate to like let them do that, build it, turn it into a marketable enterprise so then I can just see these suits sitting in a room and being like oh my god and then they have an analysis diagram of how often the word maker has been used in mainstream newspapers in the past five years and they're like this is going to sell. And I can totally see that happening. I think in some ways yes it is the end of the movement but there's a green bean out there I feel like everybody should get one and they should do something with it and they should do things that GE doesn't expect and I think that is the thing that corporations are not they haven't yet grasped that the true beauty of the movement is in its subversion and that's how new knowledge is created. Enzo Mari had this really amazing quote when he said that it's only through the act of transformation that knowledge is created. Do you think that the green bean for example is actually a Pandora's box that doesn't it's going to regret doing it? Or do you think it's so sandboxed and it's this kind of really limited API that they've kind of virtually guaranteed that it's only going to allow you to change your 15-minute wash cycle to a 16-minute one? Yeah, I don't know. I think that my teenage son is interested in laundry. Yeah. But I think that once you've given somebody a chip then that is an innately more open object. And I think that that's something that somebody with enough access to knowledge or enough will, can subvert, can do things with that you couldn't do with a closed-off washing machine that runs on certain protocols and has whatever. I'd point back to the story of the Lego Mindstorms Kit which was actually released in 1998 and that was a programmable brick, a part of the Lego set that actually was a little computer that can control motors and lights and sounds and has sensors and it's programmable which meant that they thought, ah yes, this is for Lego kids, users we're going to get them programming. But in fact, it became this worldwide phenomenon that was used in all kinds of different ways that they didn't expect that pushed the Lego brand forward in all kinds of new ways. Absolutely. And I think we're talking about a high-tech version of what IKEA hacking really is in principle on a low-tech scale. It's a very open system of these little parts that could all fit into each other with minimal effort and they thought that they were allowing people to do a finite set of functions. But then the thing with an open platform is that it allows people to do infinite things. You know? And so I do think that GE doesn't know what they're getting into. I think LG had the best thing. They were like we're kind of talking about this and I don't really want to do anything about it. So why don't you play with a solder iron for a little bit? You know? Which was really, and they had the biggest the biggest booth at Maker Fired this year which is a whole other conversation. How about some questions from the audience? Any makers and hackers? And yes I think we have a microphone. We ask you to use that because then our internet audience at home can learn from you. And it's been an incredible opportunity trying to break that system just because as you're talking about when you talk about data we haven't seen this before. What does it open mean? Who's it open to? How many people can play with it? What happens when my brand puts their brand logo on their shirt and like I can't control the Gucci's on there and then Levi's is on at the same time? There's a lot of things that we've been running into so I'll try to slow down. But I really connected with the idea of like how hard it is. I would ask you three since you're working on this and for a while that this is your passion. What kind of activity or advice do you have for those in Silicon Valley who proclaim to be open as we all know and they're not really open. It's not real. What kind of activities or what kind of things can we do to get their attention to show how important this is and that we're not, I like tinkering but they see it as just tinkering thus they don't take it serious. So I would like to hear from you guys on how you would approach this. Yeah, just tinkering. We like to try to we're trying to transform the idea of tinkering and honor it as a learning process. But in terms of if I could give advice to Silicon Valley I would say that openness is not just about technology, about standards and protocols and tools but it's about attitudes and how can we change people's perception of the world so that they know and believe that they can change things, that they can connect things, that they can transform things or maybe I just care about that a lot because that's my area. But it's hard. We need to do things like show people a very large space of possibilities like we try to do in that initial Makey Makey video, like lots of different kinds of things and then also show that they're connectable to you. You can imagine yourself doing that. Like I have that stuff. I play that game. I want to be that person. So those are the kinds of things that I hope the technology world can focus on. I'll give a stab, Alston, really quick which is with my students I use a couple of these different kinds of internet utilities. One's called If This Then That and one's called Tembu.com where it interfaces to a lot of different APIs, sometimes hundreds of different APIs. And these APIs or application programmer interfaces are ways in which many different companies, all the companies you've heard of, eBay, Yahoo, and so forth, Google and whatnot, provide means by which programmers can use their stuff. And the design of these APIs is often very carefully considered to allow people to have a certain limitations. I mean, you know, I guess they're a great start. I don't want to fault anyone for doing them because they actually really do make my students' lives really easy. But it's also the case that it's so clear where the walls are to these walled gardens and these little sand boxes, if you will. And I guess, you know, first of all, they have so much more to gain. So a carrot and a stick, right? The carrot is they have so much more to gain if they really actually trust that, you know, they should really expose their APIs as much as they can because it'll come back to them in great ways. I think Twitter really failed in this way, for example. I mean, Twitter has decided that, you know, that they're going to make money by selling ads instead of making money by having, by using themselves as a service, you know, where people can mine all that stuff that's there. And the stick is, you know, that if they don't, then they're going to make money by selling ads. And I mean, the really serious elite reverse engineering people who know how to really crack into stuff will get in there anyway and find backdoors and just do the stuff that the APIs don't allow. And, you know, you hopefully, you know, those people are white hats, but they could be black hats. You want to comment on that? Very quickly. I feel like I don't have experience that you guys have. So, I don't know that, you know, I have any advice to give. I mean, except maybe to invoke our sainted lord Elon Musk. I mean, you know, I don't know. I feel like just, you know, I think it is possible to prove that several businesses started out open source and, you know, gained huge traction and built huge followings. MakerBot is a very instructive example. LittleBits is a very instructive example. And get them that far. And then when you get this to the stage where they want to close things up, then that's another battle. That's like 10 years from now. Like, you don't need to fight that now. Maybe. Okay. Any other questions from, yeah? Hi, and thank you. This was amazing. And it's so beautiful that I really that my first reaction when I was listening was, oh, I should go and buy MakerBot! Very ironically, I'm a service designer, my husband, and we have the delight and pain of designing intangible and invisible things every day. It's great and it's painful, and we work with non-profits and sometimes with evil partners like banks, insurance companies, etc., and trying to make things, you know, better. And I was thinking, like, do you have any examples about services, hacking services? Because it might be easier to hack services because sometimes you don't need physical things or maybe infrastructure, but at the same time, things are in the policy level, so maybe impossible to hack, so I just want to hear your thoughts about it. Frontier. I know. It's a really interesting frontier. Yeah, I mean, that's my, I feel like it's going to be an industrial designer for disclosure, so I feel like that's my big blinker, I think, in terms of tangible things. But yeah, I mean, you would think that services and systems are the easiest things to hack, except that I feel like it's so much more difficult to hack behavior, and when talking about experience, I feel like that's essentially what you're talking about. There are some, I think there are ways to change, I mean, people do this all the time, they manipulate how people move in space or how people feel in space through the use of objects, through the use of barriers, through the use of, you know, all those things. And then, so can those can, I don't know, I mean, can ballards be open? You know, can they allow partial access? Can they be you know, I don't know. I just feel like, I just feel like that's actually a much harder frontier. That's my instinct, but that might be because I can understand digital stuff and I can understand bits, and then it's I guess I'd be curious what kind of service you meant, like airport security or standing in line at McDonald's, like those are two that come to my mind where there's a kind of algorithm of things that people have to do to get the thing that they want, right, to get to their gate or to get their bag of burgers. I mean, service design covers all and sometimes we have to work on all, but mostly, I mostly work on financial and public services, so maybe public services might be the context. Like renewing your driver's license, like we could hack that. I think it's a fascinating question and I have so little expertise about service design that I'm not qualified to answer, except to think that, I mean, I can think of lots of people who have very interesting occupations where they're in the occupation of observing people and understanding them. I mean, performance artists, you know, or certain kinds of anthropologists, and that having a diverse set of perspectives in service design could probably help the service design. I can't say this is a really high level comment, but just like coming from very unusual places where they're really attuned to observing people and how people work and think and are also creative in ways that you know, that might be unexpected to find in, you know, financial services and public systems design and things like that. I think the larger question is super important too, which is to ask ourselves like, yo, what else can we hack, like getting out of the comfort zone? And just to mention one, I think we're starting to see synthetic biology doing things that will blow everybody's mind in five years. It's coming. Yeah, good. I mean, one thing that occurs to me is how many negative examples of hacking there are like turning a pressure cooker into a bomb. And so I think a lot, there's a lot of fear about the unrestrained like, imagine if you do that with your washing machine, we're in like a worse place even. I'm actually imagining what happens if you do it with a 1918 influenza virus. I mean, yeah. For instance. I mean, but I think public space, people hack public space every day, you know, people who don't have a home find a place to sleep. That's a hacking of public space. We want them there. The city in, you know, very intentionally puts barriers to their being there and yet they have to, you know, make it happen. They make it happen. So, you know, I think in the study of public space in general, the art comment actually made me think of this. There's lots of precedent of people actually studying how people hack public space. The biggest classic example in the architecture world is William White and the small life of, no, the social life of small urban spaces in which he basically set up a camera that was focused on the Plaza of the Siegman's Building and found out how people were using that Plaza in all these crazy, supportive ways. So I think, you know, there's plenty of study there. But how do you create a hackable, open public space? I as far as I know, I don't know, I don't think there's a landscape designer who has done that in New York City. Okay, what else? What do you guys want to know or share or do? Yes, thanks. I did what you had to say was exciting, thrilling, brilliant and fun. I really feel like I grew up in the 60s where a lot of what you talk about you did, but you bring another language to it and I kind of feel like there's two issues that you brought up about tinkering playing and combining things that you might not necessarily think about you have to really broaden your scope and I find that people are so busy and have such, you know, their priorities are so important that the concept of tinkering doesn't fit into that kind of mindset. It's like you don't have an outcome so therefore, right? So that's one big and I see it even in myself who was, I don't have that framework but I'm still watching the clock and for what? For what? But that's my automatic response like what if I don't get the right outcome and I don't even know what the right outcome is. The second thing is is that my learning curve to catch up to where you are to use what's out now in terms of coding a lot of digital that you have a different mindset that could probably bring many of my ideas fast forward my instinct would be to just go into the public space and do it and that's how I operated for a long time and there are places like Project for Public Spaces is one, PBS with Holly White where observing is the key factor. That's where I find that very rare and so good instinct is don't end it tonight. Can we get together, can those of us who want to keep having the conversation I don't know how realistic it is but well like Avi in your talk that do it, not do it yourself but do it with others a kind of more social DIY. Helen do you have to know code to be able to do and participate in the world of this kind of design talking from bad math skills here. Thank you Helen. The lifelong kindergarten group that I just graduated from has spent many years addressing that question of do you have to know code with one answer which is here's a much easier way to get started with it there's a project out there called Scratch which is instead of typing text code you have graphical blocks that snap together on the screen inspired by Lego that allow you to create behaviors to tell stories, to make games to make interactivity and kids all over the planet are using and it's super exciting. There's now 8 million projects created by kids on the Scratch website that's free. It doesn't necessarily look like code. Yeah and that is a step towards helping people have this creative power with technology using code but I think we need a lot of other ways of thinking about playful transformation of technology beyond programming environments part of it is we need to make a lot better things that are like programming and there's that's an interesting research frontier but I think there are all kinds of possibilities for creative tools that let you do things that change the behaviors of technology beyond just programming and makey makey is one but there are lots of others and I think a lot of the examples that Golan showed were not code at all but your whole stencil kit software that's released to the public but once you have it you can just load it up I think now that I think about it I think if this then that is actually one of the most gentle introductions to programming I can think of it's a website if you haven't tried it give it a look IFTTT if this then that and it's one of the most gentle introductions to programming I show it to my freshman and their first week of university and all it does is it allows you to connect one service to another and you can do a bunch of really basic operations with all the digital stuff in your lives so you can make a relationship between an input and an output and a good example is like if somebody tags me in a photo on Facebook then send it to my Flickr account or save it to my Dropbox or email it to me or send it to me as a text message or something like that and it's just a way of creating a relationship between digital services that you use it's is it programming it's kind of on that weird middle ground like it's like you create such a simple little relationship that doesn't really matter whether or not it's programming it's that you're able to actually affect things in the world with it that's what's important we got another question back here you guys great talk you just in fact listed a couple of them could each of you you seem to be so immersed in this space that every website or book is could each of you list a few other books documentaries websites that you find inspirational that you think are related to this topic how about one each I want to make it hard I want to make it hard I'm glad you asked for books thank you I think books are very nice I recommend Avi's book Hacking Design I'm buying that me too one really transformative book in my world is a book called Mindstorms earlier I mentioned the Lego Mindstorms kit so it was named after this book which is from I think 1980 by an MIT professor who created the first programming language for children it was called Logo but it's about much more than children and computers it's about something he calls powerful ideas which are these transformative ideas that you can learn through those experiences with technology that apply to all all sorts of aspects of your life anyway it's a cool book I've already dropped so many references I can't think of any new ones what's your favorite one from your talk what's the favorite one you already mentioned I'm not sure but I I recommend this book Critical Making which is available for free online as a set of downloadable PDFs by Garnet Hertz it's kind of a punk zine there's 300 copies in existence so I was just like Garnet you gotta scan this thing in and put it up on PDF and he finally did so you can get the PDFs oh okay Critical Making it's edited by Garnet Hertz and it's just a set of PDFs online yeah I had a whole bibliography for my for my book and you know I'm very happy to send it to you just en masse like that but I think what was interesting to me is finding connections in some of the things from the 60s and 70s and I really I think going back to the idealism of those times really inspired me so I would say you know take a look at a whole earth catalogue just take a look at it it is beautiful and inspirational and kind of quaint and like you're like oh I want to cuddle you because you're so idealistic I want to protect you from the world it's so beautiful so I think I'm gonna make that my one but I have many more that we can talk about for sure so take like two more questions and then y'all can come up and pet the speakers and you know anybody else wanna are we done one more question when I teach hardware and software and stuff to kids I find there's a small set of people or small set of students who want to explore and want to take on the challenge of working with something that's imperfect and may not turn out the first time but a lot of the kids have been raised either by our culture or by education to just want to go from A to B do you think that's going to change in the next generation or do we have to start the fight now and change and hack our culture into a more accepting group? this is a really important question we didn't talk at all about schooling today but I think that there's a problem in the world I really care about learning and I think that education as a system is getting obsessed with efficiency and automation those kinds of things and that's what people refer to as funding teachers to jail even like big data and education technology like students aren't numeric values to optimize and I think that we need a lot more focus on things like, oh here's another book Carol Dweck is a psychologist who writes about mindsets the difference between the fixed mindset where you believe that failure at work right the first time is evidence that you're dumb versus the growth mindset which is trying is evidence that you're working hard and you believe that you can grow and learn and your intelligence is not fixed that it can grow and I hope we see a lot more of that in learning environments I'm going to take a quick answer at it too, now this is a question I really don't want to end on a downer and my wife accuses me of being a millennial kind of Cassandra so let me millennialist Cassandra so let me just phrase the sort of the amazing silver lining we have we're approaching an era of profound scarcity I think and I think that just think of the kinds of amazing design opportunities that we're going to have when we sort of really have to jury rig everything and we really can't afford to throw everything away and when we sort of have to figure out how to get these oddly shaped batteries working in that oddly shaped receptacle and how to get this old computer working so we can have it control this other thing and I think we're going to be seeing a time when we're going to recycle not because it's like the green thing to do but because we're going to be sort of needing to use this stuff to actually do stuff and I think that the mindset that we're talking about it's not going to be practical I think people are going to really have to step up and there's a great opportunity there to think about how we can fix things as you showed the the sugru philosophy of fixing manifesto that's going to have to become something people really get adapted to we can't just throw it away and buy a new one and buy something else yeah that's good okay thank you