The students now and the young professionals starting to become not only just active but more entrepreneurial in defining the world that they want to work in. They do that by inventing projects. They do that by rewriting the code of whatever the software is. They see everything as a creative problem that is guided by some longer vision about why they're here doing this particular thing and living this kind of life.
Hello and welcome to one to one. I'm Amelia and for this episode we're breaking a bit from the norm to feature three guests at once in our conversation with Rotolab, Michael Rotundi's new VR focus startup. Rotundi and his co-founders Nell's long and MA Green Sign have ambitions to create uniquely VR environments for architectural education and practice. And in the process, completely upend how we learn and work.
Inspired by decades of experience in architecture and VR's imminent future, Rotundi and his co-founders spoke with Paul Petrune and I about socializing in VR, gaming as education, and what this new frontier could mean for tomorrow's architects. So Michael a few years ago I had a conversation with you in your office and you brought up issues of augmented reality and virtual reality. Since then those topics have become so much more mainstream. You know it wasn't they weren't new technologies since then but it was very clear from that conversation that you have a deep interest in pursuing these technologies and now we're seeing the formation of a new venture Rotolab that you've started up.
And I was hoping that you can talk a little bit about how these interests formed based on your experience as a teacher and an architectural practitioner over the years and how you've evolved these interests into this new venture. Good opening question. I'll talk about it briefly as a sort of personal and then in a more public way. The personal level is just always trying to stay ahead of my curiosity about everything in particular architecture and teaching.
Both the practice and teaching the next generation but then at the same time wanting to continually learn new things myself. It's not just about the new things. Years ago I'll read things or I'll hear things or even imagine things but then in order to sound like you're speaking with authority you say it was once written or you say good to once said and then people listen. I was going through I thought I had heard someone say that or I read the different ways that you draw a building give you different ways of understanding.
So I started to look at two dimension and three dimension which is an issue. Actually it's a pretty great dialectic to be dealing with both as an architect and as a teacher. I basically had to convert two dimension into three dimension and you do it basically in the third eye. I started drawing a lot of axonometrics rather than perspective because I was interested in the precision of axonometrics and then how it could show you a measured drawing.
Anyways fast forward when I started to see some of the students at school in particular there was only very small handfuls only three it was on Nells and a couple of other students were interested in working with game engines instead of regular software and they were also putting goggles on and I was fascinated by that and I really wanted to understand better if it was possible to have a second third eye. I wanted to do envision things outside as well as inside. So the technology was really about the virtual technology where the physical world and the virtual world come together and again the virtual world exists in the third eye and it has for a very long time and then the physical world is basically the world that has of gravity. So that when the third eye was extended into the virtual technology that became a big interest to me.
I believe that I'm in my last phase of teaching there's multiple phases. It begins with not being sure of what you're doing and so you're paying attention to the students and eventually become sure of what you're doing and over confident and you start thinking of the students as employees you know that they're basically doing your work their research and that sort of let up as time goes on and realize that students have to be given the privilege you were given when you were younger which is nobody's telling you what to do and then this phase which is the way to renew myself is by trying to enter the world of younger people and then have them tell me what they see and what they're thinking about and then I figure out how to turn that into something how to re-contextualize that and the technology just automatically becomes a part of that. It's also redefining practice. The one thing that I've realized in recent years is that all of the technology that we've used has been really good for architecture but not very good for architects.
It's made us have to produce things faster and cheaper and as a conceptual medium not even to a conceptual medium it's been relegated to the back burner even robots the robots that we've had at school are seen as a way to make life easier for humans you know it's something else MA and Nelzer exploring how to use robots as a co-creator in the whole process. I'll finally bring it into the studio and using virtual technology to see what it can possibly do applying it to some hypothetical projects that we're trying to turn into reality and then to bring it into school to have the students play in ways that they would normally want to play when they're not at school. Where do you think this technology specifically virtual reality is right now in the context of history? Do you think that we're working with this technology, with a plan for the future or are we there right now where we can actually make substantial changes?
I can give you an overview and then Nelzer can, he's the one you want to really ask that question to get really hardcore answer. Yeah I think what we all do unwittingly and I think in a conscious way is we jump on the path which is the trajectory which is evolution itself. When you do it consciously you are able to envision how any technology, earth based technology or sky based technology, earth based coming from indigenous and sky based coming from our world which is the world of computers and digital. This is a natural evolution of specifically of art discipline and the way we think about it and it's still being seen as a production tool to a great degree and it's now in the phase where it's really being explored theoretically like software is a theoretical proposition now not just software which I think is really important in this technology.
I look at it two ways there's an analogy with there's cranes that build buildings and there's cranes that build cranes and I'm interested in both and we set up a relationship, a three of us set up a relationship and a practice that allows us to move hopefully seamlessly between both of those where you can do pure and applied research. So I think that's what's beginning to happen in the school. The impatience that everybody has for fame and fortune, the end game being selling to Google rather than just pure knowledge and scholarship is something that we got to, I think every generation is out in front of it. I think we have to confront that in both practice and in education.
So we're looking at both alternative ways to practice and alternative ways to learn and more specifically the shift right now because the atomization of everything breaking down into smaller and smaller entities is informal learning which I think it's not going to replace formal education but informal learning is definitely going to be, you're going to see that not just trending but on a huge rise in the western world where there's going to be a decline in applications and universities except for very specific areas of knowledge and students not just doing online stuff, home school, online certification when you're just moving around the city. So I think that's what we're searching right now. It's not a mantra, it's just, it seems evident to us, whatever it seems evident to us we're trying to bring it into the practice. So you think a reevaluation of the architectural education is inevitable and these types of technologies could help facilitate?
Of all education. You know, we're still in the midst of an industrialized education basically moving as many people through as quickly as possible so you perpetuate the system, it's administration centered, teacher centered and it's shifting to student centered. I mean what we talk about is 21st century learning models is basically going back to the early 20th century and grabbing a couple of Italians and bringing them to America, Montessori and Reginald Milia, you know, the Open School in England, maybe it takes 100 years to settle in. The difficulty is there's so many people that need to be educated that it's not possible to give everybody very specific attention but that's one of the, I think I'm optimistic and we're optimistic in the seminars and the studios that we teach that it is possible in a large formatted class to have people discover their own voice.
I'd say. Well fortunately you're Italian and you're already here. You're Italian and you're already here next next up. So Rotolab offers three service platforms.
There's the Rotokonsault, Rotokrade and Rotoprize. Can you talk a little bit about what those different services are? Well, so you had asked a question about virtual technology and Nells didn't get a chance to answer so do you want to address that? Absolutely.
In light of what Rotok has just said. Yeah, let's get back to that. I think there's still just a few people that are trailblazing. I say a couple of them are graduated, there's still one or two there and Nells is definitely one of them and so one of my selfish objectives was to see it with Nells and we set up an alternative practice in the office and so he's basically bringing intelligence to me that I didn't have.
When you ask the question where are we historically within kind of on the continuum of virtual reality and virtual technology as a tool in architecture. When you look at a lot of the work that came out of Columbia in the 90s you see a lot of use of animation that suffers like Maya for form generation and getting into the generation of video as a primary medium for representation. Where we currently are in the world of virtual reality is essentially the wild west, right? It's a land grab.
People pick the lowest thing fruit and they run with it as fast as possible and as Michael said they sell off what they can to Google or Facebook and use that revenue to generate new companies and that's really what we're seeing. At Rotolab we'd like to propose kind of an alternate trajectory. We look at not just the art but virtual technology in general as a means to really enhance sense and augment the imagination of the people using it with the intention of accelerating knowledge transfer. When virtual reality first came out to a point that the average person could interact with it I'm thinking about the Oculus DK one, the developer kit, the first developer kit.
It was really used in the same way that those early kind of animation adaptations were a way of visualizing architecture, a way of visualizing form and since then we've really learned that it's most successful at not just providing project visualization but instead providing real time design platforms within virtual worlds that allow for people to come together and collaborate in a real time virtual environment where everything is controlled by the design or everything is controlled by the brief of the project. So we've been doing a little bit of work with that as well. But we've been exploring just for modeling and even bringing storytelling and 3D audio in as design tools within virtual environments and then stinking that to online repositories and databases to kind of act almost as version control or version history within a modeling environment which isn't as incapable within something like Rhino or Maya. So I mean just speaking about the general state of technology is the hardware and software that's currently available to us.
Is it satisfactory for what you're trying to accomplish or like where do you think we need to move forward? What's the top priority in evolving this technology to achieve its potential? What we're really seeing is the beginning of the end for the open source movement. And when I say that, I say that as an open source supporter and meaning that it's one of the things that we're going to look back on one day and say, hey, do you remember when things weren't open source, we're getting to a point now where information is available to so many people in so many different formats that if the tool doesn't exist, just go out and create yourself.
And so that's really the way that we've been addressing a number of these problems in the Rotolab, throwing incubation programs is recognizing curating a set of people and ideas that have these ideas for tools, have these concepts, have built these companies for tools that don't exist and really trying to bring them in and say, you know, we understand we're with you and we're here to help. One way that we've done that is using actually the work that I did at SIRC with Michael and bringing that into Rotolab as a company called Second Studio where we're looking at creating essentially reality engine for multiple decentralized virtual studios that work across architecture design and healthcare to provide essentially virtual architecture for whatever that person and that professional needs. And then that's something that we're looking forward to incorporating blockchain technology incorporating decentralized technology, increasing open source and peer to peer activity in ways that the contributors to these code bases are actually being rewarded based on their use rather than through salary. That's really the future for technology is this idea of a thousand decentralized studios operating for free because it's anyone's right to information.
The one thing though, very simply for me is there's a lot of things that are happening through technology that's reminding us that we're social beings and we should be cooperating and the more we cooperate, we become smarter, faster when we're proximity to other people. That's why cities exist, right? Social media could be an argument that cities don't need to exist with social media because you can still be connected. We need to press flash.
There's a massive amount of information that's transferred through pressing flash. And I think there's all these technology right now is allowing us to, I think by the fact though we're moving towards open source theories of the economy and we're moving back into a kind of tribal sensibility of being much more cooperative but truly as McLuhan would say at a global scale, I find completely extraordinary. What's really critical though is that we figure out how to infuse meaning, potential meaning into all this stuff so that everything doesn't just become homogenous and entropy sets in. And if I can just follow that up real quick, going back I quickly mentioned our incubation programs that we have at Rotolab and there's a lot of different models out there.
You have lean startup and others. The analogous and lean startup model is the MVP or the minimally viable product. What we say at Rotolab in order to continue this idea of meaning and value is that it goes beyond a minimally viable product and it goes into something that we refer to as a salt, discovering one salt, discovering the salt within your company and within your idea. And that's a salt is something that's scalable, something that's aesthetically pleasing, something that's past its litmus test and something that is functionally or technologically functional.
And so it takes that idea of a minimally viable product and it adds some design criteria to it. We are a design innovation lab. We are a design incubator and it really says it has to be a minimally viable product plus something. Right?
I mean, would you like to? Yeah. So if you stop for a second and you think about what we've addressed so far, which is to try and understand the impact of technology upon us as learners and as people they're now connected. You know, with the 19th century struggled with moving into industrialization and education was set up to help people pay attention and remember things.
And the 20th century was to solve that industrial model that the screen came in, right? And cultural revolutions occurred. The 21st century is that the electronic knowledge and we're connected now as social beings through technology. So what you've heard so far is a proposition about how to connect people and make social connections using technologies a way to do that within coming from the understanding of architecture and design.
The incubation is in the spirit of recognizing that today so many young people recognize that their education doesn't have to end with just debt, right? Or with just a degree, but that it can be a product developed in the company. There's a lot of push from this in Silicon Valley to move people in fact out of college and directly into entrepreneurialism. Huge push.
So as educators, we and people who worked for a long time, I worked at Art Center for a very long time with a theme of bodies in space, which is how I've come into this conversation. There's an interest in art that we have, which is if we're going to push kids out there to be entrepreneurs, let's do it in a way that has depth and meaning and that gives them a sense of their social responsibility as well as their understanding that technology is there to help them, not simply to master and that they're also to improve other people's lives. So considering the possibilities that we're all discussing as an alien parent to VR situations of education or collaboration among practitioners, what kind of either social science or neuroscientific research or psychological research or however, is there to kind of support how reliable VR is as a representation of an actual learning environment? What kind of basic premises are you guys operating on that say we can trust VR scenario as enough like the learning scenarios we can study in reality to let us then grow that?
Yeah. So I listened to your lovely conversation with Michael Rabeb and I want to build on what he's the property he's put out. So look, we're at a very early stage. There's not a lot of assessment of that, right?
Because labs are just beginning, you know, labs have been working with VR actually for the last certainly 40 years, you know, in neuroscience, people are quickly moving into that space and advisors to our own lab are working on research projects on this very question of how do humans learn and explore space in a virtual realm? This builds actually on neuroscience research that is very robust of understanding rats that explore space and grow hippocampal activity. There's a lot of research that points to and I can point to the work of Dr. Veremy Pobot who's also an advisor for us who's been working in hippocampal research and looking at wayfinding in complex virtual environments.
And Dr. Clemensen, his historic lab is performing a study. So there's an interesting building on research that neuroscientists know that enriched environments amp up exploration and that amping up exploration impacts memory and learning. Can you maybe define an enriched environment within this context?
Yeah, so an enriched environment would think of an environment as in solitary confinement, that's not enriched. An enriched environment is one that takes advantage of architecture and product design to create challenges that are spatial, that tax-proxemic learning, that are ones that play with everything we've thought of in terms of product design, light, texture, scale, shifting, takes advantage of everything we've known in terms of creating place spaces and recognizes that play with objects, with challenge, actually amps up learning and memory. And so the addition of a wheel or rolling ball and a rat's cage gives them that opportunity to play and transforms that otherwise solitary confinement into an enriched environment that can then grow hippocampal activity. Yes, and it also builds on research with Lawrence Water Maze, a very famous technology that began to look at how rats learn directionality, how to leave a space, rats don't like water, and they try and find the platform.
This maze, this water maze, challenged rats through landmarks to figure out how to leave the space. That was just adding visual markers was considered a kind of enrichment to help the rats learn. So what you're seeing in neuroscience, there's been a history, a trajectory of new technologies coming in to look at spatial navigation, and that has led to an understanding of by creating visual cues, sound cues, tactile cues, you can then begin to change the way learning happens. So this sounds like a perfect segue into the work you guys are doing with games and or just the conceptualization that you have with games, which I think is going to be a little bit more specific in your application than something as simplified as gamification, which is like a different bag, but maybe now you can speak to this a little bit about the work that Rotoloud is doing under the affinity game or space, as well as just what the utility is for games in the aspect of a learning environment or simply just a stimulating environment for any type of practitioner.
So I was introduced to games as a tool for design when I was an intern at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas. Plinyfisk, the co-director there, had me designing a trading card game for use in Haiti as a means of developing community based on the people that live there. So did I know that that was going to ultimately kind of turn into what I spend a lot of time working on? And so when I came to Sierk and Michael said, hey, we're going to do games this semester, I said, okay, that's what we're going to do.
And throughout that semester, and since then, we've, as you say, moving beyond gamification to actually understanding what are the social systems at work within games that allow them to be so successful both in terms of entertainment, but also in terms of collaboration and teambuilding and information retention, memory, et cetera, dexterity. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And games have been tested in neuroscience labs with more robust research and the virtual technologies are building on that research. Absolutely.
So we brought that in as well. It's not just the theory and the practice is turning the studio itself into a facsimile of the social system that exists in games and gameplay. It's really just as simple as if you give people the belief that the world they're operating in has rules, but not the same sacrifices or not the same repercussions as reality. Then simply remove the biggest ego barrier to actual learning.
Is that really like one of the most simple, in your conception, one of the most simple reasons why gaming is an effective learning tool? Sorry. I'll just say the first thing that is very evident to me that has to be not only put into a brief but discussed openly with students is how do they learn the nature of their own learning and what their motivation is. The thing that really captured my attention with games when you read statistics like 7 billion hours a week worldwide.
Talk about selling to a big technology company, something like Twitch being sold for $5 billion. There's a fundamental difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. I was raised in a world where it was all extrinsic. You do this and you'll be a better human being, but you defer to the future or you do this or you're going to go straight to jail without passing go.
Worse than that, you do this or you're going to go to hell. That was basically the whole education system is based on the grading systems, evaluations of everybody and everything. If the young person has a choice to do things that they enjoy doing to be in school, what they'd be in school, what they'd be doing that. If you're going to drink beer, bring it home.
It's basically the way I look at it. And then the experiment is students learning and even in the studio, our studios, people learning how to mix it up not based on production models, but based on discovery, trial and error, exchanging information just for the great purpose of everybody is learning and then there is output that comes from that because it's intentional behavior. One thing that we tested along those lines is the introduction of our own playing card system within the studio. So I think you're your comment about removing the ego from the equation, allowing them to operate through avatars is definitely a real one.
We found that allowing our students to have communication and dialogue online through an avatar rather than face to face as themselves allowed for much more conversation to happen and much more knowledge transfer. And so we took that one step further and we designed and introduced a trading card system that would essentially know they would earn cards based on skills performed and they could trade those cards into level up their avatar. That avatar could enact actions based on the level that it was at in order to rewrite the brief of the studio to reserve extra time on digital fabrication tools, et cetera. And what we found so interesting was that while that's how we intended for that to work, what actually happened was they started pinning up the cards on the wall behind their desk almost as if they were trophies.
And when you walked around the studio, you could see who had done what not by the work that was on their desk, but by the cards that were pinned up behind their desk. And we realized the importance of that tangible reward to incentivize a kind of informal personalized learning that we had ultimately been trying to try and get to happen in the studio. And so that was kind of a happy accident. Well, you know, if you think about your question about how do we know certain technologies like gaming and virtual reality really make an impact on learning compared to what we think was working years ago?
And Michael pointed to intrinsic and extrinsic. How do we really know that all that all that learning, whether it was in schools and corporations really worked? I mean, there's been a big battle about assessment, which I am not an expert of and couldn't speak to about. But instead, what we have is tremendous enthusiasm and wonder about the discovery of new experience through new tools.
And Michael started this by talking about wanting to be ahead of his curiosity. And so the three of us are brought together because we are interested in communicating more experiences for people through wonder and play and creativity, knowing that there are many experiences we're not having by virtue of social pressures, have it. And let me just speak to the fact that there has been tremendous economic pressure on students and on workers where people don't have the same ease that they used to have to let themselves go. So it seems up to, I think we're taking the leadership to say even in the toughest of times, if you think about Hollywood in the toughest of times, they had great movies, right?
So Busby Berkeley made a big and then, you know, the outside of the depression. So we're saying it's the toughest time now. Let's remember where we go to stay connected as humans and to let the technologies create those experiences for us. And I think that leads right into your question then about the affinity, gamer space startup, which is really that, your question, where then do we go?
We would postulate that you would then go to a gamer space and the gamer space is physically go there. So the gamer space is an idea of Michaels that he got while teaching in Tempe and going to a bar that was covered with Xboxes and PlayStations and PC computers and otherwise gaming. There was people playing magic cards there and other things as well, but it's principal source of income was alcohol sales and food sales. And immediately came back to me and said, Hey, this is a great idea for learning space.
How do we create spaces that people come to because they want to have a beer and they want to play League of Legends and have them come out knowing more than that, have them come out with this again, informal having having having, having taken part in this informal learning in this personalized approach to their own betterment and their own education. And so over the past, I guess two years now, a year and a half or so, we've been working on this idea for what we're referring to as a gamer space or borrowing the language from James G. also at Arizona State University, the idea of infinity space. We're calling them affinity gamer spaces.
And these are spaces that offer food and drink, that offer a certain amount of retail to get people in the door that offer not arcade style games, but team based multiplayer online role playing games in tandem with studios rented by game developers and game designers so that they can test their new products in real time downstairs in these spaces and that the people playing those new games have the opportunity to form connections with the people developing those games and that allow for informal learning to have in a situation where they might even be working towards an education certificate, not necessarily degree, but moving towards a certificate based model for education where they can, by going in to get a drink with some friends, end up working for a running their own company through the entrepreneurial environment that they are doing that in. And it's also a place that we can rent out for large events like esports tournaments, et cetera, et cetera. So is this enchanted space, enchanted borrowing the language from David Rose's enchanted objects? Is this enchanted space that is both virtual and non-virtual simultaneously, but allowing for with the intention rather of putting informal learning to the forefront?
Michael, are you promising? Yeah, so is it possible to conceive of any project hypothetical in this case that we're turning into a real project as a business, a social learning and a research model simultaneously and instead of all of these being separated out, the one aspect of it which is Emma bringing all of her friends to the table is the research that can be done by wiring, I'll say it in a very, sort of, dumb way. The wiring of the brains of these young people playing these games to see what's happening in their brain when they're doing something as strategic, as these own massive online game playing. The same thing we did with Mux and see what's happening.
So we see it as all of these things happening simultaneously in one place. And my model for practice for years has been to try to invent the projects and make them real if possible, that you would only write for students because you don't have clients like that. And so this is one of them. We have two projects right now that have been on the boards for the last year that are running the verge of developing a whole business plan and trying to make it real and make it really get it out into the world.
Part of this is, yeah, okay, we want to keep the business going. But it's also to bring entrepreneur as a mode of being into practice for Nels's generation so that it's the old phrase doing good and doing well. You have a vision, you have a mission, and then you have the ability to carry it out. And if it's possible for us to make this project real, then Nels and the rest of the generation can always see that as an actual possibility.
The same way, we're able to say, nobody can ever tell us that a screwy idea like Sire could ever exist. It does. So anything imaginable is possible. How do you take that into practice?
So it's basically the phone is there for me to call other people as opposed to waiting for them to call me and say, I got a project for you. I'll do that. But it's an inventing the kind of work that you would want to do with students. As well, inventing the kind of work that you'd want to do with colleagues in a cross sector way.
So since we're lucky to be in such an enriched environment with so many talented people in research, we are taking advantage of the fact that Southern California is packed with great people in the science of computation, the science of the brain, and we're taking advantage of that. So we want to bring those worlds together to recognize researchers always ongoing. Because the beauty of this is if we're going to deal with a business model that is open source, that we're dealing with research, which is also in some sense, even though it has IP wars, is generally an open source in the sense of it's there to build continually with no doctrine. Right.
No doctrine. And so by bringing in scientists, researchers to help us think through projects, they bring knowledge of that challenges, very closed system ideas. So an example of that, we have researchers, spatial memory researchers, San Francisco from Imposit Science, as well as down in Los Angeles from Claremont Graduate School Paul Zach in your economics and mentioned Dane Clemency in the Star Club. These are the kinds of minds we want to bring to projects.
For instance, we've talked about education, but we're also really spearheading right now a potential project in senior housing, up on wood. And there, you really need people who are understanding gerontology and understanding cognitive reserve in terms of gaming technologies. So we can take advantage of this. And let me share with you then a model way to think about this.
So recently in the news, we've heard that in light of gamerspace being an infinity space, we've heard of NuVU, which is a new learning environment that has been developed by MIT for middle school kids. And it is architectural training. It's architectural studios for middle school kids, two weeks where they get to develop, learn new skills, technological skills, 3D printing, virtual technologies, Adobe systems. And at the same time, they get to borrow on resources in the city to help them figure out their project, say, for the future of water systems in their city.
We're not that different than middle school kids. Right. So we're going to be able to do this in our area to help us and do what architects have always done, which is pull together cross sector teams to solve a problem. So that's been our model.
The other model is to understand the new building, the new lab, which is in Brooklyn, which is a lab that's brought together AI, robotics, 3D printing companies. It's kind of a hub model, companies that are working in a common space that are sharing interest in research, but operating as their own project studios within this large naval space. What's the name of that space? The new lab.
So what you're seeing is the affinity space is part of a movement now of recognizing, of creating spaces, studio spaces, reconfigure to bring people together, working with the advancing technologies and the talent source that's rich in cities where you've had great universities. There seems to be a naturally kind of self-selecting community within architecture and specifically within the community at SIRC to seek out these kinds of things and to seek out those communities. But how do you make sure that in terms of education as a social priority for all to access, for all to benefit from? How do you ensure that this kind of educational model, which is very much based on the intrinsic motivation you're talking about before, if someone wanted to explore something for their own passion or for their own interests and then finding a way to do that?
What do you accommodate then those people who have zero intrinsic or necessarily extrinsic motivation to do anything, but you still get them into the space in a way that is overall helpful to build that future society? I think it's initially, I still believe it's self-selection. I think things go dormant in us, but they never disappear. And I think informal learning is what any species does from morning to night.
It's just very specifically structured for what we've come to believe as the only way to learn, which is formal. We worked last year at Arizona State with a school called the Herberger Youth Academy. And what it is, is a school for gifted children, conventional children's, conventional students, their special needs students, and there's a gifted. And it turns out that all of them, in varying degrees, are on the spectrum.
We're all on the spectrum. It's learning how to leverage that in a positive way. These kids, it's a small school, it's experimental school, and it was funded by a man who was pretty much left out in the woods because he was really smart, but he was in oddball, and he was always in trouble. And that's the...
These are physical woods. This is not a metaphysical woods. That is a physical woods and physical woods. The woods of Arizona.
He decided that it wasn't an educational problem. It was a social problem to not have the capacity to identify young people early enough so that you can leverage what their capacities are and move it into the positive realm. These kids were like 12 year olds that are doing calculus with senior researchers and ASU, kind of kids. And they weren't all from...
When I heard the word gifted, I always blanched when I heard that because they come from privileged families. Half of this group came from lower economic groups, and their parents identified them early enough and found ways to keep them engaged. And then finally the school starts a couple of years ago, and it shows me that brilliance pops out anywhere. It doesn't have anything to do with language, ethnicity.
So that really captured our attention because we were all working on the problem. The only way that architects and architectural educators can really crack this nut is by expanding once again how we define ourselves. There was a time when we were a field, and then we became a profession, and then when we wanted to bring intelligence back in, and instead of just metabolism, we became a discipline. And right now, architecture is at the front end, but I think it has to say that we're a platform.
Architecture is a platform. Just like laws in a platform. And with that in mind, which is that there's an affinity that MA and I have for that. So the practice is to bring as many people that are non-architects to the table to discuss things.
They're basically how do we solve these kinds of problems in a creative way? And then what we bring to it is the architectural mind, which is a way of taking any particular idea and being able to transform it into anything else, but also wanting to construct it. And I just want to mention, along those lines, there is a movement with an education that impacts research and then impacts business. Product development is spatial studies.
So it's a new platform that's brought together, it's cross-sector nature, it's funded by NSF through Northwestern University. And the interest is in understanding the fields that would impact our understanding, our use of space. So this would mean architecture, wing in with cartography, geospatial locations, dance, neuroscience, and neuropsychology. And who is open to taking those types of...
So the spatial studies, so the spatial studies granted a center at Northwestern and they created a platform that we all joined, but now different universities are organizing within themselves spatial studies units. So for instance, at UC Santa Barbara, they organized it in relationship to the cartography and psychology departments and they started off by holding conferences because it was setting up a smoke signal, right? It seems there. Turns out there's a new generation of young graduate students are precisely interested in this issue.
So as I've said to Michael and Mel, I think we're looking at recognizing that spatial studies is itself a way of thinking about research that opens the door for architecture to step in and be in conversation with people that have implications for degrees, certificates, but research projects. So as pioneers in this approach to architectural practice and learning, utilizing, bringing new technologies, what would you suggest a young architect or aspiring architect to become involved in this world, to become engaged and inspired? From my position, the best thing that you can do, not just for an aspiring architect, but for someone that has an interest in having an active role in contemporary society, contemporary entrepreneurialism, is learn how to write code. It doesn't matter what code it is.
You can write Java, you can write C++, you can write pro, Python, CSS, whatever. The point is that learning how to program machines allows you to think in ways that are systemic and that move beyond the otherwise linear form of education that you might receive. If I can provide a brief example, while working on a school project, for one reason or another, I found myself researching how to determine the distance an object lies from the lens that took the picture of it based on a two-dimensional photograph. And I just, I was like four hours into this research and I took a full step back and I said, why am I even doing this?
At that point, it didn't matter why I was doing that. The point was that I had jumped so far into the need to understand something that I didn't know, that I was 100% committed to knowing that. And that's a way of thinking that comes about from programmers' point of view, from a developers' point of view. It allows you to be both engineer and designer simultaneously.
And once you get to the point where you're programming video games in virtual worlds without sounding too omnipotent here, it allows you to really play God in a certain way and test out scenarios that you've always imagined or you never thought of before and just explore the tools that are given you to create your own tools. I really think that writing code is the first thing on this path. Passive active. I grew up in an education system that required me to be passive.
I teach in a school that it's project based learning, so it's active. How do we extend the notion of active? What I've seen with students using software is that they're subject to whoever wrote the initial code for that software. And so the logic of their thinking, which is another discussion which I thought was going to happen in the seminar last night, is what's the feedback loop from the technology that we use back to how the brain begins to wire itself because it habitually gets caught in that loop.
What I started to see students doing, especially working with the game engines, the software that's used for designing games, is that they had one monitor which was working with the code that was in the software, but figuring out how to get the software to do what they wanted it to do instead of what the software wanted them. So it's drawing basically. You make the pencil and go where you want it to go. And all of the information is being moved around in your head.
What happens when you have something that you consider a tool rather than a co-creative medium? You are subject to that. You become passive once again. And the third eye goes dormant and you're waiting, you're always in a reaction mode.
You're waiting for something to show up on the screen. That is the heat, death of creativity. So what Nelz is talking about is students now and the young professionals starting to become not only just active but more entrepreneurial in defining the world that they want to work in. They do that by inventing projects.
They do that by rewriting the code of whatever the software is. They see everything as a creative problem that is guided by some longer vision about why they're here doing this particular thing and living this kind of life. And I think those are, we impart knowledge, yes. We give skills, yes, but do we impart values?
Do we impart values? And we do in, I think, a very general way, but are we intentionally imparting values? And I think that's one of the things that we have to do both as practitioners and as teachers and not just be subject to whatever the work is that we're doing. I really appreciate how your team is all coming together working on a project in such distinctly different backgrounds.
That's what I was wondering, and maybe if you could share some kind of inspiration yourself and that helped you bring you to where you are right now doing type work. Well, she's our guru for giving us all together. The glue. Inspiration, you know, I was, first I was lucky enough to meet Michael at the beginning of my career.
I was a curator of education at Leuen Art Museum. Charles Demorey had organized an exhibition of Michael's and Tom Meansworth. And I discovered the Vitruvius program that was brought in at the same time, we had to do a kids program to support the exhibition. And I just felt utter delight.
And I remember, I remember that moment because it has stayed in some sense, it brought us back together as a series of co-edings. That idea of seeing young kids work with story and work with materials that weren't trash. I remember, Kathleen Copper said, they don't get to work with trash. They get to work with really beautiful pens and really great paper.
And they made such extraordinary works. I mean, it was such a so delightful that I, as a young person, got to touch on my own education when I came out of UCLA and I got to work in neuroscience, spinal cord injury labs. And I remember just working with physicists, engineers, and I'm going to say at shamans, trying to figure out how do we get the nervous system to spark again. And now we know spinal cord injury.
Spinal cord injury is really advancing in its science in terms of helping people stand up again. So that was my beginning as a student, which is understanding, being around brilliant people, working with technology to make something impossible change. And then when I, as a young curator, got to do watch children, do something that they never thought children could do, I knew that that was where I wanted to be. And as a cross-cultural researcher, never sparked my career going to Asia and trying to understand, and sometimes the Westerns view of Asia and why we thought they were, they had something so fantastic for us in terms of cognitive development.
It was also that exploration and that journey that kept me excited. So today, my word to the young people is to reiterate that co-gives them, if it will give them a skill that they actually need to create the joy and wonder and to really look at what rotus men mentioning, which is to stay in the project base, which is, I think, where you see all the inspiration with maker labs, et cetera, that are pointing out. And then to stay connected to their own joy. You know, my father said, you can take everything away from people, but you can't take away their education.
You can't take away your learning. You can't take away that joy. Stay connected to that when the heat is on.