Designing the New Industrialism | Amit Kudtarkar | TEDxUTA
[Music] hello everybody oh clap yeah clap that's good that's good I refused to drink water before this presentation because I thought well if I wet my I don't want that to go viral I don't want that all over the place so designing the new Industrials may I know what that means I don't it's pretty crazy a bunch of fancy words up there you to have a good title right so uh you know it's interesting how technology grows it's always around us it's constantly becoming better mors LW tells us this it's technology will continue to advance in advance and I'm a huge fan of gizmos Electronics I'm always interested in the next big phone that's coming out and whatnot but today I don't really want to talk about that I want to talk about how those pieces of Technology are changing us but you and I of course but culturally societ societally how it's going to change what we do and Chris bangle the former head of design at BMW got me super fascinated with this topic and since then I haven't been able to keep my mind off of it so this picture right here is a bunch of Greek pottery okay ancient Greek pottery it's found where modern day Britain is today but it's ancient Greek pottery I want you to look at it and and notice the difference the variety look how uh intricate each piece is and remember these pieces when they were created by the Greeks way back when they weren't supposed to be in a museum there were tools it was a utilitarian item it was going to be a clay pot to carry food to carry water uh they didn't really oh okay you know hey I want this to be you know a Ted X talk you know 100 couple hundred years from now so we have that and this is what our pots look like today okay so our pots and pants this from Walmart right up the road notice that there's no personality there's no character there's no individual craftsmanship in it right all these pots and pans were created with science and engineering that said okay well hey we're going to create this pot and pan it's going to be um you know it has to be this big it has to be uh this light and we're going to get it to where it's the least amount of material possible and then they took a focus group and the focus group sat down they said okay well we need to pick a color for this and okay well we found out this shade of red is popular in all 30 countries that we're going to sell it in and we can sell it to men and women so that's good and it matches like 68% of the kitchen designs out there so this this is the color we're going to choose right that's not a lot of personality that's not a lot of culture you know maybe a couple hundred years from now when they dig these up they'll probably be like wow this Teflon stuff this is good but they might also think wow these guys are pretty boring people in Japan and America all over the place they had these exact same pans you could call it globalization but really what happened was we became an industrial world and we started with this handcrafted world where things are made there's an element of craftsmanship to it and a lot of Pride and personality that came out and then we said oh we have to lower the cost we have to increase the profit margins what are we doing that's this is the goal and so what ends up happening is we end up in this industrial World which is where we're now you know and it's not a bad thing I love this industrial world we live in there's low costs there's quite a wide variety of things you can buy now and it's constantly pushing Innovation because they're all competing with each other that's cool but what we gave up was this this whole world that we had this culture this this individual contribution from each one of us and everybody creating things we lost all of that because we said no the big company will handle it you know I'll let Apple make my watch before I actually go out and make my own that was the last 100 years here we are now this is 2015 this is a 3D printer you can print things in 3D mind blown right crazy I got to see one of these for the first time this year and I just I couldn't I was like I could print anything I could do anything think about what I could print it's insane and right now this is about $1,000 you want to put one of these in your homes you can in the future it'll be much less expensive you be a put it right next to your color printer and you know your color printer will still run out of Inc after like six pages but you'll have a 3D printer which will be really awesome that's the whole point um and these 3D printers and Fabrication Technologies laser cutters endmills laad CNC equipment things that are used to build things are actually pretty expensive still you know the price is coming down very soon very quickly and that's why in the near future it's very exciting for all of us but right now they're in the intermediate phase you know kind of when GPS had to come down to us and cell phones had to come down to all has to come down to us well right now this technology this digital fabrication technology is coming down towards us but right now it's not there yet and it's in these spaces called maker spaces called Fab labs this is a picture of our Fab Lab here at UTA this is a map of all the Fab labs around the world but they're making spacers hacker spaces they're popping up everywhere they're going to be everywhere and the idea is you can come in you can learn the technology you can figure it out you don't have to be an engineer you don't have to be a designer to say I want to build something I want to make something I want to add an armrest between me and the guy next to me right all you guys you know that that's the whole point of these spaces and in that way they're designing what is going to be the new industrialism what our world is going to look like so we're going from this handcrafted world to this industrial world that's where you know the last hundred couple hundred years right and now we're going to have this new industrialism and that's what these spaces are helping to create for us right now it's very exciting you get to make your own items or whatever you want and we're going to get the benefits from the cultural side of things this handcrafted world that we were part of and then we're also going to have the lowc cost benefits and the variety and The Innovation that we get from the industrial world this is is a win-win this is not bad at all I love this and it's already happening these are some items are being made at Fab Labs across the world right now prosthetic legs uh the the guitar up there I just made that decal real quick the tedx UTA 2015 decal it took me like five minutes right I mean think about this we can build anything we want and a lot of people come up to me and they're like okay mid I hear your argument this is cool okay great but you know I really don't care I just want to go out and you know buy a phone case is that that difficult you're right and if you go to Walmart there's thousands of phone cases on the shelves you can buy any color you know all kinds of different styles protect your phone some are just stylish but when you go through all these different phone cases you always bring one back you're like okay this is my phone case now but what is it about that phone case that we still have to customize that we still have to put a sticker on that we still have to put a charm on why do we have to put keychains on our car keys why do we have to do these things is it because we want to express who we are is that it that's really it we're trying to get our creativity out there we're trying to unleash it and for many many years it's kind of been restricted because we didn't have the technology to allow us to build it and we didn't have a way create it we had no means of doing it but the time is here and it's now so this is Evan right now he's uh 8 years old he uh has his own YouTube channel him and his dad make toy reviews okay pretty awesome right he clears $1.3 million every year isn't that incredible that's insane right what am I doing here in college you know be doing that uh he's got his own line of apparel it's fantastic uh but the point here is not that Evan is a YouTube Star there are many YouTube Stars but Evan and his dad decided to utilize the technology around them the internet their camera and instead of just having those videos go in a box on the shelf for the wedding that Evan was going to have in 20 years we pull out and all laugh at them they started putting them up online and the thing is there was no network company that was ever going to say oh hey Evan come over here yeah we want to give you a TV show you you like this okay let's do this that wasn't going to happen and the crazy thing is toys A R Us has a YouTube channel too and they're not even close in followers and subscribers all their videos combined probably have you know maybe the same number of views as one of evans's videos right he's empowered himself he's utilize the technology around him now what if you could build a prosthetic hand right that was better than everybody else's and cheaper you know wouldn't that be awesome well this guy age 19 East Sila Chapel he did it he built his own prosthetic hand he met a girl she needed a prosthetic hand it was $80,000 he thought well that's kind of absurd maybe I can build it for less money and he did he built it for $350 and it's better in many many ways he utilized digital fabrication techniques he went and found out oh that's is how I do 3D printing this is how I do programming he learned it and he's empowered himself and he's changing not only his world but others around him he's really shaping the world he's going to live in he's given a Ted X talk he's super famous and fancy and smart it's amazing stuff now when you think about what he did and he spent all this time developing this hand and all the millions of dollars that the companies spend developing their hands right the medical companies spend all this time developing uh prosthetic hands billions of dollars in R&D and then you know here's Easton you know in Colorado he's just developing his own hand so is that going to change how our businesses work and it is this is a company Local Motors a really cool car company they crowdsource their designs it's that simple they just go out okay here's a competition we want to design an off-road vehicle all you guys submit designs right so the guy who won this design to have his car built said Kim when ask oh hey how long have you been designing cars only just about four years I didn't really think I was ever going to be a car designer but hey look at that he's got a car now right you can see this at the pero Museum here in Dallas it's on display so this idea that a company now they're not spending all this money they're getting all the marketing benefits from it and guess what they're empowering all of us all of us have a say in it all of a sudden and that's important that's a cultural thing for us to be able to say oh wow look my voice is in it all of us are involved in it that's it's really important that's the point of this talk is if we can get our voices out there and if we can unleash our creativity to create our ideas how can we change our own worlds for the better so with that I leave you with this quote design creates culture culture shapes values values determine the future thank [Applause] you