ENCLOSURECORE Concept 2: Modularity & Scalability

AC

What made you interested in working on this project?

JT

We think of products like avatars. One of the ways we thought about a product was that they’re an enclosure—like a skin over what's inside or underneath, whether it's internal electronics, a building [or] a car chassis. We started to call these external exteriors generative enclosures. We talked in length about the kinds of projects we would like to take on to help us illustrate the direction we're working towards, so it seemed very natural for us when you reached out.

BL

Generally speaking, AIR COMPANY is a rare example of an organization performing real-world alchemy, transforming chemicals. From that perspective, just being a part of the mission of transforming the Earth for the better was a very exciting and meaningful opportunity.

AC

Tell us about the ideation phase and design journey for creating your conceptual enclosure.

JT

Everything starts with doing our best to listen as deeply as we can to understand the [most] simple question we could distill the idea of the project down to. For us, it came down to the miraculous nature of the technology being developed at AIR COMPANY and the object doing the magic, the AIRMADE System. Put simply, we saw the system as making energy like a plant in a biological sense due to its respect for the environmental context. We thought it was an interesting parallel to shining the light on how industry is becoming—or needs to become—more like nature. It demonstrates how the two need not be mutually exclusive.

The question for us surfaced from that way of thinking about it: What is a plant? With that idea in place, [we looked at] how we imagine things might be designed in the future because where things are going, all of the processes and stages of design will condense to a single button: the generate button. Ben can speak more on the workflow he developed in Krea, an AI tool, but we just reverse-engineered what that process might look like. He made a custom node workflow with certain parameters to generate a variety of ideas within a certain context. 

BL

From a practical sense, there are two descriptors I could give to it: Generative being one, and non-destructive being the other because we built a system that's completely procedural. In the end, our solution is a solid configurable system, wherein functional elements can be added or subtracted depending on the requirements of a given enclosure.

With respect to the artificial intelligence workflows, there are definitely a combination of tools that we use here, Krea being one of them and another being the node system that helps to essentially discover as many possibilities as we could in the context of our guiding principles.

AC

Very interesting. I want to dive into AI more shortly, but before we get there, let’s talk about your enclosure concept. It focused on modularity and scalability. What excited you about that aspect of the AIRMADE System?

JT

It's fun. Scalability and modularity [are] what kids play with. [It’s] what we grew up on—Legos, letter blocks. More seriously, it affords versatile possibilities and lends itself to the widest variety of needs and design explorations.

You know, we already see today that AI tools, machine-learning tools, can generate exponentially more output than a human can. As it gets better, it'll understand what's being input better to generate a lot better output. As we're getting there, products will more and more naturally integrate this workflow of production expression into its makeup because they will evolve to accommodate a variety of enclosures from shape to material in light of [how] the software is already developed. I think that's what's fun for us; just exploring that trajectory.

BL

Yeah, it was definitely about a trajectory. It was about creating something that could grow and evolve as AIR COMPANY grows and evolves in its technology and mission and having a form that could enable that. 

AC

A ton of shapes were explored for your enclosure design. How did you iterate through the first phase of the project?

JT

It helped that we spent time early on trying to find the question to ask. That was a very useful filter through which we could put [into] this workflow to assess whether or not it stood up to what we were seeking to answer. With that filter of the story in mind, we wanted the form, the function [and] the shape to match the essence of the avatar we had in mind [which] was a caterpillar. The caterpillar is known for its metamorphosis into a butterfly through its energy conversion—nothing short of a miracle. We thought it was a very fitting avatar symbol to align to, so that's how we filtered through all of those shapes that were output.  

BL

[We were] trying to find something that felt living and breathing in its own right within the confines of the enclosure. Again, back on the practical side, we'd feed in certain things [to our setup] and add additional parameters, and yeah, it was really fun, and we learned a lot in that respect.

AC

Were there any challenges you faced while bringing your conceptual enclosure to life?

BL

I mean, you want to have a unified aesthetic to the end product, but at the same time, you need to balance that with the flexibility that comes with building a fully modular system. Developing something that could gracefully scale up and down without requiring a complete redesign was one of the main challenges here.

AC

You also designed an enclosure key. Tell us a bit about that.

JT

Back to this idea that products are avatars, it's fascinating that you can take a fork or a spoon from a house and, through [that object], imagine what the house might look like. One of the things that's fascinating about how you guys had illustrated the AIRMADE System—with the Margiela-looking lab coats, making it very fashionable as a way of accessibility to the audience—we wanted to reflect that in a fun way in the sense that the key is a token to the [enclosure]. It's fun to think that spaces that are potentially quite large with very important functions can be condensed into something so small and personal. To think that something big can only be accessed by something so simple also reflects the nature of the problem being solved at AIR COMPANY and that the solution presented seems so simple. You almost do a double-take to think that you can take CO₂ and magically make it something we can use.

AC

We’re living in an exciting time for technology and the world, especially regarding AI. We’d love to hear your perspective on it.

JT

Technology is a time machine, and AI is a wonderful time machine. We improve on technology because it saves us time, and in that regard, I am very excited to see how AI will continue to save us more time, especially in how we work. It saves us a lot of time on the iterative task execution so we can focus more on the emotional side of things, which is the sensory perception. 

For those who worry that AI-assisted creativity will produce bad art, they're right. Their worries are right, but I think it will also help good artists make work faster and the feedback loop will allow them to evolve better, making better art. At the same time, it raises the bar for bad art. So, everyone's sensitivity to it will improve. A recent example that I can think of is when the iPhone came out. There were a lot of people saying, “Oh, you're not a photographer just because you take pictures with your iPhone.” They were right to think that, [but now] when you have an iPhone, it automatically makes you a photographer. It comes down to this idea that infinite choices stretch us to heighten our sensitivity to the choices we make, and it leads us to a new understanding of what is creatively legible in the artistic sense. 

On the flip side, it raises really interesting questions regarding artists' rights over the licensing and the use of their work in the age of AI. Many people are thinking about this, but two that come to mind [are] Holly Herndon and Matt Hurst. [They’re] putting out ideas like building a consent layer so you can opt out of having your work monetized and used without your consent to trained data sets. 

BL

We need to approach [AI] with excitement. We need to approach it with great thoughtfulness. We also need to approach it with a deep sense of responsibility because the opportunity that this technology presents has the potential to redefine our relationship with technology, period. Utilizing that to create a more sustainable, equitable and flourishing future is one thing, but that vision is going to take just as much real concern. So, while there is this incredible opportunity, there is the other side: it could also make things a lot worse in ways we could never have imagined. 

From the creative perspective, it's incredible and extremely exciting to see where it goes. It's moving so quickly every day—literally, there's a new tool every single day. We should embrace that because it ultimately empowers you as a creative individual. So I’m very excited, but also responsibly excited, is what I'll say. 

JT

When there's new technology, you can either be right or have a better conversation. That's the only way to move forward.