In this episode Transformation comes from three very different angles:
Kirsten Nelson: Dan Moore spoke to us about how to engage powerful robots in meaningless motion
Kirsten Nelson: Latoya Flowers gives us insights into museum artifacts as mood boosters, at the Field Museum in Chicago
Sundar Raman: Neil Mendoza discusses making silly things
Preamble
One of the most magical aspects of creative engineering and design is seeing the figment of an idea become something you can touch and feel.
Making an experience is a continuous process. A lot of talk goes into "agile" project management. I think it requires more — that we need to fearlessly (and hopefully confidently) iterate and mutate all the way to the launch.
One of our contributors this month, Neil Mendoza, said to me, "I make life much harder on myself than it needs to be." That sounds about right!
Manifesting the unique experience that we strive for may take different paths, but they are all paths of transformation.
Robots and Meaningless Motion
Let’s not make this about me, but I wrote an essay once about a robot that can only make grilled cheese sandwiches. And I also wrote an attempted novel manuscript where a very early social robot helplessly observed the protagonist as she blundered through bad dates and sought emotional solace in all the wrong ways. That robot, too, often prescribed grilled cheese as a mood booster.
So what we’ve discovered is that first, grilled cheese is a curative balm for every bad day. And also, the trope of robots as sweetly ineffectual creatures representing our own tangled relationship with functional achievement is really our favorite thing.
Since Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since the disembodied robot legs of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” video (or even earlier when he experimented with the first vocoder on “I Thought It Was You”). Since Bladerunner’s “like tears in rain.” Since the sad robots of Air or Freescha. Since so many things from way back when until now, we have loved the imagined ennui of our machine companions.
Soooo in more recent times, when the esteemed and fascinating roboticist Dan Moore happened to mention that he’s intrigued with the idea of “robots and meaningless motion,” well, I got out my notebook for some seriously gleeful interview moments.
Mostly I wanted to talk to Dan about why we like it when robots take on some of the pointless gestures and actions that we humans randomly generate all day long. From a creative standpoint, when machines are less than optimized, we see them in their full glory.
Kirsten Nelson: First. The origin story. You mentioned an essay by Walter de Maria on Meaningless Work. Why was this so appealing as a direction?
Dan Moore: He wrote about meaningless art, and how we should be creating things that are meaningless — create things for the sake of creating things.
That was kind of the root of it. But I mutated it and remixed it a bit. You know, we've got all of these traditional robots that are meant to be manufacturing things and welding and doing very repetitive and meaningful motions as they create things. A CNC machine, or a welder, or some other kind of fabrication machine. Because that's what these things do. They move things or fabricate them.
And the idea was to take that robot and do something else with it that is less meaningful.
KN: So taking robots that do purposeful things and translating their actions into something meaningless. But then of course, that’s when it resonates with humans in some more philosophical way – the arbitrariness of so many of our actions, and how endearing that can be. We’re talking about meaningless motion, but it’s meaningful to humans.
DM: Right, but to the robot, it's not meaningful. Because it exists in that paradigm where it has to be creating things. It has to be building things. It has to be moving things. So when you take it out of that environment and put it somewhere else — it's like the stuff that Madeline Gannon does with with her hunting packs, Manus. They kind of fit in this definition. They're hunting for you and gazing at you as if they're personified objects, they’re beasts.
KN: Interesting, yeah, a lot of this is sort of exploring the imagined mindset of the robot. It’s trying to optimize its performance over and over again.
DM: Yeah, it was created because resources are limited and it’s better if things are automated. And robots can perform the job over and over again and not get tired. Eventually they will wear out, but some of them have duty cycles of 300,000 cycles. They’ll last for 10 years or 20 years on a production line if you just grease them.
KN: You’ve told me a bit about your idea for a robot that pats people on the head — a form of robot validation that I would most eagerly seek because of course its intentions would be so pure. It would be a nice gesture to receive, you know?
DM: I did one where it was giving a blessing too.
KN: I guess the only thing left to ask is “why meaningless motion?”
DM: It expresses some of the playfulness of robots, too. So, how can they become these playful objects rather than behemoths? Like, what does a robot do in its off time?
KN: How does meaninglessness translate into action? How else are you experimenting with this idea?
DM: I've got simulations for the collapse of robots. And I've slowed them down enough that I hopefully can run them when I actually get space back on this one arm that they're built for.
Because in order to actually do it, I want to get that whip of the arm going, and that kind of exceeds joint limits. But if I slow it down, I can try and do it.
If you try and play back an actual simulation of a robot collapsing, you can see its joint limits and all this kind of stuff. It's very complex to get it right, because it's just going too fast or it has too much momentum or whatnot — if you get it going way too fast, it can actually become dangerous.
I was going so far with some of the stuff that I'm doing, having it fall and hit invisible solids and structures to see how it bounces. It goes back to really turn them into a free-body kind of ragdoll. Which is fun to think about. I did a lot of like ragdoll stuff when I was in grad school, just because that kind of motion is intriguing to me. The falling, the constant hitting and stretching and whatnot, and conforming in these weird forms. It’s just evocative.
KN: One of the things that [CreativeStack founder] Sundar mentioned when I said we were going to be talking about this topic was how robots won’t truly be compelling until we can get them to do the kind of meaningless stuff that we do as humans. Those random gestures where we touch our face while we’re speaking, or other incidental, mostly involuntary little expressions of our embodied selves while our mind is at work.
DM: Yeah, that's one way to picture it — the actions that you sometimes don't realize you're performing. If you are a person that has to pick up stuff all the time and fidget, you know, that motion is meaningless. But it kind of makes you more human, right? It’s trying to make the robots more human.
Mood Boosting Museum Artifacts: Interview
Mood Boosting Museum Artifacts
CreativeStack’s Kirsten Nelson spoke with Latoya Flowers, Documentary Filmmaker and Senior Multimedia Creative with the Field Museum in Chicago, about the narrative and media design of the “Wild Color” exhibition.
As one of the first major new exhibitions that would welcome visitors back to the museum, the brief was to invigorate with a full-spectrum experience. Latoya spoke about finding just the right balance between multimedia spectacle, the splendor of static color and moving soundscape compositions.
Read the full conversation here.
Kirsten Nelson: In late 2020, when the Field Museum was planning a major new exhibit to welcome visitors back in the fall of 2021, what experience or mood was central to your design?
Latoya Flowers: For “Wild Color” we wanted to create an exciting experience for our visitors and showcase our collection of different colorful species. We started with design and multimedia experiences to set the mood and tone. We knew we wanted to get creative with lighting, sound, media and projection mapping to bring those experiences to life.
KN: It looks like the result is an exhibit that lifts people's spirits, just as you described when we first talked about this project. That must feel good.
LF: Yes, it does. We did an evaluation of the exhibit as a team, about our challenges, what we want to do differently next time, and how did this process differ from our past processes?
And what stood out to me was, this exhibit is something that we had to put together really fast. We only had a year to produce it.
And you know, my exhibit director, he really stressed that this is something that was needed for the museum. Because we were still in the pandemic when we were planning it, but we were fully reopening when it was going to come out.
At that point, we'd be at full capacity, and we wanted something for visitors to just be excited about when they come to the museum — to experience something different. To really enjoy our collection and see it up close. A lot of these artifacts and objects and species that haven't been on display, people get to see them for the first time and then really learn how nature and color are so intertwined with each other. So that was the point of making “Wild Color,” to really show off our amazing collections that we're known for.
Transforming ideas into manifest absurdity with Neil Mendoza
Neil Mendoza makes amusing and silly experiences. It takes watching some of his videos to understand what that means.
I ran into Neil at OFFF.Barcelona in May this year.
On an aside, OFFF.Barcelona was a breath of fresh air (both literally and figuratively) after endless Zoominars. Encountering flesh-and-blood-and-creative human beings IRL was the energizing oasis we had been starved for!
I love the absurdity and irrationality of Neil’s work. It’s fun in and of itself. But It also helps me to consider new approaches for storytelling. More than anything, I particularly appreciate the fidelity and completeness of his execution.
Perhaps the biggest cliche in Experience Design is the clients who demand “show me something new, something that has not been done before, and show me it working.”
We all snicker at this. But we know there’s still a fairness to the request. Of course clients want to see something radically new and unique before they buy into it fully. We WANT them to have this!
It’s hard enough to come up with radically new and unique ideas. To bring them to fruition takes that difficulty up a few notches. Is this irrational pursuit maybe what makes experience design work fun? After all, we get to push boundaries to get people emotionally engaged in real spaces.
How does one get from theme to idea, then from the idea to installed experience?
We have our process phases as designers — everything from Discovery to Maintenance. These steps are often deceptive since the mess of making something is never as convenient as this. The transformations in each phase are alchemy. The transfiguration of ideas to warm fuzzy feelings in that random kid who is glued to the interactive is the bliss of experience design. It’s that endorphin rush when visitors really go “WOW!” at the built result.
I asked Neil how he came up with new ideas for his works, given how ridiculous they often are, and also ridiculously well executed.
“I find that it’s important to get out and step away from the work, to give the brain time to create”.
Neil brought up Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” cards, as one source of inspiration. There’s one that says:
“Go outside. Shut the door.”
I tend to forget to step away. Often! It’s remarkable how effective stepping away is.
Neil’s regular practice of yoga or going on a bike ride helps him to change and provide perspective.
During our conversation I couldn’t help but notice that the conversation itself helped me think differently. Billion Dollar Idea #2: Chatroulette for the Experience Design world!
Experience Design requires us to get comfortable with irrationality.
“Well, rationality takes you down the same path that everyone has been down before. Rationality normally means reasoning from existing ideas in your head, which is stuff you’ve already done. Irrationality creates random cross pollination. Irrationality is one way to get out of your tried-and-true path of working.”
Obviously irrational could mean a lot of different things depending on context.
“So many admin jobs have been invented just to make an organization bigger. The absurdity of the jobs is obscured by a system that normalizes the work that people do on a day-to-day basis; like putting numbers into a spreadsheet every day, feels pretty irrational!”
There’s a real danger in creative work that we grapple with. Neil refers to this as “creative procrastination.” Where we start wasting time on a piece of code that maybe isn’t the best use of time. So much of creative work is time consuming; it’s easy to think that spending a lot of time on something that’s unnecessary is valuable.
I liked Neil’s process of working on multiple projects at the same time as a way to get past this “creative procrastination.” He said this allows him to move on to another project or task and then come back to it.
When things are hard (which they often are) I find myself hacking my brain looking for small wins. From the outside Neil’s work seems full of mini complexities that could get out of hand. The potential of getting lost in a week-long coding hole and ending up not using that work at all seems too real. Neil, even with his deep experience, still battles this on every project, though hopefully he’s winning more of these battles over time.
Partly the fix is in how we prioritize tasks in the sequence. For Neil it’s important to tackle the mechanical and hardware first, since
“.. that’s the harder bit. We know that the stuff that goes on a screen can always get done.”
The short version of the path to success is to “keep the end goal in mind.”
Sounds great! But more often than not, by the time I’m that deep in I start asking myself what the damn goal was to start with, anyway?!
I wondered if the silliness in Neil’s work helped in keeping the end goal in mind. Does he make himself laugh? Who’s the target audience, himself or someone else?
“Yeah I think so, I guess the more stupid the stuff is, I’ll have an idea and it seems kinda dumb and when I get to the point of actually having made it there’s definitely internal laughing going on.
Like the knife orchestra I made, I quite liked the idea of a dangerous musical instrument.
The moment when you see it work you’re like, yeah it’s as dumb as I imagined it!
I love outside input, and I don’t get enough of it. It’s going back to this idea of thinking rationally vs thinking irrationally. Other people’s brains work differently from yours so the more outside input you can get, the more you’re led down pathways you wouldn’t have thought about.
It’s why I like artist residencies so much.”
There’s a dastardly thing that happens on creative projects, even after all this planning and prioritizing, which I am loath to admit. But Neil pointed out:
At the last stages of making work for a show, I try not get too attached to parts of a project. In one of the pieces I'm currently making I swapped out a large part of it which changed it completely and for the better.
Thinking back, a lot of my favorite work had these last minute changes.
Often they didn't feel like they were quite finished until a eureka moment, combined with a lack of time to overthink things, came along.
I guess this is a lot harder with client work though.
In client work, in my experience, something similar can happen; where last minute changes come out as a win. In those cases they are the work of a very engaged Creative Director or very astute client.
The steps that we take to transforming an idea into an installed exhibit require so many different skilled craftspeople. I would argue we also require so many different creative and philosophical inputs to keep the execution fresh. This is also what allows our subconscious to take random intersections to feed into the projects we’re working on.
Experiences and projects don’t start as finished products. They are a process. They are conversations, strolls in nature, explorations in the subconscious and are fed by random everyday things.
I asked Neil what he was hopeful for.
“As an artist I am somewhat utopian and believe that we can affect the world in a good way... I guess I hope that we can live more sustainably, given human beings have such extractive existences.”
Perhaps this is our challenge as experience designers. We transform ideas into manifest experiences through all the grit and grime and doubt, to get the “wow” from the end visitor. Perhaps we should also aspire to transform our world in a positive way.
A massive thanks to Neil Mendoza for his generous time for this interview.
Also check out the presentation briefs of all the other artists who presented at OFFF.Barcelona.
Epilogue
It’s easy to fall into making safe things, which may result in static and lifeless end-results. To make something that really moves us, something that is evocative in all those mysterious ways that make us really connect emotionally, we need a bit of meaninglessness, sensory overload and lots of silliness.
In Experience Design we should actively engage with the ridiculous, to influence every step of the creation and implementation process. The more comfortable we get with the sublime hilarity of transformation, the more we’re able to take last-minute detours, the more we can take the final experience to unexpected heights!