Leah Buechley: How to "sketch" with electronics

51,758 views ・ 2012-11-15

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha
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Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics.
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I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer,
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and that means that I spend a good amount of time
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designing and building new pieces of technology,
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and more specifically designing and building electronics.
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And what I've found is that the process of designing
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and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways.
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So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive,
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and the outcome of that process,
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namely electronic circuit boards,
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are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways.
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So they're really small, generally, they're square
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and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them
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just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I
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have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up
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the process and the outcome of designing electronics.
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And so what if you could design and build electronics
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like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly,
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extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly,
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really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally?
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Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up
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all sorts of new possibilities?
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I'm going to share with you two projects that are
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investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one.
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(Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper.
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A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC.
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Sticker templates.
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Speed x 4.
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Making a switch.
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Music: DJ Shadow.
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Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller.
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Sketching an interface.
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(Music)
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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Pretty cool, huh? We think so.
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So now that we developed these tools
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and found these materials that let us do these things,
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we started to realize that, essentially, anything
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that we can do with paper, anything that we can do
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with a piece of paper and a pen
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we can now do with electronics.
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So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a
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deeper exploration of that possibility.
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And I'll kind of let it speak for itself.
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(Music)
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(Applause)
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So the next step for us in this process
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is now to find a way to let all of you
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build things like this,
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and so the way that we're approaching that is by
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teaching workshops to people where we explain
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how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also
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working to get the tools and the materials and techniques
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out into the real world in a variety of ways.
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And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build
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and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way.
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So thank you very much. (Applause)
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