David Reinfurt, Author — A *New* Program for Graphic Design

ORG Founder David Reinfurt on how identity intersects design, and what art and design have in common.

For the first episode of 2020, I spoke with David Reinfurt, founder of ORG, half of Dexter Sinister, and author of a new program for graphic design. In the interview, David and I unpack the various ways identity has intersected with his work and collaborations, how art and design are linked, and the origin of the iconic MTA ticket vending machines in New York. Let's get started.

---

Liam Spradlin: David, welcome to Design Notes.

David Reinfurt: Thank you.

Liam: So to start off the same way I always do, I want to know a little bit about the journey that brought you to your current work, and also how that journey has influenced the type of thing that you're doing now.

David: I've worked as an independent graphic designer in New York for 20 years. Before that, I went to graduate school and studied graphic design. Before that, I worked in graphic design, and before that, I didn't study graphic design. So it's a, I think typically circuitous route to the work that I do now. Perhaps the most important thing to know is that during the 20 years of working independently, I've worked with always collaborating with others.

Liam: The first thing that I want to talk about, because this is something that I use all the time and that I've actually studied in the past for projects that I was working on, and that's the MTA vending machines, and they have this very enduring and iconic interface for New Yorkers and anyone who's traveled to New York. So I want to hear a little bit of that story from you.

David: My second professional job was working at IDEO in San Francisco. I started working there in 1995. At the time, I had moved from New York City, where I'd worked in a small graphic design studio. I was interested in interface design, interaction design as it was called at the time at IDEO. And I made contact with the San Francisco office, which at the time was, I think, maximum 13 people. So IDEO was a very different place at that point. I was offered a job, and I moved out to California to become an interaction designer, one of only a few in the studio there. While working at IDEO, after, uh, maybe about a year, a project came in, a last-minute project came in from the MTA in New York.

David: And as I had just moved from New York and was a little bit pining for New York while living in San Francisco, I knew how important this project was. I was the youngest in the office, and my billable time was probably the last costly. Turns out the project was, um, IDEO was called in at the last moment to reconsider the interface design that was already built out by Cubic Westinghouse. That's the company, a defense contractor, and they also built all of the furniture for the subways, based in San Diego. Um, they're very good at building robust machinery, and turnstiles, et cetera.

David: They're less savvy at designing interfaces, certainly at that time. The metro card touchscreen vending machine was set to arrive already in three years from that point, so this was a very last-minute design rescue job. Masamichi Udagawa is a product designer at IDEO who had recently started around the same time that I had. He was set up to open the New York office of IDEO. He had recently worked as a product designer at Apple, designing one of the PowerBooks. Prior to that, he worked at Yamaha, and he was a much more established and, um, mature product designer.

Masamichi and I had struck up a friendship pretty quickly, and we both clamored to work on this project. Made a lot of sense, since he was going to be the New York office, based out of his apartment on 16th Street, right nearby here. And, uh, I was just simply maybe pushy enough or cheap enough to get put on the project, as well. We had a clear communication with the MTA, facilitated by Sandra Bloodworth, who was head of arts for transit, who brought in IDEO to this project. Masamichi handled all of the coordination with the client and with Sandra Bloodworth and the others at the MTA. I was the lead designer on the inter, on the interface. I was the lead interaction designer for it.

The project began with an existing spec and existing interface. We took that apart pretty quickly to understand what could be changed and what could not be changed around that. Kathleen Holman was also an interaction designer at IDEO at the time, worked on Nokia phone interfaces, and she was based in London. So I moved to London for about three months to work on this project. I was based in a small attic in Camden in IDEO in the kind of overflow space of IDEO, so again, it's worthwhile noting that the kind of liminal space of working small and kind of out of the flow of other projects allowed this to proceed relatively smoothly.

From the beginning, I was already interested in how to make this interface something that would persist, that would last. And so the graphic design of it uses coarse graphics. In fact, the type was huge on screen at the time. We would be used to seeing 12 point, 14 point type, on a screen interface to this point. This was absolutely gargantuan. And this was a practical consideration that was developed as we worked through the project, to do with the relative coarseness of the touchscreen that was going to be used and the novelty of a touchscreen interface at that point in time, as well.

The initial design work proceeded through a process which the MTA had set up, which included a number of review milestones and, uh, small user testing groups. It was quick. It was six months. Um, the principal design work both on the hardware, which Masamichi was doing with Cubic Westinghouse, as well as the interface, software design, was a very compressed process, and again, I think the combination of one primary contact at the MTA, an extremely compressed design process, and perhaps a acknowledgment of how contested this screen real estate would be in the future, all ended up in a project which wrapped up in six months and left plenty of room for it to change as it needed to.

At that point, then I decided to go back, do graduate school at the Yale School of Art and study graphic design properly. I could've kept on working at IDEO, but something told me that I needed to give myself a little bit more, uh, nutrition to continue to do graphic design for a long time. So I started back in school in 1997. All of the graphics and hardware spec had been sent off to Cubic. The project went away, essentially, for two years. By February of 1999, the first machine was installed in the 68th Street Hunter College station on the 6 Line. And I went to go see it with Masamichi, and I was stunned, stunned, that the interface was almost exactly as sent. I had already been through enough projects where the manufacturer was divorced from the design and been disappointed with the results, and so I was flabbergasted and excited that it was, it matched what was the design intent.

It changed in the details, and it continues to change, and in fact, the aspect of this project that I feel most pleased with, this has existed for 20 years now, is the ability for it to accept change over the course of its lifetime.

Liam: I'm really interested in this relationship between the work that was happening on the interface design and the hardware design because it's a device where you have to use both in order to have a successful interaction with it, and the interface is built to account for all of the people who would be using it in New York, so I'm interested in, what are some of the specific details that allowed you to accomplish that, especially, as you said, at a time when touchscreen interfaces in public were still a novelty?

David: We took as a given that we would make direct links between all the parts of the machine you needed to touch and what you needed to touch on the screen. We decided to use color to link the parts of the machine directly to the interface, and we went through a couple of rounds of even more direct links between what you see onscreen and what you see offscreen, but for example, when the interface asks you to put in cash, then the instruction bar is green, and that links to the area that's green on the machine.

Masamichi designed those areas of interaction with the machine with exaggerated geometric shapes, which also pulled out the colors. All of this was done in order to make it as direct as it could be, to link what you're doing onscreen with what you're doing offscreen, but particularly because you might be using a credit card, you might be using cash. You have to have a place to have a receipt. The metro card asked you to do a transaction which is unfamiliar, which is you can restore value on a card, and so you have to put in your card, get it loaded up, and then get it back out. And so all of these seemed like significant enough kind of interaction design problems with the machine itself that making the link between what's happening onscreen, the instructions, and what's happening offscreen, had to be as direct as it possibly could be.

Liam: I want to get into your work at ORG, but first, I want to ask who is Dexter Sinister?

David: Dexter Sinister is a shared name that I share with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, who's a graphic designer who know lives in London. Stuart and I have known each other for 20 years and worked together for about 13 years under that name. Dexter Sinister began as a project for an art biennial. The Manifesta 6 biennial on the island of Cyprus. It evolved into a space on the Lower East Side in a basement on Ludlow Street, which was a bookstore we ran once a week. It was a studio, and it was a space for event. The name of that space was Dexter Sinister. The bookstore ran one day a week on, on Saturdays for 5 years. Another 5 years after that, by appointment. It was small. All of this is rather small-scale. Very small-scale.

Dexter Sinister, then after setting up the bookstore, running events in the space, and collaborating on design projects, we started to be invited into art exhibition projects or things which didn't really fall into graphic design clearly. And we welcomed those invitations because the invitation was so strange to what we did. We are both rooted very firmly in graphic design as a kind of discipline or an identity or something like this. However, we've made exhibitions for about those 13 years all around the world in institutions of various sizes, from MoMA to like a small gallery or a basement somewhere. In these exhibition projects, we have tended to treat the invitations as design projects in one way or the other.

So when asked to show a piece of work in an exhibition, we've often turned around that request and said, "Well, we'll do the graphic design for the exhibition as a work in the exhibition." It's still fresh. The piece of that work that I remain very committed to is the way in which it troubled distinctions between, uh, what are the limits of a graphic design practice. How can you intersect it? What does it need to do in the world? Et cetera. That's Dexter Sinister.

Liam: There's a lot in there that I would love to dig into.

David: Okay.

Liam: First of all, I guess, how does graphic design as a practice intersect with art, practically?

David: It's adjacent, I think.

Liam: Hmm.

David: A certain segment of graphic design certainly works closely with the contemporary art as a client, so that's the way I was introduced, I think. So in 2008, Dexter Sinister was invited by the Whitney Museum to participate in the biennial. We were invited, we were given three possibilities for how we might participate. We could design the catalog. That's pretty straightforward. We could design, edit, and produce a kind of separate catalog, which would be a parallel to the existing institutional catalog. Or we could make an autonomous project in the show as an artist.

We decided to take the third option because it seemed the farthest from our comfort level. But the project that we proposed back to them was called True Mirror. For that project, we, Dexter Sinister set up a press office in the exhibition behind a hidden door in a secret room, and we went to work there every day for three weeks, and we collaborated with approximately 30 artists, writers, um, designers, curators, other creative people, to write a press release about the show. The Whitney Museum was kind enough to give us access to all of their email and fax and other press contacts.

We sent these press releases out as if they came from the Whitney, although they were coming from us, and so we would design the layout of the press releases in a certain way or consider how they were distributed. For example, one of those press releases was a piece of music performed on a Saturday afternoon at the Whitney biennial, but we called it a press release. This seems like a straightforward art project, in a way, or maybe not so straightforward. I think the distinction I would highlight is that the work itself attempts to be useful, which is usually anathema to artwork, where its uselessness is what often gives it agency. It becomes something you can think about the world through because it doesn't have to do any work in the world.

I think I'm always interested in troubling that distinction, and so I think graphic design and art are certainly separate, but I think you can approach graphic design as ambitiously as you can approach art.

Liam: I think as we talk about these distinctions and also about Dexter Sinister itself, particularly with Dexter Sinister, it seems like this is an identity that is shared, not just between people, but between physical location and programs that happen at that physical location. And it seems like there's a certain filling up of this identity that maybe explodes what's contained inside of identity itself, and I'm curious how this approach to identity impacts the work or how you think about the work or how other people think about the work?

David: That's a perceptive question–

Liam: (laughs)

David: Perceptive insight. People are always confused. What is Dexter Sinister? We never set out to make it confusing, to make it obscure. In fact, just the opposite, really. But I do think, uh, the way we've treated the name and the way we've treated the work, it jumped from one place to the other. So it's funny you had mentioned identity, as I think that's something that, coming from graphic design, we're particularly attuned to. When we set up Dexter Sinister, we also designed a badge, like a coat of arms, which became our symbol, and I feel like that worked like a typical piece of graphic design. Like the relative success of that mark also amplified what we were doing.

Turns out that the name Dexter Sinister even comes from the design of that mark. In the design of coats of arms, there is a written form, a visual mark, which comes before the mark itself and acts like a set of instructions for how to draw the mark. Our badge is defined by what's called a blazon, a, a, a literal version of it, which is "party per bend sinister," which just means take the form, divide it from the top right to bottom left with a diagonal line. So sinister means left, dexter means right. Hence, the name, Dexter Sinister.

As Dexter Sinister, one project that we made addressed identity very directly. It was an exhibition at Artists Space in New York. I don't remember the year. The name of the exhibition was Identity in quotes, so "Identity." It was a three-screen video about 25 minutes long, which provided a three case studies of art institutions and their relationships to their graphic identity. On the left screen was the Pompidou in Paris, on the middle screen was the MoMa, and on the right was the Tate.

And the work provided a reverse chronology of how they got to their current logo, essentially, and had lots of digressions about the kind of limits of branding in relation to art institutions. This project, I think, addresses some of the same things you're getting at when you, when you say that the name Dexter Sinister bleeds from one kind of identifying capacity to another, so, I, I guess I think that even graphic identity is quite a bit more fluid than the profession wants to identify it as.

Liam: I also want to touch on ORG, which is an organization that you've described as a one-person concern masked as a large organization. It seems to me, especially given the conversation that we've just had and how you mention that graphic design can be ambitious in the same capacity or the same direction as art can, that perhaps positioning an organization this way is itself a kind of commentary.

David: It absolutely is. I incorporated ORG on the first business day of 2000, by design, or by...That happened to be approximately when I needed to do it. The project was self-conscious in its set-up. So ORG, I took the name, as it sounded like the three letter acronym seemed to be a good way to indicate size. I wasn't actually interested in masquerading as a large organization, but I was certainly interested in inhabiting that form, and so I took an office that was on 39th Street in Midtown. I thought that was a good corporate address. When I called the telephone company to get a telephone number for the studio, I asked them to give me as many zeroes as they could give me. And they did. They gave me two. Fairly generous. And a 212 number, so that was good.

I incorporated on the first business day of the new millennium, which was January 3, 2000. I saved or kind of highlighted the papers, which I needed to file in order to become an S corporation in the State of New York. And I wrote a bit of narrative and did some staging of the office in order that it looked kind of bigger than it was. I even ended up writing a piece in The New York Times Magazine about that time that was called "How to Make a One-Person Firm Appear as a Large Organization." I must have written a better title than that, but anyway, it was not the goal just to get press. The goal was to actually do this project where someone might have to hiccup or stop and think for a second about who and how they were hiring this designer.

I guess I'm always interested in questioning or considering the kind of design-client relationship, not as a power grab or anything else, but just as a kind of human reconsideration of it on each project because it's so different, and I think it's very easy to fall into lazy patterns of interaction, which short-circuit what's possible to be made.

Liam: I think it's interesting that ORG is described as another fluid identity of collaborators coming in and out. At times, it's been just you. At times, it's been multiple people. And so it strikes me that that approach can ensure the kind of collaboration that you have said is fundamental to design work, but then there's also the kind of interaction with, like you said, the people who are hiring this organization. And I'm interested in how this approach has impacted those people who hired ORG, and if that thought was sparked as maybe you had hoped.

David: I think sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn't, which also I suppose is not surprising. There are clients I've worked with since then, so that's an awful long time, and so obviously they bought the structure and were influenced by it. I think in almost all the situations where I worked on projects, it was very rarely the case that the clients treated the relationship as a straightforward design-client relationship. I was very fortunate in that way.

When it devolved into a more transactional exchange, then I feel like the work got weaker. I got more frustrated. Likely the people hiring me, as well, got more frustrated. The ORG started out as just me, and then became a kind of, as you were describing, a fluid network of people who were both employed by me or simply a writer who I might be working with would stay in the studio for, you know, two weeks, or might be the case. Or sometimes, simply friends or other designers would use the studio from time to time as a kind of base to do work and have some conversation and these kinds of things.

Liam: I also want to hear about the Demise Party.

David: So I'd run ORG for six years by that point. I was getting increasingly frustrated by, not by the scale, but rather by the kind of waste that was inherent in doing projects which needed a larger scale. And so I wanted to reconsider how I was working. I was feeling frustrated by working quite so hard and having so much of it fall by the wayside, and this didn't feel very effective for the people I was working with. Didn't feel very good for me. So I decided to shut down the studio and recalibrate how I work, and work without any assistance, and to work only with Stuart, in that case, to reconsider the conditions of working, as well.

So Stuart and I had found a small basement space on Ludlow Street on Lower East Side, where the rent was really cheap. Also, by reorganizing the studio, I no longer needed all of the equipment I had in the studio, so I had computers, and I had lots of books and reference materials and tables and lights and even a fax machine, at that point. So the Demise Party I held is a public event where I gave away everything in the studio, so those who participated in kind of building up all the material, they came to this party and just took what they wanted, so computers and lights and tables and printed matter and books, and I found it to be liberating. You can imagine. It sounds like it when you clear out a place.

But also really made me feel very good, as those people I'd formed friendships with probably all of whom I still see now, many have gone on to form other studios, do other things. Anyway, the party, we gave away everything. It all happened in one night. By the end of the night, the studio was trashed, and a lot of the stuff was gone. Not all of it by any stretch. People came back and took tables and other furniture later, but that was the Demise Party.

Liam: It seems like quite a radical approach to closing a place down, to give everything away.

David: It was. I think it's typically theatrical in the way that I've organized my design practice, like-

Liam: Hmm.

David: You know, it was both a practical way to give away everything and a way to flag that up as an event.

Liam: I also want to talk about your new book, A New Program for Graphic Design. The book is based on three courses that you had developed for teaching at Princeton, and I'm really interested in what it's like to translate the foundational material of this book into a book format.

David: We did it in a strange way. Again, using some aspect of theater or performance. I started teaching at Princeton 10 years ago, and I was brought in to invent a graphic design course that had never been taught at Princeton previously. The first course I developed was called Typography, and then that developed into a second course called Gestalt, and a third course called Interface. There are now a couple other courses, as well. There have been several other people teaching with me along the way, including Danielle Aubert and Francesca Grassi, and now, Laura Coombs and Alice Chung. So it's just to say, it was not done by myself in isolation, to be clear about that.

The book began as an invitation by Inventory Press, based in Los Angeles, about three years ago. Actually, the Inventory Press is a partnership of Adam Michaels and Shannon Harvey. Adam used to be part of ORG, so that's how I met him. He knew about the teaching I was doing at Princeton, as I was developing these, these courses, and he thought it might have a broader appeal outside of the classroom. So he invited me to make a book. I had very little desire to write that book, because somehow that felt like it would make the material too static for me, and it was still working material. So we came up with a different way to make the book, which was instead of writing it, to speak it.

We set up a series of three days in Los Angeles, where Inventory Press is based, two summers ago. Over the course of those three days, each day I gave six 45-minutes lectures with 15-minute breaks in between. These were attended by art students from Otis, from CalArts, from ArtCenter, about 60 people a day or something like that, who were patient enough to sit through all of these lectures. All of these, the proceedings were video taped, video recorded, and after the fact, transcribed, and that became the basis of the book. The event itself was carnival-esque. Between the lectures, uh, there was synthesizer music and light shows and some other things. I think that kind of activity helped give the material a bit more levity than it would have otherwise.

It was also an absurd endurance performance. By the third day, after speaking for two days straight, my voice was shot. And I imagine the audience, at least the persistent audience, was flagging by that point. Anyway, that material was transcribed and edited by Eugenia Bell, and that forms the basis of the book. I think what I am very happy with in the book is that the relative casualness of the address, of the text, of the language, makes it feel a bit more like being in a classroom. And I write in the introduction, and this means I said it when I was out there, I said something to the effect that, "This book is not intended to be a kind of graphic design historical canon. These are simply references of models of people that I know and like and share with students, and anybody else would do it totally differently."

And so I suggest to the reader and to the people who were there, I said, "This is a prompt for you to do the same thing. When you finish reading this book, rip it up and make your own." And I think that license is something I'm always trying to get across in teaching. Like, as a student, you can absorb what you hear in the classroom, but it will only be valuable when you redo it for yourself.

Liam: I think it's really interesting that you delivered the book in that format. But a book is definitely still quite a solid artifact and can't necessarily reproduce the interaction that you might get between a teacher and students or between students themselves. So I'm interested in how that played into how you approached it or how you view it now?

David: You certainly miss the back and forth. That's clear. In teaching, that's a rhetorical strategy I use without like naming it as such, but I don't want to hear my voice drone on for very long. Not because of what it's saying, but more so, I'm worried that the form of one person speaking and nobody else speaking immediately communicates a kind of imbalance that's completely ineffective in a classroom.

In the book, I try to broker the limitations of it being a monologue by making it clear when I don't know something, by offering the material in a manner that perhaps seems tentative or provisional. And that at least I hope allows some room for the reader, not to necessarily disagree, although that's fine, too. Of course they will. But to imagine that they are part of the conversation.

So the book was published by Inventory Press, together with DAP, Distributed Art Publishers in New York. It came out in September of this year and had a substantial print run. We, it's been successful enough that they are reprinting it now. So I'm just going through the page proofs of the second edition, and what I'm finding in reading my own words is a slight bit of discomfort with the casualness of the language. But I think that won't change, and I'm pretty sure it is that looseness which gives it some spark. It looks like a book. I mean, it is a book. Even looks like a straightforward kind of graphic design textbook. But I think there's a bait-and-switch going on.

I think when you pick it up, you realize, oh, this isn't gonna offer me any rules at all. This is simply kind of a recording of one particular point of view, and maybe provides a model for how to do this, or one approach, and that's it. I'm consistently drawn to making work that does that bait-and-switch, and it's not a matter of trying to be elusive or anything else. But I feel like the exterior form can set the conditions for reception, which then the details can undermine and along the way leaves a kind of complicated understanding of the object, of the thing, of the project.

So I, I am thrilled when I see artistic interventions in things that are in the public, and I don't mean public art, but what I mean are like choices which don't seem to be immediately coherent with the situation that they find themselves in.

Liam: And to close the loop from earlier, perhaps the way in which the book is delivered and the casualness of the words actually crystallizes your own identity in the work.

David: Yes.

Liam: There's certainly a much bigger, broader question underneath this, but I think as long as we're talking about one specific work, maybe that'll be helpful. I'm interested in, when you were approached about doing the book, how did you know that it was time for a book or that you should do this or what was your thought process that was like, "Yes"?

David: I think it was the same as all of the work that I make. It's always by invitation. That sounds lazy or unconsidered, but I've realized that's my orientation, and it's not passivity. But it's certainly a, I'm not motivated to make work on my own. I'm motivated by an invitation. I think that's my orientation as a designer, or my, like, identity in that way, is I'm much more interested to be given a situation to work into rather than inventing everything from scratch.

So I was invited to make a book around the teaching. I didn't even consider that it would be 10 years when it came out. I always treat teaching as absolutely continuous with my other work. I never think of it as something that I have to do or I don't, never think of it as something that is external to any of the concerns I have in doing any of my other design work.

So when the invitation came to make a book, I said sure. But let's figure out a way to make a book in a different way that is productive, that makes something new, that doesn't simply wrap up what I'm doing here and seal it away and put it to bed, unless I'm going to stop teaching, which was not my plan. So I can understand what the larger question is, and I think it's essential to my orientation as a designer. Like it's just invitations are what initiate projects, and I never buy the distinction between commissioned client projects and self-initiated projects for myself. This distinction is nonsense. I never, I never initiate projects. They're always by invitation, one way or the other. They may be better or less well-funded, but they're always sparked by somebody else inviting me.

Liam: All right, well, thank you again for joining me today.

David: Thank you very much.

James Bridle, Author — New Dark Age

James Bridle explores the importance of having agency in the complex systems in which we live.

What’s it like to be friends with a robot? How does it feel to hold Google in your hand? Why should we value friction in design? These are just a few of the questions that arose onstage during Google Design’s 2018 SPAN Helsinki conference.

Behind the scenes, we invited Longform co-host Aaron Lammer and Google Design’s Amber Bravo to delve deeper by recording interviews with a handful of our world-class speakers: Google hardware designer Isabelle Olsson, artist and writer James Bridle, transdisciplinary artist Stephanie Dinkins, artistic director Marko Ahtisaari, and sibling design duo Tuuli and Kivi Sotamaa.

This interview is part of that series.

---

Aaron Lammer: Welcome, uh, James Bridle. Good morning.

James Bridle: Morning.

Aaron: You have a, uh, a new book that’s called The New Dark Age. When did the, how long, how long has it been since the book came out?

James: Three or four months, now.

Aaron: Three or four? Okay.

It must be difficult to do a book on this topic because there’s the constant chance with technology that, um, technology will surge past the concerns of the book. Was that, like, something you were thinking about while you were writing it?

James: I was thinking about it a little bit. I mean, I’ve worked in publishing, so I have some sense of the lead times and there, there’s, there’s always what feels like an incredible gulf between finishing writing and this thing actually coming out in public. But, at the same time, the book is slightly about time, and about slightly resisting that. That fear of being kind of overtaken by it. I, I don’t think there’s anything in there that, that was no longer relevant by the time the book came out, and in fact, though, because of the material it was looking at, there was stuff that maybe seemed, you know, a bit out there when it was written, and actually turned out to be incredibly important.

So, for example, I’ve, I, in the book, I picked up quite a lot on some of Carol [inaudible 00:02:59] early writing about Cambridge Analytica, which she was putting out there in 2017, but that stuff didn’t really break in the mainstream until pretty much around the time I was publishing.

Aaron: You write a lot about how technology has outpaced our understanding of it, and technology, um, often does very little to inform humanity about what it is, what its intentions are … What are, what are the ways that you try to understand that? What, um … You have such a cross-disciplinary focus, you’re an artist, you’re a writer-

James: I, I don’t have any particular, you know, set of practices or things that I really consistently [inaudible 00:03:37], beyond kind of detective novels and science fiction.

Aaron: That’s always a good start.

James: Yeah, which is a pretty good basis for anything. But, um, I think more broadly what I do is, is, is I do a lot of practical stuff. Um, I have the supreme kind of privilege and luxury to be able to engage with these technologies, pretty much as, you know, however, in whichever ways I want. So, what usually happens is that I find some new, interesting piece of technology coming along and I try to make something with it.

Aaron: Hm.

James: That could be just some kind of doodle or sketch, it might end up being an artwork, it, quite commonly it’s, like, “How can I use this for art?” Um, because that’s sort of a good question as any, because you immediately start to do things with it that wasn’t necessarily the, the created intention or the more, kind of, expected application of it, which always has interesting results. Rather than just kind of reading about this thing, like, what could you do with it yourself?

Aaron: What was, um, the most recent thing you’ve been tinkering with?

James: Most recent stuff is probably, uh, a lot of kind of decentralized technologies, uh, these kind of newer forms of kind of peer to peer infrastructures and, and programs and protocols. Before that, it was kind of newer networks, uh, and kind of simple machine learning, AI stuff-

Aaron: Hm.

James: Um, which was fiendishly complicated and took me a long time to even get my head around at the start, but at the same time, it was totally possible to do so. As with other stuff, though, there’s open source versions of these things, there’s [inaudible 00:04:51] repositories, there’s instructions, there’s tutorials, you can copy and paste this stuff on the internet and if you spend enough time with it, you, you can understand it just the same as you can understand anything else.

Aaron: AI is an interesting one, because that feels like, to me, as a, uh, a novice, a noob, one of the hardest things to tinker with, so when you think, “Okay, I want to experientially learn about this.” Like, what, uh, tell me just a little bit in AI, like, what that consists of for you.

James: The first project I did that kind of really … I, I did a lot of kind of nice, simple language, generation stuff, where a lot of this stuff starts, where you kind of feed a very basic neural network a bunch of text, and then get it to kind of spit out these amusing things that it’s learned from … One of the barriers to this is that, um, to do, like, proper stuff, you need really massive computation.

Aaron: Hm.

James: This is why, basically, machine learning has taken off in the last few years, is because you have, um, big companies with massive data centers, Amazon, Google, Apple, [inaudible 00:05:48], to realizing that to do this stuff you need to churn through such vast amounts of … Well, you first need a huge amount of data in the first place, uh, and then you need a huge amount of processing power to run it on. So, it’s, it’s, it’s an expensive business. But, you can do these little kind of tinkering toy things.

And I was intrigued, by the way, um, AI seemed to have this kind of predictive quality that the machine would sort of, like, you know, by writing, or by seeing something it would kind of create the future in this way. So I, so I made a project called Cloud Index, which, um, looked at, uh, voting patterns in the UK around Brexit and connected it to the weather in order to generate, uh, weather patterns that related to poli-, particular electoral outcomes, um, which was sort of a joke on both the predictive quality of these machines, uh, but also on all of our ideas about the kind of chance and unknowability of elections. And that produced really lovely outcomes, but, um, but I, but I needed help with it because it was my first project.

Aaron: I, uh, I identify very strongly with that experiential learning model. Pre-1800, you had these people who were masters of science, but also are artists and skilled sketchers and are, um, involved in the development of optics. It almost feels like one person can master, um, enough of the disciplines to be as you, as you describe it, someone who kind of understands the whole system. And, right now, it feels incredibly dif-, difficult to understand the whole system. And, your book is a lot about the need for people to understand that whole system, so I wonder how you think designers can participate in that educational process and, and design with that in mind. I know that’s not a simple question.

James: I, I think … So, I think there’s a, there’s a few things going on there. I mean, this, this idea that since sometime in the 18th century it’s been impossible for one, it’s impossible for one person to kind of hold all human knowledge in their head, I mean, I think that was already a fallacy, and a very, kind of, uh, Europeanized one, but, but it’s definitely true that right now no one can possibly know everything. And, in fact, no one can even know everything about, about, like, two or three disciplines within everything. You know, fields are so vast and complex now and, and are composed of such complexly interacting systems, that even to have knowledge of that system is not to be able to kind of predict, uh, in, with any kind of real validity of what will happen when, when that knowledge goes out to play in the world.

So, yeah, we, we live in this age of kind of vast and, and basically unknowable systems, and yet we have to live in them. What I think about often is just basically how complexity in the world scares people in quite a deep way. I trace a lot of our current ways to the fact that the world seems too vast to understand for most people. And, having already established that we can’t understand everything, how do we live within this complex world without going completely crazy? And it’s that sense of having agency within a complex system, not, not needing to master it, not needing to control it, but actually being comfortable with, with this kind of uncertainty and complexity.

And what I feel like mo- … At the moment, most design is, is about hiding complexity. It’s about making it easier for people to do things, making everything as essentially thoughtless as possible, when what we really, really, really need to do more than anything is, like, think about this. Not to be overwhelmed by it, not to be overcome by it, not to try and solve it, but simply not to sort of panic every time we encounter complexity in various ways. If design can encourage people, not just to use things but to think about and learn from them, then you have a process of education built into that as well.

Aaron: That almost seems like a reversal of some of the design cliches of the last decade. The, um, minimalist everything, uh, simplify for the end users. To, to simplify or even to be minimalist in thinking is, in some ways, to deny complexity.

James: It’s to deny complexity, it’s to reduce agency, and it’s to kind of increase illiteracy. Um, it’s, it’s to say that, like, this stuff is too complicated for you to understand-

Aaron: Hm.

James: You don’t need to think about this, you don’t need to worry. Every time something is simplified or, or made easier, something is hidden. And we really, I think we see that so, so strongly in, in so many, uh, examples in the present, really. You know, just taking us up to, like, the delivery or, or kind of ride hailing apps. Everything is reduced to just, like, a but-, this button on your phone behind a glass screen, requires no thinking about any of the kind of complex social structures, the laws, other peoples’ lives, low paid workers, any of that stuff is outside the scope of this kind of design visualization of the problem. And, yeah, I, I increasingly believe that actually, like, a really good role for design would be to expose people to higher levels of complexity. The balance is not making it so hard, um, but that, that’s design’s role, I think, really.

Aaron: What is the first step people can take to taking control over their own technological lives and perhaps the serenity of their brains in relation to those tech-, technological lives?

James: There’s, uh, a, a comfort level that we have when we have a working mental model of something. That means we feel like we have some sense of what’s, what’s gone wrong when we need to know that. And, yeah, and then can have, like, a more nuanced conversation with other people. There’s a difference between knowing how to fix something and having, like, a working mental model of it.

Aaron: Hm.

James: I would be terrible at fixing the plumbing, but I know basically how it functions, what it’s supposed to do … Particularly I know, like, danger signs, um, I know, uh, I can probably figure out when something’s wrong, where the problem exists, so that I can communicate with someone who has, like, a higher technical knowledge in order to fix it. That’s the, that’s the gap that I think I see in kind of technological knowledge’s, is that there are people who have higher skills and do understand these things, and then there’s everybody else.

Aaron: Yeah.

James: To which they’re completely inexplicable, incomprehensible systems. But, the, the, the thing that I think upsets people, even like kind of subconsciously, even you know without us necessarily being aware of it all the time, it’s the sense of we’re constantly relying on things that, that we have no, no sense of their function.

Aaron: Uh, you live in Athens now, you lived in London until a few years ago. How has the change in your geography, um, like, you know … Seeing different things every day, seeing a different economic system that you’re living within, how has that changed your thinking?

James: I mean, fairly extensively and, and, you know, before I left London in particular, I, I was doing, um, a huge amount of work around surveillance, and then kind of intensely sensitized myself to it, to the point where I was, when I walk around London and other heavily surveilled cities now, I kind of feel it as, like, kind of prickling on my shoulder blades. Which, which thankfully is, is very much not the case in, in Athens for a number of reasons. Um, it’s also a very technologically different place. Like, it, it feels like a lot of the kind of technological luxuries available to people in North America and Northern Europe really haven’t spread beyond there. And, and, in part that’s because of a certain affluence and, and, and time pressure and other things, but also it, it is cultural.

Um, delivery services and, and a lot of the things work in, um, uh, are kind of much more threaded into the mode of society there. Like, if you want a coffee, like, someone will bring it to you anyway, that you don’t need, like, all kinds of apps and stuff to kind of get into that system. Equally, you know, the first taxi app was for, for the taxis, because they have a much different relationship with, with labor unions and this kind of stuff there, so it wasn’t something that was, um, kind of extracting work out of, uh, a kind of new, lower, um, lower paid or lower protected group, but actually came with a set of strengths to it.

You know, looking back at Europe and looking at elsewhere, at a very different world, there’s this phrase that’s been used several times at this conference already, which is the next billion users. How are we, how do we onboard them onto the systems that we have at present? That’s, that’s not going to be what’s going to happen. Uh, the next billion users are going to be very hot, and very wet, and pretty pissed off. And their needs are gonna be radically different to the last billion users. And so, thinking through what it really means to look outside this kind of, um, this bubble of, of what design’s supposed to do because, yeah, our, our current engagement with technology is, is radically unsustainable. And that’s really, really obvious when you move outside the, the kind of bubble of North America and Northern Europe.

It’s also just interesting to do these things in different places. You know, when I did this self-driving car project, I wasn’t really thinking so much about what I was doing, or rather, I wasn’t thinking so much about where I was doing it. But, there is something different about building artificial intelligence and, and running it on the road system. Not in California or, kind of, Bavaria, but in Greece, a place with a very different, kind of, social and material and even mythological history. So, uh, when I was testing the self-driving car, I found myself just, you know, driving up into the mountains, drive around all these little tracks, I realized I was driving up Mount Parnassus, which is the, the home of the muses. Of course, it’s the biggest cliché in the world for a, like, kind of posh, English guy to go to Greece and discover, you know, the, the Greek mythology-

Aaron: Uh, it’s a rich tradition.

James: It’s a rich tradition, yeah. Um, but, but it also, it has meaning, because you’re engaging with a different set of stories than you would do if you would, if you were engaging with the kind of technical determinants myth of Silicone Valley or the kind of industrial myths of, of the German auto industry, uh, you’re enga-, like, just by, by the, the, the stories that are in the place that you’re in, they bring a, a slightly different kind of thought structure behind these things. So, that’s, that’s sort of intensely valuable as well.

Aaron: I really enjoyed your writing about surveillance in Britain, and I wonder how you think about the idea that if you don’t know, if you do know more about these systems, as you do having written about it, and now I do having read your writing, uh, you’ve almost ruined London a bit for me.

James: Um, it’s, it’s difficult. The, the book is, is, is hard work, and it’s quite grim, and it doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of things. And I, I wrote it in part to kind of get these things, not out of, at least through my head and kind of down on paper, so that we could just be clear about what we’re talking about. Um, there are hopeful, I think, aspects within the book, but again I was trying to, I was really trying not to kind of solutionize or predict or any of those things, really just to straight out just tell a bunch of stories about, “This is what’s happening.”

Um, and also this is not, not, this is what’s happening in the future, but this is, this is what’s happening right now. These are the already visible effects of the things that we’re building. Because we’re constantly being told that these technologies will kind of produce magic outcomes in the future, uh, and yet, they seem to be producing, actually, hideous conditions in the present and there’s no ex-, reason why that, why that, what that should change. So, we have to be very clear about what the situation is, so that actually we can, um, have a kind of meaningful discussion about it.

And, yeah, in, in places that’s, that’s quite traumatic and difficult. But it’s, it’s, it’s a lot better than just ignoring the situation or pretending it’s not there. I don’t think anyone is capable of ignoring the situation. It’s far more of a kind of, like, uh, a psychology in which all of that, uh, just kind of vague awareness is, is suppressed and, and results in, in kind of hideous fear and, and, and, and occasionally kind of anger, uh, or kind of at the moment predominantly anger, which seems to be the kind of dominant political tenor of our times. Um, I think, I think that’s a fairly clear psychological response to a lack of agency and power and, and understanding of the world.

Aaron: You read about, um, computational thinking and how it leads to the kinds of, um, solutionism that you were just describing. I, I wonder if you could just sort of talk about what computational thinking is and how it informs a lot of the design that at least presently we see in the world. Maybe not in the future, hopefully.

James: So, computational thinking is a kind of extension of what other people have called solutionism. Solutionism is the kind of dominant narrative of, of Silicone Valley, but it’s kind of spread to a lot of the rest of our … Which is essentially that, the issues of the world are technical problems, which can be fixed, mostly by the application of more technology. That there are, there is kind of one true answer to these problems, and by some kind of, you know, evolutionary design critical path, we shall, we shall reach that and, and that we will be able to solve these problems.

Computational thinking, for me, is kind of what happens when that settles deep into the brain stem, and we’re not even aware that we’re thinking that way anymore, so, but we still kind of consider the world as a, as a, something to be calculated. So, it starts to bring in all these questions, and not just solutions with data, but how we see the world as collections of data, how we think we can collect the world as data, that the world is, is meaningful just through kind of collecting information about it, and that there is some kind of sum total of knowledge out, uh, that if only we could gather it together, everything would sort of magically become clear. It, it, it presumes like a, a fixed input and output, like a fixed process that will come to some kind of resolution. Um, and it’s increasingly obvious that that’s not the case. Um, the world is not like that. The world is not … Much of the world is, is incomputable, but is obscured from view by this belief in kind of computational [inaudible 00:18:53], which has really, really disastrous effects.

The, the project, then, is to kind of look for, as I do in the book, to explore the ways in which computational knowledge fails. And then, to start to think about the implications of that, which are that there is no, kind of, algorithmic solution to the world, which means there is no, um, magic future point at which things are gonna be solved. Which is really important, because it returns our attention to the present, and actually what we can do in the here and now, uh, how to help and care rather than, rather than keeping your eye on this, some, some distant techno fix, which will solve this stuff, stuff in the future and I, I find that actually to be incredibly powerful and kind of reorienting, um, to actually think about what, you know, what the things that we work on, achieve now in the present … What Aldous Huxley always said about, um, means defining the ends, right? We, we can’t just keep our eyes on this kind of, like, uh, amazing future that we’ll be kind of ushered in by these things. Rather, we have to pay close attention to what they’re doing now.

Aaron: I was, as I was reading, um, about your ideas on computational thinking, my brain kept asking, “Well, what’s the opposite of computational thinking?” Like, “What is the foil, in a literary sense, for, for this?” And, the closest I could approximate, um, and I’m interested in whether I’ve misinterpreted your ideas here, is that chaos and perhaps, and acknowledgement of the essential chaos is the opposite of computational thinking.

James: Yeah. I think, I think, in as much as chaos captures that which cannot be modeled or predicted-

Aaron: Yeah.

James: In any meaningful way. So, in the book I write quite a lot about, uh, Richardson. Um, Lewis Fry Richardson, who was a, a meteorologist and pacifist. Uh, he has a really interesting life story, but he’s basically the guy who invents weather prediction. Literally. It’s called, his, his book was called Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes.

Aaron: Yeah.

James: So, he was the first person who says that we can calculate the weather, which is the same thing as saying we can calculate the future, right? That we can develop a form of math that’s so powerful, that it will capture all this data and will tell us what will happen in the future. Um, so I really, I think of, of weather prediction as, like, the f-, one of the foundations of computational prediction. Um, but Richardson does a whole bunch of other amazing stuff in his life and, uh, later on he actually, he tries to apply that to solving conflicts, and he writes a number of books about, uh, the mathematical basis, basis for war, which he never really kind of resolves because, it turns out, chaos. Um, but, uh, but one of the things he sort of hits on about halfway through, I think it was sort of early forties or fifties, halfway through this kind of process, and then doesn’t, I don’t know, for me doesn’t really [inaudible 00:21:23] the consequences of …

There’s this thing called the Coastline Paradox, where, it’s when he’s trying to work out the likelihood of two nations going to war with each other, and he thinks it might be related to the length of their shared border. So, he tries to calculate the shared borders between all these places, and he realizes it’s impossible to measure borders and coastlines of Zeno’s Paradox. Like, if you do an approximation, you know, you can say, uh, you know, if you draw this many lines, it’s this long. And then you realize they can shorten those lines and make it, like, lower the resolution, it gets longer and longer and longer. And it’s one of the first [inaudible 00:21:52] of, of, of fractal numbers, and I think [inaudible 00:21:55] later cited Richardson’s work as a kind of early example of this realization of fractals, that it’s complexity all the way down, that you increase the resolution and things become more and more complex. There’s no, there’s no answer to this question. [inaudible 00:22:07], uh, coastlines are, uh, are, are unmeasurable, or fractal in a sense.

And so, even just, like, the, the, like, [inaudible 00:22:15] also, where if you, like, really pay attention to what the maths or the technology is telling you, it’s saying, “You can’t do this.” Like, “This is more complex than it’s possible …” And, all of these things that we think of as kind of, like, failures or bugs of, of computational processes are actually, for me in this sort anthropomorphic way, is, is that, you know, the machinery going … Like, no, this isn’t the way to do this. And the evidence of it is all around us and we’re just refusing to see it.

Aaron: You just described someone as a meteorologist and pacifist, which I think is maybe my favorite, like, life/job description ever. When, when you’re on a flight from, uh, Athens to here in Helsinki where we are now, and someone asks, um, what, what you do, what do you tell them?

James: Uh, I say, I say writer and artist, it covers all of the bases.

Aaron: It covers all the bases? Um, what, what’s next? Where, where does, where is your writing and art taking you?

James: I’m, I’m super interested in exploring, like, exploring the consequences of, um, this particular and potential answer to the problem of the future, uh, which is essentially to, um, suggest that it’s not where we should be spending our energy and our thought. That we have to think very carefully about the structures that we, that we build and inhabit, uh, in the present, um, how we actually, uh, think about and care for everyone around us, and ask ourselves constantly at every point, like, “Am I trying to fix this problem? Or, am I trying to help?” That, that to me seems the axis on, on which so much of this stuff turns, rather than kind of, uh, concentrating on kind of huge, wild solutions to large problems.

Aaron: Uh, thank you so much for this interview, I really appreciate it.

James: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Alexandra Lange, Architecture Critic

Architecture critic Alexandra Lange explores the design of childhood — from the sandbox to the street

In this episode, guest host and Google Design creative lead Amber Bravo speaks with architecture critic and author Alexandra Lange about her new book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids. Together, they examine how design changes childhood — discussing everything from street design and playgrounds, to what makes building blocks a “good” toy, and why cardboard is an inviting canvas for creative exploration.

---

Amber Bravo: I wanted to start off just to talk a little bit about your background. This is obviously a really specific-

Alexandra Lange: (laughs)

Amber: … sort of subject area and it’s about kids, but your work in general is actually much more far ranging. So, I wanted to just get a little bit of background about your work in architecture and design criticism.

Alexandra: I always kind of describe myself as a magpie, because it’s hard for me to focus on one topic within the large topic of design. And I think if you look at all of the things that I’ve written about, that’s really reflected (laughs) in the list. So, I’m the Architecture Critic for Curbed, but we decided at Curbed that that could really incorporate all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily architecture. Last fall, I wrote about the Museum of Ice Cream and how it was not actually fun.

Amber: You mean the Instagram Museum, right? (laughs)

Alexandra: (laughs) Yeah, the Instagram Museum, exactly. And over the years, I’ve written a lot about architecture history. I do building reviews. I recently reviewed the exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt about design for accessibility. In the past, I’ve written books about architecture criticism and also about one of the first modern design stores in America, which was called Design Research. So, I feel like design really incorporates all aspects of life, all ages of people, all kinds of activities, and I try as much as I can to write about all of those things and not just about buildings by famous architects, or in the case of my book, not just about design for children.

Amber: It’s a little bit like when you’ve trained your brain to sort of look at the visual or material world critically, you can’t really turn it off.

Alexandra: Yeah. (laughs)

Amber: So, was there, like, a level when you became a mom that suddenly you were exposed to all of this stuff and then you couldn’t stop thinking about it from a critical lens?

Alexandra: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. Basically, I was a design critic and then I became a mom. And as you say, I couldn’t turn it off. My husband’s an architect too, so we got like five different sets of blocks as gifts. I was sitting there playing with my son (laughs), and I couldn’t help thinking, “How is this one different than that one? Like, what is this one supposed to teach as opposed to that one? Is there a difference, or is it just marketing?” As you know when you have a kid, you don’t just get stuff the first time, you get stuff basically in three month waves. As the child gets bigger, you have to get new clothes, you have to get a different stroller, you have to get a different car seat.

Alexandra: American parenting is very, very filled with stuff. So, each new wave of things brought more questions. Each new wave of activities that he was able to do brought more questions. And that is really what caused me to want to write this book because I felt like most of the things that I was reading either about designer toys or then about child development wasn’t really talking about the area in-between where the design of this toy affects child development how. It was just like, “Buy things in primary colors.” (laughs)

I felt like there was research out there, but it wasn’t put together in a way that I thought was accessible and I thought, you know, answered the questions that I had.

Amber: So, you kind of go back to this early stage of Friedrich Fröbel-

Alexandra: Yes.

Amber: Am I say his name right? He’s sort of the father of kindergarten-

Alexandra: Yes.

Amber: … or the concept of kindergarten.

Alexandra: Yes, exactly.

Amber: Those early years, or the preschool years, um, the pedagogy has always been a little bit more focused on the environment or how kids experience environment. In the book, you go through this really interesting exploration of the block and what it means and how it’s changed over time. So, I’m curious when you look at the origins of kindergarten and the block, like, what were some of the things that both struck you and also made you feel like, “Is this just a variation on a theme? Is this changing based on social context, or is there like an underpinning that is truly essential about why kids need blocks?”

Alexandra: Yeah. When I first conceived of the book, I thought it was going to be about the 20th Century. And then I found that everything in the 20th Century actually started in the 19th Century.

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: And so, I kept going back and back. (laughs) Um, and Fröbel is a great case. He was a Naturalist and a Mineralogist. And he kind of fell into teaching, and he created a system of wooden blocks that he felt would allow children, just by manipulating the blocks, to understand the natural world. One of the first things I found out about wooden blocks is that they can basically go in all of these different directions. They’re not a dumb toy. They’re not an inert thing that’s just sitting there in a chest for your child, but in fact, lots of different people have had lots of different ideas about them.

So, I would say that all of those ideas about blocks have to do with, what would now be called object oriented learning, that children have to touch things, and feel things, and figure out things for themselves in a physical environment to learn the basics of things like gravity, and multiplication, and addition. So, that is common across a lot of different sets of blocks. But then Fröbel’s pedagogy based on blocks was actually quite rigid. He had 20, he called them gifts, 20 gifts. And many of them were blocks, and you didn’t get to play with the next set until you were done learning what he thought you needed to learn with the first set. (laughs)

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: We think about blocks and object oriented learning as being very progressive, but already from the origins of kindergarten, there’s actually this rigid system. The person whose blocks I really like (laughs)-

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: … um, is this woman named Caroline Pratt, who founded the City and Country School, which is still in existence in Manhattan over 100 years later. And she created what are called the Unit Blocks, which I feel like I’ve seen in pretty much every kindergarten in America. The, the basic Unit Block is kind of a brick shape. And in fact, at City and Country, they call it a Brickey. They have these cute names for all of the blocks so they can talk about them with the children.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: So, you have the Unit Block, and then you have halves of the Unit Block, diagonally, vertically, horizontally. And at City and Country School, they have just shelves and shelves filled with those blocks. And even, like, in my kid’s public school, they have a block corner in kindergarten and they have those blocks. Those can be used and were meant to be used in a much more freeform way. Like kids at City and Country, kids in kindergarten are just allowed to take out the blocks and play with them. And so, while a teacher can come over and create a lesson around them, there’s also a sense the children should just be allowed to build and good things come from just that creative activity.

Amber: Right. It’s interesting because there’s a whole section, obviously we would be remiss not to talk about Lego.

Alexandra: (laughs) I think now often when people talk about Lego, there’s a nostalgia for a time when Lego was more free. Um, in the book, I talk about this one ad of a little girl holding this kind of crazy multi-colored Lego creation in the ad. I think it’s from 1982. And the tagline is, “What it is is beautiful,” because it’s as if (laughs) the parent wants to ask her what it is but realizes that that’s not the right question.

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: Like, that’s kind of a suppressive question in a sense.

Amber: (laughs) Yeah.

Alexandra: So, like, whatever it is, it’s beautiful. That ad went viral a few years ago when people were like, “Oh my God, when I was little, Lego was so free. I just had a big trunk of blocks. And now it’s all Star Wars Lego, and Ninjago, and all of these other, like, made-up things.” I own it all at my house, so-

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: But the truth is that, yes, Lego in its origins in the 1950s was essentially free blocks, so it wasn’t until they made into a system that it really took off as a toy. It was as if maybe there was a failure of imagination on parents’ part to understand what their kids could do with Lego until they made it more pictorial and gave you a starting point.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alexandra: And of course, built into that is the idea that once you start building your town, you (laughs), you’ll never stop building your town, so then you get a new set every Christmas. So, it leads to more shopping. It leads to being able to do Holiday sets and all of that. So, I just felt like this nostalgia for the simpler time of Lego was actually a little bit misplaced. And something I think is fascinating is, one of the few places now you do see giant bins of one color Lego is often in art installations.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: Olafur Eliasson has this amazing project called The Collectivity Project, which is just (laughs) hundreds of thousands of pieces of white Lego. And when they installed it on the High Line a few years ago, I sort of scoffed. I was like, “Why would a bunch of grownups stand around in the middle of the High Line doing Lego?” (laughs)

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: And then I went, and trust me, my family was there for 45 minutes standing around on the High Line doing Lego. And they’d created this skyscraper city. And there were people from all over the world just standing there adding, and subtracting, and doing things to this skyscraper city. So, it was a collective moment.

Amber: One thing that I thought was interesting too was the parallel between these sort of development or engineering programs for younger children and the things that they’re adopting from block play, and Lego, and how they’re using that to teach basic writing scripts and understanding how you manipulate an object. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about just how natural that feels, or, or some of the research that you did around what is the most effective way to do this at a younger age for children.

Alexandra: It was really interesting to me because I did a lot of the research on blocks and Legos before I came to the digital realm, because that just made sense chronologically. And then one day, my son came home from school and he had, what they call, a media literacy class in its library. And he was being taught how to use Scratch. And I didn’t know what Scratch was, so I looked it up and I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Scratch and ScratchJr are programs developed by the MIT Media Lab to teach kids programming. And this was in third grade.

Alexandra: So, he started showing me how he could do it and make these little animations just incredibly quickly. And I looked at the interface, and I realized that it was basically a bin of Legos but digital Legos. And the way Scratch works is the, the child just drags, and drops, and quote unquote, “clicks” together different colored pieces on the screen, and each color corresponds to a different kind of command or a different kind of accessory that you can introduce into your sequence. So, it was very natural for him to, like, click a green one over to start and then add four blue ones so that his character would run three clicks, or whatever. So, his knowledge of Lego was supporting him understanding how you could put together a run sequence in this computer game.

Alexandra: And it struck me that people talk about physical play and digital play as somehow being in conflict, but in fact I think that digital play and digital learning really rest on a foundation of this physical play of block play, because that has become almost a universal language of childhood. So, the creators of programs like Scratch and ScratchJr can assume a familiarity with little plastic pieces clicking together that then they can use as their interface.

Amber: Right. It’s really interesting to think of this idea of object oriented learning and even just as something as simple as, like, designing interfaces, or … You think about people who are using new technology, or if every app you go to is a new experience, there’s sort of these basic ideas that you need to know to be true, or this shared language of manipulation and interaction, that is completely important to have some foundation or basis in. And I think that maybe there is, like, (laughs) a little bit of toddler mentality-

Alexandra: (laughs)

Amber: … in all of us when you get into a new environment. So, I do think that’s a really interesting idea of manipulating a surface and knowing the things that it’s supposed to do or it might do because of the way we know materials or objects to work.

Alexandra: It’s funny though. I mean, we walked by the Lego Wall here at Google when we were coming. So, it’s like, I think that people at Google might be more, (laughs) more familiar with Lego as adults than your average person.

Amber: (laughs)

Alexandra: One of the things that was really fun for me once I had kids was getting back into a bunch of crafts and making and building activities that I hadn’t done since I was a kid. It felt very rusty at building Lego sets, for example, (laughs) and, you know, following the isometric directions, which when you’re a kid when you’re into it, it’s just like second nature to do that. So, I almost feel like kids have this common language, and then as you grow older, you might lose that a little because most people aren’t making things and building things in their jobs.

Amber: Yeah.

Alexandra: I think it’s still in there, you can bring it back, but for some people it might seem at first a little bit awkward, because as adults, you’re used to word commands rather than physical or visual commands.

Amber: One thing that also struck me about the way that you structured the book, so you talk about these canonical objects or spaces that kids inhabit. Of course, the two that probably pertain the most to adults are, aside from the stuff that we have to have in our space-

Alexandra: (laughs) Yeah.

Amber: … when, when kids are around us are the idea of the home or the living space-

Alexandra: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: … and the city, or the playground, or sort of the civic spaces. And you sort of have this argument that a lot of the things that we do in the service of children are actually good for us universally. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of those observations or some of the things that we might take for granted that are actually, like, geared towards helping a younger person but actually help us all.

Alexandra: I mostly talk about that in my last chapter, which is about the city, where I really tried to open up the idea of family life and talk about it in the context of urban planning, because I feel like a lot of discussion of parents in the US right now is really focused on parents of means and, like, what parents of means can do for their particular child. But if you start to talk about urban planning, you’re talking about making the city more usable and more playful for a much wider variety of kids. And it’s not just about your kids, it’s about all kids.

And so, if you start thinking about what makes cities better for children, what makes cities better for families, you immediately run into things like a park within a ten minute walk of your house. You run into things like traffic calming measures so that even if your child is two and wants to walk themselves and it takes you a little longer to walk across the street, you’re not threatened by cars. You talk about pedestrians, and also bicycles, and basically streets being created so that the car isn’t dominant. You don’t want to stuff everyone in the car to do errands. So, you want things within walking distance, so you get mixed use neighborhoods.

So, the idea of creating mixed use neighborhoods with open spaces, with connected and possibly car-free spaces with shopping, creating, like, a city that’s a bunch of little neighborhoods rather than a city that is, like, housing here and offices there, and, like, never the twain shall meet is a desire of more than just families but would also serve families really well.

Amber: Right. Also, at a certain point in the early 20th Century, kids had much more free range.

Alexandra: Yeah. So, in the early part of the 20th Century, basically pre-cars or when there weren’t nearly as many cars on the streets, children in cities played in the streets. And at a certain point, the volume of traffic was so great that children started being killed all the time in the streets. And Jacob Rees, the great reformer, writes about children being killed in the streets. And so, people from the settlement houses, which were houses that were meant to serve immigrant families — living often in very squalid conditions — and give women a place to go, give them training and all sorts of things, also started being interested in the welfare of children, (laughs) not wanting them to die but also realizing that they needed to have an alternative if they weren’t going to be allowed to play on the streets.

So, the first playground in America was built in Boston in the late 19th Century, and it was basically an empty lot in an inner-city neighborhood that the fine ladies of the one of the settlement houses filled with sand in the summer and invited all of the neighborhood kids to come in and play in the sand. And this was a huge hit. It was called a sand garden. And basically, it’s like the easiest playground you can make is a big pile of sand, because you can dig in the sand, you can build with the sand, you can create this whole imaginary world either at a small scale or a large scale in the sand.

And so, you know, the first year they had one of these sand gardens, and then the next year they had more and more. And this spread from Boston to other cities, because all of the people that ran the settlement houses were part of a larger progressive movement. And so, these playgrounds were in fact great places for kids to play, but they were the beginning of children spaces being segregated from adult spaces.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alexandra: So, it’s one of these things that is a little bit equivocal. It’s great that they had the playground, but it was the beginning of children essentially not having a right to the streets and not being considered when you’re designing a street. And so, kids get stuck in playgrounds. And especially when you get to teens and neonates, they’re not really satisfied with the playgrounds. They’re not really made for those ages and they need to have more independence, but it’s hard to give them independence when there are actually safety issues.

Amber: I had a thought too that is maybe a little bit of a loaded thought right now, but just thinking about the idea of keeping kids safe and how we design them into spaces. Obviously with the current dialogue around the safety of kids going to school and how that might start affecting the design of schools, or even the way we, like, put parameters around the school, or fence them in, or lock them down. You talk about this segregation or, like, containment.

Alexandra: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: And generally, containment has a negative connotation, but I do think that there is something of this adult need to impede, or contain, or keep safe that is actually very much at odds with the spirit of being a child.

Alexandra: Yeah. The problem is that there’s nothing that design can do to keep children 100% safe.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: And at a certain point, you realize that design is actually hindering children’s development, particularly I think as they get to be, as I said before, teens and neonates and they need independence. Like, the same, the same force that means that kids need to manipulate blocks for themselves, like need to figure things out for themself, then becomes like a need to explore, a need to have their own space and make their own discoveries about the world. And if we shut their world down so that they can only explore in these bounded environments, it creates tremendous anxiety. It creates tremendous frustration. There are all kinds of unintended negative consequences.

I mean, there are people designing schools that are more secure. I mean, the best example is the new school that they built in Sandy Hook, which was designed by Svigals and Partners, where there are all of these soft barriers, mostly with landscaping, that make it so there’s really only one path to the front door. And the front door has glass so that there is a person there that can see who comes in. And there’s kind of a gentle boundary that’s difficult to cross. So, there are ways to make security not obtrusive.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: But it’s hard to see that all schools could be designed that way. And really, ultimately, um, (laughs) we need gun control legislation rather than, uh, building out our schools as these soft prisons to protect our children.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: So, yeah, a lot of it comes back to the roads. I think having a real discussion about how we’re building the connective infrastructure of our cities and suburbs and how it needs to be built to give more children — and this also goes for the elderly and people with disabilities — more people of more abilities access to what there is without fear of being hit by a car.

Amber: I really love just this idea that like, actually thinking about design from, like, a more adaptive perspective. And, you know, you bring up a really great point with the playground sort of exhausting the interest of a child at a certain age, because they’re just developmentally past that. Also, like, what are the parents doing when they’re there? Um, but I think that designing for children, it seems like there’s a really interesting connection between accessibility too, and designing for accessibility, and adaptation, and tinkering. There’s a whole section where you kind of talk about that.

Alexandra: I was lucky enough to go and visit the Adaptive Design Associates, which is in Manhattan which is run by a woman named Alex Truesdell who won a MacArthur Genius Grant a few years ago. And she works with children with disabilities, and she basically has a cardboard workshop where they create furniture and furniture inserts to help children with disabilities live life with everyone else, essentially, be in a mainstream class, et cetera, even if they can’t sit up straight, she will help to design and create, um, a cardboard insert for a school chair that supports their back more, or different kinds of highchairs, seats that rock slightly so if a child or an adult is fidgety, they can take care of their need to move-

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alexandra: … while still, you know, performing a task. The things that they have there that they’ve made are really fascinating. And she doesn’t even like to talk about the children that her association serves as having disabilities. She really sees it all as a continuum of ability, and everyone has the right to participate as fully as possible.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: And sometimes it is just a physical insert that makes a difference between being alone, not being able to leave your house, and being able to participate in a classroom. And she says that a lot of people sometimes see the things that ADA makes as somehow lesser, because cardboard is something we throw away a lot or recycle.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: But in fact, cardboard is this amazing adaptive material, because you can cut it quite easily, it’s not that expensive, but once you glue it together and kind of laminate it, it’s totally sturdy and will last for years. I also found that there was this whole literature around what’s called cardboard carpentry that goes back farther. Alex Truesdell founded in the ADA in the 1980s, but in the 1960s and 70s, there was already this movement around furniture made of cardboard for much the same reasons. And really, I mean, it’s an idea about how you’re making furniture, how you’re helping people live in the world that is literally adaptive and you can work with all the time. I found that very exciting.

Um, another thing that she has also made there are basically trays for toys. So, for example, if a child has low vision, um, you can make a tray sort of like with a border so that the toys are not going to roll off the edge of the table and will be kept contained. But it becomes almost this pallet of toys that the child can just have in front of her, and now she can play. Now there’s no problem. Somebody doesn’t have to stand there picking up the toys over and over, and it just removes that level of frustration.

Amber: Yeah, it seems to me that things that you do for accessibility are actually universally good.

Alexandra: Right. I mean, it’s better if it works for more people.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: And it’s really about a spectrum of ability rather than ability versus disability.

Amber: Right.

Alexandra: I think that is really a powerful way to get designers who are by and large able to think about their products and all the different users.

Amber: So, as we got on the subject of cardboard, it just-

Alexandra: (laughs)

Amber: … made me realize that (laughs) the opening salvo for the book is really-

Alexandra: (laughs)

Amber: … about the glory of the cardboard box as a thing-

Alexandra: (laughs) Yes.

Amber: … to play with. And I really do think that it serves as this like nice anchoring idea for the entire book itself. So, I thought we could talk a little bit about why-

Alexandra: Oh.

Amber: … (laughs) the cardboard-

Alexandra: Sure.

Amber: … box is so magical.

Alexandra: Sure. So, the cardboard box is a block, or a grain of sand, or any of these other things. It’s just this basic unit that kids can manipulate. And if you have a lot of boxes, they can build something with them. If you have one box, maybe they make it into a house. The great thing about cardboard boxes is you can also draw on them, paint on them, cut into them, destroy them-

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Alexandra: … in a way that you can’t necessarily with wooden blocks. So, again, that’s where the kind of inexpensiveness and disposability, like, adds a little something extra to the play. But yeah, cardboard boxes have been recognized for a really long time (laughs) as very fun for kids. Doctor Spock writes about them. I’ve written about the Eames Toys from the 1950s, including one called The Toy, that are essentially based on cardboard box principles. And the cardboard box is actually in the Toy Hall of Fame, which is a creation of the Strong Museum of Play up in Rochester.

So, the first chapter of my book is called Blocks, but it’s really (laughs) about construction toys in general and the whole range of things from a tiny Lego to a giant refrigerator box that was the most fun thing in the neighborhood when (laughs) I was little.

Amber: Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you about the new book. I’ll let you say it this time.

Alexandra: My new book is The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids.

Amber: Great. Thanks, Alexandra.

Alexandra: Thank you.

Molly Wright Steenson, author of Architectural Intelligence

Designer and professor Molly Wright Steenson on lessons from the early foundations of AI

In the sixth episode, recorded during SPAN 2017 in Pittsburgh, guest host Aaron Lammer speaks with designer and professor Molly Wright Steenson about pattern languages, the important similarities between architecture and AI, and the publication of her new book Architectural Intelligence.

---

Aaron Lammer: Uh, welcome. Molly Wright Steenson.

Molly Wright Steenson: Hello.

Aaron: I really enjoyed your talk yesterday.

Molly: Thanks.

Aaron: Ah, which I found out at the end of the talk, is based on a book that you have coming out called…

Molly: “Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape”.

Aaron: So… the characters, in this story, are people that I was familiar with like, cause, buildings at MIT Media Lab are named after them and I’ve heard of them, but I, I admit that I didn’t really know their history at all. So how did you get involved with this story? What was your first brush with it?

Molly: My first brush with it came out of my dissertation in my master’s degree research, but maybe in some ways it came out of a question some twenty years ago. My first day of work at Netscape in 1996, Hugh Dubberly, who is a very well known designer, and at the time the creative director of the Netscape website, suggested to us that we use Christopher Alexander’s patterns in redesigning the Netscape website. And I was like “Wow that’s weird, why are we thinking of an architect when we’re looking at redesigning the Netscape website?” Uh… I had done some research when I was in undergrad in architectural history and really enjoyed it. And that question stuck in my head. And when we saw the rise of things like information architecture, it was really kind of interesting to see again, you know, digital people turning to architectural metaphors. It’s a long story about how I, you know, there’s another ten years in there.

Aaron: (laughs) The lost years.

Molly: But, um, (laughs) Yeah the lost years. And then I actually went to do a master’s and PhD in architectural history in order to start addressing that architectural question: What is the architecture in contemporary digital and the contemporary internet? And I found out that there’s a ton, there’s a lot of cross over.

So I researched Christopher Alexander, and-

Aaron: Do you have a- do you have, for someone who has no idea who Christopher Alexander is, how do you describe who Christopher Alexander is?

Molly: (laughs) Christopher Alexander is an architect who wrote a book called “A Pattern Language” with his colleagues at Berkeley.

What a pattern is, what he says a pattern is, is, it’s a way to- it’s a solution to a problem that you could apply again and again and it would work in all of those circumstances. Right? The patterns are all in a hierarchy, they go from everything from huge to like, nation state, all the way down to minutia, you know like how far, how big a balcony should be or set-ups for bedrooms, or light on two sides of a room, or… um, things like that. So there are 253 patterns.

And this idea gets picked up by a bunch of, um, software engineers, in the late 80s, and interaction designers, so-

Aaron: Is it fair to say like, for those listening at home, that CSS is a kind of a example of a pa- or uh, derived from a pattern language, a series of rules that control visuals.

Molly: Yeah! That and even-

Aaron: In a [hierarchical] manner.

Molly: And even in this sense, you know, patterns, these ideas that these programmers pick up …

Aaron: Yeah.

Molly: Eventually… um, so people like Alan Cooper, who’s the founder of Cooper the design firm; uh, and Kent Beck, the founder, one of the founders of Agile programming and Extreme programming; and Ward Cunningham who created the Wiki; all of these are directly inspired by Christopher Alexander’s ideas about design.

Aaron: And if you’d like, combine all the descendants of those things you’ve covered like half of the modern internet.

Molly: Oh my gosh, totally! And, if you look on Amazon right now, and look up ‘design patterns in software’, you’ll see something like twelve hundred different books. I’m not exaggerating.

Aaron: I believe it.

Molly: So you know, when you look at, um, Google and Material Design, those ideas come from Christopher Alexander.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah.

Molly: But there’s something funny about him. He’s the architect, that all programmers seem to know, in fact they might only know of him and no other architects, architect architects largely can’t stand him.

Aaron: (laughs)

Molly: So, (laughs) So there’s-

Aaron: What’re their, what’s their primary beef?

Molly: Well, he moralizes and he doesn’t like form, they think he’s a crappy designer,

Aaron: Hmm.

Molly: they find him preachy, but he’s too important for programmers, engineers, and designers of all kinds.

Aaron: How did all these guys find- if this work is not seminal to an architect, how does a programmer find it in 1982?

Molly: Funny right? Alan Cooper told me that he found notes on “The Synthesis of Form”, which is Alexander’s first book, in his junior high school library. And Kent Beck couldn’t afford the books by Christopher Alexander, so he’d go to the college bookstore in Oregon, and read them, you know, page by page and then go back, put it on the shelf, and return another time and read a little further.

Aaron: This isn’t like a thing that someone found and then spread throughout the programming community, this is like an example of convergent evolution where multiple people who were going to be influential on the web, independently found the same thing and started using it to create original works.

Molly: At the outset, these programmers pick it up in the 80s, a group forms called the gang of four, and they publish something called “Design Patterns in Software”, and that comes out in 1994. And, now it’s- it’s a really, um, central area of research, there’re conferences devoted to “Design Patterns in Software” all over the place. And so, um, that gets picked up by the web. Everybody seems to love Christopher Alexander, and uh, yeah. And then the architects can’t stand him.

Aaron: (chuckles)

Molly: It’s amazing. So that’s- he’s one figure that I look at in the book, and it’s- with that- with that angle of architects not liking him, I was at a conference and, um, talking to a couple of friends who are both architecture professors, and one of them said, “You can’t- you cannot write seriously about him. You must not take him seriously”. And I was talking to another woman and she said, “Make him the bad guy”. And when I wrote my dissertation, I was really kind of snarky about him. And in subsequent revisions of, you know, the dissertation, and then draft of chapters, I think I rewrote the Alexander chapter five or six times- I have no snark left. He’s too important. He absolutely shaped what we do on the internet. You can’t do anything online without in some way, being touched by what he came up with. And that’s pretty fascinating.

Aaron: One of the- the big points of your talk that was very striking to me is: we have this kind of AI is everywhere hype cycle right now, whether you want to talk about self-driving cars, uh, machine learning… we have this idea that AI is something that, like, just jumped out of the closet, and is either gonna kill us or save us, but it didn’t exist ten years ago.

Molly: Yep.

Aaron: And these quotes, that these people have, from the 1950s and 1960s, actually less alarmist, they’re more sort of like oh of course this is gonna happen.

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: Like, and not abstract like I’m sorta spitballing something that could become anything, pretty specific ideas about AI that really prefigure like a lot of what we talk about in AI now.

Molly: Yep.

Aaron: So how did they start thinking about this stuff?

Molly: This is what they were doing way back when. So 1955 is when John McCarthy coins the term “artificial intelligence”, and in 1956, he writes to a number of his friends at various institutions and gathers them for the summer at Dartmouth, to figure out what the platform is gonna be for research in artificial intelligence. And some of the things that it includes are: neural networks, game playing-

Aaron: Someone sets the-

Molly: Learning, yeah-

Aaron: Someone sets the bar that it’s something that would require intelligence for a human to execute.

Molly: That’s exactly it.

Aaron: As a blanket term.

Molly: Yep. It’s, uh, I think John McCarthy’s definition was, um, “it would require intelligence if done by a human, by man.”

Aaron: Looking back on this time, as a historian, how different was the way that AI was talked about when there weren’t computers? Like I think when people think of AI now they think “oh it’s a thing happening in a computer, I don’t understand cause I don’t understand how computers work”. How is AI being thought of in periods before the microchip? Before home computing?

Molly: I mean, it is imagined by computers, so, um, early machine learning, 1952, Arthur Samuel, he taught a computer to play checkers, and it learned from its mistakes and its wins and became a better checker player than the human player. But you know, people like Herb Simon and Alan Newell, you know, we’re sitting here in Pittsburgh, having this conversation-

Aaron: Sure.

Molly: And they are some of the most illustrious Carnegie Mellon faculty we’ve ever had. Simon and Newell believed in about 1957, that it would be possible to simulate the human mind with a computer. Within a couple years, like early 60s, they’d have this licked.

Aaron: This close. (laughs)

Molly: (laughs) but, but it begs a really interesting question.

Aaron: Yeah.

Molly: Um, how we conceive of intelligence and how we model it. You know, there’s another person, uh, Douglas Engelbart, who is the inventor of the mouse, among other things. But in 1961 he wrote a proposal for something called augmented human intellect and his first example in this proposal is an augmented architect. This is 1961. What does Douglas Engelbart know about architecture? From what I can tell, you know, probably not a ton. But I think that architecture is about building worlds, and AI and computation is also about building worlds.

And so I think that this, this intersection of architecture and AI is almost very natural.

Aaron: When I go through, uh, the list of the speakers here. I just- uh, I talked to Madeline Gannon about this robot arm that, um, she made. Almost every speaker here’s work at least touches on these ideas.

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: What did your research about the 1950s and 60s lead you to think about AI right here, right now in Pittsburgh alive in 2017.

Molly: One of the architects that I write about is a guy named Cedric Price; and he turned design problems kind of upside down.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Molly: So that they could be addressed in different ways. And he was very interested in rethinking the role of how a user or, or human interacts with a building or what even a building is. He didn’t wanna lock it down in space and time. Uh, and he wanted to blow open the role of the designer and the, the computer as well.

But to the point of Mimus, Madeline Gannon’s robotic arm-

Aaron: Yeah.

Molly: Uh, this is the, the robotic arm that was, um, th-that was kind of behind an enclosure at the London Design museum.

Aaron: Yeah, displayed in kind of a zoo manor.

Molly: Yeah! And you have to, you- you try to capture its attention.

Aaron: Yeah.

Molly: Her attention. And as she’s swooping around you try and do something that’s gonna make her notice you and interact with you. And then she’ll get bored and go away from you.

Aaron: Yeah.

Molly: Toward someone else, if- if you get boring. Well this idea is something that Gordon Pask started playing with in 1953 with something he invented called the musicolour mach-machine. So you’d have to interact with it and play music and it would be a mobile, sort of mobile. And the parts would move, and if you weren’t interesting enough it would get bored.

Cedric Price picks up this project with his Generator project. Which was instead of cubes, this was never built, but instead of 12 foot by 12 foot cubes and, um, walkways and ramps just sort of a recombinable center.

Aaron: Best way I can think of it is when I was a kid, in the Bay area, there was an attraction called “The Wooz”. And The Wooz was a hedge maze-

Molly: Whoa!

Aaron: That was changed at various junctures so that you would never have the same Wooz. But The Wooz is basically like a giant Cedric Price sculpture.

Molly: That’s amazing.

Aaron: The goal for Price wasn’t to lose children in The Wooz it was to have a building that was constantly renewable.

Molly: Changing. And changing according to people’s whims. And he realized that maybe people would not want to have their building move around and, and so he worked with a group of- with a couple, um, John and Julia Fraser who are programmers and architects to come up with a set of programs. And so they proposed putting microcontrollers on all of Generator’s pieces.

Let me point out, this is- this project took place from 1976 to 1979. So we’re talking about some crazy stuff here right? We’re talking about stuff that was roughly 40 years ago. But the best program, and this is where we connect to Madeline Gannon, was the Boredom program, because if it got bored of its users and it hadn’t been recombined enough it would come up with its own layouts, its own plans, its own menus, and then hand them off to the crane operator, Wally Prince, who would then take the mobile crane and move them around. So this is a building that you- that can get bored with you. How cool is that?

Aaron: Was any of this stuff actually built or-

Molly: No, No.

Aaron: Are these all- all theoretical?

Molly: It was never built. It wasn’t theoretical, um-

Aaron: Right.

Molly: It- it was a real project with a real client and I have pored over hundreds of drawings of the thing.

Aaron: It doesn’t seem like computer chips were at- in a place that could have supported-

Molly: Right?

Aaron: Anything like- I mean. This vision would have been hard to execute in the 1990s.

Molly: Yes. Exactly. But they kept trying. You know? That idea is still a prescient idea. It would still be a weird and awesome thing to interact with this set of cubes and stuff that would get bored with you.

Aaron: It’s a little like- the like modern idea of the Hackathon.

Molly: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Aaron: But it’s less- they seem less oriented around like “we’re just making stuff”. Like the ideas and the crosspollination of the ideas seems as important as executing those ideas. Which I guess is something you have to be comfortable with if you’re ahead of your time.

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: And you’re trying to make a house that reconfigures itself in the 1960s.

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: You’ve gotta be a little… willing to compromise on physical reality.

Molly: Nicholas Negroponte has written a number of books. One of the books that he wrote is called “The Architecture Machine”. This is the book that he wrote in 1970 and dedicated to the first machine that can appreciate the gesture. So this is- this is what he says in “The Architecture Machine”, he says, “My view of the distant future of architecture machines, they won’t help us design, instead we will live in them. The fantasies of an intelligent and responsive physical environment are too easily limited by the gap between the technology of making things and the science of understanding them. I strongly believe that it is very important to play with these ideas scientifically and explore applications of machine intelligence that totter between being unimaginably oppressive and unbelievably exciting.” 1970.

Aaron: Wow.

Molly: And that’s- that’s the crux of this stuff, right?

Aaron: So what do- what does someone who’s like obsessed with AI now think when they realize that Nicholas Neg-Negroponte said something like that in 1970?

Molly: You know, what I hope is whether I’m talking to students or, you know, whether it’s somebody reading my book, what I hope is that people realize that these ideas have long histories and it’s not just 22 year olds working on them but actually if you consider it it’s really some 70 years of computing and some of these ideas, you know, are- are centuries old we just have the technology.

I think you’re less prone to make stupid mistakes if you understand what has happened previously. One example I think of is, it seems like one of the low hanging fruits for people working in design has been trying to work on conversational user interfaces, or chatbots. People have learned that they’re really hard to get right, but you know what? Joseph Weizenbaum, who created Eliza, could have told you that in 1965.

These are hard problems. I guess, you know, when I consider conversations about the singularity or when I consider things like, you know, Nick Bostrom’s argument about super-intelligence, I also think that quite often the toilet flushes on the automatic toilet when I don’t want it to and then I wonder if the toilets won’t flush the way we want them to when they’re automated. Is AI really gonna be taking over the world and leaving us all jobless in the next five years and I’m not so certain.

Aaron: When I listen to you talk about this, I looked out over this sea of young people, um, who wanna do this kind of stuff. What was so striking to me was these thinkers were thinking 40–50 years in the future. They weren’t thinking about a product they could make tomorrow. I mean, there does seem to be a utopian level while they were trying to make it tomorrow, but they were setting the bar way out ahead of themselves. And there’s something about ideas that are generated when you’ve got that 50 year stare as opposed to ideas that, like, you could maybe get funded as a start up right now.

Molly: Right now, yeah. You model intelligence with whatever you have at hand. You know, I assume 2,000 years ago people had artificial intelligence, they had novel ways of communicating at great distances, long before we had telephones and telegraphs. Right? Here’s what I wonder. Are we modeling the same thing, using the tools at hand? And maybe these ideas are actually very old.

Aaron: It does not surprise me that this book and this line of thinking comes out of the history of architecture, because buildings are the things that we have to think about in the 100 year span. We do not-

Molly: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Aaron: think about cell phone design in the 100 year span.

Molly: No.

Aaron: We do not think about- really we don’t think about almost anything in the 100 year span.

Molly: No.

Aaron: And- except potentially like being able to live on the Earth and what buildings will look like because we have a pretty good guide that buildings last over 100 years.

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: If they’re properly built.

Molly: My house of the future is 120 years old.

Aaron: Do you think that was- those gu- why this started with architecture? Was because of that length that it has?

Molly: I think that’s part of it, and I think metaphors.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Molly: You know, we all know what a building is and we all have an idea of what a city or a town is and we have our own feelings of what it is to move through those- those spaces. Those metaphors were powerful ways to think of structuring the early chaos of the world wide web in the 1990s when the web was a much uglier place than it is today.

I also think the longevity is nice and I wish there would be more thought given to the ramifications of desi- design decisions and funding decisions of start ups and technologies but the other thing about architecture is it gives you an interface. Right? All technologies need an interface for people or even programmers to understand them. And architecture was one of the first places where those interfaces developed.

Aaron: How can people who want to read this book, um, find it?

Molly: You can go to my website, which is girlwonder.com. And you can find it on Amazon. You can also find it- it’s MIT Press’ website as well.

Aaron: Google can be used to locate this book.

Molly: This is right.

Aaron: Um, well thank you very much Molly. It’s been great conversation.

Molly: Thank you so much Aaron, it’s been great.