Vernelle A. A. Noel | Situated Computations, Craft + Technology

welcome everybody it's great to be here with uh all of you this is uh this is our oh this is our second in person uh talk uh we're very excited to have rennell here vernell noel vernell was a student here back in i want to say 2013 yes 2013. um wait you graduated in 2013 yeah she graduated she came in in 2011. i think at that time the department was really different i would say it was um i would say as we were really sort of in the middle of getting our group together and getting our students together especially a phd program even though it had been going on for a long time i think it really had gained a lot of speed around the time that vernell had come in so it's great to actually see her back but i'll do a quick little brief introduction but i'll try to um do us talk about as much about her that i know as possible so vernell is director of the situated computing and design lab at georgia tech i know the main thing that i really know about vernell is that she's a graduate of howard university and when she came here from howard university we had a number of contacts that we had in common when vernell was here she worked a lot on computation and carnival together doing a shape grammar her thesis on shape grammars as a release of the to the carnival experience and uh her new work right now is more about the intersection of computation and the way it relates more to craft and how it can assist craftspeople in doing their work and one of the things that i had seen online was a project that she'd recently done that i know she's not going to talk about too much today but is actually really quite interesting and it deals with the intersection of ai craft and computation and how designers can make really creative and interesting things but as they relate more to carnival and the expressive nature of carnival and i have to say i've never been to carnival but i have a lot of trendy friends and i hope to get to go someday so anyway i'll keep it short so this is rennell brunell mill please [Applause] all right thank you everybody um thank you very much larry thank you mit architecture so happy to be here all right happy to see all the familiar faces um okay so thank you very much i look forward to sharing uh my thoughts with you today i titled my talk situated computations craft and technology like larry mentioned i'm director of the situated competition and design lab at georgia tech and in my work i research into making form making through making with making terry's all about making so she knows what i mean um so i examine traditional and automated practices cultures digital and automated practices etc and their intersections with society i examine knowledges and practices tools and technologies or communities and cultures around both digital and the traditional making practices to explore and build new computational tools methodologies practices expressions and explore new reconfigurations for computational design practice pedagogy and publix so the question for today i think for this talk based on what uh how larry introduced me i would say would be around craft and computation how might craft and cultural practices reshape computational practices ideas and labels and vice versa some of the problems that i address in my work include the disappearance or eurasia of craft or cultural skills knowledges practices and communities their omission from discourses in computational design and us understanding the effects of craft and computation alongside human welfare the vision for the work is to repair both repair craft practices and computational design practices and why do this to undo damages that might have occurred in the past and today and they could be social technical theoretical cultural um two to improve current and future technologies and processes that we develop and design as computational designers and to consider the small repairs that we might make and their larger social implications when i talk about repair i refer to senate's description of repair as a point of departure comprising restoration remediation and reconfiguration restoration being a recovery in which the damage and use of history is undone with the restorer as a servant of the past remediation as preserving an existing form while substituting all the parts for new and improved ones or new and improved ways of doing things and reconfiguration which is a more radical kind of repair exploring these connections between small repairs and larger consequences and they go about doing this through an approach i call situated computations or a framework and what situation computation does or is it's an approach to computational design to research practice pedagogy that grounds our tools or methods and theories in the social world by acknowledging the historical cultural and material contexts of our field of designing and making it responds to our settings social and technological infrastructures and it asks that we refuse to remain ignorant of social and political structures that shape them some of the things it accomplishes are that it creates space for participation by those who are missing missing in practices uh it resists the segregating and privileging of certain types of intelligences and skills and it seeks to amplify the stories of historically excluded or marginalized groups currently there are eight principles for this framework i'll share a little bit with you today on how i operationalize this in my work in craft and cultural practices and vice versa such that we reveal histories human dimensions and recognize the partiality of all our knowledges within specific contexts and i'll begin here i'll begin at the cultural practice of the trinidad carnival and i'll start by sharing with you a bit of the history and practices involved in carnival this is the fun part okay so french planters introduced carnival to trinidad in the 1780s and although africans engaged in carnival festivities during their enslavement after slavery was abolished in 1834 they reinvented the carnival to express their creativity freedom aesthetic sensibilities and to reclaim their humanity in the face of a system that considered them less than human while europeans participated in carnival for fun and frolic for africans for those of african descent carnival was a religion a form of psychological release of tensions from domination segregation and violent inhumane systems of control this is an engraving from 1888 of carnival celebrations in the capital city of port of spain the term trinidad carnival or trinidad and tobago carnival doesn't define its geographic location but it's origin i have seen carnival right here on myself right you all seen carnival um but instead it defines the three main elements that define carnival that being mass or the masquerade calypso suka music and the steel pattern uh calypso and soca being the music native to trinidad and tobago and the steel pan or steel drum which was was invented in the 1930s in trinidad and tobago from all or all the discarded oil drums there are more than 70 carnivals around the globe like i mentioned i've experienced it even here in cambridge um these are some images of blue devil characters in juvie in carnival this is one aspect of carnival and it originates from the celebration of resistance and emancipation from enslavement from these dangerous uh forced uh cruel um labor of enslavement so these are blue devils they blew fire and dance and make music from biscuitins this is uh the the actual masquerade so in addition to celebrating resistance and emancipation is also a space of joy of creativity of innovation this is a photo from 1957 this is a band by george bailey and i think of the carnival of our carnival as the internet of that time public education and art in history and society all of this is wrapped up in carnival people portrayed and educated publics on their histories real histories imagined histories past and future integral aspects of carnival are also about community the root of carnival is about doing things together making together expressing creativity together singing together dancing together celebrating together and at mass camps which are places where people come together to make design costumes for carnival there are these interactions and feelings of family closeness feelings of bonding friendships that are created while designing cooking listening to music making together all of this happening in shared spaces and in competitive spaces also there's also mentoring and cooperation with people feeling wanted and secure in these spaces learning how to socialize how to create how to respect each other respect the arts and respect artists engaging in design and making in carnival is of itself a form of community engagement however most if not all of the wire vendors and designers i met during my research they organized community events mothers and fathers the events for example football competitions to keep communities together so these are some of the elements intertwined within the histories and practices of the making culture in trinidad carnival but it's also about design and making people create and perform costumes depicting history imaginations social topics environmental topics um on the left is an image from the 1950s of costuming on the right costuming from 2016. it's also about innovation just like the steel plan and this is an image of peter minshall's band from 1984 and in this project he took an active bending approach to dancing sculptures or costuming by inserting fiberglass rods into fabric creating textile hybrid costuming in addition to costuming we have these large structures that are decorated and performed in carnival we call them kings and queens of carnival but i refer to them or define them as dancing sculptures and within the carnival one of the craft practices integral to the design and fabrication of costuming and dancing sculptures is the craft of wire bending wire bending is a crop that combines elements of engineering architecture and sculpture to create structures two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures it began in the 1930s in carnival and in it wire fiberglass rods and other linear materials are bent and shaped to create these structures like you see here and these artifacts or these architectures are expressions of creativity innovation and technical skill this is a photo of stephen derrick an expert wire bender who i learned from who unfortunately has since passed away this is a photo from 1969 of a group of wire benders historically this practice is a male-dominated practice so it started here um in 2012 2013 where my interrogation into design and carnival began because i was noticing a changing aesthetic in the carnival and had hunches as to why that was occurring um scholars gave social cultural and economic perspectives on these aesthetic changes but my hypothesis was that there were problems occurring in design um that's when i found the craft of wire bending and that it was disappearing and its potential disappearance signals a loss of all that i've shown you before cultural history heritage community engagement mentoring all of this is tied to this practice to people's creativity and their innovation so based on my research some of the issues occurring in craft and in wire bending today include that there's little to no documentation of these knowledges as many times it's tacit unwritten and taught via lengthy apprenticeships to slow transmission of this knowledge dying practitioners and the change in practices occurring in society and globally and this is important because craft and these practices are embedded in historical social and political frames its disappearance signals the erasure of histories of celebration and more two because this knowledge is tied to its practitioners when they pass away they take that knowledge with them making it even more challenging to pass on that culture and that knowledge and three studies have shown that the quality of one's craftsmanship is closely tied to the strength of their ties to a community so strong craftsmanship skills strong ties to our community we craftsmanship skills weak tie style community and we want strong community ties and these practices are a voice they're a language ways of world making and so we don't want these to disappear or go away and when we forget or leave out these relevant complex histories and voices things like this can happen where in 2016 a mass designer proposed one section for carnival and there was a public outcry about it and he was accused of trivializing the trauma of slavery which i've shown you before is connected to that uh reframing of carnival that reinvention of carnival and he and his work was seen by some as glamorizing a part of colonial history where racism socioeconomic disparity were rampant and continues today on the right is a mem created by someone highlighting their feelings about that production that seemingly valorizes a sort of slave narrative and a nostalgia for an era that abused oppressed and disenfranchised african people so to summarize these are some of the issues involved in the craft of wire bending and the practice of trinidad carnival dying practices fragmenting of communities disappearance of knowledges missing demographics and producing work that might trivialize people's histories and their cultures so question how might computations software-based practices in design reshape the ideas practices and labors in the trinidad carnival my work started here with the billy derrick grammar where while i was doing my graduate studies here at mit my first step was to develop a computational tool a shape grammar to address this problem of documentation and transmission of wire bending knowledge documentation included examining wire benders participating in the craft to make that tacit embodied knowledge and wire bending explicit on the left is steven derrick on the right might start at describing this craft using symbols operations and rules so named after albert bailey and steven derick the grammar computationally describes technical knowledge in wire bending it's a series of drawings that describes the materials steps and techniques in wire bending allowing analysis transmission for expertise for education research and practice this is albert bailey and steven derek the grammar externalizes and formalizes tacit rules so that they are less tied to practitioners which is important when if and when they are dying or retiring from the practice it facilitates documentation and recording of the design and making process and sheds light on the craft's computational dimensions opening it up for expansion and inquiry this is an example of how the grammar facilitates documentation of design and fabrication in the craft so after developing this tool my hypothesis was that it could address this problem that i mentioned of transmitting knowledge so i conducted a series of workshops in trinidad and in the us to evaluate the grammar what might happen in pedagogical settings etc so i went that these workshops participants here included students and the teachers and they were tasked with designing and building artifacts using wire bending techniques tools and materials to get a sense of what they knew or they didn't know they then had to communicate how and what they made to another team without talking and this comes from uh class with terry um ready all right one of my favorite uh methods or exercises in class actually um where they had to communicate how they made these artifacts without speaking to each other no notes just drawings or notes no they didn't see each other's artifact in the second part of the workshop i taught them the grammar sort of the technical knowledge behind the craft how to use it how to use it to ask questions and speculate to explore i taught them about the materials the connections why and how they are used the theory behind the practice if you would have called it that then demonstrated practical skills how to make bends how to wrap tape how to rotate their wrists how to move their bodies and engaging in this practice then they would design and build their artifacts using the grammar and instruct another team on how to make it so before learning the grammar these are images of before and after before learning it there was poor craftsmanship conflicting standards and instructions a lack of knowledge uh missing information and a general lack of confidence expressed by participants after learning the grammar however there was improved craftsmanship there was an agreed standard for communication it facilitated the replication of artifacts which they weren't able to do properly before and it increased their confidence in knowing what to do or exploring possibilities for what they might do in this in these photos artifacts on the left are the originals artifacts on the right are replica replications so replications are possible with the grammar one of the coolest things coming out of this workshop though was a collaborative approach to the craft which is new currently the practice is singular with one person to one artifact the grammar however opened it up with many people being able to participate in the design and fabrication of one artifact it afforded a collaborative approach to wire bending which currently does not exist and appeal it to participants this reinforces mentoring cooperation and social interaction that's embedded in making in carnival it also facilitates additional ways of engaging in the craft from documentation to analysis to fabrication and assembly so some of the contributions of this work included the restoration of wire bending knowledge improving technical knowledge and technical skill documentation of the process to pass on this knowledge to others and enabling collaborative approaches to the craft [Music] all right another question how might craft-based practices reshape design pedagogy in both craft and computation well i developed three computational approaches to crafting and wire bending that included cnc machines and digital fabrication they were developed to address a lack of participation in wire bending by computational publics those who may be interested in computational technologies and the absence of women children and those with physical limitations the practice is quite labor-intensive and so these it may be out of reach for some so how might we use technology to open the practice up so i evaluate evaluated these approaches with 11 students three men eight women 10 out of the 11 self-reported little to no experience in wire bending one reported moderate experience and the majority female of this class matters because this is different from what i mentioned before the practice is male dominated so now i had majority female students okay and so this in this first approach which i called computational crafting it employs the billy direct grammar to design and make artifacts in the traditional way that wirebenders would with the aid of the grammar these are images of some of the artifacts that students made using that approach and the second approach which i called crafting fabrication which preserves the existing form of wire bending but also substitutes labor-intensive bending by hand that can be labor intensive right with computer controlled bending by employing this method we might open it up to those with physical limitations these are some of the artifacts made by students and the third method which i call digital crafting employed digital design digital design tools or and fabrication using speculative software 3d printing these are images or designs generated using that speculative tool and these are artifacts made by some of the students with this approach so in this work students could learn craft through computation and the practicing of computation through craft bringing those interested in craft and computation together bringing multiple intelligences visual reasoning seeing doing calculating and sensory material experiences together in design the work forecasts a new community that brings together wire vendors and computational designers accessible by both experts and the novices a third question coming out of this work is how might cultural practices in carnival reshape computational and architectural practices ideas and labels well after teaching my students these approaches and the craft we would then build a pavilion using these wire bending techniques to further learn about it at the architectural scale and create a piece of architecture we employed these two methods the traditional bailey derrick used and hand tools and the cnc wire bender to broaden the scope of our students technical skills and reduce the barrier of participation for those with manual limitations so we started here at the bayley direct grammar um and used it as a way to de-familiarize the practice to develop new tectonics and amplify local social relations and rules here are a few examples of new tectonics that we designed we developed and structurally tested for application at the architectural scale new tectonics of the language possible because of the daily direct grammar in this making driven approach physical and digital models facilitated a relationship among visual corporeal material and tactile perceptions each informing the other poetics built on a local skill and re-engaging non-visual experiences and architecture this is our pavilion and outcomes from this project included new poetics of construction that highlight local material practices place and people with the pavilion's new poetics indicating how different communities beyond those associated with carnival can engage with the history and the future of wire bending it extends social corporeal and sensuous knowledges through human interaction and the forces and flows of materials and craft and architecture secondly it advances the billy direct grammar with new rules emerging from this experiment and creates new social roles and practices while bending is much more than the bending and connecting of linear materials to create structures it's a tectonic language a structural poetic that is tactile embodied and experienced via human perceptions and knowledges that are spatial corporeal and kinetic conceptually it inscribes a million of interactions between community senses and the moving body while designing and making with static and dynamic linear materials for concurrent expressions of each in three-dimensional space this is a photo of my students and i and these new communities of wire bending practitioners can continue to can continue invention in the craft and its computational descriptions this implies that intergenerational and intercultural connections between traditional and contemporary practitioners is possible through computation studying tectonics through computational technologies can contribute to our understanding critique and counteraction of universalism along with the placelessness that sometimes happens in architectural computation in this second pavilion we built another pavilion we designed and built an active bending structure built again on sort of the culture of carnival and wire bending practices for a lightweight structures exhibition at iass in barcelona spain in 2019 time flies i think yes 2019 these are my students who worked with me on this part of the project and um in this project we wanted to challenge the highly technological approaches to active bending structures most active bending projects today employ highly technical multifaceted computer software for design simulation and materialization because these projects are complex right studies have employed isogeometric analyses fem simulations etc i remember speaking with joseph a little bit about some of that simulation too but while these technologies allow improved prediction and new production systems they require relatively costly software subscriptions and computational power also they require highly technical knowledge and training and advanced manufacturing infrastructures at times so remember in situated competitions you want to pay attention to existing knowledges you want to cater to experts and non-experts and consider appropriate computational infrastructure so that those missing could participate some related active bending projects that are sensitive to local material practices and skills include the zcb and toro bamboo pavilions by christoph crawler that include local craft techniques and acknowledge the socio-technical and cultural aspects of construction in these settings so we wanted to broaden the design space of active bending structures and the definition of active bending structures to include those currently missing those not highly resourced when it comes to technology or expert knowledge we wanted to stress social and cultural knowledges of our setting and their relationships to active bending so using carnival as our setting we considered the cultural histories of carnival participation in design and making by experts and non-experts building on existing knowledges in carnival we consider the tools and technologies most used in this setting and remember i showed you these costumes from 1984 and mentioned that they were active bending structures where we pulled or pulled from this as well as our analysis of our first pavilion um for further development of what our lightweight structure would be we our design comprised of three circles made out of fiberglass rods that we pinched to create the shape that we call the pringles so we had this module uh we selected this design for its modularity its geometric simplicity and the coiling possibilities because all of us all uh teams or groups who were chosen for the exhibition we had to carry our pavilions from our countries to spain so traveling or transporting our exhibitions were an important part of the of of the process this is a scaled model of our design with the larger pavilion behind and this is construction of our full-scale unit which was more than 100 feet long i think uh 100 feet in circumference uh my students and they with one pringle after we made one pringle uh we exhibited this work at iass and the circular geometry allowed us to leverage the flexural properties of the fiberglass rods and link physical form to material properties this mobility supports the mobile temporary nature of carnival with quick construction disassembly exhibition and transportation on the left is our entire pavilion packaged in a drum case for transportation here are my students and i um and with this project we demonstrated that by building on existing knowledges and skills in the culture of craft and design and carnival a situated computations approach could broaden the design space strengthen social and cultural connections link and advance culture craft and computation and employ tensions and histories in society and materials to drive and generate form this is a render done by one of my students of that pavilion within the context of carnival and this approach the situated computations approach can allow the construction and showcasing of active bending structures during carnival festivities as shown here second children adults craftspersons many people can participate in the making together using skills and knowledges in the carnival and it provides an opportunity to integrate knowledges local knowledges design practices and materials as drivers in active bending approaches so that structure sociality material practices and cultural settings are considered concurrently so how might cultural practices in carnival reshape computational and architectural ideas by new production systems or pedagogy or tectonics and new conceptions of practices and structures based on cultural knowledge now this last project that i will share tonight it's a new one it's a recent one launched less than two weeks ago and it brings together machine learning heritage art architecture and culture and it was found funded by the mozilla foundation that had a call around our artificial intelligence and its effects on racial justice so this is our project and one of the questions that we asked in our project was how might we educate our publics about artificial intelligence and machine learning through cultural design practices that are familiar to them our position was that we wanted to use ai and machine learning for the generation and circulation of cultural heritage and value and we wanted to showcase how our creativity was tied to our history and our innovations our expressions in art design dance all of these are vehicles through which we have shared joy shared absolute joy and knowledge my collaborators were valencia james a dancer performer maker and researcher in dance theater and technology and dr natris gaskins an artist academic and author of a new book by mit press entitled the techno vernacular creativity and innovation and so the vision for our work was an empowered creative black and caribbean communities that engage with learn about and interrogate artificial intelligence to benefit ourselves and contribute to global discourses on ei through cultural practices of and in carnival because we are implicated we have the example of cambridge analytica that was used or employed by a party in trinidad and tobago and many parts of the world as we know where they analyze the social and cultural behaviors of different people in the country according to race and other metrics and they were able to manipulate people into voting or not such that it benefited them in the election so whether we engage in it or not we are implicated in big data in ai and so through this project we want to engage with and educate our publics about artificial intelligence big data etc and so our goals were about knowledge so we conducted two workshops and this will continue to be part of of the project so that we could teach our communities about data ai its implications its politics and creative applications about self-efficacy by increasing our community's beliefs and their abilities their agency to use their data creatively to be critical of how data is collected and used and to be part of that discourse and three to encourage communities to engage with ai in creative practices and education and to be critical of its applications so in this part of the project there's several parts for the project i will share probably three of them today but we wanted to explore the designs possibilities when we build a training set based on dancing sculptures in carnival to generate new imaginations for dancing sculptures in carnival as a creative partner as drivers for possibilities and to further extend making and design practices in carnival so this involved you know getting data cleaning data sorting data scraping data and using this as a training set to create other fake fake images of dancing sculptures um two ways that we could have done this google collab with tensorflow runway ml i started the google lab tensorflow method as a test um in the end just because of the timeline that we had ended up using runway ml as our method for this so this is these are just some images of our data set of what our data set looks like and these are the fakes that have been generated from that style gun approach that gun network approach to generating new dancing sculptures new imaginaries of dancing sculptures in carnival okay and these are possibilities that can reconnect people to their history and connect new ones to not just the past but to possible futures imagining possible futures for what we might say with these designs and how we might make them and this project is more than the generation of design possibilities but it includes how we showcase celebrate and extend carnival and aspects of carnival using digital tools and methods how do we touch the ground how do we reach our computational publics there are several aspects of this project and so i encourage you to check it out but i'll share three parts of it the virtual gallery virtual duvet and virtual mask and let me play this this should play yeah um so i designed and modeled the architecture for the gallery and using mozilla hubs which is a free online space developed this virtual gallery showcasing these ai generated dancing sculptures in there there's audio describing the work describing or talking about carnival and it also encourages participation by visitors there is the virtual duvet experience which showcases ai generated blue devils jab jabs and jab molasses again with audio describing these histories um exhibiting videos having music to sort of curate what juve might be so especially over the past two years many carnivals have been cancelled due to the pandemic so hopefully this brings a sense of nostalgia filling people back up with the just the joy of carnival it's scary and it's beautiful parts this okay this this plays a little video too did i just pause it um again you could check it out but these are some of the images and the atmosphere is an attempt to really capture juvie which happens at night it's a night mass these are some of the ai generated blue devils and jab jabs and what these things are i don't know but they're scary they're beautiful and they're imaginative so it's for each of us to decide how we use it how we might use it and then there's the virtual mass where persons can get a taste of what it's like being in carnival so though larry hasn't gone as yet he can go here and get a taste for what it's like listening soccer music watching videos and images on carnival and the feedback only worked thus far has been very positive with some comments mentioning how meaningful the work is someone who is a moko a moko jambi in carnival he said that it made his or her day and then an educator said that this is exactly what i would like to see your country do to highlight a very rich culture as a player maker artist and educator i keep driving the point to my fellow art teachers about the carnival arts and preserving the craft for future generations to improve on your team has done a great honor to be masters of the golden age and the future mass designers to come so that's encouraging so check it out so how can craft and cultural practices reshape computation and how can computation reshape craft and culture by restoring remediating and reconfiguring disappearing histories practices and voices that can shape research practice and education and computation by informing new conceptions and tectonics of and in architecture computational tools and technologies by engaging with our publics through deep understandings of cultures societies histories and technological possibilities and by developing new research frameworks new definitions new practices and publics taking us back to situated computations which ten attempts to ground or field or tools or methods in the social world by acknowledging these things asking that we refuse to remain ignorant of these social structures and it creates a space for participation by those missing in craft and computational practices it resists desegregation and privileging of certain intelligences and skills by building practices that engage multiple ways of seeing knowing and doing and it amplifies this the stories of historically excluded or marginalized groups by deploying them in practice and education and education footy future directions for this work includes testing this framework in other craft and design practices and outside even outside the design field and more closely analyzing implications of these principles on processes of technology design and i think that's it thank you very much [Applause] but uh maybe i can ask one myself while uh they're gathering up the mic so first i thought this was fantastic i really appreciated the clarity and the level of um quality that went into generating the images and particularly at the end and it seems that it's very clear you have a very clear method of teaching wire bending and oops teaching wire bending and teaching how the shapes and variations of designs come out i was wondering how do you characterize the cultural aspects the cultural parts right if you're going to make a grammar out of something you have to characterize it first and then you can quantify it okay so how do you characterize culture how do i characterize class so i i'm not computing culture um i would say i am the grammar has facilitated um finding the important parts of of these cultural practices what is the culture of making in carnival and facilitated new um cultures groups roles and relationships that can happen to further reinforce that culture of making together and doing things together so um and what the research or research has afforded me to do is to unpack these histories and cultures that i could now share with you right so we are all computational designers but i can share these histories and share these cultures with you that had it had i presented my work devoid of that a deep understanding of its importance might have been less so tied to the the work and the process so it's beyond the grammar and these computational things but how it facilitates the sharing of these histories and knowledges just to be clear without characterizing the grammatical i see the cultural parts how do you know because you had said at the end that uh you didn't know what you were getting you mean with the ai part yeah how do you control and control the outcome of what you're generating i didn't want to control anything this is just imagine you know exploratory and the reality of it would be the next steps of attempting to make one of them but this was very much exploratory just to see and be surprised by what might emerge yeah all right oh so oh hi i'm lavender i'm a phd student in the computation group and i'm diego also a phd student at the computation group i can read this question the question is do you think you might be headed towards a fully virtual carnival experience maybe vr and how might craft inform that and how might a virtual immersive carnival change the physical carnival okay i love that question because that will never happen we need um like we need to see people we need to touch people we need we need each other physically right um i think what the virtual carnival does is it it it moves it beyond the geo geography and the specific location of where carnival happens such that you all could experience it without actually going there if there's a pandemic or other things happening right so think of it as extending carnival not replacing carnival and giving other ways of engaging if one has other physical limitations etc but other ways of imagining carnival showcasing carnival experiencing carnival so think of it as a supplement there is another actually like two questions how quickly do students pick up and use the grammar and the other one related to that what was the process of creating the framework of situated computation and will you add anything to it okay so how long did student take so we did those three processes in four weeks let's say five weeks the first week i just had them and this is the students at georgia tech so these were architecture students not not the um art and our teachers and students i should prevent these they were two groups right if we're talking about the georgia tech students these were architecture students five weeks in which they developed these skills that range from traditional to the technological and then we were all able to build this pavilion which took an entire semester so five plus probably six weeks um it was supposed to be a seminar it ended up being something like a studio which was a lot of work for students but they were game they were amazing when it came to the art students that workshop was two days long um two days or one day no one day long um let's say eight hours and that was really just testing and evaluating the grammar yeah what was the second question again the second is uh what was the process of creating the framework of situated computation and will you add anything yeah i think i think things could be added to it the process of it was really a reflection of the things that i've done thus far in addition to readings coming out of sts feminist theory on making things accessible so it really came from a reflection of all that i've done and i think my questions around who we have in our practice in our field and who we don't have and who we need to make spaces for um that was i think was a major driver behind the development of the framework i have a question for you um do you see like any connections from what you show with the carnival ai that is like basically like more visual and how would you or are you thinking about like ways of like establishing like some bridges back to making relating to like physical absolutely so ideally i would love to make some of these imaginary dancing sculptures right that way that that comes into the generation of these cultural practices we have these images and these possible designs and we could invent histories we could invent stories and test the grammar test wire bending at these scales again so um yeah it facilitates more people coming together to test and employ wire bending and explore it and making these structures and what making them a reality do you mean as a way of like decoding what is in the image through your grammar for example absolutely decoding well i like you i like you with decoding but let's say making attempting to make that a reality and what the stories the methods the education or pedagogy all that might go into trying to make that a reality the innovations yeah um i have a question um it relates to a topic that showed up in your introduction and your conclusion the idea that like some skills or types of knowledge um kind of have more privilege in either in society or in a group a group of people um i guess i'd like to hear what you think those are like what types of skills get more privilege what types of knowledge do um and then so that's like i would love to hear more about that and then i'd also like to hear like what the what you see the relationship being between kind of privilege and then like tacit knowledge or explicit knowledge great questions um so for example in regions or cultures where we have these you know coding is everywhere in the u.s now right um in trinidad and tobago that might not be the main way of engaging in design or in communication right it might be through dance it might be through art through making so the knowledges and the knowledge set of engaging might be kind of different right and so for me or anyone to come with a sort of very coding abstract way of thinking and seeing the world in in that setting is going to miss the mark and that's not the goal of the work if i want to make computational design accessible right so how do i make computational design speaking the language of the setting which is more embodied it's fun it's playful it's celebratory um and it's a different way of thinking i mean i struggled with programming when i came to mit the language was just so different for me to take i had to make it real to understand it and so when it comes to that privileging we know when it comes to computation robotics all these things it privileges a certain language that is coded zeros and ones and it's a language that that's you know it takes time for others and so how do we make space how do we as computational designers learn other languages that are spatial embodied corporeal so that we can develop tools and come up with different ways of learning and making that employ knowledges of different sets thank you okay um it's just that you said that um carnival comes from like a sort of a place of release um and emotions and i suppose that you could say that the different crafts are a way of storytelling yeah and so now that you've like produced these new meaningless images with the ai are you trying to head towards another type of story like are you trying to create new methods of storytelling or are you trying to continue the earlier stories new methods of storytelling and i like that you put it that way we could we could think of it as inventing a story through the artifact rather than the story creating the artifact so i like your question because it it asks or it brings the possibilities of making stories to match a possible design but it's not it's not it's not me right it's you know seeing what other people will or might do um so it's not from me when i make or if i try to like make one of them then i can tell you the realities of that process and how the resulting artifact embodies a particular story that one might be trying to tell um but i wouldn't say i'm deciding what it should be it's it's all playing with um it has a voice a voice of celebration of storytelling history culture all of those things yeah okay hi thank you so much for your presentation it's such a joy to see the big picture of your work ever after having seen the bits and pieces so i'm not an architect i'm not a designer i'm an anthropologist and so my question for you is if you could um speak a little bit about the ways that computational design or kind of this process that you've been engaging in around the these making practices um what it does to for attribution of um of the work and a sense kind of the relationship of different publics to the work so on one hand you know you showed the reactions to the ai exhibit and folks being like you know you've done us proud and you're doing something for us now and in the future so it seems like there's a sense of um ownership around it that's being put forward but at the same time the grammars um make the craft or at least some logics of the craft available to a broader public and at the same time the grammars are named after specific people and you're also talking about trinidad carnival so there's lots of different kind of entities that are connecting to the practice and i'm curious about how you think about what you're doing and how your research sort of redefines maybe the relationship of different groups or different individuals to one another and to the practice i don't know if that makes sense yeah thank you i like that question um so yes i i like the grammar is named after albert bailey and stephen derrick because i studied them and steven derek learned from albert bailey so it's you know way of honoring them um and when it comes to the grammar opening up the work um i like that question because i'm able to my response to that is always it's not about the thing that is made whether my students in georgia tech or somewhere else at mit whether they make artifacts using the grammar i'm happy about that but it's about in the culture of carnival these cultures wherever they may be around the world the fact that this craft may be dying it means that these communities these histories these people getting together that is not happening so it's about what the grammar facilitates in the context of carnival and in trinidad and tobago it facilitates people coming back together making together which currently we don't have much of as carnival has become very commercialized right so it's about what the grammar facilitates that being the social and cultural aspect of mentoring communities coming together cooperating that social value is what it gives to these communities for for another community it might do something else yeah okay there's one question is have more traditional makers you spoke to in trinidad seen the computational work what do they think i will also add that also have people that is are related to the carnival also have seen those images that you produce with the that were produced by the algorithm what do they think okay so the grammar part yes i took it uh when i was finished developing it so i think after my thesis maybe um i uh went back to churn that i showed it to all the wire benders who i gave them copies of it and so i discussed it with them and but bailey he said he's like yeah i i understand this i know what this is and um robot his name excuse me right now but robert um robert said ooh this might help me yeah this might help me because it's about tinkering and knowing what to do versus seeing it laid out in front of you so they were appreciative of the practice and again i'm i'm tryna i'm from trinidad and tobago but i was not of that culture of making in carnival so i needed entry for them to trust me and share all this with me right um when it comes to the ai generated images um and the project let's say feedback has been really supportive really good um and it's the first project i feel i've done that has touched the ground um the other things i've done have been kind of in the bubble of academia and this project like literally touched the ground in terms of people being able to engage and see these things we had workshops and so it it it means a lot and reception has been good well thank you so much i uh i have to say it was really a beautiful talk and a lot of really beautiful images and we can't wait to see what comes with this and then in the upcoming years okay so stay in touch thank you very well thank you [Applause] you

2021-10-06 04:16

Other news