Shilo Shiv Suleman: Using tech to enable dreaming

My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan

about two years ago.

I was in the desert, under the starry skies

with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali.

And we were in conversation

about how nothing had changed

since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata."

So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel

we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky.

Now we do the same with airplanes.

Back then,

when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince,

when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow,

he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out.

Now we do the same

with drills and machines.

The conclusion that we came to

was that magic had been replaced

by machinery.

And this made me really sad.

I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe.

I was terrified by this idea

that I would lose the ability

to enjoy and appreciate the sunset

without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends.

And it felt like technology

should enable magic, not kill it.

When I was a little girl,

my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch.

And this piece of 50-year-old technology

became the most magical thing to me.

It became a gilded gateway

into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks

and images in my imagination.

So I felt like our cellphones

and our fancy watches and our cameras

had stopped us from dreaming.

They stopped us from being inspired.

And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology,

to see how I could use it to enable magic

as opposed to kill it.

I've been illustrating books since I was 16.

And so when I saw the iPad,

I saw it as a storytelling device

that could connect readers all over the world.

It can know how we're holding it.

It can know where we are.

It brings together image and text

and animation and sound and touch.

Storytelling is becoming

more and more multi-sensorial.

But what are we doing with it?

So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya,

an interactive app for the iPad.

So it says, "Place your fingers

upon each light."

And so --

(Music)

It says, "This box belongs to ... "

And so I type in my name.

And actually I become a character in the book.

At various points, a little letter drops down to me --

and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS --

which is actually addressed to me.

The child in me is really excited

by these kinds of possibilities.

Now I've been talking a lot about magic.

And I don't mean wizards and dragons,

I mean the kind of childhood magic,

those ideas that we all harbored as children.

This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason,

was always really exciting to me.

And so over here you need to tilt your iPad,

take the fireflies out.

And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book.

Another idea that really fascinated me as a child

was that an entire galaxy could be contained

within a single marble.

And so over here,

each book and each world

becomes a little marble

that I drag in

to this magical device within the device.

And it opens up a map.

All along, all fantasy books have always had maps,

but these maps have been static.

This is a map that grows and glows

and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book.

It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well.

So I'm just going to enter in.

Another thing that's actually really important to me

is creating content that is Indian

and yet very contemporary.

Over here, these are the Apsaras.

So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs,

but how many people outside of India

know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras?

These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years

in an old and musty book.

And so we're bringing them back

in a contemporary story for children.

And a story that actually deals with new issues

like the environmental crisis.

(Music)

Speaking of the environmental crisis,

I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years

is that children have been locked inside their rooms,

glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out.

But now with mobile technology,

we can actually take our children outside into the natural world

with their technology.

One of the interactions in the book

is that you're sent off on this quest

where you need to go outside,

take out your camera on the iPad

and collect pictures of different natural objects.

When I was a child, I had multiple collections

of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells.

And somehow kids don't do that anymore.

So in bringing back this childhood ritual,

you need to go out

and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower

and then tag it.

In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark

and then tag that.

And what happens

is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs

that you can then put up online.

A child in London puts up a picture of a fox

and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today."

A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today."

And it creates this kind of social network

around a collection of digital photographs

that you've actually taken.

In the possibilities of linking together

magic, the earth and technology,

there are multiple possibilities.

In the next book, we plan on having an interaction

where you take your iPad out with the video on

and through augmented reality,

you see this layer of animated pixies

appear on a houseplant that's outside your house.

At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves.

And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away

and read the rest of the book.

We're moving, we're all moving here,

to a world where the forces of nature

come closer together to technology,

and magic and technology can come closer together.

We're harnessing energy from the sun.

We're bringing our children and ourselves

closer to the natural world

and that magic and joy

and childhood love that we had

through the simple medium of a story.

Thank you.

(Applause)