SOSO: The Magic is When You Can Push the Envelope and Still Resonate
This is what can happen when you use your voice to paint. Images: SOSO
The SOSO studio team combines design and technology to unlock our collective creative potential Take their recent project, Miraj. It is an interactive artwork that allows you to paint with your voice. Say anything, and within seconds, Miraj brings it to life. Thanks to speech recognition, the technology user’s words are used to find matching imagery online and turned into an ever-changing collage.
This mind-bending work is the product of a 20-person studio founded by three MIT grads who blend their backgrounds in architecture, computer science, and media arts. Eric Gunther (Creative Director), John Rothenberg (Managing Director), and Justin Manor (Director of Innovation) built SOSO to transform spaces, tell powerful stories, and meaningfully engage audiences through information and wonder. Recent projects also include Colorspace (an interactive sculpture that translates text messages into breathtaking animations of colored light), Diffusion Choir (a kinetic sculpture that celebrates the organic beauty of collaboration by visualizing the movements of an invisible flock of birds) and the COCA Interactive Community Wall (an experience that encourages visitors and community members to explore and create with their bodies, turning the public lobby of the building into a performance space.) Like we said, mind-bending stuff!
Here, Gunther and Rothenberg share how design and technology work hand in hand to unlock our collective creative potential and bring us closer to ourselves, each other, and the planet.
Eric Gunther is the Creative Director at SOSO.
John Rothenberg leads SOSO at the Managing Director.
How did the three of you come to start SOSO?
John: Way back in the day, coming up on 20 years, we first met when we were students at MIT. I studied architecture, and back then we cut wood and built balsa models—I didn't do any CAD (computer-aided design) my entire undergrad. Eric studied computer science, and Justin was in physics, but we were all into the arts. After we graduated, we ended up working at a traditional design firm and built interactive installations and exhibits for museums all over the world. This space at the time was called computational design or new media design or interactive design, and combined architecture, physics, and computer science, with technology. That’s where SOSO ultimately came from.
What happens when the art from Miraj lights up a building.
What was the importance of bringing together three different disciplines?
Eric: The fun part, to pick up on John's story, was when we started moonlighting as a performance group. We had a monthly performance at this club in Cambridge and we started pushing the technology and creative ideas. That’s where the triangle of different disciplines came into play. It’s interesting to see that thread: When you come at a problem from the different standpoints of technological, architecture, and graphic design, you see each world looks very different. When we did this, we saw new intersections that have become the hallmarks of our creative process.
We made a splash with this in 2008 when we developed sophisticated software tools to remix television in real-time. We remixed the presidential debates in real-time. We held these performances in theaters in different cities, and transformed the video and audio, and took the closed captioning to analyze the language and then put it back together in the debate in these crazy ways that challenged people’s assumptions. That’s when we decided to quit our day jobs and start SOSO.
John: When we started, we were one of the few firms that could do what we did. But over time, access to technology and tools has been democratized. You don't necessarily have to develop your own software or write your own code to do it. The creative tools are so powerful right now and the access to software and the ability to make beautiful work is widespread. Now it's more about the way you approach the problem and apply the technology, not just the fact that you have it. Craft becomes much more important.
One interesting piece for us is our connection to the fields of architecture, graphic design, and computer science. As a multi-disciplinary firm, we have become a refuge for people who think that way, but don't have an opportunity to do that in a normal field. One of our team members was a former linguist. We have great architects on our team. We have people who have created environmental graphics and always imagined a future where they could mix a few more things in their work. This is a safe space to combine fields in new ways and people take off with that.
Eric: When you are able to speak in technology, and then are also equally fluent in design, whether it's graphic design or physical architectural design, the possibilities just explode. I once took a class where you take a problem in thermodynamics and you move it over to electronics and you solve it as a circuit. I always come back to that because that’s what it feels like we are doing all the time: Taking a look at a design problem, then moving it over to technology, then coming back to design. Every time you jump back and forth, you twist it a bit and come up with something new.
At the Chameleon Wall, anyone can share what they want to see in the world now, and that will infuse the wall with color.
What’s your take on AI and the impact it will have on creativity in the future?
Eric: From a creation standpoint it's super exciting. We’re starting to think about it almost like another team member. We have someone on our team who is working on AI coding and talks about how AI doesn’t have the self consciousness of a human creator. AI will bring ideas to the table that most humans feel are too crazy. With Miraj, we bring up the idea of co-creation. We can give people a powerful tool to make them a conductor and operate at a level that is going to have profound ripples in the next 25 years.
John: For years we've been designing with algorithms. Sometimes they would be very simple. Sometimes they will be more complicated. But you're always playing the role of creating the formula, but not necessarily determining the outcome. I see AI more as an amplification or even an exponential version of that. We’ve already developed these skills with generative design, but AI gives us generative design on steroids.
SOSO’s work is multi-dimensional, interacting with both the space and the people on it to bring wonder and joy.
Tell us about the genesis of Miraj.
John: Miraj started when Apple TV came out. We had been doing experiments for voice where you communicate with an artwork and it would create these patterns based on image searches using that phrase. When Apple TV came out, you could talk to your TV and now you have the possibility of an HD artwork in your living room. So we started to prototype and play. It's built on a gigantic artificial intelligence engine that happens to be image search. We wanted to physicalize it and make it immersive; we wanted to make it creative and interactive. We wanted to explore it and see where it goes for the end user.
Eric: That’s been an evolution for us. When we started our company, we wanted to explore things and see where they go. As we’ve matured, we’ve embraced our identity as designers and think a lot more about the end user. We start our process with a strong research phase and persona and journey mapping. But I think you don't want to go too far from inspiration and experimentation because that spark is always going to be the thing that takes people where they have never been before.
At our practice, we wear two hats. Sometimes people come to us as commissioned artists and they give us a blank slate or open-ended brief, like a lobby space and ask what they can put into it. Other times, a company will come to us with the story they want to tell and we've got to break down the stakeholders and content strategy and turn that into a story that has the same energy, excitement and ethos that goes into those lobby artworks. We’ve had to learn to toe the line and sometimes be more user-centric and sometimes be more idea-centric.
John: We've always tried to maintain a practice of creating our own character, ideas and work in the client driven process. That’s where we have a chance to push things out a little further.
Eric: The magic is when you can push the envelope and resonate with others.
John: Here is one piece that comes to mind: We do a bunch of work with vibration, which is kind of an unusual material for designs to use and we did a piece called the “Seated Catalog of Feelings.” You put on headphones and a voice describes these feelings that you then feel through vibrations in the chair. It started as artwork and a few years ago we showed it at the Cooper Hewitt. The response was incredible—I could not have imagined the way people connected with it—even though it was a strange idea. It made us ask, can you tell stories through vibrations?
When you look into the future, what do you see?
Eric: A big one is the use of technology in public spaces to allow people to see themselves in that space. We have pitched this public mural where people can contribute their voice to it, and then anybody can come up to that mural, scan one of the tiles, and hear that person’s voice. Being able to collect people’s voices and put them in a built environment is powerful. Add AI into that and you have that additional layer of meaning and ability to communicate.
John: Eric and I've been talking a lot about opportunities to go beyond just visual design. Technology makes a lot of that possible. What's cool about that is that it can be a very inclusive experience. It can speak to a lot of different abilities and body types. There is so much great visual work out there right now. We're interested in pushing where the audio, visual and tactile and even things like smell and taste, come together.
Eric: It’s in the spirit of creating experiences that people never experienced before. Originality is still a huge part of what drives us. But there's a maturity now where we’re adapting or twisting technologies in a way that people haven't experienced.
What drives each of you to create new experiences that we've never experienced before?
John: Over the past couple years we’ve spent a lot of time understanding our purpose as a design studio. We like to say that “experience is the gateway to better futures.” We’re not out there building a healthcare product that's going to change the world or providing clean drinking water to people who don't have it. We’re here making visually-interesting, emotionally-connecting artwork and experiences. Our thought is that those experiences can transport you from your everyday life and teleport you into a new world. We can snap people out of their everyday life to help them see the world in a new way. Those opportunities to make people see the world anew are rare.
That is motivating. It adds a thread of purpose to everything because you want to see a better future and you can imagine it.
Eric: I feel like if I'm not learning through the process and the work, it doesn’t have the same kind of meaning. We think about how we create projects in relation to our team and the emotional impact it has on them. The path to the launch of the project is becoming more and more important to me.
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