What We Can Learn about Creativity from 3D Printing
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Okay, so we can get started with the talk and I would like to see a few hands who of you has managed to walk
00:23
Around the Congress Center without seeing a 3d printer That's one hand there. That's what I thought because they're doing absolutely amazing practical stuff and we were here a little bit about some background on this kind of technology today, I think and
00:43
Also, I read a tweet earlier Saying suggesting something for a house communication Congress bingo and in the up left corner there was something like 3d printed sex toys and I was like, okay the relevance of this talk is a pretty obvious to me right now
01:04
so Sasha Frisiek is going to talk about what we can learn about creativity from 3d printing and He studied Industrial engineering in Berlin and Did his PhD in
01:21
Saint Gallen during this time, he also did a lot of research at Sandford and Currently, he's a professor at the University of Würzburg At the He's a sorry, he's a professor for management and entrepreneurship and
01:44
He's just Being in Würzburg for three more days, and then he's moving to Amsterdam Continuing his work there. So let's please welcome him Yes. Hello. Good evening. Thank you that some people came at this late hour. I appreciate it
02:05
My name is Sasha as we just mentioned as she just mentioned This is it's kind of an unusual talk for me because usually I don't go to conference where they talk about 3d printing I usually go to conferences where they talk about creativity and
02:20
For my research I looked at 3d printing for the past couple of years and I thought this might be a good opportunity To kind of give back and talk to the people that actually are involved in 3d printing and I bucked many of them and my students bucked many of them and asked them Questionnaires and maybe someone interviewed you for a study and so on and I thought maybe this is the challenge For me to tell you what we're actually doing
02:41
Well, this is all about and why anyone should care. So whenever I talk about 3d printing what I mean is basically household 3d printing so this is not like What you have at your big manufacturing facilities and I'm not looking into how we can make aircraft slider and so on I look at like the tabletop 3d printing and I look at
03:03
Communities that use 3d printing and I want to understand how they how they deal with creativity But to jump back a couple years ago We started with a phenomenon looking at 3d printing because everybody told us that this is going to be the next industrial revolution This was actually a cover on The Economist
03:21
They said next industrial revolution and there was a book by Chris Anderson And he said that in a couple of years, we will basically not go to the supermarket anymore We'll print everything because that's the thing it's going to be and when we looked around we talked to people This was absolutely not the picture that we saw so the first thing that we did was trying to find out what do people use 3d printers for and that was a
03:44
horrible research question and the results were scattered all over the place and the only Interesting anecdote from that research on what people use 3d printers for was that a lot of people that have 3d printers Print things for their 3d printers Spare parts and so on and we spent like a year on it and then we said well screw it
04:04
there's nothing coming out of that and we're never going to publish anything about that and then I changed jobs I went to Wiltburg and I found a new group and they were also into 3d printing and they had the same issue that they said well This is a really interesting phenomenon but we need to find like an interesting angle in this and we we couldn't and at the time I was writing a
04:23
book on creativity and In 3d printing we looked at the platform platform called thingiverse the world's biggest 3d printing design platform And they have one interesting thing and on the platform You can upload a design and every single design is under an open license So anyone else can download the design change it upload it again
04:43
But has to quote where it's from has to reference the original design and this is in in creativity when we talk about Creativity we think this is kind of this divine thing where you give like an artist a white sheet of paper and this artist will come Up with something great out of nowhere and we have this concept like an epiphany or in Eureka moment
05:04
When we look into the literature The literature is pretty clear about what creativity comes from and what it is And it is usually the recombination of known building blocks in a way that wasn't known before So we consider very creative if something is deeply rooted in things We know and someone brings something into that deeply rooted thing that has never been connected in that way
05:25
That's what we consider as very creative and the problem is if you go somewhere and ask people Well, how did you come up with that? They will either not remember or they will have kind of fear over intellectual property issues and tell you well
05:40
I came up with that on my own and nothing has ever inspired me or I don't recall and so on so for People that try to study creativity It's really hard to find out where ideas come from because we don't quote the sources as Directly and then we looked at 3d printing and we looked at the platform
06:00
And what we found is that we can basically look at all all the things that people upload it and see the connections between them and The black here. This is not from me. This is from the talk before so you have to kind of Think that is out of sight So we see is this is basically like a network structure
06:22
On thingy verse of all designs in one category in the credit Corey is fashion. So these are all designs in Okay Just come on My own vehicle up making one first time. Okay
06:43
It's super Cuckoo moly snow valley many hinders or feel be vegan On the solution ish. Okay Okay, I try to be a bit louder than we'll see so basically okay, this is this is fashion is the first thing we looked at and
07:03
Singing of us has a couple of categories I think like 11 to 12 different categories where people can upload designs and they basically pick a category Where this design is in and then people can remix them and upload something else also And what we saw is simply by looking at those categories that they are vastly different
07:21
So this is the first one was fashion And this is the category 3d printing what people upload for instance spare parts for this for this 3d printers And what you can see is simply by looking at this universe and we had one that actually looked like a Death Star but it doesn't fit the storyline so I can't put that in but So simply by looking at the structure we saw that there's something happening and between the two what's interesting
07:46
Is that the fashion category is very hedonistic so people that upload something in fashion want to have something very individual They want to have like for instance a ring that says their own name or something that has that Nobody else has and that's why you have those big clusters in the middle were simply people change things slightly
08:05
So it fits to so it's an individual solution Well, this year is very much the opposite This is the 3d printing category and the solutions we see here are very utilitarian So basically you have those little scattered things all over the place
08:20
You have oftentimes these things were only a couple are related to one another so someone developed a solution Someone else saw it thought well that could be done a little bit better We could tweak that into something I would rather have and then they kind of had a final solution and that was fine And then they went on to do something else. So simply by looking at it We found out well the universe looks completely different. So there might be something to that in
08:44
regards to creativity so and then what we did is We interviewed roughly 80 people we had
09:00
Questionnaires out for a couple of hundred and we looked at the entirety of all designs on the platform This is a couple hundred thousand and then the first thing you do is try to find out is that Is there anything special to the process that people do so it's the creative process in any way remarkable And and the creative process that we found basically has four aspects that we can talk about the first one
09:23
We called a trigger So any kind of creative process is kick-started by some form of a trigger and what we found is that? When we when we look into the literature those triggers are often described as a problem So people have a problem and that starts off the creative process what we found is that that's only half the truth
09:41
Half the people basically started because they had an actual problem the other half started out of some form of curry Creosities for instance they want to learn something they wanted to get better that we're interested in something so that kick-start The process the second thing we we found is kind of the inspiration phase This is this epiphany moment And this is what we will deep dive into when we talk about
10:01
remixing a little bit more because remixing seems to what be one of the cornerstones in those creative communities in Which way people come up with novel solutions And then what happens is interesting is when we talk him It's probably not that interesting for people in this room But it's interesting for us as social scientists because we don't develop software often
10:22
So what happens is they distribute very early if we think about physical object it used to be very hard to have a form Of distribution so distribution was always the bottleneck if you produced a CD album You had to find someone who does the distribution for you while here It's it's very easy to distribute and because it's very easy to distribute what happens is that kind of changes the process
10:45
People distribute earlier and they distribute even when they aren't that finished yet in order to receive feedback On the basis of that feedback allow an iteration of the process of the design of the of the object That they that they did so
11:02
Basically in like an analog world you would have the distribution at the very end of the process Well here when we talk to the people they say well even if I'm not that sure if that's the correct way I simply distribute it. I ask people I gather feedback and with that I iterate and make it better So the platform the way the interaction that we found in the communities changed the creative process in
11:25
In a way that made distribution earlier, which we kind of found remarkable But if you look at it and say well, it's probably what we do in software development for 20 years. So but it's Interesting in a way so And now when when social scientists look at a problem
11:42
One of the things they oftentimes try to do is to categorize the problem in such a way that you can say Well, this isn't just one problem This is actually a couple of things and as this a neat trick and if you are in if you are a management scholar What you usually do is you come up with a two-by-two matrix and that oftentimes
12:02
Solves problems and explains what it is. And in this case we found we kind of zoomed in and wanted to find out those remixes How do they look close up? Can we kind of find patterns of how people? combine things into something new and what we found is that there are actual patterns and
12:21
That would that with a couple of patterns we can Explain basically the entire universe zoomed in and The first thing we found we call that linear Linear evolution is basically you have one design someone takes that design and remixes into something new
12:40
So you have this bottle someone sees the bottle and makes a longer bottle That's kind of like a boring story and now we had more more complex ones and the more complex ones fall into two categories So the first category we call them convergent So what happens is several ideas are remixed into something new. The first one is
13:02
It's we call the merge So this is basically You see several ideas in the case you see two ideas and you combine them into one new one so one example we always use is Someone designed a debate coin. So they had a logo of a donkey and the logo of an elephant the u.s
13:21
mascots of the parties and they merge that into a debate coin there you can flip the coin and that kind of decides what you're Going to vote or so on The the second one we found we call that retrospect and it's kind of interesting. So what we have is There's like a Grandfather basically and that grandfather has a child and that child has also a child but the child's child
13:47
Inherits something from the grandparents that was not in the parents So this is basically going back in its own history and finding something that was left out in a generation before and then bringing it
14:00
back One real-life example that people told me was there's in Microsoft Windows Apparently they brought back the start button after they abandoned it. So basically it wasn't in one version and then they Brought it back. This is also something you see currently in innovation management a lot I don't know if you've ever heard of Lego Gronky wonkies so when I was a child Lego used to be like just bricks and you built whatever you want and
14:25
Then they started to do like Star Wars and dragons and every kind of story based things and last year They came out with like a new box and in this box There's only bricks and you can build whatever you want and they call that the new thing It's called Gronky wonky and was like a big advertising campaign and as exactly that so you inherit something that wasn't the last generation
14:46
But in the generation before next thing we found we call siblings and siblings basically is several people Looking at a couple of ingredients and coming up with vastly different solutions
15:00
So they are not directly related the two things on the left and the right but they have the same ingredients and to think about that as something you would for instance see in a Cocktail bar, so in a cocktail bar, you have a very limited amount of ingredients, but you come up with completely different cocktails even though
15:21
You might not look at one cocktail and say well I could do something completely yes, but you look at the ingredients and based on ingredients you come up with something new and The last one we called in this section We called compilation and a compilation is basically a best-off people look at a couple of things and then turn them into One a compilation one example we found is oftentimes they're called like the ultimate something like that
15:47
So someone looks at an entire collection of things and then turns them into the final version of it So one thing we found is like the the ultimate Batman symbol So someone looked at every single Batman symbol that was on the platform and then combined them into like the ultimate
16:01
That's the one we don't need a Batman symbol anymore. It's solved So we found those Mmm, so all of these patterns Convergent take several inputs and turn them into something new and the other patterns that we found that were convergent So basically what convergent means is?
16:22
Several people look at the same thing and come to different conclusions what to do with it. The first one is It's a fork. So two people look at one thing and have a completely different idea what to do about that. This is I Don't know this would for instance be you have an iPad and then you have an iPad mini and an iPad Pro in the second
16:43
Generation because people have a completely different usage on it Next one we found is it's related to the fork. We call it the bouquet it's when one thing turns into a lot of things and oftentimes this happens when the thing in the middle for instance is a Gear or a tool or wheels and so on so something that you can have multiple uses for
17:06
Next thing we found and that's very important for the platform itself. It's called a customizer so customizer is a toolkit on the platform where people with no CAD knowledge can simply tweak a design in
17:21
a way that they want and Customizers were kind of kick-started the growth of thing it was because many people that don't have any knowledge on CAD can very Simply come up with their own designs and customize is also the thing that we saw in the beginning of the fashion slide the big blobs
17:40
Those were customizers where people could do something very simply on the platform with their designs to individualize it So then we found and we found an eighth one and the eighth one is very much related to the customizer but it has like it has a parent and Someone looks at a design and says well
18:00
That's a cool idea and it would be even cooler if other people could customize it and once the customizer is kind of call It a template builder once someone turned that into a customizer you have a very successful design because people can very easily tweak it
18:21
Okay So when I tell this story, there's always two questions that come up The first one is well if creativity can be broken down into patterns Can't we simply use AI to come up with new ideas and the emphasis is always on simply
18:44
and I thought about this a little bit and I Have kind of like my relationship to AI is a kind of a mixed bag and I don't see it any time soon So if you have that question, I that feel free to try I think the naughty secret about what I just told you is that yes, those patterns can explain how creativity how reuse or
19:05
Recombination works, but it cannot give you The input things the things that you actually remix it can just show you the patterns in which remixing is done So I don't think that creativity will be outsourced by AI anytime soon
19:21
the second question I always get when I give this talk is That people say well you kind of compare apples to oranges Because some of the things that you talk about are very very simple to do you have for instance the customizer you give them Toolkits and a very simple website to customize something for instance
19:40
They write their name and then that name appears on a ring and that's not really as creative as someone who combines Multiple objects in a very complicated way. So isn't there like a threshold for creativity? should everything be called creative or is creativity only like the divine complex thing and
20:03
That's kind of a hard question for me to answer because I have a hard time Like finding a cut off and saying well below that cut off it isn't creative and afterwards it is but what I can do again Categorizing looking at all the things I see and then kind of describing are those creative or not or are those?
20:22
Complex or not and what we found is that basically those the designs we can Group in two on two axes The first axis is to look at the parents and we'll look at the parents those parents can either be from the same category
20:40
They can also be from fashion they can be from a different category So someone actually made the effort to transfer knowledge from one category to the other So that seems to be more complex or it could be from multiple categories. So people don't simply merge all Batman signs but they merge something from fashion with something from 3d printing which is more complicated because you need to find it you to find a
21:04
way to combine that and Also, we can look at what's the origin of the remix? So a very simple thing would be a customizer You simply have those toolkits you drag and drop write your name in very very easy to do the next step bit more complicated Would be if you only have one parent
21:22
Use that one parent and turn that into something new and the more complex thing would be if you have multiple parents and combine them into something new so we try to group them into a way to show that If you go to the upper right you have an increasing level of complexity
21:43
and what we found is that the when the platform Allowed people to customize that that basically kick-started a lot of traction on the platform and what we also saw is that The idea of customization is a way like like a foot-in-the-door policy. So people start customizing and
22:06
Once they learn customers and they're kind of hooked on the thing It's a very easy way to get in they get more complicated over time They'll learn more and basically it's a way for them to get familiar with with remixing. It's it's a way of learning
22:21
One interesting thing I wanted to mention is a transfer remix that we found so someone Someone designed little signs for potted plants So one would say like rosemary one would say time and someone else looked at that and said well, that's an interesting idea But on I don't have potted plants, but I do have an issue like this oftentimes in my office
22:43
and basically redesigned those signs for potted plants into paper clips and the paper clips now read Please read please sign may be interesting and so on So basically the person saw design in a completely different category and transferred it
23:01
into something that Wasn't that that wasn't intended for completely different category and that's kind of what we consider to be More creative than simply also making potted plant signs, but they are round and not rectangular
23:22
Okay, that's one more thing. We need to talk about and as the initial question that we had what do people use 3d printers for and one thing that we now are currently discussing is That it might be interesting to look at the role that remixing plays in that and we have this little little graph
23:43
Again, the black lines aren't for me. So you have on the x-axis We simply have all the problems in the world on the y-axis We have the amount of demand for a solution for this problem And what we argue is if there is a lot of demand for a solution for a problem Then someone will probably mass produce it. So you have kind of like a mass production threshold and
24:07
The argument with this industrial revolution of 3d printing oftentimes was that people will not go to the store anymore But simply go to the 3d printers and what we found is that that is not really The entire story that's only part of it
24:23
What we found is people design all kinds of things and many of the things that people design in 3d print They 3d print because they cannot buy them It's like an individual solution that only a few people have maybe only them and then they print it and that Allows them to have a solution at all. And this is very much
24:45
very much comparable to what we would have if we have a workshop and we simply Don't use the 3d printer, but create something out of let's say wood You would also have an individual solution to a problem that wasn't available before
25:01
And what we see with remixing is that people use those solutions that someone else did that might not be as interesting as something that can be mass produced and then remix them into something that also only a couple of people will will need so when we had the the figure with the
25:23
From fashion with those lots of little little dots Those were a multitude of solutions that only very few people needed but allowing all those people to very simply remix them allowed them basically to have a little barcode in an area where Prior, there would simply be no solution. You would have to do that by hand. So maybe that is
25:47
One answer to the question that I had at the very beginning What the hell do people with three prints for use three prints for maybe it's not as elegant as I thought in the beginning four Years ago what might come up, but it might be an interesting approach to that. So
26:06
It's two more things. I wanted to talk about So to wrap it up when we talk about creativity Maybe the interesting thing is is that creativity in itself probably isn't as chaotic as you might have thought before the talk
26:28
It follows in a way a couple of clear patterns and we can see those patterns all over the world And maybe that will help us organize hopefully in the future creative processes
26:41
And Making it easy for people to have like a Foot in the door to make it very easy to start a creative process is like a gateway drug to more creativity And if we want to have people engaged in some form of creative process that it might be useful to have a very simple first
27:01
Step for them to do that And on on 3d printing the interesting story that I think is that we found is that We have in three print an extremely creative community and the process that we saw that people follow there Might be Something that other communities can learn from and given that here's are a lot of people that are active in 3d printed
27:26
It might be interesting for you to use the next couple of days and talk to them and maybe get engaged there and If you yeah, and if you are already engaged in those communities then please keep doing it
27:42
If anyone sends you an email with a question about an interview and maybe to fill out a questionnaire and be so kind and do that For us and that is all that I have for you today Thank you very much for coming out even though it was that late