Designer Deron Gopie on tinkering as a tool to explore new technology

Contrary to conventional wisdom, not knowing where you’re going may be a part of how you get there — particularly when “there” involves AI.

All photos by Jarrod Tredway

Tinkering doesn’t have a deadline. There’s an implied casualness to it — an artist tinkers with a pencil, playing or doodling in a way that may seem aimless. Yet, consider Picasso scribbling in ink and the power of the resulting line drawings. In one way, tinkering is experimentation in its purest form. In another, art and innovation are but the culmination of a lifetime of tinkering.

Deron Gopie, Designer at Beyond, made his first foray into tinkering at New York University’s ITP Camp, and has since become a champion for experimentation in the workplace. His work has since manifested in Beyond’s AI Fridays: tinkering time where anyone, in any role, can spend a few hours on their wildest AI ideas in a sort of pop-up academy where no idea is too silly and no one is setting a brief.

ITP Camp (or “The Un-university”) is described as “a playground for creative and techy people who want to shake things up.” The camp runs for 4 weeks as an abridged version of the university’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, bringing campers and counselors together to share ideas and meddle, fiddle, explain, and explore an array of technologies. They make magic, which Deron attributes to the variety of backgrounds in the people who attend. “When creative and technical minds really reach in both directions, it builds a greater sense of empathy and manifests in incredible new things,” he says. “Tinkering closes the gap between creative thinkers and technologists, showing you don’t have to just sit on either end of the spectrum.”

“Tinkering closes the gap between creative thinkers and technologists, showing you don’t have to just sit on either end of the spectrum.”

The first time Deron attended ITP camp, he was a rookie who was not sure what to expect. “I took the mindset that I should open up my mind and keep my ears open to listen,” he says. “Listening is critical. It’s so limiting to confine yourself and never break the mold.” ITP Camp is the opposite of confining yourself — there, you’re more likely to find a designer, a yoga instructor, a back-end developer, and a poet working together on something ingenious. Deron absorbed everything he could, attending classes and seminars, asking questions, and immersing himself in the camp’s culture of innovation. 

Then, he had a year to tinker.

The phrase “The Art of Tinkering” was catapulted into the public consciousness by the 2014 book of the same name by Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich. Wilkinson and Petrich wrote from the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio where they started a tinkering renaissance. Founded by Frank Oppenheimer (brother to Manhattan Project director, Robert), it became a blueprint for science museums around the world. The studio is the result of a scientist's total understanding that to meddle, play, inquire, and fiddle is to create. 

Deron’s second year at Camp saw him even more ready to create, having spent the last 12 months tinkering with concepts that interested him: He learned to code. He studied photography to get better results from AI image generators. He kept his mind open and built new doors to experimenting with things that his role as a designer didn’t necessarily require. He came back to Camp with a class to teach and an invention to realize. 

Deron grins as he discusses his teaching experience. “It was so unexpected and so enlightening. I taught a session on creating images using AI tools in part because I had built up this intuitive understanding over a year of tinkering.” Still, he says, “What I know now about AI didn’t just come from what I took in about the topic. Even in the act of teaching, I was still learning.”

“Even in the act of teaching, I was still learning.”

Deron’s class culminated in a good-natured, head-to-head AI prompt battle. Deron remembers the response from his students: “First, there was a certain level of intimidation around AI. A lot of people thought they were so far away from being able to create something, but that session showed the gap between what they already knew and what they needed to know was very minimal. It actually put the tools in their hands to go off and tinker on their own and discover.” Tinkering transported his students from a fear of the unknown to enthusiasm for AI innovation and gave them an eagerness to create responsibly.

What it means to Deron to use AI responsibly comes back to two of Beyond’s AI principles: Put people at the center and Amplify human creativity. “For me, it helps to put myself in others’ shoes. The grander and more complete perspective is that we’re in a world of technology and people,” he says. The most important thing for Deron is the promise of possibility. From his first job in college as a Social Media Manager to his current role as Designer after a mid-career apprenticeship at BRIDGEGOOD — a nonprofit organization for budding creatives that believes “creativity can change the world” — much of Deron’s career arc has been built on a belief that new technologies offer the possibility of doing something good with them.

“When it comes to the responsible use of AI, it helps to put myself in others’ shoes. The grander and more complete perspective is that we’re in a world of technology and people.”

Alongside his AI class, Deron also began work on an invention. Drawing on his background in industrial design, his idea was one that involved lights, sensors, circuitry, and the lost art of reading. (Asked if he was born in an analog age what kind of tinkerer would he be, Deron thinks for a moment, then says, “A craftsman of some kind, maybe a furniture-maker?…”) These days, though, Deron and a group of his colleagues are most involved in a new project at Beyond: AI Fridays. As generative artificial intelligence evolves, Deron is inviting everyone at Beyond to tinker with the technology. Currently, the one-Friday-a-month sessions are still quite instructional, but they’re yielding exciting and thoughtful results. “The more confident people become, the happier they are to tinker and are now showing up saying, ‘I want to do this,’ or ‘How do I make that?’” Deron says. “It’s surprising how people are running with it, just given the opportunity. It’s wild to watch them go.”

As to Deron’s invention? Well, it’s a stroke of genius, but right now, he’s still tinkering with it.