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Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics.

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I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer,

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and that means that I spend a good amount of time

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designing and building new pieces of technology,

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and more specifically designing and building electronics.

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And what I've found is that the process of designing

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and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways.

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So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive,

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and the outcome of that process,

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namely electronic circuit boards,

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are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways.

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So they're really small, generally, they're square

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and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them

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just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I

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have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up

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the process and the outcome of designing electronics.

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And so what if you could design and build electronics

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like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly,

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extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly,

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really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally?

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Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up

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all sorts of new possibilities?

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I'm going to share with you two projects that are

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investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one.

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(Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper.

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A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC.

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Sticker templates.

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Speed x 4.

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Making a switch.

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Music: DJ Shadow.

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Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller.

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Sketching an interface.

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(Music)

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Pretty cool, huh? We think so.

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So now that we developed these tools

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and found these materials that let us do these things,

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we started to realize that, essentially, anything

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that we can do with paper, anything that we can do

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with a piece of paper and a pen

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we can now do with electronics.

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So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a

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deeper exploration of that possibility.

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And I'll kind of let it speak for itself.

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(Music)

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(Applause)

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So the next step for us in this process

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is now to find a way to let all of you

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build things like this,

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and so the way that we're approaching that is by

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teaching workshops to people where we explain

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how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also

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working to get the tools and the materials and techniques

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out into the real world in a variety of ways.

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And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build

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and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way.

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So thank you very much. (Applause)