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Idris Brewster: Bringing history to life with augmented reality
00:28:05
We speak with Idris Brewster about how he found his way into the realm of augmented reality technology, how cultural moments can change historical perspectives, and the power of location-based storytelling and designing for discovery.
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- [00:01]
Idris Brewster
The collective memory within the country has been fractured, portions have been erased. And so we want to create a groundswell and a movement, a people powered movement to really represent and fill in those gaps of history so that we are represented, our stories are told, and they are taken in.
- [00:24]
Aaron Walter
There are memorials to the Holocaust called stapplerstein, or stumbling stones that memorialize some of the victims of the tragic event. With small brass stones placed in the cobblestone streets outside their last known residence, these poignant objects create moments for reflection and awareness of the invisible history that hides behind modern streets. Here in the United States, though, we have important points of history that often go unnoticed. Our guest today, Idris Brewster, aims to change that, and with the Kinfolk foundation, which uses augmented reality to shift how we learn about our history, bringing it.
- [01:01]
Eli Woolery
To life right in front of our eyes.
- [01:03]
Unknown
We speak with Idris about how he found his way into the realm of augmented reality technology, how cultural moments can change historical perspectives, and the power of location based storytelling and designing for discovery. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:22]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter. You can get ad free episodes discounts on our workshops, get access to our documentaries like Design Disruptors and our growing library of books, as well as our monthly AMA's with big names in design and tech by becoming a Design Better Premium subscriber. It's also the best way to support our work. Visit designbetterpodcast.com subscribe to learn more Foreign hi there, Aaron Walter here. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers Enjoy weekly episodes, four episodes per month in total rather than two. All ad free and invitations to our monthly AMA's with the smartest folks in design and tech. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. It's just $7 a month and it supports not only your personal growth, it also makes our work at DesignBetter possible. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, email us@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out. And now back to the show. Idris Brewster, welcome to Design Better.
- [03:05]
Idris Brewster
Thank you for having me, Idris.
- [03:07]
Aaron Walter
You've been doing really interesting work with Kinfolk, an organization that you co founded that is really at the intersection of Storytelling and technology, and we want to dive into that. But maybe first we could just learn a little bit more of your backstory, because the collection of skills required to do what you're doing seems pretty unique.
- [03:28]
Idris Brewster
Yeah, I definitely had an eclectic upbringing where I was engaging with a lot of different mediums and a lot of just different activities in general. I mean, I'm from Brooklyn, New York, born and raised, lived in Fort Greene, which at the time was one of the premier, like black neighborhoods in New York City, and a very historical neighborhood that's really where the Underground railroad passed through in Brooklyn and Fort Greene in larger downtown Brooklyn. And so I was lucky enough to grow up in that neighborhood and was doing a bunch of different things. Like I was playing a lot of basketball. I was very competitive in basketball, which taught me a lot of drive, discipline. I was engaging in the arts. My parents are filmmakers, and so there was a lot of dealing and making artwork, playing around with that. I was also a big video game player. I think I grew up in front of a TV screen playing a lot of video games.
- [04:22]
Unknown
What were some of your favorites?
- [04:24]
Idris Brewster
Some of my favorites? Oh my God, it runs the gamut. I mean, I'm an original Pokemon guy, right? I was on the Game Boy color way back in the day, Zelda, Smash Bros. And then getting into more of the. Got into like shooters and when I got an Xbox and sort of middle school, high school. So I was playing Halo, a lot of sports video games. And then Grand Theft Auto was always a big one. I love the open world aspect of things. And so Now I'm also PS5 playing Elden ring and other sort of fantasy type games, Final Fantasy. And so I've run the gamut again in terms of my video game interests. But that was always a big thing for me, right? Like learning through playing, learning through doing. That's sort of how I engage with information throughout my life. And so before I went to college, I sort of got into art, right? Got into graphic design, I got into sound design, making music, making a lot of hip hop beats. And so that's really where I started to explore, I would say, the materiality of technology in a way. Really getting into digital art in all senses of it. And as that progressed, I was really also getting into the analog aspect. My sound practice really graduated to exploring analog sound, taking vinyls and taking the sound into the digital space and sort of remixing it, collaging it. I like to think of myself sometimes as an archivist of sound, taking these old records from the 70s and 80s and reformatting them into something that is modern or futuristic. And so that was a lot of the stuff I was doing in high school was exploring those lanes. But I had parents who wanted the best for me, so school was always an important thing. So I went to college thinking I was going to be a doctor, right? Trying to impress my father who was a doctor as well. And that didn't work out, right. Like in college I was. Took a biology course and I was like, this is not for me, this is not my thing. But where I found my solace and my interest was in cognitive science and computer science. So those are my majors in college with a concentration in artificial intelligence. So that's what I was exploring. And from there I think I was able to get my hands on a early version of the Oculus. So I was in college, 2012 through 2016, and at that time the Oculus wasn't available for the public. The DK2 version is what I was able to get my hands on. My senior year, I got a grant from the school that allowed me to get a computer to run the VR experience and then was able to get the Oculus DK2 to mess around with it. Did studies on it in terms of focusing on emotions and cognition within virtual environments. And, and that was really exciting to me because it got to blend a lot of the things I was interested in, like different kinds of visual media, sound, audio, as well as that exploratory aspect like video games that I was talking about and narrative. I think it was an interesting hodgepodge of all these different kinds of mediums and different kinds of ways of engaging with the world that hit you at once, but also replicated your feeling of reality. And so that's where my interest was blending in college. And then afterwards I went to work at Google at Code Next, which was a program that taught black and brown youth in New York City how to do computer science through the lens of arts and play. And so that's sort of where I was beginning to educate and teach the youth and the next generation about getting hands on activities and hands on engagement with technology. Not being passive content consumers, but being active creators. And that's sort of where the work of kinfolk started to unfold because I was doing that in my free time, was really building AR. I never did AR before 2017, after I got out of college, but took a lot of time to understand and explore because New York City was considering what to do with their monuments. There was a reckoning around the Christopher Columbus Monument and so my friends and I at the time, we wanted to create these alternatives, explorations of what public space could look like if it was representative of the people that lived in the city. Mostly underrepresented, black, brown, Latinx folks. And so we started creating these digital monuments and started bringing them to public spaces, did demonstrations and gave people hands on time to explore. We really, we were lugging around like this black plastic bag with canvases and with our iPads and would bring them to meetups, galleries, public spaces, to really give people a hands on experience. With the prototype that we were creating, it was very scrappy. We were scrappy at that time, but it was really something new. And we were trying to mix a bunch of different things together, inspired by Pokemon Go, which was how we could really, how could we make the history of our city accessible from our phone and from our device. So that was sort of the genesis and nexus of Kinfolk, which was, I think, representative of a blend of my interests growing up and getting to that point.
- [09:19]
Unknown
Yeah, speaking of a blend of interests, your project sits somewhere between art education and technology. Maybe you could give us just a quick overview of what the experience is for folks who might want to use Kinfolk.
- [09:32]
Idris Brewster
Yeah, I think the experience for Kinfolk has evolved over time. I think this is a good moment to talk about how Kinfolk came to be. I mean, as you were probably aware, I mean, product design, you never build the product you want in the beginning. And it was a process to get to that vision of we want to activate public spaces with our information and with our stories and our culture. But we started in 2017. We're building prototypes, got a few residencies at museums and artist spaces that allow me to leave my job. And Kinfolk was the product of a lot of experimenting and prototyping from 2017 till 2020, when we released Kinfolk for the first time. But of course, it was during COVID that it was released. And so we couldn't achieve our original vision of activating public spaces. It wasn't safe to go outside. And so we released it as a way to bring these experiences and these monuments into your own living room. So there's a few kind of different modes of augmented reality. One of those is called Surface detection mode, where you can use the camera to recognize surfaces like your table, floor, walls, and you can place digital content within that space and it's anchored there. You can walk around and experience it. And so that was sort of the original version of Kinfolk. You could bring these monuments, create your own virtual gallery. And learn about these histories and bring these historical figures into your living room. But then as we got to get more traction, more support, by early 2023, we were able to start working on the location based version of Kinfolk and really full circle. Niantic reached out to us because they had a backend solution for geolocation technology called Lightship, which they were offering out to partners to become dev partners. And so we partnered with Niantic to incorporate their technology into our backend. So that allowed us to achieve that vision, finally, of activating these locations where people could just discover monuments and histories around their city. And so the experience now it depends on where you are. I think as a small tech nonprofit scale is an interesting question. And so we are limiting the amount of cities we're in. So if you're in New York, if you're in the Bay Area, you can experience Kinfolk in its true form, which is the location based experience. You open the app, you can go to a map and there are pins around the map, locations that are where these monuments are activated. Some of them are walking tours, some of them are singular. So that's really the experience there. And once you're able to go to that space, all you have to do, I think the brilliant part of this technology, all you have to do is pull out the phone. It recognizes where you are, and it pulls up the monument right in front of you and you can listen to the audio of the monument. We like to bring a lot of immersive environmental audio that really helps you time travel. We found that audio is like the glue to these immersive experiences that really brings people in. And then there's a whole library of content, archival content, that is accessible. Symbols are important in America, but we also want people to dive deep and engage with the history. And so you can scroll through archival media, videos, audio, photographs, music, and links that really help tell the full story of the history that we're trying to tell. So that's the experience. But. But usually if you're in another city, which we have plenty of users in other cities, you don't get that geolocation mode. So what my favorite thing is we can shapeshift the app based on where you are. A user in Missouri has a completely different experience than a user in New York, but there's no map option. And you're really here to engage with the in place mode, which is where you can bring this in your own space. So balancing scale has been interesting, but that's a general experience map for Kinfolk.
- [13:20]
Aaron Walter
That's great. I mean, it's so fascinating to see the way that you're using these technologies. It's almost like it's the right time. Where you talk about, there's geolocation, there's AR VR, is, you know, maybe another direction that this might go. I can't help but think of apps like Gala, which I was a huge fan of back in the day, where it was sort of like you would discover objects as you go through the world a lot like, you know, the Pokemon Go experience, where you go search and find things. But scale, I mean, there's so much potential with this. I live in Athens, Georgia, and there's a lot of history here. Just down the road from me was where one of the last mass lynchings was, and people drive by it every day and they don't know about it. And the barn where Emmett Till was murdered, There's a new book that just came out about that same deal. It's storing, like, Christmas decorations and so forth. It's just like it's a piece of very important history that is unseen. So there's just so much potential with this sort of technology. Have y'all explored ways to bring other people into the creation process? And if so, then how do you then curate what goes into the archive of stories?
- [14:38]
Idris Brewster
Yeah. First off, aside, we're working in Atlanta, so I don't know if that's close to Athens, Georgia, but there's history of forced labor in and around in Atlanta. Yeah. And so we're working with the communities there and the national center for Civil and Human Rights to really activate the story. There's a new park called Westside park that was built, so we're working to let people know that the ground that you're walking on was formed by forced labor. Bellwood Quarry over there was where there was a forced labor camp. And so that is just a representative of the everyday spaces that we're walking around. We don't know about just the sheer amount of information that needs to be tied to space in place. There's a lot of work to do, which can be daunting, but fuels where we're trying to go. But I think the offering that we have is that participatory design. I think a lot of the times in social media companies, big tech companies, it's an extractive relationship with the users, with the audience, where they're submitting their data to few fuel the profit of this company and the longevity of the company. And we're sort of interested in how can we in A participatory way, create a container for our collective memory. Because the collective memory within the country has been fractured, portions have been erased. And so we want to create a groundswell and a movement, a people powered movement, to really represent and fill in those gaps of history so that we are represented, our stories are told, and they are taken in. And so I think a lot of the efforts is to engage communities, engage people, and not necessarily engage digital creators. Right. We could be an agency that's just creating our own monuments, own experiences, putting that out in places. But a lot of the work and the reason why we took the nonprofit route is because we wanted to empower communities to do that themselves. We want to create an alternative to the cultural creation spaces in our digital world that are available, that can give people power, ownership, and stewardship over their own narratives and stories. And so the monuments are all created in collaboration with local community members, local grassroots organizations, and artists and historians. Right. We have programs and partnerships that are the core of how content is curated within Kinfolk. And the future vision for Kinfolk is to become sort of the premier cultural curational platform that's out there. I think there's a lot of need and a lot of desire from the general public for technology spaces they can trust, they can be a part of, and they can have stewardship over. And so that's where we really see a gap in how people are engaging with critical information around our history, our narratives, and our culture. And that's the space that we want to fill. And so our monuments will partner with the local grassroots organization who has ties within their community. I think in New York it was easier because I'm from there, our team lives there. But as we branched out and started to scale, it became a little bit more of a challenge because we're not from these spaces. We really prioritize the voices of the communities to tell their stories. And we don't want to be the middleman or speak for anyone. And so building trust within the spaces we're working with was super important as we take a sort of hyperlocal, as national approach as we scale. And so we'll work with a community organization who has a community who is really involved already in the preservation of their history and their stories, and will form focus groups, design workshops, imagination workshops we call them, so that they can start to imagine what histories they want to tell and then really engage them in the design process of monuments. I think that's one thing that hasn't been generally available to the general public, is what Is it like to create and visualize a monument that's usually left to artists? And people often don't even have a say in what monuments are put up in their spaces. And so we really like to engage the general public in terms of, I want a monument of Toussaint Leverture, the Haitian revolutionary. All right, now let's start thinking about how to design that. What values did Toussaint bring? What ethos do you want this monument to have? How do you want that experience to feel? And I think that really speaks to our process of creating monuments. It's really entrenched in the research and the history. And then figuring out the way to visualize that is super important. And that's a lot of the work we do with communities is really give them the imaginative power to bring these histories to life in a visual way. So that's really the process of how we try to work with partners. And of course, we do artist exhibitions as well, where we work with more traditional artists, not digital artists. So that's sculptors, painters, conceptual artists, filmmakers, to really be able to tell the story in this new medium. So we have a 3D team on our side who is spending a lot of time collaborating with artists as well as these local community members and historians to bring these stories to life.
- [19:42]
Aaron Walter
I wonder if you could give us a simple, concise explanation of the experience for listeners so they can sort of conjure that in their heads.
- [19:51]
Idris Brewster
So I would say imagine you are walking around Brooklyn Bridge park and you are strolling through the park and you get a notification on your phone that tells you that you are near a hidden history. You click on the notification, it opens up the Kinfolk app, and you are met with a map that's able to show you all of the important hidden histories that are around you. You can engage in wayfinding to find your way to that monument. And once you click on that monument, it spawns right in front of you. Takes a little bit of time to load, but if you're looking out on the water of the east river with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, and a 300 foot afro pick pops up out of the water into your face and it's right there and you can walk left, right, it's staying in that space as if it was there in real life. And if you're able to click on it, you can able to hear the artist statement, right, Hear what the artist's concept around that monument was and dig into the archives of the Black Power movement, the history of the Afro pick. There's A lot of history that's left to be uncovered. And we want to bring these stories to life through AR right in front of you, where you're at. And so that's the main experience. That's what it's like to experience kinfolk. The discovery is really important.
- [21:09]
Unknown
Idris. I think we'll want to dive a little deeper into the design process, what it's like to design the monuments, the technology you're using. As an aside, you were talking about partnerships and also archives. And before we started recording, you mentioned this project with James Baldwin. And both Aaron and I are big fans of his writing. So maybe you could talk about that real quick before we go back over to the design process.
- [21:30]
Idris Brewster
The paths that the people before us have walked are extremely important to have an understanding of. And the histories that existed, the wisdom that comes from our ancestors, there needs to be better ways for that to be infused into the mainstream. And so we were meeting with the Baldwin family because they wanted to see a better representation from their perspective on James Baldwin's wisdom and wanted that wisdom to be shared with everyone around the Baldwin 100, which is the 100th anniversary of James Baldwin, that is actually this year. And so they approached us to be able to make that come to life. And we saw this as an opportunity to really create a model for what celebrating cultural legacy can look like in the digital age. There's not too many models that are repeatable that are using that. And so what we ended up doing is we're creating a AI solution, a solution that incorporates AI to be able to connect people with an archive, a treasure trove of wisdom of James Baldwin. And it's going to be a more interactive way to engage with archival information. We're putting it in the form of a game, we call them wisdom cards, where people can draw cards from a deck that has all of James Baldwin wisdom through quotes. And when you draw the cards, you're then able to engage with all the archival media that relates to those certain quotes. And so I think the point of the James Baldwin project is to be able to get people closer, to draw wisdom from the history and the stories of James Baldwin to apply to their personal life. Right. There's a lot of learnings that folks can have from reading James Baldwin's books, his quotes, his letters, seeing his interviews. And so we want to be able to make that accessible, especially in a day and age where reading is becoming less and less, and we're getting further away from that era of revolutionaries and imagineers. And so this is A model that we're doing with James Baldwin and his family that we want to be able to extend to other cultural legacies as we move through the years.
- [23:46]
Unknown
Let's talk a little bit more about the design kind of process that you use for these projects. And you touched a little bit on, you know, what is it like to design a monument. But I'm just curious what kind of technology you're using. What are the design tools you're using to work in AR to build these experiences?
- [24:05]
Idris Brewster
The tools have definitely evolved as we've been creating over the last seven years. The tools that we started out with. Right. One, it's Unity. Unity is the main tool that we're building this application in. It's a game design tool. It's sort of the aggregator of all of our content and our experience and our platform. But from there a lot of the work is created in VR programs, right? So we have VR programs. We start out in Tilt Brush, Move to Quill, and these are programs where our co founder, Micah Milner, who has spent some of the most time in the world amongst any human in a VR headset creating and designing, he's a VR artist. He wears a neck brace to be able to create these.
- [24:49]
Aaron Walter
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- [25:24]
Eli Woolery
By subscribing@designbetterpodcast.com DesignBetter is supported by Masterclass.
- [25:37]
Aaron Walter
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- [25:39]
Eli Woolery
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