Peter Brabazon (Director, Discover Science & Engineering): Thanks very much everybody, thanks very much for travelling in so far particularly today. It’s a great day for us in Discover Science & Engineering, the 14th year of Science Week Ireland, and this is the first in a lecture series this week here at the Science Gallery, which if you haven’t been here before maybe another day you might come in and have a look around - a very interesting place indeed.
Obviously you’re all interested in science and that is why you are here. [Audience laughs] A bit of an open question, sorry about that! I would particularly like to congratulate of course your teachers for bringing you. That is the most important thing isn’t it? You’re very welcome as I say. This is the first of a series of lectures during Science Week. That is, 400 events this week all over Ireland organised by my colleague - I don’t know where she has gone - Cathy Foley, who has a lot of work to do as you can imagine. So let’s make this a particularly good lecture series in that we have got a really interesting person here today, Damini Kumar, who is a really intelligent and clever person.
She is the Director of Product Design in NUI Maynooth. And that goes back I suppose to her winning the UK prize as being the most innovative Young British Female of the Year 2001 - so you can imagine, an important person. She is an engineer, like myself, but she is more qualified than I am to say the least. She has a masters in product design and also has a masters in medical science. So she's a very bright and exciting person as well.
She has also invented a few things but particularly a drip-free tea pot. So there you go, so there are quite a lot of innovations that you can make out there. This is important for this week because it’s all about innovation and creativity. And Damini is the European Union's Representative for Innovation and Creativity because it’s the year of innovation and creativity. So we've got the right person to kick off Science Week Ireland's lecture series here at the Science Gallery. I am going to hand over to her and she will be talking to you for about 40 minutes and then there will be some opportunities for questions and answers. So think up the questions - they don’t all have to be about teapots by the way. Enjoy the rest of the week and can I hand you over to Damini Kumar. [Applause]
Damini Kumar: Thank you. Welcome everybody. Peter has now taken away about 10 of my slides on what I was going to speak about, my background and stuff. But basically today I am here to talk about design, creativity and innovation, how it fits into science, engineering, all the disciplines. And it’s very exciting, the first day of Science Week today. So welcome all. So just to give you a bit of background, obviously Peter said a bit. [Slide: ‘Background’]
There’s me with my funky teapot many years ago. But at school it was my lifelong ambition to become an inventor. I was told that around your age at school that I couldn’t go off and do a degree in inventing. So the nearest thing I could get to it would be mechanical engineering. I studied mechanical engineering. I then went on… I realised that my actual interest was in design, creating new products, new innovations, new inventions. So I went on to do an MSc in product design, very hands-on, very practical. And I will go into that in a bit more detail.
Then I went on…recently in Ireland, I moved to Ireland six years ago and I have been working here in universities and in industry. But I did a Masters in medical subjects. And basically what I did for this MSc is, I was inventing a suit that people could wear and it would measure their movements by this suit. So it had sensors built into this suit. If you imagine if you are in hospital and you have had a stroke or you are in rehabilitation and you are moving your arm slowly every day. But no-one can actually monitor how far you are moving your arm or if it’s getting better or if it’s getting worse. Or if you are at home with an illness, the same thing applies.
So basically I invented this medical suit that you could wear with sensors built in, that would talk to a computer and measure your movements every day and give you feedback. And it was to do with yoga as well, the movement of the joints with yoga. That was my recent Masters. But in between both my Masters I worked in industry for about 10 years. So Habitat - which used to be in Ireland, I don’t know if you remember the shop Habitat, it has now left Ireland but it is still in Europe - so I worked for the likes of Habitat and other companies designing real products.
And how it used to work is, they would come up to you and say, right, we need a new juicer for our shops. And you would go off in your design team, you would see what juicers were out there. Consumer products, household products is my particular field. And you would go off and design it. I'll go through the design process in a minute and what it entails. But designing new products for the shops. And then most recently I am now at university. I am in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. I am Programme Director for the Product Design Degree, which is a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree. And the degree is new. It’s three years old. So again I am designing the degree to try and make it the best design degree I can in product design. So I will talk about that process as well. I will talk about the Imaginate competition.
And January this year the European Union announced this year to be the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. They believe that creativity and innovation is what’s important in the future, new products, new innovations, new science. All of that is going to help us out of this recession. I am not going to go into the economic details, but help us out of this recession, and help us in the next recession, if and when it comes. So with that role as the European Ambassador I basically speak around Europe, speak to different audiences. I work with the European Parliament. And my basic role is to promote creativity and innovation among everyone.
The other Ambassadors, we are all across Europe, there’s 25 of us. They are probably a lot more famous than me. So you would have heard of them. The likes of Philippe Stark, who had that series – I don’t know if any of you saw it on BBC 2 recently. No? OK, Edward de Bono, he is another famous… but Erno Rubik, the guy who invented the Rubix cube. You all know Rubix cube. He is another Ambassador. The guy who invented the MP3 player format in Germany. That’s the reason we all have iPods and MP3 players today. So they are the other Ambassadors.
Just to go a bit in my past, my journey so far. I always wanted to be an inventor. At the age of eight I started keeping a little book of ideas, of things that I wanted to see designed better or changed to make my life easier. And I am sure you have that all the time, everything you interact with, every product, everything you use. I am sure at some point in the day you think, ‘Oh my God, this doesn’t work properly. Why can’t someone design it better?’ Well I had that curiosity right from a young age. So I had a little book of ideas, which I still have. And, as I told you, the closest I could get to innovating - or so I was told - was mechanical engineering. And that’s what I went into. Mechanical engineering was great, but I felt constrained on the artistic side so I went on to do product design.
Now I am going to talk about my actual invention and how I set out to do it. During my Masters in Product Design I wanted to set out to invent a new product. I wanted to be a famous inventor in the UK, in London. And someone came up to me and said to me, ‘If you invent a non-drip teapot you will make it.’ And I was like, ‘Really? A non-drip teapot, is that really a problem for people?’ And the more I researched it, the more I realised that actually the last 50 years there’s been scientists, engineers and designers trying to solve the problem of dripping teapots. I don’t know how many of you use teapots, how many of your families do. But actually wherever you go you will find they will drip. Whether you are on a train, at home, no matter, you can pour it in a special way which I am not obviously perfect at doing. But they drip, they spill, they ruin the tablecloth, they get hot liquid onto you. So I set out to do it.
How did I go about it? I spent three months on this project. And to be honest a lot of design and invention and innovation is to be practical. So you can…you need the theory, you need the maths, you need the science. You need to know what is behind…like I did all the maths and all the science but that was in the evenings. In the daytime I was working in a pottery, a little pottery in Londonbridge, in the centre of London, with a clock maker who made ceramic clocks. And I was actually doing design-make-and-test projects. So I had…I was building teapots with my hands, with crazy spouts. Some of them just like any shape that came into my head, I would make the spout that shape and test it, and see did it drip more, did it drip less, was it any good, or was it worse? And I had about 12 different prototypes. They are actually all sitting in London.
And if you see the spout shapes on them they are all weird and wacky designs. But it was just to be practical – to get to know how something works and what it is doing. Obviously you need the science and maths. You need to understand it. But I believe all innovation, all invention comes from being practical and design making and testing. So I set out to do it. And together with the science and maths and all my crazy shaped spouts and teapots, I realised I had hit on the solution. That if…here you can see in this picture. [Slide: ‘Non-drip Spout’] You can see the groove on the under side of the spout. So basically what it is – is if you see the spout there – with that groove on the outside, that tiny shape change the spout becoming narrower. You can see that – as it is coming up it is getting – it’s becoming narrower. As you are pouring, as you are tipping this teapot and the spout is becoming narrower, it is speeding up the fluid inside.
So if you’re pouring, it’s becoming narrower, it’s speeding up the fluid inside. As you tip back or as it’s …basically liquid works in a way that the faster it is the less likely it is to drip. So if you’re speeding up the fluid you are going to actually prevent the dripping, from that simple shape change on the underneath, on the under side of the spout. Not only that – because of the shape change that it is, a little upside down ‘V’, you can imagine on the inside it has now got a ramp. That is actually a ramp. I wish I had the teapot here to show you. But if you are pouring that and there is a ramp on the inside – when you tip back from pouring a liquid, that ramp actually prevents any more fluid going past it. So it’s working by (1) when you are pouring it, speeding it up. As you’re tipping back it has now got a lip on the inside, which is sending the fluid back. And that is the invention - a tiny shape change to a spout. It’s not an attachment. It’s not anything else.
And the beauty of this upside down ‘V’ is that I wanted it to be able to be mass produced. I didn’t want this teapot to cost, you know, €100 to buy and no-one could afford to buy it. I wanted it to be made, manufactured in a process that could be mass produced in the existing machinery. So with ceramics, which is one of the hardest materials to mould, you cannot put anything on the inside of the spout because of the process of manufacturing. It has to go on the outside. So without even realising it at the time, by creating this shape on the outside I’d created the shape on the inside without actually having to go inside the spout. So totally non-drip. Obviously I allowed for mistakes, which I will go into. And it’s a simple innovation. What was to come after this I wasn’t prepared for at all. And this…it’s a non-drip spout.>[?
So I have a worldwide patent now. And it can be applied to anything that pours. So wine bottles, petrol pumps, industrial machinery, anything that pours any liquid. On a wine bottle this would be 360º, going all the way round the lip. Anything that pours any liquid with this shape in any material can now make it completely non-drip and non-spill. Petrol pumps – you will realise later when you are driving – it’s quite annoying to get petrol on your shoes. It’s a waste of petrol as well. So it’s a solution to everything. I had my eureka moment with this invention. I spent, I think, the next seven days testing it, to make sure it was foolproof. And it is completely foolproof, even if there is minimal liquid in there, and the liquid can’t speed up. It actually…when you pull back you see the ‘V’ now on the outside, that groove.
This is the third way it works. If there is going to be one drip, as you are pulling back, the liquid cannot speed up, because there is not enough liquid in the teapot. As you pull back the last droplet, well the fluid will start to drip, it will hit this ‘V’ which is now at an angle. Water can’t go upwards, so it will come off that edge into the mug. And then as you tip back, if there is any dripping, the droplet will stick to that ‘V’ on the outside. And I have had the likes of Unilever and the other companies test this invention by hammering the top of the teapot to try and get that last droplet to come off on that ‘V’ on the outside. And it can’t, because of surface tension. If you put a droplet onto a ‘V’ like that and the droplet is going around it, you can bang the top, but that droplet is now stuck to that ‘V’ on the outside. It cannot come off. It grips onto it because of energy and surface tension. So it works in three ways.
So what came next after this? Then after this the next morning I was called, and I won quite a few awards. I was the Young British Female Inventor of the Year, as Peter has already said. Magazines, newspapers, [shows slides of press clippings] I started to tour the world with this invention – trying to promote it. And then also hit the media as well. And before I knew it, Big Breakfast – I don’t think…do any of you remember the Big Breakfast? No? It was a morning programme. Or GMTV, Richard and Judy, all these programmes, within the next couple of weeks I was on live TV speaking about this invention, pouring every presenter in the UK practically a cup of tea from this teapot - proving that it wasn’t dripping. You know, they made me pour it live on every TV programme there was – Sky News, BBC News. And I gained a lot of media interest from it.
Going back to the point where someone said to me, ‘If you invent a teapot that doesn’t drip you will make it as an inventor.’ And in three months I had done it. At the same time there was a professor at one of the universities who was trying to solve the same problem, who had spent the last 20 years of his life trying to do it. But the difference was, he was a scientist, which was great, but he didn’t use any practical element to it. So he just got caught up in all the science and maths, but didn’t do any practical side of it. And in science and engineering and design you really need to have a practical side. You need to be experimenting. You need to do design-make-and-test.
So creativity – everyone is talking about creativity. I don’t know if they are in your schools. To try and be more creative, this is the future of Ireland and the next generation. What is creativity? Basically, to me, it can be broken down into simple language. Creativity is to be inquisitive and be curious. Start questioning things. We put up with so many – product design obviously is my field, product design engineering – but we put up with so many products that we are not happy with. We are really not happy with them. But we put up with them.
Does anyone know when the wheel was invented? [Responses from audience] A long time ago. Any idea? [More responses from audience] "Yesterday" we have got over here. [Laughter] Apparently…well not apparently – the wheel was invented approximately 3,000 years ago. Yet only 30 years ago some scientist, designer, engineer, whoever it was, realised that putting a wheel on a suitcase would be brilliant for us. So 3,000 years and then only in the last 30 years does someone realise to put a wheel on a…to make it a trolley bag, a trolley suitcase. So being creative is questioning things. It’s not living with the products that you don’t like or the science or whatever it is you are trying to create or be innovative. You’ve got to start questioning. And you will find that you will get a lot of people around you at that time saying, ‘Oh, no, that will never work.’ I had that during my stages of trying to invent the non-drip teapot. They would say, ‘Oh you will never do that.’ And ‘You have set aside three months – impossible.’
Believe me you can do anything. If you want to, if you are passionate, and if you put your mind to it, put the hard work, get the science and maths, learn about it, you can do anything. So you need to have an open mind as well. I will give you examples of this. To have an open mind, you need to be original, and take risks. Here is another thing. We are too afraid to take that risk. But actually the best ideas come from failure or learning from your mistakes. Don’t be scared of failure. Actually failure is positive in the world of science, engineering and design. It actually teaches you what doesn’t work - with my 12 crazy spout shapes. And if you could see them – you might find them on the Internet. If you see these spout shapes, people will laugh at you. But they actually taught me what was really not going to work. And from that failure, from those mistakes I went on to develop the idea. And lateral thinking.
Does anyone here know about lateral thinking or even understand what it means? Again it’s another word, I don’t know if it’s used in schools a lot or…[response from audience] Pardon? Well lateral thinking, just to put it into simplistic terms is the ability to see things unusually. And I am going to give you a couple of examples of that now. So just going back to the failure point. Thomas Edison, he invented the light bulb and various other world famous inventions that have changed our life as we know it.
And this is one of his quotes, ‘I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’ And he was delighted. He was jumping up with joy at this quote. He still hadn’t invented his product or the light bulb. But, again, those 10,000 ways that didn’t work taught him what would work later. And that is something that you really have to remember. If you want to be innovative, creative, whether you want to run a business, become a scientist, it doesn’t matter. Take those risks, allow for failure and learn from your mistakes. Don’t repeat them, obviously, don’t repeat mistakes. But you learn from them. So lateral thinking, just to make sure you are all still awake I am going to give you a lateral thinking puzzle. This is just trying to get your mind to think differently from the normal way of thinking. [Slide: Lateral Thinking Puzzle] So the rope ladder of a boat hangs over the side of a boat and just reaches the water. It has eight rungs, five inches apart. How many rungs will be under the water when the tide rises four feet? If you could put up your hand if you think… Yes.
Response from audience: It doesn't go into the water at all.
Damini Kumar: Pardon?
Response from audience: It doesn't go into the water at all – the boat rises.
Damini Kumar: Yes, there you go. Well done. [Applause] Had you heard it before?
Response from audience: Yeah.
Damini Kumar: Oh you have heard it before. I should have said, if you heard it before don’t answer. But basically that’s exactly it. So guys, those of you that were trying to calculate it, I am just trying to get you to open your minds into a different way of thinking. Don’t think the normal way. Be creative. Be curious. Be innovative. And think of it a different way. I am going to give you one more. If any of you have heard this one please don’t answer it. OK. [Slide: Another Lateral Thinking Puzzle] One day two mothers and two daughters were going shoe shopping. The trip was successful. Each bought a pair of shoes. And altogether they had three pairs. How is this possible? If you put up your hand, if you think you might know the answer. Yes?
Response from audience: It’s only three people. One is a mother and a daughter. Because you have got the granny and then the daughter and…
Damini Kumar: Exactly. Well done. Round of applause. [Applause]. So did you hear it before?
Response from audience: No.
Damini Kumar: Exactly. So it doesn’t matter, even if you did hear it. You are training your mind. Even if you have heard these, I am trying to get you to think differently. So basically, it was a daughter, a mother and a grandmother. That still counts as two mothers, two daughters. So I am just trying to get you to think. That’s all lateral thinking is. That's all…being creative, having an open mind, and not limiting yourself right at the beginning. And just don’t think of the obvious, think of other ways as well.
So now I am moving on to innovation. [Slide: "Innovation is using creativity to add value"] Again a word used a lot at the moment. For me… to give you a simple definition of innovation. Again all the newspapers, the Irish government, I don’t know if your teachers – everyone is using the word, innovation. Let’s be more innovative. There’s hundreds of definitions of innovation that you will find on the Internet. But to me it’s a basic one – innovation is using creativity to add value. So you are using your creativity which is being inquisitive, being curious, opening your mind, problem solving - all of those things to add value – i.e. you are doing something to either invent a product so someone has a better use of that product. You are inventing a car for the future. You are inventing a business that people want to use. It’s all about the user and user-centred design. So that basically to me is what innovation is. You are using creativity, but to add value, either if you own a company, to bring more money in. If you are at school you’re using innovation to help yourself understand all the subjects and to do well in all of them. So you are trying new ideas. You’re ensuring creativity is channelled into productive results. And one other tip I can give you right here is, ‘Don’t reinvent the wheel.’ Now I’ll give you examples of that.
If there is something out there in whatever you are doing, whether it’s science, engineering, design, and you’re trying to invent or innovate something, and someone else has already invented part of that product or the technology or something, there is no point you trying to do it yourself. Use what is already out there. And I’ll give you an example here, the Apple iPod. Can you put your hands up if you own one? [Show of hands] OK.
So leave your hands up if you think Apple invented that whole product. [A lot of hands go down] OK, so you are absolutely right, they don’t. Apple actually design the casing. So they are about designing the casing and the experience that the user has with that product. So what they are trying to do is, when you use your iPod you feel happy, you feel like it's doing what you want it to do. And there’s minimal bugs in it. The technology inside an iPod is actually not done by Apple at all. They have licensed the technology from loads of other small companies, scientists, engineers, technologists, computer scientists around the world, that are already experts in their field, that know how the technology works, have written the program, have written the software. And they license it off them, and then case it themselves and put it into a product. So my point here is, please don’t reinvent the wheel. With me, I didn’t reinvent the teapot. I kept the teapot, the vessel, and I reinvented it to make it non-drip. It’s every small step. And you need to also collaborate. So if there are people that have done it around the world, go and use the knowledge that they have. There is no point in you doing it yourselves.
And my last main point here about innovation is don’t innovate for yourself, don’t invent for yourself. Innovate for the user. There is no point designing a product that you might enjoy unless everyone else wants to enjoy it too. And you find that with a lot of good… a lot of design, a lot of invention. You can see inventors that are caught up in their own product. Because they think it’s the best thing. But then they go out and speak to people and they don’t want it. So design. What is design?
[Slide: "Design is the process that uses creativity and innovation", with images of futuristic cars and chairs] Again these are renderings of cars, futuristic cars. Design is the process that uses creativity and innovation. I am going to go very briefly through the design process, what it is. But it’s basically a tool. It’s a methodology. It’s something you can learn. It’s a process from beginning to end that teaches you how to use your creativity and how to invent a new product, or how to use your creativity and start a new business, or whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s just a process. And it’s being used in so many different domains at the moment. It connects technology, science and humanity, because it’s about the user. All the products we are going to see – the next generation of products that you will have at home are all about the user. It’s how you feel using them.
Another example of this is the Nintendo Wii, where Playstation – Sony Playstation and Nintendo were both about to launch a new product. This is a few years ago. Nintendo went out and did their research and basically questioned everyone – young mothers, grandmothers, young boys like you, anyone, and said, ‘What do you want from a games console?’ The questions they got back were, "We want something interactive. We want something to lose weight. We want something that the whole family can join in together." Meanwhile Sony went off and questioned existing Sony users and said, "What do you want?" And they said, "Oh better graphics, better technology, better gaming." But they didn’t actually go out to the whole market, to the whole user. And you all probably remember Nintendo Wii, you couldn’t get your hands on one a couple of Christmases ago. There was a waiting list for everyone. You couldn’t buy one for Christmas. And they actually dominated the market. And Sony’s Playstation did that [she gives a gesture of a decrease] and Nintendo Wii sales [indicates an increase], you had to queue at six in the morning when they got a delivery to get one.
And then the other thing to remember is everything we have used in our daily lives has been designed. You are not wearing trainers, or runners as you call them here, at the moment because you are in your uniform. But in your runners, those airsole pockets, who do you think designed those? Scientists, engineers, technologists. The function, the runners that make you lose weight now, or just give you comfort to your foot, that’s all science. You may think that’s fashion design. It’s not. It’s actual real… they are solving real problems. And it’s the human body, so it’s very important - on what your shoes can do for you when you are running or you are in a sports field.
So again that’s a perception. Scientists, technologists, engineers and designers do real exciting things every day. This geeky image that is associated with them has to disappear, because there’s a lot of good work going on.
[Slide: "Research – understand user. Concept generation – new ideas. Develop. Test and Evaluate. Prototype"] So the design process, just very briefly to run through it. We have been through it anyway. You do your research. So you need to understand who it is you are designing for. Concept generation, where the creativity comes in, and you get new ideas. And at this stage the golden rule is, no idea is a bad idea. So no matter how weird, wonderful, wacky, crazy, insane your idea might be at this stage, you keep it. Because later on it might answer another question. Then you develop. Again be practical, you test and evaluate. [Slide: Dyson Vacuum Cleaners Testing] Here you can see the Dyson vacuum cleaners being tested for hours on end, on a piece of carpet, backwards and forwards to see their lifecycle. And then you prototype and you test again. And the main thing about the design process is that at any stage you can go back to the beginning. So if at the developing stage I realise the product I am designing doesn’t work, you go back. You go back to the beginning and you start again. Or you go back to another stage in it, and you start again. You don’t just carry on and at the end go, ‘Oh well this product doesn’t quite work and it’s not exactly what I wanted, but here it is.’ You keep going back, and you keep changing it ‘til you perfect it.
So creativity in education…. [Slide: "Breakdown barriers between different disciplines, e.g. art and science… everyone is creative!"] These are just some of my views on school systems, the education systems. And basically I think we need to understand that we need to break down the barriers between arts and sciences. Both are valid. Both are important. And both go hand in hand actually, especially in innovation and creativity. So remember you can be good at art and science. Or if you are more scientifically orientated, keep on your creative and artistic skills. And if you’re more artistic, remember that science, maths and engineering provides you with the knowledge to be able to be creative. So you really need to have cross-disciplinary thinking going on. Learning by doing.
So these are some of my students at the Product Design Degree. [Slide: Students of Maynooth Design Degree] Learning by doing, we teach them something. I teach them something, then they do it. They put it into practice. So they can understand why they are doing it - problem solving rather than knowledge transmission. And here’s the key word I think so far in this whole presentation, that everyone is creative. Everyone in this room is creative. Even if you came up to me and said, "I cannot draw a stick man. I can’t think outside the box. My mind is not open." Believe it or not you are creative. It’s something you’re born with. It’s something that usually is either not fostered in school or it’s not brought out. But I can give you examples of creativity as well, both with a competition I set up last year and my product design students. And I will give you examples of the reasons why everyone is creative. But believe me, you all are creative. So have any of you heard of Imaginate? [Show of hands] OK, a couple of you. [Slide: Imaginate 2009]
Imaginate 2009 was a competition I launched last year. And basically it was to get students your age to start thinking about problem solving, about being more creative, about being innovative. And it was simple. Last year we asked students to design an object for the classroom of the future. It was open to all secondary school children across Ireland, northern and southern Ireland. And I wanted you guys to go out and solve real problems you faced at school. There were two categories. I just really briefly want to go through some of the submissions. So you can see here, some of these students, they are all aged between 12 and 18, depending on which category. This is the Junior Category. Some of these students I met at the awards ceremony apparently aren’t creative, don’t problem solve, don’t have an open mind, so they think. And these are some of the ideas. [Slide: Wonder Bag] So here you have a wonder bag, this bag that does everything – makes popcorn, has an umbrella, has arms that come and massage your shoulders when your back hurts from carrying it, has a 3D hologram that tells you about all the latest things coming out, matches. And you can see, this is from a student just spending, I think it was 45 minutes problem solving. And her main issue was carrying her bag and why her bag didn’t have more features, which was an issue across a lot of students actually.
Here’s a couple more. I won’t go into them in a lot of detail. But here you have no more books. [Slide: Imaginate Design – Cyber-Visor] Another problem for a lot of schoolchildren they don’t want to carry books. They are heavy. So this Cyber-Visor basically transmits your teacher’s notes onto the glasses. You can send your homework direct to the teacher’s computer by pressing a button. And it has loads of other features. Again just creativity, innovation. It doesn’t matter will it work, will it not work. It’s ideas of problem solving for the future. This is a robot to replace the teacher at school. [Slide: Imaginate Design - iBot] And it does everything from… I don’t know… clean the floors as it walks, to give you information. And it does everything. And it has again a hologram thing.
This is a new seat … this student thought that every seat in school should be like this, with a touch screen. [Slide: Imaginate Design – S-Life] And this pen, you see here, actually corrects your spelling. [Slide: Imagine Design - Pen] So if you write a word and it’s the wrong spelling, it starts flashing red. Again what a brilliant idea for the school students being creative. This is now the Senior Category, the winner of the Senior Category. [Slide: Imaginate Design – Zen Workstation] This student believed that every desk by the year 2025, in Ireland, every school desk across the country will look like this. His inspiration came from a palm tree. And it’s completely ergonomic, a touchpad, and all your notes and work is on this desk. Again no more school books, no more school bags, which seemed to be a common theme among students. "The slate" does everything. [Slide: Imaginate Design - Slate] Again it manages your whole diary, your social life, your school life, completely electronic. [Slide: Imaginate – Bright Comfort Classroom] This is actually the classroom. This student designed the classroom of the future. So it’s got a solar panelled roof. You can see the chairs going around and then coming out. This is an enlargement of one of the chairs. They seem really comfortable for a school. It’s like a lounger, you can sit back, recline. You’ve got your touch screen here.
And you know… so again a completely environmentally friendly classroom of the future. Again just more ideas. And I am just showing you this, hopefully to inspire you. These are students your age brainstorming. So we had prizes and everything. The winning schools also got prizes. And it was webcast on RTÉ and shown on RTÉ children’s TV. And you can see here, sorry, we actually prototyped the winning ideas. [Slide: List of Imaginate prizes with photo of students and their prototypes] So you can’t really see it clearly. There’s the Cyber-Visor. And there’s the Zen Workstation. Because we have a rapid prototyper in Maynooth where you can basically draw something on the computer in SolidWorks, which I am sure some of you are aware of. And then it prints it in plastic in 3D. So we actually gave that as a present to the students.
So just to say there are ways of being creative, there are ways of using your imagination, we are going to be launching it this January again. There’s going to be a different theme, where we are going to ask all the secondary school students around the country to problem solve another problem in their school. And if you want more details obviously they are available on the Imaginate website. So very quickly, just to end the presentation, and then I want to show you a video.
I just really want to go and talk about product design at Maynooth, [Slide: "Product Design (Marketing & Innovation) BSc Honours Degree – 'The Innovators of Tomorrow', Course Code: MH305"] what we are trying to do, and other degrees across the country and in the UK, and what it actually entails. So it’s a BSc Honours. It’s a Bachelor of Science degree. And basically a product designer is to a product what an architect is to a building. We create and invent a new product for the mass market, something that the user wants. We use maths and science. You have to have the knowledge. There is another type of design called blue skies design where you can invent or design anything, but it doesn’t have to function. No-one has to really use it and no-one has to buy it. This sort of product design, when it’s scientifically based, you’re inventing something that people actually want and that is functional and does work, and yet looks good at the end as well. So you learn how to sketch, to draw, and even if you have no creativity this is my example of it. So my students come into me at 18, "I can’t draw. I am not creative. My teacher thinks I am not creative. I am not artistic." They are now in third year. The degree is three years old. And in third year they are rendering in 3D. They are sketching. They have got spatial awareness. They are thinking laterally. And it’s just the way of teaching you how to do that. So it can be taught. [Slide: "Three integrated streams: Technology, Marketing, Design"]
You do marketing throughout the four years. You do technology, which is all the science, maths and engineering, and then the design as well. And obviously nowadays most products are electronic, have some sort of electronic components. So we also teach you the basics of the electronic, so you are aware of it. [Slide: "Contact www.productdesign.ie"] But if you want any more details of this degree, or any other product design courses or design in general, obviously your teachers can get in touch with me after. But now just to end the talk I want to inspire you all. [Slide: "You can achieve anything if you believe in it – follow your passion and ambition!"] So basically my motto in life is "Follow Your Dream". You can achieve anything if you believe in it. There will be people along the way that say, "You can’t do this. You can’t be….you can’t have that career." But follow your passion, follow your dream, and enjoy what you’re doing, and you will be successful at whatever you do. And I can almost guarantee that for all of you. So just to end now, I want to show you a video. This is from a website called Ted.com, which is for designers. It’s on creativity, inspiration. And again I just want to show you this video on Theo Jansen who followed his passion. Again people didn’t think this would be possible. But you can tell me yourselves what you think. [Playing Video]
Video
[Titles: “Remarkable people…unmissable talks…now free to the world. TED, ideas worth spreading”]
[Titles: "Theo Jansen"]
Theo Jansen: I would like to tell you about a project which started about 16 years ago. And it’s about making new forms of life. And these are made of this kind of tube, electricity tube, we call it in Holland. And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time.
Narrator: Eventually these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution.
Theo Jansen: I want to put these forms of life on the beaches and they should survive over there on their own in the future. Learning to live on their own and it will take a couple of more years to let them walk on their own.
Narrator: The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food but from the wind. The wind will move feathers on their back which will drive their feet. The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beech with its nose pointed into the wind. As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand it stops and walks in the opposite direction. Evolution has generated many species. This is the animaris [unclear]. [Laughter] [Applause]
Theo Jansen: This is a herd and it is built according to genetical codes. And this is a sort of race. And each, any…every animal is different. And the winning codes will multiply. This is the wave going from left to right. You could see in this one. And now it goes from…yes, now it goes from left to right. And this is a new generation, a new family which is able to store the wind. So the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of the…and they can use that energy in case the race…the wind falls away and the tide is coming up. And they still have a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives. Because they drown very easily. I could show you this animal.
[Demonstrating Animal] [Applause] So the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. There are 11 numbers which I call the "11 holy numbers". These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way. And in fact it’s a new invention of the wheel. It works the same as a wheel. The axis of a wheel is staying on the same level. And this hip is staying on the same level as well. In fact it is better than a wheel. Because when you try to drive with your bicycle on the beach you will notice it’s going very …very hard to do. And the feet just step over the sand. And the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in between. So 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel we have a new wheel. And I will show you in the next video. OK, start it please. [Video demonstration] That very heavy loads can be moved. There are some …there is a guy pushing there behind, but can also walk on the wind very well. It’s 3.2 tonnes. And this is working on the stored winds in the bottles, here is the feeler where it can feel obstacles and turn around. And that’s so …if you see it has gone through the other way. Can I have the feeler? [model of feeler]
OK. Yes. So they have to survive all the dangers of the beach. And one of the big dangers is the sea. This is the sea. [Demonstrates glass of water] And it must feel the water of the sea. And this is the water feeler. And what’s very important is this tube. It sucks in air normally. But when it swallows water it feels the resistance of it. So imagine the animal is walking towards the sea… [Demonstration: puts tube in water]…as soon as it touches the water it should, you should hear a sort of sound of running air. Oh. [hissing sound air] Yes. So if it doesn’t feel it will be drowned. OK. Here we have the brain of the animal. [Model: Brain of Tube Animal] In fact it is a step counter. And it counts the steps. It’s a binary step counter. So as soon as it has been into the sea it changes the pattern of zeros and ones here and it knows always where it is on the beach. So it’s a very simple brain. It says, "Well there’s the sea, there are the dunes, and I am here." So it’s a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal. Thank you. One of the biggest enemies are the storms. This is a part of the nose of the animaris percipiere. [Model: part of tube animal]
And when the nose is fixed of the animal the whole animal is fixed. So when the storm is coming up it drives a pin into the ground. [Demonstration: tube animal drives pin into the ground] [Laughter] And the nose if fixed, the whole animal is fixed. The wind may turn but the animal will turn over its nose into the wind. Another couple of years and these animals will survive on their own. I still have to help them a lot. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. [Applause]
Damini Kumar: So there you can see, just using plastic tubes, lemonade bottles and some science, maths, engineering and his imagination and creativity, he has actually designed these creatures that can live by themselves in families on the beach, know where the water is, know where the sand is, and actually using wind power can survive. So thank you. [Applause] Thank you to everyone for coming today. I hope you enjoyed the talk. I hope it inspired you to be more creative or innovative, or just think differently in whatever you do. And the main thing is to follow your dreams, your ambitions and just get there. And remember to work hard as well at school, because it does pay off later. Thank you. [Applause]
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