Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Case Study: Jay Silver, Makey Makey”.
So real, quick i’ll just tell you what i study um. This is a book i gave to my son because i’m like a super hippie dad and i’m like uh, you should learn to love nature and you should build things, but you know like non-rectilinearly and should be like about balance and cactuses and stuff. So i gave him a building block set, so i gave it to him like great he’s going to love nature. There’S the stars, the kids and the pictures are loving stars. You can build things with cactus blocks, that’s not what he did.
He started doing stuff like this and then he’s like oh mommy, daddy. You should help me do this stuff too um and here watch. I learned this and now you try it and you can probably do it better than me, because your hands are bigger, and so he kind of took what i gave him and turned in kind of like a catapult or something and like this is what humans do With things, if they don’t already know what they’re supposed to do with things and that’s what i study is, how do you, like you know, work with people as creative agents or with people so that they see the world they live in as a construction kit, and So this product here is called makey, makey and dale asked me to talk about it and kind of the story of of how it was made, and a kid actually asked me how. How do you think to make that – and that was the only question i didn’t know the answer to because the answer is like i don’t know, there’s like a thousand things that made me think to make this over eight years.
So how do you answer that? So i thought i would show you guys today, some of the hundreds of prototypes that all in different ways contributed to making this. So, let’s start back five years ago in india, when i spilled some lentils on a 555 timer and found out that they could squeak without kind of like the electrical resistance of the circuit, but with the electrical resistance of the everyday world. So i started playing with some kids with this concept and this is at a slum school in india. They’Re saying oh, listen to the bike, listen to the plastic, listen to your head and then we actually took that triple five circuit timer and put in a little plastic bag and we’re just touching it to things listening it to it squeak and like there.
What’S that, that’s like two different clay pots. Why are they electrically connected by resistance? Like i found out later, clay is like permeable by water and there’s the sound of a flower. Can any of you hear any of the sounds? Oh it’s just me hearing sounds okay.
Let me mic this real, quick. There we go now. Can you hear it? Can i get the podium mic on it’s on great.
Thank you, okay, um! So then i put in a plastic bottle and we poked it on things and listened to the sound that came out and my friend told me hey, you know, uh graphite is conductive, so that’s the first pencil model and i showed that to crayola and said you Guys should make this. This would be a good product, and this is the official circuit diagram of how that pencil works, nothing to be afraid of, and then i put that circuit on a mechanical pencil and i took it to the maker faire in austin. I think it was five years ago and i met so many people there and i was – and i figured out that you could make stuff like this, and then people cared about it other than you and your friends and um, and i actually hooked up with adafruit There who i already knew but like we decided to make a kit together and then i made this paintbrush prototype, which was like the same thing as the pencil, but a paintbrush and a jacket and we’re actually running around new york city. Touching things with the jacket making them squeak with a friend of mine, star simpson, when we realized wait, the real excitement here isn’t about the pencil or the paintbrush, or any of that. It’S that you can make these things on the fly. So here’s where we came up with this video um, can you hear any sound out there? Okay, great um, and so here you just thumb pack that circuit onto a pencil and it’s the same circuit as a triple five timer. And then you can draw sounds and then you can take that same circuit and then you can move it on to other stuff. So here’s a paint brush just like the prototype i made except you can make it on the fly and water kind of bunches up on plastic surfaces like tables, but it sinks in really great to leather, couches and then waters everywhere and and metals everywhere and and Anything can conduct electrons unless it can’t so the world’s either an insulator or a conductor and electrons flow through the moving water and they flow through the the what’s inside that pipe, i mean it’s like water’s flowing through the pipe. The pipe’s made of metal trees have like vasilary arteries. I don’t know, and you can put that in all kinds of stuff – and i realized that’s really what this was about.
It’S an invention kit, so here i started workshopping it all over the world. Here’S in taiwan a mushroom organ made by a 12 year old girl, and this is an 18 year old mit student who made something called stradio, which is a resistor ladder, hot glued into a straw and at not back to school camp, which is an unschooling camp. For teens this 15 year old young woman made a hula looper and every time it circles her shirt, it presses against her body closes a circuit closes another one closes another one and produces a series of sounds and professional designers were using this, and i was asked To workshop this at big companies actually on the top left, there is intel and they hired me as a maker research. Scientist now also up, there is bump on the bottom left.
Bottom right is ido, and so that’s when kind of the point at which we thought. Okay, we need something that is like this, but you can hook it to a computer, and so we took a teensy and we threw it on a breadboard. And then i showed that two years later it sat dormant, while other things were happening to nathan, seidl and uh.
He said it’s got to have less look, not 20 inputs. It’S got to have less so we’re like okay, six inputs and then i was like it’s got, ta look more beautiful, so we took it into photoshop and then we we printed the photoshop drawing on a circuit using just basic circuit techniques, and this was the result Of that – and this is what is makey makey – the circuit just pretends to be a keyboard, so your computer doesn’t know, there’s not a keyboard there. It’S just like i’m a keyboard just like if you plug in a usb keyboard and then you start googling for stuff, then anything that takes keyboard input works with makey makey. So that’s any software on the web. Any software on your computer pretty much takes keyboard input or mouse input.
These are four plastic bins from a dresser drawer and i don’t really recommend trying this because i cut my toe so many times. I lived in the forest at that point and there’s this like commercial, where people are making piano stairs in the subway, and it’s like no like we are making piano stairs like consumers are making those we’re all makers here. This is a piece of aluminum foil. Cats.
Are very conductive on their paws and inside their blood and stuff, like that, and bowls of water are conductive and you have photoshop on your macintosh, and so we put this on kickstarter and it was two thousand percent funded and here’s what people are doing with it. Now um, this is a maker from austin who we now hired in our company as a pro maker, so we fund him as a pro maker. This is the spark spangled banner star spangled banner as lunch, and you kind of got ta wait for this last note: it’s a good one. I don’t know who this guy is, but i like when he plays dogs as a piano. This is the guy at the exploratoriums playing plant drums houseplant drums. I really like this diagram because i like any diagram that has a person in it and especially when you put your sister in the diagram.
This is a really sweet, 12 year old, who made a trampoline slideshow controller for his sister’s birthday. So she could be the star of the show and control the slideshow, and this is a dad’s proposition to make a controller for his son, who can’t have full use of his hand. He has cerebral palsy to be able to surf the web and since all these serious things were starting to happen with makey makey, i thought i better put a serious warning on the box, and so i did and then, when you open the box, i thought i Better, let people know exactly what i’m talking about here, and so i did and the world is. A construction kit became the center of this new company and last week it’s called joy labs.
We just moved in to we have nothing there. So it’s a blank canvas and we’re really excited to start making tools that help people see the world as reconfigurable, which also means they’re seeing themselves as the person who can reconfigure the world and the world is a construction kit and that’s our basic tenant and we’re Going from there .