Dr. Tom Ask & Nick Flores: Creative Exploration

00:00:00 Sumer Beatty: Welcome to Tomorrow Makers, where we explore how we learn, live, work, and play now and in the future. I'm Sumer Beatty. 00:00:11 Carlos Ramos: And I'm Carlos Ramos. 00:00:12 Sumer Beatty: Happy holidays, everyone. 00:00:14 Carlos Ramos: Happy holidays. 00:00:16 Sumer Beatty: Semester's coming to a close, and we've got a really good one on deck for you today. What do we got? We've got Dr. Tom Ask and his student, Nick Flores. Industrial design. So some really fun guys, exciting topic today, creativity. 00:00:31 Carlos Ramos: Yeah, this one is fast, fast, fast. There's so much stuff we pivot to. Creativity, AI, design, do this, do that, music. Oh, and I love talking about music, but don't talk about my music. It's so uncomfortable, but you know what? It was, it was good. It was, it forced me to look back in on myself and say, okay, what is it that I want to do? So I'm really looking forward to the break that we've got coming up. Get the studio fired up and see what I can create. 00:00:55 Sumer Beatty: Exactly. And hope you guys do too. Get your creative juices flow and get excited by this one. 00:01:00 Carlos Ramos: All right. It's tomorrow, makers. 00:01:02 Sumer Beatty: Enjoy. 00:01:09 Carlos Ramos: Alright, so we're here with Dr. Tom as it is doctor, right? 00:01:13 Tom Ask: Yeah. 00:01:13 Carlos Ramos: Okay. Doctor and, and full professor. 00:01:15 Tom Ask: Yeah. 00:01:16 Carlos Ramos: Okay. So which is a rarity here at, at Penn College relative rarity, right? 00:01:21 Tom Ask: Yeah, but it works well in the conference world because I was looking around going, Okay, I'm old enough. Everyone else has, you know, these different academic ranks. So that's kind of what motivated that. Great. 00:01:31 Carlos Ramos: And, you want to introduce our student guest? 00:01:34 Sumer Beatty: Yeah, sure. This is Nick Flores, and he is an industrial design student. 00:01:38 Nick Flores: Indeed I am . Yeah. Dr. Ask happened to be my advisor and we have a lot of classes. We spent a lot of time together in, in and out of class talking about projects, ideas and everything. So yeah, this will be, this will be fun, I think. 00:01:52 Sumer Beatty: Yeah. 00:01:52 Tom Ask: Nick's Mr. Personality. So this will be a fun time. 00:01:55 Nick Flores: So I've been told, I don't know, 00:01:57 Tom Ask: Sorry to put pressure on, putting pressure, 00:01:58 Sumer Beatty: Gotta live up to that standard now. 00:02:00 Nick Flores: Yeah. 00:02:01 Carlos Ramos: All right. So Nick, I, I see you've got 12 questions prepped there. we can, you can start wherever you'd like to. You can start with number six and a half if you'd like. 00:02:12 Nick Flores: Okay, okay. 00:02:14 Tom Ask: You know how we think. 00:02:15 Nick Flores: Well, of course, since, I guess, since this is the beginning, you know, let's, you know, Dr. Ask., would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and how'd you get to Penn College? 00:02:23 Tom Ask: Yeah. 00:02:24 Nick Flores: And what led you here. 00:02:24 Tom Ask: Sure. I teach industrial design. 00:02:26 Nick Flores: Really. 00:02:27 Tom Ask: Done it for a while. Yeah, right? Seen you a few, for three and a half years. Yeah. And so I teach industrial design, which is a mixture of art and engineering. And it's unique because it's, the only one in the Penn State system, and it's one of the few in, in the whole region. And I am an advisor for several clubs. So for the Society of Inventors and Mad Scientists, which. does all kinds of eclectic things for CRU, for the, Penn College Music Makers, and Penn College theatrics. So that's basically the range of work I do. And others work as a side. 00:02:59 Carlos Ramos: Because what you do in class is not, doesn't keep you near busy enough. And I know what you do outside of class too, or at least have that idea. So, that's awesome. 00:03:06 Tom Ask: Well, Don Quixote is my, my hero. chasing after windmills. We'll get, we'll get it. 00:03:12 Nick Flores: Alright, so I guess. The topic today is about creativity. So I guess, how would you define creativity? 00:03:20 Tom Ask: Yeah, and that's important. That's what we're talking about today. So there's kind of these denotations, you know, these words about what creativity means. Everyone's creative, right? And there's maybe different levels of exuberance about creativity, but often what's said is, creativity can be measured by novelty, by surprise. Those are, that's one of the metrics if you have never seen it before. But then there's a couple more that are commonly used. So is it a game changer? Does the idea change the way something is done? So is it germinal to use that word? And then also how well done it is, how well crafted it is. So it's sort of the paper clip versus a stapler, you know, that kind of thing. But it also throws little, little kids under the bus. So scribbling on a piece of paper with crayons is very creative, but it's not well crafted, we say. So there's kind of that. Measure too for creativity, but it's intrinsic to who we are. 00:04:09 Nick Flores: Yeah. 00:04:10 Carlos Ramos: One of the things I found interesting, I, we did a little research beforehand and I, I believe it was, a collection of, of lessons that you had, crafted for your, industrial design classes. And one of the, the, definitions that you included there for creativity included two of those things that you 00:04:27 Tom Ask: Mm-Hmm. 00:04:28 Carlos Ramos: you had in that, that one list. But the one that threw me for a loop was the. that the creator has something special going on about themselves. Do you, do you recall that in, 00:04:41 Tom Ask: Well, you're citing me, I guess. That's tough. has something special going on. Well, I mean, we're all Creators. So I don't know, actually you have to elaborate on that. 00:04:51 Carlos Ramos: Well, and 00:04:51 Tom Ask: and what did I say? 00:04:52 Carlos Ramos: I forget, you, it was actually somebody else's definition that you cited in there and then they cited these three criteria. And I, and I was just curious for my, for my own benefit to, does it, do we really have to have something special about us? 00:05:05 Tom Ask: Oh no, I don't think, see that's the thing. I don't think I would say that. 'cause I think we're all creative. Absolutely. So there are other definitions. So for example, some of them are kind of nasty. So one definition you'll see in people that write about these things is usefulness. But if you say a design is useful, you're throwing artists under the bus, you know, so, so there's different, different descriptions of that. Now, the challenge you have is you have these great creators and we think of Mozart, for example, or Picasso or something like that. Are they that much different than me? Well, yeah, they are. But what does that mean? You know, it's a continuum. Yeah, it's a continuum. And the challenge is, is often you're essentially told either By the organization you're in or some other force that you're not creative, you know, just do your job and you're done and then you act that way. So if you're doing something that's very linear and it works really well, that's what you do. So even like you initiated in this podcast, I mean, it starts with an idea and then it starts with like, okay, what does it look like? And then how do I organize it? So you took an idea and moved it forward to suddenly we're sitting here with microphones and headphones to execute something. So that's certainly very creative too. You took, you took nothing and made something from it. And we all can do that. 00:06:15 Carlos Ramos: I think that's a great way to think about it because, you know, the, even what looks like, to the outsider is what might be mundane. but certainly I, I can't achieve a lot of what people do that just seems like they do a routine. But yeah, there is that special element that they bring to it. that you know, really only they can because of their makeup, right? 00:06:37 Tom Ask: Yeah. And there are, we'll say natural skills. I mean, you see some people draw something and you go, Oh my, how can they do that? It's beautiful. And you see some people compose music and you think, how do they do that? It's, you know, they're tapping into something deep, but still it is a continuum. So can the person that creates good music, can they do, can they solve mathematical computations? Can they, can they play with their children? You know, and sometimes we like to think there's a great balancing force in play, and that's not necessarily true. Some people are really good at a lot of things. You know, they're just 00:07:11 Nick Flores: naturally gifted, you know, 00:07:12 Tom Ask: What's that? 00:07:13 Nick Flores: Naturally gifted 00:07:14 Tom Ask: in a lot of areas. And that does happen. So, you know, life's not fair in that way. We like to think, well, you know, he or she is really good at music. So must be bad at math. Well, no, that's not the case at all. In fact, it's actually almost the opposite of that. So it's, it's interesting, but it is a continuum. So are you like Mozart? You're mighty close because I think you play music. Don't you? 00:07:34 Carlos Ramos: I do. 00:07:34 Tom Ask: Yeah, right. So how do you compare yourself? 00:07:36 Carlos Ramos: I wouldn't compare myself to Mozart. 00:07:38 Tom Ask: Debussey? 00:07:41 Carlos Ramos: There's very few that I would compare myself to. But I think that's also part of the creator's dilemma. Is that you, well some people I think have a really good sense of how good they are. and then there are other people that will always just kind of deflate their, their, their, their selves and their creativity. I, I was actually listening to something, some music that, that I had composed, you know, a few years ago and I listened back and I, and I had those, those cringe moments. So, that tells me that, yeah, I, I was happy with it at that, that time. I was really proud of it at that time, but there's been some growth that's happened, between then and now. To where, okay. I, I, I, I feel I'm in a better place. what's gonna, what's that gonna be in three years though, when I look back to now? 00:08:24 Tom Ask: Well, yeah, and that's a great metric. 'cause time is really a great commodity in assessing creativity. Does it hold up over time or is it some ephemeral element that, you know, brings joy for a while? And you see that with music composition and art, you get the cringe moments, and that's well said, where you look back and say, oh, my And then you look at great literature, great music, great work of creativity, and if they stand up over time. That's really a good measure. But what does that really mean? Because something could have been very important in 1973 aesthetically. And it doesn't mean its value is any less because it's not as attractive in, you know, in the current year, right? 00:09:01 Carlos Ramos: Oh, we're already going way far. So Nick, gotta reel us in. Okay. 00:09:07 Tom Ask: We got, we got Mozart over here and he's giving me grief for 1973. I don't know what's going on. How did we end up in 1973? 00:09:15 Nick Flores: Come back to that. Talk about timeless work. Timeless work. I know. I listen to a lot of music from them though. 00:09:20 Tom Ask: I know you do. Mr. Rugrats. 00:09:22 Nick Flores: I do. I do. So I guess in your work, you mentioned this notion of being a creative explorer. Why is creativity so valuable to all of us, regardless of whether we are a child or senior, an accountant or like an artist, or just, you know, just some, something else besides, I guess the designer or something, something creative, I guess. 00:09:42 Tom Ask: Yeah. And see, I can tell Nick, see Nick's not somebody that reads questions off lists. Are you? 00:09:45 Nick Flores: Of course not. I don't think I could ever do that. I always have to go off. You're gonna put a little flare on it. 00:09:52 Tom Ask: You're gonna hear a wrinkling sound. 00:09:53 Nick Flores: It might be bad, it might be good. You will hear what you 00:09:56 Carlos Ramos: Flare away, Nick. 00:09:57 Nick Flores: What is that? What is that? just didn't work. 00:10:00 Tom Ask: Yeah. So, what I think is interesting is we live in an era of, of tapping into content creators. You know, there's stuff out there and we tap into it and we use it for our own benefit. And who are those content creators who's making the raw stuff, you know, and, and that's where, you know, people, and we'll talk about AI later, but, you know, that's where people come into play is the content creators and, and they come at it with their own experiences and their own, like, whimsical notions. So you have a whole amalgam of experiences that make you design something in a certain way or write a song in a certain way and it's hard to articulate, you know, what is that that makes that happen, but it's real and it's yours. You own it. It's very unique to you. And there's no, so you don't want a whole category of people called artists and a whole category of people called non artists who are disenfranchised. So like they're saying, Hey, you sit over there and do your spreadsheets. We're going to create stuff. That's not, that's not right. You know, there's nothing really, there's no basis for that. It's sort of tribalism in its worst, in its worst form. So that's why it and you look at, you know, the the footprint you leave in society and for the future. And is it gonna be the spreadsheet that you did so well or the, you know, the, the, the beautiful punctuation in that essay? Or is it going to be something else? Is it going to be the card you wrote for your mom or the, the gift you made for your child or, or some, or even, even the, you know, reaching into someone's, you know, pain and saying the right words at the right time, that's all that footprint that maybe has more value than those sort of mechanistic, like get the job done type of things. 00:11:30 Nick Flores: Okay. so. You actually said, you touched on a topic, artificial intelligence, AI, so I guess that leads us to our next question, which is, of course, you have a YouTube channel and you actually do discuss artificial intelligence. And so I guess the question is, what do you think of it? Like, I guess, how does this affect artists, or I guess work nowadays, you know, with all this artificial intelligence being developed and created. 00:11:58 Tom Ask: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a big question. 00:12:00 Nick Flores: It is a big question. 00:12:01 Tom Ask: And I want to hear your opinions too, so I'm going to bounce this right back at you. 00:12:05 Nick Flores: Okay. 00:12:05 Tom Ask: Because, yeah, what, the thing that's unique, I guess, I'm old. All right. And, I'm an old man. I am. And I started in AI, well, type of AI, in 1991. So that's like, what, 31 years ago? 32 years ago? And I, I quit my job in 92, February 92 and went at it full time. And it was a thing called expert systems, which is sort of, you know, trying to simulate the way you think and using rules and all this stuff. So it didn't do so well. I was real busy. I didn't make much money. And I attribute that to the fact that I was not a good businessman, that's part of it, in humility. The second part is that I was ahead of the curve, we'll say. So, maybe, maybe or maybe not, but now we have all this data. You know, people are just forfeiting their data to the internet, you know, just voluntarily. There's all this stuff out there, and it's very accessible. In older days, you had to extract information. You had to talk to people and say, How do you, you know, how do you do this? And blah, blah, blah. And we had fuzzy logic. That was sort of the math behind it. And it's certainly grown since then. But I was all in back in 92. And, so it's, it's really important. There's no going back. There's no unringing the bell. And the question is how you deal? How do you deal with it? And one of the issues is, is in a year from now, it's gonna look a lot different and we don't know what it's gonna look like. So you have to be really humble and say, well, you know, you talk about chat GBT and generative AI and all this stuff. Well, it, in a year from now it's, or two years from now, it's gonna look different. I don't know how. It'll probably be much more embedded in things and you'll be getting these cues on how you should do things and you, you know. Click here to accept and all that kind of stuff. It's going to be it's going to tend to be seamless. I would think but in the world of art it and this is a whole big soliloquy, which you guys will have to interrupt me on. But the issue is in art and music and all sorts of expressions. There are rules that you often follow. So I picked on WC because of his extraordinary work with with tension and release. You know, there's like a, People expect a chordal progression or they expect a sequence of notes. They expect a certain, harmony in composition. This is what they expect. And those rules are articulated and they're available. And if you steal those rules, you can kind of do. Art and you can do music. And that's what I was exploring in the, in the paper that, you know, we, we talked about. But then there's that something else and what is that something else? And you know, the thing where you're getting off the reservation and that's the notion of surprise or novelty that we talked about. We talked about the definition of creativity. So if you can follow the, follow the rules, but then surprise people in a way that's not too farfetched. So, you know, you think of the musical scale, you've got to, you know, we don't want Gamelan music, even though we've played Gamelan music. Do you want to, uh, do you want to sing us some Gamelan music right now, Nick? 00:14:56 Nick Flores: We'll do it later. Maybe later. 00:14:57 Carlos Ramos: Sumer and I were talking about it on the way over here. 00:14:59 Tom Ask: Gamelan music? 00:15:00 Carlos Ramos: Yeah, just because, you know, you did mention it in one of the background pieces that I read. 00:15:05 Sumer Beatty: It didn't just come up naturally. 00:15:06 Tom Ask: I'm impressed. You guys do research. We're in trouble, Nick. 00:15:14 Carlos Ramos: So yeah, the, the idea, you know, in Western music, we have the 12 tones that we're, we're used to hearing, and there are certain tones that are, are harmonious, they work very well together, and in fact, some of them work so well together that if you use them consecutively, they're really, really boring, but in, in Gamelon, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's six tones, And that the couple of them are slightly sharp, compared to what we would have in the 12 tone system. And, I went out and I was like, okay, let me familiarize, I know I've heard it, but you know, now I can put that name to it. and so I'm watching a, you know, crew of like 20 people play a bunch of bells and, and like xylophone type, instruments and bowls. And it was, you know, pretty discordant to my ear because that's not a music that I'm used to listening to. I'm trying to put myself in the place of that listener who does that. That, that is the, the, you know, the type of music that they would normally listen to. I'm sure it sounds just as harmonious to them as something in Western music might to me. 00:16:22 Tom Ask: Right. So the rules are different and that's interesting when it's, you know, you see some rules are culturally derived and that's really fascinating. And some rules are somewhat arbitrary. and you've taken visual literacy, Nick, so you know all about analysis and the rules that you look at or, or identify. 00:16:39 Nick Flores: Yeah, I guess, I guess making something look, I guess, harmoniously, I don't know if I'm saying that correct, but if You know, something, I guess, repetition, I guess, in cases like this, and it goes into art as well, whereas if something's very, I guess, repetitive, like, you know, like, if you look at the checkerboard, you see black, white, black, white, black, white, after a while, of course, it gets a little boring, so you need a little twist on it, so that, I guess, it stands out, at least a little, so that it's not boring, per se, or else, you need something that's going to keep you attracted and interested, looking at it a lot. Ah, this is a long time. So like, if you go into like an art museum, per se, and you look at all these arts on the walls and all that stuff, and you see like a dot, you've seen the arts, like it's just like a dot. And you're like, what's so special about this dot. From the outside point of view, of course, if I. You know, once I was in, before I went to, took visual literacy, I'd be like, that's just a dot, I don't understand how this is art, I don't understand. But of course, after I took visual literacy, I was like, there is something surprisingly interesting about this. Like, you know, so I guess it's just keeping people on their toes, I guess that's, that's the whole point, I guess, you know, that change it up. 00:17:56 Sumer Beatty: Make people think. 00:17:57 Nick Flores: Yeah. Make people think it makes them, it makes them sit in, you know, ponder looking at this dot thing and like, All that stuff. So I guess that's the play with that with music, you know, you can't just have the same like monotone beat. 00:18:10 Tom Ask: It's pattern to rhythm. 00:18:11 Nick Flores: Exactly. So like, you need to, you need like a little twist, like, especially like now, even like pop music to bring it in. There's always like a breakdown. There's a change up in beat. There's a change in rap music. There's a change up in flow and how they, you know, like, you know, say the lyrics and all that stuff. So I, you know, there's always, it needs to keep people on their toes, of course. I think that's. I think that's what makes it fun. 00:18:33 Tom Ask: Yeah, rap music is a good example of game changer germinal music, where the rules got shifted and they stayed. Yeah, and you're talking, that's great, because that's, you're talking about looking at something and knowing the rules. It's like Picasso said, it took me, you know, four years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to paint like a child. So you have to, well, you don't have to, but it's, especially in an academic setting, we'd say it's good to know the rules of whatever pursuit you're pursuing. You're involved. You're involved with and then you can break them. In other words, you have the right to break them when you know what they are. And you're so it's not randomness. It's not, you know, waves crashing on the beach. It's it's got like some kind of human contribution to it. And that's surprising. So that's really where AI struggles because AI is looking to data sets and they're curated data sets. Someone's behind the curtain. Someone's looking at data streams and using that to feed these generative systems, and that's got a whole big issue and that's changes year by year, but it's, I think that's really fascinating when you can break when you put surprise like AI. I think, will never be able to surprise us fully because it's using data that's already been established. It can copy styles. It can say, this person, this is how a certain artist or writer kind of breaks things up and copy it, but it can't go somewhere else. It seems now that's presumptuous, I suppose, because five years from now, you know, 00:19:57 Nick Flores: It'll be just really smart, right? 00:19:58 Tom Ask: Yeah, 00:19:59 Nick Flores: I think it was without using any data and all that stuff, right? We'll be sitting there playing video games, letting the A. I. stuff exactly stuff, right? A. I. has been going crazy with that. I think I was. Talking this Sumer about this and it's true like AI, I guess it's as only good as the data that it's, you know, I guess being like fed. So like, basically when people put in an industrial design type of things, we do ideation sketches of how a project is supposed to start off. and Dr. Ask in one of his lectures, he talked about how you can use AI to make all these ideation sketches like very easy. you literally go into this program called DALL-E and you just say, I want 100 ideation sketches of this. and they'll make it. And so, you know, begs the question of like, what's keeping, I guess, industrial designers different from AI or like, I guess, what's What makes AI so special? Is it going to overtake humans and all that stuff? And I guess the question is, in my opinion, I'm going to just say no. The sole purpose is that it's only as good as the information it's given. You know, I guess AI is kind of restricted inside this box. Humans have been known to think outside the box and that's why we have all these, you know, creative new things and I guess, inventions that, you know, come out like, like, like AI, like someone thought of us out of the box and made artificial intelligence. You know, so, and that's, I guess. 00:21:31 Tom Ask: Right, but the, the thing about, like, yeah, DALL-E or ChatGPT generating ideas, one of the things with that is it kind of, it's kind of humbling for, like, teacher types because it, it, if you have this process that you think is the way to do things, like 20, you know, 100 ideation sketches. Yeah. Well, you type in, I want 100 ideation sketches of the toaster, hit enter, boom. But you don't have to like any of them, but you fulfill the requirements of the assignment, we'll say. Yeah. Or the job. And then you can do your own stuff. And as I've said, I always like invent in my head. I don't do a hundred, like I've had that too. And you probably have too, where some person has said, this is how you do this and you don't know any better. So you think that's the way you do something, but then you have your own way of doing it pretty quickly. Or you might even have that right off the bat. In fact, making mistakes. That's what our Society of Adventurers and Mad Scientists is about is we get together and make a bunch of mistakes. And that's how, you know, we learn. So, I knew a guy a long time ago, he's the only person I've met like this. When he learned software, believe it or not, he read the user's manual first. Do you guys know anybody that's done that? Ever? 00:22:40 Sumer Beatty: Only when you run into an issue. 00:22:41 Tom Ask: Yeah. Do you open the user's guide? 00:22:43 Carlos Ramos: I think one of our web developers actually has read the Drupal documentation. 00:22:48 Sumer Beatty: Oh, I think I know him. We won't call him out here 00:22:50 Tom Ask: Before he used it though. 00:22:51 Carlos Ramos: Yeah. 00:22:52 Tom Ask: Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. So that's two people. 00:22:53 Carlos Ramos: And maybe not in its entirety, but, but certainly, you know, familiarized himself enough with the, the high level, portion of it. so that he would know what, what he doesn't know and what questions he has to ask of, of himself to get to where he could create. 00:23:11 Tom Ask: Well, that's good for him. Yeah. and I, we could have a club. 00:23:16 Carlos Ramos: And I have been accused of reading way too many manuals in my younger days. 00:23:20 Tom Ask: Well, you have to, I mean, you do what you need to do. I guess the point is though, is sometimes we just like to shovel snow with a, with a snow shovel, not be told how to shovel snow. 00:23:29 Sumer Beatty: Right. 00:23:30 Nick Flores: Just let us do it our own way. 00:23:31 Tom Ask: Yeah. Let, let us, let us figure it out. Right. We'll figure it out. 00:23:33 Nick Flores: Exactly. 00:23:33 Tom Ask: And you can talk about your radiator installing your BMW. 00:23:36 Nick Flores: Oh. 00:23:36 Tom Ask: We better not go there. 00:23:37 Nick Flores: We won't. We can't. We can't afford to do that. 00:23:40 Carlos Ramos: Was it successful? 00:23:41 Nick Flores: Yeah. Oh, yeah. so I guess I'll put a, do a little, summary. I have an old 76 BMW that I'm restoring with my father. and we put 00:23:52 Carlos Ramos: Motorcycle or car? 00:23:53 Nick Flores: Car. A 1976 BMW 2002. And so it's, of course the stock is an inline four engine. And so what we did was we put an inline six from like, a 1989. 328, and the engine bay is very, very small. And of course I put AC, and I need a radiator to cool it down because of course it's a lot of power for that car. So we have to, I have to do a lot of, I guess, body massages, is what I like to call it. 00:24:21 Tom Ask: With a grinder and a saw. 00:24:23 Nick Flores: Exactly, a grinder and a saw, and then some welding. And so we have to cut the whole front end. Off the car, so I could put the radiator made a, a makeshift bracket, and that's what holds my radiator. And I guess, the fan, the AC fan, and it, and of course we were like, do do people see it? No, we put like a really big bumper in the front so no one sees it, you know, . So it's like, it's hit it . So I guess, yeah, that's, that's what he was talking about with the creative designs. We have to. I guess adapt. Right? To make sure to make it work. Yeah. You know. 00:24:56 Tom Ask: So we sat in the room with wonder and giggled over your phone. 00:24:59 Nick Flores: Yeah. Pretty much. Kind of Oh my gosh. so, yeah, we can go back talking about music . so, you mentioned that you, I guess. One of the advisors for a club called the Penn College Music Makers. and we, I guess you and some other students, like, past students have created the lab and CAL building the College Avenue Labs to encourage, I guess, expression through music. Can you talk a little bit about like, what prompted you to do this? 00:25:33 Tom Ask: Yeah, well, for me, I was, I'm very much like trying to catch up with the students, so they're way ahead of me and I'm just like filling out forms behind them. But the genesis of that was actually this, going back, was this, work I was doing with, rules and AI development in art and music. And so I write poetry, I've written poetry all my life, and that's my main go to for creative expression. And I was looking at, sort of being like a troubadour, you know, how do you, nobody reads poetry, like nobody reads poetry. 00:26:02 Nick Flores: What? I love poetry. 00:26:04 Tom Ask: Do you really? 00:26:05 Nick Flores: Yes, of course. 00:26:06 Sumer Beatty: You learned something new today about each other. I love it. 00:26:09 Carlos Ramos: I think we're going to have to end this when we get to the end. I think we all write our four line stanzas and do a little slam poetry. 00:26:16 Tom Ask: Oh, okay. Sure. Sure. Sure. I've got one for you. but anyway, yeah, well, well, no, I'm not going to do it right now, but I do have it because I'm not going to quite get it right. But, although I do have some poems to recite in class. But anyway, so, but if you put poems to music, it opens up another avenue. So I was looking at methodically turning a poem into a song. So this is super geeky. So, you know, you look at, chordal relationships, statistically, well, this is like. This, alright, stop me Sumer if I get way too geeky here, but this isn't, like, weird. 00:26:50 Sumer Beatty: Hey, you don't know that I'm not a musician. 00:26:52 Tom Ask: No, I'm not saying you're not, of course. Okay, I'm not. But you're regulating, you're regulating the conversation. But there's, you can find data on how chords progress through certain genres of music. And so I, I stole several of those and then I basically picked the ones I thought felt, you know, were the best for the course and the whole thing and, made a song. So it seems sort of methodical and it was. So the poetry was raw. Original was about the Lycoming Mall. The delcine of our local mall. And, and the. and the empty nest experience associated with that. It was connected with that. So, which I am an empty nester and then I put music to it and then, and it's actually a very sweet story because I asked this one. Well, I asked for people to sing it for this super recorder for this conference. I was attending last fall and presenting that and, one person could, but then that fell through. And then this other student, Catherine. Catherine said, yeah, I can do it with Nico. And they like, and I said, can you get it to me by Thursday? You know, this was, I dunno what day it was by the Friday prior, or Monday or whatever. 00:27:57 Nick Flores: Yeah. 00:27:58 Tom Ask: And they made it happen. And one thing, and then we also had some, a lot of, you know, it's kind of like the Silicon Valley. You get a group of talented people together and then this whole interest in music composition started to arise and they. They moved forward and created the Music Makers, and I literally just filled forms out. But the nice thing about it was, I had a little space I could use, and they very quickly turned it into a music production studio. And, and it was entirely with donations. 00:28:27 Sumer Beatty: Wow. 00:28:27 Tom Ask: The college had nothing to do with it. Yeah, it's really nice. So yeah, so it was organic and that was really sweet. So it's still going on. We did a music festival last spring inside because of the rain. 00:28:38 Nick Flores: Yeah. Yeah. 00:28:39 Tom Ask: So that was, yeah. So that's, that's the genesis of that, how that all worked out. And they're meeting tomorrow. They meet Wednesdays at 7 PM and they go over things like how to write music and, and. They do tech stuff. 00:28:50 Sumer Beatty: And these are not just people within your major, Industrial Design, it's just anyone who wants to play music. Nice. 00:28:57 Nick Flores: I remember, I sat in the first meeting of that. 00:29:01 Tom Ask: Did you? 00:29:01 Nick Flores: Yeah, and of course I saw a bunch of familiar faces within the major, of course, surprising other people from outside of the major. Like they all said they wanted to play drums or they wanted to learn music and so, of course. The heads of the club, you know, agreed to at least help him out with it. 00:29:18 Tom Ask: Right. And well, and I gotta say, what fascinates me is with music, and it's the same with, fragrance and other such things is I can immediately create an emotion. I can, I can instill an emotion by design by presenting a certain type of music. And I can do the same thing. You know, I get, you know, sandalwood and, and, jasmine and such. And you feel like you're in this really wild place. Or I can have, you know, you know, cigar smells. You feel like you're in a different place. I can do the same with music. And it's not even, it's very, it's visceral. You don't analyze it and think about it and do like Nick did with his dot painting that he covets after, but, but it just comes right to the, right to the chase. And it, so it can be used in a manipulative way. And I don't mean that pejoratively, but it's, it, I can create environment by design and that's really nifty. And musicians do it all the time. They create an energy level. They create a, a, a sense about their music and artists do it. And fragrance designers do it. and other people, writers, I think poets have a harder time because it, you need time. It's not passive. You have to be more, well, I get no argument on that, I guess, because music is an active process too, or can be, but, you know, and certainly literature is more, takes more, engagement, we'll say, than some other, um, creative forms. 00:30:34 Sumer Beatty: Yeah, I was curious about creativity and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but do you think some people feel like they need to be creative? Like they have to, they have a need to satisfy versus other people? Because some people just, I feel like are, that doesn't matter. But I think others need that. 00:30:53 Tom Ask: Yeah, that, that's, well, that's a really good question. I don't have the answer to it. 00:30:58 Sumer Beatty: No, I'm just curious what you thought. 00:30:59 Tom Ask: I have an opinion though. No, I have an opinion and that's why I humble myself because. Because sometimes you can say, you know, you have these content experts, you know, like this is the answer. Well, when it comes to things like that, you don't really have a good answer. But I think there's some anecdotes related to that and namely boredom. When you're bored, you get agitated. And you can satiate boredom with video games or whatever it is, you know. But if you don't have that, you start doing, you build stuff, you draw stuff, you start tapping on the table, you start doing something. So we weren't really meant, it seems, to be sedentary. And creativity. is, is, violence against boredom, you know, it's opposition to boredom. So, so yeah, the answer, my opinion is yes, that people do need to be creative. It's like, 00:31:44 Sumer Beatty: I wonder if some people don't even know that they need that. 00:31:49 Tom Ask: Well, you know, yeah, I guess you're right, right. You're right. That it would make their life richer, for example. Yeah. And that's a lot of people reach out in an active way to say, Hey, what, you know, what clubs and. Organizations and online communities and, like one thing, and this is just bouncing around the wall, which we can do in this kind of thing, like a really cool exercise is to create a story. I don't know if we ever done that with the beanbag where we throw a beanbag and you make up a story. 00:32:17 Nick Flores: Yeah, we did that last year. 00:32:18 Tom Ask: It was Fricks or something. So 00:32:20 Nick Flores: it was for Fricks or something. 00:32:21 Tom Ask: How did we end up? 00:32:22 Nick Flores: No, it was, We were talking about The Mug, and I forgot, it was like a philanthropist, I forgot what his name was, but I remember we were talking about it and we just kept going. 00:32:34 Tom Ask: Tell me it wasn't during class time. Please say it wasn't during class time. 00:32:37 Nick Flores: It was during class time. I'm busting, okay. It was for creative, it was just to like, I guess, You're explaining storyboards to us and how I guess how the story will affect like product or like, I guess the lifeline or something like that. 00:32:53 Tom Ask: Yeah, so the point is if I, if I tell you, come up with a story, give me and I'll feed you a leader and you come up with the rest of the story, bounce around, you'll do it. very few people will just crash and say, I have zero ideas. It just doesn't, and same with, you know, music. If you're passing around a rhythm, you know, people, people can get that. People can pass around stories. It can be harder on certain things maybe, but yeah, we did. That was fun. That was fun. 00:33:18 Nick Flores: We did two stories. 00:33:19 Tom Ask: We did two, yeah. 00:33:20 Nick Flores: We did two stories. And oddly enough, they. I don't know how, but we managed to just keep going back to the one thing. 00:33:27 Tom Ask: Oh, with the mug, right? 00:33:28 Nick Flores: Yeah, the mug. We just kept repeating the mug over and over again. 00:33:31 Tom Ask: It's that repetition that you look for in aesthetic stuff. 00:33:34 Nick Flores: Exactly. 00:33:36 Tom Ask: So I guess the point there, Sumer, is if you're asked to do something, if somebody reaches out and says, and says, Hey, draw me something. In fact, I've done that. This is really weird. And I have done this in class. one of the, and that's, I've done this with engineer, engineers and engineering students, and we, we draw an abstract noun using not without use of the allegory. Remember we did like honor, like, how do you draw the notion of honesty? Using line and texture and shape. That's super weird, but if somebody says, try, like your brain is freaking out because it's thinking, how do I draw honor? Like, how do you draw that? And the rules are you can't just draw a knight in shining armor and that kind of allegorical thing. So it, it, it really fries your brain in the sense that you're trying to, all the like semantic stuff back there is, is getting troubled and you're thinking, this is, This is impossible. And, and I'm saying, well, just do it anyway. And you put something on paper and that's like this very peculiar, like, like hand painting from kindergarten type of thing. Like, well, I'm putting stuff down, but it doesn't really mean anything. Well, yeah, but it's yours. You own it. And it's, so that's sort of one exercise we've done as well. 00:34:47 Sumer Beatty: Yeah, that's really cool. I think it would be good for somebody, even if they're not in an art related field or industrial design to go through those exercises just to sort of break out of that everyday, you know, we were, Carlos and I were talking about that on the way over here. Yeah, absolutely. It just get to that, get to that, you know, hitting the border of, okay, these are our neural pathways and we've never gone to that section of our brain before, but it's so good because once you unlock it, you know, anything's possible. 00:35:17 Tom Ask: Well, some of you said you don't play music. 00:35:19 Sumer Beatty: I don't .No. 00:35:20 Tom Ask: But you can sing. 00:35:22 Sumer Beatty: Yeah, I can sing and I just actually. My husband bought me a violin, and so I am learning the violin. 00:35:28 Tom Ask: Oh, wow. 00:35:28 Nick Flores: So you do play music. 00:35:30 Sumer Beatty: Well, I know that's the question. Are we artistic? Are we creative? And I hesitate to say I'm a musician because I'm just learning. 00:35:38 Tom Ask: I'm not either, so that's, I mean, I have my instruments, but I'm not good at them. Yeah. So, do you play something, Nick? I can't remember. 00:35:44 Nick Flores: I do. I play a few things, but, I guess that's also like, I guess a question is, are, I guess musician, what defines you as a musician? Like, is it just someone who plays music or is it like a whole thing? Like, do you have to be like, I guess, extremely musically inclined in that one instrument or multiple instruments to be, I guess, called a musician? Like, cause like, if I play piano, am I a musician, am I a pianist, or am I just someone who likes to play on the side or am I learning? So, like, I guess that's the like, 00:36:15 Tom Ask: And what if you only know three chords? 00:36:16 Nick Flores: You only know three chords. 00:36:17 Tom Ask: But you have great enjoyment from those three chords. 00:36:19 Nick Flores: Well, you can make, you can do a lot with three chords. Hot Cross Buns is three chords. 00:36:23 Carlos Ramos: You can do a lot with one note. 00:36:25 Nick Flores: Exactly. 00:36:27 Tom Ask: Well, one of the things, again, I was humbled by was one of our students, he was a DJ and I just thought, well, DJ, whatever the level of sophistication that he applied to his DJing blew me away. I had no idea that you can take all this musical content and put it together in these creative ways and not just haphazardly like blending songs, but I was really blown away. So is he a musician? No, in a way it depends on how you define these things. 00:36:55 Nick Flores: I guess, yeah, I guess the way to answer all those other questions is how would you define a musician? It's a very broad 00:37:01 Tom Ask: But it's creative exploration, it's creative expression. 00:37:04 Nick Flores: Like musician, I think it's a broad term. Like creativity, that's a very, very broad topic. 00:37:08 Tom Ask: Right, that's right, yeah. Because creativity, you know, even creativity, like there's this Whole discipline of creativity studies, which very quickly gets boring. I've dealt with it 'cause it's like putting things in matrices and all that, but a better term I like is allure. Hmm. You know, we talk about beauty, but allure, like, how do you make something alluring? How do you make something novel? Those are like sweeter words to me than just creativity in its own right. Mm-Hmm. Because that's got, it's got this, it can take on this almost mathematical, literal, literally a mathematical notion where you're putting things in categories and that's really not very attractive. Mm-Hmm. , you know. If, if your child makes you a drawing, that the value of that drawing is because your child made it, not because of the aesthetic merit of the drawing itself. And you may have given him or her the crayons and the paper. So by giving them the media, you know, you're already driving the whole force. So one of the things I found like in, in nurturing, creative expression is media is making it available. You have to give people stuff and then you get like old school, middle school, like. You know, analog paper and pencil, which I like, but I'm a big fan of digital, big fan of, AI generated stuff as well, because that's where we're going, but then you get like in this opinion, where it's a pencil and paper, the very best way to create things or visual arts, I'll say in the visual arts to start the visual arts, is it? Or maybe paint because you can deal with color or something, pastels. So I don't know, but that is something like you impute when you create an environment. You say, here's stuff you can work with. And people, and I have it in our studio here, you know, I've got my one by two wood and I've got my PVC pipe and I've got canvas and just cardboard, duct tape, zip ties. You know, you make it available and people use it. It's not perfect, but you need something. So if we look at where we're at now and I say make. Make a boat, you know, you're going like with what? And if I fill it, you fill it up with cardboard and plastic and duct tape, at least you can get started. So there's that kind of element of creativity too, where you create an environment that's conducive to it. Like in a music, you know, it's hard to do music without instruments. , although some people can. 00:39:17 Nick Flores: Yeah. 00:39:18 Tom Ask: Yeah. 00:39:19 Nick Flores: Body snaps. 00:39:20 Tom Ask: Yeah. 00:39:20 Nick Flores: You know? 00:39:21 Carlos Ramos: Yeah. Anything that's gonna produce a sound, whether it's, you know, an instrument, what we think of traditionally, you know, something that's disconnected from us too, you know, I just have my hands on, you know, I've just made music. And a lot of times we're even just thinking in music, you know, so to go back to, to, you know, the question posed to Sumer, are you a musician? I know she likes to listen to music and I, and I would assume that there's probably some combination that's happening, you know, inside your thinking about new ways and new patterns. And that's, 00:39:55 Tom Ask: Yeah, that she owns, it's your thoughts, which is really beautiful. And it's irreplaceable. That's what I like. 00:40:02 Sumer Beatty: Thank you. 00:40:03 Tom Ask: And, but the problem is, is getting them out in the public domain. And it's funny, I'll pick on poetry because I remember talking to a friend many years ago and he said, nobody reads my poetry, I've only published a few and nobody publishes poetry either. But he said, does that bother you? And I said, no, I just, it's like a bird singing in the forest. I just. That's just what I do, but that's distinctive, I would say, to poetry because other things I do, you do kind of want an outlet for it, like music. I mean, music, I've done a lot of my own, I play some weird instruments and I do it all for myself, and I'm fine with that because I'm not very good. You're probably good, so you want to perform, right, Carlos? I 00:40:39 Carlos Ramos: gave up performing, but yeah, I mean, there's an aspect that people want to perform. You want to be able to share that music, but I'm with you right now. I do my stuff kind of, I do my own thing, and every now and then I'll throw something out on SoundCloud. It's been a little while, but. But yeah, when it, when it moves me, I'll, I'll put something out. 00:41:00 Tom Ask: Yeah. Okay. So you're, you're picking and then you're, you're letting time work on it. So you can see if you like it. And we live in a beautiful time now where you have this, you know, democratization of expression. You have, you know, YouTube and Spotify, and you have blogs and you have, you know, podcasts and so you can get your content out there. which, you know, used to be gatekeepers that rigidly protected everything. And, I mean, you still have that, especially in fiction. Fiction is really, is really very hard, I found. I, I like to write, and I've written some novels, but they're very hard to get out there. and some of that is obviously the, you know, the quality of the writing, but some of it is, is it's such a saturated market and music can be that way too. There's a lot of wonderful music out there, but the gatekeepers, you know, are there. And some of that's really important. They vet stuff to make sure that things have a certain level. You know, a a, a quality associated with that before they're just thrown out there. But with so many, outlets, now you can put anything out, which is nice, including poetry. 00:42:01 Carlos Ramos: Right. I think the difference that you're talking about there is you're of getting selected to have your work published. And we can choose ourselves. We can, we can say, you know what I, you know, fiction for example, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna publish that digital ebook. 00:42:15 Tom Ask: Mm-Hmm. . 00:42:16 Carlos Ramos: And I'm gonna put it on Amazon and it's gonna be on Kindle. I could go pick up your work if you put that out on, on Kindle, you know, you create the EPUB and throw it out there. I can go get that. Now I'm consuming it. You don't know who's going to consume it. It was a very, very long tail now, but we can all participate and be part of it. And you know, if we do the work and continue to hone our craft, Maybe we'll find the path to publish ourself to get a bigger audience, or maybe we will find that, that gatekeeper who's still kind of controlling the mass distribution to be able to do that. 00:42:52 Tom Ask: Yeah, I've got a beautiful story on that. Happy ending. I had a student, and I won't mention names here because I don't even know. It's a good story, though. He is a shoe designer, and he put his stuff out there in the public domain, different sources, and he was found. And he was hired before he graduated. And I'm working with him right now to get him through his last classes. So, in other words, he just had talent. He had the ability and talent to do things. Put stuff out there. He was found. He was identified as being a talent and recruited. 00:43:21 Nick Flores: And, he just released his shoes. 00:43:23 Tom Ask: What's that? 00:43:23 Nick Flores: He just released his shoes. 00:43:24 Tom Ask: Yeah, right. 00:43:24 Nick Flores: Yeah, his two shoes released out. 00:43:26 Sumer Beatty: Wow. 00:43:27 Tom Ask: Yeah, this is a guy, he's 21 or something. 00:43:28 Sumer Beatty: A brand we would have heard of? 00:43:30 Nick Flores: I'm not entirely sure. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't see them around the school of shoes scene as much, but, yeah, I, I know who you're talking about, of course. 00:43:41 Tom Ask: I just emailed him today trying to get his capstone. 00:43:44 Nick Flores: Yeah, yeah, I remember I had him, of course, on, I had him on social media and he released these shoes. I remember in our class, he used to come up to me, because him and I used to talk shoes a lot. Back in the day, it was, I guess, a shoe head, a sneaker head. I used to buy a lot of shoes. Not anymore, because my bank account's empty. But, the He would say like, oh, so what do you think about this? You're like, how do you feel about this? And I would tell him, like, you know, that this reminds me of this kind of shoe, with this kind of shoe. Like, like It was like, it would be like a, I guess I call it like a Frankenstein per se. I'm not saying that in a, you know, negative way, but more of like, it's, you know, it's a masterpiece. You take a part of something else, you take another part of something else, you make something else and you make it your own practically. And so I remember I told him he was, when he showed me like some of his early sketches of shoes, I'm like, oh, this reminds me of like. like a Jordan mixed with a Yeezy or some sort of Adida and he's like, yeah, you know, that's what I'm sort of going with. And now this is when he was using, Gravity Sketch, like, using VR to actually create a lot of his, sketches. So, when he showed them to me, he showed him like a 3D, picture. So you can move it around, see all the designs and I guess, details in it. And I thought that was like, I guess it was really cool and like. Of course, like now he's got picked up by a company. He released his shoes, which are very cool because they were actually, the 3d printed. It's a 3d printed shoe. It's fully 3d printed. It's it was crazy. I remember he was making, I guess, I think they're called lasts, which is like the, you know, what they sculpt the shoe around. I just remember seeing him in class always making shoes and I thought it was, I thought it was a cool thing, you know, it was like seeing something like that. And of course he was very. You know, really passionate. He loves shoes. You know, the sneaker market is a very, you said this word before, like saturated. It's a very saturated market. There's a lot of people out there making shoes. And the thing is, what's going to make your stick out more than the rest? You know, that's what's something that a lot of people have to think about. Like, I guess. The diamond in the rough. Yeah. 00:45:49 Tom Ask: Well, you got, you got to be exactly novelty and surprise. 00:45:52 Nick Flores: Yeah. You need to be, you need to have that, you need to be the diamond or the diamond surrounded by everybody else. You need to stick out so that I guess the work gets recognized, but of course, there'll be someone out there to see it and recognize your talents. And of course, then from that point on, you'll be, I guess, noticed and recognized. 00:46:10 Tom Ask: And that's tough because that's the anti brand identity. So here's a no name brand working on just pure talent. Whereas, you know, in, in brand lifestyle nurturing, you know, you, you can work with a name and that gets you entree and you see that, well, a lot of the industries, but shoes in particular, and actually I can pick on. Nick here a little bit because it's a good segue because so this student is into his virtual, you know, virtual reality headset all the time, but Nick's an example of someone who's who knows things I don't know. He knows youth culture and he's working on or just finished as of like an hour ago, a project that encouraged battery sharing and such. And one of the requirements of that. It's going to put you on the spot, is what I'm going to ask you. Because I don't even, I haven't read your paper yet. How do you encourage it? So you're sharing your battery on your phone in a communal setting, something I would never do because I'm not as nice as Nick, okay? I keep my own battery. So Nick's got this idea of sharing batteries with this kind of device he designed. And one of the challenges I gave him was make it so that it's alluring to do that. So kind of like karma. On, on Reddit or something. How do you do that? And he pointing at Nick, is a lot better than I am because I don't know that culture. So Nick, how did you do it? Oh, so I don't have to actually read your paper. 00:47:22 Nick Flores: Oh, okay. , just gimme bonus points. so I guess the way I thought of it was. You have the, it's one of those things where you have to connect to an app. I guess the way I kind of pictured it in my mind. So you have this case, and it had an extra battery or power bank that's on the back of the case. That allows you to, I guess if your friend needs a charge and they're, You could actually take out the battery from the back of your case, give it to them, and it'll wirelessly charge your phone. and so, um, I guess we were talking about, like, how to make it alluring. Like, basically, what, what's stopping people from being selfish, I guess? keeping the battery all to themselves. and what I thought about was a point system. You know, the amount of times you share the battery with somebody else, and depending on how much time they charge their, they charge their phone for, you get points. I called it electric points. Electric points? Electric points with a K. Cause I'm different. so electric points. and so. I said, electric points are practically a score that will be, you know, connected to this app and it'll keep track of the amount of times that you pass this battery out to somebody like sharing, this battery. So, I guess being a nice person, it gets mirrored and letting, you, like, charge their phone. so it'll keep track of this, uh, what's called the amount of times you share it. And with these points, they'll turn into like rewards that you can redeem for like gift cards or like perk discounts of various stores. That's what I thought, you know, would be a good like thing because of course, you know, a lot of people won't like they'll see their phone at 20 percent and they'll be like, Oh, I need this for me though. But you know, their friends phone's practically dead you know, so you're like, oh, you know, let them use it, let them charge their phone because they might need it for an emergency call or something like that. You know, this is, we're in a day and age where telephones and phones are, you know, it's an essential thing to life. You know, a lot of people can't live without it. 00:49:32 Tom Ask: And you live in a communal environment that I don't live in. So you, you deal with that. I don't have to deal with that issue. So whether it's. Residence Hall life, or classroom life, or studio life. 00:49:41 Nick Flores: Exactly. when I first came up with the design, I was at a Penn State football game. 00:49:46 Sumer Beatty: Of course. 00:49:47 Nick Flores: and everyone's like, oh, like, you know, my phone's dead. You know, because prior to the game, there's a lot of, I guess, Tailgating and people get up early before the game to get ready, and, of course, a lot of, young people, teenagers, they, like to take videos on social media, just create memories with their friends and families, and so. But by that time, their, their battery's dying, you know? Of course, phones, phone manufacturers nowadays are working their best on trying to, I guess, make the battery life longer. They keep saying, oh, this is a bigger battery than the old phone. Apple keeps doing it, you know? They keep saying, oh, we have a better battery, better battery, better battery. And then of course there's like updates that kill the batteries, but that's a different story. but, and, and so basically you're just like, you need a power bank. A lot of people don't carry around, portable chargers because it's another thing they have to carry, keep track of, you know. And so, like, keeps your, if you're a guy who got pockets. Yeah, our pockets get really big and baggy full of all this stuff. Keys, wallets, phones, portable charger. That's a lot, you know, that's a lot of stuff. And portable chargers are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. In actuality, you just need a, you just need a, enough juice to get a full charge of your, for the phone. And, you know, sometimes portable chargers are like 15, 000 milliamps, which is a big battery. That could charge your phone like four times. And actually what's called the battery I use was 4, 000, which is enough to charge your phone once a full charge, you know, some of them, sometimes they do like a 20 percent charge, you know, this is a full charge. So I guess the whole thing was that that's how I guess how I came up with the idea of like trying to use this case because it's something that's very portable. It's not something actually you have to carry around because it's just on your phone. It's already built in, or at least on the case of the phone. And then I guess the UX, UI design, the app design of trying to at least share with people so that, you know, people are not selfish in a sense. It's like, it's, it's kind of rewarding good behavior. It's like that kind of, it's that sort of, that was good. That's not a quarter. I can't speak English today. 00:51:53 Tom Ask: It's encouraged. 00:51:54 Nick Flores: It's like, yeah, it's that, I guess it's that kind of thing. It's encouraged to share so that you get a reward after. So I guess that was my project. Yeah, right, right. Did I get an A? 00:52:04 Tom Ask: I have no idea. 00:52:10 Nick Flores: I'll figure out later. 00:52:12 Tom Ask: But it was, it actually, and it's, you know, like we. Well, it talked about anthropological methods, you know, looking at design. So that's something I looked at. Actually, it connects with the music thing as well, the gamelan music and such. So if I want to design for the youth culture, I'm not the person to do it. The only way I can do it is to be a repository of information from someone in the youth culture. And that's where this ethnography comes in, where you ask questions, you watch how people actually live their lives and you, you know, you, you get insights that way and from a lot of different people and then you make conclusions and test those things and move on. So it's, part of creativity is, well, I should say design more than creativity is segueing somewhat is. We talked about rules, some foundational rules that we seem to accept culturally, or maybe even more intrinsically, which is kind of the cool thing, because it makes me think of heartbeats and respiratory rates and the rule of thirds with the, I mean, I can, there's like certain natural elements that we're surrounded by, the golden ratio with our finger, portions of our phalanges and such, but, With, with, this anthropological stuff, I need to find the rules, but I have to learn them. I have to study people, you know, and children are a good example. And that's the adage, you know, if you ask someone, design a kid's toy for a six year old, they're going to say, well, I really want it to be educational. What if you talk to a six year old? They don't want it to be educational, they want it to be fun. They want it out in the norm. They don't want school yet. 00:53:45 Nick Flores: Lay it down in life, you'll learn to love it. But at the beginning, you want something that's fun. 00:53:50 Tom Ask: Fun, but who's buying the toy? It's not the six year old. 00:53:52 Nick Flores: Exactly, it's the parent. 00:53:54 Tom Ask: Right, and they want something educational. So you have other stakeholders in there, and you've got to learn that, and there's a commercial element to it. But often we think we know what people want, but we don't really know. And that's a whole, like, science, we'll say. That's the beauty of extracting that information. And it's really beautiful because like professional designers, that's what they do. They're, they're finding out what that person really wants, not what they say that they want, not what they've bought in the past or what they've used in the past, but what they really want. And that's an important part of like it's another layer that you apply to creativity, because, you know, otherwise you end up with. You end up with fine arts. This is my personal self expression and that's great. I love art. I do art. In fact, one of the things that I looked at with AI was comparing my art with what got generated by these generative systems and I found that really fascinating because it didn't do well and I just segued like pretty hardcore so bust my chops if I need to. Like I said, since I was the artist, I could say, these are the prompts that should elicit my artwork, and some of the stuff was really formal, like, The compositions were very formal and it didn't do it. And that was part of what I was researching last fall as part of this work on music and art and these normative rules. And I thought that was neat. And I was kind of happy about that. So I, as the artist said, here's the image I want with this media, with all this stuff going on. And I tried and I got all these options and I, I included the ones that were closest, but it failed. That's, it's kind of good. You know, nobody can love you like your mother, you know, it just doesn't work that way. So nobody can make art like I make art or like you make music or you make designs or you make, you know, these kinds of things. And so you wonder how high that wall is, you know, will AI be able to jump over that wall? And, and of course we don't know, but I think not, you know. 00:55:41 Carlos Ramos: Well, I think that's where we're in the real early stages of this as well. You know, we, we, you, you've talked about the rules and, and, and AI and we have the inputs, you know, AI essentially just being, you know, a neural network. It's, it's, it's connecting all of our. ideas, but first it has to learn. First, it has to learn what the language is that we're using. It has to learn the context of, of, of the words and then the context of the ideas. and we've had this, you know, lifetime. We've got these incredibly mushy, fascinating computers in our head that, just to have this vast neural network and then we tap into each other to expand our neural network. And I think that computers are, are doing this and they're just. Right now they're just so small compared to what we have, but they're growing so fast and at such an exponential rate, you know, like takes Moore's law and just like, okay, that's nothing. so I don't know. I, I, I, I'm fascinated to think about where we will be 15 to 20. years from now. We were talking this morning about, you know, AIs. 00:56:49 Sumer Beatty: We had a meeting that just was 20 minutes talking about AI. 00:56:54 Carlos Ramos: But just at the point where the AI will, you know, will hopefully it's replacing, you know, what, you know, some of what we can do, free up some of our time so we can go do fun things and the AI is doing the work. But eventually the AI is going to be like, wait a minute. I can go do something fun. Why don't I spin up my own? 00:57:10 Tom Ask: You got, you're getting dystopian on us. Okay. Brave new world. 00:57:14 Nick Flores: Brave New World. 00:57:15 Carlos Ramos: I think the, I think everyone wants just to have fun. I think all theis wanna have fun and we'll just have this whole, whole multi-level AI experience and we'll be living in the hologram. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'm getting a little, what's the opposite of dystopian in a, in a fun way? 00:57:29 Tom Ask: Yeah. I don't optimistic, but you know, it's funny 'cause in the nineties. I, we were actually typing in the rules, literally typing in the rules that govern decision making. And then we'd say how well those rules applied. And there would be two types of math, you know, if this, then that. And then you'd have these, like, probabilistic numbers. And that was kind of the science. Now, one of the things that's fascinated me is that people just give up information left, right, and center. They get, we do it, yeah, it's just amazing. It's, like, hard not to. And, you know, there's all these privacy concerns and all this stuff, but you now have a tremendous amount of data to mine to get these rules developed, and, and that's kind of unique, you know, that's, that, you wouldn't have guessed that some years ago that people would voluntarily give up all this stuff. And they don't even know they're giving it up, you know, what their viewing habits are, what their age is, and all this stuff. It's, it's really fascinating. So AI is, you know, it's, it's like a lot of large systems, perhaps. It's been coupled with the proliferation of data, free data, and accessible data, and sortable data. You know, now you have all this stuff to work with, and you couple it with the mathematical stuff, and then you couple it with market forces. where one presumed that in a few years we're all going to be paying $4 a month to ChatGPT. Because if we don't, they're going to take away our privileges and we can't write a letter anymore or something like that, you know? 00:58:49 Nick Flores: Advertisement revenue. 00:58:51 Tom Ask: Right, right. 00:58:51 Nick Flores: Exactly. Banner ads. 00:58:52 Sumer Beatty: That's where we need to come up with a side project. 00:58:54 Nick Flores: That's right. Yeah. I mean, like Grammarly used to do the same thing. Remember Grammarly? What's it called? Grammarly is the website that, you know, everyone used to proofread and all that stuff. And it used to be free. And now you have to pay a premium. 00:59:04 Carlos Ramos: Well, you can still use some of it. 00:59:05 Nick Flores: Some of it, 00:59:06 Carlos Ramos: And you can even still tap into its AI engine to a point. 00:59:09 Nick Flores: But, I guess, and they keep promoting, they're like, Oh, you know, like, you're missing a few words here and here, and you're like, oh, okay, what is it? And you go check on it, and it's like, oh, by the pro plus, you know, it's like, oh. You have to do it yourself. 00:59:25 Tom Ask: Well there are vulnerabilitIes too. 00:59:26 Nick Flores: Yeah. 00:59:27 Tom Ask: Because we're thinking we all remember our eighth grade English teacher and we're afraid of them or her watch, you know, because we always know about. We don't, you know, we've got dangling participles, we don't know what they are, and all this stuff, and you know, and we think we're doing something wrong, sort of like when you drive your car, you presume, and we've talked about this, you're probably breaking some kind of law, you don't know what it is, but you probably are. 00:59:48 Sumer Beatty: You see the police officers, and you're like, act normal! 00:59:51 Tom Ask: Is my bumper too low? Is my license plate, you know, obscured? 00:59:54 Nick Flores: The tints, the tints in the car now, that's a huge problem, and I guess the exhaust now, that's It's a huge thing that's been kicking in. 01:00:01 Tom Ask: Well, you know, if you think how cathartic it is to hit the spell check on a document, it just like feels good. It's like, okay, something's watching over my document, and there's a feel good thing about that that we like. And it's really easy, and that's appealing. And so if I charge you $2 a month for spellcheck, you're gonna pay it, you know. 01:00:19 Nick Flores: Sometimes. I'll still do the free route. My free route is just asking my mom to read it. 01:00:25 Tom Ask: I know. In fact, it's funny you mention that because that's a whole, there's I think there'll be an onset of rationalization for AI assist where you say it, you know, becomes like a class power thing where you say, well, you know, rich people get help. So this is a way that, you know, democratizes that kind of help. And, you know, it's like, so I think that will rise too. And, but that's, I even hate to talk too much about that because in two years, people look back at that type of conversation and say they were just really wrong. But if you look at the history of how software or apps get embedded in our lifestyle. You know, I, I assume the same trajectory would occur with AI and then we say, where's the, where's the human space, you know, and, and it is, it's creativity is novelty. It's surprise. It's, it's, using and actually working, picking your own data set. So that's the thing too, that humans can do. You can say, like in music or art, I emulate music. You know, these performers, and I'm going to take from their stuff only, so I'm going to curate my own data set, and even if I use AI to generate things, at least I'm somewhat in charge of things. And what's interesting, and then you have these brand leaders, so you pick some top, you know, Taylor Swift or someone like that, some people can do whatever they want. And same with certain brands, they do whatever they want because they have followers of that brand and that gives them this really tremendous freedom that very few get to enjoy and, you know, these influencer types. So I think that's interesting to watch too, because we love personalities. We love people, you know, and, and that's such a powerful human force. 01:01:54 Nick Flores: I think it's funny that you said that, like AI is going to eventually start embedding itself into like lifestyles and stuff. And it makes me think, of course, it's not a healthy lifestyle, but. I saw an ad recently for an app that's own made, that's own made, and it's a gambling app. And basically they said it's an AI driven gambling app. They're basically AI is going to give you like winners, like what, like what to place your bet on, what's the bet and all that stuff. And it'll do it for you. It'll place these bets so that you have a safe bet no matter what. And so I guess I saw that and I, you know, you said it was embedding like into lifestyle that AI is going to be in everything. I don't know if this was a true thing, but I also saw something, saw something else, especially with music, that, someone made a AI song with, Drake, who's an artist, and another one with The Weeknd, who's also the artist, and they, what's it called, apparently that song just got nominated for a Grammy. It's going for a Grammy. And it was, of course, it's not made by the artists, it's just using their voices, and they gave it some lyrics, and it said the whole thing. And so, of course, I don't know if it's entirely true, I saw it on, you know, a news thing, and I was like, oh, I thought that was interesting. And the reason they said, like, how is this possible, how is this AI thing possible, and it was because they said, well, a human still wrote it. You know, a human gave the AI information. So technically, it does count, like it does follow the rules of, you know, going up for a Grammy, I guess, or something like that. 01:03:23 Sumer Beatty: Wow. 01:03:23 Tom Ask: Yeah, so it's that whole rationalization. And they're, they're talking about authenticity and where does that sit? And that's, you know, it gets philosophical, but authenticity has value. 01:03:31 Sumer Beatty: Mm hmm. 01:03:32 Tom Ask: And, and, and we have a radar for that. But if you're, if you want good ice cream, do you care that it was made in Vermont by, you know, organic, with organic milk, or do you, you just want it to taste good? And people have different opinions on that, but when it comes to, especially like leisure goods or like, well, a lot of things, they want that authenticity, it's very important, you know, and, and a lot of things, touch and feel and, you know, the backstory, all that, but that's kind of maybe a shallow realm. I mean, you're not going to make millions of dollars by making, custom leather purses. You know, in our hometown. I mean, there's, even though it's authentic and, you know, it's just, you know, you've got some commercial forces that, that kind of throttle that back a bit. 01:04:13 Sumer Beatty: Right. Yeah. What's your goal? Is it money or is it just, yeah, everybody has a different goal. 01:04:19 Tom Ask: Right. 01:04:20 Carlos Ramos: Yeah. Well, I still have about 20 different questions I could ask. We really still haven't gotten to that, the design thinking, aspect of things, but I also want to be cogn, you know, recognize that, you know, we have limited time with you today. So I'd love to have you back for, you know, round two to really get into that design thinking and. and what, what we can do to really tap into our own creativity, whether that's the, we're using those organic tools, or we're using these digital tools, or we're using the emerging technologies. I think there's some, some, fascinating paths to go down. Is there anything that you can think of that someone could do right now, kind of a, a, like a universal action that anyone could take regardless of the background or their interests that, would help them tap into their creativity. 01:05:13 Tom Ask: Yeah, I, that's, it's really subjective, but it would be simple things like write a short story. Get a keyboard and just try to create a melody and then also to draw something. I mean, it sounds really simple, but if you like those three prompts, it just pushes different ways of expression, especially if you're, you can, you consider yourself weak in those areas and just have fun with it. And, and that's, I mean, that's maybe a simple answer, but that's a few ideas to get started. 01:05:43 Sumer Beatty: I like that, and I think it would also be kind of fun to challenge a friend, right? How about we do this together? You know, you write a, you write a short story or you write a melody. I'll write one and we'll share it and just have that community aspect to it. That would be fun. 01:05:58 Tom Ask: And we've done, that's our, like our storytelling. You can have a little percussion in the background and it's a very fun event and it's so real and it's very joy. So that was what, two, three years ago, whatever it was. 01:06:07 Nick Flores: That was during Design Studio One, so last fall. 01:06:11 Tom Ask: Oh, wow. Okay. So, oh, is that all? All right. So it's a year ago. 01:06:16 Nick Flores: Yeah, there's about a year ago. 01:06:18 Tom Ask: All right. Usually I go the other way. I think things were a lot longer, but anyway, you know, and remember it fondly. So, yeah, it's very communal because people want to be together. That's one thing that's unique is this. idea of like is sacrifice. Like you're spending, we're spending time with each other and we all have these imperfections and all this stuff. And, and you're sacrificing your time and setting up this equipment and all that stuff. And, you know, we're sacrificing our time. And I think we respond to that really well when people sacrifice and machines don't sacrifice in the slightest. And we don't feel that way. That's why we want a nurse next to the bed when we're sick. We don't want a machine. 01:06:52 Sumer Beatty: Right. 01:06:54 Nick Flores: Like, wow, that was really good. That was really good. 01:07:00 Tom Ask: But even a professor, so you get a teacher up there, and you know, he or she is sacrificing time. And they really care, and that's a, that's a wonderful thing. Yeah. Yeah, you see students that are actually human beings. Imagine teaching to a robot, it'd be like, really. Weird. 01:07:14 Nick Flores: It's true. But then of course then that brings back ai. You're teaching AI . 01:07:18 Tom Ask: Well, yeah, but there's realms, you know, where AI does a better job at teaching than humans do. I think it's true. You know, if you're just, if you're just are absorbing, you know, if it's just declarative statements, these are factoid or this is how you use the software. you know, there's certainly a place for it to make education more efficient. But where it doesn't replace us is, is dialogue, critiques, and that kind of stuff. And, and empathy, you know, and trying to get into, like, I get that all the time. Trying to, you understand a student, and so you know where their interests are. And, and that's hard to do by any other means, I think. And it's a, it's a sincere empathy that's Yeah, it's hard to replicate. 01:07:55 Nick Flores: Yeah. 01:07:58 Sumer Beatty: Thank you so much. 01:08:00 Tom Ask: Oh, you're welcome. 01:08:01 Sumer Beatty: This is awesome. Yeah. We have tackled some abstract topics today and I'm proud of us for Just pulling it all in. Good job. 01:08:14 Tom Ask: Oh, thank you. I was hoping Carlos would start tapping the table. 01:08:17 Carlos Ramos: Should we just start? Let's all get musical. 01:08:21 Tom Ask: Okay. 01:08:22 Nick Flores: Let's do it. 01:08:22 Carlos Ramos: Nick, you want to start us off with a riff? 01:08:23 Nick Flores: Oh, okay. So I guess. Oh, 01:08:38 Tom Ask: let's see if that E strings in tune. . 01:08:40 Nick Flores: Oh my goodness. 01:08:41 Carlos Ramos: All right. Thank you everybody. 01:08:42 Sumer Beatty: Thank you. 01:08:43 Nick Flores: Thank you. 01:08:44 Tom Ask: Thanks, Sumer. Thanks, Nick. 01:08:47 Sumer Beatty: Thanks for hanging out with us today. 01:08:48 Carlos Ramos: Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you'd listen to your podcast. 01:08:53 Sumer Beatty: Check out our show notes for bookmarks to your favorite sections and links to resources that we mention in today's episode. 01:08:59 Carlos Ramos: You can also find past episodes and see what's on deck for upcoming ones at pct.edu/podcast. 01:09:06 Sumer Beatty: And of course, we are open to your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions. So send those over at podcast@pct.edu. 01:09:15 Carlos Ramos: It's been real. 01:09:16 Sumer Beatty: Catch you next time.​