(applause)

(steady beat)

Thank you so much for having me here.

I'm really excited to be able to share

some ideas that we've been developing

in terms of designing future memories.

It's also a little funny to be doing it here,

so close to Silicon Valley because some of the ideas

that we actually have on technology

pretty much fly in the face of a lot of the common wisdom,

some of the amazing things that have come out

of this very area.

The ideas that I'm going to share with you

about memories come from a long-standing interest

in memory and specifics.

We've been working on the 9/11 memorial museum

which we just opened this last May.

For eight years we were partnered with ThinkDesign

to develop the master plan for the museum

and the design all the exhibitions then design the media

and then produce over 90 different media pieces.

This is the slurry wall, the so-called piece

of infrastructure that withstood the pressure

of the Hudson river for a full year after 9/11.

When president Obama inaugurated the museum

this past May he said Here is where we will tell

their story so that generations yet unborn

will never forget of co-workers who led others

to safety, passengers who stormed a cockpit,

our men and women in uniform who rushed into an inferno.

He was speaking in specifics about the way in which

we tell stories in the museum because we made

an early decision to win the competition,

to not do it like a typical museum

with a historian or curator.

We tell the story of 9/11 through stories

of those who lived and made history on that day.

It allows us to acknowledge the fact

that 9/11 isn't quite history but it's not quite

current events.

When you first walk in to this museum and see

this narrative map made up of people's memories,

you're actually aware of the face that a third of the world

watched 9/11 live or heard about it on that day,

but you hear the story actually from those

who lived through it.

[Man] On the day of September 11th, 2001...

[All] On the day of September 11th...

[Man] I was in Honolulu, Hawaii...

[Woman] In college at UC Berkeley...

[Man] In Miami, Florida...

[Woman] We were actually in a meeting

when someone just barged in and said--

[Woman] Oh my God, a plane has just

crashed in to the World Trade Center!

[Girl] I went to frantically get to a radio.

After you pass through those different memories

of people witnessing it from afar and you see them

witnessing it up close, you stand in front

of that slurry wall just beyond there

and witness history yourself.

The museum is a constant dance between seeing things

that are facts, things that are real,

things that are absolute, and then investigating

the memories yourself.

Like any memorial it has this wall of faces

and you can see an individual, but here you can

select any individual in front of you

and see all of these memories from that person.

All of this is donated and collated

from different family members.

You can actually hear, in this case a brother

delivering an oral history about his memory

and about who he was.

So mixing between these different memories,

you can see these artifacts from the recovery

but also here from people inside the towers

and what their experiences are.

[Man] Very quiet.

One of the firemen from Rescue One

looked up and he said We may not live through today.

We looked at him and we looked at each other

and we took the time to shake each other's hands

and wish each other good luck.

We're gonna have to walk up 80 flights of stairs

with our gear on, but this is what we have to do.

We're going upstairs and we're going to save somebody.

So we mixed together all these different

memories of the past with acknowledgement

that this story is not over and that it's changing

in the present day.

So we have, in this final space, which is called

Foundation's Hall, a broad array of different experiences,

but all of them changing.

We have for example this experience,

which is an algorithmic piece.

It's actually made up of over two million

different articles of the news from September 11th, 2001

all the way to the present day.

They're arranged in chronological order

according to different themes that the algorithm

actually puts forward.

This is constantly changing and updating,

acknowledging that 9/11 itself, whether it's

the action from the middle east,

or in Guantanamo are simply not finished yet

and that the event itself is ever-changing.

Finally the last thing the visitors do

is they're able to leave their own memories

and actually see them projected

directly onto the slurry wall itself.

This was part of a general strategy to the museum

where we really wanted people to be able to synthesize

and to come to peace in whatever way was possible

with the actual museum experience.

The museum just crossed a million visitors

just since May and over 15% of those visitors

write their own mementos.

Since most people come in groups, that's pretty much

half of the group members that are coming in

that are writing their own messages.

I literally just snapped these with my phones,

but just to show you what we're getting.

My father came home from work that day

in a dusty suit and I thank God he came home at all,

or miss you both every day, love you dad and Chris.

Love, Jon.

Or this one, we were mere kids when this happened,

and now as adults we understand the impact

of this tragic event.

It's actually this one I want to talk about

in particular because I did this event on 9/11 this year,

a panel, and Bill Hurst who's an experimental psychologist

was on the panel.

He studies memory and specifically he did a study

about 9/11 stories and he said

That's a very interesting thing that you're doing

with people writing messages afterwards.

You're asking about it.

He said You know what you're really doing,

you're helping them inscribe the memory

of the experience deeper inside themselves.

I thought this was very interesting.

I hadn't quite thought about it in that way.

He basically wanted to explain that the brain in this case,

the synapses that make up memories have all

these different pathways, hippocampus and amygdala.

As you fire different ones together,

they literally inscribe the memories

deeper inside of yourself.

They make a deeper impression.

I took him out to lunch a bunch of times

and started a dialogue with him.

I'd like to share with you today some of

both our projects, from local projects,

but also some of the ideas that he shared with me

that make memories far more impactful.

The first one is we're more confident

in our memories if they involve emotion.

For this engagement, the Cleaveland Museum of Art,

we were asked by the board at the end of this

huge 350 million dollar expansion to look

at how technology could engage new visitors,

could engage people who didn't know anything about art

or families.

Essentially what we did is looked at ways at first to delete

a lot of the technology that they had planned

and then to make things really simple and impactful.

In this case, this woman is selecting

an individual sculpture.

That's the original locations that that sculpture is from.

Very simple ways to contextualize these artworks

so that people can make these emotional connections.

That, for example.

This is the bedroom that that actually was painted for.

Totally changes the way you think about temper paintings.

In this case, this is the original castle

that that tapestry was woven for.

Here is Picasso when he invented cubism.

It suddenly makes this emotional impact.

In this piece, which is probably the signature

part of this engagement.

This is all 3,000 artworks that are in the museum

at that time and they're organized in different ways.

Love and lust, color, these are different algorithms

that are bringing forth these artworks,

but then an individual visitor can go and select

and make connections between the artworks themselves.

You can look at them by materials,

you can look at them by artworks or by era,

and then you can load them onto an ipads to make

your own tour of the museum.

Lastly, and this is probably one of the craziest ideas

our studioses had, this is using facial detection.

You make a different face and as the expression is matched,

it shows you an artwork that looks like that.

It suddenly transforms the gallery into a place

to make that emotional connection with the artwork

and suddenly it's a social space,

it's a space of performance.

It's a space to actually make those connections

between people.

That's the first counts I'd like to shed,

is the idea that social media should actually be social.

Groups of people in front of technology itself.

Reminded me of this mantra which we started using

during the engagement.

You can see with technology this makes a lot of sense.

The idea of participation which is at the heart of our work.

This is actually from Ben Franklin.

This is just how humans are, we believe.

In fact, you see it again in these memory studies.

Another study had people taking photographs inside galleries

and sure enough, as you take photographs of artworks,

you remember them less, that's just the facts.

What is interesting though is if you ask people

to take close-ups, to investigate with the technology,

they remember twice as much.

This is an engagement for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian

Design Museum.

We're doing this Dillisk Fedirenfrum.

We designed this experience and pitched the museum

on a lot of crazy ideas but the craziest one,

which is the one they chose,

was to allow every single visitor to have a pen

that both tracks them inside the museum,

let's them collect things from the casework,

but also make design.

In making design, you want to learn more

about design itself.

It's exactly putting you in the act of playing designer.

The pen itself was developed with partners

at GE, Estelle Networks.

Makes simply an undercurrent.

It's simply this wonder of technology and I'm going

to show you some early prototypes.

This doesn't open until December.

Our studio were constantly building and constructing

these individual pieces.

These tables will be located in select galleries.

Most of the museum is traditional with case work,

but you can draw anywhere and connect

directly with the artifacts themselves.

The collection is open to you, to take with you

and to gather and to make connections, one to the next.

You can see all those different connections

between parts of the collection and save it onto your pen,

most importantly as a piece of inspiration.

It's not just a scholarship or an inert artifact

sitting in a case, it's there to inspire you,

it's a designer and of course that's what

Cooper Hewitt is so good at.

If you just want to draw, this is what happens.

It takes any shape that you draw and matches it

directly with a piece in the collection.

I've seen this for hours and hours and I still love

to just watch the ways that these different

formal connections actually play out.

What's amazing is that it's making this formal argument

embedded inside the technology that all of design

starts with that, whether it's digital or physical,

a pencil or a pen, line work.

Humans are making things and out of that

comes the entire design world that we live within.

When you come up to any individual digital table

you can draw a shape and see it matched

directly with a part of the collection.

I'm going to go into wire frames to show you

what happens after that.

Again, all of this is in process.

You actually draw an individual shape and you get

a match with a piece from the collection,

but then on the right, you see that?

Those are three different, what we call making apps.

It allows you to digitally create things

inside of the museum to understand more

about the design process.

Just to show you what that looks like,

when you actually open it up, for example this is

an extrude tool.

You can see, this is my favorite part, on the right,

it's matching you with a part of the collection.

This is where we get into some of the challenges,

at least in our mind, for software.

We like software with an attitude, with a point of view,

and in this case, software that tells a story.

It's both giving you a tool, but it's instructing you

and showing you the historic precedence

for what you're making.

This is just a prototype for what it's actually

going to look like.

Very, very, very simple tools that allow you

to play with different materials and different shapes

and just again, even with the simplest of gestures,

start to understand something about design itself.

In this case there's different materials

that you can look at.

This one is really excellent for making different stemware

or individual pieces of lamps.

Finally I wanted to share with you this piece.

This is really the clincher

that the museum really bought into.

We said We want to give everybody a pen

and literally invite them to draw on the walls.

It's the opposite of what anyone would do in a museum.

They have this amazing wallpaper collection.

What we said is we want visitors to understand wallpaper

in a room that allows you to project 360 on the room itself.

These are just early style frames in terms

of the actual architecture but the idea is that

that pattern can then be taken with you and put

on your phones or it could even be printed,

maybe downstairs and you could take it as a product

when you leave the museum.

Just to show you what the actual room looks like.

This is the prototype and this is what it's like

to live-draw your own wallpaper inside of the museum.

What I really love about this is that all of the ways

in which people think about wallpaper,

these are the individual repeat patterns,

that's actually baked into the software itself.

It's teaching you about how software works.

Or in this case, all these lessons

from famous knoll designers from the 20th century.

That's Alexander Girard. You use his palettes.

You look at different pieces of inspiration

from his work.

It has teaching built in to the interface itself.

Again, it's software with a serious point of view

and a real attitude.

It also allows you to move through the historic wallpaper

and to hear oral histories from individuals

talking about that wallpaper.

In this final shot, this is actually the interface

itself as it works, and this is my favorite part.

See what just happened there where it said geometric?

We have little tool tips from designers

who are just going to talk to you

about different parts of the design process.

As you're drawing things it notices things you're doing,

in this case, Jonathan Addler has a little comment for you.

The idea that you can actually build expertise

into the software to help you be a better designer

and most of all to inspire you.

I'm just going to show two more projects.

The next one I'm going to show you has to do

with tangibility.

Obviously a lot of what we're trying to do

is to blend architecture and media together

into experiences.

In this case, this idea that people are much more

confident in their memories if they leverage

multiple senses.

This is for a company called Timken

which is an amazing B to B company that makes

precision mechanics.

They are in Ohio and, for example,

anyone who flew here, probably many people here,

there's a 99% chance that you ended up

on their landing gear because they make 99%

of the mechanics inside the landing gear

here in America.

It's that kind of attitude, they make can't-fail mechanics.

We tried to capture that story in partnership

with Davis brand capital that was re-engineering

the entire story around Timken and also

for their new global headquarters which really

focuses on innovation and on mixing together

design and expertise, what they know and what they make.

The actual precision fabrication itself.

I'm just going to focus on two interfaces.

All of them embed stories and parts of context within it.

In our case what we talked them into

was using tour guides, was using people.

The human face of Timken.

They're only doing very, very high-end engineer tours.

That's essentially their customer base.

In this case they're trying to show the context,

the world's largest wind farm.

This is the longest tunnel ever drilled in the world.

They only do these very, very extreme

forms of engineering, or this, the Mars rover.

They're inside each of the three rovers making it's way.

And you can--

This is a Mars rover, Curiosesity bearing.

It's a quarter inch precision radio bearing.

It operates at 100,000 rpm and it is extremely efficient.

I love that moment of pride.

The ability to hold up a single piece of mechanics

and understand exactly what it was,

what it was doing there on Mars.

What we did is we said We want your customers

to be able touch and unfold

and take these precision mechanics apart.

The engineers recoiled.

They were like First of all these things

are way, way too important and precise

to actually be touched.

Even the chrome itself, we don't even let the salespeople

touch any of these pieces.

What we did do is make a virtual version

where people can understand what's inside these bearings

on a very, very precise engineering level.

Again, this is all tour-led.

I think that makes a specific bond itself

where you can answer any questions,

but the ability to then magically dissolve and open up,

to actually show all the engineering inside

of all these individual precision pieces,

really is what's able to communicate

with the larger context of impact,

then on a very, very specific level,

all of the little engineering details that really prove

exactly what Timken is bringing forward.

Then of course the customers can play with it themselves.

That's a huge part of what they are offering,

the ability to see and manipulate,

to make that deeper contact with things

that are literally invisible is a huge part

of this engagement.

The last thing that I'm gonna share with you,

which I think wraps a lot of these ideas all together

is this piece that we're building

for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation

along with the U.S. Federal Department of Education.

It's sort of a funny, double-funding source.

You have the most extreme innovators

and then a highly conservative organization

coming together along with the New York Hall of bet365体育赛事

and a number of other funders to come up

with a learning system around middle school physics.

We had this idea early on in the engagement.

We thought There's probably this scenario

where you have these bored kids sitting in class

and they're just seeing these formulas

and hearing a teacher drone on.

They can't quite understand what is being talked about

in terms of Newtonian physics and all these abstractions,

about gravity, about inertia, about momentum and rotation.

Then they would leave that classroom and run out

onto the program onto a swing or onto a slide,

literally embody all of those exact same ideas.

If you think about it, playgrounds are essentially

Newtonian physics machines for us to extract

those forces on our own body.

What we did is we built out a system that allows kids

to play on the playground and in playing,

learn about physics.

Essentially to do physics experiments on their own body.

This is an early prototype that we shot.

Again, if you think about dodgeball.

Dodgeball is everything that you need to know

in terms of Newtonian physics.

You have momentum, you have inertia, you have a mass.

She's gonna throw this ball, this is hilarious.

Look out!

There it goes.

The ability then to have this experience as a kid

and then to turn around and to start to extract

patterns, not even knowledge, but patterns out of it

is a huge aspect.

What they do is they trace the individual video

and then the patterns start to arise.

As a technologist, we were really excited

because we knew the power of this platform

is to basically do all of the math,

to reveal all of the physics inside of it.

The educators stopped this immediately

and said No, no, no, no, no.

This actually, the memory scientist underscored,

he said If you tell someone the answer to a math problem,

there is zero chance they will ever remember it, period.

There's nothing there, there's no friction.

What we started discovering is, in learning applications,

you actually want to build friction

and we call it positive friction.

Again, this is the opposite of what I think

a lot of software is doing today.

You need friction in order for people to actually retain it.

We bury a lot of information inside of the app

so you have to move through it to discover

even some simple mathematics in terms of distance

or rates, or if you click in further,

you can get into a forced diagram and start

to put the pieces together and you might

even have parts of the application that look like this,

that have some learning actually built into it,

that have something that's closer to a knowledge base.

This is actually quite controversial in education.

Do you even offer this level of application?

In terms of the prototyping, it's a complete joy

because you're out on the playground

with kids playing and that's the whole idea.

All they're doing is playing and discovering

and playing and discovering.

That process of allowing kids to go out there

and in the midst of a play activity be curious

and to discover and reveal all the ways in which

our daily activities, the things that we already know

to be true are actually embedded inside the physics itself,

that is really where the joy comes in.

In this footage, we shot this a week ago,

at Maker's Faire actually.

You can see it's constantly asking again

this social experience where someone's telling

someone something else to do and then they're using

the application itself together, to reveal

a lot of these patterns and to understand.

As you can see that's a live graph

of the actual physics itself built into the video.

Everything layered from their experience comes out

and builds it out.

We really want to endorse Scott's idea about this idea

of a new era.

I think this is a new era in terms

of the future of learning.

For us, we take it as this great leap forward

about how people are going to be learning

and the types of future memories that

we are going to be able to build with them.

For us this idea of something that's tactile,

something that's multi-sensory,

something that has productive friction,

that's social, that builds in a human relationship

in congruity with technology that's emotional

at it's core, that's what the future of learning is

and I think honestly, with those types of tenants,

we can start to build things that will last

far, far into the future, all the way

until it becomes part of the past.

Thank you so much.

(applause)

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