(thoughtful music) - [Announcer] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) - Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director, and today we present the two person design practice CW&T with Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy.

Today's event is presented with support from the Design Core Detroit and series presenting partners, Detroit Public Television and PBS Books and media partner Michigan Public.

Just a few announcements before we get started.

This time of year, there is lots of great student work to be seen, so I encourage all of you.

There's the MFA Thesis Exhibition that's at the Stamps Gallery right now.

Lots of great work to be seen there.

And there is the student curated Lasom Blache at the Street Gallery in the Stamp School, and everyone should go see that too.

And then another visual feast is upon us next week.

The 62nd edition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival opens here Tuesday night.

It's not to be missed.

There'll be a big party, there'll be lots of experimental work to be seen.

You should go to the Ann Arbor Film Festival website and get your tickets posthaste, aafilmfest.org.

And this year we'll showcase lots of local makers in and amongst the annual international slate.

And one hot tip, Stamps School professor, Phoebe Gloeckner.

Her film will be screening here Wednesday evening, so get your tickets to that.

I believe it's in the nine o'clock show, might be seven.

Check out the website.

Reminder to silence your cell phones.

We will have a Q&A here today directly following the talk.

There's a microphone at the end of this aisle, a microphone, the end there.

Come on down and line up at the microphones directly at the end and we can ask some questions.

A little bit of background on our guests.

CW&T is the two person design practice of Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy with backgrounds in architecture, film, and computer science.

The duo met at NYU where they began their scale and medium agnostic approach to design.

Since 2009, CW&T's work has spanned from interactive software to human scaled tools that enhance their relationship to work, life and time.

Their practice centers around a process of sketching, prototyping, testing, writing code, machining parts, and building each addition themselves to assess their intuitions around improving everyday experiences.

Sharing this process with community is essential to their practice as they cultivate an ethos of openness through teaching and open source software and hardware.

This pedagogy extends into their home studio where they host office hours and lend a hand or offer insights to anyone who's interested in figuring out how to make something of themselves.

Most prestigious CW&T is the recipient of the 2022 National Design Award for Product Design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Please welcome, Che-Wei and Taylor.

(audience applauding) - Okay.

- Thank you.

Thank you for that super warm welcome.

Thank you, all for coming out here and spending some time with us.

Let's begin.

- Let's begin.

- Hi, I'm Che-Wei.

- I'm Taylor.

Hi.

- Hi.

And together we're CW&T.

- Yes.

So we're a two person design practice, but we're also a family.

Our kids, Pau and Tree are.

- They're somewhere.

- Somewhere here.

- We lost them.

- One of them backstage, one of them is reading.

They watched us rehearse this.

We forced them last night.

So thank you all for being here.

We always like to start when we give presentations, not by talking about two things, not by talking about things that we make, but by showing you as an introduction to kind of who we are two things that we like.

So Che-Wei's gonna talk first about his chosen object.

- Yes, so my chosen object, there's many things I love, but if I really had to pick one, it's the thing on the left.

It's a moon dust brush.

There's a brush designed by NASA for the Apollo mission.

So before astronauts reenter the lunar lander while they're playing on the moon, they have to dust some moon regolith off their spacesuit.

And in order to do that, NASA spent an enormous amount of effort, time, and money to design this brush, 'cause this thing is designed so that it can articulate and it's like designed perfectly, overly engineered and like so thoughtful that I think it's kind of like a state of the art over-engineered object.

And that's why I love this thing.

- And the piece on your right is an artwork by the artist Jean Tinguely, the Swiss artist.

And after digging into his work for a little while, I came across this series of work called, Radio Drawings.

And what they are are two dimensional compositions of the insides of regular radios.

I like to imagine them all, you know, there's about 30 of them that I've come across.

I like to imagine them all installed in a gallery.

It's not a very well documented piece.

I actually don't even know if it's called, Radio Drawings, officially, but I like to think of them as that.

And yeah, it's one of my favorite works of art.

- So a little bit more about how we met.

We started in, we met in the fall of 2007 at grad school.

And in the beginning Taylor just put me in the friend zone.

She was like, "I don't really like you," so I was like, "Let's just work together."

So, that's kind of how our journey started.

We started working together and now we have a family and kids and still work together.

It's true.

So yeah, during our time.

So, grad school is kind of a special time.

You can explore lots of ideas.

And I think in retrospect, looking back on it, it's a while ago we kind of got to explore and planted a lot of seeds of some of the ideas that we're exploring now.

So we wanna show you a little bit of the stuff we were doing back then.

This piece is called 3.16 billion cycles, which is the number of times as little motor has to spin to run for a hundred years.

So this is a hundred year mechanical alarm clock.

So that motor's just spinning really fast, it's gets bullied, you know, geared down to different time cycles.

So some of these discs spin at like once per minute.

That really big one spins once every month on average.

And then there's one that spins a once every year, once every 10 years.

And then that really big ring that's hanging on this whole thing with that crack in the middle is a ring with a hundred notches on it.

And so this thing just spins really slowly and then after a hundred years are up it falls off.

So it's kind of like a hundred year alarm clock.

And that's what that is.

- [Audience Member] Where is that?

- So, I made a few of them.

One is in my parents' house and then there's two more that are in our studio and then there's one that some guy was like, "I want to buy this thing."

And he paid for a deposit a long time ago, like in 2009 and they never came to pick it up.

So, we still have it.

- [Taylor] He wrote though, like last year.

- Yeah, he did.

And then he doesn't.

Yeah, anyways.

- Yeah.

It has his name on it.

- Yeah.

- So this is a piece that's called, 1bit 1hertz cpu.

And what you're seeing is you can imagine it like a really simple, very slow computer.

Whereas usually our computers have a clock that process data, process our inputs at around 2.67 gigahertz, which is around 2 billion times a second.

Here we have a clock with a single input, which is a light switch.

Our clock rotates, it's a one hertz AC motor.

So the clock samples your input once every second and then your output is a single bit, which is shown as a light switch.

So it could take up to- - Light bulb.

- Yeah, sorry, a light bulb.

Thank you.

So it could take up to a second for your light to, for the input to get relayed to output for the processing to happen.

Da, da, da, click.

- [Che-Wei] Press harder.

- [Taylor] Press harder.

Uh-oh, hold on, I have to go back.

- [Che-Wei] Oh, too fast.

- [Taylor] Too fast.

- Okay, so some more origin stories.

So 2009 we graduate and we really like working with each other, so we decided immediately that we would just start our own studio, whatever it takes.

And we got really lucky.

We happened to find this tiny studio space.

It's the label on the door was BA-501.

And BA stands for bathroom alcove.

So it's literally a bathroom closet, an oversized bathroom closet that we managed to rent for $400.

And the same day we also met our first client who was like, "I'll pay you 500 bucks to build my website."

So we were like, "Cool, we have the funds to start a studio."

And that's kind of how we got rolling.

Yeah, so that's our first studio.

- So in the beginning Che-Wei and I we pretty much said yes to every single job that came our way.

A lot of them were little software projects like making websites for people.

But back in the day it was kind of like a thing to do big screen mobile interactive software installations either for big companies or for events.

This is one of our earliest projects that we did actually over winter break in grad school.

It's a custom vjing set up for the Obama inaugural ball that was put on by, The Huffington Post.

And it was really fun to write.

- Yeah, that's a giant laptop screen.

- And we were kind of, we were in the background hitting a keyboard while we played all different types of media on these screens.

- So fast forward a few years, about 12 years ago we decided to merge our home and studio life, so we shoved every machine we had at the time into the basement.

And over the years we've amassed even more machines.

So there's a little tour of our basement workshop.

That's a plastic injection molding machine.

- [Taylor] It looks bigger on the wide angle.

- [Che-Wei] Oh yeah, that's the CNC mill for metal machining.

- [Taylor] Way bigger than lifestyle.

- We have a lathe.

Anyways, it'll keep going through.

But yeah, it's taken a few years to amass this together and people often ask like, "What's your life-work balance like?"

And our answer always is like we, "It doesn't exist."

We are literally blending it together.

We're not actually even trying to define a line.

Work and life are the same.

Our kids are involved in the things that we make.

We write off many meals because our kids are like, "What are we gonna name that project?"

And we're like, "Sweet.

This is now our work meal."

(audience laughing) Sewing machine.

I think it's legal.

Photography set up.

Yeah, we do some electronics here, not super hardcore, but we build stuff and then we'll see.

Yeah, this is our living space.

So, this is where everything happens.

That little kitchen island is where we eat, lay out projects sometimes that's my little office nook where I stand and do work.

And then a few years ago, I think three years ago we got really lucky and our neighbor built out their entire garage, like built out their backyard and we got to ramp that.

So our little commute is through our backyard into this other space.

And here we do a lot of assembly.

So we get all the parts from different vendors, assemble them and then pack and ship from here.

So if you've ever bought stuff from us or if you do in the future, this is where it all is getting shipped from.

- So over the past around 15 years, we've been super lucky and we've been able to transition from making software projects for other people to pretty much only making projects that things that we want for ourselves and our work.

We're gonna show you kind of, some of the things are a little bit, I don't know, I won't say mundane 'cause I don't think they're mundane, but they're like everyday tools and objects that we find personally interesting or useful in our lives.

Things that we wanted for ourselves.

So this is a project called, Pen Type-C.

It's one of our favorite writing implements.

I have one on me right now.

It's a machine bookmark pen with a little clip.

This is Pen Type-B.

We do custom anodizing also in-house, custom titanium anodizing.

This is 55 66 88.

It's a phone stand set at three different angles for easy documentation.

- [Che-Wei] Phone furniture.

- Phone furniture.

This is a jump rope.

This is a mechanical pencil, it's also a bookmark one.

I really wanted to make a mechanical pencil for our children so that's why we made that.

And this is called M.R Tape Dispenser, which stands for multi radius tape dispenser.

And it's made out of a folded sheet of stainless steel with machined.

I always forget that tear - [Che-Wei] Serrations - Serrations.

Serrations.

Thank you.

It's doing, oh, hold on.

- Yeah.

- I'm gonna have to go back one.

- Ooh.

So yeah, over the years, we think a lot about like what are we doing, what are we making?

And one of the things that we've realized over the years that we're I think more like a band than a brand, I think a lot of startups are trying to like figure out their brand and we don't really have a logo.

We kind of have like an ID system, but we actually don't have a logo.

And one of the things that we think about a lot is, or the way we kind of arrive at projects is just living life.

Like we're not actually trying to chase a certain niche or we don't do focus groups.

Not to say those are bad, it's just not how we do things.

We kind of just like live our lives and ideas just pop out of random places and we sketch a lot and prototype a lot and we just try to make things.

And then once in a while those things become part of a release.

Like we're like, "Okay, this is good enough to release to the world."

Kind of like have a band just like jams on stuff and they're like, "Oh, this song's pretty good, let's release it."

And so I think that's, we feel very connected to that kind of approach to releasing stuff.

And I think it's very much like, Oh, we never know really like when we put something out, whether people are gonna receive it well or not.

Usually people, some people hate it and some people love it and that's okay, we're just gonna keep jamming and keep making stuff.

So, we wanna show you a bunch of projects.

Projects that I think we continue to aspire to make.

So yeah, you'll see.

Things that are more weird.

So yeah, we're gonna start with this one.

This one is called, Time Since Launch.

And it's a little device that I think is weird.

It doesn't really fit into any product category and which is why maybe we like it so much.

It's a device that just counts from zero to a million days and it always shows you how many seconds, minutes, hours and days it's been since the moment you triggered this device.

So here it says it's three minutes and six seconds since someone launched it, so not very long.

- Since I launched it and took the photo.

(chuckles) - Yeah.

Okay, next slide.

- Oh sorry.

- So I want to give you a little backstory on how we arrived at this device.

So there's this really beautiful thing that happened in 1962.

I don't know if any of you were around for this.

I was not.

John Glenn, this is John Glenn approaching his space capsule.

He was launched into space to become the first American to orbit earth.

And the cool thing about this thing among many other things is that he wore a 12 hour stopwatch on his wrist.

So most astronauts today wear a watch 'cause they're kind of synchronized with Houston.

But John Glenn wore a 12 hour stopwatch.

And the reason he wore this watch, which was made custom for him, like a strap that fits around his spacesuit and pressure suit is so that he can be in sync and count how much time has passed since the moment he launches.

So as soon as he launches, he actually set it 20 seconds ahead, so that 20 seconds after launch he can hit start and then be in perfect sync with Houston, Cape Canaveral and also many tracking stations around the planet.

So I dunno if you guys understand this, but like if a thing is orbiting earth, you need antennas pointing at that thing to maintain communication.

So there's actually all these tracking stations around the planet that are pointing at antennas in their little wedge of the sky to make sure John Glenn maintains radio contact.

And that's kind of cool, right?

All these people around the world on this little temporary time zone.

But on top of that there are 60 million people who watch this event on TV live or listened on the radio.

And I find that so I don't know meaningful that we can all share like at this temporary time zone for just a few hours and that we all can kind of relate to it.

So that's where the idea came from.

I was like, "I think it'd be really cool if we can make temporary time zones like that."

And it doesn't take much to do it.

You kind of just, you just need two stopwatches.

Like you can just break out your phone or your watch if it has that function and just be like, "Okay, let's go."

Kind of like how bank robbers do it when they wanna rob a bank, right?

It's very, very straightforward.

And so one of the first devices we made is this thing.

This is originally stuck together, like it's a single device and it's designed so that when you break it apart it, they both start counting.

And so I can hold onto one, I can give one to you and then we walk away, we part ways but we still maintain this thing that continuously points to that moment in time when we decided to be like, "Okay, now's our time zero."

And from that point on we have this special time zone that nobody else gets to share with us.

When we make projects like this, like that idea came pretty quickly and then we prototype it and we usually get to a prototype, a functional prototype in a few days.

Doesn't take a lot of effort, but it's a huge hurdle to go from like a little functional prototype all the way to something that's manufacturable and performs in a way that we feel is necessary.

And in this case we really hit a wall, like it was a hurdle at first.

We're like, "Oh, maybe we'll get over this."

And the problem was we couldn't get this thing to last for more than a few months on the power draw that it was pulling, so the batteries would run out.

We tried making it using solar power, but then if you put this in your drawer, it's not gonna work after a while, even if the batteries kick in.

We thought about harvesting atmospheric pressure differences, which is a way you can harvest energy, but that is also not fully reliable.

So we literally just gave up, we're like, This thing, we're never gonna turn into a product, 'cause we can't figure out how to harvest energy in the right way.

Right, yeah.

Of course it's not- - I dunno.

- Excellent.

- That's good.

- So, putting projects on the shelf is also, a lot of people ask us how do you decide which projects to work on and which projects to release into the world?

Putting projects on a shelf is something that we do all the time behind the scenes.

And in our house we're constantly making things and over the years I've kind of found a lot of comfort in just being okay with now is not the right time.

I'm not gonna force this thing into the world without that extra piece that really makes it come together.

And in this case it felt really bad to launch 100 or 1 million day launch clock that only lasted for four months on its batteries, so it was a no-go for a really long time until one day a friend came over and brought his friend over, his friend's name's Josh.

And Josh saw this project and he immediately was like, "This is cool, I can help you build this thing."

And so Josh is one of our most beloved friends, he's an angel and a very brilliant engineer and we worked with him and he got the electronics down, so that the power draw on them is so low that if you literally just breathe on it, the humidity from your breath will cause it to draw slightly more power.

And right now time since launch, it runs on two L91 Energizer batteries, which are the best batteries that you can buy as a civilian.

And they'll last for 150 years.

It'll last for 150 years on those two AA batteries, which is pretty cool we think.

- Also has backup.

- Oh yeah.

- So yeah, if and when the batteries run low in 150 years, there's a little symbol that comes up that's like, "Hey, low batteries."

- Few years left, yes.

- And then you have a few years to find some replacement AA batteries.

And then when you take the old AA batteries out, the backup capacitors kick in, so the clock is still actually running and then you can put in the new batteries and then you're set to go for probably another 150 years or more depending on what kind of batteries you have in 150 years.

- So when we first conceived of this project, we really liked the idea of putting this ability in everybody's hands to create and elevate moments of personal significance.

And it turns out a lot of people use this thing for weddings or to mark significant moments in their lives like the birth of a child, changing careers.

But some people sort of in the same way that we've intended it will launch theirs.

They'll get it and they'll be like, "This thing is cool.

It's Tuesday morning, and now this is a significant moment for me."

And so I like that people can kind of take ownership over moments through this device.

- This next project is called, Earth Clock, it's maybe self-explanatory.

It is a clock that zooms in and out of places on earth that look like different numbers.

So this one currently says 16 and then colon, I think that's a zero that's coming, o five.

So yeah, four o five in the afternoon.

So every minute it just keeps zooming in and outta places on earth.

And people wonder, "How did you do it?"

Well it's not a, this is old, this is from 2011, so pre-machine learning.

So, all the places on earth in the database are picked by hand.

So people are just, or I started just like scouring the internet or scouring the maps, just being like what can I find that looks like this number?

But now lots of people from the internet have contributed places, so now the database is really big, a few thousand locations and yeah, it just like randomly picks one for each number.

- I wanna add a little anecdote.

Yeah, so we have a custom screen for this in our house and it doesn't run all the time, but we had it off for a few years and I guess like spent a lot of time not paying attention to the database.

So when we first turned the clock back on a few months ago, or if we haven't turned it on for a long time, you can actually see geological changes because the satellite imagery updates, so your zeros will look a little bit different, things aren't green anymore, so you don't really see a defined number as much as it used to.

- Yeah.

- The world is- - Crazy.

Yeah, I've seen stadiums disappear and also lakes have disappeared.

Glaciers also disappearing.

Yeah, it's kind of scary.

But anyways.

- So this is a project called, Solid State Watch.

It's one of our favorite projects, but it's also a project that a lot of people hate on the internet.

Is it gonna do it?

No.

Yeah, jumped in.

So this project revolves around this watch right here, it's called the Casio F-91W.

Has anybody seen this watch before?

Yes.

So this is a 35-year-old piece of technology originally designed back in 1989 by Casio.

And there aren't many pieces of technology that are still around and as ubiquitously available today that have gone relatively unchanged in 35 years than this.

I can't really think of anything else to be honest.

And it's pretty good.

I mean it has accuracy of plus or minus 30 seconds a month, which it could be off by at most six minutes a year.

And the battery lasts for over six years, 13 years, sorry.

So this is the digital electronic movement that's inside the watch.

And me and Che-Wei kind of fell in love with this thing.

Like, we really consider it just this beautiful piece of technology and we have lots of different watches that we've tried making over the years, but when we came across this one, we decided, hey, like let's just figure out how to make a watch casing for this movement.

And so we experimented a bunch and eventually what we ended up with was making these 3D printed cases for the watch movement, transparent cases and then casting them in resin.

So when you order a solid state watch, we make these all in house by the way.

We make about 15 of them every week.

And when people order them, you order it by selecting your time zone and there's no buttons on the watch to change your time, change your adjust time over the years, there's no access to the light anymore or the alarm clock.

Like I said, a lot of people hate this project because we took a good thing and we made it worse.

(audience laughing) The date is covered by that little orange dot because the movement doesn't adjust for leap years, and so it's gonna be wrong after some time.

And we like to think of this project in the same way that you think about the way that insects are cast or not cast, but they become preserved in in amber.

Yes, so it's a way for us really we're recognizing and we're celebrating and elevating what we consider this really beautiful piece of technology.

Over time, time is gonna drift but by buying it, you knowingly consent to that process.

And that experience of technological decay you live with it every day, and eventually it just stops working.

- Okay, next project, this is called, Timed Capsule with a d on it.

It's a time capsule that unlocks itself after a certain amount of time.

It's made out of decommissioned scuba tanks.

- [Taylor] Oh sorry, sorry.

- So we take old scuba tanks that you can't use anymore.

We cut off the top and then we have this machine top that has all the electronics and the hardware to lock itself.

And the electronics are there, so that you can set how long you want to keep it locked for.

And this came out of this thing that we do with our kids.

We'll do it if we have another kid.

But anyways, we have two kids.

And on their third birthday we had all their friends or our friends and family write letters to them to put in the time capsule and open 15 years later when they're 18.

So, we didn't have this device around but we have like little prototypes of a time capsule that are stuffed with letters that they're gonna open when they're 18.

And we really like this practice of kind of producing nostalgia for yourself or like just, yeah, just the idea that you could preserve something and open it later.

So, I saw actually there's a time capsule on campus.

There's probably more.

But anyways, we saw one too today that's gonna open in 22118 I think or something like that, like hundreds of hundred years from now.

Which none of us are gonna be around for.

But I think we're more interested in how do you make something for yourself that you get to open and get this like insane feeling of nostalgia that almost feels like a drug.

It's like a drug you can take just by putting stuff away and then opening it.

Anyways, that's why we're making this device and we just finished making our first one.

It's still a prototype and it got sent to the UK Science Museum where they're gonna stuff it with letters from kids.

And well, that one's gonna stay closed for a hundred years.

So, not for us.

(Taylor chuckling) Oh, this one.

Herring Blade.

So this is a tool that I carry around all the time, although I don't have it on me right now.

It's a super minimal utility blade.

And this has a little story of how we came up with this.

- [Taylor] Sorry.

- So I used to teach at Pratt in the architecture department and maybe students are familiar with this thing where you walk up to a shared tool cabinet and you open it and none of the tools that you need are in there 'cause it's a shared cabinet.

So that happened, we're like, "Oh, let's go make some inflatables," and we needed a whole bunch of blades to cut it with and we open up the drawer and there's no blade holders, just raw blades.

So in a scramble we just assembled whatever we had around to turn it into a blade holder.

And that made me start thinking, "Okay, what is the absolute minimum you need to have something hold a utility blade and still make it useful and functional."

And so after many, many prototypes, we tried making this.

Click, please.

- Oh sorry, sorry.

- So yeah, this is Herring Blade.

It has no mechanical parts other than the blade itself.

It uses a little magnet to kind of lock the blade in the position it needs to be in.

And that's it.

That's what this does.

- So this project comes out of a curiosity about technology as a medium for creative expression.

Specifically an interest in what it means to express yourself with a medium that's not only hard to see but also difficult to understand.

So this is a series of physical lecture notes that were developed as a teaching tool originally for the school for poetic computation where we teach occasionally.

And so the idea behind this is to take students on a journey from the single transistor as a single unit of computational material all the way to a functional computer and sort of weave that story as we go.

This low level approach to learning electronics is certainly not for everyone, but for me there's something really beautiful about making visible and giving access to the material world inside computers.

So, there's six boards in total?

Yeah, I guess it doesn't really matter.

There's six board in total.

The first one teaches the basic anatomy of a printed circuit board, you go over an LED circuit.

The second board you learn about the transistor and you build logic gates from transistors.

The third one you learn about integrated circuits.

You build with integrated circuits that are in fact logic gates within them, simple logic gates.

And then the fourth and fifth board are labeled memory and time.

And we start to introduce the idea of feedback and time-based circuits.

We build one bit of memory, we also build an oscillator, we build oscillators which can produce sound.

And then the last one we build our own programmable microcontroller.

(board beeping) And one of the most fun parts of this class is kind of putting them all together and students realize that they've built a sequencer and a synthesizer and we get to play and make great sense.

Okay.

- [Che-Wei] This next project is called, Superlocal.

It's a clock, and this has a little backstory.

So there was a time a few years ago where we were all at home all the time and we would be up at night doing all the work, 'cause during the day we were hanging out with the kids 'cause we had to, 'cause they were home all day every day.

And we had this problem where they were waking us up way too early and we happened to be prototyping a clock for a friend, so we had this thing already around.

This clock happens to have a 24 hour movement, so that hand just moves once, does one revolution per day instead of two.

And so we just put a sticker on it, there's a blue sticker on there and we told them, hey, when the hand passes the blue dot, you're allowed to get out of bed and when the hand passes the orange dot, that's when you're allowed to come wake us up.

And it worked.

It was kind of amazing.

Like immediately it worked and we realized, "Oh, this makes sense."

Time is so abstract, we have to like teach them how to read clocks.

But if you just put dots where you want them, time makes more sense.

And so we made this thing Superlocal, so it's a clock with nothing on it.

There's little dimples, but those dimples are there, so that you could put white magnets where you want to mark events in your day or I don't know, whatever you want, things that are important to you in a daily cycle.

And one of the things that's super revealing to me, at least when I first put in dots is just how much of a day is taken up by sleep.

It's kind of crazy but maybe you guys are well aware of it.

Yeah, it's an interesting thing to see what your day looks like.

So one way to use it is kind of just like visualize your day.

But we've also used it in ways where it's like, I want my day to be this way.

And you kind of put dots where you want to shift your day.

Maybe you don't wanna spend so much time answering emails, so you shift that thought a little bit earlier to be like, okay, after the hand passes this dot, no more email or whatever you want.

Yeah.

- So about seven or so years ago, Che-Wei and I decided that, we're constantly trying to think about, not constantly, but every once in a while we try to think about what we do.

A lot of times for circumstances like this when we have to talk about our work, which we're not awesome at, but we're getting better.

And so we thought that it would be fun to sort of figure out if we have a set of guiding principles that we don't strictly adhere to.

But we were just curious if they exist.

And so we wrote a bunch down seven years ago and it's kind of nice because every so often we go back and visit them just to kind of check and see if they still make sense to us.

And they kind of do, which is nice.

To be clear also we're not revisiting every project and making sure that we're following these principles intentionally.

They're much more in the background than that.

So, the first principle is stay small.

It's the two of us and our studio assistant Colin, who handles most of our shipping and our fulfillment.

Our shipping is fulfillment.

Our fulfillment and our assembly.

We intentionally wanna stay small because we're already responsible for ourselves and our kids.

And adding more people to our business will definitely change the way we make decisions and will kind of pressure us to probably make projects that we wouldn't necessarily make if we weren't also needing to think about the livelihood of another person.

So we wanna be very careful about growing and taking on more responsibility because we know it will affect our work and the choices that we make.

We also like to move through things relatively quickly and we work really well as a team.

And once you add more people, things kind of get blocked up, tend to.

We're an effective team.

- We're anti gremlins.

Yeah, we're like- - I took that word outta the slide.

- We're anti boardroom design gremlins.

I don't know if that makes sense.

But design by boardroom is, yeah, very not us.

Anyways.

Yeah, this is love over money.

I think a lot of people probably practice this way as well, but we're very much like this.

We sometimes take on client work and it's usually because we either love the person that we're doing the work for or we love the work itself.

We absolutely do not do client work just for money, right?

- Yeah.

- No, we don't.

- And we also, in terms of our own practice, like when we make products, like we said earlier, we often shelves things and one of the things we are kind of true to is that we never try to push a product out just because we need to make money.

We do need to make money.

But we always figure out a way.

We'll never just like put something out and rush it out 'cause we think it's gonna produce income.

- So this slide means different things to us in many different contexts.

So one thing that we like to do is we feel like when somebody buys something that we make for them to actually feel like they own it, they need to have some sort of insight.

Both just by seeing it into how this thing was built and an understanding of how it was designed, how it might break.

So one thing that we think about a lot with our work is legibility and making sure that these things actually make sense to people who pick them up, who own them.

Because you really do feel like you own something once you also own an understanding of how that thing came into the world.

Yeah, that's it.

Do you have anything else?

- Yeah, I think it should say like share everything.

Like we're very, we have no secret projects.

So later in the Q&A, if you wanna ask us anything we will actually answer anything.

Like, we'll tell you how much money we make.

Like we have really no secrets.

Yeah, 'cause it kind of doesn't make sense I think for us.

Yeah, we're happy to share things 'cause I think we benefited a lot from our community of people sharing information and tips with us, and so we just want to keep paying it forward and share as much as we can.

Oh, buying lottery tickets.

This is one of our most important mantras.

We buy so many lottery tickets, not literal lottery tickets.

We treat every project, every sketch we make like it's a lottery ticket, 'cause there's no correlation between how much time or effort we spend on a project versus how well it's received.

And so every time all we're trying to do is just put more stuff out, 'cause it's really impossible to tell.

Partly because we don't do focus groups and things like that.

That's probably why people do that.

But anyways, that's how we do it 'cause we can't, so we can't do focus groups so we just like keep putting stuff out and treat them like they're lottery tickets.

- Make what you want.

So we'll never make anything that we don't want for ourselves and we don't want in our home with our family around our children.

It's a pretty simple one.

Yeah, we're also not really, we're not dedicated to any particular way of making.

If an idea comes up, we'll never stop just because, "Oh, that things seem really hard."

And we're very fortunate I think that we live in a time and we live with an understanding that if there is something that we need to make, if we do need to figure out some new material process or learn some new skill in order to make something happen, we have the internet and we have the resources to figure that stuff out.

And so does everybody I think.

- The proof is in the prototype.

This is also maybe like a very important mantra in our studio.

We have our entire workshop set up, so that we can go from a sketch.

So we're often just like sketching out an idea and then by the end of the day we have a functional prototype.

Like that's the ideal scenario.

It's not always a single day, but it is often very, very quick.

And the reason we have it set it up that way is so that we can prove to ourselves that whatever idea we came up with is actually worth continuing working on.

And so in effect it's just proof for us.

We're just like, "Let's just prove to ourselves that that idea is even a good idea."

And one thing we try not to do, or actually we never do for ourselves, we might do it for other people, is to produce renderings.

I think renderings are a trap.

It's like a drug.

You can kind of trick yourself into thinking, "Oh, that thing works, it looks great too."

And then ice for me.

And then when it comes time to making the thing, we're just like, "Ooh, I don't really like it or it doesn't, it didn't work the way I thought it was gonna work."

And so we're very just in our studio, I know lots of people here render stuff.

I used to actually make a living rendering things.

So, it's just not for us.

But we always are going straight to functional prototype just to be like, "Okay, is it actually gonna work?"

And then we will figure stuff out later.

- Yeah, I think also something to keep in mind is that if you do render something, don't think of it as a substitute to making the actual thing.

And sometimes that high you get from seeing it rendered will kind of make you be a little bit lazy and not do the other steps.

And I think that just be aware there are different things and they will give you different things.

Make it good.

So we're a very small studio as we've said many times in this talk.

And that means that everything comes on us, which includes there's always gonna be unpredictable, stressful things that happen, especially during production and fabrication of things.

Things will go wrong.

But we take it upon ourselves to really make a conscious effort not to cut corners when we make choices about manufacturing.

Things go wrong still all the time.

But when we start cutting corners, all of that stress and all of those things that go wrong, it's us whose lives it affects, it's nobody else's.

And we would rather pay more money for a thing and make it in a way that is really proper rather than deal with the consequences which are stressful.

- Yeah, it's like making it the right way the first time instead of making it the right way the fourth time.

- Doesn't always work out.

- Yeah.

- I think it's gonna change, I clicked it.

- Make it last.

We are so far on this side of the camp when it comes to value engineering.

I think a lot of products these days and for a while have like a value engineering part of it.

And nothing against that.

I think a lot of products do need to be value engineered.

But we're on the other end of the spectrum where we're like, "No, we're not gonna value engineer this.

We're gonna over-engineer it to make sure it lasts more than your lifetime."

I think the part of the problem with value engineering things is that you design and manufacture in such a way where it's just gonna survive long enough, either the long enough for the product to be useful or maybe long enough for the warranty to expire, which I think is the worst case.

We just wanna make stuff that lasts so long that you're gonna keep it around.

It will never reenter the waste stream is sort of what we're aiming for.

So instead of making something that's recyclable and requires more energy to get back into becoming something useful, we just wanna make things that just last forever.

So you're like, "I'm never gonna throw this thing away.

I'm not gonna think about recycling this thing 'cause it's just gonna stay with me or get passed down generations and so on."

- [Taylor] Keep it real.

I don't remember what we were supposed to say for keeping it real.

- [Che-Wei] Ooh, I know what I supposed- - Oh, I know what I'm supposed to say.

So, we're a small studio.

We also are responsible for doing a lot of our customer service emails and which means that when people understand that we are a small business and when we make that visible to people, it's more fun and more manageable to answer customer service emails.

So, when it feels like somebody is writing to a big company and maybe like we presented ourselves on the internet in a way that we're hiding and pretending to be a big company, we tend to get more emails that are angry and not really directed at humans way.

- Yeah, it's no fun.

- It's no fun.

So we wanna be very transparent about who we are as people and we have a really nice relationship with the supporters of our work and we're very grateful for that.

- I have a little pet peeve that's related to this.

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah, one of my pet peeves, I hope nobody does this, but maybe some of you guys do this.

I sometimes I look at student websites and student portfolios and at the end, at the bottom of the website they're like CEO of blah.

And I'm like, "No, you're not.

You're not a CEO of your own studio.

You're just a studio.

Let's be honest."

And so that's, yeah, I know.

We're trying to practice that too.

We're like, "Hey, we're just two people."

We're not trying to act like we are a giant corporation, 'cause it's not good for anybody.

- Sorry.

- We have one more.

- Two more slides.

- Weird principle.

It's just a question mark.

And this is just to say that if you were watching us in studio, like if there were.. Or if you were just like looking through a window peering at our daily studio existence, you'd be like, "Oh my God, these guys are idiots.

They have no idea what they're doing."

Just like fumbling, breaking things, like nothing's working.

We only recently figured out how to do taxes.

- It's very messy, it's very messy.

(chuckles) - It's just like, it's such a, we're just, we have no idea what we're doing.

And so, we're 15 years into studio.

I don't know how long.

Yeah, a while.

And we're still trying to figure it out and I think it's just gonna be that way.

And I think that's something we've realized over the years too.

It's just like nobody knows what they're doing.

Everybody that we think knows what they're doing, we've realized, "Oh, you actually have no idea what you're doing either."

And so we're I think comfortable in the state now of being like, "Oh, we're never gonna know how to do things properly.

We're just gonna keep fumbling."

So, that's all we're doing.

- Say we wanted to leave you with homework.

- Yeah, I have some homework for you guys.

It's a very simple exercise.

It's something that we do every few years, Whenever, usually when Taylor gets super stressed out and starts breaking down.

So, it's a form of relieving some stress, I would say.

- Gaining perspective.

- Yeah, gaining some perspective.

So the exercise is to break out your sketchbook or notebook and you just draw a circle.

And this circle represents an average day.

So imagine, 12 o'clock is at the top, like 12 noon is at the top, 12 midnight is at the bottom.

And you just want to like slice out sections of that pie and figure out how much time you on average dedicate to different things, right?

So everybody has like a sleep wedge, you might have some like a work wedge, class time, whatever, exercise and you kind of just like lay it all out as close to reality as possible, your current state.

And then the second part of the exercise is to now draw another circle right next to it, to the right.

And in this circle you're just gonna fill out your ideal day.

So what does that, you know, whatever you drew on the left, you know now you know that's what your average day looks like.

Now just like tweak it to be like, okay, this is how I actually want my day to be.

And I think we've done this exercise a few times and for each of us it actually does something different.

Like mine are relatively similar, so it's like a tweak.

And so it's like, "Oh, it's like an aspirational thing."

I'll be like, "Oh, I wanna change a few things to arrive at this other thing."

I think for Taylor, I don't know, it's like a.

- It's just a nice way of taking inventory and getting really an objective.

People feel overwhelmed often.

And I think that this is a really nice objective way of seeing actually how much time you have.

And often it might reveal that you actually don't have that much more time to spend on the things that you'd rather spend time on, which could feel very frustrating.

But at least like you can concretely see it and stop beating yourself up.

- Yeah, I also recently learned that I have aphantasia.

- We're done.

- Okay - Time's up.

(laughs) - Oh, time's up.

(audience laughing) All right, if you guys have questions, come talk to us.

(audience applauding) - It is, time's up.

- Okay.

- I think like a little thingy rang.

We're good.

- You have a question?

Yeah, go ahead.

- Are we supposed to wait for people to go to answer questions or are we?

- No, let's go, right?

Some people are gonna leave, but we will get this Q&A going.

(audience chattering) Thanks for coming, everyone.

- Thank you, everybody, for coming.

(audience applauding) Will have to take this out.

We're supposed to come here.

- Okay.

- Okay, you guys.

- Oh.

- We have folks at the mics.

This is great news.

And Tree, we wanted to introduce, Tree.

(Taylor chuckling) You wanna come out?

(Che-Wei chuckling) Just wanna show you.

They do travel with the family.

(chuckles) - This is Tree.

(audience cheering) - Pau is backstage too, but didn't want to come out.

- Okay, that's okay.

- But Tree was up for it.

So anyway, all right, let's commence with the questions and thanks for being quiet on your way out folks.

- Do you wanna start over here?

- Right.

- I love the presentation and I have a sort of difficult answer, maybe general question about like, well actually I have two questions but the first one is in your lives and in the 15 years that you've been doing this studio, you're very inspired by time, so has your perception or like appreciation for time changed in the time that you've been doing this in any way?

- Yeah, for me it's, yes.

I used to be in this, I think there's like a few camps of people's relationship to time and I think I started in one camp and I think I'm in a different camp now.

So I think there's like a pretty popular camp that's like, I don't want to be tied to this oppressive force called time where you're like, "I don't wanna wear a watch.

I don't even wanna know what time it is.

I just want to erase time from my understanding, so I can like live my life the way I want to live."

I used to be in that camp, I was like, "Yeah, I'm just like, what is this thing that's just like organizing my day, I don't like it."

And then over the years making different time pieces and researching it about all these like weird time things and thinking about it.

I'm now in this other camp where it's like I actually want to understand, have a greater closer relationship to this thing called time.

However arbitrary and abstract it is, I think it's actually quite healthy to know how long it is when you say I'm gonna be there in five minutes, 'cause I think it's a actually a form of stress to not know.

To not know is this thing gonna take me 20 minutes.

In your head if you think that's gonna take 20 minutes, but it actually takes 40 minutes, that feeling sucks.

And so I'm very much in the camp now of like, okay, there's this thing called time.

We have this amazing shared language that's basically global.

Everybody understands time the same way.

Can I just get better at it?

So, actually do some weird exercises now.

We have this game called the ten second stopwatch game where you just close your eyes and you like run a stopwatch and you try to get as close to 10 seconds as possible to kind of train yourself to be like, "Oh, this is 10 seconds feel like."

And then also these days when I meditate I'm also, I just meditate for five minutes and in my head while I'm meditating, all I'm doing is trying to like open my eyes exactly at five minutes when the gong goes off.

And I think, yeah, that's where I am now with my relationship with time.

- Thank you.

And then the other question was that in these projects that deal with time and like a great amount of time and you have to prototype these and test them, like how does that work?

And like what are the difficulties in that?

And like I guess waiting a super long time to see if it actually like works.

- [Che-Wei] (chuckles) Yeah.

- Oh, sorry.

(chuckles) So, it's really difficult as you could probably imagine to test something at scale.

So millions of days.

And so, we essentially just do our best.

Things like time since launch we work with our friend Josh, who is a very gifted engineer and we know exact, like we've broken down this piece into every possible like within our control into every possible scenario that could go wrong.

And we know the fail points.

And yeah, it's really just like we know that we're doing our best in every single detail about this thing and that's kind of just what we can offer.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Does that answer your question?

- Hi, guys, thank you for being here.

- [Taylor] Thank you.

- When I think about you guys' work, I often contextualize it with fine artists that have used technology to think about time like Felix Gonzalez-Torres or Tobias Wong.

And I always wonder, when you were first starting out, who were the fine artists and designers that moved you?

And as you got older, who do you continually look to to like inspire your practice?

- Yeah, so while we were talking today about, Time Since Launch, I was thinking about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Perfect Lovers.

That piece where there's two analog clocks side by side and over time they originally start at the same time, but over time they drift.

I think see a lot of people nodding.

But that's a piece that's been a huge influence to our work for a very long time.

I'm trying to think of others.

This is a hard.

- Like these days.

- These days, yeah.

- I don't know.

- It's changed over the years.

Like different art pops up in different times in your life and for different reasons, and yeah.

- I think these days like we do go to a lot of museums.

That is an activity we force our kids to do with us.

And I think it's less, I think at least for me, it's less about getting inspired to make specific work when we go to museum, it's more just like I get so energized to be like, I just want to go home and work.

It doesn't really make matter what we're making.

It's more just like seeing incredible work at museums or on the street.

I'm just like, "That is so cool.

I wanna go home and work on stuff and make something as good as that."

And that's sort of, I think my current relationship to art is like that right now.

- Yeah, I also like to think of when I go to museums, something that's just like an idea that I obsess over is like why we, like why certain pieces of art are effective versus others.

And especially in the technology art world, some of the things are like pretty difficult to understand and very flashy and I have a hard time to be honest with a lot of work that's like very data and digital and just like difficult, it's difficult for me sometimes to connect with and very overwhelming to my senses.

And so, I consider myself a technology artist to a certain extent and so I don't wanna ever make somebody else feel like that.

And that's just one experience I have about art.

Che-Wei probably doesn't have the experience at all, but I feel like that.

- Go ahead.

- Yeah, amazing talk.

I was just kinda wondering because we have a little one on the way and curious about how y'all's collaboration changed with having kids and if also if you just have like any tips for like, I don't know, just being creative and continuing to produce with them around and engaging them at all.

- Yeah, there was a pretty drastic shift, like when we, since I would say almost from the moment we met until we had our first kid, we were together literally 24/7.

Like I think there was a few hours we were separated over the course of many years, but once we had our first one, we have to figure out like we kind of just like took shifts.

It's like, okay, you go work while I hang out with the kid and we would swap.

And that worked for a while.

Like we were relatively productive in that sense.

And then we would work together at night while the kid's sleeping and then kind of repeat.

Yeah.

- Yeah, I think it's very different depending on your relationship and depending... My perspective is from a woman and I find it very hard to think and very hard to concentrate when Che-Wei is around or when my kids are around, I actually can't concentrate.

And that's like a very, it was a painful realization to sort of be expected to, I could see Che-Wei doing work and I was resentful for a long time of him being like, "Just like do the thing."

(Che-Wei chuckling) I actually can't, I physically cannot do it.

But I've grown to be accepting an understanding of that and I know that like I need to do extra to give myself space to think.

- [Audience Member] Okay, appreciate it.

- Hi, I'm very passionate about creative technology and it's something that I at least wanna do for a lot of my life.

And I guess my two main questions are how did you get to like where you are finding the skills and desire to have very, a more non-conforming like artist job that also incorporates more expensive and difficult to understand technologies and like also what is your studio set up like?

Like how do you have like 3D printers or laser cutters or whatever it is that you're using and like balance that with office space and work together?

- Yeah, do you wanna- - No, go ahead.

- So it's taken a long time.

We've been doing this for 15 years and we've gradually accumulated all of our tools in our office.

Working with technology, I guess it really depends on the person, it depends on how you work.

Sometimes that stuff can be really hard and unless like you're incredibly passionate about it or like have money or the desire to like hire somebody to do it for yourself, which we know many artists, many technology artists who, you know, they're like, "Oh, you're really good at this thing, can you make this project for me?"

But most of like the fine art stuff that we work on, it's really just time spent researching and like digging deep into materials and how things work.

And it's kind of like this obsessive.

Hi.

Like desire to learn and understand how things work.

And I really don't feel like I can be creative with these things unless I actually understand them.

But many people can be creative with things and like not have that understanding and I think that that's okay too.

So it just really depends on what your practice is and what works for you.

- Yeah, thank you.

Also, you said that you help teach architecture.

How does that like overlap with what you do with the creative technology?

- Yeah, there's some overlap I guess.

I haven't taught in a few years, but I taught architecture for 15 years or 16 years.

And I think I mean I was very fortunate the architecture department kind of just left me alone, so I could teach whatever I wanted.

So I would just show up to a studio presentation and be like, "This semester we're gonna do blank."

And I think it was, I was fortunate in that way that they left me alone and that would just attract students that were interested in the things that I presented.

So yeah, some years we did inflatables, some years we did crocheting, really like working hands-on, but we also done like generative design stuff, like writing code to like make stuff.

I don't know.

Yeah, so it kind of, yeah, I don't, I try to use architecture studio teaching as like a place for all of us to explore ideas.

So yeah, so for all of those examples actually, like inflatables, crochet and all of them, I had no expertise in those things.

It was more just like, "Hey, I'm interested in learning how to make inflatables.

Let's all do that as a studio and then build up a body of work, so that we can repeat this semesters beyond that."

So yeah, that's kind of how I approach it and bring it in.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Thanks.

- Hi, so I'm also a student, so I'm kind of curious, how do you guys get inspired?

Is it like suddenly a idea, like rushed to you or it's like, "Oh, you do some research," and I figure, "Oh, this is fun," or it's like, it's kind of, your work is a representation of your like reflection or understanding of time and it kind of evolves through time.

And which approach do you think like work best for you guys?

- Yeah, it's kind of all over the place, I would say.

Ideas usually come just by being in the world and giving yourself time and space to think.

Sometimes an idea comes up when like somebody shows up at our house and they're like, "Check out this really cool LED that is like, costs like $200 and is like a single wavelength photon shooting LED."

And then we're like, "Whoa, let's do something with that."

So, it's kind of all over the place.

But I really do think ideas mainly come from giving yourself time to think.

- Yeah, time and mental space.

Like I think our kids tell us all the time or they actually have stopped doing this I realize really recently.

- Yeah.

- They used to say, complain that they're bored.

And we'd be like, "That's great."

You have so much space to come up with new ideas.

And it's hard to find boredom maybe at this age, I don't know, or maybe you guys are bored, but I really value boredom a lot.

Being bored is great.

If you're bored it's an opportunity to open up a sketchbook or just like let your mind wander and let new ideas just like float up to the top.

So yeah, boredom's great.

- [Audience Member] Thank you so much.

- Thanks.

- I really love that whole story about like getting more and then be creative.

I'm asking is it okay to take a selfie with you guys?

- [Che-Wei] Yeah.

- I absolutely want to capture that one.

- [Che-Wei] Sure, right now?

- Yeah, it's okay.

- [Che-Wei] Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah.

- [Taylor] Yes.

(chuckles) - Thank you so much.

- [Che-Wei] Okay, where are we going?

- [Taylor] Oh, sorry, we'll do it there on there.

- It's okay, it's just too tall.

- [Che-Wei] Yeah.

- Okay, I had a different question, but then based on some of the other questions, now I have two.

- [Taylor] Okay.

- So I'm a designer in the technology industry and my sister is in the Stamps program doing her at MFA.

And so we often have this conversation about art and design and like, especially in industry, how that's like defined as like two different things, especially based on like the titles that you have and all of that kind of stuff.

And then you touched a little bit about how you see view yourself as like a technology artist, but then I know a lot of the people that like I work with that consider what you do design.

And so I'm wondering like, do you think about this?

Like is this something that you discuss?

Do you have a stance on it?

- Yeah, well I don't know.

- It's a good hard question.

- My like gut reaction to that is it doesn't really matter.

Like the label I think maybe matters from like a job placement perspective, but in terms of like having a creative practice, I think ultimately you just want to be honest with yourself and just like make the things that you want to make.

And it doesn't matter if it's a design project or an art project.

And I think that's how we tend to approach things.

Like we actually, I think whenever we start sketching stuff, we actually don't know if it's gonna end up as an art project.

Like in my head at least, art projects are projects that just don't make money and we make one of, and then design projects are projects that we make more of and that we sell.

I cut, that's for me the division line and the place it comes from is the same.

We just want make stuff that we wanna see.

- [Audience Member] Yeah, that makes sense.

- That was a good answer.

Yeah, like, I would maybe steer you towards looking at craft too as a way of understanding design.

I think about this a lot and you know a lot of people these days like who call themselves craft people, maybe I shouldn't say this.

- That's okay.

- No.

- Yeah, trash on craft people.

- No.

- That's not what she was about to do.

I'm just joking.

(chuckles) - I'm not gonna trash people, 'cause like design came out of the industrialization of producing goods, selling stuff, big companies like figuring out how to efficiently and cheaply make things for lots of people.

But if you start to look into craft, the things that are being made are, they're essentially like useful things for people's lives in the same way that design objects are.

But the amount of time, especially in some of the traditional craft cultures, I think what's really beautiful there and what I encourage you to look at is like just the amount of time and effort people spend intimately with creating something and like, it's really beautiful and inspiring and I don't consider myself necessarily a craft person because I have never been able to, I don't do that but I have craft trumps like real craft trumps design any day.

And I would love for our things to have like that same effect and that same, I would love to have that same connection with the things that we make as craftspeople, really good craftspeople do.

- Thanks.

- [Audience Member] Should I ask my second question?

- You have any another question?

Yeah.

- Okay, one of the things you touched on in the talk and then also briefly now was like money and like love over money and also you touched on kind of like working for other people and then transitioning to doing like your own work.

Can you speak a little bit more to that in terms of like how that was, how difficult it is and like how you thought about it and how you think about it now maybe versus when you started?

- Yeah, where do we start?

- Yeah, the one thing that we didn't talk about in this talk, which maybe we should have is we had a moment back in 2010 where Kickstarter started to become a real big thing and our first project was very successful on Kickstarter because it was a new platform at the time and it was like a new cool thing.

Projects aren't blowouts anymore on Kickstarter.

But yeah, the first thing that we put on that was like, is a very stressful long saga, but it was a very successful financially successful project.

And that sort of started to make us realize like maybe that we can begin to use this as a tool to stop doing as much consulting work and transition into design work and it allowed us to put faith in that and kind of get our foot in the door.

Yeah, that was a significant moment for us.

- Yeah, I think, I mean there's a lot of luck involved too.

- Yeah.

- Like yeah, like the timing of Kickstarter, its popularity and we were ready to launch something that was very lucky.

We were also, prior to that as a studio, we were doing a lot of client work, but we were luckily I guess in the right niche where the projects we worked on were kind of seasonal, so it's like we would work really hard heads down, like not thinking about anything else for a few months, but it paid well enough that we could just mess around for the rest of the year and that's when we would just like make hardware, write other little software programs that we just wanted for ourselves.

And so it was kind of like a, our own built in way to be like, okay, we work hard and then we mess around and then we work hard and mess around.

That cycle kept us going for a while and allowed us to kind of like explore ideas that were outside of doing client work.

So yeah, we were lucky enough to have that as well to figure things out.

- [Audience Member] Cool, yeah, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- Can you hear me?

Oh, there it is.

Hi, my name's Joey.

I'm actually an engineering student here at Michigan and I've been following your band I guess for quite a while now.

(Che-Wei chuckling) - [Taylor] We have to band.

- And I guess I'm a big fan.

But one thing that's always really drawn me to your work is how well you document everything and how well you really present kind of your thinking behind every choice that you make in how you build things.

And I guess I just wanted to know a little bit of how you kind of built that system or how you think about showing what you make.

- [Taylor] Yeah.

- It's a total mess.

Yeah, like I said, we don't know really know what we're doing I think.

- No, but it's been a really impart important part of our practice since the very, very beginning.

And mainly like we owe that a lot.

I think like we came of age during the beginnings of Kickstarter.

And if you look into that project, like some of our very first Kickstarter project, don't look at it, but look at it if you want to.

(chuckles) - Yeah, that's fine.

- We realized at that point, and this wasn't intentionally, it was really out of like, we can't do anything but be very transparent about the story of what's actually happening.

And it turned out like that is actually, it's an amazing way to connect with people.

Yeah, to really be transparent about what's actually going on.

And it turns out like people end up liking things more when they feel more invested in the actual story and like invested in understanding why something is made the way it is.

And so we've kind of taken that and run with it the whole time.

- We're also constantly documenting like we're, yeah, constantly just like documenting everything.

Like even if it doesn't look good and we're just like document it, document it.

So we have a lot of material to work with and I think what ends up showing is just like a small slice of it.

Even when we're taking photographs of like finished products, it's like thousands of photos and then we pick one, that's like, that one works.

So I think it's like, yeah, just like constant documentation so that you have the material to work with to present something.

- [Audience Member] Yeah, awesome, thank you so much.

- Thanks.

- Hello, I had a question.

I work at the digital fabrication studio at Stamps and I love using all of the cool tools we have to make different things, but I often struggle combining different kinds of tools.

So I was wondering if you had, I saw you have lots of really cool, fun things in your studio and I wondered what your strategy for combining all of the different processes that you have is.

- I love that question.

It's a good question.

I don't know, I feel like things tend to be.

Once you cross pollinate between fabrication processes, it like opens space for, you know, all of a sudden, like you have a new language there to play with.

I don't know how we do that.

Do we do that?

- Yeah, I feel like we actually resisted 3D printing for a while actually.

- Really?

- Yeah.

Remember we were like, why would we ever need a 3D printer?

It was our first thought when 3D printing was like, MakerBot was the only one selling consumer grade 3D printers.

We were like, we don't really need that.

And then we ended up trading, like we didn't buy one, we like traded some stuff for our first MakerBot.

And so we're actually not a, I mean I love tools, I'll buy any tool any day just to have it.

And I like, at least for me, I'm not consciously trying to figure out, actually I do, but I'm not good at it.

Sorry, for example, I bought this plastic injection molding machine that's sitting there.

I've never used it.

It's never been turned on.

And I'm constantly being like, "What can I make with it?"

And that's actually true with many of the machines we have.

I get excited about it, we buy it and it just sits there unused until an idea shows up to be like, "Oh, that's what it's good for."

And then it becomes a really useful tool.

And so yeah, I think it's just like it reveals itself when the time is right to be like, "Now's the time to use me, use me well."

I think we're, yeah, less trying to be like, "Oh, how do we use every machine in the shop to work together?"

Yeah, that's all.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Is that it?

Well, thank you, all.

- Thank you so much.

(audience applauding) - Thanks for having us.

- Thank you, both so much.

- Thank you.

- Bye.

(audience applauding) (audience chattering)