Transcript

Bringing back a dose of craft into the digital tools | Gravity Team | TEDxAthens

[Music] red it's [Music] red we often hear people say I'm just not creative but we all have ideas I mean imagine if we can just bring our ideas out into the material world and you know we've been doing this excuse me seems to be excuse me imagine if we can just bring these out into some material world and this is something we've been doing throughout our history so much so that we've created tools which allow us to extend our creativity even the simplest tool encapsulates a history of design and Perfection which allows us to be even more creative now you may ask yourself why am I telling you all of this well let's let's go back one year we're in our Design Studio at the Royal College of Art in London after a long summer of working abroad in Tokyo Taipei Berlin and New York and we're looking around us and we're seeing people doing just that they're material materializing their ideas right in front of us of course we're in the D studio um but what intrigues us is how people are creating and what are the tool they use and how the tools influence what they create and then we start to look at outside the studio what about other people how do we create in general and that's when we have our light bulb moment everybody is creative but the modern tools for creation are becoming so complex and disconnected from the way we think that we end up not taking that much ideas into reality and that's when we start to believe that we're not creative so we come up with a plan we're going going to design a tool that's going to be simple and intuitive as simple as making s castles on the beach when we were kids and we think it's a great plan yeah it's like the greatest plan but very soon we discovered that we're not the only ones thinking in that direction a lot of people are trying to enable people to create especially connecting the digital and the physical world so we have from dolls that you move around and then they're animating a doll in the digital world or creating pottery with your hands even our tutors are not encouraging us to go in that direction they're telling us it's a risky area so we're suddenly in front of this big big mountain and no idea how to cross it but still we have one belief that there's something to be done so we decide to take the journey have you heard about Howard Garner and his theory of multiple intelligences his theory states that we have multiple intelligences that we develop and we use throughout our life for instance kinesthetic when you're moving your body and learning how to use it for example when you're learning how to play the piano or learning how to ski mathematical when you're using logic to solve different problems or linguistic when you formulate your thoughts and communicate them through words or special we call it the Mind side so it's this time when you have these images in your head and you're understanding them rotating them and seeing them here in your head spal intelligence so if I imagine these two cubes I can see them in my mind I have a good idea of their shape how they relate to each other how they're position in space and all this is sort of instant in my mind if I want to communicate this with you without you being in my mind which I hope you're not I have to go through all these description which which are going to read translate in your own visual language into your special intelligence and now that's very interesting because creation is believed to rely mainly on spatial intelligence but the tools that we use for creation and especially the modern digital tools computers for instance rely a lot on linguistic and mathematical intelligence you have to decompose actions to achieve what you have imagined at the beginning so the result of this is you spend your time translating your thinking between your different intelligences so our idea is would it be possible perhaps to switch this and design a tool that would rely mainly on the use of the spatial intelligence so let's think of dsers they use a lot their kinesthetic intelligence and we had a great example this morning but um we were very surprised to discover that the choreographer when McGregor uses a lot of sketching in his creation process and we thought that after all it's not that far from designers and Architects so the way they create is um his team his dancers they try new moves they repeat them and then they go and sketch them and they do this in an iterative way so that they are creating live so immediacy is very important for them and sketching allow them to have this immediate storage of the information now let's think of architecture the scale of the project is so big that you cannot work alone you have to work in teams so communication is crucial I mean from the first sketches of the lead architect to the 3D visualization team to the client there is so much communication needed to make sure that the initial ID makes it into the final output so so in this process there could be a lot of miscommunication and things lost in the process so for example here Mr joh clearly wanted more holes in his building our journey started with so let's go back to the plan what could we develop um we have all this inspiration now so what do we do with it so we start brainstorming and designing experiments to truly understand how humans create we develop a set of exper we develop this set of uhar tools people like the limitations and around to help usly we realize that the world we live in is the KE ingredents for logic and insights came from this first we come up with one main element the simple set of rules with a simple set of you have a simple set of rules for example when you have Lego and it's uh you understand that you have to connect the once you master that that it's very simple you can create like from castles to like entire cities even people then the second one is uh it's physicality so right now the digital tools are losing physicality but still when we're creating we need to be physical that's our human nature throughout our experiments we disc discover that this is very important and the third one is immediacy so you have this idea in your head but you need to be able to like very quickly see it outside and like understand it to be able to have this iteration process all the time so at the end of all this experimentation we have uh this simple Cube and this was kind of one of our proudest experiments because it seemed to have tackled everything it's a small cube of acrylic layers in which you think of an idea then you take the sections of that idea and you trace each section and you stack these acrylic layers on top of one another so it's simple it's immediate and it's physical you're holding your object in your hand not to mention you can share with others other people can see this uh object but this is not the tool we set out to to to create what this helped us do is it helped us better understand the human element of the tool and once we had this better understanding we could start opening the doors to technology and and this is where we really got crazy I mean we started thinking of anything from holographic displays to augmented reality solutions to six AIS arms which allow you to sketch freely in space anywhere you want so we really get crazy but to be honest we're not computer scientists we are not electronic Engineers or robotic specialist so most of this and most of what we know about this is what we've seen on YouTube videos and we watch a lot of YouTube videos but it's not that bad at the same time we grew up with these guys and you would probably have done all of this with a few Shing gums and a matchbox so it gives some confidence and we have the chance to live at an exciting time where a lot of bricks are around us the bricks for creation and we we can just use them assemble them and start to build with them so for the next three weeks we learn how to code we connect some wires we spend some time in the workshop and we befriend a company specialized in augmented reality and when we feel we are ready we travel to their office in Paris and test our new prototype gravity is born so what is gravity it's a tool that allows you to sketch in 3D using augmented reality we created a Hardware software solution and it's composed of a tablet a pen and a visualization uh tool such as augmented reality glasses or virtual reality masks so let's have a look at how it works so you're sketching as if you were sketching on a pad of paper and the controls on the tablet allow you to choose on which SK on which plane your sketching so that you can quickly materialize what's in front of you and uh as easily is sketching different in different planes so um what's great is that you don't have to rely on CAD or perspective drawing and so uh we built this prototype so that it would work with augmented reality but we also like try to uh like look at a lot of different possibilities so we also tried with uh virtual reality the Oculus Rift and um so I think it's time for for a demo so Shay are you ready for a live demo yeah let's see if we can uh make a chair here here so as Pier said you draw on a 2d surface so I'm going to draw the beginnings of my chair here just the profile and this is all 2D as you would on a piece of paper but what I have here now is ability to then change the plane in which I'm sketching so I can move this chair up can move it around and just get the next profile of the chair started it's a bit hard to draw a chair in front of so many people and then I'm able to rotate the plane once again and I think I'm going to make an outdoor chair so with outdoor chair you have a lot of these um these slats in the chair so change the slats and I'll rotate once more to do the back side you can see this maybe not the best uh chair here maybe we change the color we can do something like yellow across the back here so with a few Strokes o it's not the most beautiful chair but with as you can see with a few Strokes I'm able to kind of drop what I have in my mind into uh a 3D object now this gives me a good a good sense of the the shape and the volume in which I was trying to achieveing which I was thinking of and I can quickly iterate on this process so I can I can quickly delete and and start again and so it's just a great way to create a few bits of 3D content all right so uh as we can we can see you can quickly create something but what do you do with it so um the great thing is that you can export any content that you create as a 3D file and you could just I don't know like 3D print it if you want a physical object or maybe you want to load an existing 3D content in gravity so that you can make some annotations you could use it to quickly communicate an ID in 3D even if you're not like a like a designer or an an architect but also you could just have fun just like create some crazy worlds and quickly like put them in in in 3D environment so um this animation everything has been created in gravity and I don't know it took us 5 minutes so this is really uh like as easy as sketching on paper so um what's really interesting is that by using augmented reality we have we are removing the screens from the early stage of creation and that's very important because as Architects and designers are used to when you're creating you're just in a studio with people just in front sitting in front of their computer so uh right now you can focus on what you're creating rather than uh having to think of what functionality you're going to use in the software to show that to your colleague and you're creating in your real environment so you're looking at it as if it was a real object but the object that you create exist in the digital world so it means that the possibilities are endless so as you see we are really passionate about this project um what's very interesting to us um is if most of the tools that are out there for creation are really about like bridging this ideation and materialization we believe that somehow gravity makes this Gap a bit smaller actually we no really longer have to translate our thinking between the different intelligences as we described before um we try to really design a tool that's relying mainly on your spatial intelligence so you can just stay in this sort of state of mind and create like this yeah so our aim was that since the beginning but then after testing gravity with so many people we discover something else that people are connecting again to their kinesthetic intelligence so they they isn't it what the craft is all about so we're bringing a bit of craft into the digital tools no no two drawings are the same so it's it's very interesting to see how people start to to use their body to start uh communicating their ideas so if we go again and see Shay uh are you up for another run I didn't it last time but let's see and so he's there thinking about another idea and he's only like visualizing it here and communicating through The Strokes of his hand he no longer has to have pass through different other like complicated uh systems so gravity is connecting uh the kinesthetic with the special which was something that we found when we started testing with people and it's great like little by little people are creating their own techniques they Master the tool and then they start going crazy so it's it's very interesting we know that that if you really put the right tools into people's hands they can they can create they will be creative so we're very happy to have arrived to the conclusion that when you create a tool and you put it in their hands of people there is actually no conclusion it is only the beginning thank you [Applause]