Transcript from 382: Playing In the Desert with Leah Buechley, Elecia White, and Christopher White.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, here with Christopher White. Our guest this week is Professor Leah Buechley. We're going to talk about machines, and hands, and art.

CW (00:20):

Hello, Professor Buechley. Thank you for joining us.

LB (00:24):

Hello. Thank you for having me.

EW (00:26):

Could you tell us about yourself as if this was the first day of classes?

LB (00:32):

Sure. So my name is Leah Buechley. I do research and explorations, kind of at the intersection of computer science, and electronics, and design and craft.

LB (00:50):

I'm also very interested in education, and so the work that I do tends to take place at the intersection of all of those things. And it's easiest to talk about with props. But we'll do the best we can.

EW (01:05):

Yeah. Audio only is tough for props. Okay. We want to do lightning round, where we ask you short questions, and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask "How?" And "Why?" And all of that. Are you ready?

LB (01:21):

Ready.

CW (01:22):

Science or engineering?

LB (01:25):

Engineering.

EW (01:26):

Art or craft?

LB (01:28):

Craft.

CW (01:29):

Favorite artist?

LB (01:32):

Andrea Zittel.

EW (01:35):

Hardware or software?

LB (01:37):

Hardware.

CW (01:38):

What's your preferred way to learn new things, reading, videos, trying it out until you make it work?

LB (01:46):

Doing it. For sure.

EW (01:48):

Favorite fictional robot?

LB (01:50):

[Ooo]. I'm going to pass on that one. Because I can't answer quickly.

CW (01:57):

Doesn't like any robots. Complete one project or start a dozen?

LB (02:03):

Oh, complete one project. For sure.

EW (02:05):

Can an image created by an AI be art?

LB (02:09):

Yes. And I want to keep talking, but I'm going to resist the temptation.

CW (02:14):

Maybe we can come back to that. A tip everyone should know?

LB (02:18):

Don't be afraid to copy the work of other people as a great way to get started.

CW (02:25):

I like that.

EW (02:26):

There used to be these painting schools, that that's what they did. They copied the old masters, and we seem to be so afraid of copying other people's ideas in order to get that experience for ourselves. It's weird.

LB (02:39):

Yeah, no, you can learn so much, and...I think we are too afraid of copying. And pretty naturally you end up doing your own thing. So yeah.

EW (02:52):

It's hard to actually copy.

LB (02:55):

Yeah. It's hard to be somebody else for any extended of time. Your own weirdness just takes over pretty quickly.

EW (03:03):

So going back to, can AIs make art?

LB (03:07):

Yeah. So I would expand that and say that the context in which that is happening is really critical. And...I think what computation brings to art and design is in large part the power to build kind of entire classes or entire families of kind of related things.

LB (03:34):

And so, in that context, I think both the output of an art AI...would be comprised of more than just a single image. It would be the code. It would be probably a whole family of images and kind of a larger body of work than a single painting, for example, that I would want to see before I would call anything like that art.

LB (04:04):

And again, kind of the context and the intent are important there too. So yeah. So with some asterisks, but the answer is a definite yes with some expansion.

EW (04:24):

Do you want to follow up on that? Because you were the one playing with VQGAN.

CW (04:27):

Well, yeah, it just came to mind. The reason I put that in there was I've been following people who were using a neural network system called CLIP and something GAN. I'm going to space it. We'll put it in the show notes. It's VQGAN or something.

CW (04:41):

But you can go in, and you can type a prompt. And it'll go through, and using its various things it's been trained on, it'll generate images. And they can be very surreal, weird images.

CW (04:51):

And things I've tried to do with it come out as just kind of bad dreams. But I've seen other people who are more skilled at prompting it come out with things that actually look like paintings -

EW (05:02):

Yeah.

CW (05:02):

- or very cool, haunting, ethereal things, and have an emotional response to it. And yet it just came out of this neural network, and somebody just typed "Make a fancy, surreal bookstore."

LB (05:14):

Right.

CW (05:14):

So it's hard for me to call it art, but...also, I had emotional response to it. So -

LB (05:20):

Right.

CW (05:20):

- how is it not?

LB (05:22):

I'm a big fan of the artist Nettrice Gaskins. Actually she just came out with a new book. It's "Techno-Vernacular Creativity," I believe, that I wrote a forward for. But her work is, I think, a gorgeous example of how AI-generated images really can rise to the label of art. One lovely example.

EW (05:50):

Cool. We'll have that in the show notes.

LB (05:53):

Cool.

EW (05:54):

Okay. So your research group is called Hand and Machine. Why is it called that?

LB (06:02):

Yeah. My career has really been about finding ways to bring a humanness and a materialness to technology. And so that is reflected in the name.

LB (06:20):

I'm also very interested in exploring and kind of questioning these dichotomies that we often set up, like that the hand and machine would be so different, or that they would be so much in opposition, I think is worth questioning.

LB (06:36):

And so that provocation is also appealing and part of why I chose the term. Not so different from the name of my previous research group which was High-Low Tech, embodying kind of some of the same ideas, and some of the same style of approach.

EW (06:54):

Did you switch the name as part of moving from MIT to University of New Mexico, or was there another reason?

LB (07:03):

Yeah, I mean, in large part it felt like a fresh start in a really different context. So, for all sorts of reasons, UNM is really, really different from MIT.

LB (07:17):

And it felt appropriate to kind of put the MIT work, which I'm so proud of and so delighted with, especially work that I got to do with my students there, but to kind of tie that in a bow, and set it aside, and start something fresh and new. So, yeah, I wanted to choose a new name, and have a distinct new start there.

EW (07:41):

Boston, and MIT particularly, has a very enthusiastic engineering community. New Mexico is more known for art. Do you see your surroundings affecting what you do?

LB (07:59):

Absolutely. So much so, I think, although in perhaps often unexpected ways. One of the things that's been wonderful about being in New Mexico, more so than I think the art community per se has been the landscape and the materials that are readily kind of at hand.

LB (08:23):

Being able to spend a lot of time outside, a lot of time sinking and being in just dirt, for example. I've done a lot of kind of work around clay that I think is really related to that. Just being closer to the dirt.

LB (08:38):

And also being much more involved in being able to do stuff like go hiking, and backpacking, and gardening, and stuff, has had a wonderful effect. So, definitely the setting really matters, and communities really matter, but in probably more subtle ways than just art versus engineering, in some sense.

EW (09:05):

So talking about clay, I saw on your website something about computational ceramics?

LB (09:11):

Yeah.

EW (09:11):

What could that possibly be?

LB (09:13):

Right, right. So, where to dive in. So I should say one of the ways in which I work is to become infatuated with a material, so textiles, or paper, or kind of more recently clay, and then just start to play with it, and explore it, and see ways in which I can bring my engineering expertise or my computational expertise...to bear on that material.

LB (09:44):

So the work in clay that I've been doing is focused around computational design or algorithmic design in ways that kind of traditions and techniques from that community can be applied to clay, and also how we can combine kind of cutting edge technology and computational approaches with longstanding traditions of working with clay.

LB (10:09):

So more concretely, I've done a lot of work around using the laser cutter to, for example, etch patterns into clay, to create templates that you then press into clay, to generate computationally-designed surface patterns.

LB (10:31):

So, worked to create some software that lets you generate kind of computationally-designed, essentially origami patterns, but for clay. And then kind of the most recent development that I'm really excited about is we just got a ceramic 3D printer for my lab.

LB (10:51):

So we're starting to write some custom software so that we can kind of computationally generate 3D forms that are then printed in ceramics.

LB (11:02):

And then once they're printed, I think, also a really critical part of the process is that you can use traditional ceramic techniques, kind of traditional crafting techniques in all sorts of ways to kind of take the next step of the process.

LB (11:20):

Or often you can integrate new and different computational processes at each step of kind of a traditional crafting process. So all of that is really exciting, and interesting, and something I'm having a lot of fun exploring right now.

LB (11:35):

I should also say on that topic that Jennifer Jacobs, who's one of my former students from MIT, and is now a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara, that she and I just got an NSF grant to explore kind of computational design and ceramics.

LB (11:53):

And in particular, some kind of traditional artisans who work with clay and to try to find interesting combinations at those intersections. So I'm really excited to start working on that project with Jennifer also.

EW (12:10):

Is it about making the ceramics more aesthetically pleasing, or are you also trying to make them stronger for less material?

LB (12:22):

Yeah, not so much stronger for less material,...but a couple of things I would say.

LB (12:31):

One is that I think there is a tremendous amount that fabrication researchers can learn from traditional craftspeople about the possibilities of materials, about processes that are kind of off our radar, about just different kinds of materials that might be totally off our radar.

LB (12:53):

So part of this is learning from traditional craftspeople kind of how they work with clay, some of the technologies, techniques, materials that they use, and using that to inform research on computational design and fabrication.

LB (13:10):

And just from my experience so far working with ceramics, there's so much that you can learn from traditional craftspeople that's really applicable to developing new technology. So that's one facet of it.

LB (13:23):

And then the other facet is kind of the arrow going the other way, where when you use computation in the context of design, you open up just entirely new worlds of possibility. So you can use computation to generate shapes, and patterns, and structures that...you would never generate by hand.

LB (13:50):

And so bringing those possibilities to kind of to blend with traditional craft is also really exciting, both aesthetically, potentially functionally, although...we're not taking an especially kind of functionally-oriented approach here.

LB (14:12):

But it wouldn't be surprising if some of the results would end up being functional. But yeah, just that conversation between those two traditions and those two perspectives is what seems really exciting.

EW (14:27):

Can you give me a hands-on, like, what have you learned from an artisan that has affected computational ceramics?

LB (14:38):

Right, right. Sure. So one of the first things that I did is I created this whole kind of library of trying to bring together computational techniques and approaches with traditional ceramics. And so a traditional ceramic craft, one of the things that people have done with ceramics for a very long time is carve the surface of ceramics.

LB (15:02):

And then there are all sorts of traditional techniques that are based on kind of layering that carving with different colors or clay, for example, to create all sorts of surface patterns and textures, but also graphic effects.

LB (15:20):

So you might kind of carve the surface of the clay, then paint it, and then wipe away the excess paint so that the paint stays only in the areas where you carved it. Or conversely, you might paint something first, then carve it, right? To kind of create those opposite effects.

LB (15:38):

And you can imagine layering these techniques in all sorts of interesting ways. So within the traditional ceramics world, there are all sorts of these established techniques for making marks on the surface of ceramics.

LB (15:52):

When you combine that with the laser cutter, you can kind of add the power of computation to all of those traditional techniques. And instead of carving through using a traditional carving tool, you can carve using the laser cutter.

LB (16:10):

You can play around with different layers of kind of glaze or underglaze to get really beautiful kind of graphical patterns in clay. You can play around with how in focus or out of focus the laser cutter is to get dramatic kind of gradiation effects.

LB (16:31):

So that expertise that comes from the craft community can really inform things you choose to do with technology. And then what you're able to do with technology in turn is really different than what you're able to do by hand. And so there's this wonderful back and forth that's really productive and interesting.

EW (16:57):

I've done a little bit of ceramics and a little bit of the sgraffito carving.

LB (17:03):

Yeah. Sgraffito. Yeah, yeah.

EW (17:05):

Sgraffito.

LB (17:05):

And Mishima. And yes...Yeah. All of those techniques.

EW (17:09):

But I think the closest I came to anything computational was glaze generation and trying to -

LB (17:15):

Right.

EW (17:15):

- do the chemistry of the glaze.

LB (17:16):

Right, right.

EW (17:16):

Mostly through trial and error and tree searches.

LB (17:23):

Right. Well, I mean, another thing that you learn as you explore any of these particular domains is that...they're all quite technical, and many of them are already quite computationally technical.

LB (17:38):

So another place where computation is quite present already in traditional ceramics practices, like the kiln, and the firing processes that the kiln goes through to get exactly the right kind of temperature at exactly the right time. And so -

EW (17:58):

And air composition, whether you want oxygen or not.

LB (18:02):

Right, right, right, right. So all of those things, when you approach it as a hacker, there's so many possibilities. And that is a lot of what I love about these intersections.

EW (18:18):

Is this about making things beautiful, or interesting people in computer science, or something else?

LB (18:27):

Right. So I think for me, it's many things at the same time.

EW (18:33):

[Affirmative].

LB (18:33):

So beauty is always really important. I think...beauty is so important to all human beings, and it's something that it's easy for whatever reason in our culture today to think of as a trivial or frivolous thing. But I think it's actually just a core, really important human value and one that we should honor and take pride in.

LB (19:11):

Anyway, so I think beauty is incredibly important to the human experience. And so yes, beauty is critical there and something I wish that more people embraced and defended kind of. So beauty is really important. Technology and developing innovative technology is also really important.

LB (19:37):

So I'm not so interested in doing stuff that doesn't involve really creating some piece of novel technology in some way. Also there's a kind of social cultural element to my work where I'm very interested in kind of looking for inspiration in places that seem maybe forgotten or underappreciated by society.

LB (20:11):

Often that can mean turning towards technologies and materials that were traditionally used by women. That's a whole source of amazing stuff that has been historically kind of undervalued just because it was stuff that women did.

LB (20:26):

And so bringing kind of attention, and celebration, and acknowledgement to some of those spaces is another aspect of my work that I enjoy and I think is important.

LB (20:41):

Then kind of related to that is that when you can put technology in the context of a craft, or an art, or a design practice that has maybe been traditionally overlooked, and often that's because again, that's been something that is done by a community of people we don't pay a lot of attention to.

LB (21:03):

Then very naturally there are wonderful ways to kind of engage different kinds of communities into kind of creating technology for themselves, and rethinking the power that people can get from building technology, and designing technology.

LB (21:25):

And trying to make that power, and status, and stuff accessible and inviting to more and different kinds of people. So it's all interconnected. But all those aspects are there.

EW (21:41):

I remember when fractal pictures started coming out in the 80s, 90s?

CW (21:48):

It sort of started getting popular in the late 80s when -

EW (21:51):

And real -

CW (21:52):

- computers could do something.

EW (21:54):

And realizing that you could program that.

CW (21:57):

Yeah.

LB (21:57):

And it wasn't really very hard to program something to get incredible, amazing images out.

CW (22:04):

Well, they were incredible for then.

EW (22:05):

Well, yes. They were incredible for then. Now, not even VQGAN would bother with that.

CW (22:10):

"Look, this has four colors!" But yes, yes.

EW (22:15):

I can understand how that sort of awe and beauty can bring people to technology to help them realize that those people who are a little afraid of the technology, it provides a bridge. You also do more fabrication. It's not just pretty pictures on screens. Not to downplay pretty pictures on screens, because they're amazing.

LB (22:44):

Right.

EW (22:46):

But the fabrication is part of it for you. And that's part of building the new technologies, or is that just because the fabrication is what's interesting to you?

LB (23:00):

Yeah, I think both... I mean, computing and programming, I find incredibly exciting and compelling.

LB (23:14):

And then being able to take that into the physical world in some way, whether that's through building electronics and hardware, or whether that's through kind of having the code generate something that then is a physical object in the real world, that is just kind of, for me, extra exciting and compelling.

LB (23:40):

...And there's also all sorts of really exciting, interesting, new technology to develop in that space. And so, it's a mashup of those two things.

LB (23:56):

But I think now that I know that there are ways to make computation come alive in the real world off of the screen, yeah, it'd be hard for me to move into working on projects that lived only on the screen I just find the physical world completely enchanting and fascinating.

EW (24:16):

I totally agree. That's why I do embedded, because the first time I made a motor move and it was under my control, it was just magic. "My bits can affect the actual physical world? How is that possible?" So yeah, I love that feeling.

LB (24:32):

Yeah, totally. Totally.

EW (24:34):

How do interactive murals fit into all of this?

LB (24:39):

Yeah, so that's a totally different project that I'm also really excited about, distinct from the ceramics. So that is a project that I'm working on in collaboration with well, some wonderful students in my research group here at UNM. In particular, Alyshia Bustos, who's awesome.

LB (25:04):

And also an amazing mural artist named Nani Chacon. And...she just is an amazing painter. And this project when I was at MIT, I did a series of projects around interactive wallpaper.

LB (25:23):

So thinking about embedding kind of sensors, and computation, and actuators like lights, and tiny motors, and things like that kind of on very large indoor surfaces.

LB (25:38):

So that you could have these surfaces that were beautiful, like wallpaper and decorative, but also could monitor your environment, could do some tracking of where you were in the space, could act as a control for all of the other electronics in the room or in your home.

LB (26:00):

So thinking about, again, a kind of ambient, kind of beautiful, large surface in your home that might function as an input/output device.

LB (26:14):

Those were made...primarily by painting using conductive paint, kind of painting circuit boards onto either very large sheets of paper or directly onto walls to make these interactive wallpaper pieces. So that was a project that my students and I did at MIT, and it was really kind of fun and interesting.

LB (26:36):

When I came to New Mexico, again in large part I think because of the context, and the culture here, and the traditions, there's an amazing mural painting tradition in the Southwest and in particular in New Mexico, and so I thought, "Oh, I would love to do a similar thing, but in the context of murals."

LB (26:56):

And...the technology in some sense is similar, but it's a lot harder, because these things have to live outside in the elements. They're much larger than a wall in your houses. And then -

EW (27:13):

You can't hide the batteries in the frame.

LB (27:16):

Yeah. There's not a lot of hiding of stuff. I mean, that was true of the wallpapers -

EW (27:23):

That's true.

LB (27:23):

- to some extent also, but you could plug it into your computer off to the side in a way that you can't really with an outdoor mural. But then the interaction possibilities are also really different. So murals are at a different scale than a home.

LB (27:40):

So you get really far away from them,...more than you would a wall in your home. Cars drive past them. They're in public spaces instead of private spaces. So that opens up all of these possibilities for collaborative interaction. Anyway, so that has seemed all just really exciting and interesting.

LB (28:02):

And so, Nani and I, and Alyshia, and some other students are painting our first kind of very large scale interactive mural right now on the UNM campus, again, using a crazy combination of conductive paints and tapes to have everything be just kind of flat and really integrated into the painting.

LB (28:30):

Kind of playing around with both different themes and designs for the mural and also different interaction scenarios. What do we want to do with this thing? And my next question, what does it do? Right. So right now we're in the process of building it. We have some embedded lights in parts of it that are part of the display. We have some kind of color changing elements as well, lots of painted on capacitive sensors that allow for kind of interaction through touch and also collaborative interaction. To trigger certain behaviors, I have to touch one part and you have to touch the other part at a certain time, and that will trigger certain behaviors.

LB (29:25):

We're just starting to play with some of those possibilities, like making games, for example, that you can play like on the mural across this very large wall. A lot of it also just getting back to beauty is just like, it's beautiful. I think, and the combination to me of the traditional mural painting and the like aesthetic of the electronics is really interesting. The look and feel of like conductive inks and tapes and stuff kind of integrated into this giant painting is really beautiful. We're playing with all of that. Stay tuned on that front. I don't know that I have a great like finished description yet, but we're having lots of fun.

EW (30:12):

Is this related to your work with Chibitronics?

LB (30:17):

In a round about way. Another material that I became really infatuated with right around the time when I joined MIT was paper and thinking about ways to embed electronics into paper. I did a lot of experiments with painting with conductive inks and paints, kind of circuits on the paint paper, kind of developing different ways that we could embed electronics and paper.

LB (30:52):

Right around that time Jie Qi joined my research group first as an undergraduate visiting student, then as a, as a PhD students shortly after. She brought to the group and to the lab this amazing expertise in paper. She had been working with paper for a very long time. So Jie then, it was like rocket fuel to all of the paper explorations that we did in our lab.

LB (31:31):

She did all sorts of incredibly beautiful and imaginative and like groundbreaking things with paper-based electronics. We collaborated on some of that stuff. A lot of it was really driven by the work that Jie did. One of the outcomes is that Jie turned some of her development into this kit for paper-based computing called circuit stickers and a startup company called Chibitronics. That was really grounded in the work that we did and the group around like paper-based electronics and paper-based computing. It was a joy be able to work with Jie and collaborate with JI around some of that stuff. I'm so proud of the work that she's done since, including her work in Chibitronics and designing circuit stickers with Bunnie Huang and others. That was great.

EW (32:34):

So I guess before that, you must have been interested in wearable technologies because you were involved with the development of the Lily pad. How did that come about?

LB (32:46):

Yeah, I would say I was really infatuated and really interested in textiles and the materials of like fabric and yarn and kind of soft, flexible things. My PhD project was around developing a set of techniques for embedding electronics into textiles. One outcome of that was designing the LilyPad Arduino. Then I was just in the right place, right time. I got my PhD in Boulder, Colorado right when SparkFun was starting up. I developed this technology and the board. I took it to them and was like, "Hey, do you guys want to mass produce this and sell this?" And they were like, "yeah." We worked together and that was how LilyPad came about. It was like this project that came out of my academic research and then they were able to like commercialize and distribute, and that was, that's been a wonderful collaboration ever since.

EW (33:52):

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting that process?

LB (33:56):

Gosh, that's a tricky one. I mean, one thing... Maybe the biggest thing that I might tell myself at the start of that project, it's okay to let go of a project and move on to a new one. Let other people take it over at a certain point because it's good to let go of old projects to make space for new ones.

LB (34:28):

So the LilyPad got commercialized and then you were Jie' mentor at MIT while she was developing the circuit stickers. As you were watching that go into more of a professional / commercial / fabrication sort of thing, did you have advice for her? Was it very different? Was there a lot the same?

LB (34:54):

Yeah. I think that was something we talked about and have talked about a fair amount. There are in certain ways Chibitronics and circuit stickers is modeled on the LilyPad. It's a kit for constructing electronics in this different medium. It's this a set of components that were similar in many ways to the set of components that LilyPad offered. In a lot of ways like LilyPad was kind of an initial template for circuit stickers.

LB (35:36):

Then other choices were really different. One thing that that Jie did that was really different is that she and she worked with Bunnie and they started their own company as opposed to offloading the production and distribution onto a third party. Like I did with SparkFun.

LB (35:57):

They really had to deal with all of that stuff too. And I think that has benefits and drawbacks. It was a harder thing to do. I think they also reap some benefits from that, they had more fine tune control over the design. It's something that we still talk about it from time to time: what it's like to run a small kind of hardware business, what it's like when that business like evolves over time and changes and the whole context around this thing that you did changes. All of that is really interesting. And you like to think that your project had a role in changing that larger context. And I don't know, it's interesting,

EW (36:46):

Both of those projects have made a huge impact in making STEM more approachable through art. Just making it more fun. What's coming up in the future? Do you have anything, any ideas of, are you watching anything that has the potential to be as much fun as LilyPad or to be Chibitronics?

LB (37:09):

Oh gosh, that's such an interesting question. One thing I would say is that compared to 10 or 15 years ago, it's delightful to see just how many more things that are like that out in the hardware world and how much more celebration of and an acceptance of these non traditional electronics. How much more appreciation of that there is. I think there's all sorts of like beautiful and interesting stuff happening that really wasn't when I started out. I think especially you see that in opportunities for young people. It used to be that there was none of that's really when I started working on LilyPad Ardunio. We couldn't get any of these materials or weird electronics. It was SnapCircuits and that was it.

LB (38:08):

The blossoming of all of these different creative things that you can do with electronics, I think is so wonderful and great. The projects that I'm working on right now, I'm having lots of fun. I think they're really exciting opportunities in computational design and fabrication. Which is where I'm spending a lot of my time and energy these days. I think for better or for worse that's a space where it's less amenable to like a kit that you like sell to somebody. On the other hand, I think there are really exciting things that can be done in software to make those spaces more accessible and also to prompt people to think creatively about materials and tools and so on. Certainly you see lots of that out there already. I think there are all sorts of possibilities there for more stuff along those lines, too. So I don't know. I think there's more fun for everybody like on the horizon, including myself. So that's good.

EW (39:18):

Okay. You said origami like 45 minutes ago and half the people who are listening are like, "And she didn't even stop?" On your website, on the Hand and Machine? Machine and Hand?

LB (39:34):

Hand and Machine yeah.

EW (39:35):

Hand and Machine, it talks about paper and tiny machines. Now I'm really into origami, especially weird origami with curves. And snails. So I need to know everything you can tell me about this.

LB (39:53):

Yeah. So this stems from... For the most part, the origin is I became obsessed at a certain point with teeny tiny motors. I think they became like widespread because of digital cameras with little moving shutters, which are now kind of obsolete, but thankfully you can still get the motors.

LB (40:18):

You can get these teeny tiny stepper motors in particular that are like the size of your fingernail that are just, well, they're gorgeous. To me anyway, they suggest that you should put them into paper and make tiny little machines and tiny little mechanisms. So I have a whole eBay addiction to buy tons and tons of these motors. I have a whole bunch of them. This is a project that has been a little bit on the back burner since COVID. The last interesting thing that I was able to do along those lines with is to collaborate with the wonderful researcher, Hyunjoo Oh, who is a professor at Georgia Tech now in the industrial design department there.

LB (41:17):

We shared an academic advisor, Mike Eisenberg, so we became close that way. She does amazing stuff with paper mechanics. We collaborated around building a set of mechanisms, seeing what these teeny motors could do with paper. We made a library of these little mechanisms, like thinking about different ways to make gears and cams and stuff, purely out of really lightweight kind of purely paper. Then using these tiny stepper motors to move stuff around.

LB (41:55):

We taught a workshop. Again, it was like a year, I guess two years ago now. The summer before COVID. We explored that with a group of people, which was really fun. It's a project that I would really like to pick back up again. Cause I think there's so many possibilities there for paper, mechanics and paper mechanisms that are just incredibly delicate and effective. Also you can quite easily, I think translate those or transport them onto wearables and body-worn things because they're so lightweight and don't consume much power and all of those things. So I think there's tons of potential there. I've done a little and I'd love to do more.

EW (42:52):

How small are these?

LB (42:55):

They range so you can get... there's some pictures on my Instagram that show a collection, but some of them are the size of your pinky fingernail or something. Some of them are more like, I dunno, maybe the size of your thumbnail or something, but these beautiful little motors. They're pretty awesome.

EW (43:16):

And seen some on Amazon that are about a three quarter inch by three quarter inch,

LB (43:23):

No much tinier. I'll send you a link..

EW (43:26):

Yeah. I need a link for that. The snails must crawl! Sorry,. Are you putting together a library of these? Where can I find your mechanisms? Are they still in the research and development stage?

LB (43:42):

I'm trying to think. We had a website and then I don't know what happened to it. We made it for this workshop and I would have to dig it up. The easiest answer is yes, they're still in like this R and D phase. It was one of these things where COVID, just, everything went haywire. That was one of the threads that got lost, unfortunately, but it's good to talk because it's a reminder to pick it back up.

EW (44:10):

Yes. Pick it back up for me. I don't care about anybody else just for me. I should have asked you before, what's your favorite conductive thread?

LB (44:21):

Oh, gosh, that's a tricky one. I would say I don't have a favorite. It all depends on your application and what you're wanting to do. I mean, just pure stainless steel is probably the best for straightforward stuff. Most importantly, it doesn't corrode. I like the one, I'll get in trouble perhaps for saying this, but I like Adafruit's conductive stainless steel thread. The variety is great and different threads are good for different applications. Okay.

EW (45:00):

I'll accept that. When you say stainless steel, it's still plied, it's still multiple threads connected, right? It's not just one, right?

LB (45:14):

Yeah. Right. It really is like thread. It's hundreds of teeny tiny stainless steel wire that is spun into a thread. So it's soft and flexible like a traditional thread, but all of the little fibers that make up the thread are actually stainless steel.

EW (45:37):

I wonder what the spindle looks like for that. Nevermind. Sorry. I just get lost in the...

LB (45:49):

Oh, I, I totally understand. Yeah. And you can go down rabbit holes of textile fabrication machines. Yeah. They're they're great. Yeah.

EW (45:57):

When I looked at your site, you also had fabrics that weren't printed were had threads. Can you, do you have any idea what I'm talking about?

LB (46:09):

You probably mean, so one of the projects we're working on is a collaboration with a team of civil engineers here at UNM, which is looking at embedding kind of smart, like electronic textiles into composites for aerospace, but also for civil engineering broadly. Where we fabricate these circuits that are entirely fabric based. This is using some of the techniques I developed when I was in graduate school for making laser cut textile circuits out of conductive fabric.

LB (46:56):

You can make really beautiful, precisely laid out essentially printed circuit boards, but they're soft and flexible by laser cutting conductive fabric in a particular way. We're using that to make these soft, flexible circuits, which then we embed in a composite and it's very useful to have them be made out of textiles because the composite material can soak into the electronics and it doesn't create like a problem with the integrity of the composite. The textile and the electronics just kind of become like a hundred percent embedded in the composite cause the textiles can just absorb the resin.

LB (47:40):

We're experimenting with essentially composites that can sense their own shape. We're making these kind of custom sensors so that the composite can sense their shape and also kind of the stresses that they're under. Is it being bent in a certain way? Or is it being stretched in a certain way? Is it about to break? Then we're working with using shape memory alloys to be able to do something. The composite would say, "I'm being bent in this way, that is going to break me. So I'm going to exert a force to like, resist that bending and like go back to like a, a comfortable shape. So I won't get broken." So that's, that's the heart of that project.

CW (48:28):

Seems like you could also a closed feedback loop to, "Okay. I want to go to the shape and know I'm in it."

LB (48:34):

Totally, we can get into a shape and then detect that we're in that shape. Or we can like, if we're being bent into that shape and we don't want to be there, try to bend back. Yeah, totally.

CW (48:50):

I'm thinking of smart-sail sailboats for some reason now.

EW (48:54):

I'm thinking of prosthetics.

CW (48:56):

Well, yes. Okay.

CW (48:58):

When you say composite, what, what does that mean?

LB (49:02):

Fancy way of saying like a combined materials that is in our case, what we're working with right now is fiberglass and then a polyester resin. So we have layers of fiberglass and then we soak it with polyester and it to make this really hard, stiff, like structurally sound thing, but that has these embedded, um, you know, sensors and actuators and would

CW (49:28):

Carbon fiber fall under that category as well?

LB (49:32):

Okay. Carbon fiber is often used in place of the fiberglass. Okay. The challenge of with working with carbon fiber and why we've kind of skirted that a little bit for the short term is that it's conductive.

CW (49:47):

Of course it is.

LB (49:50):

You have to like factor that into your design. There ways I think that we can actually leverage the fact that it's conductive and it has these interesting electrical properties, but we haven't done that yet. We've kind of just used a non-conductive fiber to avoid that issue for the shorter term.

EW (50:09):

Okay. So you make a circuit with a flexible fabric and then you put fiberglass around it to get something hard. Why didn't you just make a fiberglass PCB?

LB (50:23):

That's what we do essentially. There's like a sheet of fiberglass, um, that is like the backing material for everything. Then we have to like cut the textile circuit out of a copper fabric. And then we adhere that to the fiberglass. Then we're actually using this polymerization technique to, to polymerize some of the fiberglass to turn it into a sensor essentially. And so then we integrate that into the circuit and it is actually the fiberglass. Then we put a bunch more layers of fiberglass. So a single layer is not enough for the composite application. We ended up making these composites with like 20 layers or so of fiberglass. And one of those layers is the layer with the circuit.

EW (51:14):

Okay. Christopher, do you have any more questions? I mean, if I keep clicking on different projects she shows on her website, I'm just going to keep asking questions. There's the one with the person, child in front of what looks like laser cut, amazing curtains.

LB (51:35):

Yeah. That's my son. That's a curtain in my house. That's part of exploring computational design and fabrication.

CW (51:50):

What are your... I guess it's kind of a weird question, but what are your tools that you predominantly use for design? Are you living in like Fusion360? Do you have custom things? I notice on your website, you have something called SlabForge, so you're developing some of your own tools.

LB (52:06):

That's all over the map. Right now, what we're exploring is writing a lot of Python code and then using that in Grasshopper and Rhino. That suite of tools. But there are, there are always other toolsets to explore. For the computational design stuff, that's what we've been doing a lot of more lately.

EW (52:40):

Oh, I have to say that if I was in New Mexico, I would be wanting to sign up for your research lab. There are so many things there and so many opportunities. It's just, there's a lot of fun. Now we should probably let you get back to making these things instead of just talking to us. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

LB (53:07):

I don't think so. I think that was, that was probably quite enough. But I am looking for graduate students. So if anybody is interested in spending several years playing in the desert, check out my website and stop by for a visit. That would be lovely.

EW (53:33):

If we are ever In New Mexico, I know where we have to stop.

CW (53:35):

Yup.

EW (53:36):

Our guest has been professor Leah Buechley, associate professor in the Computer Science department of the University of New Mexico, where she directs the Hand and Machine research group. Thanks. This was really interesting.

LB (53:51):

Thank you so much. That was really fun.

EW (53:54):

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm and now a quote by Isaac Asimov

EW (54:12):

"Actions such as his could come only from a robot, or from a very honorable and decent human being. But you see, you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans."