I'm Ben. I'm Ben. Hi, I'm Ben.
My name is Ben Uyeda.
My background is in architecture, but now I sort of just work
as a designer at large.
Without much ado, let's give it up for Ben Uyeda.
Today we're going to make pottery out of concrete.
Today we're going to make a sofa out of bamboo plywood.
Today, today, today.
So nice to meet you in person, because I've seen the videos.
There are literally hundreds of these out there now.
Millions of views.
So before I tell you the business reasons why I publish my design
ideas, instead of patenting them and turning them into products,
I'll share some of the reasons why I became interested in design
in the first place.
(many videos playing at once) Today...
I love architecture so much.
I studied architecture at Cornell, both undergrad and grad, and actually stayed on
to be part of the faculty teaching some of the first courses on
sustainable design in the architecture school.
I loved all of that experience, but as I got farther and farther into
architecture practice with my own firm that I co-founded, Zero Energy Design.
If you do design as a service sector, it takes just as long to design
a affordable house well as it does an expensive house well.
But there's way more
money in the commission on the expensive houses
So even as you're trying to focus on things
like sustainability and affordable housing, there's this constant business
push because you want to create stability for your employees.
And so you feel this constant tension that feels like
it's impossible to resolve in a holistic manner.
Like, how do I align my inherent motivations to provide for myself
and my family, make a good living, to create a good quality of life,
and at the same time express myself as a designer?
And that's where YouTube came in.
Hi, Ben, here
in this sort of second act of my career,
I sort of started making videos around 2014.
I became really interested in how do I give away my design ideas,
but how do I still monetize the creation
and incentivize the generation of new ideas?
And so I made some YouTube videos.
I think the first video I made was a vase out of a wine bottle.
And I'm going to show you how to make this herb garden out of old wine bottles.
And then I just kept escalating I did slightly bigger projects.
And then we did a... I designed a three legged stool
that could just be made with, you know, a handsaw and a five gallon bucket.
Just pouring a little bit of concrete, put it into three sticks, wait
24 hours, pop it out, and you have a three legged stool.
That design went on and has now been built on six different continents.
There's small businesses that make and sell those kind of stools.
They're used in schools in Uganda.
They're used in pretty much every
every possible seating application you can imagine all over the world.
And I never sold anything.
I just made one and then shared
a 90 second video or so of that process.
Where that sort of leads
today is probably our most intriguing current project is
we're recycling giant 30 foot windmill blades
that we harvested out in the Palm Desert
in our sort of outdoor workshop, we had
these just massive beautiful fiberglass objects that we're transforming
into large 30 foot long outdoor tables for a local restaurant.
We're basically taking these things
that are from about 60 miles away at the local wind farm
that would be going into a landfill and that will never decompose.
We're modifying them, cutting them up adding to them, repainting them,
resurfacing them, and then handing them off to our local restaurants.
So it's, it's one of the examples
I'm so proud of because it is
both local and global at the same time.
Right?
Like that idea of act local, think global.
With digital media, you can do it all.