-
I love paper, and I love technology,
-
and what I do is I make paper interactive.
-
And that's what I say when people ask me what I do,
-
but it really confuses most people,
-
so really, the best way for me to convey it
-
is to take the technology and be creative
-
and create experiences.
-
So I tried to think what I could use for here,
-
and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea
-
that I wanted to print two DJ decks
-
and to try and mix some music.
-
And I'm going to try and show that at the end,
-
and the suspense will be as much mine if it works.
-
And I'm not a DJ, and I'm not a musician,
-
so I'm a little bit scared of that.
-
So I think, I found the best way to describe my journey
-
is just to mention a few little things
-
that have happened to me throughout my life.
-
There's three particular things that I've done,
-
and I'll just describe those first,
-
and then talk about some of my work.
-
So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with wires,
-
and I used to thread them under my carpet
-
and thread them behind the walls
-
and have little switches and little speakers,
-
and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive
-
but kind of all hidden away.
-
And I was also really interested in wireless as well.
-
So I bought one of those little kits that you could get
-
to make a radio transmitter,
-
and I got an old book and I carved out the inside
-
and I hid it inside there,
-
and then I placed it next to my dad
-
and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio
-
so I could eavesdrop.
-
I was not at all interested in what he was saying.
-
It's more that I just liked the idea
-
of an everyday object
-
sort of having something inside
-
and doing something different.
-
Several year later,
-
I managed to successfully fail all of my exams
-
and didn't really leave school with much to show for at all,
-
and my parents, maybe as a reward,
-
bought me what turned out to be
-
a one-way ticket to Australia,
-
and I came back home about four years later.
-
I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere.
-
It's in far western New South Wales.
-
And this farm was 120,000 acres.
-
There was 22,000 sheep,
-
and it was about 40 degrees,
-
or a hundred or so Fahrenheit.
-
And on this farm there was the farmer, his wife,
-
and there was the four-year old daughter.
-
And they kind of took me into the farm
-
and showed me what it was like to live and work.
-
Obviously, one of the most important things was the sheep,
-
and so my job was, well, pretty much to do everything,
-
but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead.
-
And we'd do that by building fences,
-
using motorbikes and horses,
-
and the sheep would make their way all the way back
-
to the sheering shed for the different seasons.
-
And what I learned was,
-
although at the time like everyone else
-
I thought sheep were pretty stupid
-
because they didn't do what we wanted them to do,
-
what I realize now, probably only just in the last few weeks
-
looking back, is the sheep weren't stupid at all.
-
We'd put them in an environment where they didn't want to be,
-
and they didn't want to do what we wanted them to do.
-
So the challenge was to try and get them
-
to do what we wanted them to do
-
by listening to the weather, the lay of the land,
-
and creating things that would let the sheep flow
-
and go where we wanted them to go.
-
Another bunch of years later,
-
I ended up at Cambridge University
-
at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K.
-
doing a Ph.D in physics.
-
My Ph.D was to move electrons around, one at a time.
-
And I realize — again, it's kind of these realizations
-
looking back as to what I did —
-
I realize now that it was pretty much the same
-
as moving sheep around.
-
It really is.
-
It's just you do it by changing an environment.
-
And that's kind of been a big lesson to me,
-
that you can't act on any object.
-
You change its environment, and the object will flow.
-
So we made it very small,
-
so things were about 30 nanometers in size;
-
making it very cold, so at liquid helium temperatures;
-
and changing environment by changing the voltage,
-
and the electrons could make flow around a loop
-
one at a time, on and off, a little [inaud].
-
And I wanted to go one step further,
-
and I wanted to move one electron on
-
and one electron off.
-
And I was told that I wouldn't be able to do this,
-
which, you know, as we've heard from other people,
-
that's the thing that makes you do it.
-
And I was determined, and I managed to show that I could do that.
-
And a lot of that learning, I think,
-
came from being on that farm,
-
because when I was working on the farm,
-
we'd have to use what was around us,
-
we'd have to use the environment,
-
and there was no such thing
-
as something can't be done,
-
because you're in an environment where,
-
if you can't do what you need to do,
-
you can die, and, you know,
-
I had seen that sort of thing happen.
-
So now my obsession is printing,
-
and I'm really fascinated by the idea
-
of using conventional printing processes,
-
so the types of print that's used to create
-
many of the things around us
-
to make paper and card interactive.
-
When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this
-
and told them what I wanted to do,
-
which was to print conductive inks onto paper,
-
they told me it couldn't be done,
-
again, that kind of favorite thing.
-
So I got about 10 credit cards and loans
-
and got myself a little very close to kind of bankruptcy, really,
-
and bought myself this huge printing press,
-
which I had no idea how to use at all.
-
It was about five meters long,
-
and I covered myself and the floor with ink
-
and made a massive mess, but I learned to print.
-
And then I took back to the printers and showed them what I've done,
-
and they were like, "Of course you can do that.
-
Why didn't you come here in the first place?"
-
That's always the case.
-
So what we do is we take conventional printing presses,
-
we make conductive inks,
-
and run those through a press, and basically
-
just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow
-
through pieces of paper
-
so we can make that paper interactive.
-
And it's pretty simple, really.
-
It's just a collection of things that have been done before,
-
but bringing them together in a different way.
-
So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on,
-
and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips,
-
one to run some capacitive touch software,
-
so we know where we've touched it,
-
and the other to run, quite often,
-
some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect.
-
So I'll just describe a couple of things that we've created.
-
There's lots of different things we've created.
-
This is one of them, because I love cake.
-
And this one, it's a large poster,
-
and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it,
-
and the poster talks to you when you touch it
-
and asks you a series of questions,
-
and it works out your perfect cake.
-
But it doesn't tell you the cake there and then.
-
It uploads a picture,
-
and the reason why it chose that cake for you,
-
to our Facebook page and to Twitter.
-
So we're trying to create that connection
-
between the physical and the digital,
-
but have it not looking on a screen,
-
and just looking like a regular poster.
-
We've worked with a bunch of universities on a project
-
looking at interactive newsprint.
-
So for example, we've printed a newspaper,
-
a regular newspaper.
-
You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly,
-
and when you touch it, you can hear the music
-
that's described on the top, which is something you can't read.
-
You can hear a press conference
-
as well as reading what the editor has determined
-
that press conference was about.
-
And you can press a Facebook "like" button
-
or you can vote on something as well.
-
Something else that we created,
-
and this was an idea that I had a couple years ago,
-
and so we've done a project on this.
-
It was from a funding from the government
-
for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings,
-
difficult to say, and something that I had no idea what it was
-
when I went into the workshop, but quickly learned.
-
And we wanted to try and encourage people
-
to use energy better.
-
And I really liked the idea that, instead of looking at dials
-
and reading things to say, you know,
-
looking at your energy usage,
-
I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected
-
and had color-changing inks on it,
-
and so if your energy usage was trending better,
-
than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear
-
and all would be good.
-
And if it wasn't, then there'd be graffiti
-
and the leaves would fall off the trees.
-
So it was trying to make you look after something
-
in your immediate environment
-
which you don't want to see not looking so good,
-
rather than expecting people to do things
-
in the local environment because of the effect
-
that it has a long way off.
-
And I think, kind of like going back to the farm,
-
it's about how to let people do what you want them to do
-
rather than making people do what you want them to do.
-
Okay.
-
So this is the bit I'm really scared of.
-
So a couple of things I've created are,
-
there's a poster over here
-
that you can play drums on.
-
And I'm not a musician. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
-
If anyone wants to try and play drums, then they can.
-
I'll just describe how this works.
-
This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone,
-
and when you touch it, it connects to the app.
-
(Drum hits)
-
And it has really good response time.
-
It's using Bluetooth 4, so it's pretty instantaneous.
-
Okay. Thanks.
-
(Applause)
-
And there's a couple of other things.
-
So this one is like a sound board,
-
so you can touch it, and I just love these horrible noises.
-
(Sirens, explosions, breaking glass)
-
Okay, and this is a DJ turntable.
-
So it's wirelessly linked to my iPad,
-
and this is a software that's running on the iPad.
-
Oh, yes. I just love doing that.
-
I'm not a DJ, though, but I just always wanted to do that.
-
So I have a crossfader, and I have the two decks.
-
So I've made some new technology,
-
and I love things being creative,
-
and I love working with creative people.
-
So my 15-year old niece, she's amazing,
-
and she's called Charlotte,
-
and I asked her to record something,
-
and I worked with a friend called Elliot
-
to put some beats together.
-
So this is my niece, Charlotte.
-
(Music)
-
Yay.
-
(Applause)
-
So that's pretty much what I do.
-
I just love bringing technology together,
-
having a lot of fun, being creative.
-
But it's not about the technology.
-
It's just about, I want to create some great experiences.
-
So thank you very much.
-
(Applause)