A Penchant for the Peculiar--ITRI's Creativity Lab

Two years ago, a new unit emerged at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), one of Taiwan's key centers for technology research. Infused with novel ideas, the Creativity Lab, as it is called, quickly gained renown. With its aim of breaking down the barriers between technology and the humanities, the Creativity Lab could be called ITRI's "dream factory." The lab's origins can be traced to the personal experience of its director, Hsueh Wen-jean.

In 1997, Hsueh was the director of the Digital Imaging Technology team at ITRI's Opto-Electronics and Systems Laboratories. As part of a joint project, she visited the globally recognized MIT Media Lab. She was stunned by the laboratory's open environment, the diverse backgrounds of the researchers, and the orientation of the research towards meeting human concerns. She hoped that ITRI could have a research operation like the MIT Media Lab.

The next-generation concept motorike designed jointly by the ITRI's Creativity Lab and Sanyang Industry features sleek contours, and incorporates a PDA and GPS receiver. The hope is that it will ignite a trend in future motorbikes.

Grand dreams

Subsequently, with the support of former ITRI president Shih Chintay and the current president Lee Johnsee, the Creativity Lab formally commenced operations in March 2004, marking a new milestone in ITRI's efforts to serve the needs of domestic industry with creative ideas.

To ensure the sound development of the Creativity Lab, it initially allied with the MIT Media Lab and shared in the latter's creative resources. Established in 1980, the MIT Media Lab was a completely new concept in American academia. It was at that time that Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT professor and the MIT Media Lab's founder, foresaw that media such as radio, television, telephones, movies, newspapers, magazines, and books would undergo major changes and gradual convergence. Inspired by this vision, he set up the multidisciplinary research institution.

In 1995, Negroponte's book Being Digital described a shift of technology's focus from material "atoms" to virtual "bits." His prediction helped encourage global technology and media giants to invest in research on digital media and entertainment technologies, while also sparking the movement to build a digital information highway.

The Media Lab's resources are abundant, as it gathers together more than 40 professors, over 70 research and administrative workers, and 170 PhD and master students working in 30 research teams on 300 projects. The Media Lab's annual budget is more than US$30 million.

The next-generation concept motorike designed jointly by the ITRI's Creativity Lab and Sanyang Industry features sleek contours, and incorporates a PDA and GPS receiver. The hope is that it will ignite a trend in future motorbikes.

Transcending traditional roles

Although ITRI's Creativity Lab took its initial inspiration from the MIT Media Lab, it is driven even more strongly by the needs of Taiwan's industrial transformation. Hsueh stresses that for "manufacturing Taiwan" to become "creative and branded Taiwan" it must invest even greater resources in innovation and R&D.

However, how should the first step toward becoming an innovator be taken? Perhaps by breaking down the boundaries between specialized fields.

Hsueh, who graduated from National Taiwan University's Department of Agricultural Engineering and received a PhD in mechanical engineering from Cal Tech, appears to be a thoroughgoing technophile, and yet she is also an intellectual who likes to spend time imagining the future.

For her, research requires concentration and the ability to enjoy solitude, making it somewhat incompatible with her disinclination to work in a single field. After obtaining her PhD, she took a job in General Electric's R&D center. The GE organization is enormous, encompassing everything from aircraft engines, electrical generators, and motors to a credit card business, and after Hsueh had worked with different GE units, she came to understand that implementing technology in a business requires the cooperation of many people. She also came to a clear realization of the gulf lying between dreams and their realization.

GE's strategy at the time was for the R&D center to receive 25% of its operating budget from headquarters, with the remaining 75% coming from other business units to pay for proposals made by the R&D center. The R&D center had to justify its value to the other business units within GE in order to be funded, a system quite similar to the one at ITRI. Currently, 60% of ITRI's budget is subsidized by the government, with the remaining 40% derived from cooperation with industry.

The next-generation concept motorike designed jointly by the ITRI's Creativity Lab and Sanyang Industry features sleek contours, and incorporates a PDA and GPS receiver. The hope is that it will ignite a trend in future motorbikes.

Imagining the future

With an environment for nurturing creative ideas in place, the question remains of where the ideas themselves come from.

Hsueh points out that while the inspiration for ideas seems to come from nowhere, a scrutiny of history reveals that outbursts of creativity have often occurred in the gray area where two different fields converge.

For example, the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 overlapped the fields of expertise of biologist James Watson and physicist Francis Crick, who inspired each other. As another example, Apple Computer founder Steven Jobs successfully combined music technology, a user interface, and industrial design in directing development of the iPod, the most popular consumer electronics product of recent years, creating a product that is also a trendy objet d'art.

Interdisciplinary cooperation has become a defining feature of the current era, and the Creativity Lab's operations began by "collecting" a group of peculiar people.

A graduate of National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, Arthur Y.H. Cheng is typical of the eccentrics at the Creativity Lab. Formerly a university instructor, he was recruited by the lab after presenting a monograph called "Technologically Advanced Countries and Imaginatively Advanced Countries" at a conference organized two years ago by the Center for SF Studies at National Chiao Tung University.

Inquisitive since he was a child, Cheng frequents cinemas in Taipei's Hsimenting district, and researches American and Japanese science fiction cartoons, movies, robots, and video games. He often laments that the Chinese-speaking world rarely produces works of science fiction that can stand with those from America or Japan.

"Ninety percent of science fiction explores the world of the future. Technology is a tool for building a bridge to the future. Yet there is hardly any discussion in the Chinese-speaking world about what sort of revolutionary changes will be brought by technology. Is this not alarming?" he asks.

"I believe that imagination about the future and business innovation are definitely related. And works of science fiction can aid people in coming up with technology ideas," he says. Cheng points out that people in Japan first imagined a world with robots before beginning to actually produce them. By 2000, Japan had 153 companies manufacturing robots. In the US, the television series Lost in Space and the novel Childhood's End (which partially inspired the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) appeared not long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

The exhibit called "Water Machine" is a mechanical boat that resembles a ray fish. Because its surface is smooth, it can move forward rapidly when propelled by a pump. Horus Shu, its inventor, says that with 70% of the Earth's surface covered by seas, objects modeled on marine creatures will be helpful in future deep-sea scientific research.

Discarding old ways of thinking

The outside world looks askance at the Creativity Lab, whose thinking and methods run counter to those of ITRI's other departments, curious about what results its members can produce.

At a recent demo, the prototypes of many new products were shown, but even more in evidence was the process of how ideas come into being. For example, entertainment technology researcher Lin Ying-tzu used computer imaging to describe her idea for a modified mirror. The notion came from her habit of looking at herself in a mirror. Because many women squeeze their pimples while at the bathroom mirror, they naturally wish that the mirror could locally enlarge the reflected image of a pimple so that it could be seen more clearly.

Shouldering the burden of the demand for results that comes from both within and without ITRI, Hsueh explains that prior demos were not launches for technology or products, but represented a return to a state of innocence in the face of completely new ways of thinking. Many people believe, she says, that "bold thinking requires a radical departure from practical matters, but as long as the right partner is chosen, you are firmly resolved, and are willing to try, success is within reach."

The MIT Media Lab and the Lego Group jointly developed a robot made of blocks. It uses a simple program that allows the operator to control the robot's various movements. Robot competitions have been a staple of creativity competitions for children, both in Taiwan and abroad.

Giving space for ideas

Ever since its founding, the Creativity Lab has received the most attention for spurring the creation of Taiwan's first cross-industry "next-generation creative alliance," the Next Consortium.

For an annual fee of NT$6.8 million, members can share in the MIT Media Laboratory's research projects, and through mutual cooperation they can draw on creative resources in other industries in developing new product concepts.

A delegate for one of the member companies, Sanyang Industry vice president Frank C. C. Lin, points out that in October 2004, his company's president Huang Kuan-wu visited his counterpart at ITRI, presenting his vision of "Sanyang the manufacturer becoming Sanyang the innovator," with the end result being a joint project.

The global motorbike market, says Lin, is roughly 30 million units. Taiwan produces just 700,000, while China produces around 15 million. A single factory in China has a production capacity that surpasses that of Taiwan as a whole. Therefore, the biggest challenge for Sanyang is how to get consumers around the world acquainted with Taiwan-made motorbikes. Last year, Sanyang sent four employees to visit the MIT Media Lab, and brain-stormed with the Creativity Lab team. They developed a concept motorbike that reflected their imagination of future transportation.

A vendor shows off a Japanese-made robot that can dance, turn somersaults, and perform pushups, exciting the curiosity of the engineers on hand.

Releasing latent potential

However, people wonder why Next Consortium did not attract the participation of the neighboring Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park (HSIP).

"Perhaps that's due to the vendors still being quite profitable. They don't feel pressure to transform their businesses and don't feel they need to spend money on abstract ideas. Also, the HSIP is extremely tech-oriented. The vendors don't deal with end users, so they don't sense any urgency with the creativity issue," explains Hsueh.

"Taiwan still has a great deal of potential that has not been unleashed," Hsueh says. For technologists, who are used to right-brain rational thinking, exploiting the potential latent in the emotional left-brain may bring forth Tai-wan's next economic miracle.

The Topobo blocks brought by a researcher from MIT's Media Lab can not only be used to build various objects, but "active" blocks can be built into "joints" that the builder wishes to move. The memory chips integrated into the blocks use embedded programs to record twists or displacements. The assembled blocks can then automatically repeat the recorded movements, and a dog that can walk and turn its head is born.

With a background in engineering herself, the Creativity Lab's director Hsueh Wen-jean hopes to use humanistic thought to unleash the creative potential of technologists.