Transcriber: Josefina Tieppo Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Hi, I'm Phoenix Perry, and I'm here to ask you a question,
and my question is how does our drive for human connection shape our technology?
I'm going to tell you a story.
It's a story that might be hard for some of you to hear or listen to.
It's a story of pain, struggle, and disconnection.
I was a gifted child.
On a test I took when I was very young,
I did well.
This test has subsequently been called into question
for its merit and authenticity many times.
However, something happens when a label like "gifted" is applied to you.
What is possible in your life is now reassessed.
Everything changes about how you're treated.
And all of a sudden, you become "that kid."
You're pulled out of your classes, you're given more attention,
you're given better toys, and you're given more resources.
And this is a really surprising thing,
and I think a lot of non-neurotypical children
struggle to understand what is going on.
I would propose this is the beginning of disconnection
for many very intelligent gifted children.
So at this point, my parents did something profoundly positive
to counteract how isolated and alone I thought I was.
They got me a game system and a personal computer,
and even though they couldn't afford it, they went ahead and did it anyway.
Man, did they get that one right.
On one channel, in high school, I was watching Star Trek,
and on the other, I was programming animations in Basic.
That was really wonderful.
However, they got something really, really wrong.
All of a sudden, Bs and Cs were no longer acceptable grades for me.
And also,
second place trophy was a little bit of a disappointment.
The expectations were reset and my boundaries and rules were redrawn.
So some of you may begin to see here a pattern
of my academic achievement and successes being equated to a sense of self-worth.
From this story, you can probably guess what I ended up doing for a career
and where I ended up living.
I moved to Silicon Valley to become a developer
because that's what gifted kids do, right?
If I thought I was prepared from high school and college
about what would be expected,
I was in for a whole new level of surprise.
Silicon Valley culture was a shock to my system.
I began working longer and longer hours and pushing myself further and further
to be able to achieve success.
At some point, I began sleeping on a box under my desk,
and this was normal with my team.
This was normalized.
Silicon Valley really does promote and normalize bad behavior,
and this is not healthy.
So years of stress and competition
had led to me having a pretty low physical resilience.
And eventually, the lack of sleep and the lack of nutrition
began to cause my body to break down,
and I was in chronic pain.
My back, my arms, my shoulders, my hands: they hurt pretty much nonstop,
and I began taking pain pills just to even manage.
Most of my fellow developers were also on some kind of pharmaceutical
to enhance or enable their ability to work such ridiculous hours.
This is the norm in technology culture,
and you can't do it.
This doesn't last.
People burn out, and you break.
In my case,
I want to talk about why I feel this archetype of this developer
who's this mad genius
and changing the world by working 24 hours a day
is not a paragon of achievement.
This is a total nightmare, and it's unsuitable in every regard.
I developed a case of carpel tunnel.
It was so blindingly painful that I couldn't even lift a teacup,
my boyfriend had to brush my teeth,
and the technology that had allowed me such constant companionship
had let me forget and destroy my body.
About two years into the process of being disabled -
I spent five years of my life completely benched -
I began to really think, "I should do something about this."
And at this point, my doctor made me make a promise to him
that I would tell people what had happened to me,
and I wouldn't just suffer in silence.
And this is the moment where I began to think,
"How can I heal myself and how can I rehabilitate my field?"
I want to talk about the first thing that I decided was problematic.
This thing had hurt me and caused so much pain in my life.
Even looking at it made my stomach do back flips,
and that was the computer mouse.
This technology was developed in 1963.
Stop. Take that in.
That was the last time input modalities went through a revolution.
What was going on in the world in 1963?
That's the year the CIA was formed,
that was the year that Kennedy put an embargo on Cuba,
and Alfred Hitchcock released "Birds."
Even the track pad can be considered just a slight advancement
on this point and click technology.
During the five years I had off, I had to do something with myself,
so I started playing music, and I rediscovered a love for making art.
When I started programming again, I started asking,
"How could the things I learned about my body during physical therapy
be brought into interface design and allow me to really create expressively
using my body to create all kinds of interesting applications?"
I started working with this musician named Margaret Schnell.
We were collaborating with a machine learning expert
called Rebecca Fiebrink,
and we used this process of machine learning
to embed gestures into musical and sound performance with visuals.
So what that means is I could do things
like spin in a circle and have a camera record me spinning
and know to associate that movement with a delay filter on an audio track.
And very quickly, I had a physical, playable world,
and that was really fun.
And machine learning is on the edge of really revolutionizing HCI,
or human-computer interaction.
It is almost out in gesture technology in your Android,
and I'm very excited about some of this work
because interfaces that reward human contact and connection
really are the future of design.
I've been working on a project called Bot Party,
which is a fun interface that I'll tell you a little bit about.
It is an interactive playable musical world,
and you discover and unlock all the animals and weathers and patterns
by moving with other people.
If you hold hands, you free animals, which is kind of fun,
and if three people hold hands in a circle,
they can change the weather patterns in the world.
Challenging the physical barriers we put up out of fear
was my aim of this project.
It's really interesting to see what happens
when you ask two strangers in an art gallery to touch each other.
There's some awkwardness there,
but it's really fun,
and surprising and unique things can happen.
The next project I'm working on is -
or you can think of it like a haptic pixel grid,
and each one of these kind of units in our grid,
our haptic surface,
I can turn on and off, and it allows me to -
just like, you know, with the pixel communicating the light and darkness,
I can communicate information to people.
And my friend Heather and I,
we've been designing a game that you can play on this surface.
So how can we teach people that they can communicate using vibration?
Well, we use bees as our inspiration
because it turns out that they communicate food location
using this kind of dance that vibrates the hive.
And we were like, "Can humans learn this new skill?
What's possible with that?"
How can our technology
open up new experiences and new senses of wonder?
Technology, like the Arduino and the BBC micro:bit
are now the new norm for kids like me.
That's what they're handing little children.
And these children are in a really good position
to really think about new design patterns and open up new behavior patterns,
but we need to be really careful
to not bring to them the same toxic culture
that has really impacted me and infected an entire cultural movement:
Silicon Valley.
We need to encourage all children into STEM,
not just the ones who fit geek and nerd stereotypes.
Learning programming and basic electronics
should be as fundamental as learning to read.
Making access to education,
including computer science and engineering,
should be a 21st-century aspiration.
This is a project I'm collaborating on right now called "Do It Kids."
We're working to bring physics to life in the classroom with teachers,
and we've developed a set of curriculum that brings the teacher first,
and we really focus on how can we augment the curriculum they already have
and make STEM concepts, like oscillation and waveform
really physical and really understandable.
So it turns out when you build a guitar, and you're holding a vibrating string,
understanding a waveform
becomes a whole lot more obvious and a whole lot more simple.
Right now, what we've got is a set of three things,
and when you've built all three of them, you can start a band.
You have a keyboard, a guitar, and a microphone,
and that's really something fun
because learning STEM doesn't need to be abstracted from life, right?
Now, I want to talk a little bit more about this mythology of "harder! = safe."
Harder means that you are somehow safe from your fears or worries,
and that it's somehow better.
Also, there's a really deep-rooted myth in STEM that "harder = worth."
So people who make it and end up very rich in this field
believe they deserve it because they've worked hard to get there.
That's not true.
Nobody is more worthy of success or safety or financial reward
just because they were in the right place at the right time with the right skillset.
Working harder is a coping mechanism
that many people have to handle a fear of failure.
I want to propose that learning to program isn't hard,
but how we teach programming is difficult to understand.
We need to change that approach.
In 2013, I started a project
to experiment with a new pedagogical way of doing things,
and this project was called Code Liberation Foundation.
It is an organization
which teaches women, non-binary, and femme-identifying individuals
to program games and creative appplications
as part of a community.
We let anyone who is interested in learning something
come and learn with us, but also teach with us.
And also, you know, we're teaching while we're learning,
so we really eschew this idea that you need to be an expert
in order to understand an idea,
and that really separates us from other programming start-ups
because we don't really want you to feel like you can't teach this stuff
two weeks after you learn it.
And we talk about code using visuals and metaphors and sometimes even dance.
It's a playful, soft, community-driven approach, and it works.
Learning that involves being part of a healthy community is life-changing.
This is a photo that I have a lot of love for.
It's got a bunch of our members in it
from different generations through the program,
and these girls have pushed for -
all these women, these amazing women -
have pushed forward the field of games and AI and interface design
in really surprising and challenging ways.
By making tech more inclusive,
somehow I managed to make myself more whole in the process.
So we're soft bodies, and what do I mean by that?
We should not bend around our technoogy.
It should aid and support our human experience.
Now I have a challenge for everybody here.
Let's bring all of our messy emotions and feelings and dreams
into a field in dire need of a new story and a new mythology.
That's it.
(Applause)