Principle 2.2: Design Inside-out

My SLOrk (Stanford Laptop Orchestra) experience was full of inside-out designs. Once, Terry Peng and I (one of my SLOrk mates) made a joke that SLOrk is like a Stanford GameTrak Orchestra. Actually, there is no regulation that we ought to use GameTrak for SLOrk pieces, but anyway, GameTrak is mostly and widely used in SLOrk as it fits the ethos of laptop orchestra. It is astonishing that SLOrk pieces have been continuously created and designed from GameTrak for about 15 years, while GameTrak is actually a medium with constraints.

One of the most remarkable 'inside-out design' moments in SLOrk history is, I believe, Yikai Li's bass. Terry, Yikai, and I formed a project band called 'USB3', which aimed for a band that can play modern pop music under SLOrk's ethos. Now, I don't even remember why Yikai was chosen as a bassist, but after we started instrument designs for USB3, It turned out Yikai actually did not even know what bass guitar is. But I loved that fact because he had no biased impression on bass guitars at all, so he was less likely to fall into blunt transfer or porting of bass guitar into GameTrak. Terry and I only taught him how bassists pluck strings to play bass notes.

His bass guitar design was entirely inside-out design; He had a clear purpose, which was to play bass notes in a plucking strings manner, but he confronted multiple constraints and had to figure out how to make GameTrak bass playable. First, he tried making the pulled string length determine the pitch, but it turned out it was very unplayable with GameTrak. He then mapped each pitch on each nine rectangular grid on the horizontal plane and let the two-dimensional position of the string determine the pitch. Later, he realized he had to play more than nine pitches. He added more grid mappings, which are switchable. In the end, his bass resulted in something very different from traditional bass; His left-hand keeps moving around the two-dimensional horizontal plane, which is visually different, interesting, and funny. Recently, Alex Han (a trained and professional musician) was practicing Yikai's GameTrak bass, and he was so surprised that the pitch mapping is actually very unintuitive for trained musicians, while it was the most convenient mapping for Yikai.

I actually often experience mixed feelings when I do inside-out design…

In many cases of inside-out design, including Yikai's bass, I feel constraints rather lead us toward a more creative result in design processes. A lower degree of freedom leads us to a more creative outcome. More degree of freedom does provide us more dimensions to explore but I think we become less productive when there are too much things to explore. Contraints enable us to more focused on a well-organized design process without feeling lost while not knowing where to start or what to do next.

However, for some cases of inside-out design, I can't help but doubt if the artifact is truely my own creativity (Haha). I somewhat feel like I have to always steer the handle with my own hands with the freedom to steer in any direction while driving the process of the design in order to acknowledge that the result is my creativity. But, sometimes, although I had my own concrete intention, I still feel like I have passed through a race track (the medium's constraints) like a miniature toy car when I do a inside-out desgin; The steering handle was not entirely by my hands. And the result is actually something I didn't anticipate, though it matches my intention…