“I had a weird dream last night. There was this party and they had these drinks full of stars that kept sparkling. And I had a few of them and then, all of the sudden, there was this Nobel Prize Laureate and he was jump roping. Then I was jump roping!”
That was no dream Chee, Target’s Opening Night Party was hilariously playful and visually stunning!
Renowned news correspondent, author, and international journalist, John Hockenberry, returned for his third appearance as Master of Ceremonies for the Art Center Design Conference. After reminiscing of his 2006 experience with a block of Velveeta cheese, a play on the 2006 theme of Radical Craft, John showed a more ’serious’ investigation of this year’s theme with a homemade video of his children and their ’serious’ takes on the art of playing. On who should not be allowed to come to Serious Play, “anyone who’s too serious about playing,” one child exlaimed, because, “they’re going to make problems for the speakers by blurting out things like ‘that’s not the right way to play!’”
As the laughs abated, John observed the unique role of the Design Conference community, the zealotry not about crusading to save the world but rather the inner zealotry that concerns the inner compulsives we all have within us. “The inspiration that we find within ourselves doesn’t ultimately belong to us. Our ability to create and think beyond the present moment, to think of solutions to a problem; those impulses don’t belong to you, but rather they’re part of the collective human legacy. This conference is all about evangelizing this message: this is what we do on earth, this is how we thrive. Serious play is so fun that it’s serious.”
The first presentation began by exploring the serious play of exploring the outermost galaxies of our universe…
George Smoot, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and Nobel Prize Laureate, uses his mind, his understanding of cosmology and his ability to ask penetrating questions about those things we can’t see in order to comprehend the very earliest moments of the birth of the universe.
Professor Smoot chose to avoid angling the talk in an indulgently techie direction, instead opting to change our perspective by showing us the intricate designs found in nature. Playfully titled “CSI: Cosmic Scene Investigation” Smoot engaged our senses by examining the relics of creation, aiming to infer what happened at the Beginning and how to understand it.
He weaved through slide after slide of stunning visualizations to convey the sheer size of our ever expanding universe. “I wonder if there’s another Design Conference going on somewhere out there, with other intelligent beings thinking of what designs they might do, and trying to understand what’s going on outside their world?” he begged.
The universe is a perfect sphere, with evidence of the earliest moments of history on the ever expanding outer edge. He blew our minds with astounding numbers: “Hubble alone has to potential to see over 100 billion universes” and with a detailed 3D map of, 1 million universes scatter through the void. The design of the universe, talk about serious play.
The better we understand how the universe formed, the better we’ll understand it’s future – and what role we play in it. The soon to be launched Planck satellite will give us a massive resolution boost so we can really see the complicated patterns and analyze the nonlinear processes that exist out of dark matter. By focusing on irregularities and scaling it up, we can really get a picture of what’s going on, to – ironically – look back to “see how the beginning moments unfolded.”
Dr. Charles Elachi is the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Vice President of the California Institute of Technology. He is also the proud father of such projects as Casini, the Mars Rovers and Voyager.
“It’s a pleasure to come back down to earth and give a talk here.” Dr. Elachi explained the JPL environment, “it’s a toy store for scientists and engineers; the Disneyland for nerds; a playground of adults.” There’s currently 17 robotic ‘emissaries’ in space that JPL designed and now controls. JPL was born out of five imaginative, adventurous souls who liked to see, basically, which chemicals they could mix to make the biggest explosion. Look where others are not looking, Dr. Elachi heralded, “do not go where a path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Mars provides a great exploration destination, Dr. Elachi explained, “it’s somewhat similar to earth, it has polar caps, it even has weather. There’s great canyons on mars, it has volcanoes [dwarfing Mount Everest] and we recently caught a landslide.” While the rovers were originally only hoped to last one hundred days, four years later they’re still powering onwards, with their solar panels cleaned by the occasionaly passing dust devil. “It’s good to be smart but it’s great to be lucky,” Dr. Elachi added. The rovers journey on, diving into craters we wouldn’t dare drive into.
Dr. Elachi was clearly excited about JPL’s upcoming mission of the Phoenix rover, scheduled to touch down on Mars May 25. He perfectly recounted the hours, minutes and seconds until landing. The Seven Minutes of Terror explain the Phoenix’s autonomous landing, descending from 14,000 mph to just, yes they say just, 900 mph and then releasing itself into free fall equivalent to the height of two Empire State buildings, firing up its own jet stabilizers to hover itself down to the surface of the Red Planet.
Dr. Elachi went on to talk about the findings on the rings of Saturn, the Lord of the Rings, and the methane spewing geysers found its Titan satellite. While it has some similarities to our earth, like rivers, lakes and even rain, the sub-freezing temperatures indicate that that liquid is more likely similar to our gasoline. “It’d be a great place for a holiday,” he joked, “you could fill up your car just by dipping a tube in the lake. Just don’t light a match.”
“You guys won!” John honored Professor Smoot and Dr. Elachi, on creating space flight as something you can do without leaving the earth. Dr. Elachi concurred, “now you can use a combination of physical as well as robotic presence [to explore the solar system].” And when asked where he’d go on a 3-day space holiday, Professor Smoot suggested his keen interest in going to Titan…so long as there’s a hotel there.
The session broke, with peoples minds well and truly expanded.
During the break there was more fun with the Jumpers. Meantime, attendees built structures out of “Muscle Water” whose bottle shape, designed by Art Center alum Yves Behar, lent itself perfectly to constructing great structures once they finished the delicious nectar it contained:
