Kate Stone: DJ decks made of... paper

76,808 views ・ 2013-07-23

TED


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00:12
I love paper, and I love technology,
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and what I do is I make paper interactive.
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And that's what I say when people ask me what I do,
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but it really confuses most people,
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so really, the best way for me to convey it
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is to take the technology and be creative
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and create experiences.
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So I tried to think what I could use for here,
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and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea
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that I wanted to print two DJ decks
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and to try and mix some music.
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And I'm going to try and show that at the end,
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and the suspense will be as much mine if it works.
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And I'm not a DJ, and I'm not a musician,
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so I'm a little bit scared of that.
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So I think, I found the best way to describe my journey
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is just to mention a few little things
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that have happened to me throughout my life.
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There's three particular things that I've done,
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and I'll just describe those first,
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and then talk about some of my work.
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So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with wires,
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and I used to thread them under my carpet
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and thread them behind the walls
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and have little switches and little speakers,
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and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive
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but kind of all hidden away.
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And I was also really interested in wireless as well.
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So I bought one of those little kits that you could get
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to make a radio transmitter,
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and I got an old book and I carved out the inside
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and I hid it inside there,
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and then I placed it next to my dad
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and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio
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so I could eavesdrop.
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I was not at all interested in what he was saying.
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It's more that I just liked the idea
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of an everyday object
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having something inside
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and doing something different.
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Several year later,
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I managed to successfully fail all of my exams
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and didn't really leave school with much to show for at all,
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and my parents, maybe as a reward,
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bought me what turned out to be
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a one-way ticket to Australia,
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and I came back home about four years later.
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I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere.
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It was in far western New South Wales.
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And this farm was 120,000 acres.
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There were 22,000 sheep,
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and it was about 40 degrees,
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or 100 or so Fahrenheit.
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And on this farm there was the farmer, his wife,
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and there was the four-year-old daughter.
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And they kind of took me into the farm
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and showed me what it was like to live and work.
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Obviously, one of the most important things was the sheep,
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and so my job was, well, pretty much to do everything,
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but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead.
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And we'd do that by building fences,
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using motorbikes and horses,
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and the sheep would make their way all the way back
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to the shearing shed for the different seasons.
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And what I learned was,
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although at the time, like everyone else,
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I thought sheep were pretty stupid
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because they didn't do what we wanted them to do,
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what I realize now, probably only just in the last few weeks
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looking back, is the sheep weren't stupid at all.
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We'd put them in an environment where they didn't want to be,
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and they didn't want to do what we wanted them to do.
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So the challenge was to try and get them
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to do what we wanted them to do
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by listening to the weather, the lay of the land,
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and creating things that would let the sheep flow
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and go where we wanted them to go.
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Another bunch of years later,
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I ended up at Cambridge University
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at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K.
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doing a Ph.D. in physics.
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My Ph.D. was to move electrons around, one at a time.
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And I realize — again, it's kind of these realizations
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looking back as to what I did —
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I realize now that it was pretty much the same
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as moving sheep around.
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It really is.
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It's just you do it by changing an environment.
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And that's kind of been a big lesson to me,
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that you can't act on any object.
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You change its environment, and the object will flow.
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So we made it very small,
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so things were about 30 nanometers in size;
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making it very cold, so at liquid helium temperatures;
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and changing environment by changing the voltage,
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and the electrons could make flow around a loop
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one at a time, on and off, a little memory node.
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And I wanted to go one step further,
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and I wanted to move one electron on
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and one electron off.
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And I was told that I wouldn't be able to do this,
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which, you know, as we've heard from other people,
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that's the thing that makes you do it.
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And I was determined, and I managed to show that I could do that.
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And a lot of that learning, I think,
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came from being on that farm,
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because when I was working on the farm,
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we'd have to use what was around us,
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we'd have to use the environment,
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and there was no such thing
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as something can't be done,
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because you're in an environment where,
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if you can't do what you need to do,
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you can die, and, you know,
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I had seen that sort of thing happen.
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So now my obsession is printing,
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and I'm really fascinated by the idea
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of using conventional printing processes,
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so the types of print that are used to create
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many of the things around us
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to make paper and card interactive.
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When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this
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and told them what I wanted to do,
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which was to print conductive inks onto paper,
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they told me it couldn't be done,
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again, that kind of favorite thing.
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So I got about 10 credit cards and loans
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and got myself very close to bankruptcy, really,
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and bought myself this huge printing press,
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which I had no idea how to use at all.
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It was about five meters long,
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and I covered myself and the floor with ink
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and made a massive mess, but I learned to print.
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And then I took it back to the printers and showed them what I've done,
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and they were like, "Of course you can do that.
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Why didn't you come here in the first place?"
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That's always the case.
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So what we do is we take conventional printing presses,
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we make conductive inks,
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and run those through a press, and basically
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just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow
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through pieces of paper
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so we can make that paper interactive.
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And it's pretty simple, really.
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It's just a collection of things that have been done before,
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but bringing them together in a different way.
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So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on,
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and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips,
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one to run some capacitive touch software,
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so we know where we've touched it,
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and the other to run, quite often,
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some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect.
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So I'll just describe a couple of things that we've created.
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There's lots of different things we've created.
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This is one of them, because I love cake.
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And this one, it's a large poster,
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and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it,
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and the poster talks to you when you touch it
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and asks you a series of questions,
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and it works out your perfect cake.
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But it doesn't tell you the cake there and then.
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It uploads a picture,
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and the reason why it chose that cake for you,
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to our Facebook page and to Twitter.
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So we're trying to create that connection
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between the physical and the digital,
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but have it not looking on a screen,
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and just looking like a regular poster.
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We've worked with a bunch of universities on a project
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looking at interactive newsprint.
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So for example, we've created a newspaper,
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a regular newspaper.
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You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly,
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and when you touch it, you can hear the music
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that's described on the top, which is something you can't read.
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You can hear a press conference
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as well as reading what the editor has determined
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that press conference was about.
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And you can press a Facebook "like" button
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or you can vote on something as well.
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Something else that we created,
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and this was an idea that I had a couple of years ago,
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and so we've done a project on this.
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It was for funding from the government
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for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings,
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difficult to say, and something I had no idea what it was
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when I went into the workshop, but quickly learned.
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And we wanted to try and encourage people
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to use energy better.
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And I really liked the idea that, instead of looking at dials
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and reading things to say --
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looking at your energy usage,
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I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected
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and had color-changing inks on it,
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and so if your energy usage was trending better,
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than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear
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and all would be good.
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And if it wasn't, then there'd be graffiti
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and the leaves would fall off the trees.
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So it was trying to make you look after something
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in your immediate environment,
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which you don't want to see not looking so good,
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rather than expecting people to do things
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in the local environment because of the effect
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that it has a long way off.
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And I think, kind of like going back to the farm,
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it's about how to let people do what you want them to do
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rather than making people do what you want them to do.
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Okay.
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So this is the bit I'm really scared of.
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So a couple of things I've created are,
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there's a poster over here
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that you can play drums on.
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And I am not a musician. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
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If anyone wants to try and play drums, then they can.
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I'll just describe how this works.
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This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone,
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and when you touch it, it connects to the app.
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(Drums)
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And it has really good response time.
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It's using Bluetooth 4, so it's pretty instantaneous.
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Okay. Thanks.
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(Applause)
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And there's a couple of other things.
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So this one is like a sound board,
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so you can touch it, and I just love these horrible noises.
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(Sirens, explosions, breaking glass)
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Okay, and this is a D.J. turntable.
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So it's wirelessly linked to my iPad,
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and this is a software that's running on the iPad.
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Oh, yes. I just love doing that.
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I'm not a D.J., though, but I just always wanted to do that.
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(Scratching)
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So I have a crossfader, and I have the two decks.
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So I've made some new technology,
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and I love things being creative,
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and I love working with creative people.
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So my 15-year-old niece, she's amazing,
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and she's called Charlotte,
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and I asked her to record something,
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and I worked with a friend called Elliot
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to put some beats together.
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So this is my niece, Charlotte.
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(Music)
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Yay!
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(Applause)
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So that's pretty much what I do.
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I just love bringing technology together,
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having a lot of fun, being creative.
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But it's not about the technology.
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It's just about, I want to create some great experiences.
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So thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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