Justin Downs on open hardware
Stefanie Wuschitz speaks to anthroengineer Justin Downs, founder of IEF R&D, about open hardware and working with David Byrne. This interview is part of the Making Artistic Technology program at the Research Institute for Arts and Technology in Vienna.
You built a successful business on open hardware. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
No, because Open Hardware is not about ‘free’ as in no money. Using Open Hardware or Open Source in general is just a way to re-emphasize different structures of your business. So instead of emphasizing a business based off of IP and making money from in-court and lawyers fees, you are emphasizing the actual product and the labour that goes into creating a product or solution for your clients. You are emphasizing labour over capital when you are using an open source platform. So you are focusing more on getting paid to create a solution instead of getting paid to make a legal entity.
You did an open hardware project for the singer of the Talking Heads, David Byrne (Playing the Building). Did it turn out the way you expected?
Yeah, that wasn’t a classical open hardware project though we put the design up on the internet. David Byrne wanted the whole thing built analog. And so the way that I actually engineered the whole project and the motor control and everything was ….it would have been high tech for 1962, you know? So it wasn’t really a piece of hardware that people would be interested in using or replicating.
It was solenoids, right?
There were solenoids and all the circuitry was analog, so when I had all the switches to activate different mechanisms all the timing I did with capacitors and resistors and things. So instead of having a digital microcontroler with milliseconds, I actually just did a bleed circuit with the capacitors. So when you hit the key it would fill up a capacitor and then it would bleed off at a specific rate and that’s how long the things would turn on. So it was a very…he wanted it to feel like a musical instrument, like a hand instrument.
So how many capacitors did each tone have? How many durations could you choose from?
I can’t remember of the top of my head. There is 52 keys on the keyboard and there is probably about 104 capacitors, which I would use.
So two capacitors for each key?
Yeah, about two, but we had different mechanisms. So the striking mechanisms were different than the wind instruments, that were then different from the motor vibrations. The motor vibrations I didn’t actually have any timing on. Just the strikers and the wind. Oh no no I did have a capacitor, but it wasn’t so much timing more to bring in the motors slowly and take them out slowly. So it wasn’t a hard on/off, that was for electrical reasons though.
Must have been a lot of tweaking and fine tuning.
Yes, it was a lot of tweaking, but in general David really liked the idea of open source. With this project he made sure that every time we put it up it was free and open to the public because he didn’t want any hierarchy in terms of who could experience it. Because he really felt that part of the piece was the interaction with people. So we did talk about open source in the more sociological aspects of what open source allows. Which is open participation by anybody that wants to get involved with the process.
My next question would be: What do you have to be aware of when your customer is a lion?
When your costumer is a lion? When your costumer is a lion it’s very hard to get them on the phone. It’s very hard to get them into a meeting. That’s actually why recently I just did another open source project LINC, that was Software based for the lion conservationist we switched over from the route of having open source tracking mechanisms actually on the lion to an image recognition system. To do this we built a database with facial recognition where you can take photographs of the lion, store them in this database and they will match the lion IDs up — the computer vision system will match the lion IDs up based on these photos.
Do lions have different faces?
Yeah, it’s tricky! It’s relatively easy with patterned animals like zebras and leopards, and things like that. The computer recognition is much easier. But we used a convolutional neural network that learned to read lion faces and we actually are getting around 80 percent positive rate return forgetting the correct lion within the first five matches. So the computer did teach itself how to look at individual lion faces. And it works pretty well. It is an Open Source Software project and it was much easier and less invasive in general than collaring the lions. Because when you want the lion to test out your open source collar you have to go out to put a piece of meat out, then you have to wait for six hours hoping that this lion will come around. Then you have to tranquilize the lion, put them down, take the collar off, put a new collar on. And that whole process in very hard on the lions. So the lions support open source software more than open source hardware, I’d have to say.
Wow, I’m glad that you survived that project.
It was a good project and also as a side note, I’ve got a really good story which I can tell later, but on one of the occasions of collaring the lions we went out to the bush and I got chased by a lion.
He wanted the collar?
Ya, exactly, he wasn’t happy with his, he wanted a new one, yeah, he he. So it’s easier on the lions and also easier on the researchers and hardware developers, to just have a software…yeah.
You have been working in different cultures and climates. How did that influence the development of your project?
Well, it’s been a big influence. And it’s part of what I have become good at and most interested in. Not so much the technical aspects of development, but the social technology I think is the biggest hurdle that we have, you know? In terms of technical achievements we are very far along, in terms of being able to provide power, communication, agriculture, things like that. But what is really difficult is the social technology. How we can actually integrate the physical technologies in a meaningful way that helps society to create greater social justice and patterns of beneficial interactions between individuals? And so being in all these different climates and cultures, I’ve been able to see the way that people need technology in different ways and also socially, how they relate to it. And so when designing a project it is very beneficial to not only focus on the technical, but the social aspects of the community its going to serve. And that’s another reason why I have been drawn to open source so much, because it not only allows for the development of a solution, but it allows for the ownership of that solution by the community that uses it. Because people are able to see the plans they can utilize it, modify it, change it, and become the caretakers of it themselves — using open source solutions. That also to me has been a big draw to open source. And why the projects I’ve done with various people have been successful,. I have worked on a lot of really strange non-classical problems, that aren’t really addressed by the main development stream. And so using that as focus point I’ve been able to make some meaningful solutions for clients I’ve worked with.
You have worked also with really large institutions as UNICEF and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Did you run into any frustrations due to the scale of these organizational structures?
Yeah, yeah, the bureaucracy, we actually — with the UNICEF contract — we finished the job completely and we were done with the field testing before we were officially hired. He he he..because of just the way paper work and the payroll structure works and things like that …So you know, also the reams and reams of legal contracts that you have to deal with when working on these projects can be very daunting. And that’s also another good point, when you have a large organization and you sell them on open source — it cuts down on a lot of that legal back and forth — that is taking up resources in terms of time and money just in the general development of a contract. But when you say, ‘hey these are open source, you know, these are the open source licenses we have to obey ‘, and , they are on board with that and they know what it entails, then it streamlines that process. But you have to convince them. You have to show them that in the long run it’s in their best interest. And that can sometimes be a challenge. But overall it has worked out pretty well with these institutions. People are pretty receptive to it, because in 90 percent of the cases that I work with, people just want to solve their problem. They don’t want to be like Apple. The first cathode ray TV set had something like 4 to 10 patents. The iPhone now has, I think it was 104 patents to it, so you can see the shift in thinking with these large corporations which is creating a bottle neck in terms of development. Because it’s more legal than actual technical development. And most people though, even large organizations like UNICEF they really want a solution instead of just a piece of paper saying that they own this technology.
You call yourself an Anthroengineer? What is an Anthroengineer?
That’s the good thing about having your own company, you can make up your own title. And I completely made that up by myself. But I’ve been doing this now close to 20 years and I found that my skill is not..you know..I’m not a super rocket science engineer, I’m pretty good technically, I’m pretty handy, I know machining, electronics, I know how to build things, but I also think a lot and think of ideas in context and the social context of that. And so I realize my real strength is bringing together what I was talking about before,being able to look at a community or an organization and culturally figure out what kind of technical solution would be most relevant.
Basically looking at the community and being able to combine the kind of anthropological outlook or take on the organization or the problem set and then taking a technology and applying it. So it not only technically solves the problem, but also supports the underlying social relations and is supported by the underlying social relations of the community I’m developing the solution for.
So I realized I’m not just a fabricator or engineer, but I’m also a social scientist, or anthropologist.
Where I really look at the community and make a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the social interaction.
You know, if I made the nicest can opener in the world that would open 500 cans a minute, but it ran on lithium batteries …it would be useful for two weeks as long as the battery is charged. But if the can opener was going to be used in the bush in Africa or up in the Yukon in Canada a had crank opener would be a much better fit for the community and its resources.
I now come to my last question: What would you recommend to new teams of people who want to develop open hardware together? How should they collaborate and overcome the challenges that often have to do with social issues and relations?
I would recommend, when developing open hardware,… the open hardware projects that I have seen be the most successful,… if you really just want to focus on creating an open hardware platform, then really focus on making a brand and a community around that hardware solution. Because there will be other people that make the hardware, especially when it’s open, that make the same board or make their own version of it. But if you have a community and a name brand around the hardware that you are creating and you use it as the focal point for a community then your hardware project will be successful. And if you are just designing to create a solution to a specific problem, then I would say, focus on making a hardware solution that would fix the problem of your client, but also try to investigate what other communities the hardware solution could be useful for and reach out to them also. So you make the community bigger than just your client. In that way you get more parties supporting the platform. So you could theoretically create a solution and then you don’t have to be the gatekeeper for it for the rest of its life. Maybe somebody else could take it over who could find it more useful.
