Toward Experimental Community : a reflection on Biodesign, Humanity, Machine Learning, Education and VR
Last year was a bold year for me, I have been in explorative journeys started with nothing more than curiosities to humbly push the edge of possibility. The term “experimental community” — which I defined as a society of people that believe and take actions in the continuum process of disrupting the status quos, and favor “experimentation” over “perfection”, have been in my mind because the journeys that I will discuss here would not be possible without my partners in crime : the beloved teammates, freak friends, and noble mentors who walk on this journey with me. As we enter 2017, I think it would be a great idea to write a reflection on my “Experimental Community”.
Esperment (french) : practical knowledge, cunning; enchantment, magic spell
I first met Barbara, an amazing healthcare innovator at Medicine X conference by the introduction of my great friend Charlie. A couple months later in her workshop, we were designing solutions that can improve college students health. I have observed many exceptional ideas from using spaceship to solve public health problem to the use of drone for medicine delivery because Barbara was encouraging futuristic ideas using the design kit that she and her team developed. One thing that came up to me is that these great ideas need a space that allow new ideas to be explored and implemented. These kind of space goes beyond maker or hacker space and its main function is to created a culture of disrupting for good. This space should inspire the larger community not through fancy 3D printers or fabrication tools, but by the actions of people working together bringing diversity to innovation.
Human Mind, Artificial Mind, and Healthy Mind
How can we facilitate the collaboration between different minds to create a healthier community?
Talking about diversity and innovation, one startup that I cofound, Humanity X are on the third years mission to develop and implement ARKHumanity, a platform that listen to calls for help on social media for the prevention of self harm. I see this platform as an example of the technology that rely on the relationship between human mind and artificial mind. The circle of interaction between people in society has been extended by social media. Therefore, there is a possibility for the outside people to send empathy and respect to peoples in need. With the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the machine can better understand the context to facilitate the connection between people. I have no doubt that the pattern recognition capability of AI will exceed human performance in many fields, which is great in the sense that it will challenge us to think “what is true value of humanity?” as Alec Ross wrote in his final chapter of his book the industries of the future. I believe that these humanity values are essential for innovation, that is why we call our technology startup “Humanity X”.
Our team which start off as 5 strangers : Kacie, Jordan, Pat, Bin and Ram went through many adventures internally and externally. We received tremendous supports and opportunities, especially for me to exchange ideas and collaborate with talented and curious minds like Susannah Fox, Dr. Chethan Sarabu, Mike O’Reilly, Dr. Stephen Friend, Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky, Scott Wald, and Dr. Leland Hartwell. We are looking forward to thrive and welcome new dreamers, innovators, doers, especially Dr. Tara Su to join our journey in 2017 and beyond!
Also, I cannot thanks Charlie enough for introducing me to the Medicine X community. It is incredible to see how everyone is really included in the discussion on the future of medicine. I am intrigued by the variety of subjects from VR as a tool for participation in hospital design, to the use of blockchain for pharmaceutical security, and the juicy question “how can we make research wonderful?”. This conference really inspired me to think of how other fields like food sciences and environmental sciences could bring more diversity to thier discussion in the friendly manner.
I am also happy to be part of the team led by Dr. Neal Lester to continue the effort of Hacks for Humanity, the place that got me started. We have a panel discussion on Hackathon and Society at Disruptive Innovation Festival this year and will soon published a paper from our research on the hackathon for social good.
Biodesign = Bio is life + design is love
How can we learn from nature to design the future?
There is a visionary japanese science fiction that focus on giant animal robots called “Zoids”. In the series, Zoids are engineered based on real creatures like dinosaur, tiger, bird, fish, etc to be war machines. I remembered having obsession on assembling the mechanical toys from these series with my father. The experiences of putting together motors and other structural pieces to create a walking dinosaur robots introduced me to biomimicry unconsciously.
It is also probably why there is a strong spirit of maker in dinosaur fanatics like me.
During summer, I and my friends were having a fun moment submitting an idea to biomimicry global design challenge. This challenge take us far far beyond our expectation. Winning prizes and receiving great mentorship from Rob, Chris, Megan, Jack, Janine and Biomimicry Institute was amazing in the process of trying to understand how to truly create a sustainable innovation and business that help people. Thanks to Ray C. Anderson Foundation for believing in us, we got funding to experiment with our endless ideas. We started off purposing Jube, an edible insect capturing device inspired by a carnivorous plant and fabricated by local wisdom of wood basketing.
We go on and think of sustainable food sources, which are crucial for our future. We wonder how can we convert the plentiful proteins from edible insects into foods that are more appealing to public? That is when we spinoff a team that focus on food 3D printer. Our food fabricator team led by my talented friend Tawan was really successful in choreographing the dance between tradition and futuristic design. They have developed and patented different solution in which food culture is used as an inspiration to fabricate food of the future. I believe that we have a long way to go for our BIOX team, but it all started with small little step.
Bio X Culture X Fashion
I also had a memorable experience working with Dr. Galina and her colleagues at the beautiful School of Art, Media, and Design at Nanyang Technology University, Singapore. I remember meeting with Galina for the first time at a conference, where I was doing a MacGyver trick to get my slide to the projector because the projector was not working properly. It was an amusingly intense and extremely fun collaboration where we developed prototypes of interactive experiences and artistic wearable technology that give nuances on how fashion, biotechnology, and culture can create a second skin for human. I am humbly grateful that our work was presented in Beyond Conference in Germany and lead to the creation of new research laboratory at NTU.
Fashion is not just clothing, it is the identity of our species and it speaks about how we interact with the world. Galina and I were in a panel discussion for the Disruptive Innovation Festival, and she mentioned how future biotechnology can help make the fashion more sustainable and diverse with materials and processes not yet existed, which I really adore and feel excited to see :)
Virtual Reality for Better (?) Reality
How can we learn from nature to design the future?
MIT Medialab is one of the place that I am always eager to see for myself since middle school, especially after I saw the talk by Professor Maes on the sixthsense project. Professor Maes inspired since then that we can design the future. I was thrilled to join the virtually reality hackathon. I and my new teammates at the time were some sort of the misfits because we are one of the last group that formed, but that is not because we do not have things to contribute to others, but because we have a vision that we want to do. Our team, Nabanita, Biswaraj, Yuta, Adrian, and I (I miss all of you so much) developed a platform that convert story to virtual reality contents. We think that this idea is revolutionary in the sense that it allow everyone to tell their story in the immersive platform by just writing story.
People were telling us that there is no way we can pull this off in 3 days, but we did and received 2 awards for that. This project has many components from textual analysis using machine learning to 3D scene visualization, and I think that I am the least technical in this area among my fabulous teammates. However, I discover that my determination to get things done, to search for the answers, to fearlessly ask for help, and to hack the way in make me learn a lot. One of the mentor at Medialab said to me after I asked him to help figure it out how to post the result from machine learning analysis to Amazon web server, that I am a fast learner and I am proud of that. Thanks to Steven, Scott Greenwald, and the hackathon team for organizing these incredible event :)
Artificial reality (VR & AR) is fun for me, but I am always curious how can we used it to inspire the reality that we cannot escape. Two VR projects that I explored recently with my teams were addressing that. One is VR for public transportation project, where we aimed to create a disneyland ride experience in the public transportation to entertain and encourage public to travel in the more sustainable way.
The team purposes the term “Acoustic Driven Virtual Reality”, where surrounding sounds are the key for generating 3D experiences in the virtual world. The original idea for the project came from my experience sitting in the noisy traffic of Bangkok. In the project, I have learned the most from my brilliant teammates, Ben (the project leader) and Fluke. They show me that the group of undergrad students (three of us) can do cool stuff, if trusted and freakness are in the team. This project is under review for publication, so finger cross with hope :) Another VR project with my marvelous life mentor, Dr. Tara is dealing with the sensitive topic of racism. Dr. Tara is an outstanding expert in human communication, and I collaborate with her on using VR as a platform for educating people to better communicate the racial issues. I am grateful that she is doing this project because this is the time that we need innovative tools to bring humanity together more than ever. Dr. Tara is presenting this project soon in WSCA conference coming this Feb, so I wish her all the best (which I don’t think she really need it because she is genius) :)
Design Fiction and Education of the Future
How do we use fictional story to inspire the future society?
Fictions take us places we never been. By recreating some elements from those fictions using design process, allow us to explore strange new worlds with tangible materials. I was involved in couple design fiction projects from the Futuretopia: an exhibition at the idea museum that explore the idea of choices and science fiction,
The museum of capitalism project where I and P’Bank design an architecture that embody the ambiguity of the capitalism through the openly interpretable structure of the museum,
The Dinovation project, which is the extent animation of my futuristic dinosaur meme from my presentation that make lot of people laugh, and my final adventure is being part of the team to design intelligence air condition system for airbus innovation challenge with the international fellows : P’Golf, Thuraya, P’Pun, P’Gear, and P’Terus. Each journey, there is something that I learn about the topic and about myself as Marie Curie states :
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less”
Talking about the future, one thing that I am always interested in is education. I believe that education is a culture not an isolated process as my mentor Professor Werasak states “Education for all, and all for education”. I have been working with a group of curious minds to prototype a learning environment where the focus of education is not on what is discovered, but rather on what we can discover together.
The team of JSTP alumni, P’Gear, Tawan, and the JSTP team have implemented the biomimicry camp, which challenge middle school kids to design robots that can walk on mud by taking inspiration from Mudskipper (it is incredibly hard to move on mud), the social robot camp that focus on connecting the art of performance with robotics to create an emotional robot, and the new camp that we are planning on right now: the machine learning for agriculture camp. All of these camps challenge both the camp facilitator, and the camper (middle school students) to work together on solving problem that has no definite answers by breaking boundary of disciplines. Our world is facing many challenges that have no known solution, kids are already good and eager at solving these challenges (we can see that they are very good at playing games). What if we flip the education to focus more how to solve the unknown rather than the known — I believe that school will be EXTREMELY FUN!
I am also very lucky to be in the awesome class by Dr. Leland Hartwell, the nobel prize laureate who is now interested in the future of independence education. In the class, I designed the proposal for digital literacy education platform called “LearnX” which aims to utilize artificial intelligence in personalizing the lessons for students. These lessons are oriented around learners’s goals in life, which I think will make education more meaningful. One lesson that I have learned from Dr. Hartwell is that everyone can be successful if they find something that they like to do, pursue it vigorously, and repeat it into habit. On top of that I am proud to be part of the Biodesign Education Outreach team where I purposed the crazy idea of Biodesign Go mobile app that hope to turn research at the ASU biodesign institute into a playful game like the popular Pokemon Go.
The connected world
I think that despite the political climate, right now the technological infrastructure have connected the world more than ever. We have many great APIs that allow applications to seamlessly share information from behavioral data to personal genomics data. These massive digital fingerprints will fuel the development of machine that could potentially understand us more than we understand ourselves. On top of datapalooza, the distinction of reality and imagination is also blurred out with the introduction of many 3D visualization tools. I recently ran into AR toys where kids can create digital animation using camera to digitize their painting and sketch on paper. These smooth connections between artificial and reality, biological and digital will set the standard for the future business and industry.
I recently read an article about Mark’s vision on the future of brain to brain social media, which is extremely exciting but also make me wonder whether the connected world through technological infrastructures will allow us (human being) to be more empathized and connected with one another, or distract us and steal that natural sense of connection away from our species. These question and the work on the hyper reality by Keiichi Matsudareminded me of Win Lyovarin’s stories, where he writes about a genius copywriter that can design advertisement on every media including human feces, and he finally cannot escape from what he created. I recalled the philosophy of the synthesis research center : “Rich but not complex” which I think is the aesthetics for our near future.
2017 and beyond!
On top of many things, I am still in school and I appreciate the wide variety of subjects I learned from the japanese monster, ghost, and supernatural class to genetics engineering. This year I was nominated to be part of the think tank on the future of art and culture supported by the Ford foundation and center for cultural innovation, which I met many fabulous creative thinker including the magician of laboratory 5, Cindy coon!
My journey is going to continue organically with my two philosophy : first, everything happens for great reason (at least it teach us something) and things we lose will come back to us in other form. I am looking forward to improve on 1) not bringing back the past memories to distract the present and future, 2) to be more forgiving and let go of things, and 3) try to be better at verbally communicate complex stuffs because I am a visual thinker (It is hard sometimes to talk without having a diagram or slide). I am also starting my thesis this semester with the best advisors I ever asked for : professor Todd, Professor Finn, and Professor Kusumi :)
To wrap this up, the main idea that I want to convey through this reflection is that the great experimental community is not in Utopia, but it is our friends and peoples around us, we just need to believe and encourage them to have fun exploring thier strange new world as we hope they belief in us. I like to end this reflection by quoting mister Disney, the person that inspired me with his colours and magics :
“We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious…and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”
