What Musical minds teach us about Innovation

I designed this series of posters and branding for a music-themed event featuring IDEO partner Michael Hendrix. During the event in Tokyo, Michael spoke about his book, Two Beats Ahead, and also performed music alongside the modular synthesizer player Rintaro Anraku.

In designing the posters, I drew on the idea of modular synthesizers and on a theme from Two Beats Ahead about finding design inspiration in unlikely combinations — like Jimmy Page’s unusual use of a cello bow to play guitar for Led Zeppelin.

Modular synthesizers work by generating electronic waveforms like sine waves and then manipulating them to create new sounds. This itself was once an unlikely combination — electrical waves and music. I decided to create my own unlikely combination of electrical waves and paper to create visuals for the event.

I created the backgrounds for the posters by programming a robotic arm called Line-Us to continuously draw modular synthesizer-style sine waves onto paper using a pencil. I photographed and recolored the drawings before adding them to the poster designs.

In addition to the posters, I used video of the robot drawing the waves for digital signage featured at the event. The video, seen below, shows the rhythmic, almost musical movement of the robot as it translates digital signals to pencil on paper.

The Python script I wrote to draw wave patterns can be found here.