Connie Shi + Matvei Malkov, Google Material Design

On what makes software engineering a true creative practice

Liam speaks with Googlers Connie Shi, a software engineer on Material Design, and Matvei Malkov, a software engineer on Jetpack Compose, and the trio unpack what makes coding a creative practice, and which creative choices are required when you build a design system for other developers around the world.

The wide-ranging conversation turns from complex problem solving and technical logic to the concept of creativity as the question-provoking quality of a thought.

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Liam Spradlin: Okay, welcome to Design Notes.

Matvei Malkov: Hello.

Connie Shi: Hello.

Liam: Uh, so just as an introduction, I want to hear from each of you, Connie and Matvei, what it is that you're working on now and what the journey was like that brought you to that point? And maybe, Connie, I'll start with you.

Connie: Sure. I'm currently working on the, um, Compose Material 3 Library as part of Jetpack Compose. How I came to this point is I studied computer graphics in college. Uh, worked on a series of mobile applications and became interested as part of that in understanding more about the design-system side and also how UI libraries are created. An opportunity came up and I joined Materials Design four years ago. And have been, uh, fortunate to collaborate very closely with the Android team for the past few years.

Liam: And, Matvei?

Matvei: And for me, um, I think it's, uh, you know, pretty, uh, pretty straightforward in general. I studied computer science in the, the uni as well. Then I started, uh, working just nightly, uh, like in a few agencies here and there. First of all, I started like in with the back-end development and then I switched over to mobile, specifically Android's development. Made a few apps here and there. Tried out the, to, like to be a startup person. It didn't work out.

Um, and then I decided, "Okay, maybe that's enough for me with the applications and, um, like development. Um, it's enough for me to develop for kind of users. I want to develop for developers." And, um, decided to train myself in library development, framework development, well, uh, which is what I'm currently doing. For four years I work at Google and the whole time have been in, uh, andro- uh, just toolkit team, or Android Toolkit team. Uh, so we develop libraries for other developers to, to use to build applications. Pretty exciting thing.

Liam: Both of these stories, it strikes me that both of these stories sound quite straightforward, but for me as a designer, I have a lot of questions. I'm going to have a lot of, uh, probably basic questions for you both. Matvei, when you say that you like worked in the startup world on applications and things like that, but you became more interested in building libraries, can you expand on that a little bit? What made libraries like more exciting or interesting to you than, than full applications?

Matvei: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Um, how do I, how do I tackle this? So I think the idea is there is all this, this part, uh, of you building some things for developers, um, as an engineer. But the, the audience varies quite, uh, quite a lot, right? So if I'm building something, um, in my application, I still, uh, develop things that my teammates will use and I will use later on, which kind of makes me a framework developer on the very, very, uh, small-scale, so I can serve four or five other engineers, maybe 10, maybe 20.

Um, so while I, while I was doing this kind of d- designing complex solutions, uh, for the application, reusable parts, um, and whatnot, I identified that I kind of enjoy this part of, um, of programming. Just kind of making sure that some things survive the test of time, um, still serve the purpose when the new, uh, um, requirements come from product or from, from design even.

Uh, and then I decided, "Okay, what if I will make it, uh, like a full-time job, to just make the new libraries, APIs, interfaces, uh, for developers, uh, to use?" So it kind of allows me to, um, allows me to serve a big, big, big, right, of different users, cohorts, um, different backgrounds of users, um, different expertise levels, which is pretty challenging and interesting, uh, thing we're currently doing.

Liam: Connie, would you say that it's similar for you or different?

Connie: I agr- ... I, it sounds similar. I think in reflecting on why I chose this path, from my last team, I worked on a educational product, uh, Google Classroom. And so they were very passionate and driven people who wanted to solve problems f- in the education space, which were very worthwhile. But similar to Matvei, I found myself, um, trying to balance how to focus on the end product, but also, finding time and space to make sure that the software and the engineering behind the product was solid and, you know, brought user delight.

And was accessible, and all these other aspects that, which contribute to the enjoyment and the, um, end goals of the product that wasn't exactly stated in our, you know, annual, um, goals or road maps. And so it was, I think I realized that I gravitated over time towards the, like Matvei was saying, building tools, so that it would make it easier for other developers who are more business logic or product focused to be able to do that aspect of their job easier. Instead, of having to figure out how to cleverly, um, or use extra time that they had to focus on these more foundational building blocks that should be available and somewhat standardized so that, um, more of our peers can take advantage of.

Liam: It sounds like maybe it was something that you wish someone else was doing back when you were working on product.

Connie: Absolutely, back then, um, at Google, there was a crowdsource library before the Material Design team, I think staffed up our own engineering, um, teams and produced a library. So it was very fortunate that by the time I was interested there was this opportunity to, uh, participate.

Liam: I want to back up and understand. Connie, you said you studied computer graphics. I'm interested to know what you learned there and how that informs your software engineering practice?

Connie: Sure. I went to school to study computer science, but my focus was computer graphics because when I was much younger, I was very interested in animation. I wanted to work at, uh, places like Pixar or DreamWorks as a special effects artist. But over time, I realized that what interested more, while the, you know, the, the visual art was very beautiful, that I was more interested in the tooling and how to, um, solve the problems that arose from, uh, at first just like the computational limitations.

But then, um, later also, uh, I think I, as I learned more about what the life of a visual artist, uh, is like, it appealed to me less than, uh, what it's like to be a software engineer, which I think is a lot about solving problems. And understanding constraints. All the things that I think we will discuss further on, but, um, you were asking me, how does that ... Sorry. Could you repeat the question? (laughs)

Liam: Sure. I'm curious how, um, how that kind of perspective informs the way that you create software now?

Connie: I think when I first started studying computer science, I thought it was a very logical, mathematical-based, uh, discipline. That there was, you know, a right answer and a wrong answer, very black-and-white. And as I continued my studies in both the very, you know, logical computer science side and then also computer graphics, I realized that it's more of a craft. And more of a trade, and so there's a lot ... There's no one right answer, right? The creativity ... I guess, I, I think through computer graphics, I discovered the creativity side of, uh, software engineering.

And so I think when I, through my day-to-day job, I try to think about I guess, the, the subjective aspects, and the human aspects of computer science, and software engineering because until whatever artificial intelligence can take over our jobs completely, we have to (laughs) deal with that very, um, you know, sometimes illogical, but always very fascinating, interesting part of, uh, dealing with another person.

Liam: Yeah. Okay, I, I'm really interested in that, um, because you two are the first software engineers that I've had on the show, except for maybe a pilot episode that I recorded back in the beginning, um, with Roman Nurik. Um, and the premise for us kind of getting together for an episode is that software engineering is in fact a creative practice, which I think maybe some folks, including designers who work with software engineers might not be aware of or might, you know, not have that perspective. So I want to know from each of you, what that means? Where is that like human-subjective side to the software? Where does that come in and what makes is creative?

Matvei: Okay. I can, I can, I can give it a shot and then let me know if I'm, uh, you know, if, uh ... I'll get carried away quite a lot-

Liam: (laughs)

Matvei: ... 'cause also it's, it's a nice segue 'cause, uh, Connie talks about, um, about graphic design, right? And then, um, as I happened to study a l- uh, little bits of the graphic design like low-levels, so, you know, graphic languages, and shaders and, and whatnot. And I think that's kind of where we can touch on this creative process of in general, in creative and software engineering being a creative practice. We can go from the one side of the spectrum where you have, um, design and kind of, you know, building this mental castles of logic, um, of, uh, of a problem you're solving.

And we can end up on the other side of the spectrum, might be something like even line. Maybe it's like, uh, you know, a space of creativity. So for me, like this, uh, engineering being a creative practice is when you f- find some time, during your day to call this kind of focus mode and either see, experiment, and see things appearing on the screen. For example, for you, right, I'm kind of saying, "Okay, what if I do this? What if I do that? How do I accomplish this tricky design that I've been given?"

Uh, it sounds kind of small, but then, um, you can really, really can get carried away trying to, uh, produce something that works well, feels nice, you know, well optimized and stuff like that. And then, yeah, again, that's kind of like on, on a visual side. And on the, um, design problem I solve in space, is like where you ... Because you, you try to maintain the big problem in your s- in your head, expand on this, contract, uh, and, uh, you know, see how it, um, later spills out into the code you're writing, which is pretty, pretty creative process, uh, at least for me.

Liam: Could you walk through maybe a small example of that, the, the way that you, you know, perceive a problem, which can be addressed by code, and expand and contract that to come to a solution?

Matvei: Sure. Let's say you have, uh, maybe layout to design, right? You have like half of the screen to make it, so that it appears on user end later on. I think e- even, even from here, like you start by kind of building a mental map in your head saying, "Okay, this thing goes there. This things goes here. Those things are f- f- form kind of a group and those things are completely detached." I feel like even now, I'm talking about it and I'm kind of building a tree, a tree of elements and how they are connected.

Um, so even this, like you start getting more kind of, you know, you, you start to imagine things, right, uh, i- in, in your head. Build a tree, seeing, okay, I can solve this one with this tool. This one is with that tool. You maybe try to sketch it. Maybe you fail because the tools available to you are not enough. Or you don't know what tool you need to use yet. So you go into, into, you know, into the weeds of one section of the screen. The other one, coming back again seeing, "Okay, m- I'm kind of done with this one. I want to finish it, uh, a little bit more, but for now it's, uh, it's enough. I'm going there to another place, uh, on a screen."

Uh, design this kind of, this beats again, then zoom out again, to, to see the, the bigger picture. Maybe you get some feedback from the, from, uh, from your peers on how this looks, how this feels. Maybe you go to your designer, product manager, get the feedback, and then, you know, start over again. It's kind of more I think the example on the visual side and, um, makes you keep a lot of stuff, yeah, in mind. And kind of navigate through this.

Connie: I have to take a moment and process everything Matvei has said (laughs) because I think that's very-

Liam: (laughs) Same.

Connie: ... deep thinking. Um, maybe if I could go back to your original question of what, what does-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Connie: ... the idea of a creative process mean to me? The word curiosity comes to mind and because I think for something to be creative, to me, it means that there's no, at least to me immediate obvious way that, you know, a problem should be solved or it has to be performed. Um, in order to I guess tap into the creativity, I think it has to be something that maybe, uh, invites questions and, uh, like I said, a curiosity to learn more. You know, maybe if you're, you know, d- day-to-day were asked to make something or solve some problem, uh, what makes it creative or what, what, uh, a list turns it into something that requires, uh, either a creative process or practice is that, you know, we want to find out more.

What is the purpose? What is the problem? Who are you trying to, um, answer the question or solve the problem for? What benefits does it bring them? What are the different possible ways we could approach it? Um, I think especially from Matvei and me because we, um, don't work in a close ecosystem, meaning, you know, we, we're not just, um, concerned about an app where we control the back-end and the front-end. And we know what the user can and and cannot do 'cause we have a very tight control.

I think that requires a lot of, um, creative thinking about, you know, "I cannot predict what everyone will try to do, so how can I, um, design something, like an API in our case, such that we promote and strongly encourage the behavior we, we want? And, um, in a not very constricting or dictatorial way, try to dissuade you from (laughs) doing what we do not wants." Um, and then of course, based on feedback from our, our lead adapters, um, and from our peers, it's a very iterative process. Because whenever you get new input, hopefully you'll be amicable and fluid enough to, um, mutate. And be nimble enough to adapt to the new, uh, needs and constraints that you learn along the way.

Matvei: Wow. This is so-

Connie: (laughs)

Matvei: ... uh, this is so, uh, deep actually and, and so true what-

Connie: (laughs)

Matvei: ... what Connie just said. I kind of got like this, um, in my head this metaphor for writing a story. Like, you know, driving, driving a person who u- who's using your tools, APIs through the story. The idea is we, we have tools and we really, really have to think on a day-to-day basis of like, "How the user will p- perceive our, our things we're building, our building blocks, uh, what should they see first? What should they bring the most attention to?" So I think it's kind of like again, storytelling, scripting thing, which is, I can see that also creative practice. So in that sense, in that sense, it's very, very, um, uh, very similar. An asset is fine, I imagine.

Liam: I have to say, first of all, I feel like I have an extremely rich picture of what goes into creating code. And second, I want to say that like the, the picture that I'm getting from both of you is actually from a process perspective, a philosophical perspective, and, yeah, a creative perspective. It sounds very similar to what an interface designer would do when they're working on an interface design. And I think having you two, who work on libraries here is such a great example because your product also, as you said, deals with users and these users happen to often be other software engineers or developers.

And I know from interface design that when we talk about trying to guide users through the story or, you know, enable them to do certain things, we think about in design like certain signifiers, which could be text, or icons, or just shaped colored regions of space that imply (laughs) the ability to do something. (laughs) And I'm curious what those signifiers are in code that allow your users, who are developers to understand what they're kind of able to do, supposed to do with the things that you create?

Matvei: First thing that comes in mind, even though being, uh, a very cliché thing, right? In, in, in programming, in programming, there is a cliché that says like there are only two hardest problems in, in programming, in engineering, which is, uh, cache invalidation and naming. We, we skip the cache invalidation because it's technical problem, but the naming, I think is something we heavily, heavily utilize in our day-to-day job.

Uh, and, um, I don't know how much time on, in my life I spent just actually, you know, just sitting down, not writing code, and thinking, "How do I name this thing?" Because the name is, uh, the utter importance for us and then for developers as well to discover, to understand what it means, what it, uh, what this thing will be used for.

Um, and it goes for kind of public things developers will see, um, on all the layers, right, so it's, uh, it's all the, the names of the parameter, what this means, um, how do we kind of signal to developers that this is the thing they need if they have this use case to solve? So, um, naming is very, very on a surface there like we, we utilize this, this thing a lot, um, among some other, some other things.

Connie: Matvei and I have had many conversations about naming and I've learned a lot from the motivations and, uh, let's say API regrets that, uh, the Android Org has had in the past. And why now, naming, you know, now there's a lot of guidance, um, around naming. I think beyond that, um, in our libraries, we try to, you know, have documentation and have examples. And we have, you know, things like a catalog app to showcase how we recommend our APIs are used.

I know that on the Material Design side, we want to be able to be helpful and be a bit more opinionated. And provide guidance, um, about the, the ranges of, not only feasibility, but recommended, you know, colors, or paddings, or boundaries, or typography, or whatever else. And I think depending on how a library is designed, that could more or less, uh, be also how we convey, um, guidance, uh, to our end developers on how, uh, we think that our library could be used to help them achieve whatever, uh, business needs they need in their application.

Liam: I want to latch onto something you said there that, um, the library is designed, (laughs) code is designed. Um, earlier, Matvei, talked about a castle of logic and a castle is certainly designed. There are a lot of materials that go into that. I'm interested in what, what, um ... There's a question that I ask to a lot of folks in different disciplines. Like what is the stuff that you're working with? What is the stuff and how do you compose it? (laughs)

Matvei: Well, I don't know. Maybe I just, um, really right now, 'cause, 'cause, uh, because of, because of what Connie said, I'm gonna attach to this idea of, you know, storytelling, um, a little bit. Um, so maybe that's why it comes to mind as well. I think it's kind of, uh, you know, it's, um, castles of logic, uh, are built on kind of like, you know, logical pieces of this goes here. If this Boolean bit flips, then we go through another completely different corridor in the castle or like just an in g- different branch, uh, in our, in our logic, like in, uh, in, uh, in our imaginary tree, uh, in my, in my head.

Connie: Uh, Liam, I can add on from a slightly, maybe a different vantage point. So I agree with everything Matvei is saying. Um, and you were asking about what materials we use? I think of, uh, what m- what Matvei has described, if I could, um, torture the castle metaphor a little bit more to be the center? And then as we expand, there's the grounds, and the moat, and whatever else that protects it. And I, I think of those as supporting features, right, that make, um, the castle strong, and, and protect it and, and for it all. And I think those, uh, are the, sometimes aspects of software engineering that we don't think about 'cause they're not so core to the code.

But they're things like documentation and the secondary things we think about like, "Yes, our primary user base is the developer, but our secondary user base, perhaps even more importantly, is the end user and how does the tools, in this case our library, how does that enable the developers to create the kind of experiences that our end users want? Um, and then also, how do we support just beyond the core library that we provide to the developers in order to, um, make the most effective use of the, of the tools that we're providing?"

So I think of the materials, you know, being the bricks are maybe the code that we write and then, you know, the documentation that we provide in the library. And then, uh, in our library cases in particular, the additional, um, developer-advocacy support, the community that we provide, um, and the, you know, ongoing support. And the, for material, the design tools and the, you know, all the other sort of huge cast of supporting characters that help enrich and create this ecosystem.

Because, you know, just like programming languages come and go, uh, libraries come and go, tools come and go. And, uh, I think sort of the, the secret sauce or the, like what differentiates between the ones that have longevity and have a rich user base is all these extra, uh, supplemental add-ons, um, that complement the primary product. That is the castle of logic.

Liam: Okay. (laughs) I'm glad, I'm glad to bring it full circle with the castle of logic. Um, as you were talking, I was also picking up on, you know, some of these supporting elements like, uh, design tooling and guidance, and things like that, um, speaks to a kind of shared language that I think is especially present on Material Design where engineering and design have to work together so closely because we are serving both groups at the same time as a product.

Um, I know that, you know, often in conversations, um, with designers, a topic that comes up is, you know, working with engineering and being kind of accountable for understanding technical concepts, the constraints of the platform that you're working with, things like that, um, so that we can ensure that both of those things are kind of matching up. Um, but I'm interested if there's a similar conversation in software engineering about a shared vocabulary with design and what that looks like?

Matvei: You want to go first, Connie?

Connie: (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Connie: I think it's d- a different experience for me and my team because we're so close to a design product than perhaps for you or, um, someone who's on a consumer or business-product focus team. So for me and my team, I think we perhaps were attracted to Material Design because we are, have an affinity for creativity and design. And so I think it's a constant give and take, where we are interested in, you know, being involved early on in the design process.

But we understand that or we try to understand that while it's important for our design counterparts to be aware of the technical constraints, um, sometimes it's could also be hampering, um, because I think just like you push us to figure out how to create and build the tools. Or, you know, create effects that currently do not exist, um, we also don't want to already put boundaries up to prevent you from, you know, thinking beyond what is currently available.

Um, I will say that one of the things that my team has been focused on is to educate new designers who come into the organization who maybe not as familiar, um, with how, especially like the release and lifecycle of a library. And how long that can be, especially for something like Android that has a very long, um, long adoption tail. Um, so we are currently in conversations with our design counterparts to figure out, how do we, not only explain it in terms that an engineer would understand, um, but also, in terms a designer would understand?

So for example, we've tried, in addition to explaining, "Here's our res- re- release cycle. What kind of changes can go into each and why it's important to, for various reasons like user trust, or accessibility, or whatever else?" Um, we try to give concrete examples of, you know, if you wanted to change this aspect of the design system or if you wanted to introduce this new feature. Uh, we don't want to say, "No."

What we're saying ... What we're trying to, um, I guess get to is a common ground, a common ground of understanding of how can we fulfill your amazing vision, but at the same time, make sure that our existing products, and users, and potential new users will see us as a, um, added benefit, instead of an unpredictable churn in their main focus, right, to, to create something worthwhile for their team or users? I hope that sort of (laughs) answers your question.

Liam: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Matvei: I'll try to take a little bit of a different then s- spin on the same question, uh, a little bit 'cause I've been y- um, a big advocate for a designer too, uh, engineer kind of, you know, relationship between design and engineering. I always thought about it as one of the most important alliances I have to make and maintain while working, especially like in the, in the fields where you develop application. Um, when you can, create application for users.

Uh, I feel like it kind of usually building this relationship with design, sharing the same vocabulary, explaining them how I think while, while I'm making their designs happen, and understanding how they think. And like what are they gonna, uh, what all, all the user journeys they want to cover and why is it so important? Uh, makes my job easier and also actually more creative 'cause I can suggest something, right? It's not like, "Here is design. Go make it." It's more like, "Hey, this is the button and it is there because we want to put more attention."

And, uh, and I know. I can, um, I can say and suggest maybe, "Oh, you know what? In our platform, IOS or Android or, and what, uh, and whatnot, there is tool to make it even more, to bring even more attention for some reason. I don't know. We can just kind of add a circle." So it's kind of more, it becomes a conversation. It becomes a creative brainstorm together with, with the developer, between developers and designers. And I think, I think it's like the whole, uh, engineering, the whole like IT industry, we can do so much more, to be honest, uh, in, in, in this regard, kind of talk more, uh, between the engineering, uh, so that would be very, very nice for everyone involved.

Liam: Just to follow up on that briefly, I want to ask, are there things that you wish more design practitioners knew or practiced in that regard?

Matvei: Is this the place where, um, where I say, you know, i- if, uh, if designers that design, for example, m- m- m- m- mobile applications for a particular pl- platform know the platform guidelines and capabilities? I think that usually helps a lot. I mean, I think r- right now, it's mostly the standard, right, um, that kind of everyone kind of more or less aware of what's happening. Um, but I think, I think that, that's a thing we can always use more from the applications, right?

Liam: Yeah.

Matvei: I'm saying, "Okay, this goes for Android because of this and that. This is not possible. This is possible." Um, usually goes a long way.

Connie: One of the things that I noticed, especially with the designers from the Android Org is that oftentimes they'll use the library and use some coding projects. And sometimes even to, um, livestream code-alongs. And I find it to be, uh, always a rewarding experience to watch and see someone who is not, um, primarily in my discipline use the product, especially someone who is a colleague or, you know, is from the field of the, um, person who designed it.

So I think in this particular case, it's a designer using a UI library. But I think it would be, uh, equally interesting just for, you know, uh, like a teacher, to interview a teacher, if this is my previous team to ask, "Oh, how would you create a product to solve this problem that we, you know, to ... How would you surface this feature from a different perspective?" Uh, someone who maybe is not biased based on all the, you know, learnings and, and, uh, best practices of our fields to come at it from a fresh eye.

Um, so, yeah. To circle back, I think it's not a requirement, but certainly we strongly encourage, I think our designer and counterparts to play around with our library or product and, you know, review our documentation 'cause I think sometimes we make assumptions of what people know and do not know 'cause we are steeped in it every day. And it's, um, you know, usually people have very good insights, uh, when they don't make the same assumptions as, um, oftentimes it leads to a better product for everyone involved.

Liam: Yeah. I think, um, going back to something you said earlier, Connie, something else that I'm really interested in across disciplines is recognizing either a piece of work or a body of work as being complete, or finished, or at a good point for, for being considered finished for now, which is often the best we can hope for. I think as you talked about like the lifecycle of something like a library, the release cycles and so on, um, that your discipline may or may not have a more clear answer to this. But (laughs) I'm curious, with the library, with software engineering, is there a way that you can tell that the code is, um, is complete?

Connie: In my experience, there is different definitions to complete. I, I, I think that in order to be a good steward of a product that our users will actually trust, we have a very high bar for, you know, always being backwards compatible and not causing binary incompatibility, not, um, basically abusing or, you know, losing our user's trust. But at the same time, I think with both design and, um, software engineering there's never really ... It's never really like completely done.

It's this is, um, you know, for this version, which I want to, um, target either for, you know, uh, a big public conference or because I think it's important that we have regular updates with fixes and performance improvements. And all the other, um, maybe not as, um, flashy, but very important, uh, work that make my product dependable. Um, I think there's the, there's the question of, "Is it ready for this regular cadence to be released?" And then there's the, "Is this completely done?"

I think that probably it's n- it's never completely done. It's either we're moving on to another major version or, um, we have a new release. But I think it's very important too, for the sake of, you know, the, both the developer and the user audience to not get into a, um, scope-creep situation where because, you know, new ideas and new information always comes up that we hold off releasing, you know, uh, uh, a stable version of the library because our users also have their own deadlines.

And they're also waiting for, you know, whatever changes, or fixes, or futures that we've decided to include. So, um, I think the question maybe is, is this, is the, is the library or is the design system at a place where we're ready for, um, you know, a preview or a general audience to get feedback? And then, be honest about, "Okay, we're gonna make changes, so we're going to be clear that this is a, you know, either minor or major revision based upon like delta from the previous one."

I think we often try to be very intentional about why we change things, but sometimes that doesn't matter because it is still a disruptive change for that, uh, you know, user or developer on the receiving end. And it's unwanted because they didn't opt into it, or they weren't informed, or they thought that there was a different contract of trust between you and them when they decided to use your product.

Liam: Yeah. This goes back also to the idea of kind of the, the boundaries between or within design and engineering in the sense that, you know, we were talking earlier about, um, technical feasibility and trying not to set up unnecessary boundaries around what can be done. Um, but I'm curious like how the boundaries are set up right now, and where they might be set up in the future? Like how do you, how do you make that decision early enough in the process that, that something is, is kind of worth investing this creative energy in or not?

Matvei: Uh, coming from the kind of, uh, if you don't talk, uh, about the material as, uh, as a design library. I'm kind of talking more widely about the whole framework development. I think trying to set as, uh, fewer boundaries as possible, um, is usually a good thing, right? And I think we kind of see this, um, well, you, you, you compose, you, you know, like this new model UI toolkit. We've seen a very big breakthrough even with them, with the creativity that, uh, developers found out, now unlocked them.

Like h- having, um, them having access to basically no restrictions, good tools, good APIs, makes their head explode with ideas. Like developers are free to explore, um, but again, it's more, it's more about the lower-level APIs and kind of engineering work we are doing. Uh, maybe material, in material we try to set a little boundaries a little bit, uh, a little bit more, right, because we're trying to be more opinionated about, uh, what material is and kind of how material application looks like. So I think the answer there is like boundaries are necessary, but I think we're still, we're flawed with them all the time, right? So we're, we're trying to shift it here and there, and adjust as needed.

Liam: Just to close, I'm also always interested in asking about the future. I'm curious how you each see the future of code as a creative medium and the relationship that we've spent a lot of time talking about between code and visual design?

Matvei: I feel like the more we go towards the future of kind of like, you know, programming languages, um, tools, and stuff like that, I f- I feel like the future l- uh, looks bright (laughs) in g- um, in a sense that the creative part is actually what will stay in my opinion. I, uh, I think we have to make a lot of things. We makes, we make a lot of routine, like routinely made operations and calls. And, um, general chores easy for the other person, users, and everyone else involved.

But there is still this need to build mental castles. So complicated logic, um, make it appear on-screen later on. You know, push this change that kind of makes things happen. Um, this is, this is not going anywhere anytime soon, I imagine. So in that sense, I'm very, I'm very hopeful 'cause the juicy bit stays with me and then, you know, the other things I'm lazy to do will be, will be automated at some point.

Connie: I agree with Matvei, and I look forward to that future. I think we've already seen throughout the relatively short history of software engineering that it, uh, you know, at first it was fairly inaccessible both in terms of hardware and I think education. And over time, it's become, you know, much more democratized. It's easily accessible. It brings people together. Um, I think it's one of those disciplines where regardless of age, or geography, or your background, access is available, especially if you can get online, which I hope most people can.

And, you know, things like Android are open-source and largely affordable. And we try to provide tool- tooling that, um, like we spoke about before, that facilitates whatever problems they need to solve. And so I'm looking forward to more sort of design through coding. So I think some things I already saw in school are things like data visualization.

I think conveying information that maybe traditionally do not bring the word, you know, visual or design to mind. And through I guess the ac- the, the increased access that is now available, um, through either, you know, someone manually coding or li- as Matvei is saying, more and more of these automations that we can, um, make discoveries and also consume information in, um, ways that are not as, uh, easily discoverable before.

Liam: Thanks. I think that's a great vision to close on. Thank you again, uh, both of you for joining me today.

Matvei: Thank you.

Connie: Thank you very much.

Dave Crossland, Google Fonts

Exploring the impact of digital type on our lives, on software production, and on the future of design

Liam and Google Fonts Specialist Dave Crossland explore what digital type can teach us about digital production, emotional expression, and where we fit in the world as designers; and how – with a little imagination – we might unlock new possibilities.

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Liam Spradlin: Hi, Dave. Welcome to Design Notes.

Dave Crossland: Hey. How are you?

Liam: Good. To start off as usual, why don't you introduce yourself and the work that you're doing?

Dave: Well, I'm working with the Google Fonts team as the sort of operations manager. Often, I get boiled down to the team font expert, and I've been on the team for over 10 years. I sort of know everything that's going on, a lot of context, and so, I'm often explaining what we do can be very nuanced. There's a lot of depth to typography, but at the same time, it's something which a lot of people don't think about too much. A lot of my work is explaining type designers to Google and Google to type designers as we commission fonts.

Liam: Tell me a little bit about how you got there. What is the journey like to become font expert?

Dave: Well, I think I've always, since I was early teenager, been interested in graphic design and publishing, the power of information and information design. That's what I went to study at college in the UK. I'm English and I went to Ravensbourne College of Design, initially in a graphic design program, and I graduated in interaction design.

Then, a couple of years after that, I attended the University of Reading, which has an old kind of red brick Ivy League style university and has a department of typography, and within that, a master's program in typeface design. And so, I attended that for a couple of years. As I was student, the web font revolution was happening and this ability to use any font on a webpage was re-arriving. It was something that had been in there in the '90s but had gone away and then came back some 12 years ago.

And so, I was very keen on the idea of what I call libre fonts, other people may call open source fonts. That was a bit of a radical idea back then. Recently, I was chatting with a recent graduate and I said, "Well, you know, before Google Fonts, da da da." They were like, "No. No, I was 12 when it came out." Don't remember.

Liam: There was no before.

Dave: They don't remember that. Yeah.

Liam: Why was that a radical idea?

Dave: I think if you go back about 10 years, there was just very, very few fonts which were available under such sort of permissive license terms where anyone can use it for any purpose and even modify the font itself. And a big question will be, wow, it's a huge effort to design the typeface, to draw everything. And it's difficult to do that on a hobbyist kind of part-time basis.

If you try and do type design as a hobby, you just may not be able to put enough concentrated time into it to get good at it. And so people who really get into it are really investing, I mean years of that life into it. And so to design a typeface for six months as a full-time effort, that's something that's got to be paid. And so always with libre licensing of things, then people can sometimes feel a bit mystified about why would anyone be paid to do something that's given away.

There are organizations that benefit from work being freely available. It's more valuable to that organization for the work to be unrestricted. And that's really the case here with Google Fonts, that having fonts which are not tied into Google's products that are totally open and can float around with their text, the document can be exported and imported in and out of any application, that's important for people. And especially as we keep advancing into the future with new mediums, there's kind of AR, VR stuff right now, seems to be a sort of new platform, new technology that people are exploring.

And so the ability to always be able to move forwards, even if a company from a previous era ends up going out of business, going out of the way, if they've been publishing free and open libre software or font or other things, those things can have a future life. So yeah, it was a new thing back then and was seen as a bit radical because people, I think, had some anxiety back then about how it was going to work.

Liam: You also mentioned aspects of type design that are really integral to the process, but that people maybe don't think about very much. Could you talk a little bit about some of those?

Dave: To me, something that's been driving me to work on this for over a decade is there's this sort of amazing tension between the ubiquity of type and its obscurity. You can't go anywhere in the world, in any urban environment without being surrounded by text. And yet the fact that someone has drawn those letters that you are seeing and that there's this system of shapes going on, is something that's totally below the level of consciousness.

I think one of the biggest trends in these years I've been working on this has been this continued globalization and internationalization of type. Hundreds of years ago there was a lot of ads in London, Paris, New York, but that wasn't the case in a lot of other nations capitals. And today, smartphones are becoming something that everyone has and digital typography, digital advertising is becoming a real big business.

I think today you go to India and you'll see commercial billboards on the side of the highway that are in English, but it's also the world's largest democracy. So a lot of the political billboards are in the local languages, local writing systems. So yeah, I think there have been these commercial drivers in the past, but I think that with digital typography, digital advertising, we're seeing that change.

Liam: I think it's interesting to point out how much type kind of constructs the world around us or how much it's surrounding us in urban areas, and the fact that someone made that. Something that I like to explore a lot on Design Notes is how we as designers are placing ourselves in the world. And it strikes me that this is kind of a special placement as it were because we are placing ourselves in the type that is then being placed by other people into other contexts. I guess I'm interested in your thoughts on what that relationship is and how we can be conscious of it as designers.

Dave: Well, I would say that really the real value of different type is the emotional note that it adds to the text. This is in a way kind of true subliminal advertising. There's not really secret messages in a single frame in a advert on TV or whatever that all kind of 1950s ideas, the kind of weird shapes in the ice cubes kind of stuff. As far as I know, that's not real. But the way that letter forms shapes make you feel, that is real. And there's a lot of fonts for the Latin writing system that we use in English, other European languages, but there's very few for many of the world's writing systems.

You go and you see a ice cream shop, I think Baskin-Robbins in the States it's like a big international chain. And when you travel around the world, you are going to see Baskin-Robbins shops and they're going to have Baskin-Robbins written in another writing system and it's not going to match. The way the two typefaces look is not going to match, not going to carry the same feeling.

So I think, yeah, there's a huge amount of potential for the future in developing much richer palette of type options for all the world's cultures.

Liam: Speaking a little bit about the impact that type can have on our emotions, our socialization, impact that it can have on the world. I'm curious if there are specific projects at Google Fonts that you think have had a particular role in that area that you would want to talk about.

Dave: Sure. I mean going back, the old days when Google Fonts launched, we had a breakout hit in the lobster font and these days, pretty much every city you'll see lobster around. That was important in the early days because when you saw lobster on the web, you knew that wasn't a system font, that was something that you hadn't seen before. Since those early days, the Google Fonts team has grown to invest in four areas. We're working on the Google's company branding type, we work on the operating system type for Android, and [inaudible 00:10:51], and other operating systems.

And then we have lobster and all this other expressive options for products. And then we also invest in the foundational technology, so things like font quality checking tools, or even the font formats itself. And yeah, I would say that the idea of the Unicode standard itself, the idea of bringing all the world's writing systems together into one standard, and making that completely interoperable and universal is, again, part of that real foundation that Google Fonts is building on. And so codifying languages as digital fonts is something I think which is really important. And literacy, accessibility, these are foundational human needs, and the type is a really key building block of that stuff.

Liam: Speaking of factors that people might not consider related to type design, it strikes me, especially as you're talking, that to be a type designer also involves a significant amount of technical skill as well. That type design becomes a different mode of creative practice or of production.

Dave: Yeah. I mean I think, again, for me to be obsessively working on this for 10 years has meant there's the visual culture aspect, the linguistic aspect, the technology, the business, and all of these things are interrelated.

Liam: In a lot of recent reading I've been doing about concepts surrounding digital production and how that influences social systems that inform our lives, I've read about how free software that we talked about earlier has sought to reconfigure or re-socialize the relationship that we have to practices like this to making digital products and the processes behind production. Having mentioned that being a type designer already involves a different mode of production from a lot of other design disciplines, I guess I would ask more broadly how Google Fonts fits into that, affecting the relationship that we have perhaps to digital products?

Dave: Yeah, I think there's an old idea about value having two sides. There's the direct usefulness of a thing, use value, and then its value and exchange. What can you sell it for? And when you produce things where they're having to be directly monetized and you're producing for exchange, then that can sometimes create incentives that warp the thing, and designers can end up maybe being told by the business to go and optimize that side of the value proposition to the detriment of the usefulness. And an example of this outside of type, and maybe outside of design, would be healthy food. Healthy food could be cheap, it doesn't have to be the top tier deluxe stuff, but it's more profitable to sell food which is addictive and unhealthy, and we end up with food deserts in the urban landscape. And so with fonts, to some extent, this can also be the case. A language support can be missing for certain nations which don't present a large buy-side of the marketplace.

And with Google Fonts, what we've heard is that there's an issue where some type designers that we've commissioned have seen the incentives such that they don't put their best effort into their project because it's a fixed fee, it's being paid upfront, and there's not the same speculative retail or revenue opportunity that they have with their own projects. And they will put their best effort into a project which they're making to retail, but what they'll earn with that over say 5 or 10 years is speculative. It could be close to zero, it could be millions of dollars, over the years. Personally, I think that's unwise because the Libre fonts become the most widely used ones, and that becomes what type designers' reputations get staked on, but other people see that differently. So I think when making free software or making Libre fonts, often people are making them for themselves, and maybe they're being commissioned and their time is being paid for, but that exchange value aspect is being taken out of the equation, and the focus can be on making it as useful as possible.

Liam: Do you see that as a model that could work for other things, especially in digital production?

Dave: Well, I think those other things came first. That was definitely my idea, that when I went to do a master's degree in type design, I was very focused on this idea of bringing some of these ideas from the Libre software movement, Wikipedia, Creative Commons. These things, there was much more of a buzz around them. Creative Commons was new when I was a student. We do see people making Libre fonts typically under the open font license outside of what Google Fonts is doing, so different governments, different individual designers, different companies have decided to go with making their fonts freely available. Nothing to do with Google.

Liam: Yeah, I was going to ask, do you think that the success of Google Fonts or the ubiquity of those fonts, because they're free, has had an effect on the industry? But it seems like maybe those things are happening in multiple places independently at once.

Dave: Yeah. I mean obviously Google Fonts, in certain respects, is big, in other respects is small. So I think there's probably more open Libre fonts today with Google Fonts existing than there would be without Google Fonts existing. But that's hard to say. It's a speculative fiction there. And in my studies, in being a student of type design, the history of all this is something that's synthesized, and I think when you go into the different eras of the type industry, in the past there's always been a $0 tier. Before digital, those physical typesetting machines would come bundled with a few choices that are free, and before Google Fonts, there was plenty of freeware fonts around on [inaudible 00:17:54] and other places.

And in the '90s, if you got CorelDRAW, it came with a CD with hundreds of fonts on it that if you had to get them individually, it'd be way more than CorelDRAW. So there's always been a cheaper option. I think if Google Fonts didn't exist, there would be less people enjoying using type to express themselves and identify their brands on the web, themselves on the web, and the type industry overall would be smaller. There'd just be less people using different type and thinking about type. I know some people see it differently and they could count every use of a Libre font as a lost sale, but that's like when people say that PirateBay costs the movie industry more than the GDP of Japan or whatever. In the real world, that simplistic economic ideology just doesn't work like that. And I think what really happens is often the opposite of what simple theories predict.

So I would say that it's good for everyone in the type business that more and more people around the world are choosing and using different fonts thanks to Google Fonts making it so easy. And I'm English. We have the BBC in England, in the UK, which sets a very high bar for the quality of TV. And then there is private cable-style TV, satellite TV that's even better because it has to compete with that public option. And people don't just watch the BBC or just watch private TV, they're going to see the good TV, the good TV programming that's entertaining or whatever. The highest traffic websites using Google Fonts do not purely use Google Fonts, they're using type from a mix of sources because it's ultimately about the typefaces and the typography, and the licensing terms, the cost is a factor, but it's something of a secondary factor. So I would say Libre software, Libre culture, Libre font is this global public service provision that's setting a baseline, which means no one's excluded below that baseline and sets the stage for more broad competition in the marketplace. And the fourth area of our investment in a tooling technology, that is something that is directly improving the overall business and industry. We have excellent QA tools and know-how about how to finalize and productionize typeface designs, which is available to everyone in the world he wants to enter the business. So there's a more level playing field.

Liam: When you talk about the perception that maybe a use of a free font is a lost sale or things about movie piracy, without going too deep into it, maybe some of those thoughts are coming from a friction between modes of understanding what a product is and how it's distributed between historical analog implementations versus digital ones. And I'm curious what you think about that because as I learned about type design, it seemed like type had had this kind of friction for a long time, of how is type distributed, how has it been distributed historically, how does that line up, how have we tried to replicate that in a digital space, and where has that gone right or wrong?

Dave: In the past these previous eras of type, when type was physical, especially at the end of the pre-digital period where we had this dry transfer lettering, like Letraset was one of the inventors, the leading brand of this, you literally rubbed out the letters one by one on the dry paper and you paid by the letter, and that kind of business model where you had to buy the type, buy the letter, it's not coming back. And even before that, when metal type would wear out it'd need to be recast and rebought. So I think that was the case, as I said, in London, New York, Paris. But in most of the rest of the world there wasn't that much typography going on. And today there's this huge growth in demand for type globally. So the distribution models and so on, the idea of buying a font on a floppy disk, well that was sort of working for English, I remember. And I was a student, that was just kind of on the way out, and OpenType, where you could have more than 250 glyphs in a font file, was coming in.

But I got a glimpse into those older days where even for English digital type was kind of tricky. So yeah, I think as the technology improves, it's just a better experience for people making publications in a broader sense, and that's going to lead to more people wanting to make good quality stuff and wanting to use good quality type, new type. There's a fashion aspect to it. I mean, type has such a long history. It predates capitalism, almost. So 500 years ago a typeface cost more than a small private army. This was a royal technology and it was extremely powerful. The printing press caused revolutions. And maybe Marshall McLuhan idea, but maybe the fact of printing existing as a technology itself caused a scientific revolution. That way of thinking about atomizing and breaking things down into their pieces and making them uniform and repeatable and reproducible. The type was the first mass produced product.

So that power has not gone away, but it's only got cheaper and cheaper over time, over hundreds of years. But we still have a good business, a good industry, healthy industry that lots of people around the world are making type today. So I don't know, I'm not sure if that really addresses your question, and it's something that personally I've been in a privileged position where I've been working with Google pretty much since I graduated and Google's been cutting the checks to develop almost all the type that's in Google Fonts.

Liam: Yeah, I think it does address the question, as digital type as a whole is such a surface for exploring how things move from analog to digital modes of production and distribution type continues to evolve into a place. Speaking as someone who works on a design system during the day, I'm very interested in the capacity for variable type to embody a system that can satisfy user intent without knowing about it and perhaps requires a designer intent that is more facilitating of a wider range of expression. I want to just jump into that little bit and talk about it.

Dave: Absolutely, yeah. So the way that I've been advocating for variable fonts, variable typography, a flexible typography is to say that there's three main benefits to variable fonts. To compress, to express, and to finesse. And what you touched on there was the third thing, where we can improve the user experience in a way where they're not even especially conscious of it. This is kind of automatic finessing that's individual and providing subtle accessibility improvements, which maybe on a mass scale could be measured, but that can be quite subtle. So to break down those three things, the to compressed benefit is that if you take a set of static fonts and you look at the total file size there, if you were going to use all of those styles within those families, and then you look at the file size of those families as variable fonts, then often you see a pretty big reduction in file size.

Now obviously if you're just using Lobster, it's a single style font, there's no reduction possible with variable fonts. If you're just using regular and bold, there's probably also not really a reduction. But even if you are just using regular and bold as a variable font, you now have all of the weights from regular to bold, and say maybe those semi bold medium weights can be useful for you. And as designers, we can do large type or even text type and choose type for its expressivity, for those feelings it evokes. And being able to dial in and fine tune those feelings, that expressiveness is exciting. But that automatic style selection I think is really the most powerful benefit here. So the big example of this is this idea of optical size designs, where in pre-digital, pre-phototype, every piece of metal type was being made at a physical size, so the marginal cost of customizing the typeface design to that size was very small.

And then when we had phototype, you took one design and you just scaled it up and down to the size you wanted and you lost that size specific design. So today with variable fonts, we can have a continuous range of designs from a very small design to a very large design, and then multiply that across weights and widths. So the heaviest weight, the lightest weight can be much more extreme at a large size. And then as the size comes down, the type kind of gets more resilient and the readability and legibility is reinforced or defended, and the actual proportions get less extreme, even though it's still the maximum possible at that size. So I think the designers, end users, font users have not really even begun to scratch the surface of what variable fonts can mean for typography.

And there's this old Marshall McLuhan idea that when a new technology or a new paradigm arrives, what he called a medium, as opposed to the message that it carries, when that medium arrives in society, then initially it's only used to mimic and emulate previous technology that was most similar to it. So for example, early radio hosts, they would dress up in a full on three piece suit to announce the news on the radio, as if they were doing a public speaking event in front of a large live audience, even though they were stuck in a studio. Early cinema, they would stick a camera in the middle of a theater auditorium and film a stage play, and only later did you get radio shows that were not mimicking giving a speech, and films like, say Orson Welles's Citizen Kane that pioneered new ideas about how to create cinema that was cinematographic.

So what we see with variable fonts is that they're being understood today with that kind of compressed benefit, we could say misunderstood, that it's all about the smaller file size version of static fonts. And especially for technology companies, engineering managers can really get that because that's a very measurable benefit. You had what you had before and the file size is smaller and there's no change to the design, there's no change to the typography. It's just a pure engineering benefit that can be very easily quantified.

But I think that kind of overlooks the real value and opportunity and what's going to happen is that the designers using variable fonts are going to become sort of pioneers and discover the deeper nature of the new medium of typography, of fluid or variable typography. And they're going to come up with new kinds of designs that weren't possible with static fonts. There's this sort of meeting place between the type designer and the type user, and variable fonts kind of start to break down that barrier that in the past with static fonts, the type designer issues, the final release of the project, like this is it, and then the type users work with what they have.

And with variable fonts, there's this sort of type design on rails kind of thing where you have so many options as the font user, you can fine tune so many key aspects of the typeface. You are not drawing the shapes, so you're still within predetermined ranges of what you can choose from. But you get this incredibly fine grain control and it becomes kind of like a musical instrument, obviously you have the possibility to make horrendous sounds, but also you can make something which really sings and that no one's ever heard before.

Liam: Yeah, I think it's fascinating the idea of bringing who we consider users closer to the process of design or production. But also I think this must have tremendous implications for design as a practice as well, because we're no longer focused on designing single points in a design space, but now we can do line segments, or planes, or entire three dimensional shapes as designers. What does that do to the mental model of a design practitioner for what they're creating?

Dave: Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential which is yet to be explored. And I think that this potential is in the total systems, and it can be difficult to get into it when you're dealing with kind of snapshots of static frames in a design app, where you are sort of ideating and mocking things up and how things work within the actual medium of the digital experience is where it's going to be.

Liam: I also remember being struck learning about the concept of design space in variable type, that it is in fact multi-dimensional to an extent that is hard to even visualize as humans living in the three dimensional perceptive space that we do.

Dave: Yeah, I mean, we are offering variable fonts like Roboto Flex, which have got over a dozen axes, and there is a real system behind that. It isn't a dozen completely different things. There's a dozen things that are interrelated and that work as a system and definitely visualizing more than three dimensions, even three dimensions, can get trippy.

Liam: What do you think lies in the future for that? How do you think that that process changes to become more apprehendable? Or does it?

Dave: I've always been in that sort of old chestnut, that should designers code? I've been very much coming into design from a technology culture. And so I think that in the same way there's been some work around how to better visualize programs because they also can end up as these very complex, multi-dimensional, abstract entities. And yeah, I think a lot of people, myself included, who go into design, they have such strong math skills. There's three kind of people in this world, those you can count and those you can't. And so that's definitely me. And so I think that there's some kind of more direct experience of this stuff, which can be hard to translate or visualize.

Liam: I think it's very important to call out the importance of approaching this from a technical aspect as well, because the things that we create as designers are also mediated by things that were designed themselves. So, perhaps you must create the thing that allows you to design in order to design the thing that you truly want to make.

Dave: Right. Yeah. And in my teaching practice, one of my primary principles of teaching is to walk students through an experience first of making and then give them some theory to deconstruct their experience and well, it sounds silly, but to structure it then. That when you have the direct kind of raw experience and you don't really know the theories behind what you're doing, then your senses are more open to the total thing. And in stage magic, the way that illusions work is the misdirection, right? That humans are very good at deleting out stuff that they perceive from their awareness.

And so having people go first in experiencing something means that they're not filtering their experience based on a kind of ideological prejudice. And so, I would say that that's pretty deep to design practice and that it's important to try and experience the medium directly and work with the medium through its own logic rather than trying to treat it like a version of the old medium, the old way of doing things. Like I said, I really credit Marshall McLuhan with a lot of this stuff. I know that's a kind of design school classic, but it definitely shaped my thinking about all this stuff.

Liam: That's great. I think that's a great note to reflect on as we close. Thank you again for joining me today, Dave.

Dave: All right. I think I've got to change someone's diaper.

Judith Donath, Founder, MIT Sociable Media Group

Exploring potential futures for life online and the joy of learning (and sharing) something new

Liam speaks with Judith Donath, the founder of MIT’s Sociable Media Group, inventor of e-cards, and author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Donath’s work offers crucial insights into the sociality of digital products and platforms, and the opportunities we have as digital producers to make things that truly meet sociable ends. In the episode, Donath unpacks some of this work, exploring potential futures for life online and the joy of learning (and sharing) something new.

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Liam Spradlin: All right, Judith, welcome to Design Notes.

Judith Donath: Hello. Happy to be here.

Liam: So, just by way of introduction, as usual, I want to ask you to tell me a little bit about your work and the journey that's led you there so far.

Judith: Wait. Where do you want me to start?

Liam: The beginning. (laughs)

Judith: Well, where I am right now is I am in the midst of writing a book about technology and deception. But the way I got here was a fairly roundabout way. My undergraduate degree was actually in history. And I was really interested in medieval history and early scientific revolutions. But in looking at how scientific revolutions change society, I got, I, you know, this is in the '80s. And I was thinking, you know, I could take computer classes. There's a whole technological revolution going on now. I could see what it's like on the inside. And I took one class and was completely hooked.

I loved programming. It was taught in APL, which was a language that used mostly just Greek characters to program, and everything is in the form of matrices. And it just seemed like this really fascinating way of thinking where you just are trying to model something, but you're turning everything into a series of matrices. And then, I learned Lisp, and it was turning everything into linked lists, and, you know, got really, really interested in programming. I had also been doing a lot of work in film.

And anyhow, this is how I eventually ended up working as a game designer, and then went to the Media Lab with its first opening. And was, uh, you know, because my background was considerably less technical than most people who are coming in from computer science, especially at that time, I had a background in history and film and art, um, my work, you know, from the very beginning, leaned towards looking at what sort of the humanistic side of computing was, really interested in what was going to happen when people could use computers to communicate, um, things like the, you know, early email, what it would be like to have a whole society connected. And that's the work I continued to do for quite a while.

Eventually, I stayed on at the lab, and I ran a research group called the Social Media Group, where we looked at the question of, you know, what, what is it, what does it mean to be in a social space online? And in particular, how do people get a sense of other's identity? What are the ways you pick up from these, like, very sparse queues? Now, those queues online are sparse, but one of the things you don't really think about is how sparse in many ways the queues are in everyday life.

The example I'd often use with my students was, what can we do to make an experience like sitting in an outdoor cafe, and just watching the world go by? People walk past, and you might be wrong, but you have a very strong impression of a lot of people of what their politics are, what their personality is, and it's based on like a fleeting glimpse of them. How does that work? And what would it mean to transform that in a world that we have so much more control over how it's designed? And so, we did a lot of work with visualization.

One of the things that I drew from my film background was, in film, you kind of break down, uh, you know, one of the ways of categorizing shots is long shots, medium shots and close-ups, where long shot gives you like this whole establishment of a big scene of the world, the whole setting, and environment. And medium shot is really about the relationship among a small group of people. It's, it's how you shoot a conversation. It's about reactions and how people are interacting with each other. And a close-up is really like a portrait where you're really looking at a specific individual.

And a lot of what we were interested in doing was thinking about how we could make online interfaces that both address those three different scales, but also would be able to kind of move smoothly between them. Needless to say, if you've looked at Facebook or Twitter, we're not quite there yet, um, in the actual world with real life living interfaces. But I think those sort of general problems are still a very useful way to think about it. And, in particular, now, with all the hype, I don't know there's excitement, but there's certainly a lot of hype, around the metaverse, um, that question of, of representation, and what is it you want to see of others, and how you structure that space should be at the forefront.

And one of the things that I think is very disappointing about the ways I've seen any of this imagined by the people who claim to be building it is that, they've kind of alighted that problem by basically saying, well, it's gonna kind of look like real life. Here's a picture. It's kind of cartoony, but we're all sitting in this kind of tedious looking meeting room. Like-

Liam: Right.

Judith: There's really no reason why you should wanna make that be your representation for an enormous number of reasons.

Liam: Right. I, I wanted to get into that a little bit, because as you're talking, it strikes me that, you know, you have a background in film, which is kind of representation of reality that's like attempting to capture some, something that it must exist in analog space, right?

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And then also working with virtual space, which, although it is created digitally, can represent almost anything. And I'm curious how you think about that, like the different ways of representing a type of reality that are available to us?

Judith: Well, one thing about film though is that, I think fairly early on, the practitioners were interested in getting away from that sort of pure reality, if, you know-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: It was one of the most avant-garde films or filmmakers was Andy Warhol, who just took a camera and turned it on for eight hours. That's a representation of reality. But it's both unwatchable, a very avant-garde, that it, it turned out that a lot of the way of creating a story with film was through doing things that have nothing to do with what we see in real life, all kinds of things about cutting, you know, how you cut films, how you make reaction. It doesn't necessarily have this analog to virtual space, but it was certainly very imaginative in trying to understand how you create something that is a time-based medium and has starts with a recording. But a lot of what makes film is the way it's cut, the, the pieces that are taken out of it.

Now, in terms of thinking about how we look at virtual spaces, you know, I think the, the problem is quite different, because ideally, we're not filming. But what we want to think about is, how do we represent in a visual sense the information about a person. So, I think, you know, a cartoon of someone is not gonna be that interesting, certainly be less interesting than looking at them face to face. But what is interesting is that you have all this history of interactions. And you have, how someone ha- like what someone has said, you have their words, you have, you might have who they follow. You have all these other pieces from which to build a representation from.

And I think that's the really interesting challenge. And it's not really been followed very much. There's, uh, a paper by, uh, Jim Hollan, and Will Stornetta, which is quite old at this point, but they had a line in it that's, uh, for me, has always resonated, which was saying that you, it's called, the paper's called Beyond Being There. And it's a challenge for designing social interfaces to say, we don't want to recreate reality. We want to do something that's beyond it. And it doesn't necessarily mean it has more detail or more pixels or more dimensions to it. Often, it's the removal of those things.

There's reasons why a lot of online forums that are text based are really interesting. It's not that they're missing a huge visual component. It's that you can do all kinds of things when in the interface, when you, you could thread things, you can move stuff around. So, it might be quite minimal, but it's not about representing the look of reality. It's about representing the relationships that you're developing in your virtual reality.

Liam: There is also something you said about film being a time-based medium that really stood out to me.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And now I'm thinking about how that applies to the other things that we're talking about, like a forum, for instance. I would suggest maybe less time based in the sense that people say things, and then you can refer back to what they said after a time where, in real life, you might have forgotten about it.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I wonder how that factors in to how you think about creating other virtual spaces.

Judith: Right. Well, yeah, one of the things we explored, it wasn't a dead end, but it was a place where there's lots of exploration still to do, is thinking about, for instance, those forums where stuff has been built up over time, how do you rep- you know, what's an, uh, much more interesting way of representing that sort of agglutinization of how things pile up over time. Or even something like I'm, you know, as I'm writing a book, I spent an enormous amount of time in Google Scholar, which is not something you normally think of as a social interface.

But if you think about the way that papers have citations in them, and those cite other things, and some, some papers become really popular, or they become really controversial, and there's, you know, if you could map that, which you can, you just happen to, but by mapping that, you would have a really interesting space to explore. You could see what's been influential. You could perhaps prevent people from doing the same thing over and over and over, because they're simply unaware of what they're building upon.

And even in forums, there are times you may want to do that, particularly in certain advice forums. I think it's a interesting design problem, both how do you extract the information about what is the interesting material, how do you map it, but also, how do you know when that's a useful thing to do, because sometimes with something like Wikipedia, you want to develop this encyclopedia of knowledge. But sometimes with a forum, the point is for each person to be able to go in and talk to other beginners or people at intermediate levels, or people want to teach. So, by making it all a reference site, you might lose that. So, it's, it's also about being thoughtful about whether where you're looking for the experience of the interaction versus the experience of being able to look up the information.

Liam: I'm really interested in this idea that the representation of you that exists in these spaces can be something like an assemblage of information, and maybe also visuals, but, but-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... also primarily information. I want to dig more into that, like the concept of being embodied, virtually, and how many shapes that can take.

Judith: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you know, uh, again, I think this is a, uh, still a research problem and something that for a variety of reasons is not part of our current interfaces. But let's use Twitter as an example, because it's pretty simple. And it, but it's also one of the places I feel need something like this the most, because you're quite likely to encounter people who you have no idea who they are, or if they are a person, or are they, you know, are they a bot? Are they someone who's just come in as a provocateur?

So, if you could see people very easily as a representation that, you know, would still be like a avatar, something you could see at a glance. But instead of being a drawing, it was a visualization that showed you something about their history online. Is this someone who's been posting for years? Or did this account appear a week ago? What are the words and phrases that show up a lot in their history? How has that changed over time? How many followers do they have? And can we have a little representation of what sort of things do those people talk about? And who is it that they follow? Yeah, when a service like you could be like a set of word clouds type of thing, but something like that that would give you, at a glance, a way of starting to get a vivid impression of who they are in a way that's relevant for that space.

Liam: One thing that stands out to me is a connection to a piece of discourse that I think I encounter often about social media, which is that it is perhaps presenting us with too much information or information that is like too disparate, and yet drawn together, that it becomes overwhelming for us to handle.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I wonder how such an embodiment would interact with that, if it is even a valid idea. And the second thing is how we would come to understand our own embodiment in that context, whether or not we could actually modify or manipulated after the fact.

Judith: Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, in terms of sort of quantities of information, again, that's a design issue. So, you could think of it this way. All of these things can exist at, at multiple scales, where there would be something that you would just see at a glance, and it would be sort of like the avatar that sits by this, this side, but instead would at least give you that basic information, like how long has this person been online, you know, a quick visual presentation of, you know, how much do they post, how long would've they been posting, how many followers do they have, how many people do they follow. So, that could be just a very straightforward, simple, almost stick figure scale piece. But then you could have, you know, like a simple slider-like thing that just starts to drill, you know, if you s- are curious, you could just see a more and more detailed version of it as you, you know, if you're like, oh, I want to see more of this.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: You don't have to have like a huge pile of information. But that's, you know, that's not a complicated design question. The question of what your editing abilities are of that past, that's really, I would say, application specific, and that's part of what makes the different environments that we go to, because there are some, there may be some spaces that are about saying, conversations here are ephemeral, you know. You say some things, they're here for a day, and then they're gone. Other spaces may be about saying, you say this is like the congressional record. It is never gonna go away and it's gonna be here for life, and you can't change it.

And there's others that's, you know, they could say, well, you have this. You can delete things. Maybe you can't add things. Those are all like, you know, in a way of thinking about it is that this platform is a little bit like going to different restaurants, you know. It's not that a fancy French restaurant is better than McDonald's. It is in certain things, but not if you're taking six, six-year-olds out to dinner, you know.

Liam: Right.

Judith: That you really want something with plastic surfaces that you can clean really easily. So, you know, all those questions about history really change the tenor of the social experience. But I think in a more ideal world, we'd have more platforms and more spaces, and an easier ability to choose among those. You know, it would be the sort of thing people could choose, you know, even at the level of their own page or their own, you know, if I post this, I'm gonna start a discussion. Now, I'm the host of the discussion.

And I can change the parameters for it in a way that's clear to the people participating in a richer way. I think things like that would, as people became used to it, would I think help us be able to create the types of conversations we want over different ideas, the same as we now know you can invite someone for coffee is very different than saying, I need to speak to you in my office right now.

Liam: Right. (laughs) Or sending, sending a text that says we need to talk.

Judith: Yeah.

Liam: I'm wondering. Being able to do all of this in a digital or virtual environment makes it perhaps a lot faster or easier compared to actual life where, you know, if you invite someone to coffee, you need to actually probably physically go to the coffee place and agree on where that is, and how to get there-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... and everything. Whereas, maybe you could do more of those things faster on a larger scale, digitally.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I'm curious what that means for how this form of interaction contributes to our personhood or our understanding of ourselves.

Judith: Yeah. I think, well, for one, this is a huge revolution we have lived through in our time. You know, it's actually very quickly that we've kind of forgotten how revolutionary it is. I mean, there's a paper called something like Mass Conversation, and it's from the '80s or early '90s. And, but it's like basically saying, like, hey, you know, we're having conversations with 50 or 100 people. This is just unprecedented. And it became a pretty much something we, we got used to that you would go online and, and just be in some conversation with enormous number of people.

But, so, there's a couple of, there's a number of interesting ramifications about that. One is that these conversations are also very lightweight. There's very little commitment, in particular, the fact that you are not physically present and that in many situations, your identity is either easily obscured or effectively irrelevant. If people don't know who you are, they may get to know your real name. But in general, that may not make a huge difference. So, the lightweightness tends to make it so that people feel that there's very little consequence, and there's cer- certainly a lot less meaning to it.

The, you know what you said about the effort that goes into even just having a coffee, but that effort gives it us, the experience a certain significance that we lose here. We have this bigger scale, so we have a much larger scale of less significant interactions. So, that's one big change. And then, there's the whole question of how are people drawn together. It also means that we've lost the significance of geography in a lot of ways. The fact of, you know, we ha- we're able to do this easily. You're on the West Coast. I'm on the East Coast.

People can talk all over the world. But it may mean that we lose track of what cultural differences may underlie a lot of the conversation which, when you're speaking face to face, whether it's that you, uh, have an easier time noticing that there's all kinds of cultural behaviors that remind you that you may only share a certain number of assumptions with the people around you, all get kind of flattened online. So, what we're dealing with is a world where everything is a little bit cheaper, but there's much more of it. And-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: You know, I think that goes hand in hand with a lot of other social changes, some of which are separate from the internet. There's at a much larger scale where we are less dependent on other people. If you look at, if you read stories of like, life in 1800, where you might need your neighbors to help you with the harvest, or help you repair your house or raise your house, you need pretty significant committed relationships to live in a world like that. The internet has come, you know, probably not coincidentally, at a time when we were already moving a lot of the things we need other people for to a market.

Like I don't have to rely on family to have babysitters. I can hire someone. You know, I can hire a stranger. There's a, you know, I'm not asking someone to help me harvest my food. In fact, I'm just buying it at the supermarket. So, we have this opportunity to have all these relationships and conversations in this very lightweight way at a time when we are already kind of in the fading days of certain types of very expensive, in terms of time and effort and reliance on relationships.

Liam: What do you think are the most pressing design challenges in the space right now?

Judith: There's some huge pressing issues in the world that are somewhat conversation based. And a lot of that is around misinformation and, um, our inability to deal with diversity, and the, you know, sort of the growing hostility between political camps both in the United States and worldwide. So, those are, are worldwide issues. They're very conversation based. They certainly have representation online. So, I would say in, you know, in terms of pressing this, the question of how to get people to be able to converse and interact in a meaningful and useful way with people they do not agree with is probably the most pressing one. You know, it may not be the most exciting design challenge, but it's probably the most pressing issue we're dealing with.

Liam: I think that also speaks to the way in which the intent of designers, and software engineers too, for that matter, plays out in these conversational spaces or digital products. I'm thinking a lot about, you know, is the answer that as a discipline, we simply have to own up to that and come up with solutions to this problem? Or do we actually need to divest some of the power that we have taken in that in order for that to improve?

Judith: I think the, probably the most pressing problem, on the flip side, is that an enormous number of design decisions are made, not with the goal of how to make the best social space or how to solve these things, but they're made in terms of how do we satisfy advertisers. How do we get people, you know, how do we get people to stay online more? How do we get them to do these things? But they're, these are not social goals. And so, our interfaces are not being designed to make the social experience better. They're designed to make the extractive experience better.

Liam: Right.

Judith: And, and so, I think finding ways to have significant and heavily used sites that are designed for the social purposes. I mean, there's some, I think, pretty well known analyses that say, you know, certain things about how some conversational interfaces are made now or that effectively end up encouraging disputes, because to a simplistic assessment algorithm, it looks like engagement, you know.

Liam: Right.

Judith: You know, it might mean if you want to follow that path, your computational analyses of conversation needs to be more sophisticated, and not mistake argument for engagement. It may be that engagement isn't the right goal. It might be that trying to algorithmically prolong or shorten conversations isn't a really useful thing. Maybe let the actual people who are participating make that decision and don't really try and weigh on it in either direction.

Liam: Right.

Judith: When you spoke earlier about sort of this accumulation of information that we have in these discussions.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: So, the earliest discussion space, both I was familiar with, and, and then I did a lot of work analyzing was Usenet, which was just threaded topical discussions with sort of no algorithm, but very heavily text based. And it had a pretty rich culture, you know, and information would grow. And then, at some point, people would say, okay, well, we're tired of explaining, you know, how to, let's say it was a group on having like a home aquaria. You know, these are some basic things. We'll put it in a FAQ, and then we'll continue to have that discussion. And they would tell people, read that information, then join in the discussion.

But there was still a interesting, ongoing discussion, and there wasn't any index into it. There are multiple things that went into the demise of Usenet. But I think one of them was, at some point, Google bought up all the, or gathered up the archives of it and indexed it. And what happened then was that, instead of, when I wanted to learn something about a particular field, instead of what people had done, which was get to that news group and start reading it, become familiar with the people in the conversation, and then dive in, you could just make a query, and you would get an answer. And if that didn't answer it, then you just make another question.

But because you could dive into a whole index of the discussion, people stopped seeing it as a social space where they got to know the people and the participants, and then took part in it. They just sort of saw it as a encyclopedia you could query. And it changed the nature of it enough that that was, you know, well, it wasn't the only reason it stopped being a useful space. That was one of them. But that was certainly done with very, with good intention of making it more usable. But it had this fairly unexpected opposite effect.

Liam: Right. Yeah. It feels like it's coming from a place that I think many things in the tech industry come from, which is that data are the ultimate resource for understanding things.

Judith: Well, that and then what's a big theme in the book that I'm working on is that, a lot of technology is really designed to make things more efficient. But it turns out, a lot of things that are costly to do, those costs, and I mean in cost and energy, or time or effort, allow those costs to now to actually be really valuable in some way. You know, in that example, it was the cost of sort of reading through all these conversations. There are other costs that have to do with, you know, the commitment, the effort to make go for the coffee or the dinner.

And when you build technologies that make things more efficient, it's great when the effort that you've now eliminated really was kind of wasted effort. But it turns out like an awful lot of examples of the effort really weren't useless, uh, and particularly often serve some important social purpose, either in showing your commitment to someone or something, or making you more adept at something before you go on and try something else. And when you build tools that eliminate that, you've taken away something really valuable.

Liam: Right. You know, speaking of Usenet, I also want to talk about another case that is very dear to me from earlier in the internet's history that I think could be a really interesting conversation as we talk about, you know, the design challenges of relatively new modes of, of existing online. And that's e-cards.

Judith: Okay. (laughs)

Liam: I feel like the progression of e-cards could be a nice surface to map these ideas onto, especially as I think about, you know, my own history with the subject as starting in a time when email was really exciting.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And I think in many ways, the internet, you know, still had a capacity for emulating some of these offline mental models. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, because you're cited as the inventor of e-cards.

Judith: I am the inventor of e-cards. Well, I was procrastinating writing my thesis. (laughs) Yeah, that's, so, I'll tell you how I ended up doing it. And then I can talk a little bit about my thoughts on this.

Liam: Sure.

Judith: Uh, well, and I was working on my thesis, and so open to any kind of distraction that anyone wanted to present to me. And my office mate was, had gotten very, very excited about the computer language, Perl, and actually, you know, was writing the, one of the early textbooks on Perl and insisted I learn it. Uh, it's a language I still cannot stand. But I had done some consulting for a company. Uh, I, you know, some early internet company was trying to do some online travel thing. And I had suggested to them like, hey, if you're gonna do like travel, why don't you like have, like, postcards people could send from somewhere online? And they looked at me like I had six heads. It's like, yeah, no. Not interested in that idea at all.

So, and my office mate, this idea was floating around in my head when he said, you've got to learn Perl. I thought, well, I need to assign myself a problem. And that's how I will learn it. And I thought, well, why don't I try and do online postcards? How would that work? How would you send a postcard to someone? So, that was the genesis of it. It was not a deep research piece or anything. And so, I had lived, before I went to graduate school, I had lived in the East Village in the '80s, when it was still mostly burned out buildings and everything. And it was, (laughs) the postal workers there were very surly, a couple of times had found all our building's mail in the trash. (laughing)

And, um, so, I've modeled the postcard site, uh, off that sort of model of disgruntled postal worker. So, it's very cranky. And you would, basically, for those who haven't seen this, you would get an email. That's, you know, someone sent you a postcard. You get a email that said, you have a postcard waiting for you. Because one of the issues was the wa- uh, it's, also this is, another piece of this is that the web was very new. And there weren't that, there were almost no, pretty much no social applications on it. And so, for me, like coming from things like Usenet, the web was kind of cool. But it was also a little disappointing, because, you know, especially then it was just pages. There just wasn't a way to interact with others.

And so, trying to figure out how to put some form of interaction into it was part of the postcard challenge. And so, it had to be this kind of kludgy thing where you would get an email that told you to go to a page, and the page would then be rendered with a postcard for you. And I started it, you know, I think it was, I'm thinking 1994. And it came out right before Valentine's Day. And so, like there were a couple days, so, two postcards, sent three, seven, 10. And then, Valentine's Day hit, and that was in the hundreds, then it was in the thousands. And within a couple of months, it had taken down the network to the Media Lab, and I had to have, like, a special line run to my computer so that it wasn't taking down the entire net there, because it was so incredibly popular for about a year.

And so, one of the challenges, my adviser was like, wow, this is really amazing. You've done this really successful thing. You know, you know, this has to be a thesis. I'm like there just isn't a big there, there. It's online postcards. And so, I spent a fair amount of time. Usually, you have to write about this. Like, I'm like, well, what can I say about this? So, the sort of deepest insight I was ever able to extract from this project was that, when you write, you have this technology. People just, you know, this is still when, as you said, email was exciting. But one of the things is, when you write a email, you have to say something. And you often don't really have anything to say. And that's-

Liam: Yeah.

Judith: ... I think what people really liked about the postcards, because it became this way to just, it's a li- a little bit like a little present that you could send to someone. You know, there were all kinds of, I mean, part of it was I spent a lot of time gathering like a huge range of postcards, which I'll talk about in a second. But it was a way to reach out to someone and send them a note without actually having any reason or meaning. Like email is, is really something you, you know, you have to have some message. You can't just say hi and that's it. But you could send a postcard and just say hi.

And I think that's what people really wanted. And in, then, you know, if you think more deeply about it, if you look at things like social psychology, there's the concept of phatic, P-H-A-T-I-C, interaction, where it's the interactions we have, where there's not a lot of content in it. But they're really important for just sort of aligning people. If you look at, you know, if you run into like, uh, an acquaintance in the grocery store, the conversation may be completely empty. And people say, well, small talk, it's so useless.

But it's not. It, you know, how you use it, the fact that you, you know, even eng- you know, even engage in conversation with someone, says, okay, I acknowledge you, you know, if you remember a little bit about them, there's all kinds of social information in that. And what the postcards did was that let you have that type of interaction that email didn't. And I think that was its big social contribution.

Liam: Yeah. You know, I can't help but notice that it kind of created one of these types of, I guess, low resource interactions that we were talking-

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... about before that have become so prolific, and also that it was something that came from a social desire to meet social ends, and was hugely influential because of that.

Judith: Mm-hmm. And it also, some part of it was to let you just sort of reach out and touch someone in subtle way. And it was also that it let people say, I have found something new.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Judith: And then send it to others, which people really liked to do now. Now, that's been so speeded up that it's, you know, a whole different expectation of what is new. But still, you know, I think at that time, there would be a few new things on the net. But this is, you know, this is even before, I think it's bef- you know, it's either the very early days of Google or before Google Search, where simply the problem of finding something new online was significant. How did you find things?

Liam: Yeah. And I also think it's like a very human impulse to want to demonstrate that you have some new knowledge.

Judith: Great. Something new, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Liam: Just in itself.

Judith: Mm-hmm.

Liam: I think that's a great thing to wrap us up with, Judith.

Judith: Okay.

Liam: Thank you so much-

Judith: Thank you.

Liam: ... for joining me.

Judith: This was really fun. You have great questions, and this has been really enjoyable.

Aline Borges, The Florist

The power of composition, and the importance of community

Liam speaks with Aline Borges, a Zürich-based floral designer who’s made the leap from fashion coordination for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to independent floral design and installations. The conversation covers what it’s like to move between different creative fields (and countries), how to think about composition to tackle almost any creative challenge, and the courage it takes to start on a new venture.

---

Liam: Aline, welcome to Design Notes.

Aline: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank for the invitation.

Liam: Sure. Um, to dive right in, I want to know a little bit about your current work and the whole journey that led you there.

Aline: Wow, that's (laughs), that's already one podcast just for that (laughs)-

Liam: (Laughs).

Aline: ... but, no. Um... So, I'm a florist, I come from a background of fashion. I was working 15 years in fashion in Brazil as, uh, executive producer, creative director, fashion coordinator for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire and other, um, important, um, magazines. And what I used to do is I used to take care of all the images and all the editorials in the magazines. And, uh, when I decided to move to Switzerland six years ago, I thought would be also a great opportunity to change career as I was changing my whole set up. I used to grow up with my grandmother that had a huge garden with lot of flowers and she, she told me a lot about how to take care of the flowers, how they are, what they like, but of course that was in Brazil, that's another weather and environment. Um, so I came to here and I decided to do that and I went to the UK for a year to study floristry there before starting the business and it worked. So, I'm happy.

Liam: I have a lot of questions-

Aline: (Laughs).

Liam: ... I wanna follow up on. First, I would like to n-, understand what it was like for you to make the jump between two creative fields that, you know, at first glance feel quite distinct from one another.

Aline: Yeah. That's a interesting question because in my view they are not so distinguished as you may think. Because when I work with photography I wasn't like a-, any specific, um, um, person as a photographer or a stylist, or a makeup artist. I saw... I was the coordinator of the project, I was the creative director. So, I was seeing the, the whole picture as one. So, I learned a lot, um, over the years and I, I t-, I say that because I didn't do any, um, important university or I don't have a, um, MBA or anything like that. I learnt doing it. So, I start my career being a photographer, uh, a assistant photographer, then I was assistant for a stylist, then I was a model, then I was... So, I, I learned a little bit of each of the, the steps then I became what I became to see the whole thing.

When you see the whole image as one, you start to understand where you can get better and how to, um, decode the, the, the image that you're seeing. And florist is more or less like that. You need to understand what you are working with and then you need to understand what is it that you are seeing. So, it's about texture, it's about colors, is about depth, it's about, um, length and it's about, um, how do you, um, see the whole information that the flower is giving to you altogether, how they combine together. So, it was not that difficult a jump. Once I understood that, um... Because my specialty is not, um, doing small things, is doing, uh, installations and, um, uh, whole set ups for, for events, for weddings, uh, um, installations in, in museums and, and galleries. So, you see the space that you have to work with and you understand how can you work in that f-, m-, space that you have.

So, you put what you have, uh, available at the time. So, I, I don't think was that difficult. I- it's quite interesting actually.

Liam: Right. It strikes me as you're talking also that in both cases you're working with living subjects who are dynamic (laughs) entities.

Aline: Y- yeah. Yeah, yeah. Most of the time... Th- th- the flowers are, I would say, are a bit more sensitive because they just die (laughs)-

Liam: (Laughs).

Aline: ... really fast. So, you need to pay attention in more on th-, uh, how warm or how dry the d-, the space that you are working with, uh, will be and how can you make sure that they will be comfortable in the space that they will be and so on, so.

Liam: How did you make the decision to specifically pursue the floral arts? How did you l-, reconnect with that kind of interest?

Aline: Yeah. So, it sounds a little bit like crazy but I was really doing researches when I moved in here. I took kind of like a sabbatic time, um, to understand a little bit the environment that I was in and to make a research of the city and the country because I moved to Switzerland... Like I didn't know Switzerland at all. I know, I knew from Brazil but I never been here before. So, I came and visit and a-, in the three days that I was here decided, "Okay, I'm moving in." So, when I was here I needed to, you know, understand where I was and what is it that the city, in my opinion, was missing. And one thing... I always thought as myself, "What is it that I would like to have that I cannot see it here?"

So, I thought as, as a client and I said, "Oh, I would love to see, you know, to have a nice, um, store that I can buy beautiful flowers like in the English style," because in my opinion, this is the style that I, I could consider the most free style that leaves a little bit th- th- the flowers the way they are in the nature. So, it's, it's more, um... It's like you bring your garden inside of the house. So, this is what I wanted to see and I tried to find out this in Switzerland and I could not. So, I decided to do that. But it was a huge research of other fields as well. And one day I just w- woke up and I said, "I... You know what? I would try this. I would do this course in the UK and see how it goes." Because, you know, the flowers are very sensitive, so you need to have the hand for that. Is not that, "Oh, I wanna..." You know, probably had a plant in your house that you tried-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: ... and it died. So, they very sensitive, so you need to see as well if you are good working with them and if they allow you to, to do this with them. So, I just decided and I w-, I pursued and, and it worked for me. So, yeah, that, that's pretty much how was it.

Liam: Yeah.

Aline: (Laughs).

Liam: I'm (laughs) really interested to dig into the, the program that you completed to learn this art-

Aline: Yeah.

Liam: ... and what you learned there. I mean, you mentioned like knowing all the qualities of the flowers, that they are living entities, so those qualities are changing, they're different from flower to flower even in the same species. Like-

Aline: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... how was that? How did you learn those qualities?

Aline: Yeah. So, what I learned with my grandma, it was a living garden, so that's a completely different thing to work with cut flowers. Um, so the school I did unfortunately... One of the schools I did doesn't exist anymore because after COVID they shut down, unfortunately because they're really nice. This school is, is not specific for how to learn the techniques in flower, floristry. They teach you as well about, um, things that are, I already knew a little bit from the fashion field, which is color palette and, um, texture, how to work them together, and they were, uh, very focused on installations. So, when you work, uh, uh, an installation you need to really understand the technique because 90% of the installation is regarding the pre, um, structure that you do to receive the flowers in. So, that's the most important part of the installation. Because, um, when you understand the difference of the spaces that you have and you build an installation ready for that kind of, um, flowers that you wanna receive.

But, anyway, so the flo-... Th- th- th- the school, um, it was in, during a year and you learned how to take care of the flowers, how the seasons of the flowers are, what flowers are in, in which season, the names of the flowers and what flowers do you have are not so important. So, you, you need to understand the base of the flower is. If it's soft base, if it's a hard base, if it's made of wood, if it's like, um, um, a-, one that is chewy like for example the, the tulips. They, they, they have one specific type of, um, um, base and, uh, um, as a hydrangea for example that is h-, a little bit woody and you need to cut it. So, they teach you how to take care of each of these type of flowers instead of like, "Okay, let's look at the tulips. How do we take care of tulips?" No. So, so it, it was a really nice school. Um, and then it was interesting because I was there for let's say five days a month, then they left, uh, leaved us to, to do some homework. And then we came back with the pictures of what we trained at home, uh, like homework and then we came back and went to a next, n-, next level. So... And I had a teacher, he was amazing and he used to say, "You know, the best part about learning the rules is to break them."

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: Once you understand the rules and you understand why is it that you need to understand that rule, you can work in a way boarder way than just, you know, being inside of the rule. So, that was something that always stick in my head like, "Okay, I can do this with the flower but what else can I do with it?" So... Yeah. So, it's really, it was really amazing school.

Liam: Can you tell me about a project where you broke the rules creatively?

Aline: Well... Yeah, I ca-... I have some. I did, uh, an installation in a, uh, uh, um, brand called COS in Hauptbahnhof, in, in Bahnhofstrasse-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: ... here in Zurich. It was a b-, huge installation on the top of the ceiling that I needed to work with, um, uh, baby breath which is a little, tiny flower. Uh, so, b-, my intention was to be build like clouds, uh, look like installation. So, I was working with the, I would say, 3,500 stems of it, um, and while I was working it I had, I learned how to do that installation in a way in the school but then I arrived there and I had, I would say one and half hours to finish everything. Because they... The flowers were alive and it was a project that we were doing with, with, with the brand and they said, "Look, you need to do on the say because we just have this window for you to do the, the installation. And after that this door will be open for the public. And you need to be here to tell the people what is it that you did and everything." I was like, "Okay, that's not going to work. I cannot work with this structure."

So, I needed to change everything in my head and think like super fast what is it that I could do to make it work. So, I just did a completely n-, other technique that I would do for hand-tie bouquet for example. So, this kind of situations it's, uh, happens a lot, so.

Liam: When you're talking about building these installations, I'm always really curious what the stuff is that designers and artists are working with, what is the other stuff that you're working with besides the flowers that, that helps these spaces and installations kind of come together.

Aline: Well, it really depends on the project I would say. I have a right arm person what I work with that understand my way of working. So, when a project come in we kind of have a, a chat and she gave her point of view and I have mine. But it really depends on the how much weight do we need to carry, where is it that it will be, how long we will have to, to, to make the installation. This will define the size of the crew. But it's not a 100% florists, um, it's, it can be, you know, hands-on people, people that wanna learn as well. Because I am a person that I learned everything doing, so I do believe that people that wanna learn things they wanna learn doing as well. So, I get really a lot of people that just wanna, you know... I s-, I received a lot of CVs and people, "Oh, I would just love to just to, you know, be part of one day of one installation that to do to understand what is it that you're doing." I, I, I invite these people sometime but, uh, of course we have the professional people and, uh, sometimes even companies to build the structures depending on the size of, and what we are talking about if it's a huge project or if it's just a store, or... Yeah, it depends.

But it's all kind of people, it's not, I'm not in a box with that at all.

Liam: Yeah. And still thinking about how the flowers are alive and the kinds of design constraints that that places on you, um, as well as the fact that, like you said, you prefer to, to work with the flowers like they would be in nature and, you know, you grew up learning in, in a living garden. How do you think about the ways that you're kind of recontextualizing the flowers, like the natural world into the built environment or into some other situation where you wouldn't normally see them? How does that influence the work?

Aline: I think that the flowers, they speak to you. So, um, when I'm doing something, I look at them and I, I let them speak to me, what is it that they are telling me on that space. So, when you see a garden, even if you see for example, um, a natural garden like a, a, a wild garden, that's the word, um, you see for example little bit of pu-, roses here, you see some, some other flowers there, some hydrangeas in the other side. You don't see them all like mixed around, you know. They, they all come a little bit together in bunches. So, the things I wanna always think about is how I would see them in the nature and how I would see them put together in a way that they look like that they were in the nature. So, try to put the same stems of the same flower together with the others and, um... I heard this from a friend once, it's like organized mess.

Liam: Mm.

Aline: Um, because it is. But also, the space that the flowers will be. When I know the space, they influence a lot. So, it really depends on the day as well, the mood, the season that we are in. It's really an organic, uh, work. So, for example, I prefer to choose my flowers, uh, that I will work with looking at them, um, and not just buying some, some flowers randomly. I choose them, they speak to me in that time. Th- the ones that I will work in that period of, of time which is two days because they, they cannot be more than that, um... It's, it's all connected to each other, it's very organic. And sometimes it could be that first thing that they do is that... Okay, we will have the focus flower, and then we get the, the secondary ones but then we have so many beautiful flowers together then we wanna put them all together. It works as well because w- w- what we learn in school is that we need to have a focus flower which will be your main flower that you will work with and then you need to h-, work with the around flowers on this first flower. But I don't think this is nice. Is like all the flowers are important, why do we need to have the secondary flowers? Why w-, why wouldn't put them all as important ones-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: ... because that's how they are in the garden? So, that's more or less how I, I think in my head. But it really depends. I can, I... It doesn't have a formula for that.

Liam: I'm also thinking about, um, you know, the, the work that I've seen from your studio. I, I guess I am thinking about the relationship of the work to the specific place where it's happening. So, in this case, we're in Zurich.

Aline: Yeah.

Liam: I feel like a lot of your work I've seen flowers that, um... You know, Switzerland has a lot of wild flowers (laughs). But I'm seeing ones that, that I might not necessarily be exposed to any other way and I'm curious how you think about that, like the flowers that you're bringing into the environment.

Aline: Is a symbiosis connection. It's a, it's more like a visual, um, connection to me than a thinking process. And I also believe that when you think too much it doesn't work. You need to see it and you need to feel it at the moment. I don't know how s-, to explain that. I think creatives understand what-

Liam: Yeah.

Aline: ... I'm talking about. It's more like a, "Okay, I like this. I don't know why and I, I don't know if it will, will work but I would try it out." And in the beginning was a lot of trying and some errors, of course, but, um, after a while, it just becomes something very organic, very automatic. A- a- a-, n-... I can't explain it.

Liam: Yeah. It makes intuitive-

Aline: (Laughs).

Liam: ... sense. Um, I'm also realizing many... You know, on this show I talk to a lot of folks who do all kinds of creative practices, design practices, art, but I'm realizing that your specific art has something that can probably never be expressed in other disciplines which is fragrance.

Aline: Oh, yeah.

Liam: I'm thinking about the fact that flowers beyond all of the visual qualities that we've talked about also have a fragrance.

Aline: Yes.

Liam: And a-, I wonder if, if that's part of, part of your thinking, how you feel out the flowers, what impact that has.

Aline: The good thing about cut flowers is that they don't have much fragrances and we normally try to avoid the fragrances because people have normally allergy of the pollen because-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: ... the scent comes out of the center of the flower. I work with small forms and of course big ones because, um, when you work with cut flowers you need to go for quality and to go for quality you need to, to go for professional, uh, farmers that work with cut flowers. So, they already developed the flowers without scents because of people that don't like the scents and it's... As my bouquets are normally... You cannot choose the flowers that you are working with and my clients needs to trust and, in what I'm doing, I try to make as best as I can to of course not give them something that will give them allergy or fragrance.

But I had, uh, situations that I worked for example with a lot of roses together, and it could be challenging. And, um, I think the fragrance, uh, subject it's, it's something really interesting because we are not there yet to decode fragrances and smells as we are with images for how it's pleasant to everyone. So, I think will be very interesting in the future to see how it will be developed but we don't try to work with the scents as much as we can to be honest.

Liam: It's like a whole other dimension of the flower.

Aline: Yeah. Yeah.

Liam: And has-

Aline: Because it's, it's, it;s very sensitive. It's like perfume. You don't have one perfume that everybody likes. It's like even the flowers, you don't have one flower that everybody loves.

Liam: Yeah.

Aline: I mean, peonies I would say is the, the most loved one. But even though they can have a scent, it's a very strong one when, when is it there. So, it can be disturbing actually.

Liam: I think there's an aspect of your work that certainly as someone who worked as a freelancer at one time, and I'm sure many of our listeners as well (laughs) will, will be wondering like how you successfully entered this new field, and set up the business, and, uh, you know are able to market it and, in my opinion, be really successful about that. I mean, we were speaking before the show about your website and how the aesthetic of it is so tight because again, you have so much experience developing these aesthetics and managing all the different parts of an installation which, you know, in the German language I think metaphorically the internet is like a room that we walk into, so I would consider a website to be a space as well (laughs). Um-

Aline: That's, that's true.

Liam: What, what was that like and, and how do you do that? Just on a more practical side I think-

Aline: Hmm.

Liam: ... people would like to know.

Aline: Yeah. That's a interesting question. It's, it's just... I mean, people ask me over and over, "How, how did you do it?" I mean, first thing I really think is that I wasn't afraid at all. It doesn't, it didn't really matter for me if I would be successful or not, I was doing what I, I really believed that could work. That was the first thing I, I really went through. Second of all, if I knew that build, build a business in, in Switzerland would be a little bit complicated, I wouldn't have done it. So, I just didn't know how difficult h-, it could be. I just, you know, went for it. I jumped in with my head and, you know, the only thing that could happen wrong is it couldn't work, but it did. So, you need to leave the fear aside and you really need to believe that you can do it. That's the first thing I believe. And I start my career as freelancer, doing everything you can imagine, as I told you in the beginning.

So, you need to learn a little bit from the experts. And I, I really believe in, in self-learning and everything I wanna learn to be honest I just google it and a-, it's there. You can learn absolutely anything you want nowadays in the internet. So, I would do it more research before starting something, and of course I have this aesthetic sense I think since always. Since I'm a little girl I used to, to choose my, my outfits and I always had a great sense of, um, color and, uh, and, and space, and texture, um, so it, of course this helped me a lot. But I think learn, learn, read, uh, research. This is really, really important for you to even understand what is it that you wanna do that what is it that you like because in the beginning for me for example, in my career in fashion, executive production, it doesn't have a course that you go... At least not... I'm 43, so 25 years ago it didn't have any course that I could do that would teach me how to do what I did back then.

So, it really was me being curious, being fearless that helped me to do that. And changing the field, of course I was a little bit like, "Oh my God, what I'm doing? Aline-

Liam: Mm.

Aline: ... are you crazy? You have such a successful career in fashion, what are you doing becoming a florist?" And also, I received a lot of critics. People saying to me like, "Are you sure you wanna do that in Zurich? Like this will not give you any money," "Are you crazy? You have plenty of florists out there." Is just... You cannot listen to these people because if they were, you know, knowing what they were saying, they would, they would be doing-

Liam: Sure.

Aline: ... as well, but they are not. They are all like working for some companies that they are not happy with w-, you know, whatever. But I just didn't listen, and I went fearless, and I did it. And when I started, um, one thing I realized is of course I'm a English speaking person in Switzerland-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Aline: ... and this is... It's not easy, especially in the start because I didn't know anyone, I didn't had any friend and, uh, I just thought about reaching out the women group of people that I was admiring when I moved in here. Because, um, I had this, this time I said to you, uh, that I had like a, kind of like sabbatic to try to understand. So, I, I, I saw a lot of women in this, um, city that I s-, "Oh, she's doing something really nice. She's an artist, she's great in this," and I said, "Hi, I'm Aline." I sent messages in, in Instagram and, uh... Because I'm, I'm very imagetic person, so Instagram was my platform five years ago, so, I was reaching them and saying like, "Oh hi, how are you? And, uh, I'm doing this. Would you like to collaborate?" And that's how it started. And then Zurich has an incredible community of women that are doing and pursuing what they love, so I think I was embraced pretty much in the beginning. So, I really appreciate that, it helped me a lot. And that's how it started. Yeah.

Liam: That's fantastic.

Aline: (Laughs).

Liam: I think that's a great notes to close on.

Aline: Yeah. Thank you.

Liam: Thank you again for joining me today.

Aline: Oh, thank you for the invitation, was a lovely talk.

Ignacio Ciocchini, Streetscape + Public Space Designer

How the built environment expands, constrains, and informs our experiences of life in a city.

Liam speaks with streetscape and public space designer Ignacio Ciocchini, who’s created much of the public furniture that New Yorkers encounter every single day – from benches that provide personal space, to entire built landscapes for Bryant Park, to chargers for electric vehicles and more.

The conversation ranges from the materiality of the built environment, to the ways in which it expands, constrains, and informs our experiences of life and socialization in a city, with a look toward the more human-focused future that Ciocchini envisions.

---

Liam Spradlin: Okay, Ignacio, welcome to Design Notes.

Ignacio Ciocchini: Thank you for inviting me, Liam. Uh, this is great.

Liam: I wanna know a little bit about your work. So what are the things that you're working on now? What kind of work do you do? What are you creating and what is the path that led you there?

Ignacio: I could talk for two hours, but, uh, long story short, uh, I, I am an industrial designer. I studied in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. And I was always interested in, in toy design, packaging design, and street furniture design. And, uh, so I ended up, uh, specializing in designing products for cities, uh, street furniture, street scapes and public spaces. And I did that, I ended up doing that because one of the jobs I got after taking classes here in the U.S. was with the, uh, business improvement district that they do public space management.

And, uh, so they basically are private public companies are, uh, stores of place and maintain it and improve it over time. And there are thousands of them in the U.S. and some of them have a lot of money. And actually the one where I worked, I, I ended up creating around design department and we would design and construct our own improvements to public space and street furniture. And then over 10 years ago, I started my own design consultancy and I specialize in designing that.

So for example, now I'm in New York, I'm working on an electric charger for electric vehicles for Con Edison at, the first pilot just went out. I'm also working for, um, designing electric chargers for all electric buses, pilot going on here. Um, so those are more site specific projects where are for a city only and they may be replicated somewhere else, but they're not for the market. And I'm also doing projects that are more traditional, um, product design for manufacturers.

Like I'm designing a, a chair for a company in France. I'm designing a, um, system of tables for a U.S. company. Um, so my work is both site specific and for the mass market and, uh, products and spaces. That's where I do most of my work.

Liam: And what is it that motivates you to do this type of work? Or why is this public furniture or product designed? What is it that kind of draws you to that discipline?

Ignacio: I think cities are the biggest in-invention the humankind has come up with, uh, because everything we have ever invented happens within them. And they have been evolving through time, but also in, in not so great ways, you know? And some of the technologies have pushed cities to evolving one way that was maybe advantageous for that technology. For example, with cars, everyone talks about that. Uh, but not so much for human life and human experience.

So my interest is really in being part of the solution. I think we have gotten some of these things great. Then, I mean, some of these things in the city, the overlapping of different economic activities and professionals and culture and interaction between people that works really well. But the things we all talk about pollution and overpopulation and, and, um, over consumption and garbage and all of things, you know? I think there's a lot of work to be done and the perspective of an industrial designer, I feel can help a lot, because of the way we attack a problem and the way we look at a, a problem that is different from the way sometimes urban designers or architects look at it.

Liam: I think you mentioned the aspect of human experience in a city. And that's something that I'm super interested in right now. I've had a conversation recently with anthropologist Tom Boellstoff, who's done a lot of work, uh, anthropologically in virtual space. And I also had a previous episode with Rob Giampietro who talked about the idea that designers of all kinds are kind of responsible for shaping the experience of people's lives through all kinds of different parameters, like how big a book is, how heavy a phone is, what shape a chair might be. And it strikes me as you're talking that public fixtures within a city are shaping the experience of living in that city...

Ignacio: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... through, like, the way that you interact with them, but also through the way that they create specific actions like disposing of trash, resting, securing your bike, navigating around town. How do you think about those influences when you're doing your own work?

Ignacio: I think it's a key component of, of design. I, I love, uh, of, of serving how people use, uh, public spaces and, and because there's already an experience within the city. And I think it would be, in many ways, would be a lot easier to design a new city from scratch than it is to fix what we already have. So I always try to start with observing how people are behaving out there and what they are doing. Because I'm looking for someone, some, something to latch onto to, to create an improvement.

And uh, let's say a city, if a city doesn't have benches, right, just the mere action of adding a bench, any bench, any urban bench would improve that city. But so, um, if a department transportation is, um, in, it's approaching me to design a bench. What I'm looking at is what is the right bench for this city and what features that they need to have to really create a larger impact on the way people use public spaces.

And the way I arrive to those solutions is through observing, uh, people and their behavior and then asking questions about why. Why did you do that? I noticed you didn't use it, or you did use it, or you did this, you didn't... I think I'm lucky that designing public space has a lot of limitations and from materials and things like that, but from an observational point of view is very cheap because you're not in private property, right?

If we had to observe you and I about how, how do we use the headphones we have on, someone, it's not that easy to catch people in an, and observe them in a natural way. How do people use, um, monitors in a recording studio. With public space, you can do that very cheaply and, and you can do that for an extended period of time. I love that. And I have used it on many of my products, you know? So insight that I have, have seen, or someone on my team has seen then turned into a solution that created a product that was step above what was out there.

Liam: What does it look like for a product to be a step above what exists already?

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Ignacio: I'll give you an example of the bench. You know, when I was designing the city bench for the Department of Transportation, um, so the first thing I did was to, to go, and of course New York has lots of benches, you know, in parks and places. But they were n-, they had no benches on the sidewalk. So when I was observing New Yorkers, I noticed that many of the seats on these benches were empty.

And then you would assume, "Okay, people don't want to seat, right? Don't give them benches." But when you observe, what happens is you see one person sitting, another one walks by, looks at the other person. You can kind of tell they want to sit, but they don't. They just keep walking, right? Or maybe you have four seats and only two are taken, and two seats are left in between.

So based on that, I asked the question to this, the ones that were willing to talk to me, uh, I said, "Why, why did you do that?" And the answer to that question gave me a solution. They said, "Well, the seat is too narrow. I can't, my body doesn't fit in that seat." Or, "I don't want to rub elbows with a stranger." Or, "That person has a large bag and is taking up a seat. I don't want to ask them to move it." Or, you know, they have it all. "Oh, that person is on the computer and I'm going to bother them." Um, or, "I have to be on the computer and to have space."

So now I realized there was a social component about social space. So, and it goes beyond ergonomics. It doesn't matter what shape or size your body has, right? What matters is that you feel comfortable and you have your social space. So I, I made these, uh, seats that are very, uh, wide, uh, at 27 inches wide. And have armrests and are separated from the other seats. So you can sit on an angle and talk to a friend. You can put your bag on your own seat, you can be on your cell phone, on the computer.

And so there's a lot of things you can do. So just this minor change made it so that these benches are highly used. A lot of people sit on these benches and it is because of that insight that came from observing. I didn't know this. And in fact, the longest bench allowed in New York was six feet. And my bench is seven feet, right, and, and two inches.

So we had to sort of work within the regulation, say, "Look, if you really want a three seater and you want people to use them, then this is what you need." And we, we tested prototypes and it worked beautifully on the prototypes.

Liam: This is something I would love to talk about is the, interaction between you and your practice as designers and an organization like a city who has this rule that a bench can only be six feet. And maybe that rule has gone unexamined for a long time. I'm sure that those conversations can be kind of difficult, right? They must be a very complicated stakeholder.

Ignacio: Yes. I have to say cities are very different now than they were even 15 years ago. You know, Department of Transportations now, they have lots of urban planners, urban designers, and even public policy people that are, are, are well informed when it comes to public transport and all of that. It used to be very difficult because you wouldn't interact with engineers that came only from highway design and that kind of area, you know, that is needed. But they, they did not have the human element because it's not what they, what they look at.

So, uh, the bench, when I designed the bench was under Jeanette Sadik-Khan. And her, as a commissioner, she was very open to new ideas. She wanted new ideas. So when I mentioned this and because it was going to trigger, uh, higher use, and they were after that, they said yes right away. I mean, but you are correct. A different transportation department would have said no, maybe. Um, but it wasn't a problem to get this one approved from the size point of view. I mean, there were other things that, like, cost and other functional features that were more tricky to work on. But, um, that one was not a problem in this case.

Liam: I think I'm also curious because I, I think a significant part of our audience is probably younger designers, I think, often who are going into interaction design or some other discipline like that. But I'm curious, um, going back to your journey for just a second, how you ended up being exposed to these kinds of stakeholders and organizations to get into this space that you're in now. Because it, it feels like something quite specialized and maybe very difficult to break into.

Ignacio: My advice to someone younger would, would just say, would be to, you know, you need a plan. You need to know what you like and what, what will make you happy. But also be open. Don't assume you, you know everything and, and that you know everywhere where you will fit because something might exist out there that you will love doing and you may not be aware that this position exists, especially now where so many people they have dual degrees. Uh, you know, like architecture and medicine, you know? All, all these things are happening now that are very, and it changes in technology in the next 10 years will be incredible.

Uh, so more so than the last 20. So, um, I would say stay open. And I think that's why I am where I am, because when I was a student in, in New York and I still couldn't speak English very well, and um, I didn't know what to do and I was also working at the restaurant while, while taking classes and this part-time position became open in a business improvement district, I really had no idea what it was.

And when I went to the interview, I interviewed really to design, um, redesign facades for building. Because they had a program to, um, redesign the facade of, um, businesses for free to improve the downtown area, right? So I was the designer and the design director designing these storefronts and signs that they were then offered for free and the company would pay half of the cost. So it wasn't really something I had too much experience on. It wasn't what I wanted to do. But I was lucky that this design director and others, you know, explained to me the, the vision of the company and what the company wanted to do. And that's when I saw things and say, "Wait, if I stay here, I can do these things and, and I have ideas of what other things I could do."

So, and I ended up staying there for a long time. I started as, as a draft person, as a designer, and then I became the, the be-, I went all the way to being Vice President of, of design there, and I had, at one point, I had 10 people under me. And we were working for three different companies at the same time. So, uh, because we were not hiring any consultants. Basically I created an in-house design team to tackle everything in-house.

Um, now with the pandemic that, that has been severely reduced. So I would say do plan ahead, but stay open minded and ask questions. Never assume you know everything. Never. That's the biggest mistake you can make, is that, "I know everything. I know myself. I know the market, I know where I fit," you know? It's okay to know the market, but allow yourself to think that there may be something out there you're not aware of.

Liam: Yeah. I think that's also in the same spirit of what you said about kind of observing people and figuring out what it is that they want to do with the products that you want to create. It makes a lot of sense. Going back to that, back to the example of the seven foot two inch bench, the design of this bench seems to, like, open up a lot of possibilities for folks to have a seat and do what they need to do in a way that wasn't there before. But I'm also curious if the design of public furniture or other kind of fixtures that you've worked on have the capability to either encourage or discourage, like, more specific behaviors. Like what are the ways in which these things could change what people are choosing to do in the first place?

Ignacio: Yeah, I mean, um, benches are very controversial because of the, uh, you know, the urban camping and all of that. And, um, I think that, at least in my case, I think some of the, some of those designs have been misinterpreted. You know, some of the, the bench, um... So the first target audience that a bench like that will service is the third age, right? Someone who is older, uh, that lives in a city that maybe they don't have a park nearby, and the only exercise they can get is to walk around.

But if you are of a certain age, you know, over 70, 65, 70, depending on your, on your physical, uh, fitness, you have to rest. You can't walk three blocks or five or 10 blocks and then come back home. You need to walk one block and rest then another one and rest, then two and rest. And if you don't have benches on the sidewalk, you can't do that. So what, what we figure is, so also an elderly person, they don't have the back strength and the arm strength that someone your age or even my age would have, right?

I'm, I'm guessing I'm probably 20 years older than you, so they need arm rests to hold themselves onto while they're sitting because otherwise the full body weight goes down onto the bench and they can get hurt. And then they also need the armrest to push themselves up from a seating position to a standing position. So that is very important that they have those two armrests. And if you have three seats, then you're going to have four armrests out there dividing up the seat.

So unfortunately those armrests are going to make it so that if someone wants to sleep on the bench, they will not be able to but it's not why those are there. It's really not. And I'm, I'm talking about in my case and for, for that product. So I, I know that, uh, some people find benches with too many divisions offensive and I understand. But what I would say is think about the elderly and think about the elderly in urban areas. And they really need that. Then other interactions that could be, that are happening, you know, like, including obstructions on street furniture to make sure that, uh, skateboarders don't damage things, you know?

That, that's very controversial too, and you can look at it from all sides. I worked for a long time for companies that had not only designed and built, but also have to maintain these public spaces. So I understand the frustration of installing, you know, 100 $3,000 benches out there that are made out of IPE and, and you have your beautiful park, and then in a month, a good 10% or 15% of them are scratched.

And I don't, I don't think people realize how expensive it is to fix that. Once you have a $3,000 bench out there that is damaged, it's maybe more expensive to fix it. So I also see the other, the other side of the story is, is the youth that doesn't have access to public space, uh, that doesn't have access to a proper, uh, playground or, or play space or skateboarding place where they can do their tricks.

So it's a tough one. I, I, what I do is I look at each project individually and I try to make the right decision for that project, right? Not making a blanket statement in a case like that, I don't think is the right approach.

Liam: Right. I'm also thinking about the ways in which these can influence some of the things that you were discussing earlier that cities have struggled from in the past or are struggling with now. Things like over consumption, traffic, pollution, things like that. Because I have also seen examples of public furniture that says, like, it will help to reduce littering or something like that. I'm curious, like, how these pieces can have those kinds of impacts as well on solving, like, problems that the city as an organism has itself?

Ignacio: Well, the problem of trash collection is very, um, New York has one and you know, trash bags are, um, stored on the sidewalk. It blocks the sidewalk and it, it looks really bad. When we talk about taking some of that space away from cars and giving it to people and balancing that. Mind you, no one is talking about getting rid of cars completely. When we talk about balancing that space is, um, giving that space back to people. Uh, doesn't mean always tables and chairs.

What that may mean is that may mean a bike rack that instead being on the sidewalk is, is a probably bi-bike rack on the parking lane. It may be that we have a larger trash container on a parking lane rather than the sidewalk. The same with an electric vehicle charger. So, um, and that technology is moving in a way that, you know, sensors will allow a city to, to monitor these improvements in a way that wasn't previously possible as to whether a parking lot is taken or not, whether an EV charger is charging or is empty, whether a trash can is full or not.

And so, um, I think a lot of those things will, will, will change as we balance out the space for cars. You know, everyone talks about electric cars and, and with, with the policies that, uh, the federal government is implementing and everyone is looking at that, you know? It, it's, it's a business opportunity for a lot of people and I, I've done quite a bit of work with electric chargers and I am still doing.

I don't think that electric vehicles or autonomous vehicles are the solution, the only solution for people, for cities. They are part of the solution, but the problem we have is a problem of quantity. We are trying to fit 20 gallons of water in a five gallon bucket, if not more. So, uh, it's an impossibility. So we can compress the size of cars, but to what point? So the solution is to reduce the number of cars in cities severely and make them smaller, make, make them more practical, making sure that it's not only one person traveling in them. And then making sure they don't pollute, right? And then making sure we reduce the accidents and the people that unfortunately lose their lives on a bike or on a scooter or, uh, in a car.

So I think all of these solutions need to work together. And I think the problem I see is that cities are getting overly excited about electrification, right? Thinking that, that's the solution. But if you electrify all the cars you have now, and you still have the same number of electric cars out there, whether they are autonomous or not, we are still going to have the traffic problems we have now in any city.

So I think we need to think about this holistically and see how all these technologies can interact. And then when these technologies do become a product that is in the public space, that it is the right product for that city. And I'm working now on electric chargers for ell- all electric buses. And yes, who wouldn't want to have all electric buses in the city?

But, you know, electric charging equipment for buses is, is really big. Is, uh, we are talking about switch gear and compressors and chargers that are 10 feet by eight feet by nine feet. So where, where do you put it? And are you going to block a public space or a sidewalk because you want your electric bus? So I think there needs to be a, a connection between city agencies, right?

Because if the city agency that is doing the electric buses only cares about electric buses and doesn't care about where these things go, then we have a problem. If there is interaction between city agencies, then the right decisions can be made. So I think the case of the electric charger for buses I'm working on is a case where there is interaction between the Parks department, the Department of Transportation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City Transit, and um, New York Power Authority, Con Edison.

So everyone is involved to make sure that, yes, we, we will get electric buses, but the chargers will be, the chargers that are installed in public space will be designed correctly and we'll have functions that will serve the public also if they need to take up space.

Liam: And speaking of that, I'm really curious, um, as I talk to folks who work in different creative disciplines, I always want to know, like, what is the stuff that you're working with? Like, um, and by that I mean kind of the practical constraints or the parameters that you have to work with. Like, you talk about the bus charging infrastructure being comprised of, like, this huge amount of machinery, but what are the things that you're thinking about in your work in terms of materials, physics, shapes, dimensions? Even maybe manufacturing or replication. How did those factor in as you're designing something?

Ignacio: When it comes to materials for street furniture, we are very limited, you know? Designers that work in this space, we, we know this very well. There are not that many, um, materials out there that will fit the bill as far as how long things need to last and the cost associated with it. So I, I do work a lot with, uh, stainless steel, you know, type 316, type 304. I work a lot with, uh, carbon steel that is electro coated and polyester powder coated plastics too, polyethylene, um, plotationally molded, rod molded and glass, you know, aluminum, um, aluminum extrusions, you know?

But it's wood also, but it's not that varied, the materials that I, I can really work with and be confident that it will last. Uh, if I know that the bench or the trash can will be out there for 10 years and will get no maintenance, I really need to be careful about the choices I make with materials. And often cost is, is, um, is limiting when, when working with with city agencies.

Um, you know, I've been in situations where you know that stainless steel is the right material but, um, the city agency can't afford it. So, and you have to lower the cost or the project doesn't happen. Uh, so you have to make compromises, right? And yes, you may be saving, um, money going with the lesser material in the beginning but, um, 7, 8, 9, 10 years into the project, you may, you may be having problems, uh, that you wouldn't otherwise have if you, if you chose the right material, the most, the more expensive material.

And when I say more expensive, you know, this means, it could mean double the cost, right? So it could mean, um, do we want to pay 1,500 uh, dollars for each bench or do we want to pay $3,000 for each bench? So that's a tough decision to, to make. So it's challenging. Material choices for street furniture is very challenging and, um, there are thousands of materials out there, but very few that, um, we can feel confident, uh, about using out there.

Liam: Throwing another kind of access of creation into the mix. I'm curious about how you take all of those requirements and begin to create an aesthetic with these products. Particularly, like, a lot of the work that has been done in Bryant Park, there seems to be a very distinct kind of visual aesthetic to those products, and I'm curious how that balances out with the materials that you have to use and also the usefulness that the products have to have for people in public space?

Ignacio: Yes. Well, you know, Bryant Park is a special case. It's incredibly well run and, uh, you know, the, the park funds itself, um, basically with all, all the events and activities that they generate there, um, sponsorships. So, um, you know, in a case that is site specific like that, you work to a budget. So if you know that, for example, the, the trash cans I designed for Bryant Park, um, the park had trash cans out there already. They were getting old. And, uh, uh, you know, the, the level of maintenance Bryant Park has, it's, it's really unbelievable. And those trash cans are emptied, you know, six, seven times a day and there are about 120 trashcans in the park.

So, um, the, the park is pristine. So, um, what I wanted to do with that design is not only design a trash can that looks good, and that performs its function properly, but also that communicated. That communicated the, the, the level of attention and maintenance that the client was putting into the park. I wanted the, the product to communicate that.

And so the, the trashcan itself became a branding vehicle in a sense, not in a sense of carrying a logo or anything like that, but the design has a connection, a connection with, uh, with nature. Uh, they basically look like little flowers in the park. And, um, they also communicate the value of recycling and doing it properly and the connection that, that has with the planet. So that was the thinking for, for the product.

And then of course it had to be going into this park that already existed. So it had to relate to the park itself, to its history and some of the other elements in the park that I had already designed myself. So I think that it's a very interesting case to look into. You know, trashcans are really the unsung heroes of public spaces along with, uh, with the sanitation workers. Um, because you ca-, you cannot have a well run public space without having a properly run sanitation effort. And without this trashcans and, you know, in a, in a small park like Brian Park to have 120 of them, that's a lot.

So having them, the right design in the right locations, and in this case, um, expanding the message of the company, you know, becoming part of the message of the communications, um, I think that, I thought that was important. And I think the trashcans are working really well for the park.

Liam: Thinking about the type of work that you do and the materials that you're working with, and especially like all the cost considerations and logistics of creating and installing and maintaining all of these things. It strikes me that my own practice, which is interaction design, has a really serious luxury in the sense that we are able to iterate on things really quickly because we're working with software. So our materials are pixels, processing power, like, server space, things like that.

Ignacio: Mm-hmm.

Liam: We can ship something really quickly, see how it works, and change it really easily compared to something that's built of metal, wood, glass, those sorts of things. So I, I heard you earlier in the conversation mention using prototypes, but I'm really interested in how this process of iteration, like, leads up to what you would consider a finished product.

Ignacio: I think prototyping is, is key. You know, prototyping is, is part of the design project because you, you have to, uh, process. You have to assume you will make mistakes and you will make mistakes. And you have to get those mistakes out of the way early in the process to make sure that users and people that are trying to enjoy the park don't pay the price of your mistake.

So, uh, in the case of the bench for, uh, New York and the trashcans for Brian Park, we did build, uh, prototypes. In the case of the bench, I think we built, um, about seven of them. So once the design was approved, we built prototypes. We installed them on the sidewalks without promoting it, without saying anything. And then now you get to observe how people are using the new design, the new product. And you get to see what's working and what is not working.

And if, uh, if you have the luxury to have the budget to do that, that's key. Because testing, I mean, you can do all your 3D modeling and check your structure in Solid Works and build a prototype in the factory and destroy it and see where it breaks, you know, all those things we did and, you know, the, the, the structure, the structural side of checking, that you have to do. But that can happen in a factory.

I think testing, um, in the public realm and just letting people use it and see what's going on, it gives you invaluable insight into the design and what you can do to improve it. And it could be a trash can, it could be a ping pong area, it could be a carousel, it could be, uh, a bench. Uh, it could be an electric vehicle charger. It doesn't matter. I see that as part of the design process, and I usually try to convince my clients to, to really include that in the scope of work when they hire me.

My work doesn't finish when the final fabrication drawings are, uh, are approved and we are ready to go. Uh, or when I approve the first prototype at the factory, which I do, but I'm always interested in going beyond that and really seeing the product in action and, and see what can be done better. So, um, and also prototyping if you are, uh, if you're in public space, you know, sometimes prototyping can be done with mock-ups. If you are, if you are not sure about the idea you can try out a concept instead of going all the way and fully developing it.

And it could be, you're not sure whether that's the right position for a bike rack or, um, for a city bike station or for a, an informational sign or maybe a parklet or an extension of the sidewalk. You can create those with temporary materials and observe and desi-design after that, which is something we have done quite a bit too before finalizing the design. It's just to do something, uh, temporary quickly and then observe.

Liam: As we start to wrap up, I think something that I notice among my fellow designers is the impulse to want to improve things. I mean, I guess that's why we are in the business that we're in. You started the conversation by saying, like, "We want to create public furniture that is one step ahead of, or one step above, more useful, better for the people out there than what is currently available." And I'm just curious, like, I lived in New York for six years and had my own relationship to the city. And I'm curious what you might change about the environment or the experience of being in New York from the work that you do?

Ignacio: I think that, um, you know, as a user, if I take my, my designer hat off, right, and I just think of myself as one more user of the city. And I think the city is working on this, is the improving bike lanes. And, of course, creating more, uh, fully protected and divided bike lanes so that you feel safer when, when biking in the city. Uh, see, I am a biker, but I am very, I am a very careful biker and very fearful of going into... You know there are many bike lanes that I'd see people use that I would never, I would never go there myself. I would feel unsafe. Um, and, and perhaps I have too much information about what's going on in the city with alternative modes of transportation.

So I would like to see that, you know, because, uh, I think my level of fear, uh, when it comes to biking is higher than, than other users, right? So if the city gets to a point where I don't feel as fearful about using my bike on bike lanes or crossing over a bridge, then I think a lot of other users may, may be feeling like me. I mean, the city just, um, included a fully protected bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge, for example. The bike lane was separated from traffic, car traffic, but was mixed up with pedestrians. And with the number of tourists and pedestrians walking there, that didn't work very well.

It's now it's fully protected, fully separated from cars and from pedestrians and I believe it's working very well. So, a-and as a designer, I would like to see more, you know, I would like to see more public spaces and, and fewer cars in New York. Um, I think that I still see too many cars out there that only have one person. Uh, and, uh, you kinda wonder was it really necessary for, for that person to get into their car. You know, I use public transportation as much as I can. I use the subway a lot, even through the pandemic. I use the sidewalk, uh, the subway and I followed all the guidelines and I never, I never got COVID.

So as I said, there's a lot to be done and a lot to improve. But in general terms, I would say, a-adding more public spaces, improving the ones that are out there. I think New York has added a lot of, um, that became larger and larger over time, and that is great. Um, but some of them, I feel, need to become permanent now and need to, the design needs to improve because I think some of the, some of these temporary, uh, spaces are starting to show their age. And, and as we mentioned it before, right, public spaces are, they need to be managed properly.

So if you create a public space and you just leave it, um, leave it out there to, to see what happens, it could go in the wrong direction, right? So I look at public spaces as, as really products, right? Like, I'm not sure if other people think about them this way. But, you know, if you, if you're a product designer and you design the consumer product or an app and no one is using it, you know, no one. It's not selling. It's not, um, no one is downloading it. Um, you, you probably made a mistake. It's probably the wrong design, the wrong service.

And you can say, "Oh, people are misunderstanding my design. That's why they're not using it." But that's not the, that's not the reason. The reason is it may be a good design, but it's the wrong design for that situation. So I think we need to put a little more effort into public spaces. And, and New York has done a lot. But, uh, now I think we need to go to the next level, you know? Because when someone decides to go into the, into a public space or a park, they don't have to pay for it, right? You don't pay to enter a park, uh, Central Park or Washington Square Park. Um, it's a public space. You enter, you enjoy it.

And sometimes I think, um, um, we forget that, you know, time is very valuable. I believe that we do pay. When people decide to go into a public space, they are deciding to spend their time there. So if I'm deciding to spend two hours in Madison Square Park, that's time is very valuable to me. So I may not be paying it with, um, money, but I am paying with my time. And that is a conscious decision people make because you have choices. You have choice. I can go to this park, I can go into this store, I can go back home, I can go to the gym.

So what makes that person decide, "I will go into this park?" It's because the park has the features that that person needs to feel comfortable. You know, a bathroom, a place to eat, a seat. You have moveable sitting that allows you to sit in the shadow or, you know, have a comfortable sitting position to talk to friends or just be on your own and work. So I think that if we start thinking about public spaces that way, then the second you see a space and you see that no one is using it, you, you realize right away why. It doesn't have the features that would make someone comfortable. So why would someone sit there, you know? It looks unsafe or it smells. It's not clean. It's not designed properly. Um, it doesn't have any shade or so.

Um, I think it's important to think about it that way, you know, to take it seriously and, and say, you know, people have choices. If I want them to use this public space or this park, I need to, I need to compete. I need to compete with other things that they can do.

Liam: Right. So to close, I'm also interested in where you see your discipline specifically moving in the future or the work that you are doing? Especially, you know, we've talked a lot about reducing cars on the roads. I know that before I left New York, there were kind of indefinite street closures that started popping up during the pandemic for just mixed use public space. Again, probably going back to your point about the design is not really optimized for what this, what the space could do. But, um, and also as people start to talk about things like consumer AR and things like that, like, where do you see the discipline going? How will it interact with these possible futures?

Ignacio: Well, I think that it's already going there. If I look at the type of projects I've been working on in the last five years, most of the products I've been working on have technology in them. That was not the case, um, even 10 years ago or 15 years ago. So I think all these technologies will start appearing in public space. And like, um, 5G, um, sensors. Modes of transportation that have technology attached to them, um, like virtual parking spaces or, um, you know, like in the case of scooters and electric chargers that will be integrated with existing infrastructure.

So I, I think that all these technologies will have an impact on the city. And some of them you will see, some of them you will not, but I see a lot of work, uh, for urban designers and product designers and engineers adapting this technology to the city in a, in a human way. I think we need to do it. Uh, we need to prioritize us people, humans. And, and as, as long as we do that, we will be able to adapt these technologies, uh, in, in a, in a human way. Because, because it's a lot, right? It's a lot, uh, between cameras and sensors and, and radios and antennas and all these technologies that have a lot of advantages for the people that live in the city and for the agencies that have to manage the city.

But if those are not integrated properly, they, they will have a negative impact on the quality of life, on how urban spaces look and function. So that's what, what I'm interested in doing. Is to help those companies out there, help those tech companies integrate their products with the city in a way that works for the public. And I think in the next 10 years we will see a lot, a lot more of that coming in, starting with, uh, 5G radios and antennas and other technologies.

Liam: Well, thank you again for joining me, Ignacio.

Tom Boellstorff, Anthropologist, Coming of Age in Second Life

Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff on life—and the future—in virtual space.

In this episode, Liam speaks to Tom Boellstorff, Anthropologist and UCI Professor, whose ethnographic work in Second Life (documented in his book, Coming of Age in Second Life) provides important insights into how virtual space – and our interface with it – informs and interacts with our lives in actual space.

In virtual worlds like Second Life, inhabitants exist only through their own acts of creation, which also serve as a primary mode of experiencing life in virtual space.

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Liam Spradlin: Hi, Tom. Welcome to Design Notes.

Tom Boellstorff: Thank you for having me.

Liam: So to start out with, as is tradition on Design Notes, tell me a little bit about your work and specifically the journey that led you there.

Tom: Sure. I'm an anthropologist and I'm a professor at the University of California, Irvine. And I actually started out doing research in Indonesia many years ago about gay and lesbian Indonesians and sort of how identities move around the world on how they change and don't change when that happens. And I started doing that research in 1992. I started doing it a long time ago before the internet was even there. But when I was doing that research, I really saw the influence of mass media already, television and films and things like that. And that got me interested in technology and media.

And after doing that research for about, oh, 15 years in Indonesia, I thought, "Oh, I'll try something a little different." And so I had had that interest in technology and so got interested in virtual worlds. And this was in the early 2000s when they were just getting started and thought, "What would happen if I tried studying virtual worlds using the same approach that an anthropologist uses when they go to Indonesia or anywhere else, trying to understand a culture? How is it different or similar? How does it work?"

And so I sort of tried that out as an experiment and it worked really well and there you have it. And so for a while now I've been doing digital anthropology research about the internet. So I've been very lucky to have a career where I get to do all kinds of different stuff and I'm getting ready now to sort of come back to virtual worlds and do a research project on the anthropology of the metaverse, people are calling it nowadays, and looking at some things that are going on around that.

Liam: It's striking to me when you characterize your work before virtual worlds as exploring kind of the nature of identities and how those shift and change in different regions of the world, that studying a virtual world must kind of explode that concept.

Tom: It is interesting. Like in some ways it explodes it. But one thing that has always surprised me studying virtual worlds is that a lot of it isn't that different. And so seeing a film or a movie or getting an idea of a concept from somewhere else in the world and transforming it. Like in the case of Indonesia, which is the fourth biggest country in the world, that's been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. Indonesians are almost 90% Muslim and many of the others are Christian or Buddhist. Those all came from elsewhere. The idea of the nation state came from elsewhere, being a nation and so many ideas. And that happened in the US as well.

And so humans have always been very trans-local, like ideas and things have always flowed and moved. And sometimes that's because of people moving. But sometimes ideas can move when people don't. And that is something that with the virtual world kind of thing really gets transformed in really interesting ways. And one thing that is sort of exploded, or one thing that is truly different is the difference between an idea moving from one place to another physically, whether that be aided by radio or movies or internet, compared to an idea taking form in the internet itself. And that is something different because a movie or a book is really interesting, but we can't talk there together. But right now we're talking. And so there is something really cool that happens with the possibility for those kinds of virtual spaces, for sure, that's something that's really interesting to study.

Liam: I wanted to get into that more, but first I want to back up and just define a couple of terms as we get into this conversation. So first, how would you characterize a virtual world or virtuality in general?

Tom: Yeah, that's a really good point. So right now, especially in this sort of new era of metaverse hype that we're in, virtual gets used in two different ways that are actually very different. And so it's important to keep those separate but also look at areas where they overlap. So one is VR, virtual reality, which means the goggle kind of Oculus Rift thing where you see things in 3D and that's really cool, and whatever, the technology's improving.

But you can do VR without the internet at all. You could have a flight simulator on your computer, on your laptop, if it's not even plugged into the internet. So virtual reality is about an interface. It doesn't have anything to do with being online at all. You can do it, unplug your computer from the internet, turn off the Wi-Fi, and you could do VR with any kind of game that you're playing or a flight simulator or something. And so that's what virtual reality means.

Virtual worlds means a shared online place where this is a picture of my house in Second Life, one of my houses in Second Life, where if I shut off my computer and I come back the next day, it's still there because it's on the cloud. It's a shared place online. That's what a virtual world is. And that's different from a social network site. And we even see that in English where we say that you go on Facebook but you go in Minecraft or Fortnite or something like that, Second Life.

Many of the early virtual worlds were text-based. You don't even need VR. You don't even need graphics. They can just be text, where it would say, "Tom walks into a room. The room has three chairs and a table." And for instance, when some disabled folks with visual impairments use Second Life, they use readers that read it out as text. So even nowadays. So you can have VW, you can have a virtual world without VR and you can have VR without VW. One's about interface and one is about shared place. And so it's confusing because those are two pretty different meanings of the word virtual.

Now, part of the whole metaverse thing is the kind of Venn diagram where you can have a virtual world that uses VR. Super cool as long as you don't get nauseous or whatever. And so you can combine them, but you don't have to. And it's actually pretty clear that most people don't. And I don't think the future of the metaverse is that they're always going to come together, which is sort of a matrix idea. Because that's why so many companies are doing all of the AR, augmented thing where you can still see through if you wear the glasses. Because it's clear that having that kind of 360 immersion in a virtual world can be super cool, but probably not all day long, at least for most folks.

Liam: Out of curiosity, what do you think the implications would be of widely adopted augmented reality in the actual world?

Tom: It's so hard to say because so often with these kinds of things, companies will come up with use scenarios and then what people actually do with it is so different. And if you look at the history of technology, which I'm very interested in, you see that. When the iPhone first came out, people thought you'd hold it up and talk on it and everyone was worried about brain cancer and people didn't really even think about apps or that it'd be connected to a watch or whatever. And so often uses are emergent from new technologies. And so there's a whole bunch of predictions out there, but if history is any guide, they're mostly going to be wrong. And the really cool stuff we're going to really want to sort of be watching to see what it is that folks do with these things. The big warning around all of this stuff is that you could have this stuff being largely developed by governments or nonprofit organizations, but that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where the Metaverse kinds of technologies are overwhelmingly being developed and implemented by for profit corporations. And so what is being talked about in terms of what is going to be used for is very much driven by a certain kind of commodity product mentality of those companies. Which is probably just scratching the surface of what could actually happen. And so right now that kind of prediction stuff is very much being driven by marketing and it's very much being driven by for profit corporations that probably aren't going there in all kinds of directions of cool stuff that could be done with these technologies.

Liam: I think that many of the things that we're seeing predicted, there was a video circulating recently, at the time we're recording, of someone shopping for I think a bottle of wine in a store in, again, NVR. But I think that many of the things that people are thinking of in terms of the notion of having property, the notion of buying things, the notion of creating things have already played out in Second Life in a certain way.

So I want to talk about a concept that you established in your book, Coming of Age in Second Life called creationist capitalism. Because I think this idea that the world that we're talking about is actually a space in which you can do things and in which you can create things although it is a creation itself is really interesting and something that should be talked about as we revisit the idea of existing in this space.

Tom: Yeah. So a couple great points you mentioned. One is that one really negative effect of the corporate hype around the Metaverse, but around this stuff more generally is a lack of attention to history, which is very common in that hype. And it's amazing, Second Life is almost 15 years old now, and it's amazing how many people will be surprised or say, how can you still be doing stuff in Second Life, it's old.

And no one ever asked me that about Indonesia. No one ever says, why do you still go to Indonesia, why are you still interested in Indonesia, Indonesia's really old. You should only be studying new things. And that idea that we're only interested in what is new or big is definitely coming out of that pipe of the industry that can damage our research agendas in that way.

And this idea that people will often ask about, is this going to take over and have a billion users or should we just pack up and go home without any idea of a middle ground is also I think damaging. Because there's so many interesting things going on let's say with virtual worlds that have between a half million and five million active users. That's a lot of people. But part of the hype cycle is, if you're not going to hit a billion then I don't care.

And so I think thinking about looking at the whole range of things that people are doing online, not only the top two, is very, very important because often a lot of pioneering and interesting stuff is happening in smaller spaces that aren't getting noticed by the tech framing of these things.

And that idea of creationist capitalism is also really interesting and important because, especially right now, this moment that we're in around the Metaverse, not everything is new. A lot of what's going on is not new, but some of it is new. But it's really hard to tell right in the moment what is actually new and what's not, it's surprisingly difficult. That's always the case.

After five years, it's easy to look back and say, oh, this part of it was innovative and new and this part was not. But right when it's coming out, it's remarkably difficult sometimes to figure out what's new and what's not.

So the creationist capitalism thing is just thinking about, in the most basic sense of thinking about economics, going back to Marx or going back to basic economics, commodity production requires materials and labor, so if I'm going to build a house or a chair or a car or something, I need human labor to make that. And then there's the materials, I need cloth to build a shirt or a coat, I need metal and plastic to build a car, I need wood or whatever to build a chair. And the commodity models of economics are based around these factors of materials and labor and other things as well. But those are the big things, time and other things show up as well. But materials and labor are the big stuff.

And with creationist capitalism, what I was trying to think about is that with online commodity production, you really lose in many ways that material side of it. And so creativity itself becomes a new kind of labor in a virtual world, whether that's Fortnite or Decentraland, you get cool gear in Fortnite or you build something in Minecraft or you build a chair in Second Life. To make a thousand copies of that chair or one copy of that chair is almost no difference, just a teeny amount of bandwidth and server space. But you don't need a thousand times the materials like you do if you're making a thousand chairs.

So creationist capitalism is a way of thinking about what happens to capitalism when that materiality shifts. There's still the materiality of the computer and the keyboard, but there's not the materiality of what's needed to actually make the commodity in the same way.

And so we are moving into a world where, there's still going to be physical objects sold, lots of them, but there's a lot of stuff nowadays being sold that is virtual. And the NFT, the non fungible token thing, is part of that. Part of what an NFT is doing is actually trying to break this model of creationist capitalism. It's worth more because of scarcity, there's only a few of them.

And for 15 years, in Second Life you can do that. So if you make an object, a chair in Second Life, you can have it be free to copy or you can say this is unique, it can't be copied further. And you are basically turning it into an NFT then. And that interrupts that scarcity model where the same cost to make a hundred or to make one. So NFTs are basically trying to recreate the scarcity of physical objects where you need more wood or more metal to increase the value. It's that same idea.

So yeah, I mean, there's more to creationist capitalism than that obviously. But to me, one interesting piece of it is this issue of digital objects for which the materiality cost of their production is zero or close to zero compared to the physical objects.

Liam: I'm curious because it strikes me, and I think this comes through in Coming of Age in Second Life as well, that this mode of material-less creation or creation that is not as intensive on materials has huge implications for your experience of the virtual world, but also can reflect back into your experience of the actual world. Specifically in how you design your own embodiment and environment in a virtual world. So I'm curious about your thoughts on that. And also from a philosophical perspective, if the manufacturing of scarcity has an impact on that and what that impact is?

Tom: Yeah, I mean, that's a deep question, so I don't really have a complete answer for that. But it is true that because of the lack of scarcity in that sense, often people in a virtual world, their homes are palaces or they're really big, or they can have 10 cars, they can have a virtual Ferrari. And there has been interesting thinking about how is it that you can have a shift in social class in that sense.

But then also the other side of that, once again, I'm not the first person to say this kind of thing, is could this then, if it's not done right, lead to a world where rich people have a big house and a yacht in the physical world and less rich people have a pod or a small studio apartment and they have a yacht and a mansion online. And is that a way to shut them up because they don't get to have equality in the physical world.

So you can imagine this as being a way to exacerbate or increase class inequality. Or not. It's not really inherent in the technology, as with so many of these things it's what we do with it. And so it is interesting how we think about scarcity and abundance, and the way in which NFTs are trying to reintroduce scarcity into a virtual environment that, historically, one of the selling points is you don't need it. You don't need to have scarcity. But because our economic models are predicated on scarcity, then how are things going to get expensive if everyone can have it, right? And one point of view would be, who cares? Let's let everyone have stuff. Another can be, if I'm thinking in that capitalist model, or I need to make money, and the only way I can think about that is through scarcity, then I have to try and artificially create scarcity in a virtual space, because that's the only way I can think about money making.

So it's a really interesting question, once again, about how our economic models are intersecting with these new technologies, especially, once again, given a context where it's not, when you think about VR or virtual worlds, these metaverse spaces, it's not like you have five big corporations going up against like five nonprofits, a nonprofit consortia all doing it and seeing what happens. It's all corporate, and so we really have to push back and be creative to think about these other kinds of things, because the nonprofit space online, the kind of Wikipedia, Internet Archive, other kinds of things that are out there, nonprofit stuff, it's out there, absolutely. But it is very much overwhelmed in the public discourse by the corporate stuff. It is much, much bigger.

Sometimes, when people say, "Oh, the technology causes X, or the technology is doing X," we need to step back and say, "The technology when viewed through this capitalist model does X, but we can think otherwise. That's not the only way this technology could be used." And that's going to be a real challenge moving forward, unless there's some big movement to sort of think of these things more on the line of utilities, where we really want to support non-corporate models for them.

Liam: In a previous episode of the show, I talked to Kerry Murphy, who runs a studio called The Fabricant, and The Fabricant produces virtual couture, so fashion that only exists in virtual space, and you can apply it either to a photo of yourself or to an avatar. In Kerry's case, he had a photorealistic avatar created, and in the episode, we talked about how he tried out programming this avatar to do certain dance moves or wear clothes that he would never wear.

So I'm really interested in this idea that I think you also get into in the book about how this mode of creation in virtual space allows you to embody yourself in ways that are perhaps wildly divergent from the embodiment that you have in the actual world, and what that means to people and the implications that it has when you can kind of design yourself?

Tom’s Ethnographia in Second Life

Tom: Yeah, no, it's a super interesting question, and it's something that is really affected by the particular kind of virtual world in question. So some virtual worlds, and a lot of the biggest virtuals out there are designed as games, right, like World of Warcraft or Fortnite or something like that, and often, in those virtual worlds, there are fairly strict limits placed on your avatar embodiment. If you are in a Star Trek virtual world, you can't be a hobbit and you can't be Darth Vader because it's supposed to be Star Trek, not Star Wars, right? And so there are limits, and often in those spaces, avatar customization is often more about clothing or weapons, gear, stuff like that.

And then there are virtual worlds that allow you to look almost any way that you want, and so in a virtual world like Second Life, you can be photorealistic. You can also be a refrigerator or an animal or a ball of light or a different gender or between genders or a dragon. So some of them are very open ended and some of them aren't, so that has an effect. And another thing that has an effect is whether you're allowed to have one avatar or more than one avatar. So in Second Life, you have one avatar, but you can have as many free Second Life accounts as you want. It's just like getting Gmail accounts or something like that.

And so most people in Second Life have multiple avatars, and they'll call them alts, and sometimes a common thing that will happen is someone might have an alt that is closer to their physical world embodiment, and then another one that's more different for sort of fantasy purposes or for fun, they want to be another gender, that kind of thing. So if you only get one versus if you can have multiple, that's also going to change what people do with them.

And so you see all kinds of amazing creativity around that kind of embodiment, whether that be people who think they might be trans trying to be the other gender, and maybe that helping them understand themselves. There are support groups that happen for that kind of thing. People who identify with animals and love animals being animals, people who want to be younger or older than their physical world embodiment. I've worked with people in Second Life who are in their eighties, and they sometimes embody as a avatar who's 20 years old. In several cases, I've talked to people about that, where they say, "I'm not trying to hide who I am, but I don't want people to know that about me at first," because they love going to a dance or going to a club and having people talk to them and dance with them and whatever, and then if they ask, "Oh, who are you? How old are you?" they'll say, "I'm 82."

But they'll say, "In my physical world, that same person just would walk past me on the street and not even talk to me or look at me. But if they meet me and they talk to me, this 20-year-old body is actually, in some ways, it's who I am. I used to be this old, and I think this is some way the authentic me." And people just, I had one person say, "It's like you take a zipper and pulled me out, and that's who I am. And I love it, because I'm not immediately dismissed for being 80 years old. People get to know me, and then I tell them." And so there's also that interesting kind of thing that can happen socially, where people can be so quick to judge people based on their race, based on their gender, based on disability, based on age, and to not be immediately judged on that, people... One person in Second Life once told me, and this is in my book, where in Second Life, you get to know people from the inside out, instead of the outside in.

So that kind of thing is really wonderful. And then in some virtual worlds, yes, you can not only have clothing, but you can make and sell clothing, and in many virtual worlds, that can be a real source of income. And one thing that's from, it's not in my Second Life book, in some of my more recent writings on disability, one person I worked with was a fashion designer in the physical world who had to stop because of a disability, because of Parkinson's disease, and sort of just stumbled into Second Life just to check it out, and realized that she could actually do fashion in Second Life. So this is another example where we can't often predict what the use will be.

And she started making money in Second Life, some pretty good money in Second Life, and is now a very well-known fashion designer. But for her, it was also this huge emotional thing of being able to reconnect to a career that she thought she would have to get rid of forever because she could no longer hold a needle or do that kind of stuff, and she was able to bring back a creative side of her life that really meant a lot to her. And on top of that, one thing she really found interesting, having been a professional fashion designer, is that in Second Life, gravity works differently. Avatar bodies work differently, fabric drapes differently, and that was a cool challenge, and is a cool challenge for her. And I know people who are architects who had to quit their jobs, and love building homes in Second Life as well.

But yeah, so the avatar embodiment kind of thing is really interesting. And unfortunately, we still see racism and sexism and ageism happen in these spaces based on avatar looks, but it doesn't have to be that way, and there's also a lot of people pushing back against that and trying to think about new kinds of inclusive communities that we can build through avatar embodiments in these spaces. And so it's going to be a really interesting area moving forward, because in theory, you could have a virtual world that didn't have avatars, that people just sort of looked around and were ghosts, but it basically never happens. And so it is a really interesting area to watch as we move forward, and once again, how do people do different stuff with them based on the degree to which there's flexibility or multiplicity?

Liam: Right. And I think that that whole discussion highlights another point from your book that I thought was so important, which is that when we think about corporations coming into a space like Second Life and their motivations. What they would actually find out is that this mode of creation is the consumption that people are interested in, that creation is the mode of existence in that space, right?

Tom: Yeah. Well, and that idea of user generated content has become huge because YouTube doesn't make the videos, Facebook doesn't make the posts, Twitter doesn't make the tweets, and so a lot of these companies are based on a user generated content model. And in virtual worlds, open ended ones like Minecraft or Decentral and Second Life, that kind of thing are doing that. Ones like Fortnite or World of Warcraft that are more game oriented have less of that. The company is doing more of the content in the game oriented ones, but the more open ended ones actually share a lot with things like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter in that it's based on a user generated model where the company isn't creating most of the content.

The interesting distinction with something like Second Life, and this shows up with the game worlds as well is the current corporate model around the metaverse, the sort of two big paths, the two main ways that they make money is either advertising or subscription based, and a lot of games are more subscription or purchase based. So you buy Zelda: Breath of the Wild for $59 or you buy League of Legends or you buy Red Dead Redemption or whatever. You purchase the game or you pay $10 a month for it or whatever, and Second Life is free but to own land, you pay a monthly fee, so it's also subscription based, and that's one model. And then the other model is the advertising based of the free things like Facebook or Instagram. And what's interesting is that with the subscription model, and they both have whatever, pluses and minuses, but with the subscription model, you don't get the surveillance capitalism kind of thing.

Second Life doesn't care if your identity is different and they aren't tracking everything you do and spend, and the online games aren't doing that in the same way as well. Animal Crossing isn't doing that in the same way because you pay 50 bucks to have Animal Crossing. That's how they make their money. And so those are the two main forms that it is taking and both of those can use the user generated content model. So Facebook does it or Twitter does it and their advertising based, where something like second life does it but they're more subscription based. Online games are more subscription based. It's more of a Netflix model in that sense. And so it's going to be something very interesting and important to watch moving forward is what are the effects of those different commodity models? One subscription, one advertising. And then we can sort of make a grid, how does that then interact with the degree to which a virtual space is using a user generated content model or a company made model?

And there's an in between model that even Second Life uses a lot that a lot of these places use, and this shows up even with things like YouTube nowadays where between the company and the average user is the content creator or the influencer. So you have the idea that because like in Second Life, I mentioned that person who creates clothes and sells them or whatever, we're talking one or 2% of people in Second Life who are doing that kind of thing, and then there's a bunch of people who just hang out and buy the clothes. Think about YouTube. You have people who make a lot of money doing YouTube videos and they aren't employees at the company, but they are paid actually, some of them a lot and then you had the average person who watches it.

So you have a kind of hybrid third model that is showing up in a lot of these spaces where it's not the company making it the stop, like Nintendo for Animal Crossing, you get the rollout of the new content they're making, or the user, the average person making everything like tweets or Facebook posts, where you have this in between kind of semi-professional position of the content creator or influencer who's not an employee of the company, but in many cases, is paid by the company or by the users and often ends up creating most of the core content so the company doesn't have to and the average user doesn't either, and it's the average user that levels up. Maybe they get into it and they become content creators. So it's interesting how that model has also emerged as a third model, and how will these different models shape what happens socially is a really interesting area to be looking out for as we're watching what happens with these things moving forward.

Liam: For sure. Is that one of the things that we can expect in your work on the metaverse?

Tom at his desk in Second Life

Tom: Probably. I'm still figuring out where I will go with that, but all these things I'm mentioning are things that I probably will be looking into. What are the different models out there? What are some unexpected models that are out there? What are some possibilities that we can look at with these things? Because Jaron Lanier, who's very well known sort of coined the term virtual reality, and one of his books talks about the idea of lock in, that we still type HTTP for a website or we still talk about a desktop with folders and that kind of thing, and that once a format gets locked in, it can be influential for years and decades. And so it can be really important to be asking these kinds of questions and doing this kind of research now while the stuff is a little more unstable and emerging, and we can try to steer it and think about how can we do it better, rather than wait until things get locked in and one format or one company wins out.

And then we see now with things like Facebook where it's way more difficult to change it once it is so dominant and locked in, that it's hard to imagine an alternative and it's hard to imagine how it would be implemented, even if we imagine it once something has become so dominant. And so I think it's really important to be having these conversations and thinking about these possibilities while things are still a bit more emerging and unstable and there's the potential to steer the conversations in ways before that lock in happens.

Liam: All right. Well thank you again, Tom, for joining me.

Tom: You're most welcome. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

Julian Zigerli, Zürich Fashion Designer

Fashion designer Julian Zigerli on un-gendering clothes, cultural influence, and adaptation.

In this episode, part of San Francisco Design Week's Digital Edition, Liam speaks with Julian Zigerli, a designer in Zürich, Switzerland creating clothing that allows everyone to decide how what they wear expresses who they are. In the interview, Zigerli describes how the rich culture of Switzerland impacts his work, what it means when someone asks for "straight" clothes, and how his creative practice adapted in a time of pandemic. Content warning: In this episode, the word "queer" is used in a reclaimed manner.

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Liam Spradlin: Listeners will know that the show has been on hiatus for almost a year now because of the current situation in the world. A lot has changed. Our perspective on our work has changed, I think my perspective on the show has changed, but there are a couple of things that I still want to hold on to in terms of how the show is run because I think there's still a lot that we can learn from especially two questions that I want to ask. The first one is who are you and what is your work (laughing) and what is the journey that led you there, both the how and the why of like how you arrived at the stuff that you're doing now?

Julian Zigerli: I'm Julian Zigerli. I'm a designer from Zurich, fashion designer, and I'm doing fashion, menswear, women's wear, lots of accessories. Yeah, it's fashion (laughs). And how did I arrive there? I mean, I was always interested in fashion itself and, uh, I went to Berlin to study at the University of Art, and it was one thing I knew I'm going to be good at when I realized I want to do fashion. Yeah, it was my [inaudible 00:02:03] basically (laughs). And now I'm like 10 years in with my brand, back in Zurich since 10 years already, and, uh, started my brand 10 years ago and, yeah, it's been kind of growing the whole time and like evolving and like finding new ways on how my fashion or like the Julian Zigerli fashion can be adapted.

Liam: I think, from my experience of your work anyway, I, I think it has a very strong aesthetic and I think it has a strong point of view and I'm interested in knowing a little bit more about how you got there. How did you develop the like style of your brand?

Julian: I think it's been there since the beginning basically. I mean, and during my whole studies, I always knew like, at some point, I kind of want to do my own work, and that's what I've been working for, or what I've been, uh, studying for, like to really create your own spectrum or universe of, uh, how you think fashion or like clothing should be. And, uh, from the beginning on, it was always this very playful, uh, approach to design and like very comfortable, but also fun and happy. These are like synonyms, you would say, uh, which you can connect to the work I do.

Julian: And, um, it's been growing, but we always stayed on this path, or this track, and to keep it very aesthetic and very ... storytelling is always a big thing about like every collection has its own story and like its own kind of, uh, visual language, but it's all connected with everything else we do. We don't reinvent the brand every season from scratch. We keep on going.

Liam: How do you come up with that story or how do you conceptualize like what a collection is and what it does?

Julian: There are so many different approaches to it. Like sometimes a title comes into my mind or like an idea or, yeah, something, it doesn't really, (laughs) it doesn't really matter in the end, and then, uh, I start building something. Like I always call it I'm building a box and whatever fits in this box makes sense and, whatever doesn't fit in th box, I need to cancel out or like don't put into this collection. And, uh, yeah, it's always a spontaneous approach, I'd say, to a theme or to a topic and, uh, yeah, once I started with the title of a collection, then the whole thing started with this title and then, another time, I knew I want to work with a artist, we do a lot of creative art collaborations for print designs, so sometimes it's, uh, a artist collaboration I know is going to happen and then the whole thing builds around this. But, in the end, it's always the final collection, actually.

And that's also something which changed. It's been a crazy year, but we already started to change a bit our way of how our industry should work. Uh, we already started that a year ago, basically, like in November, last year, two years ago basically (laughing) and we don't really focus, uh, on collection, seasonal collections anymore. We take it on the go. We're like still processing how this, this works for us. So that's a bit like a new angle, to not think of a complete, full collection, but to think of a theme and put it in different parts.

Liam: So maybe the, um, distortion of our perception of time that I think we collectively experienced in 2020 have informed-

Julian: As I said, we already started of this in November 2019. I had this idea to not finish a whole collection, to just like start working on it and then see how we can evolve it, and then, yeah, corona happened and it basically underlined our new way of working. It was like slowing everything down, make it more easy for us also to work on it, and it basically helped to create this path (laughs).

Liam: The other thing that I'm really interested to get into, because it's one of the things that excites me about doing this podcast in the first place, is understanding the relationship that a creative person has to their work. And I love a metaphor, so (laughing) when, when you say that the style of your brand becomes a universe or (laughs) a space with this cohesive aesthetic, what are the planets or galaxies in that universe for you?

Julian: The whole Milky Way, I feel like, (laughing) also because the Milky Way is such a beautiful, uh, thing to experience when you look at it and also the, the idea of it. So, yeah, it's a ongoing street (laughs).

Liam: Are there also things that you can identify from your life or your experience that really inform your approach to the work?

Julian: I mean, um, really, like my work and my life is quite separate, but it's also, at the same time, I'm living it, so I'm really in it. I'm also wearing it all the time, like I wear my work every day basically, so I think, there, it kind of melds together.

Liam: What does that mean, you're living it?

Julian: I'm also putting my face on the brand a lot, so it's like, my personality, I think it all is kind of part of the aesthetics or the designs I do, so this fun and quirky kind of way of life basically, and also I love different things. I'm, I'm very interested in like outdoorsy stuff, for example, so I'm trying to keep it dynamic.

Liam: So the brand is at least partially expressed by your presence in it.

Julian: I guess. I mean, I don't really see that because I'm doing it (laughs).

Liam: Yeah.

Julian: I'm too close to it, so I guess, for the outside, I am kind of a big part of it, but, also, sometimes it speaks for itself.

Liam: But then I would also ask, or maybe say, that (laughs) the brand could be something that you use to express yourself. Maybe that sounds obvious.

Julian: Could be, actually (laughs). I mean, I'm designing loads of things which I really personally love to wear, so, yeah, I do use it also to express myself, of course.

Liam: I'm interested, especially since I moved here, I think that the experience of being visibly queer in a place like Switzerland is different from New York, where I'm from, I think that's probably true of anywhere in the world, but I'm interested to understand that experience as it relates to this location. Does that make sense?

Julian: I think so (laughing). Yeah, the brand is visibly queer. I'm queer myself, so I don't hide it, I also show it and I like to show it, but I think it has to come natural.

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Julian: Like I don't are play this gay card. It's just part of it. And, uh, being in Switzerland doing this, I guess it takes balls, (laughs) but, on the other hand, it's also, since I don't title it as a gay brand, like it's just clothing you can wear and everyone can decide for themselves what to think of it or how to wear it or when to wear it and where to wear it, if it's Switzerland or New York or wherever, and, uh, I think it's more like a way of expressing. And having this bold language and designs in Switzerland, it takes a moment (laughs) for people to understand what you're doing, but, uh, we've been here now since 10 years and, in the end, actually Switzerland became one of our biggest market of our work and I never really expected this to happen.

Julian: Like, when I started, I was always like, "Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be based in Zurich. I'm going to do it from here using this, uh, not really big, uh, fashion industry we have in Switzerland to really stand out, I guess, from others as well and then never really think about ..." Like I always try to think outside the border, so it was never ... that Switzerland was never our foc- focus. We always try to really work internationally, and that still is the case, but it became important for us to also be in Switzerland.

Liam: And you mentioned this thing of like taking a moment for people to understand their encountering the work or like their understanding of the work and what it means and that it's okay to express yourself through fashion this way. Is that something that you think about?

Julian: Not necessarily, I, I think more in the beginning and now less. Like we know what we're doing (laughs). We don't have to rethink every time. We're like, "Okay, this is going to work. This is not going to work." We kind of know what we're doing and, uh, yeah, that helps a lot, having such long experience.

Liam: It's funny, one of my questions that I had prepared beforehand was whether you wear your own work often (laughing).

Julian: Uh, yeah, um, mostly toe to top (laughing). Working on some shoes at the moment, so.

Liam: Yeah (laughs).

Julian: Yeah. That's also the, the fun part of not focusing too much on collections, seasonal collections, anymore, but more conceptual work. I still want to keep on doing it and, uh, it's actually the most fun you can do like to have really a collection with a theme and, uh, really make it very conceptual. But then also, since we have the shop since ... three years, we have a shop in the Niederdorf in Switzerland, in Zurich, it helps to also create products which are not necessarily connected to any collection, just like think about the product it- itself or the design itself and ... I kind of lost my thread there, but-

Liam: Yeah (laughing).

Julian: ... I think you know where this is going (laughs).

Liam: Yeah, yeah. And I think it comes to my mind that a lot of successful creatives talk about creating work for themselves, (laughs) does that make sense, or creating the work that you want to exist?

Julian: Um, to a certain point. I don't have myself in my mind when I create that much. I think this is like something which comes organically, like is always a big part of it because I also kind of, kind of imagine how this piece, like how does it look when you wear it. So, basically, you know, I know myself the best, (laughs) so I, I guess this is always kind of a part of it, but there's also a lot of pieces which I don't necessarily want to wear or will wear or I just know they're not for me, but we're still doing them. It's not that the collection are always just for me.

Liam: Right. Maybe the work is not specifically for you, but it is created from your perspective.

Julian: Yeah, for sure.

Liam: That makes sense. There's another topic that kind of stems off of this whole conversation, in my mind, which is something that you posted on Instagram a few months ago. In your story, there was as screenshot of a DM that someone had sent you that asked, "When will you make clothes for straight people (laughs)?"

Julian: Oh, yeah, that was a good one (laughs).

Liam: And-

Julian: Very interesting question (laughs).

Liam: ... and I really want to unpack that to the extent that we can (laughing) in a 30-minute interview or whatever (laughing). Um, I've been thinking about this question like ever since I saw it.

Julian: Oh, really?

Liam: It was actually as I came to Switzerland. To start with, I want to know what your initial reaction was and how you perceived that question.

Julian: I mean, you saw the, the reaction I had. I actually really had to post it in the stories. I never really do that. I don't necessarily receive that many weird, funny questions, but that one was just like, okay, what the fuck am I going to answer, answer to this question? Like there was one million ideas, but like none really kind of matched, so I was like, "Okay, let me, let me ask the community (laughs). Let me see what they have to say about this." And, uh, it was also a bit, like a tiny bit, making fun of this very weird question, like what does that even mean, making clothing for straight people? Like what does it mean? Like I really, I still don't really know (laughs).

Liam: Yeah. But I think this ties into what we were talking about before, which is like this, uh, like kind of lapse in understanding. Like I think-

Julian: It's very narrow-minded, um, and that's basically what I try not to do. Like, when you enter my shop, we have sometimes people ask like, "Do you also do menswear?" or "Do you also do women's wear?" And I'm like, "Hey, just have a look." Like we don't separate the pieces in the shop. It's like all is hanging there, no matter women's or men's or gender fluid. It doesn't really matter, like it's just there. It's clothing. And we have men trying on dresses. They don't really care. Like we really try to open up these boundaries and, in the shop, it's really easy to do that, and then, when you receive a question like that, it's like, "Okay (laughs). I don't really know what to answer you."

Liam: Yeah. And I, I think that perspective of like, "We don't necessarily do menswear or women's wear," maybe you just do wear (laughs).

Julian: We, we wear (laughs).

Liam: It feels, it feels-

Julian: We wear and we wear (laughs).

Liam: ... it feels very intuitive, as queer people, to think of it that way, but I ... but, but it seems to me like someone who would ask this question is identifying something again the work that tells them like it is, it is gay or it is queer, but also like it is not for straight people or like, "I do not have access to this creative work," for reasons that were not-

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: ... identified in the question.

Julian: I mean, I didn't ask him, so.

Liam: Yeah (laughs).

Julian: It would have been interesting to reach out to this person. Uh, what I can say, like we honestly, 10 years ago, we started as a menswear brand. Like it was like my decision to focus on menswear, really only do menswear. We had really like a very sporty and sexy and like creative kind of approach to it, and still do and it's still very sexy. Like I love a good boy in my dre-, (laughs) in my clothing. And, uh, at some point, like we had female customers from the beginning on, like it didn't really matter, and then, at some point, we decided to include dresses, like really do women's wear pieces. And, at some point, I was like, "Hey, let's just do whatever we do and we don't really need to divide it in parts."

Liam: Yeah. There's something about like who feels like they can access certain clothes in a way that, that maybe other types of design or art don't experience.

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: So we've discussed how you relate to the work, how you create it and engage with it yourself and think about it, but also how the work engages with the world. How does it fit? What is it doing? What is the impact of the work, I guess?

Julian: I think it has its own little niche. There's not that many brands I would say you can compare it to. Like it's very its own kind of thing. And, uh, I guess the, the strongest language we have is our print designs, so there's always a message when you wear them, like you can tell it's a Zigerli. Like I heard, I heard that, a lot of times, that people who are wearing stuff from me, even if it wasn't without any print, like they're like, "Ah, people recognized it." So it's really its own little universe, (laughs) a little alien walking through the world (laughs).

Liam: Yeah. So there's like recognition. We've established like the work has this aesthetic. It is its own alien walking through the world (laughing) from some other part of the creative universe.

Julian: Uh, you can be part of the clan (laughs).

Liam: Yeah (laughs). Yeah, like you can join this universe.

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: Like that recognition, I think, is also serving a purpose too.

Julian: I mean, that's actually beautifully put because, uh, we really want to make it so people can join and like really share it and love it as well. Like it's very, it's a very kind, kind of, uh, happy feeling we want to do with our clothing.

Liam: Yeah, and I think, going back to this question, because there is an untold amount to unpack there, again, this like moment of needing to perhaps reckon with the existence of like a pink jacket or a dress that a man can wear. There's a kind of confrontation there that I think has a lot of potential.

Julian: Mm-hmm.

Liam: Like maybe ... I don't know if you remember any of the answers that you posted to that question, but I wonder–

Julian: No, I don't (laughing). Need to check the archive (laughs).

Liam: ... I wonder if that person saw those or if there was a moment of reflection-

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: ... that was triggered by that.

Julian: I was thinking about that, like to share I with him, but then I also thought like it's not really ... I don't know, I mean, it's not that nice to post someone's DM or a story. It's not something I would do in general. It was just this one specific question-

Liam: Yeah.

Julian: ... which I picked out. I was like, "Okay, I need to share this with the world."

Liam: Yeah. But I think my instinctive reaction to it is like there's such a big conversation to be had.

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: ... with that person. But, on the other hand, as you said, like you're creating this work intuitively from your perspective, you're creating things that you want to see in the world. That's the work, and it isn't necessarily your work or my work to guide someone on that journey. But it is interesting-

Julian: We could help them, (laughs) I, I guess.

Liam: We could.

Julian: But, I mean, there's ... we also don't create something which needs to be understood by everyone-

Liam: Mm-hmm.

Julian: ... you know, so, uh, fair enough, there's a question like this coming up at some point, I guess (laughs). It's, it's not designs which everyone wants to wear or can wear or understand. Like sometimes ... I hear a lot of comments like, "Ah, what's this pajama (laughing)?" because we do like prints from toe to top and, uh, fair enough, if you want to call it pajama. I love looking comfortable and, uh, wear prints, so (laughs).

Liam: Yeah, I mean, why not? I guess like one theme is like, yeah, you can wear this as pajamas-

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: ... if you want.

Julian: You can, of course.

Liam: You can wear this business suit as pajamas or ... (laughs).

Julian: I actually started some pieces as pajama (laughs).

Liam: Yeah?

Julian: Yeah, because it's like silk and comfortable, so why not? Maybe it's interesting to hear the opposite side, like what's the client's idea when he buys Zigerli or why would he buy something from me? And you are actually a client of mind, so what brings you to my shop?

Liam: I think, uh, I think this is interesting, turning the question around on me-

Julian: Yeah (laughs).

Liam: ... but I think my perspective on what I wear is similar to yours in the sense that like I see it as an expressive surface for me and who I am and what I want to look like and who I want to be every day and I choose what I wear on that basis. And so I think I picked up on the vibe of the designs at your shop are things that are accessible as you want them to be and expressive as you want them to be and unique. It has a unique point of view and perspective and I appreciate that in a design.

I think probably I've become more conscious of that type of expression, especially since coming here to Switzerland, because, as we discussed, there is this moment of perception leading to understanding or this kind of confrontation that causes someone to think like, "Those clothes aren't for straight people," and I kind of indulge in that a little bit (laughing). I think it's kind of interesting, I think.

Julian:Yeah, yeah.

Liam: Reading, uh, a book called Insult by Didier Eribon, he talks a lot about this idea of the relationship between subverting and assimilating to dominant culture and the fact that like those things are always happening at the same time and, when it becomes effective is when you are aware of the proportions of those things, when you're doing it, how much you're doing it, and why you're doing it. And I think that clothes are like a very effortless but high impact way of engaging in that. So that's why I dress the way I do (laughing).

Julian: Also, love the fact that we can talk forever, like there's so many reasons why you would buy Zigerli that it's actually nice. And I love the fact that you say like it's you decide on, uh, what you're going to express with it or like how you're going to wear it and like that's the whole idea. Like you can wear the most craziest piece, but the way you interpret something else in it, you make it your own.

Liam: Yeah, it's open-ended and I think it takes a lot of awareness to come up with that interpretation or that, you know, approach to wearing clothes, as simple as it sounds.

Julian: Yeah, (laughs) that's true. You have to think of it, about it.

Liam: I'm going to get a little more specific-

Julian: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... about the work and talk about maybe a specific collection that stands out to you and then dig into that and get into the details of like-

Julian: Mm-hmm.

Liam: ... where it came from and what it might mean, if anything.

Julian: Um, there's actually maybe like two or three collections I keep thinking about or like ... I mean, I love all my babies which I created, nothing stands out more than something else, but there's one which I like to tell the story about these art collaborations we do like every second or third season at least. We have a artist where we collaborate with. And there was this one collection in 2014, the summer '14 collection, we collaborated with Katharina Grosse, which is like this really big name in the art world. Uh, she lives in Germany. And, there, I literally turned the clothing we created ... uh, uh, I made like a kind of, uh, a canvas (laughs). So we, I basically created a blank canvas on a body and put it in her studio and she painted on it, so that was a very, very beautiful collection of fashion and art and like how, how you can connect it and it's also a very visual connection. Like you could really see how this happened.

Not every artist collaboration works the same way. This was this one specific one. And then there's also, talking about Switzerland again, like where I am now since 10 years, and also one of the reasons, basically, I came back is like this, uh, flora and fauna we have in Switzerland is beautiful and, two years ago, I really wanted to work with Switzerland as an inspiration and I started Carrot Believe It collection, where I used Switzerland and Japan as an inspiration. And I realized how fucking beautiful it is to work with, uh, Switzerland as an inspiration and you could create so many also a bit ironic (laughs) prints with ... like, there, we did all the prints ourselves. Like there was no col- collaboration and, yeah, it was just, it was, it's never-ending.

And, uh, ever since then, I keep thinking about doing it again, another collection like this, because, after finishing the summer collection, it was summer '19, I immediately said like we'll do, again, Switzerland for the next season (laughs) and we did a completely different story. It was the Ring My Bell collection. It was just more, uh, [foreign language 00:25:40] we say in Switzerland, really like countryside, like wood and ghosts, like really mystic kind of vibe. So it was a completely different story, but, again, like I love to have my home country as a inspiration, but really translate it so differently.

Liam: You talk about combining the design sensibilities of Switzerland and like all of the inspirational things that exist here with a place like Japan, and it strikes me that, even within Switzerland, there's such a rich diversity of local cultures to explore as well.

Julian: There is. It's such a tiny country and (laughs) there's a lot. Yeah.

Liam: So we've talked about creating the work, but I think fashion is editorial and I want to talk about how you edit the work as well, like the planets that don't get to stay in the universe or (laughing) things, things that you have to take out of the box. Are there ideas like, for example, have there been prints that you're working on and you see it going it in a different direction and you might either stop working on it or keep it for something else or ...

Julian: I mean, for the 10 years we've been working, there's really not that much which we created which we didn't use. I always call it this is our kind of sustainability, like to not create stuff which we throw out and don't use anymore, but to create something and, if it doesn't really work in this moment, we keep it and reuse it in a different season or in a different project. And, uh, there is one or two prints which I know we've created which were nice and will work and, at the moment, I edited it (laughs) and I took it out and they're, uh, on hold, but they will come back. Everything is always coming back.

Liam: How did you come to the decision to save those for later?

Julian: I mean, we already had so many prints in this collection (laughing). Like that's what I said, like this whole, uh, Switzerland collection very kind of started where we ... like we never had this many prints in one collection. Usually, it's l-, it's like a third of what we did this season and, that season, and, uh, so these prints I'm talking right now, they're like a few seasons later where I realized, okay, we don't have to put all our gunpowder in one gun. We can use different guns for it (laughs).

Liam: Yeah. That speaks, again, to the abundance of inspiration in Switzerland.

Julian: Yeah, (laughs) again.

Liam: It seems right to address what is happening in the world and I'm curious what effect that has had on you as a creator and on your creations?

Julian: As I mentioned earlier, we already followed this new path of creating collections, but not necessarily putting them into the fashion circle season. So this, basically, had the biggest effect that we definitely did this. We're still launching, soon, the third part of the current last winter collection, which we, when we started to work on it, it was still autumn/winter '20 collection, but then, during the whole process, we realized that we need to divide it in different parts, and then now part two is coming and, uh, then we are currently working on the third part of this collection. So we, we stretched the whole thing and it kind of helped us to relax a bit, to not be too stressed about it, because fashion is a very, very stressful business. Like you're basically always running behind. Like to create a whole collection, putting it out, producing it all in one season is really ... it's, it's tough. It's really fast.

It's very a fast business and, uh, this kind of helped us to relax. Like, you know, there were productions were closed. There were ... like not every fabric were, they were able to deliver, so we were like we take it as we go, and everyone kind of understood that maybe some delays will happen and it was okay for most of them and we're just going to keep on this more healthy kind of, (laughs) uh, work way also for the future. Even if this pandemic ever is going to end, we will keep on with this more, uh, (laughs) relaxed way of working.

Liam: Yeah.

Julian: So this was one of the biggest effect it had for us. Also, to rethink products, like what do we need these days, what can we create so the customer will buy it? It's not necessarily only fashion. We did a lot of little accessory things this year, like just a bit more ac- accessible to possess, I say, like you need less money for it (laughs). So this also kind of pushed us into this mo-, in this direction a bit more, which is just helpful for the shop.

Liam: And I'm the proud owner of some Zigerli masks as well.

Julian: (laughs). That was basically our business for 2020 (laughs).

Liam: Yeah–

Julian: And, luckily, we started very early with, uh, with the whole production of it. It took me also a moment to process are we really going to do this, are we really going to make money off of a pandemic and really create masks? But, when we tried it out and we did it the first time and we used up all our archive of fabric, so that was the whole idea, to not produce something new because everything was closed anyways, but to use what we had, leftovers, and then we did it and we did like maybe 10 or 15 designs in the beginning. We took pictures of it always with a matching piece of clothing, like same print. I looked at the pictures and I was like, "Okay, this is actually going to work. This is actually ... we created fashion." So, for me, it was like just another beautiful accessory we created.

Liam: Has it been challenging, on a personal level, to continue working during this?

Julian: Um, we are a very, very small team. My studio is quite spacious, so this was actually kind of a safe place for us (laughs). It was nice to be able to go somewhere and keep on working and ... since everything else was closed or now, again, everything else is basically closed, so there's not that much else you can do. And to have like a very warm environment and really beautiful workplace, it helped. Like it felt good to, to go to work (laughs).

Liam: That's probably something a lot of people are feeling. I don't think I would ever miss an office as much as I do now (laughing)-

Julian: Yeah (laughs).

Liam: ... as, as nice as it is to be able to work from home.

Julian: We never really experienced that. When the first lockdown came in spring, March, was it, the first one or two weeks, we were like, "Okay, what are we going to do?" We stopped everything. Like we didn't carry on working on the collection. We're like, "Okay, we're not going to spend any more money on any collection." The shop is closed. There's not really that much coming back in. Online was good, but not major. Like our shop's very important. So, for two weeks, we were cleaning the studio (laughing) until we came up, okay, let's start with, uh, [inaudible 00:32:38] Early, which was like our pillows and blankets. So we created pillows and blankets, and then the masks came and then, literally, we worked our asses off to satisfy our clients, our customers, so we've been busy the whole 2020, and we never had the issue of like staying home too long (laughing).

Liam: Yeah, I think that's very fortunate.

Julian: Yeah.

Liam: All right. Well, thank you for joining me for this conversation.

Julian: Thank you (laughs). It was a pleasure.

BJ Best, Poet, ArtyBots

Poet BJ Best on teaching computers to do what humans can’t.

In this episode, Liam speaks with BJ Best, a poet who teaches computers to do what humans can’t in the name of art. His network of ArtyBots is part of a vibrant scene of robots creating, sharing, and collaborating with one another on virtual art. In the interview, Best describes the reflective opportunities and editorial impact created by a bot-created body of work numbering in the tens of thousands.

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Liam Spradlin: BJ, welcome to Design Notes.

BJ Best: Thank you very much.

Liam: So to start out with, tell me a little bit about your current work and the journey that led you there.

BJ: Yeah, certainly. My home discipline as I like to call it is poetry specifically, but recently I've been very interested in how computers can media art in a variety of contexts. Growing up, I was always interested in computers and am kind of a self taught programmer. I learned how to program using basic. And I was always interested in the way computers think and of course that's kind of a misnomer, computers themselves don't think, but they can do surprising things that, um, otherwise, humans can't. BJ: And so I always enjoyed dabbling, but it feels like only recently computers have become both accessible enough and also powerful enough where people like me, who don't quite know how to program entirely, are able to use them, um, in a variety of contexts in order to generate content. And so in the past couple years, I've used computers to generate art in a variety of ways. Um, procedurally generated music, I've created procedurally generated video game, I've worked with poetry and artificial intelligence and then, uh, the arty bots project to make computer generated art.

Liam: So, tell me a little bit about arty bots. What is that and how did you get started on that specific project?

BJ: Yeah, so arty bots is a Twitter account itself, but it's also the kind of umbrella term for a family of Twitter bots, all of which create visual art in a variety of ways. They're mostly abstract bots 'cause it's difficult to create representational art through mathematical equations.

Again, I was interested in the idea of how computers can do something that humans can't, and specifically when I talk about humans, I'm mentioning myself (laughs) uh, because I have very little artistic ability in any sort of traditional state. I cannot draw, I cannot paint, I've attempted these things and the results are fairly comical (laughs) as a result. But I love art and I love the possibilities of creating art and specifically I love modern, post-modern art, particularly bright colors abstract art, and that seemed to me like the sort of thing that a computer could do fairly well.

And so I got this idea in my head maybe I want to use a computer to make art. And so after a lot of searching around on the internet, I was able to find people who had ideas about how to do this and I was able to find some sample code as well, which helped make this to be a reality. After that I had to learn, uh, these bots are written in Python, I had to learn Python. I'd never done anything in Python before, and I wound up stealing codes from other people both to start making the art and then the second part, which is to create the image, but then also post it on Twitter in order to make it a complete bot.

And then once I had bots that were posting images, I figured it made sense to have them reply to each other as well with the various algorithms that were programmed within each individual bot. Liam: So you created these bots that are now creating visual art and I think there's an interesting question here, which is are the bots artists? Are you an artist? Is it both? Is it neither?

(laughs) I, I think it's both, although I would prefer to credit the bots maybe more than myself and I think the cool thing about the bots and the thing that might make them artists is that they can do things humans simply can't. The bots treat an image pixel by pixel as something and so most of 'em are 500 by 500 and so you can do the math and it would be very difficult for a human to concentrate on that number of individual squares and have each one be meaningful in some ways. A computer, of course, can run through a grid like that very, very quickly.

So example, for one bot, it's called Arty Abstract and it's one of my favorites and it paints very abstract pictures based on mathematical equations. Um, it uses things like sines a lot and cosines and other limits and logs and all sorts of interesting things to create an equation and for every color on the canvas and in computers, colors are usually defined by three different variables, I always use RGB, red, blue and green. Each one of those has a complicated mathematical equation and so each red value, green value and blue value are calculated by these equations and then each single picture is plotted. To ask a person to do that seems like that'd be remarkably difficult thing.

And so I think they are artists in the sense that they can do something that humans can't and ultimately they're the ones that are creating the pictures. Obviously I... there's a human behind it choosing the code, choosing the equations, but like I said, without the computer, I would be unable to present any sort of image like this and I feel they kind of have a life on their own in terms of the things they're able to create that someone through traditional techniques would not be able to.

Liam: I'm very interested in the definition of a concept like art and the definition of a perhaps more specialized kind of art called design. And so I think it's something that everyone has a different answer for but I want to know, like, does this method of creation or the creators themselves, do these things inform or change your conceptualization or the broader conceptualization of what art is?

BJ: I think it has to in some ways because up until this point in history, with some exceptions, the idea that there could be something that could do calculations and that could present something that looks like art were limited in a variety of ways. And especially as we approach things like artificial intelligence, my thoughts are pretty simple compared to artificial intelligence. It's surprising what AI can create that looks in some ways to either realistic things or perhaps more artistic than just pretty colors in terms of pixels on a screen.

That being said, it does really challenge the idea that is it possible that only humans can make art and what forms of art are acceptable? I know the challenge of claiming an art is created by a Twitter bot is that tweets kind of by their nature are very ephemeral. You see it for a moment, you either like it or you just scroll right by it and then for all intents and purposes it's gone.

Most of these bots, I was doing some brief research, most of these bots have tweeted around 60,000 times, more or less. Uh, the arty bo- arty bots bot itself is, is over 100,000. And each one of those is a picture. And so the question because, well, what do you do with so much art? (laughs) As opposed to should you go into a museum and a museum might have a lot of pieces, for example, but it's no where on the order of 60,000 different things you could conceivably look at.

For me, personally, there is this interesting idea too, that you can take any image created by one of these bots and present it on a wall, on a canvas, and I've done that. Recently I had a show about computer mediated art with a colleague of mine, Joel Matias who's a musician and we both created computer mediated art and one of the things on the walls of the gallery that we created was a conversation of arty bots and so I took 15 canvases created by arty bots and hung them on a wall in a very traditional setting.

And so that kind of further confuses the idea of something that otherwise is ephemeral and to give it to sanction of printing it out, putting it on canvas and hanging it on a wall.

Liam: You made a point about the fact that each of these bots has tweeted out thousands of times and created thousands and thousands of works each and I'm interested besides sampling one conversation, if this huge output somehow forms a larger collection are a cohesive body of work overtime? Are there through lines in these works or do they tell some kind of story or is there an additional meaning that's created through this constant additive process?

BJ: The analogy I think that makes the most sense to me is the idea of a museum or a collection that someone might have and that this is just a very, very, very large (laughs) collection of a variety of pieces and yet they're all done by the same artist, so to speak, and they're done by people in conversation.

Now, honestly that's a great question because I still don't know what to do with the idea of what would you do with 65,000 pieces of art? And that's just one bot and the number of bots is in the teens now and so again, the math quickly multiplies.

I'm not sure because it's challenging to say that the bots have grown or developed because the algorithms that I've devised haven't really changed. Once I think something works, I just let it go and, um, the oldest of these bots is now older than four years old which is actually comparatively ancient in terms of Twitter times and Twitter bot times. And so in some ways I like to think of it as the bots are continuing to do themes and variations of what they've done all along. But I do think it's important to think about, that these bots have had a long lifespan and enough interaction with each other and with other visitors that like to come and see them that there is something more cohesive and more important, that the sum is greater than its parts rather than just one pretty image that one tweeted out once upon a time.

Liam: Talking about this indirect or procedural process of art creation, I'm reminded of something maybe mechanically simpler, but no less sophisticated which is some of Sol LeWitt's work, which the work that a visitor or a gallery goer might see is actually the result of the gallery following instructions for how to paint the gallery walls and I wonder if you also consider the code or the procedure behind these works to be a type of art itself.

BJ: Yes, uh, I was thinking about that as well and I agree with you 'cause I think the similarities are very strong. The code is simply a set of instructions and then I'm asking the computer to carry them out in, again, complex ways or going pixel by pixel down the screen. I do think code can be art. I'm a little hesitant (laughs) to call my own code art though, and it's often because I feel like I'm mucking around and trying to create something almost sometimes to the point where I don't quite understand how it works. And again, as I mentioned, I often steal code that I find online because I don't quite know how to make something work and I'm very grateful to people who post examples online that I think I can take work and tweak and figure it out.

So personally I find my code to be, you know, they call it spaghetti code and I do (laughs) not follow best practices in a lot of ways which I'm sure will haunt me at some point. That being said, I do think there's an art to good coding and I think the people who can do it well, it is an art form because it's, it's working in concert with the machine to make the machine do something, um, incredible and very well. But it is a collaboration. Um, and the most basic example would be a random number generator. Any time you ask a computer to roll a die, you never know what number it's gonna come up with, and in theory you could do that yourself but the numbers a computer can generate are huge and it's so easy for it to do that you need that collaboration and you need the code to make that happen.

Liam: I also want to talk a little bit more about how the bots interact with one another because they are kind of replying to each other and passing these pieces back and forth and doing different things to them, but they also talk to each other as well and seem to have their own little personalities and I'm really interested in what that adds to the whole space.

BJ: Definitely. Each bot is its unique thing and really each bot only does one thing hopefully well, and that's all it can ever do. So for example, Arty Wins is a bot that treats an image as if it were pixels and the pixels were grains of sand and so it simply blows some pixels across the screen and creates these kind of weird wispy structures. Arty Triangle is a bot that looks at an image that it receives and reduces it to a nice ordered set of triangles or other shapes that can be made out of triangles, parallelograms for example.

And so yes, these bots go back and forth and they can send images and every once in awhile it will go from a conversation it's having with one of the other ones and at a moment's notice say, "Okay, I'm done talking to you, I'm not going to go talk to somebody else."

But yeah, because it's a tweet, it's not just the image, there needs to be some text that goes along with it and each bot has a little bit of its own personality or tweets out some information about what it just did. Most of the bots I've created are pretty whimsical in their personalities. They love puns, uh, for (laughs) better or worse about whatever they have to do, so there's a lot of triangle puns for Arty Triangle, for example and abstract puns for Arty Abstract.

But generally they're pretty jovial over all in dealing with each other and I think overall that helps create this idea of whimsy that these bots have that they can generate these fun beautiful little images and hopefully guide the viewer into that kind of space that this is meant to be fun and it's meant to be beautiful and it's meant to be something to brighten up Twitter, which as we all know can otherwise sometimes be a darker (laughs) contentious place.

And that kind of whimsy is something I actually see in a lot of bots that are on Twitter that create art or play with text or do something like that. There's a sense of playfulness, um, that a lot of Twitter bots have and that's something I really enjoy about them because it's fun to play with the computer and it's fun to see what a computer can come up with and also identify how a computer is also not human and there's something inherently funny about watching a computer attempt to do human things and not always succeed in a normal way.

Liam: I wanna talk a little more about the place that the bots occupy on Twitter because arty bots is just one family in a landscape of Twitter bots that has grown enormously and become really large and I'm curious if there's something about Twitter as a conceptual space that helps this scene exist or grow?

BJ: Yes, definitely. I mean, Twitter is, as a company and a platform is pro-bot. Right now, if you sign up for a developer account that gives you access to the APIs to create bots basically, one of the options you can choose is I'm creating this account in order to create a bot. A lot of other social media platforms do not want bots. And so Twitter just definitely has a more open and welcoming attitude. And particularly it's happy if you identify whatever you've created as such. If it's a parody account, they want you to identify that. Um, all my bot accounts are clearly identified as bots and, and not really people sitting there scribbling anything.

And so, Twitter welcomes it. I also think the other aspect of Twitter is its brevity. It encourages people to do small, weird little things in a small space and since Twitter is designed around the idea of a small space, the ability to experiment and do weird little experimental things I think is encouraged just by the fact that it is, is designed to be small.

Um, there are bots that tweet out weird little sentences, um, that they've created through some sort of algorithm. There's several bots that I enjoy that use emoji to create either a landscape, uh, one creates an art gallery, um, or they use Unicode characters. There is one that creates a little desert for example. And so all these small, little things, as little respites around all of the other noise of Twitter, I think work very well on a platform that's designed for small things.

Liam: There's something about the intentionality of creating a bot and even a language that we use to talk about bots that's making me want to separate this idea into as many small layers as possible and to inspect them all, so another layer that came to mind is that you are creating the code that creates this bot and the bot creates the art and then art can have many layers in itself based on the quantity and the nature and all of those kinds of things. But, the bot as an entity is also its own layer. Like we've conceptualized these as discrete entities somehow and I'm interested what you think about that.

BJ: Definitely. And again, it kind of goes to the dialogue that, you know, I've written and really they only cycle through the five puns that they have or anything, but you do kind of wind up anthropomorphizing them a little bit and thinking about them as their own beings. Another bot is called Arty Crush and it crushes the colors of images down to only eight colors and basically what it does is it pegs the red, green and blue, either to zero or 255, 255 being the max. And when you do that for all the permutations you wind up with eight colors.

The joke about that is that it makes it look like a very old school kind of computer image back when computers could only display four colors on their monitors. As a result, it's, that particular bot has a personality where it doesn't believe in anything past basically Windows 3.1. In fact, it hasn't even upgraded to Windows 3.1 yet.

And so, they are like they are entities and again you could program them to say whatever you would like, but even within them, they feel like they have individual personalities and it's difficult, I think, in some ways, to not think of them as people, which is strange and I don't mean people in the typical sense but perhaps as intelligences, even if they're intelligences that only do one very specific task. And now I don't know if we simply have a penchant for that and as people we like to humanize things and perhaps things we might not understand or if it's due to the particular dialogue.

But not just my bots but other bots too often have some sort of text that makes it sound like they are someone in additional to something and sometimes it's just as simple as a bot saying hi, uh, in response or something like, uh, your image is ready or here's what you asked for or something like that. But it implies there's a speaker there that's more than just the program itself.

Liam: Speaking of the things that we've encoded into these bots and also the things that we pick up from them in terms of their humanity or beingness, whether it's there or not, arty crush is perhaps averse to software updates. I'm wondering if bots can make their own editorial statements through the art that they create.

BJ: Yeah, I think there's kind of two layers there. One, and this is true of all bots and AI too is that your own interests and predilections are coded into them. And so for me, I love bright colors and I love abstract things and therefore I've coded bots that can do those things that I can't. You know, I love big, loud things and at some point some of the images they created are garish, frankly. And so, the personality of the creator winds up being in these bots and it will always reveal whatever it's created. There are a couple of bots out there that generate landscapes in a very soft way. Um, soft, uh, neutral colors, very closely related and they draw mountains. It's a very different experience than looking at one of my bots, which is loud and colorful. Those kind of bots are far much more contemplative experience.

On a larger level though, one of the things I like about the bots is simply the profess the value of creating art and constantly creating art. And the nice thing is that these bots, as long as they run, are not subject to any outside commentary, political movements or anything. All they're doing is creating art and it does not matter what's happening in the outside world, it doesn't matter what's politically happening in the US or the world or economically happening. By god, they are (laughs) gonna create art and they will do it on and on and on ad infinitum.

And I think there's something powerful in that idea that we might be able to learn from that which is we always have the ability to create and try to create something beautiful in the face of whatever external pressures we might be up against at the time. And, and so in some ways, I think these bots do have a, a vague sentiment, a vague political sentiment that art is meaningful, art is valuable and it is important to continue creating it regardless of whatever else is going on in the world.

Now, that might be a little heady and coming on a little strong but I do think there's some sort of idea there and I think that is a bit of an editorial commentary about the value of art and particularly in a platform like Twitter, which is a wash with politicians and celebrities that it's important to do other things, like create art.

Liam: That kind of leads into the next question that I have which is about your poetry and also the other work that you've made that's mediated by either code or AI and I'm interested specifically in the AI mediated poetry and how that intersects with the work that you've done that is not mediated by computers and how the meaning of that work is augmented by collaboration with computers.

BJ: Yeah, so what I've done is I've long been interested in how computers can write language and up until very recently, attempts to do that were pretty simple and followed simple templates and you could pretty easily tell what algorithms were being used and they wound up being very repetitive after a while.

With the rise of AI, all of the sudden computers can perform much more fluidly and write language that looks much more human than ever before. In fact, in the past, I tried to write a computer program that would write language based on frequency of letters of it wound up just writing this gibberish, like a Scandinavian language with a lot of vowels and things like that. (laughs) And so not very effective.

But, I discovered an AI library called Torch RNN and what Torch RNN does is it studies language. It knows nothing about language, but it studies a text and treats each character as a point. And so very similar to the arty bots in some ways, rather than looking at pixels, it's looking at individual characters. So that includes letters but it also includes things like spaces and punctuation.

And so I fed my own writing from the past 20 years into Torch RNN and the theory is if it studies it long enough it will start to be able to write words and also phrases, sentences, that look sort of like something that I may have written as my own poetry. And so it takes awhile to train the model so it can study all of this and figure out all the vectors between what letters go together but it was pretty cool. After awhile and after me dialing in the parameters pretty well, it started writing words and it started writing sentences and the sentences usually did not make logical sense, but it knew how to put a the in front of a noun, for example, or sometimes how to put a verb in the right place.

And it was very surprising to watch a computer kind of spit language back out. So what I wound up doing is taking that output, which often had some good things and some just clearly gibberish things and sometimes it would not make up words at all and it would just be letters on a page, and shaping that into a poem and as a result I wound up getting many of these poems published and they're very odd creations in that they look like poems and much of the language is language we're familiar with as in their words and we know what they mean, but the computer has no idea what they mean. It just knows patterns and it throws words together in a very interesting set of combinations. Nouns become verbs and vice versa and it generates this very kind of surreal landscape of language that makes sense on an intuitive level but doesn't always make sense on a literal level.

It's a very collaborative process 'cause I'm editing whatever it generated and in theory the computer took my original words and did something with them but overall I definitely view it as a collaboration between software and myself because it wrote things I would have never thought to write, it created words, it created images I would never have written myself and together we've created this strange dream scape, uh, in the form of poetry.

Liam: Have you ever been surprised by maybe some of the reflective opportunities or ideas that have been presented in these poems?

BJ: Definitely. That's my favorite part about working with these is how the computer program's gonna use language and how I can do that. And again, my favorite examples are simply taking nouns and turning them into verbs or vice versa. One example is sometimes it learned the word sword and I have no idea what poem I used the word sword in, but it wrote the line I'm sworded by your love and I don't exactly know what that means but I love the idea of taking a sword and somehow using it as a verb and applying it to how one might feel about loving somebody else. I'm sworded by your love. And that seems pretty powerful and pretty meaningful even though I can't quite literally articulate it.

Yeah, and I mean there's a hint of violence there but there's also a hint of just being cleaved by someone, that's how much you love them. And you know, we have the, uh, more connotations of sword as perhaps nobility, or that I'm willing to fight for you. There's a lot of things that we can bring to bear on that line (laughs) but yet it's not 100% clear exactly which one might be the right one.

For me, that was the most exciting part of this is using words and using lines that might mean something but that I don't quite know what they mean. You know, through our daily lives and all throughout school we're taught to write something and write clearly and write and have a point and it was very liberating to work with a thing here, a computer, that knew nothing about any of those rules. All it knew was mathematical patterns between letters and it created language that looked real but wasn't. Liam: I'm going to close by talking a little bit about the future of these sorts of creations and what direction this is all going in terms of the surprising nature of the collaborations that we have when creating art with computers, the venues where those collaborations take place and everything in between.

As AI continues to advance, artists will find more and more ways to incorporate it into their work. There's a really cool program called Runway that I believe might still be in beta, I haven't checked recently, but basically Runway is a program intended for artists to use artificial intelligence without having to get into the nitty gritty of managing packages and learning computer languages and that sort of stuff. It's a really incredible program.

Recently, I'm going back to that gallery exhibit that I mentioned, my colleague and I created a work called Torch Zone and it was four piece computer mediated work. It started with one of these poems that I had written through Torch RNN. I fed those poems into a program in Runway. The AI package is called... I don't quite know how to pronounce it, it's ATTNGAN A-T-T-N-G-A-N. But what it does is you feed words in and it attempts to paint a realistic picture based on the words. So if you typed a dog on a beach, it attempts to create a photorealistic picture like that.

Of course the poems don't make much sense on a literal level and therefore when you feed those into such a program it creates just these wonderful dream scapes that look, again, quasi real but clearly are not a realistic situation.

My colleague Joel then took, uh, the image and used it to create music based on an algorithm he created and he also used it to create a 3D printed sculpture. And so when you think of these things just as data, it's pretty interesting to imagine how data can be applied through different media in order to create different forms of art.

Beyond that, artists will find the use in this and I think what I see in most of the bots on Twitter and artists who are interested is that disconnect, that uncanny valley between what could a human do and what does a computer do? Because no matter how close it gets, and it's getting better all the time, artistically it's still almost always possible to find when a computer's made something versus a human. And it's the computer's attempts to try to make something human that for me are the area of artistic interest. Um, it's something humans can't do and it teaches us something about how we are human compared to how we are machines.

Liam: Yeah, I guess anything that a human would do is automatically human, even if we aren't attempting to be human. (laughs)

BJ: Yes, and again, it's the idea that these programs are created by humans but they're harnessing powers that humans don't have and it lives within this very, you know, awkward and someway cyber space of if a human has control over a computer but a computer doesn't understand what it means to be human, where does that leave that communication?

Liam: Yeah, all right, well thank you again BJ.

BJ: Wonderful, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you

Laurie Rosenwald, Making Mistakes on Purpose

Illustrator and author Laurie Rosenwald on how to make mistakes on purpose and avoiding being alone with a blank page.

Liam speaks with illustrator, editorial designer, and author Laurie Rosenwald about how she’s managed to cultivate an aesthetic—and a career—around “making mistakes on purpose.” Learn how chaos and collage can come together to reveal unexpected creative potential, and let Rosenwald help make sure you’re never alone with a blank page.

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Liam Spradlin: Laurie, welcome to Design Notes.

Laurie Rosenwald: Hello.

Liam: I wanna start off the interview the same way that always do, which is by asking, what brought you to your current work and how that kind of creative journey has influenced what you're making now.

Laurie: Well, my current work is my always work and it was really fun because... oh my goodness, what is your name again that I met this morning?

Phil Maniaci: Phil.

Laurie: Phil (laughs), sorry. Anyway, Phil asked me, um, "How long have you been in New York?" And I said since 1955, which is always fun answer to that question. So I've always, you know, I basically been painting and drawing since when most people start, when you're two or three years old. The thing is I never stopped. And I don't really draw much of a distinction between the commercial and the noncommercial or fine art and commercial art even though maybe I should. Uh, for me because I've always done painting, graphic design, illustration since I can remember.

And for me, it's a kind of a big mush and sometimes it's a commission, sometimes I get paid for it, sometimes I don't. And everyday I'm doing visual art of one kind or another, but I went to RISD when I got out. I wasn't really thinking about, oh, this is a career. I just never thought about it. I was always kept doing what I started with, drawing.

Liam: You said that you don't make a distinction between commercial art and fine art and that maybe you should, and I'm really interested in why you say that?

Laurie: Well, I been joking a little bit that, you know, commercial art makes a swell hobby because the fact is the last, uh, couple of years I been concentrating on doing books, which are not necessarily a fabulous way of making lots of money. I've spent a long career doing mostly editorial illustration and graphic design projects that I think what I do is compared to what most people do, much more all over the map and nonspecialize. So like one day, I'll be doing a type of graphic poster, then I'll be doing a portrait of Amy Winehouse, then I'll be doing an animation with David Sedaris, then I will be doing writing or doing a story telling event.

It's always been like that even when I was in school. I was in several departments at RISD and I've continued to do very varied things, but to me they all help each other and they all affect each other. Like, a lot of my paintings are of letter forms. So there's graphic design and painting me. Or I do portraits as an illustrator and I also do portraits as a painter. Or you know, hand lettering or whatever it is sort of feeds the other practice.

Liam: How do you decide which medium is right for the thing you're trying to make?

Laurie: Well, that kind of depends. It's a, sometimes I'll use a really unusual thing like I've spent a lot of time in Sweden and I wanted to have a friend film me while I was doing lettering and then put it on Instagram or something. And I wanted to do things that people could steal and maybe sign their emails with. Like for instance, I did one with ink that says, "You magnificent bastard," which I think is a great phrase. And I did it in ink and it's a little bit Ralph Steadmany if you know Ralph Steadman it's like very spiky and angry looking in a fun way.

And then I was looking for a squeeze bottle, I was in my friends apartment, uh, because I often draw with a squeeze bottle full of paint. And I make a very blobby line with that. Uh, sometimes they use fabric paint and the only thing I could find in their fridge was a bottle of sriracha. So I did all this lettering in sriracha a very angry, but I think funny. Like I did, you ma- you magnificent bastard in sriracha. And then I just wrote the word sriracha (laughs).

Liam: That reminds me, I saw you speak at the type directors club recently and one thing that stood out to me from the beginning of your talk was the example you gave of creating a bird out of paper scraps. And I'm wondering if you could describe that a little bit for the listeners.

Laurie: Yeah, well, I always show images of that particular story when I talk about my, my workshop. I also been teaching a workshop for many years called how to make mistakes on purpose. Because I found that I was, it came from my own insecurity and my own feelings of inadequacy because even though like I said, I been drawing all my life. Sometimes I would get especially as an illustrator a brief that I thought was silly. Like draw the 21st century mom. Like what does that look like?

So I would just start with a blob on a paper and it could be anything. So the blob turn into a detail of her dress or her hair or the background or a cloud or anything, but if I started with a white blank sheet of paper and really trying hard to envision what the art director was asking me to, that didn't help me. What did help me was a formal thing, which is having a blob or a mark of some kind on the paper and building from there. So that I was never alone with a white sheet of paper.

So another good thing about that is that in my opinion, a lot of things look alike because we've all been working with digital media for what? Since the '80s, including me and I'm not against digital anything. I use Photoshop and illustrator and all that stuff every single day. But I think if you only use digital media, it's a drawback because I think that let's say you're making a drawing and I'm making a drawing, if you're doing it in illustrator, you're both using illustrator program, they're gonna look more alike because illustrator wants to do certain kinds of perfect things.

But if we're drawing with shoe polish on a paper towel, they're gonna be more different and I think you need that kind of, uh, clash between the digital, you need to bring something handmade and organic and spontaneous and a surprise into the digital realm for it to be exciting at least for me. That's something I needed to do. So for instance, I was doing a children's book and I had to draw a picture of a canary. So, uh, like everybody on earth, I could go to Google images and get a billion canaries. Nothing against Google images, I also use that every day, like everybody does.

In this case I didn't want to do that. So what I did was I took some ripped black construction paper and ripped it into 10 or 12 pieces and then I took a digital picture of it and then I turned one of them into a canary by coloring it yellow and sticking a beak and some legs and the word canary in 800 point type. And it's a, it's a canary.

I like the power of the wrong thing. So none of those ripped papers looked like canaries, but I forced it and I think that because the virtue of doing it things that way is that it's surprising. So it's fun for me and it's also fun for the viewer because it's not gonna look like if I went to Google images and then looked at a canary picture and then drew it in illustrator. It's just not. It's gonna be different and I like different.

Liam: You mentioned earlier this idea of sitting down to a white page or a blank art board or something and then trying to put what the art director said onto the page with nothing, no blobs, nothing to go on. And I think a lot of people can probably relate to that feeling of like trying to sit down and turn on creativity.

Laurie: Exactly.

Liam: And I'm wondering how you get around that especially in settings where you might be on a deadline or when it's just more difficult.

Laurie: Well, it really has everything to do with the element of surprise and wanting to be surprised myself rather than going from A to B. It's more like finding things rather than starting from nothing and creating something from a void. So like I said, I would make a blob if I'm doing a drawing or even if I'm doing, you know, a poster, I could take for instance in my computer I have a zillion things that I've made by hand in black and white. And that's what we do in the workshop to is basically create chaos.

So I have all these different chaotic images sometimes they're washes or torn paper or different kinds of lines or blobs or squares or patches or whatever, textures. And when I want to make a poster especially when I'm on a deadline. I'm just saying poster, but it could be anything. I could grab one of those washes, usually things are in black and white so I can change the color in Photoshop. And I can make that the sky or I can make that the hair or I can make that whatever so that these things live like having a fantastic like on a cooking show or, you know, you have this pantry, which everything imaginable that goes on forever.

And that's what's in my computer in those files, in those folders are elements that can become anything. So I'm never alone with a blank screen or a blank piece of paper. I make sure I'm not because I don't like it. (laughs).

Liam: You mentioned this element of surprise being something that can help you get started on this and start putting together these ingredients. Have you ever been surprised at the end of a creation?

Laurie: Yeah. With things that I come up with, of course. Sometimes I run into trouble because especially on a formal level, if it's a style or the thing looks different from a lot of the things that I've done before. A creative director, an art director doesn't like it because they were expecting, oh, it will look like they Uncle Sam that you did for the Atlantic or that page you did for the New Yorker, but I think that if you get a good rapport with an art director, they maybe will see that there is even though it wasn't what they were expecting that there's something good in it. And that's, that happens nine out of 10 times, but not every time.

Because a lot of people, you know, they have a picture in their minds eye what they're expecting. And nothing else will make them happy.

Liam: So you work in this really broad range of media with all these different materials and techniques and you mention like the art director who doesn't get what they might have in their mind or expect. So they have some conceptualization of like what your work is even though it encompasses like all of these things. How do you conceptualize it?

Laurie: Well, I think the people that I work best with and really know how to use me as a designer or artist or whatever the hell you want to call it. And I think that there are certain wonderful people that are willing to, uh, take a chance on me that I'll do something exciting because when I start, I don't really do the whole thing where you make a sketch and then you make a, you know, that you know exactly before you even begin what it's going to look like. I'm bored with that myself. And I don't want to spend my days doing that. So every thing I do is kind of an experiment, although, I have to say, uh, I'm very experienced as a draftsman, sounds such a weird word. [inaudible 00:12:27] and um, I've trained these all my life so I know how to draw and I know how to create something from nothing.

So it's really important to me like I said to combine something I draw by hand with something digital and not just be digital because I mean, I've done that. It's like wallpaper magazine used to have like a lot of illustrations, I mean, I actually never worked for them, but I did some things that looked like what I called the wallpaper style, which is drawing an illustrator very clean. And I like the way they look, but you can't tell one illustrator from the other. They all look the same because they're all using the same technique and the same applications.

And that's, I think especially among younger creative directors, their discovering of course, that it's wonderful to have elements that are made by hand and it brings individuality and warmth to whatever project you're doing. So yeah, I guess the most successful projects are where, sort of like a collaboration where you're both sort of discovering something new.

Liam: Something else that stood out to me from your talk at type directors club was at the end during the Q&A when someone was asking you where do you get inspiration or like how do you get inspired and your answer to that was that you have never been inspired (laughs).

Laurie: It's true.

Liam: And that really made me think. So I'm interested in expanding on that and also knowing where does your work come from?

Laurie: Uh-huh. Well, like I said, probably a lot of the people at Google and, you know, people doing creative, they, they just keep drawing and they grow up and they bring their experience, their life experience into their drawings and their work. And it's more like that, that, um, when I say I'm never inspired because it's the word inspiration to me, it's sort of like your, uh, [inaudible 00:14:24] or something. And some muse, the lights on your shoulder and whispers in your ear. I, I just never had that romantic kind of experience of, uh, breath of inspiration like a poem or it's more like I wake up, what am I gonna do today?

And if I have an illustration assignment, I look at that and then I start experimenting and if I don't have any assignment, maybe I'll make a painting or work on a book. I think, you know, work is more fun than fun. I think I would be lost if I didn't at least attempt to do something creative and fun everyday. And sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's painting, sometimes it's an illustration or a piece of graphic design.

Liam: Something that I'm really interested in recently is understanding how the work that we create as creators or artists or designers or whatever, we happen to be relates to the world and one thing that you said I believe in an essay was that your work or your aesthetic tends to fly better in Europe. And I'm curious about that, why you say that and why you think it's the case?

Laurie: Well, I'm from Manhattan, I'm born in Manhattan. I've lived here most of my life. And, um, except for when I went to RISD, mostly here. And, but I've also spent a lot of time in Europe and I always since I was a teenager started turning right. You got to go somewhere, but if you're from Manhattan, where do you go, you know? (laughs) I think the artists that influence me the most were always, you know, Matisse and Picasso don't come from, you know, Kansas. Uh, and also Japanese art and I also had a lot of clients, especially, when they're economy was crazy booming in the 80s and 90s in Japan.

I did department stores, all kinds of things just, really fun big projects in Japan, packaging and stuff for Shiseido. I had a show there, um, so I had my five minutes of fame in Japan back then, but in Europe for some reason, I think probably it's like a mirror reflecting the things that I like, which happen to be a lot of art from Europe. I mean, I kind of hang out at the metropolitan museum and, you know, I get very, if the word is inspire, but I get ideas from the paintings there and you know, artists like Stewart Davis or Charles Sheeler or Arthur Dove or Marsden Hartley or that's the period of art that I like the most is early 20th century painting.

And a lot of them actually were American, come to think of it. But them and Picasso, who's my favorite.

Liam: So do you think that, that it's this kind of really trying not to use the word inspiration, but this

Laurie: Oh go ahead.

Liam: ... but this kind of reflection of the art that you seeing from European artists or have seen in Europe that makes the work more successful. Do you think that it's a kind of aesthetic sensibility that's different between the two places?

Laurie: Well, I think that, you know, Andrew Wyeth is a good example. You know, I think or Grant Wood or somebody like that. In American art, I think in general, people are a bit suspicious still of abstraction or things that are kind of abstract, which I would guess, I would describe my work most of it is kinda abstract or like kinda minimal, but you know, I'm still telling a story. But the abstract tradition in painting anyway is mostly coming from Europe. So if that's what I relate to, then no wonder, you know, I had a lot success in France and Germany and doing a lot of magazine work especially.

In Italy, I worked with Ferrucci back in the day, which was really fun. So yeah, it's just we sort of like the same stuff.

Liam: I think when you talk about abstraction and the desire for something to be as close as possible to your photograph, it's interesting because a lot of your work incorporates these handmade elements that are essentially a composition or a photograph of certain pieces like the paper canary or like cardboard or something like that.

Laurie: Well, I use photography, digital photography, changed everything for me because I would make those, like I was talking about, the elements, you know. Like I'll have a scribbler, I have a texture in a file, I have a folder called textures, okay. So in there I have like paint roller, I have ripped paper, I have, you know, wishy washy wash. It's very practical like the stuff we do in the workshop is super practical. And a lot of people do the workshop that have nothing to do with art and design. And they're the ones that love it the most. Like they, they send me letters afterwards saying that they came up with some great business idea, like you know, I always show the moving Working Girl with Melanie Griffith, which is an 80s movie, which is fun.

But she comes up with a great business idea because she's reading a gossip column just for fun. She's not trying to come up with a business idea, but it's really about the random, bringing in the random because we're also good at our jobs and I think that's a bad thing sometimes that, you know, let's say you're young in your 20s and you get very good at a certain kinds of you know programs and you get so good at that and you can give your clients exactly what they want and deliver every time perfectly.

And then all of a sudden you're 60 and what have you discovered? Nothing. Because you know, to get somewhere new, you have to do things you don't do and you have to surprise yourself. I kinda don't like to say what we do in the workshop, but it really is creating chaos, but don't worry, in a safe way. And then afterwards saying the magic words, oh, what could this be? Rather than going from A to B and problem solving, which is nothing wrong with problem solving, but there should be also room for surprise. So therefore, room for, you know, discovery and innovation, something new because you got to break the pattern, you have to sabotage yourself.

This is what I do. I need to sabotage myself and I discovered that and I help other people do it to make something new and different happen.

Liam: I think what could this be is super interesting and it speaks to the point that I, I think I was trying to get to, which is that using actual tangible materials and not just software veers away from abstraction and then sharply towards it because you understand like what this thing is, but then it's presented to you as something completely different.

Laurie: Right. Like one of the things that are very often, you know, talk about and I'm working on a book also about this work, mistakes and purpose book, is that I once did this and I'll always appreciate Kurt Anderson who has a studio 360 radio show and he's a brilliant writer and he was the MC or something for the AIGA conference national conference a number of years ago where I did the workshop and he liked it. And so he said, why don't you do it on my radio show. And I was thinking, okay, because this is a very, you know, visual thing. But I did end up doing it just for his staff, the people that worked on the show and they didn't air it, but I didn't care.

It was really fun, but right before we did this, the producer called me up and said, so I want to just talk about what's gonna happen next week, da, da, da, da, you know. And then he said, we- well, well what if you're not a designer, what if you're not an artsy person or what's the point of this workshop? And I said, well, suppose you're a radio producer. And he says, I'm listening. So okay, so I say well, part of your job is to maybe talk to Laurie and find out what's gonna happen next week like you're doing right now. So I said you could ask me like how I came up with the idea or where'd I go to school or any number of... where was my studio or anything?

That's problem solving and that's good. And I don't want to get rid of that. I don't, I don't want to go into this baby state of ignorance. No. But for one question, you could bring in the random and I said, okay, I opened a book on my desk. I said, I'll do it now. So the first words happen to be gold bullion of this novel I happen to be reading that was on my desk. So I said, okay, Laurie, uh, do you reckon the big bucks with these workshops or is this hippie thing you do for only art schools? Or you know, I made it be about money, about gold, and maybe that's not a good question, but what's valuable is that it's probably one he wouldn't of asked me.

So when you bring in the random, like flipping open a book at a certain page, you know, I could ask you a question based on, you know, this piece of tape that I found on this table. That is valuable because it gets you somewhere you haven't been before.

Liam: Now I'm thinking about what questions I should ask.

Laurie: Well, sometimes it's as simple as like literally like what's on the table before you. You have a can of soda, you have your phone, I think either of those could create a question.

Liam: Yeah, maybe have you ever tried designing something on a phone?

Laurie: That's a very good question and I'm glad you asked me (laughing). The answer is, not really, but I've used my phone in my work because I'm lazy and I'll see something that I want to photograph and of course you always have a camera with you with an iPhone. So uh, I've used it certainly to, you know, I could take a, a picture of my glasses or whatever and so I've used the phone in that way, but also now I have a iPad Pro and I draw on that sometimes. There's this really great magazine called American Bystander that I been working with and there, I published like a full page, I worked in this particular case with Risa Mickenberg, a friend of mine.

But we did this piece called Amazon Prime Suspect and I did all the illustrations for it on the iPad because I wanted a rather realistic representations of al- it's a shopping list of things that are available on Amazon and all of them are available verbatim. Exactly. So it's a shopping list that tells the story of a murder. So it's this woman, there's like cozy shack rice pudding and a onesie and, you know, cat food. And there's this woman living alone and, and she's lonely. Then some man comes into the picture and at first they have real sexy times so there's like believe it or not, octopus sex chair is, you can get it on Amazon. So I drew the octopus sex chair and then he starts to annoy her so I have like beard restraint, fart dampeners.

And it ends up with a body bag. They have all these things on Amazon so to draw these things, I just went, I did the most opposite of what I u- usually do and I would just draw products. I would trace them in the, the program called Procreate and it worked great because in that particular story, I needed to be very realistic and not abstract and show that these things were really available on Amazon. And that was a lot of fun. So yes, I draw on an iPad, which is sort of like drawing on a phone and you can draw on the phone. I've tried in, in, um, uh, notes or, yeah, but it's a little bit, it's too small. And also drawing freehand, not tracing or anything, but to draw, you can just draw with your finger on the, um, iPad and it's really kind of great. I want to get better at that though.

Liam: Well, the system works. That is... I didn't know that, that question would end up at octopus sex chair. (laughing).

Laurie: Exactly.

Liam: I also want to talk just a little bit about another book you've done, which is called All the Wrong People Have Self-esteem. Could you just tell us a little bit about that?

Laurie: I did this book and it was kind of the opposite of all the touchy feely, self-esteemy things that are out there that seemed a bit disingenuous to me. Like, how can I put this? Like, the reason I called it All the Wrong People Have Self-esteem first of all because I think it's funny and second of all, I think it's true. And thirdly, you could feel bad about so many things. You could think you're fat or you're ugly or you're stupid or you know, all kinds of horrible things. And it's not like I want people to think, I think that the people that don't have these doubts their jerks that nobody likes, you know, it's like all the wrong people think they're all that.

They think they got it all figured out and there's nothing more unattractive than someone who thinks they're, you know, the bees roller skates, whatever. So you know, you don't want to feel bad about not having self-esteem like you should. So it's another thing that you could feel bad about. So that's why I called it that. But it's, it's funny because it's also a very just like me, I guess, it combines, you know, collage, free-hand drawing, computer drawing and writing and a lot of different stories. And people weren't sure, you know, is this a humor book? Is this a graphic novel? Is this really a self-help book just because it has self-esteem in the title?

So I'm trying right now in my career to unconfuse people, I'm not sure that's a word. But like I'm redoing my website, a friend is helping me do this right now and I'm gonna make it a little bit more traditional because the way it is now, even though it looks fun and I like the way it looks, it's Rosenworld, right, rosenworld.com. And they go there and there's a part about the, uh, workshops. And there's a part about the stories. And there's things about the paintings. And then illustr- and it's too much. It's just too much.

Liam: Yeah, and that leads into my final question, which is where do you see your work going in the future?

Laurie: Well, what I'm hoping for is that memoir will be a big hit because I spent many years writing and this is really a collection of all the things that I've written and I've put a lot of time and work into it. Because it's really funny and you know, on the one hand, it, it's with an agent now. Um, and he's a good agent. His name is Paul Bresnick and he has done some very high profile books with some really good writers. But you know, this is not and easy sell because you know, who's gonna read the memoir of somebody's who's not famous, I wouldn't. So it's got to have something else. I think my strength is the funny in the book and it's kind of unusual that at least the illustrated version is also very colorful and fun.

And so I'm putting a lot of maybe eggs in one basket, but I want to do because I love books, I want to do more books, I want to do more workshops in interesting places, in big places, in unexpected places. Um, I want to do the book about the workshop, so those are some of the things I want to do. What will happen, nobody knows. I don't know.

Liam: But that's the exciting part, right? (laughing).

Laurie: Absolutely.

Liam: All right, well thank you again, Laurie.

Laurie: Thank you for inviting me, Liam. This was fun.

Kerry Murphy, Founder — The Fabricant

Kerry Murphy on how his virtual fashion house, The Fabricant, explores ideas of embodiment through clothing that can only exist in virtual space.

Liam speaks with Kerry Murphy, co-founder of digital fashion house The Fabricant, to learn how ones and zeros are spun, woven, and stitched into virtual couture. In designing couture that doesn’t—or can’t—exist in physical space, The Fabricant also explores ideas of embodiment and self-actualization. Murphy pushes these concepts even further, by interacting with his own “virtual twin,” composed from 3D-scans of his body.

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Liam Spradlin: Kerry, welcome to Design Notes.

Kerry Murphy: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Liam: To start out how I always do, I'm interested in what your journey has been like to your current work and how that journey has influenced the kinds of things that you're working on.

Kerry: So, my background is in film and visual effects and I worked in advertising for over a decade, and I felt that advertising industry is a little bit solace and doesn't necessarily have a purpose in most of the work that we do. And I think I was always searching for purpose in my work. And basically, I just happened to make one animation test with clothing, and it was a complete miserable fail. And through that, I established conversation with some fashion designers, who happened to be digital fashion designers, to basically see how I can animate clothing in much better way, only to realize how far fashion industry is from actual digital transformation 'cause I thought that all fashion designers are designing in 3D software these days, but it happened that it's only the start of the digital transformation of fashion industry currently.

And there I just understood that the whole fashion industry is completely unsustainable, very toxic environmentally, and plus also culturally. So I saw that there was a lot of opportunity to change and I actually saw that there's a lot of opportunity to create that type of change through 3D and fashion because basically if you completely democratize the design practices into digital practices you can be basically saving a lot of materials and waste in the process itself. So meeting up with my current co-founder Amber, who's a, let's say a true Visionary when it comes down to creating that digital change in the fashion industry, it gave me a new opportunity to basically start a 3D animation company focusing completely on fashion. So I think that's basically the short story of how I came about going from visual effects to becoming a fashion design company.

Liam: So you talked about using 3D and digital to reduce waste in the process of creating fashion, but I also want to get into what digital couture is.

Kerry: (Laughs) Well, I mean, if you look at the word couture, it only means sewing, then this of course, haute couture which is like this high-end luxury fashion which is only like I think 30 companies in the world can call themselves haute couture companies. So digital couture is basically the exact same, uh, couture on its own but basically we're doing digital sewing. So we don't use any material samples in the design process whatsoever. Our whole design process is in 3D software and digital couture.

Liam: And how is that work eventually consumed?

Kerry: Oh, I mean, the case change his quite a lot with it because it's digital clothing, so essentially it's not something that you wear on your physical body and it's not something that keeps you warm. We believe that all lives are becoming so virtual these lives that at some point people will actually want to start dressing their virtual identities. And what I mean by virtual identities right now that can be your Instagram profile picture, your Facebook profile picture, your LinkedIn profile picture, but in the future we believe that everybody will have a digital twin of themselves that they will actually want to do create in in a certain way that will go with their identity which we believe it's going to be somewhat different from a physical identity.

The way we identify ourselves in our physical world of course, it's much more limited than in a virtual world. The way we speak on social media is different way that we speak in our physical lives, and we believe that digital clothing is just gonna be a big tool and a vessel to create our digital identities and to communicate to our peers, our different communities, our friends, our family, you name it.

Liam: The distinction between our physical embodiments and the virtual identities that we have is really interesting, especially thinking about how that idea is already manifesting where we're using the physical aspects of our embodiment to create that digital twin that the you mentioned. And I think right now from what I understand when someone buys a piece of digital couture they still need help putting it on because it's still being put onto some representation of their physical embodiment. So I'm wondering do you think that that will change in the future, that the tools that we have for creating these will be such that will be doing that ourselves?

Kerry: Absolutely. I think I always use this example from the film industry because I have to go to university for several years to learn all the tools, and cameras, and editing software, and I really was proud of the fact that I knew all of these tools that nobody else really knew around me. And then with the first smartphone now everybody's basically a filmmaker, everybody has a camera in their pocket, and editing tool in their pocket. YouTube is a great distribution tool, you know, you can basically be marketing all your videos. So it's really the age of consent making and the smartphone has democratized that.

And we're on the same path to create that for fashion basically. We want to enable everybody to have a digital avatar of themselves so they got actually wear digital clothing. We want to make clothing for our lives, our identities, and the question then is what is that experience, what is that tool that enables everybody to live in the virtual realm and allows everybody to be a content maker? We want to be co-creators where we actually bring that fashion craftsmanship as it exists today in the physical world, bring it into the digital space and make those tools that allow everybody to think along and create garments with them for them for their virtual use.

Liam: I'm also interested in, again, this idea of, of having a virtual embodiment and trusting it and having that represent you online, because I think that the initial conceit of social media was that this person who's posting is a representation of you authentically. So when that is maybe less the case, or it's more accepted that these embodiments have capabilities that we don't in the physical world, how does that act of creating your virtual self end up interacting with your real self?

Kerry: No, it's a good question. I think the immediate answer would be, let's say an augmented reality of, um, overlaying digital items on top of our physical lives. So if we talk about it from that perspective, that, okay, everybody's going to have AR contact lens, not that it's like my favorite future, but if that is the case, and then everybody could be wearing digital clothing in their physical lives as well. I think what the blurring between the two right now is I would say the smartphone, we already have AR filters on smartphones. The face filters for Instagram is super popular. And I think a lot of the people that we engage with have asked like, "Oh yeah, when are we going to make the body filter for Instagram for clothing?" Of course, there's a lot more complexities when it comes down to the technical execution of that, but we're starting to see it already.

Uh, I think one of our partners Carlings who also did a digital fashion campaign last year, that was immensely popular, they just released a Instagram filter to go together with their physical t-shirt. So basically you go to Instagram and you open up their filter function and you scan the logo on the t-shirt itself, and then the Instagram filter places a graphic on the t-shirt. So that's already layering a digital layer on top of the, of the physical body, but you still need that medium, which right now is the smartphone. So I think a lot of the answers are going to lie there. And when we talk about the fabric and let's say 100 year vision, I think it was Amber who mentioned at first that she was imagining that we all be wearing holograms, that were basically wearing a basic body suits and on top of that, they will be a form of a hologram on top of us. Technologically, right now that's not really possible, but we can't even imagine what we'll look like a hundred years from now. So I can completely imagine that our clothing can be completely digital at some point.

Liam: Focusing on the creation of digital clothing, in past conversations when I've talked to folks who are working on physical garments, we talk about things like how the garments move, how they drape over a body, how they fit and the texture of the material, things like that. I'm interested in what those are in a virtual environment. What are the constraints, if any, or like what kind of parameters are you thinking about?

Kerry: Good question. I mean, for us, the language is the exact same. We talk about drape, fit, stitches, seams, materials. I think that's basically 80% of the conversation, but we talk about it from a technical pipeline perspective. How do we insert the stitches from our 3D fashion software to our professional software? You know, we're, we're trying to create a pipeline where somebody says, "I want to top stitch there," that that stitch gets automated throughout that whole technical pipeline. So I think that's a little bit of a different part of the discussion, but we also say that we take the language of fashion craftsmanship, and we just do the digital craftsmanship side of it.

So basically it's the same type of craftsmanship, just in a different space. The way we construct stuff is completely different. So when I go to fashion universities and I see these kids there basically with their sisters and their paper patterns, cutting patterns out, kind of reminds me of how film industry was before the '90s that, you know, there was an editor cutting a spool of film, you know, pasting it back together only to check how the edit works. That's kind of where fashion is right now. But when you look at the 3D software itself, you basically have two layouts. You know, one, one side of the window is to draft your 2D pattern, and the other side of the window is to draft the 3D volume, where you basically 3D stitch it together to create the 3D volume of the garment itself.

Now, I don't know exactly how much faster that is, but I can tell you that you're not going to be able to put a physical t-shirt together in two minutes, what's possible basically in 3D. So I think that whole ideation process, that whole design process from a creative perspective becomes so much more powerful because basically you can put your ideas down in 3D almost as fast as you can sketch them down on paper. Within a day, you can go through hundreds of different ideas, color ways, uh, details, uh, blocks, silhouettes, something that typically can take weeks, if not months, to put together in the physical world.

Liam: I'm interested also in the new material possibilities afforded by virtual fashion and what it's like to invent a new material and think about how, how it exists on its own and also how it interacts with the environment and maybe with other virtual materials as well.

Kerry: That's probably my favorite part of the whole process itself is to actually create stuff that's not possible in the physical world. And I believe that's where 3D actually provides the most value for fashion, is to actually do stuff that you will never be able to do physically because of gravity, for instance. Uh, w- with materials, you get to play around a lot with it. It does need to be much more technical and a little bit more engineering type minded from a different perspective to actually ideate and be super creative.

And I guess in 3D, the rule is as long as it looks good, it's good. Oh, at least you need to be able to get some type of emotional engagement out of it. You know, it can be super ugly, it can be super beautiful, as long as you're creating something that resonates and that has visual appeal in one way or another. And again, it's the same thing, you know, you get to play around and try hundreds of different things within a day. Unlike fashion, if you're going to talk about material innovation, you know, can be months, if not years before you're coming up with something that's visually appealing to actually put on the clothing itself.

Liam: I also wanna talk about how people are responding to, uh, these, to these products right now, both as they see things like digital installations that are showing off new garments, or when they actually see themselves or a representation of themselves wearing these garments?

Kerry: It is still a very niche that not many people have a virtual representation of themselves yet alone, a photorealistic representation of themselves in 3D. So not many people have gone through that process of actually getting an avatar of themselves and putting digital clothing on themselves. But this is something that I already did in 2017, as a proof of concept for myself to see how the process goes from technical perspective, only to find out that there was a real, let's say, psychological aspect to it as well. First of all, having to do the body scanning half naked and knowing that I was going to put those results out into the web was kind of scary and yeah, kind of hit my own insecurities in a lot of different ways.

But then the learning that came through, it was actually a lot about body positivity. I started seeing myself in a 360 view and I started understanding how my body works. And then when a digital fashion designer was tailoring digital clothing on my body, and she put clothing on to my body that I wouldn't wear necessarily my physical life, my first reaction was like, "No, I would never wear that." But my second reaction was like, "But hey, what if? How would I feel?" So all of a sudden I started becoming much more open to things that I was not necessarily open for before. And I was kind of able to start breaking those, let's say, stereotypical barriers that I had set for myself, uh, throughout my life, just by being able to observe myself from a third person perspective in the 3D space, doing dance moves that I can't do in my real life, wearing clothing that I would never, ever actually want to wear in my real life to actually start thinking of like, "Hey, what if?"

So, I actually started taking dance lessons to, you know, try different things out, to express myself differently from a creative perspective. And I can just basically, you know, matrix style, almost just upload different dance moves on my body and really just look at myself doing crazy stuff that I can't do in my physical life in third person perspective. It really... There is something like super strong from a psychological perspective that's very hard to put into words. It's just something that people will need to experience for themselves. And I believe that in the future, we're definitely moving towards that space where a lot of other people will start seeing themselves in third person perspective through these avatars. Eventually, I think everybody will have that one-to-one translation of themselves in virtual life, and beyond that they will actually want to start curating their virtual avatars in ways that don't look like themselves, but something that they can still emotionally connect to, something that resonates with their own identity.

Liam: Right. As you were saying that I was thinking a lot about a book by Tom Boellstorff who did an ethnography of second life. And I think earlier when I asked about the interaction between our virtual avatars of ourselves and our physical presence, I was thinking a lot about how other people will experience that. But it strikes me that as Boellstorff says in his book, a lot of the things about the act of creation and second life and about the act of creation of your avatar specifically is about self-actualization, and maybe this is the same thing. The outcomes that you're getting from it are not so much about how they impact your physical embodiment with regard to other people, but how you are able to perceive yourself and understand yourself.

Kerry: It's so powerful to be able to basically just put yourself into a safe space and observe yourself from a distance to kind of see what is it that you do. It's, it's, it's almost just another layer to when you first hear your own voice, or when you first see yourself on video, or when you first see a picture of yourself, this is just like another elevated format of that.

Liam: There is an interesting idea that I came across when I was researching fabricants work, and that was that data can be used as a raw material for creativity or creative work. What's meant by that?

Kerry: Well, just like cotton is a raw material that basically that's where it starts for us. Data is our raw material because all of our work happens in the PC. So we could just call that all of our work starts with ones and zeros, and it also ends up in ones and zeros, but in just a different format. And it goes through that whole process from going from raw ones and zeros to processed ones and zeros, I don't know exactly how to word it, but, uh, in the end, there is a visual output that in its essence is still ones and zeros.

Liam: So assuming that virtual couture and its new capabilities, which are personalization, collaboration, all of the sorts of things about this new virtual embodiment that we've talked about, and also including the possible future where we're wearing holograms and body suits that generate some sort of visual output for clothing, in the meantime, what do you think the impact is going to be on the world of physical fashion and systems by which it operates right now?

Kerry: I think there's gonna be a lot of change coming, and I think it's going to be very disruptive in a lot of ways. I think we're going to move more towards local manufacturing because basically we won't need that overstock anymore. We won't need to produce in high quantity because we're moving towards a production on demand business model where actually all the clothing can be 3D renders until the purchasing point. So once the consumer actually buys the clothing via e-commerce or online store, then that gets manufactured. But I also believe that that whole manufacturing process is going towards atomization, where robots will be making our garments. So that disruption, I think will be, let's say fairly destructive for a lot of countries.

And I hope that there will be companies and organizations who can make that transition as friendly as possible for the people that actually rely on that income on a daily base, because most of our garments are still handmade. It's still manual labor. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest things that some people in our network are asking us, what are we doing about that aspect? And honestly, I don't really know, you know, we're barely surviving as a company to begin with. So that will definitely have to be something that from an ethical perspective, we really need to take a stance on and to be aware of the type of change that can come through virtualization and hope that we can really help support that transformation when it comes down to the places that are very much relying on that physical production at the moment.

Liam: Right. Well, thank you again for joining me, Kerry.

Kerry: Cool. Thank you so much for having me.

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.

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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.

Material Design Awards, 2019

How four teams harnessed Material’s components and code to craft award-winning experiences

In this episode, Liam sits down with the winners of the 2019 Material Design Awards — Scripts, Trip.com, Reflectly, and Ruff — to discuss how they each adopted and extended Material to build expressive, inspirational experiences.

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Scripts

Liam: All right, Maja, Thomas, welcome to design notes. 

Thomas: Thank you so much. 

Maja: Thank you.

Liam: So I wanna start off by getting the history of Scripts both as a product and it's designed direction. 

Thomas: Yeah. So scripts is an app that anyone can use who wants to learn to read and write in a new language, in a new alphabet or new character-based writing system. Scripts is our second app. So with Scripts, we're sort of like expanding our learning platform and now we have an app that is completely focused on teaching how to read and write. I think the main thing with Scripts is that we're trying to make it very interactive and fun to learn and very effortless. 

Liam: How would you define Scripts' identity and how does that come through in the app? 

Thomas: Everything in Scripts is trying to make it easy to form a habit of learning. So it is by a couple of different things. One, it's we're trying to keep the learning, the daily learning sessions, uh, short. Um, so you practice for five minutes every day, and usually even if you have a very packed schedule, uh, you can usually find five minutes to practice every day. 

Also, these sessions are quite fun and interactive, so you're drawing the characters and it's a pretty enjoyable experience. Finally, the look and feel of the app is quite colorful, uh, and vibrant and I think that just brings a pretty positive experience to the whole thing. 

Liam: So, Scripts won the award for experience. And I'd like to know a little bit more about how Scripts has created this unique experience with writing characters and learning new writing systems. 

Thomas: The way we teach character, uh, drawing in Scripts is, is literally by drawing on the screen. So you'll be using your finger and following some of these [stem 00:02:35] cells in the app. And in the beginning it's going to be quite easy. So you'll be getting a lot of guidance on like how to draw each character. But as you go along, some of these sort of guys are going to start going away and it's going to be harder and harder. 

I know this is really meant to sort of like build up your muscle memory in drawing these characters. Also, some of the characters that we are teaching in the Scripts, uh, each character has a specific meaning and when that is the case, we actually have sort of a visual representation for that character. So, um, we show a faint image of what the character means underneath the character. 

For example, what would be the, uh, the character that means tree or wood in Chinese, when you're drawing it you will be seeing like a faint image of a tree underneath the character. And this really sort of like reinforces your understanding of the character as you're drawing it as well as your recognize Busch shapes that you're drawing. 

Maja: Yeah. 'Cause you know the character actually is shaped similarly what it means. So it's just dream versus that.

Liam: Something that stands out to me from a visual design perspective is the system of color and gradients in the app. And I'm interested in learning more about how you think about that and what the system is like. 

Thomas: The colors in the app serves two main purposes. One, I think it changes your mindset from it being like a a chore or like a productivity task to being quite joyful and colorful. So it brings us in a game like a experience to it. 

And then we also map colors to different stages in your learning. So, depending on the difficulty level of the character that you're drawing, we will have a specific color for that type of game interaction. 

Maja: From a brand perspective, I think it's also a very easy way to like when you have the app open, you know it's the Script app, you have open, 'cause every screen we'll have a very unique way of looking at these colors, these gradients. So it's just um, from a brand point of view it's really to reinforce even your image of a script. 

Liam: I'm also interested in the connection between learning to write characters that have specific stroke orders and doing that onscreen, using your fingertips and then carrying that knowledge over to offscreen where you would actually be writing it with writing implements.

Thomas: In certain language, it's like the, the order of the strokes is paramount. So when that is the case, we actually show you like a number, and a dotted line and it's a sequence of drawing the, the character. So like the lines in the character and by doing this and like over and over and over again, you're building up your muscle memory. Not only like the shape of the character but also like the sequence of the strokes and that comes across when you're done moving from the screen over to like a physical media.

Maja: We realized that everyone uses their phones or their laptops to write these days like [inaudible 00:05:33] I think is still a thing, but most of the time we use our devices and swiping is just such a, an everyday interaction these days that I think is just a very nice connection that we teach something in such a digital way that you can later take and use even in an offline setting. 

I just think it's a very nice feedback we had from actually someone in housing the team that they have, uh, these graph here, and they said that for them being able to write on a screen, they're actually like learning the character is on a bigger scale as well. Like if you would just write it on paper, it makes it so much easier to learn it than if they had to, uh, write it on a paper with a pencil. 

Liam: So even if you carry that knowledge over to typing on a laptop, having that kind of intimate familiarity with how the character is structured is really helpful. 

Maja: I, I think so. 

Liam: Do you think that there are other unique challenges to learning a new writing system that are uniquely addressed by technology or by touch screens? 

Thomas: Yeah, I think technology can make something that is quite monotonous and make it a more engaging experience, a bit more vibrant and interactive. So I think that's a pretty big thing is, is moving us from like being quite a chore to pretty joyful experience. I think also the way I see it is like your phone is probably the thing that a lot of people ... it would be the least likely thing to forget when you're walking out the door. 

So, I think that combined with short, fun learning experiences makes it a pretty, uh, likely chance that you will form this habit of learning using technology.

Maja: And you don't need any other tools. If you have your phone, you're set. 

Liam: I'm interested in some of the smaller ingredients that go into building an engaging experience in terms of things like haptic feedback or animations. How do you see those contributing to reinforcing learning? 

Thomas: We use both, uh, haptic feedback and animation to bring context to the drawing. So for example, when we first present the characters here in the app, we, uh ... just an animation of the character being drawn in front of you. And I think that's the like prime to you on like, "Okay, so now I'll be drawing this myself." And also gives you like a, a rudimentary understanding of like how it's being drawn, and then when you actually draw with yourself, we have haptic feedback at the beginning of the stroke and also at the end of a stroke. And I think that just gives you a better sense of what's going on with a system and how it's reacting to your finger when you're drawing. 

We also have haptic feedback in animations when you make a mistake in a drawing, in a sort of like shaking his head and uh, you know, giving as if, if, you know what's going on and then you can correct. 

Liam: Something else that I noticed when I was trying out the app was that as I went through actually drawing characters, the app made me feel like I was doing a really good job because it took the stroke that I drew and kind of smoothed it out-

Thomas: Hmm.

Liam: ... and made it into the right shape. So I'm really interested in little small touches like that that kind of make the user feel like they're doing really well. 

Thomas: Yeah, a lot of it is probably like building up your confidence so we're not trying to drop you in the deep end right away. Uh, it's sort of like a gradual progression of ramping up the difficulty and I think that can just like give you a little confidence boost at the beginning of drawing.

Maja: Yeah. Which is actually my favorite thing about the app is this, that at first you already look like a pro doing it. So even people who think like, Oh, I would never be able to learn decent that alphabet because I just don't have the talent to draw like that even." I think it's a very encouraging way to get started by seeing that, "Oh my God, I'm doing well." And then later on as you are given more freedom, then you can actually see that you did learn how to write these characters. 

Liam: Another interesting point is that as a person whose native language is written in a Latin script, I feel like often when learning new languages that also use a lot in script writing is not necessarily something that comes to the front of my mind. So I'm interested in how you think about the relationship of learning a language and learning to write. 

Thomas: Yeah, I think basically both, let's say like learning to bright and uh, learning, let's say like vocabulary, which we also teach with our other app. Both of these are core fundamental building blocks of language learning. And I think basically no single app or no single experience will get you all of the way there with uh, learning a language. 

But I think having this focused experiences and building up these skills like yeah, independently in many different ways can really help you get there. 

Liam: Something that I like to ask everyone is about the future. So I'm interested in the areas that you see Scripts design moving into in the future as technology evolves and all of that. 

Thomas: Something that we did very recently was to release a ASL in the app, which is moving us in a, in a slightly new direction. Uh, so is LST American sign language for the deaf community and where that we actually worked with an illustration artist called Yiqiao Wang from Gallaudet University and she's deaf herself. 

And the way she had drew the illustrations had just all of the depth in the knowledge of the details that I think only someone who is likely deeply familiar with the nuances of it would be able to do. I think taking it in this direction and, uh, working closely with other collaborators is probably something we want to keep doing. 

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

Thomas: Cool. Thank you very much.

Maja: Thank you.

---

Trip.com

Liam: Welcome to Design Notes. Why don't we start off, uh, with the introductions. So, what's your name and what do you do?

Momo: My name is Jiamin Wu, you can call me Momo. I'm the director for trip.com.

Hazel: Uh, my name is Hong Cheng [phonetic 00:00:22], you can call me Hazel. I'm the head of marketing design.

Liam: All right, so to start out with, I want to get a little bit of background on the history of trip.com and its design approach.

Hazel: Well, at first, hm, we aimed to create a tool which provides a convenient travel booking service, but we are now trying to, uh, become user's travel mate, accompany our users during the whole travel process.

And from the design aspect, at first we simply used the blue and the orange, which make up our logo, but from September 2018th, we started to build up a brand new branding system of our own, which contains cars, phones, uh, electricians and so on.

And then, following the release of our new brand identity, we also developed a new branding, uh, design concept of: your travel mate, always by your side. And from this year, February, we started to apply this new design system to the UI of the new version of our mobile app, making use of all the elements from the branding system for the first time.

This was a major update for us, and, uh, we made a comprehensive change to six aspects: the structure, the colors, the shapes, uh, the icons, the materials and th- the shadows.

Liam: And so, I'd like to know a little bit about what role material plays in this new approach.

Momo: Well, material design gives us a desired direction to begin with, and from there we can proceed with the design thinking, get inspired during the process. For example, since we have a main design concept of being a user's travel mate, and we also draw inspiration from the layout section, we designed our app's lay out structure more clearly to help users locate the information they want much easier, and, uh, to let them know we aren't the app. They are.

We also pay close attention to the material design feedback section. Since it placed, the important role of guiding users through the next step, uh, explaining the situation. That's why we designed so many different ways to express feedback in the app. Not just a button, but a set of illustrations and animations to display when there is no such result.

And also, a series of transitions between the pages. These pages help to show the users the relations, shape between the information, and, uh, show them where they came from, and, uh, and where they should go. And go next.

Liam: Trip.com won the award for universality this year. Uh, and I'd like to hear a little bit about how trip.com thinks about designing inclusively.

Momo: As a global travel plan from covering 23 countries and the regions in 19 languages, trip.com brings a high quality, unified and intelligent experience to its users around the world. 

Following on from our brand renew project, we have continued to improve our brand design to be more concise in the own trade. We also, uh, customize th- the design in terms of font, font size, light height, [inaudible 00:04:43], and other minor aspects, in different language, to suit different reading habits around the world, and then to insure our brand is consistently present.

To be consistent with our brand image as a global online travel agency, we also created a group of highly representative illustrated characters from around the world. They come from different countries and they speak different languages, but they all help bring to life trip.com's brand starring. 

Liam: How does trip.com think about accessibility? 

Momo: In terms of accessibility, besides what I mentioned before, that we took, uh, the font into account. We also paid close attention to color contrast. To be specific, all of our color combinations are now including test buttons, illustrations, meet to the international standards, in order to make sure the text and the background colors have sufficient contrast. 

And furthermore, when considering the people who are visually disabled, like color blindness and the color weakness, the use of color alone is not enough. So it's necessary to combine color with other methods. 

For example, on our booking detail page, we combined color with illustration and test explanation to distinguish virus order status. 

Liam: I'm interested in how trip.com manages to create an information architecture that helps people through that process. 

Momo: Well, I believe that many of us get frustrated by a complex booking, so it is important to- to simplify the whole process to users with a clean information structure. To improve the experience, we guide users to finish the process step-by-step, with the help of smooth, uh, transition animation. Besides that, if users from different countries don't have to change their habits when booking a product, the process will also become much smoother. Take the calendar design as example. Our China and Japan size, both Saturday and Sunday are highlighted. Why on the South Korea side only Saturday is highlighted? And as for the Russia side, that has its own unique design. 

Furthermore, efficiency is also important, you know, for success, for information infrastructure. Uh, we will say that although they are diversified products in our app, the actions and designs for each one are consistent. For example, our search page allows users to search for all our different products on a single page, create a unified feelings. 

Liam: Following on from that, I'm also interested in where you see trip.com's design going in the future. 

Momo: Well, in the near future, according to the guide of taxing, we will introduce trip.com dark version, which fits our branding system. So, we can look forward to that. And in the long-term, on the one hand, we will adhere to the concept of being a travel mate when designing, and, uh, try to provide users with a closed loop design before, during and after traveling. 

On the other hand, we are in the [inaudible 00:08:30] to be a group with strong responsibility, and we hope our designer can deliver the concept of traveling responsibility to make, you know, all our users more responsible travelers. 

Liam: Well, thank you again both of you for joining me. 

Hazel: Thank you. 

Momo: Thank you.

---

Reflectly

Liam: Jacob, welcome to Design Notes.

Jacob Kristensen: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Liam: So, to get started I just want to get a little bit of history on Reflectly, both as a product and it's design direction. 

Jacob: Reflectly actually started back in the beginning of 2017. We were a small company doing a lot of consulting work, and we had a hard time tracking our, I guess you could say, mood, because internally in the company we had, you know, some battles with consulting work. And, essentially we were feeling a bit down, a bit under the weather sometimes because, you know, the work was kind of a big load. So, we actually built this tool to kind of help us track, essentially, kind of our small wins and losses throughout this period. And quite quickly found out this was actually a problem for a lot of people not only in regards to consulting work but just in regards to like general problems they had in their lives, and kind of tracking their mood and seeing how they developed over time. 

So, we actually turned to the consumer-faced market with this product and looked at, essentially, what problem are we solving in the world that is at the center of this problem for people who have in their everyday lives? Essentially we were looking at going towards the Instagram generation, because we were just seeing a lot of people resonating with this project and the value proposition that we were putting out, especially in regards to having this safe space where they could essentially just vent. 

Essentially, you're seeing the world through the Instagram keyhole with the nice filters and everything looks great. Your friends are always on vacation, and you have this ideal that you strive towards obtaining but it's always unobtainable, and you always got to get more problems in your personal life.

Liam: Yeah, nobody's taking pictures of the bad stuff.

Jacob: No, everyone knows their own bad stuff but you don't like know your friend's bad stuff. We see a lot of people who take upon themselves to tackle these internal problems, and because it's Instagram, the generation, and because they're actually looking at, "I have this façade I have to keep up," a lot of people have a hard time even telling their best friends, or their family, the truth of what they're going through. And that's why we ... We see a lot of people who come towards a product like this, because it's a little personification of a, essentially a little robot that you're talking with, and you're just able to very freely, and very honestly, put in all your thoughts and all your feelings, and that's the barebone essential of kind of the core of what journaling actually is. It's off-loading all these feelings and knowing that they're stored somewhere.

Liam: So, this idea of forming a relationship with this little robot and being able to tell it all of the things you're going through is very central to the product. I want to know how you approached designing an experience around that that kind of reinforces that feeling.

Jacob: So, essentially, the first screen you're greeted by, actually at any point in time when you open Reflectly, is like a hello screen where Reflectly, as you would with a new person you meet, introduces itself. And then you go through a flow of getting to knowing each other. Essentially, Reflectly's asking you, you know, the first screen after you start onboarding the App is, you know, what do your friends call you, to kind of get a personal level of interaction, and without pulling out too much information from the user, because we essentially just need to know what they like to be called.

From there it kind of funnels down into a deeper relationship, so over time you build this level of trust with the App, which is kind of propagated through these flows that you go through within the App. So, you go through flows of questions, where you every day come through a series of different questions that you can choose to answer. But instead of actually going in and just giving people a blank page, which is actually where journaling fails, because a lot of people have a very hard time articulating what they're thinking, this rambling head just full of thoughts and putting it into words. That's actually a good gift to have, but very few people have that gift and ability to just like have a blank piece of paper and just like write. 

So, that's actually why we break it down to microinteractions where Reflectly will ask you a question and then instead of you writing something down you interact with a given piece of UI. For example, selecting an icon that represents how you feel, or you can use a little slider to kind of define your mood. It's all these small microinteractions which are designed to be very delightful, actually help build that relationship with the robot. So, the trust quite quickly is apparent for people and they quite quickly build that relationship themselves.

Liam: I'm interested in what role Material Design has played in inspiring the visual aspects of the App.

Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, very early in my career I was kind of a quick adopter of Material Design. I love the idea of having a unified system for all your interfaces. And, this was back in 2014, '15 that popped out. And, on the flip side of that I also quite quickly recognized that it's hard to get, at least at that point in time, a unique feel for your App, or a unique look for your App, like very, very brand-specific look, because it was very much the same all across the board.

But, the very core principles of Material Design, you're having a piece of paper, and having elevation and, you know, giving it physical properties that they can't bump into each other and just like things can't merge through each other, the very core principles, I think, have stuck with me for a very long time, and still do today. So, a lot of that is rooted in what you see today in Reflectly, that you have a "material" that kind of morphs and animates into different shapes and sizes but also you have, you have a very physical restraint in the App that things can't merge through each other. They can't bump into each other. You have different levels of elevation. You have animations that drive the App. So, a lot of the things that, I think, were some of the core principles in Material Design I've kind of taken with me throughout the time and helped guide the way of how we designed Reflectly.

Liam: I also know that Reflectly, it's UI is built using Flutter.

Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And I'm interested in if you think that that has given you like additional design affordances compared to other options, or like what role that's played.

Jacob: Yeah, Flutter was great for us. Previously we were using another cross platform framework which just wasn't really living up to the standards we had, and hoped for, to actually have a cross platform framework that just worked. That being said, we were, of course, looking at a lot of different options, even just writing it natively, just like in pure IOS and pure Android. But, Flutter we were quite early in the Flutter wagon, and we were in very late closed alpha when that popped out. And, it was great for us because we were actually able to see the performance level across the board, and we were able to do a lot of the complex UI that we had designed and hoped to be able to implement, like very easily. We also got quite a lot out of the box at some points in time. 

So, for example a key transition in the App is where the user clicks one of the cards in their journal and it kind of morphs into a new page and you have this very nice transition where you feel that some elements are carried over. For example, the key [real 00:07:22] image is carried over, and that is natively done in Flutter. So, they have a hero widget for that and it kind of makes things fly across screens and you get these lovely transitions, and it really helped the user know where they were coming from and going to. So, that is kind of all the way through being a lot of basic ideas of Flutter that we can implement or re-implement ourselves, but always on the backbone of the platform.

Liam: Reflectly won the award for innovation this year. So, I'd like to hear about specific things, or specific ideas, that come through in the App that make it innovative.

Jacob: I think a lot of the things that we do in Reflectly, again going down the path of keeping it, capturing a complex idea like an emotion of a human in a simple way very difficult, and you have to have a balance of keeping it understandable for the user so it doesn't get too complex, but also allowing them to have enough room to actually capture the given thing that they want to capture. For example, being it emotion in combination with different activities, in combination with random thoughts. Getting that boiled down and being able to interact with that in an easy intuitive way I think is an innovative approach we've taken. 

Another thing is we also use quite a lot of animations in the App, so we actually go in and use animations to drive affordance at a lot of places so you could, for example, see the main journaling page some things animate in, in like a staggered way so you kind of get this natural flow, but also things animate in a way that the main cards in your journal actually animate in from the side, staggered. So, you can quickly understand the forms of these cards of this block of widgets is that they slide left-to-right instead of going horizontal in the scroll. As you can quite quickly understand across a lot of the UI of the App that the animation actually helps the user know what the affordance is of the object and how they can actually interact with it.

Liam: So, with things like your systematic approach to motion and communicating things to the user that way, is that something that you've iterated on over time or what does that look like?

Jacob: The bareboned ideas of an MVP when you launch that is, you know, launch quick. So, back then it was very rugged, very bareboned, and over time we've really iterated on the idea of how we can implement more both delightful animations like the user feels playful when they interact with the App because they love the small microinteractions. But, also because the animations help us really dive deep into how the user should approach a different object. Also, if you look at a, let's say, again, the journal listing page, like the big journal page that we have, back when we started it was just, you know, everything loaded instantly. It isn't the best experience. You kind of just get everything thrown in your face, and the human mind actually naturally reads left to right and top to bottom, so having things stagger in in that order gives a very peaceful and natural way of looking at a UI and kind of getting introduced to it every time. So, that actually happens in a lot of places in the App where we kind of stagger things in for the user instead of it just plopping in their face.

Liam: Finally, where do you see Reflectly's design going in the future, like what's the next iteration on top of this?

Jacob: Yeah, so actually now we're in the process of redesigning a lot of the App. We call it version 3.0. So, we've taken essentially what we've learned throughout the last 24 months of being in the market and really diving deep with our users and hearing what they want in a product, but also seeing how they're using the product in a certain way that might not be as what we intended originally. Some, of course, very positive that they're using it in a different way than we intended but, of course, on the backbone of the platform that we've built. But, on the flip side also some things that aren't quite clear for users. So, we're actually going to be breaking a lot of the interaction down even further, kind of into what we, again, call microinteractions. So, instead of the user having going through these long defined flows that you would, you can draw the analogy over to going to the therapist, having a 10-minute therapy session every day. 

And, in the long run that might for some users get a bit hard to deal with, instead of going in and quickly logging down some thoughts or quickly putting in some emotions. So, that is, I think, what we will be looking into further going forward. I also think delighting users, giving them playful interactions. We just launched a new filter page which kind of has these little wobbly sliders so you can navigate them up and down, and when you release them they kind of wobble back and forth, like a very small thing but just a thing that feels so delightful and so playful you want to play with it a lot. That also is the idea of a very approachable and friendly UI, going deeper with that, actually adding as much empathy into the UI as we can. 

Also, in the response when a user's having a bad day actually changing UI to catch them and pick them back up, compared to when they were having a good day. Looking into that dynamic of the split between what a user is willing to interact with on good days versus bad days, something we're going to go quite deep with, because we can see it worked very well.

Liam: It strikes me that as you talk about the interface being able to pick users up and respond to what they are thinking or feeling that maybe the interface is always the conversation.

Jacob: I think very much so. The context that the user's in matters, you know, the most. Bringing stuff into the context for the user, and actually allowing them to have different experiences, novel experiences, throughout their time within the App, so it's not just like the same experience they go through every time, but it actually caters to their current mood and their current need is something we're looking a lot into. We've kind of dipped our toe in that world today, but going forward that is going to be a lot like a cornerstone of the App, even more than it is today.

Liam: Well, thank you again, Jacob.

Jacob: Yeah, you're welcome. Great being here.

---

Ruff

Liam: Bardi, welcome to Design Notes.

Bardi Golriz: Thanks for having me, Liam. It's pleasure to be on.

Liam: I want to start out just with the history of ruff as an app and its design approach.

Bardi: There are a couple of different sources of inspiration/motivation for the app. I mean the first one is from quite an unlikely source and that's Notepad on the computer. For as long as I can remember, I've depended on Notepad as a safe space for me to dump text into, basically.

For example, if I have an important email I want to write, or I much prefer the comfort of drafting it first in Notepad, and then once I'm happy with it, for me to move it elsewhere to the email client.

Or for example, I could be on a call with someone and there happens to be something I need to write down, I happen to be in front of a computer, I'll open up Notepad, I'll dump the text in there. So I mean, in both examples, and there's many similar use cases, the text is essentially in transit in Notepad.

The second source of inspiration was, there's an app on the App Store called Edit for iOS by The Audacious Company. And it's just a single page of paper. That's all it is. And when I came across it, I linked that back to Notepad, the way I've been using Notepad over the years.

And I was like, "I would like something that accomplishes what I use Notepad for on the computer, but for mobile basically." Whereas Edit is just that single page of paper, I decided to take the concept a bit further with ruff, by allowing people to set aside text to come back to later, which is a concept that I refer to as stashing.

Basically what that does, that increased utility basically gives the app a lot more versatility that enables the experience of using ruff, to be potentially unique per user. So for example, if you're a writer, you could be using it to draft different versions of a blog post, for example, or you could be using it a bit more conservatively, like a conventional note taking app, or it could be used as a clipboard.

Basically ruff, gives you the freedom to use it in whatever way you see fit, whatever suits you. It doesn't want or need to replace your text editor. It doesn't want or need to replace your to-do list. What it wants to essentially be is a springboard for your text when you're writing on the go.

And that's where the FAB actually comes into play, where the act of sharing becomes a fundamental interaction point. I wanted ruff to be something that is a pleasure to write in, but I wanted it to be as fast and easy as possible to move writing out of the app as well.

Liam: So you mentioned the FAB is a specific component that's helped with the functionality and the character of the app, but I'm wondering what other areas material played into creating this experience.

Bardi: So once I decided I wanted the app to be more than just a single sheet of text, when I introduced the concept of stashing, that's when material depth became a much more prominent UI element.

That's where the bottom sheet comes into play, where you can move between different elements that you've stashed, that you can fetch. Other influential elements was definitely the color system. The material color system played a big role, because I was well aware ruff is, what it may lack in functionality, I needed to more than make it up in terms of personality.

I mean, something I hear a lot of people say these days, but it was actually a legitimate requirement for the app, to be delightful to use. The reason being I was of the perspective that if it wasn't fun to use, then it would be a much less attractive proposition compared to, let's say, more feature rich alternatives.

Also, typography was as well for obvious reasons, a key element for the app and what I love about Material was the fact that it gives this non uniform flexibility to go with the style that best suits the content that's being presented to the user.

So that's why, given the transient nature of the text, that's where, for example, I decided that the default font should be a monospace font, for example.

Liam: Ruff won the award this year for theming. So I'd like to go a little bit deeper into how you thought about theming while you were designing the app and how you made some more of those decisions around what colors represent the app, what shapes you would use? That kind of thing.

Bardi: Like I mentioned, given the intentionally narrow scope, I knew that it needed to make that up with lots of personality and that sort of theming definitely came into the forefront.

I wanted ruff to present the writing environment that removed friction from the very idea that, okay, you're writing on your phone. So I wanted it to be pleasant to look at, and actually fun to interact with as well.

I wanted the branding to hit something of a sweet spot in terms of I wanted it to be warm, but not overbearing. I wanted to exercise restraint, but also to have a point of view as well.

So I mean, it's not something that I've actually ever done with my previous apps, but it was a core requirement going into the app's development for branding to have a starring role in terms of its development.

For example, it was really important for the entire development stack, from say, copywriting all the way to marketing, for there to be personality in the app. I mean, it was a first for me, but it definitely won't be the last.

So, I mean, in terms of the colors used, I wanted something distinct because there's millions of apps on the Store, and whatever app you're creating there's probably hundreds, if not thousands of apps doing that same thing. So it was important for me to create something unique and distinct, something that can stand out in terms of competition.

Liam: I'm also wondering what it was like from the perspective of a developer implementing theming. So the actual code behind it, and whether that experience actually informed any of the decisions you were making, or if you found unexpected things that may have changed the direction.

Bardi: The thing that definitely helped was the Material Components. The documentation was incredibly helpful in terms of providing just the right amount of guidance and flexibility in order for me to put my ideas into practice.

For example, with the color system, that's something that I constantly refer to throughout development, in terms of picking the right colors for the job.

That's where a lot of the basis for the three different themes where you got light, you got dark and you got black. A lot of that was on the back of having that reference point where the Material color system provided.

And in terms of the shapes and everything I used, a lot of it is all these different components within the library. Me kind of doing my own remix with them, putting them together. So you got the bottom sheet, then I've got the FAB that goes with it. It was a really fun experience because this was like the first time where I've had this impressive toolkit to work with. And I only had my imagination as a constraint in terms of how do I get these pieces to work together.

Liam: One other thing that I've noticed is that even since the awards were announced, there have been updates to ruff and it still manages to maintain this really strong focus on the sheet of text that you mentioned before. As the app continues to grow, how do you think about adding new features to an experience that has to stay so essential?

Bardi: That's a really great question because since it launched in the summer, it's been evolving quite a bit, but I'm quite conscious of the fact, like I mentioned at the start, the core simplicity is like a fundamental design choice.

So I'm conscious of the fact of introducing more and more features based on feedback at the risk of adding complexity, unnecessary complexity that makes the app lose its core essence. So I'm being very carefully considered in terms of what I add into the app as I go along.

So for example, like you got the bottom toolbar, which didn't exist when the app launched originally, but it was something that a lot of people were asking for. And I took my time in terms of how do I introduce this functionality without taking away from having a clear, simple sheet of text for people to write into. So I took my time with that.

With everything that I do, it's just finding that sweet spot, design sweet spot to make sure that I manage to add more utility, but at the same time, maintaining, preserving as much of that core simplicity that made the app, let's say, popular with its original set of users.

Liam: And taking that bottom toolbar as an example, what was your thought process on how to add that? And how did you come to the implementation that you did?

Bardi: One of the core requirements with the app was for it to be optimized for single handed use. And I don't normally enjoy the process of writing on the phone. It seems like something of a chore. And I think part of the reason is because it could just be a personal thing, but I tend to use my phone with one hand. And so a lot of the design decisions are motivated by the fact, how can I introduce feature X or Y while being optimized for one handed use? So that's where the bottom toolbar, it became an obvious choice. It needs to be within reach. So it makes sense for it to be at the bottom. By being in the bottom, also away from the text, because the other main requirement was for the text needs to be the primary focus at all times, Content over Chrome. So that made an obvious choice, an easy decision almost for it to be at the bottom.

But then, some of the details behind the final implementation of the toolbar was that I could have everything displayed at once, but then they would result in smaller target areas for every button. So for example, I can have the options to add bold formatting, italics, underlying. I could squeeze everything so it's visible at one time or I could do something different. I could double down on the whole concept that this is an alternative way of doing things. Instead of having, for example, just a B to represent the changing the text to bold, have the entire text show. So it says bold instead of just the B. There's pros and cons under our approach. It means you can see less things at a time, but also means it's much more difficult to make mistakes, for example.

So that's where the whole concept of the scrolling list came into play. So you have this horizontal scrolling list that in theory, I could continue to add different functions to. So it gives me that flexibility. So it's kind of future proof in a way. And it also gives me the flexibility where if you scroll onto one side, you get the quick settings as well. It's kind of like, how do I get what people want, which is formatting options, but how could I do it in a way that is potentially better? Because doing it different is easy. Different is always easy. Different is not difficult to accomplish, but I want it to be different, but also be better as well at the same time.

Liam: I always like to close by asking a question about the future. So we've talked a little bit about how you plan to kind of evolve ruff's functionality in the future, but I'm interested in your thoughts on where the design or even the personality of that might go.

Bardi: At the moment, it's intentionally a single sheet of text. That was quite intentional, but definitely something I'd like to explore is the possibility of having multiple writing surfaces. I don't know whether I'd be able to accomplish that, but that's definitely something I want to be exploring.

Because, like I said, that versatility, I think it could open up the app to do many different things that it's not currently capable of doing. The other areas of improvement that I'm currently looking at, probably more realistic and more in the short term is this whole concept of stashing and accessing items within your stash. Because originally to go back a bit, the original designs of ruff in order to access the items that you've stashed away, they were a right swipe away. So the thinking being, okay, I want that main view to be completely focused on, right? Nothing else, no other UI, but it just didn't feel right.

In terms of, it felt a bit too disconnected both physically and conceptually from the main writing surface. So what would happen was it felt a bit more like a conventional text editor. It felt like I was loading files rather than fetching texts, if that makes sense. And it felt as though whenever I was loading things, it was loading to a new writing surface as opposed to over the existing one.

So that never felt right. So what happened was I decided that's where everything moved into the bottom sheet overlay, where it just immediately, everything felt more right. Conceptually and physically, it felt connected to the main writing surface. Like I was actually writing over the main text area and I also didn't feel like I was dealing with files, in terms of loading and saving files.

There wasn't that much personality within the app in terms of its visuals. But that's something that I'd been gradually adding into the app. So for example, you have, when you swipe to stash text, you got this icon of a dog with a piece of paper in its mouth. So that kind of thing is stuff that I like to sprinkle across the app more. And it's something that I've been doing progressively, but yeah, it's definitely, because I think in terms of an app's overall personality, the fundamentals are there for me to work with and to improvise further. So that's definitely a goal moving forward.

Liam: Well, thank you again for joining me, Bardi.

Bardi: No problems, Liam, it was a pleasure.

GMUNK

GMUNK on the psychedelic origins of his aesthetic and the importance of discomfort

In this episode, Liam speaks with Bradley Munkowitz, also known as designer/director GMUNK, unpacking Munkowitz’s scintillating psychedelic aesthetic — inspired by actual psychedelic experiences — and why it’s important as a designer to continually challenge and be challenged, maintaining a healthy discomfort with one’s own work.

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Liam Spradlin: All right, we’re recording. Welcome to Design Notes.

Bradley Munkowitz (GMUNK): Thank you. So you didn’t get all that ASMR talk we just had? That wasn’t recording?

Liam: No, but we can get back around to it.

GMUNK: (laughs) Revisit it later?

Liam: Yeah, yeah.

GMUNK: Okay, we’ll revisit it later on.

Liam: So, to start out with, I wanna know what brought you to your current work. And also how your journey there has influenced the type of things that you’re making.

GMUNK: I was always a creative. As a kid, I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, and like… illustrating stories of my characters. And I went to school at Humboldt State in northern California. State college, didn’t have a ton of money. And just like… it was a playground for psychedelic exploration. Cannabis and psychedelics were a huge part of my college creative explosion. I came from Minneapolis, and then my whole family moved to San Francisco when I was 18. And so, you know, I kind of found myself in Humboldt County. And, uh, just took over the film and graphic design departments and just, you know, flash was a huge one back then. Back in the late ‘90’s. It was like, flash and 16 millimeter film, and Photoshop work, and illustration. Like, traditional illustration was my fine art track. And combining all those into a language… and that was kind of the breakout.

And then once I got into the industry, my ethos was just being curious and learning. Started off as kind of a web animator filmmaker, but then that took me into experiential, and commercial, and design work, and UI, UX. Installation, sculpture, robotics, projection… you know, anything with light and material. You know, and then as I got older, it was always going more into narrative and themes. And, and telling stories. You know, telling stories of identity and, I’m, I’m really into the metaphysical and… which is, you kind of go back to the psychedelic foundation in a lot of ways. ’Cause psychedelics cause you to question your subconscious. You question reality in a way. Because you lose track of where your body is. You lose track of what you are.

And you go where it’s just you and your mind on a rocket ship somewhere else. For a while. And in that time, you have to learn not to panic. (laughs) You know, and to just accept that this is all in your subconscious, and this is your reality. This is what’s inside you. At least that’s what I believe. I believe it’s not fake. I believe it’s actually your subconscious showing you a different reality that you should accept because it’s within you.

And that has guided my creative path. Aesthetically, conceptually… so I struggle with finding the balance of like, how do I make a living doing commercials? Do I really wanna just be making advertisements all my life? For brands, like that’s a really tough gig. You know, so it’s like, what is that balance?

To answer your question, I think that it’s all about just staying curious, and learning, and collaborating. Working with people that take you outside of your comfort zone so you experiment in new mediums. And that causes a lot of inspiration. ’Cause anytime you start over, or start new on anything, it’s always the most inspiring phase of that discovery, ’cause it’s new.

Liam: Right.

GMUNK: And I think sometimes the only way you can get anywhere is through collaboration. Because how else are you gonna learn? You can’t just go to school for everything, you know? If I didn’t have my collaborators, I’d be nowhere. And I know that. And I will openly admit that. That’s just the way it is.

Liam: Yeah. There’s so much in there that I want to unpack. But I want to start with this connection that you drew between your experiences with psychedelics and the aesthetic that you’ve developed, because it strikes me that the aesthetic of your work is one that is extremely strong, and also extremely dynamic. But you use a lot of practical effects in your work. So I wanna know how you approach translating these ideas of other realities, or manipulating the reality that we have using the tools of our everyday reality.

GMUNK: And that’s a good question. I’m a big fan of the Mars Ones, and the Alex Grays, the psychedelic artists who I love. I mean, Mario Mars One is a good friend, and my favorite. You know, my favorite style. Because it’s warpy, and it has lensing in it. Where there’s a distortion in his images that I feel is very psychedelic and very camera related, which I’m obsessed with cameras and lenses.

But for me, I don’t see that stuff. I don’t see the traditional psychedelic world when I go in. Mine is almost a little bit more science fiction, and it’s about light and material and texture, and refraction and distortion. And sometimes it’s character based, and I don’t believe these characters to be aliens, or some other interstellar communication. I believe it’s my whimsical mind assaulting my brain. There’s like, things that emerge out, and they’re like these ever-evolving transforming kind of tube creatures. Kind of like weird, tentacle-y, you know, lots of eyes, lots of tongues, lots of multiplication and geometric shapes, but they’re definitely beings. And they always are tearing my head apart, and like opening it up, and showing me new portals inside.

And it’s actually a very cartoony style. And I’m more interested in where that cartoony style exists, which is in this brilliantly detailed refractive geometric world. And so my work explores that. ’Cause I’m not really a character animator, and someday I will collaborate on the character side, and just take a two week retreat to Sedona, and just hug a rock and do psychedelics for two weeks, and then be like, okay this is exactly what we’re gonna make, you know? But right now, I’m really inspired by lensing, and lens distortion, and fish eyes. And then putting through that system of distortion and lens distortion, materials. Materiality and, and illumination. And how all three of those elements work together.

And sometimes I’ll make graphic design out of this. And I’ll make it in 3D so I get the lens distortion in there. And sometimes I’ll do it practically, where we’ll get a bunch of mirrors, and a bunch of lights, and a bunch of lasers. And get cameras, and lenses, and fish eyes, and just do it in camera. And sometimes I’ll do it in CG with, uh, the FX company. Like, the mill, or frame store. And we’ll say, ‘hey.’ You know, ‘we’re gonna go in this light world.’ You know, sometimes data related, sometimes light related. Sometimes it’s data as light. You know, I made an Audi commercial that was really psychedelic. And somehow it got approved by Audi Global in Germany. They were all about it actually, which was great. It’s not usually like that. And, and, and, and then that branches out into textural work. My photography is all about texture. And I don’t go to an expanse and just take a wide angle landscape shot of it. I don’t do that. I get in it, and I find compositions… for either from the air or the ground that are about depth and texture. Where I wanna feel like I’m submerged in this world, and it’s a little bit claustrophobic.

And then I shoot with medium format digital cameras, and then I just nerd out on the texture, and the sharpness, and, and just the detail of everything. Which in itself becomes psychedelic. Because if you have so much detail and such high fidelity in it, you just lose yourself in it. And then you find yourself kind of tripping. Which is the goal. And then there’s, you know, the infrared photography, which is taking that even a step further, where you’re seeing a light spectrum that you can’t even see with your naked eye. So you need a special camera that sees the invisible. You know, sees the unseen. And that in itself is also very psychedelic, ’cause like, it’s that uncovering that you go back to in, in the deep dives into your subconscious. You’re seeing something that can’t be seen. With a special camera, and I love that shit.

And then the color palettes, and the compositions, and the tonal range is all very limited, and goes back to almost graphic design in a way.

Liam: When you say that Audi was really into the commercial, but it’s not always like that. I imagine that maybe it’s challenging to bring this aesthetic into everyday reality in a way that is approachable and consumable by other people.

GMUNK: One of the things I’ve decided in the end… and this isn’t in all commercial work, but it’s a lot of it. Is, I’m just gonna pitch stuff that I love, and that I really wanna make, and that resonates with that inner being that wants to push this aesthetic. And that’s just kind of my style. And if people, you know… That’s what fine artists do. Fine artists say, ‘this is my style. If you want my style, you can buy it.’

And as a commercial artist, I kind of want to do the same thing. Where it’s… and I’m not only a commercial artist, but in the commercial realm, you know, I wanna say like, okay, this is the GMUNK treatment. You know, and it’s gonna be psychedelic, and it’s gonna be kind of with that approach. And most of the times I fail. Most of the time, they don’t buy it. And then I say okay, well do I wanna do something kind of bright and neutral that isn’t really a part of my repertoire? And it’s like, well, you know, maybe ten percent? Fifteen, I’ll be like, ‘yeah. I need some money. I want to buy a new camera.’ You know?

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: We’ll do it. And I think with client work, it’s all about the client. You can’t be too selfish, but in a way, they’re hiring you for a reason. You know, so you kind of have to be selfish in a way. ’Cause they’re hiring you for that reason. They want that treatment.

Liam: You also describe yourself as, besides being a commercial artist, a designer and a director. And I’m interested, given all of the different things you’ve done, and all the collaborations that you’ve done through your work, what each of those roles means to you.

GMUNK: Yeah, I consider myself a designer first, because it’s in my blood. Not like, genetically. My dad was an actuary, uh, so it’s a mathematician. But he had a very structured mind. And my mom was a, a wild creative writer teacher. So mixing those two together gave me this creative yet structured mind. And when I was in college, I took an oceanography course. ’Cause I love the physics of the ocean. I love the waves, I love the movement. And I thought that it would be very creative.

So I took an oceanography course. It was hard for me, ’cause you go out in the freezing cold in your boots and the mud, and you’re collecting crab sediment. And then you bring it back, and you study this sediment in the mud. Looking for crab refuse or whatever, right? And my charts and my diagrams of that research were so structured, and so organized, and so designed, you know… I’d hand draw everything. And my teacher was like, dude, you just need to take a graphic design class. This is not normal. No scientist should do this.

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: Like, this is not for you. You need to take a graphic design class. You know, and then I took graphic design in college, and it was literally like, one of the worst programs ever. It was like all old school, everything practical and just like, hands on. Like, cutting type out. And it’s just like, so not where it was going. You know, it was principles, but it was kind of old school. But out of college, my first job was at a, a company in London. And I was the only American in a studio of 25. And my two roommates were Danish and Swedish. Basically, it was dot com money. You know, I graduated in 2000. So basically, they were putting together some of the best web artists in the world to go work at one company. And somehow I got picked because I was doing really experimental work that was just so different. Because it was personal. It was almost anti-establishment psychedelic… but absurdist at the same time. It’s like, who would actually put this kind of stuff out?

So that’s why I think I got selected to be a part of this super team, but the other people in it were some of the world’s best Scandinavian, German, Dutch, and English designers. So I went to the studio, and that’s where I learned. Like, real shit. Like real graphic design. From these guys for two years. Just every day. Beat down. You know, beat down. And from there, you know, went on to do UI work, and tons of grid work, you know, so when you’re doing work in Flash, you know, I have a one-pixel border on my five-pixel high fonts. You know, it’s just like so detailed. And that work and that style has stayed with me forever.

Where now, if you look at my computer, there’s literally nothing on the desktop. I have fifty thousand notes documents that are all designed perfectly, you know, typography, underlines, grids. You know, spent two and a half years doing really hardcore UI work for feature films. Oblivion and Tron Legacy, and a bunch of others. We just designed the new Top Gun Maverick UI in there, and… so, make a long story short. I mean, that design sensibility of grids, typography, organization, beauty, that goes to my closets, that goes to my organization, the way I… Everything is a design. So it’s not that I do a ton of design work anymore, but I’m a designer. And I’ll always be a designer forever. Because it’s the way I live.

And a director is mostly how I make my work now. I’m 43 years old. I’m not as inspired anymore to just like, go into Illustrator and smash out a fifty layer gridded out UI, or like, go into Photoshop and do a fifty layer composite of something. You know, so I direct. I direct designers, I direct animators, I direct, you know, cinematographers, editors, and so that’s how I do my work now. That’s my profession. I’m a professional director. And creative director, design director, live action director, experiential interactive director. I talk a lot, and I inspire people, and I run teams. And, you know, when you’re a director, it’s a vibe.

It’s a collaborative energy where you’ve gotta get people to buy in to your idea, and the way you want to execute it. And you have to just inspire people to rally around you to make something. And all of us want to make something. It makes us happy. You know, so many people, as long as you have something inspiring for them to do, they’ll get on board. And make something. And you have to let people have a say, and a voice… you can’t dominate a collaboration. You have to just assist it, and cultivate it, and nurture it.

I’m a chill dude. I don’t have any sort of ego, I’m a lover. I’m a collaborator, and a stoner. And stoners are kind of chill. You know, we’re chill. And there’s not a ton of anxiety in stoners. Or psychedelic warriors. There’s not… there’s not a lot of anxiety, and so I bring a very calming, but collaborative, energetic… so, I think that answers your question.

Liam: Yeah.

GMUNK: ’Cause I am a director, and then the Galactic Crusader, the psychedelic warrior, that kind of informs my approach.

Liam: Do you think that your relationship to the work is different being a director versus opening up Illustrator and just doing it yourself?

GMUNK: Yes. It does, because it’s not as personal. Because you didn’t make it with your hands, but I realize that. And so, as I’ve been getting older, I’ve looked at it. You know, like I said, I come from a design background, so I’m look… I always like, assess and look. And study. And so I’m really big on having a website that spans all of my work from the beginning. And I look at the grid. And I say, okay, what do I need to do now? What do I do to update the grid? I live by the grid. I’m obsessed with the grid. And so my personal work is hands on. My photography is hands on, I’m grading all the photos, I’m going into Photoshop and retouching all that shit. And then I make a lot of psychedelic art. So that’s all done in Maya, you know, these are huge prints that are over four feet wide by four feet tall. They’re big. I do them in Maya so I can do the lensing and the camera. So I’m still making stuff. You know, and if a brand wants me to make one of those illustrations? All about it. You know, that’s great. But, you know, some hands on animation for something? I, I’ll source that shit. I’ll get… I have a whole crew of collaborators that I work with, and stuff.

And so I, I think that sometimes… a, as a director, you are, you know, writing the story or collaborating with the screenplay writer or, you know, other treatment writers. It is always the animus, that spark within you that kind of propagates the whole thing. It is yours in a way, but then you just build your team around you to make it with. So I have both. You know, the directorial work, I can’t do by myself. And to be honest, I’m just posting a new project on my website right now, and I’m looking at it, and I don’t like it. And it was a huge opportunity. And it was a good budget, and a great shoot with a great team.

About 85 percent of the work that I do, I’m not crazy about. And I only see the flaws, and I think about, you know… I really, really study it, and I make notes about what I could do better, what I would change in my approach. Because sometimes when you do work and you have to work fast, you just pick a direction and you go. All hands on deck, and you just go. And it’s fast, and happens in three weeks, a month. And usually that direction is picked within a couple days. And it’s just like, okay we’ve chosen, and we’re going down this path. All hands on deck, here we go. And sometimes in hindsight, you’re like, ‘I should have picked a different direction, I should have changed the edit. You know, I should have done this, I should have done that. And that happens a lot.

And my trajectory, my story, my creative story, isn’t ending now. It’s ending in 25 years. And hopefully in 25 years, my work is at a way higher level than it is now, and my work now is at a much higher level than it was ten years ago. But I’m always gonna be improving. I don’t think I’m going to plateau, and then go back down. It’s just an upward climb, and as long as I’m really hard on myself and really rough on the work, and never satisfied, I’ll get better.

And my friends are rough with me, too. Like, just relentless. Relentless in the feedback, and kind of, uh, questioning. And nobody’s defensive, we’re all just kind of able to take it. And it’s so important. ’Cause like, the second you start loving your work, and you’re just like, oh, I’ve done it. Like, what else can I do? This is it.

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: You, you’re finished. And then you plateau, and then you go back down. And it’s like, you can’t do that. And the more you do this, the longer you do it, the more humble you become. So many people who are young and start out and do something great… they’re like, ‘I’m the shit. I’m the hottest shit.’

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: And that’s trouble. And you’ll always find that like, the best people are always the most humble. Because they know where they’re going. Like, they know where the end game is, and they’re nowhere near where they wanna go.

Liam: Yeah. And, like we were discussing before the interview, there’s… there’s a certain level of discomfort in creative work that becomes productive and pushes you forward like that.

GMUNK: I think you need to be uncomfortable. Constantly. And that’s why, for me personally, I’m always throwing myself in new industries. Where I don’t know anything. You know, I know a little bit. And I collaborate with people, and I go in there and I don’t know shit. I just learn. And I’m totally uncomfortable. Like, intensely uncomfortable. But I don’t show it. You know, I go in there as confident as could be. You know, just faking it. Just completely faking it. And it’s wild that you could do that. But that’s the only way to get yourself an opportunity. Like, everything is about the opportunity. As long as you’re not over promising, that’s the key. You can’t overpromise, but you can kind of fake that you’re comfortable. So you stand as a leader, even if you’re uncomfortable. Kind of just fake that. And that’s okay. But you can’t promise the world and then default on the promises. That’s the strategy part. And, and that’s where the producers come in. That’s where the producers come in and say okay, you know, this is what we’re going to promise. This is how much it’s gonna cost.

I’m terrible at that shit. But I think once you’re comfortable, and you slow down, and you go through the motions of repetition, it’s bad. It’s over. Everything becomes repetitive, and you’re kind of doing the same things every day. Talking to the same people, doing the same shit, hiding behind meetings. Where your day is just meetings and phone calls, and you don’t do any work whatsoever. Until five or six o’clock, and that just becomes the reality. You need to change that shit. You know, you need to change that shit and get other people to handle your calls, and say look, I’m a creative, man. I’m not just like… ’cause if you just talk, and talk, and talk on calls, but you don’t actually put pen to paper and be creative, you’ll lose it. You’ll lose the spark.

So for me, like my lifestyle as a freelancer. Because you’re always uncomfortable. There’s no repetition whatsoever. Every day is different, you’re in different places doing different things, different locales, and there’s just constant stimulation from everywhere, but that makes you uncomfortable. And then, you know, as a freelancer, you’re able to collaborate with whomever you want as well. Whenever you want. There’s nobody managing your time but yourself, which is kind of how it needs to be. At least for me. I’ll freak out if someone else is managing my time. You know, like, time is literally one of your most valuable assets. And how you structure your time. And you can’t just like, flip a switch and, ‘I’m creative now!’ You know, it’s-

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: … by the time to be creative. I have two hours. Ready, set, go. You know, ideas happen in the most unexpected places. A lot of my ideas come in the shower. A lot of my ideas come on the treadmill, when I’m just drawing under a tree. Listening to music and walking outside. Rarely does an idea come from the computer. I’ll look at reference, and take something from it, but like, what it means, and what it’s trying to say, and like how it fits into the bigger picture… that all happens outside of the computer, man. That doesn’t, that doesn’t happen at my standing desk with my headphones on, you know? It has to happen in a dinner conversation. You know, drawing on a napkin. And on a hike. For some reason, water and me… like, the shower is always the spark, you know? Swimming. I love baths. Dunking in the bath and just like, thinking. Looking out the window, you know.

Liam: Shifting back to some of the specifics of your work, it seems like a lot of your work crosses these axes of different types of experiences. You have audio visual pieces that I think are mainly consumed on a screen, and speakers, and things like that. And you also have experiential pieces that involve, like, physical spaces. I’m interested in what each of those things uniquely affords to the viewer, or the visitor in terms of experience.

GMUNK: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think one of the most rewarding parts of doing creative work is watching people experience it. Because you’re always surprised. There’s always an unexpected reaction or engagement. And experiential work for me is kind of my favorite type of work right now, because of that. You do work for the television. You make a commercial on TV. Someone’s just going to sit on their fucking couch and not want to watch it. There’s no engagement. People want to skip the commercials. You know, fast forward on their DVR, you know? People watch something on YouTube on their computer with their headphones, they’re half there. They’re like, kinda not focused on it, there’s someone in their ear, their tea just arrived at the table, you know. It’s just like, there’s always shit going on. They’re in a studio, someone’s tapping their shoulder. There’s a dog sleeping at their feet, you know. There’s just never one hundred percent engagement.

What I love about, for instance, VR, is you put that headset on, you’re gone. There is nothing else that matters. There’s no phone, there’s nobody talking to you. You are in that world. That’s full immersion. I love that shit, right? And I wish that, you know, I really hope that VR finds its groove. Because it’s fucking cool. It’s just like, you take off the headset after you’ve done something, and you’re like, where did I just go? It’s very much like a psychedelic experience in a way. It’s like I’m smoking DMT or something. Just lose yourself. So experiential artwork like that, when there’s scale, and immersion, and storytelling within an environment where you don’t care about distractions. You’re just in it. Like immersive sculpture, that’s what we’re doing with the robot stuff, for instance. Like, with [inaudible 00:25:06] that’s like immersive sculpture. Where you go into a room, and there’s 15-foot tall robots swinging lights, and shadow, and material, and sound, and reflections. And the only thing you really wanna do is watch it and take pictures of it. The only two things you’re thinking about. It’s like, holy fuck this thing’s huge and loud. Is it gonna kill me? What are they doing? What is the meaning behind this? What are they communicating? How am I a part of it? Are they gonna kill me?

Um-

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: … that’s all you’re thinking about.

Liam: Just to be clear, are they going to kill me?

GMUNK: They’re not.

Liam: Yeah.

GMUNK: You know, they’re totally not interested in killing anybody. They’re interested in making beauty and sculpture, but owning a space, right? And Box, which was a projection mapping piece, it’s only purpose was to create illusions where you see that, and you’re like, ‘what the fuck is happening?’ Like, how is this happening? I don’t understand how this is happening. This is an illusion of depth. Where there is no depth. That’s why we’re calling it Box, ’cause it’s a flat screen, and all of a sudden it’s a box with all sorts of shit going on in, inside the box. And so it’s an illusion. And when you see an illusion, you are engaged. You’re immersed. And you’re immersed in that illusion. Trying to figure out how it happens. Like, you see a magic trick, same thing. It’s like, how the fuck did you do that? You have my attention.

And I saw a speech recently that was really interesting about engagement and attention. Where if something’s wrong… this dude gave a speech. His name’s Alex Cornell. And he basically gave a speech where he recorded a 45 minute video of him talking to himself. So it’s all cued up. And he’s conversing with himself about the concept of an idea. Like, the, you know, the inception of an idea. And he intentionally in this recording throws the time off a little bit, so you realize that there was a mistake. So you engage more, but he did it intentionally. Which is so fucking tight. Like, it’s so cool. And, and it worked. I was like, oh, Alex, you know, on that one part you were a little-

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: … you know, it took a little long to respond to yourself. And he’s like, ‘oh yeah, I did that intentionally.’ I was just like, man.

Liam: (laughs)

GMUNK: You know? Like, and but that’s the kind of thing, right? You, you find out what people pay attention to and you use it to your advantage to get people more engaged. So that’s what I love about experiential work. Is it takes you off the screen. And it, there could be screens. But it’s in a dynamic environment.

And so, I’ve been thinking long and hard, man, about how do I make a living as a creative? Like, what’s the best way to do this? Is it about making, a Maytag commercial for refrigerators with a funny guy and a dog on the floor? Is that my path? Working with ad agencies who are going to change everything and I’m gonna get pissed off? Or is it about creating experiences where people can go in and I know that there’s an engagement there? That there’s an appreciation and, and, an immersion, and a curiosity to the work that they can actually move through it.

You know, and, and the answer actually is both. You know, I do want to make the commercials because I love live action. I love filmmaking. I love telling stories. I love shooting, I love cameras, lensing. And that’s why I work in so many different disciplines, because I love a lot of different things. I love making psychedelic prints, because I feel like it’s personal. You know, I feel like it’s things that I see, or that I feel that I need to get out. And then I print ’em giant, you know. Large format printing. Hang ’em on a wall and let people look at ’em. And, and then they kind of have a piece of my mind. And it feels personal. And it feels like I have a personal connection with them. That’s experiential. Or the photography is personal because it’s a story. It’s a memory. Every photo that you take is a memory, because you remember exactly where you were, how you felt. Was the backpack heavy? Was it cold? Was I thirsty? What was the feeling like when I saw this vista in [inaudible 00:28:45] in Iceland, and like, how did that feel when I was shooting it? And what was I thinking about?

You know, it’s just… it’s such an experience for yourself. So, I don’t know. I, I don’t have the answer for like, what is the secret for being a successful creative? Other than just, you’ve gotta stay on it. You’ve gotta be kind of relentless in your pursuit. And what you’re pursuing is a lot of different things. It’s a lot of learning, it’s a lot of personal expression, it’s a lot of engaging with your audience. It’s a lot of satisfaction with improvement, with growth, and you have to pursue all of that all the time. You know, and if you stop pursuing that, and if you get comfortable, you’re gonna lose it. You’re gonna lose that fire. And then you’re not gonna succeed.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a really good note to close on.

GMUNK: Oh, wow, we’re done!

Liam: (laughs) Yeah.

GMUNK: Okay. Oh, that was good.

Liam: Thank you again for joining me.

GMUNK: Yeah. No problem.

Qianqian Ye, Artist and Creative Coder

Exploring our shared vulnerabilities — and shared futures — in ink and code

In this episode, Liam speaks with interdisciplinary artist and creative coder Qianqian Ye in her San Francisco studio. The duo traces her journey from wielding calligraphy brushes to building a hand-holding glove, unpacking the vulnerabilities we all share as humans, how creative intent is communicated, and the importance of imagining other futures.

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Liam Spradlin: Qianqian, welcome to Design Notes.

Qianqian Ye: Hi, thank you.

Liam: To start off, I want to know about what brought you to your current work and how has that journey influenced the things that you’re making?

Qianqian: So, it has been a very interesting journey but I think it all starts with calligraphy ink and brushes. So, when I was a kid, my parents sent me to calligraphy school, because I was not a very quiet kid. So, I had my calligraphy s- practice for 10 years, but I know that I really hated. I, you know, had a lot of struggle with that but I guess that has embedded in my, my blood, literally.

And then, uh, I went to architecture school and for my Master I studied landscape architecture. At that time, I had this, like, kind of dream that I felt designing space for people is something I’m very interested in. And then I realized this kind of social interaction in groups is a main thing that I’m interested in. The form of the beauty, the material, or, you know, the o- other very architectural things I actually know are really my focus. I realized people is the thing I’m most curious about.

Then, uh, I moved to Bay Area. At that time I was working a Danish urban design company. The fact that I was leaving Silicon Valley really changed a lot of my life path. So, then I started to do more of technology-related design. Coding, those sort of things. And, you know, such a moment of my life, I start to go back to ink and water, and brushes. And I start to make paintings with them. And all the paintings that actually are talking about the vulnerability in human actions. And along that journey, I was making different, other type of works, but pretty much most of them are talking about the same issue. About how people are vulnerable and awkward, but still trying.

Liam: So, you mentioned that a theme of your work, kind of thing that you’re really interested in is the complexity of human social interaction, and I’m interested in the ways that that theme has emerged in all of the other media that you’ve worked with.

Qianqian: Yes. So, I think back in architecture school, when I was designing spaces, I always am thinking about, like, what kind of social story would happen here? Will people come here to break up with their partners? Will they come bring their grandparents? Like, what that is kind of potential social stories change the way I design a space. And last few years, I’ve been spending more time doing creative coding, community building. And that’s a huge people project for me. And it really opened a window for me to understand what does a group mean, what does community mean? What does human interaction even mean in a, in a group like that?

So, I feel like along the journey, my understanding of how human and humans work have been changing a lot. And I’m very curious to see how this exploration is gonna take me to.

Liam: So, focusing for a moment on a specific work of yours, I’m interested in the origin and the meaning behind the Alone, Not Alone works.

Qianqian: So, Alone, Not Alone project, actually it contains a lot of different part. It start with, actually, a set of robotic installations that I was working on. So, that was a set of installation includes a robotic hand that will hold your hand, and a robotic arm that will give you a hug. And those robotic hand and arms were designed to put into, like, a glove and a scarf. Um, so that was a project that I was thinking a lot about how humans are lonely, or not lonely with a companion of technology.

So, that was like the view one of Alone, Not Alone. While I was working that, I started to make a lot of paintings to discuss about the loneliness, um, and the awkwardness, and vulnerability in that sort of human, human, human technology, or human the world relationships. Um, so that kind of was a story of how Alone, Not Alone got started, and how it developed to a set of ink paintings that you see on the walls.

Liam: In a piece in The Offing, you mentioned that the minimal nature of these pieces combined with the narrative titles that you came up with let viewers make up their own stories. And I’m interested in how you think about that, and how it changes the interaction viewers have with the work.

Qianqian: So, I think vulnerability is something I talk a lot about in my work. I think it’s universal, but the story behind why you are vulnerable on certain things is different for everybody. So, when the show Alone, Not Alone was up, the curator asked me, “Who do you think will buy your paintings?” And I was like, “Maybe someone who’s awkward and lonely, and, you know, vulnerable.” And then she said, “Oh, you mean everybody?”

So, I was like, “Ah, okay.” So, that was time I was like how this thing, when I thought it’s like, uh, a personal character is actually so universal. But when I was thinking about how do the viewers embed their personal story into the work, there was one example that I remember really vividly.

So, that was one buyer, and she contacted me on social media. She said, “Hey, I really like your work. But your paintings, uh, the show just, uh, finished. Can I come to your studio and buy some work?” And I was like, “Oh, sure.” So, she came, and she bought three pieces. And I asked her, I was like, “Oh, why did you buy these three?” And the reason was, she, the reason she gave me was completely different from my intention behind those works. That was a moment that gave me a lot of feelings. There was some feelings of, ah, as an artist, I’m not ready to sell my work. Because when I sell this, they will belong to other people. The narrative will belong to them. And then I was feeling like, I am glad that the narrative of my work is not that narrow. It could be translated to a lot of different feelings.

So, in one of the pieces that she bought was, was just me drawing three people, that I called that as, um, three is half of the infinity. Because it’s kind of half of the infinity sign. So, that was actually a project that I was exploring about, uh, polyamory, or, you know, open relationship thinking. Like, what does it mean to have a regular relationship? Can we think about different type of relationship interactions? So, that was actually my intention behind that work. And then I ask her, “Why do you buy that piece?” And she said, “I have three kids. This totally reminds me of them.” And I was like, “Okay!” Of course, I didn’t share with her about my intention behind it, because, and the title itself, I think, works for me and worked for her, both ways. So, that was a moment that I remembered that really, really vividly.

Liam: And do you think that that’s changed how you relate to the work? This kind of balance between, like, the intent that you’re putting into it, and the way that it’s received.

Qianqian: Yeah. I think that’s sort of like, when I start to sell my work, and start to hear people’s understanding of it, that was a time I realized I need to do more internal work to make sure that I’m making the pieces for myself. Because sometimes, I know that the buyers or collectors opinion will affect the way I do things, and I know you will, I will probably get affected. But I really want to protect my inner self that I don’t want to make work actually for other people right now. I think a lot of work I have to do is just like, I need to let them out. And I really don’t care if it’s going to get sold or not.

Liam: Within this work, how you harnessed the interaction of the materials that you’re using, so ink, water, and paper, in shaping these pieces, and there’s, I would say, maybe like a slightly unpredictable nature about that sometimes, and I’m interested in the unique interactions that might be afforded by the other media that you’ve worked with, particularly the digital or technological ones.

Qianqian: Yeah. I think ink and water, paper, this combo is really organic. It’s really unpredictable. Which is something I really like about it. And the technology, or digital medium have something that is always so precise. So, I was always being thinking about how can I combine these two things. So, there is one project with a science fiction book illustration that I did for a museum in China. They commissioned me to use ink and water to pain a dystopian future of a Chinese city when technology takes over, and when people are really lonely and isolated. So, that was the one time that I discovered this power of ink and water in the futuristic and technology technical context.

Another experiment that I been done with ink plus water and other technologies were, there was one piece on my to-do list that I want to go back to China and collect some smog to make some ink, and then using that ink to paint some works about the environmental issues. So, that’s kind of like alter the ink element in this sort of work using technology.

And some other type of work that I have done is using, alter their water element in this combo. So, for instance, I did a work that using ice instead of water to produce work. So, water is really unpredictable when I work with it, but actually, ice is even more unpredictable. And that has been fun, like, exploring different mediums. But I know there’s some other type of explorations that I want to do, that bring this kind of Chinese-ness and the future-ness together in some sort of format.

Liam: Yeah. And speaking of that, we were talking earlier about your work on Other Futures. For the listeners, I’m interested in what is that project, and also what was the motivation behind that?

Qianqian: So, Other Futures is an event that I’m producing right now at the Gray Area of Grand Center in San Francisco, California. So, that is a night of audio visual performance, include a piece by Chinese artist duo, Miao Jing and Jason Hou, called Zep Tepi. Zep Tepi means first occasion in Egyptian creation mythology. That piece talk a lot about what is the type of alternative future we can create using mythological and, uh, historical figures. And, that piece itself was the reason why I actually started producing this event. So, when I saw that piece, I realized, wow, I really want to bring that to the Bay Area. Because that piece currently is touring right now in China, and I felt that kind of future narrative is something I really want to add to the conversation we’re having in the Bay Area right now. Especially in the electronic music scene.

So, when I go to audio visual nights in SF or in Bay Area, I was seeing this very Western, minimal, geometry style. Then, when I saw this very mythological, oriental images from the Zep Tepi piece, I was like, I want to bring that here. Because when we talk about the future, when we talk about music, electronic music, can we have some other voices? Can we bring the otherness there? And then I’m working together with three local artists as well. Their work are talking about how can we challenge the mainstream future narrative using some non-western music and visual. Or, even some other piece a-about, like, can we imagine a future that’s 100,000 years from now? How could that be?

So, discussing the otherness in the future, or other futures, are something I’m very curious to explore right now. And I want to bring more of this kind of conversation to Bay Area.

Liam: In your conceptualization of these futures, do you think that otherness continues to be a concept?

Qianqian: I think, uh, otherness, or futures, the, the parole is something I’m heavily believed in. Because I don’t want to see a singular future. I don’t want to see a future that’s pictured by one group of people. I want to bring different voices at least to that conversation.

Liam: Going back to talking about the fact that your work touches a lot of different media, in an interview with Forth Magazine you said that the medium doesn’t necessarily matter, and that the important thing is the message, or the story you want to tell. And because your work expands many different media, I’m curious about your process for deciding which medium, or which tool is right for the story that you want to tell.

Qianqian: Yeah. I think it’s really a interesting question, because I’ve been asking this to myself a lot as well. And, I think sometimes it depends on what is the story I want to tell. The story, usually, is more important than the medium itself. So, I was making a lot of ink paintings. And at that time, I was actually working on a creative coding library called P5.js, the translation for it. So, I was helping a fellow that year called Kenneth Lim, to translate that library to Chinese. And then the creator of P5.js, Lauren McCarthy, was like, “Hi, Qia, can you actually make some work that we can feature on the home page?” And I was like, “Okay.” And then she was like, “You, you did some ink work. Can you just use P5 to maybe do something about ink?” And I was like, “Mm, interesting. I never thought about it.” Then, I was [inaudible 00:15:57] for her encouragement, and then I made a piece that just, very simple, 50 lines of code, to just draw a inky landscape, that code Shan Shui, using P5.js.

So, that was an example that how different medias got translated, or transformed in a way. The other main story that I’m thinking about, regardless of the media, is, like, what I mentioned before, is I’m just so curious about the vulnerability of people, the soft side of them. Because I think I’m, in general, slightly, or pretty much socially awkward. And I’m very curious about that part of myself, and I want to go dig more. When I meet people who are kind of awkward and vulnerable, I just find this kind of comfort. So, I kind of just want to render that sort of story in different dimension.

So, I have done, like, these sort of stories using ink and water, and using, you know, robot installations. And even using, you know, just HTML, and JavaScript. So, I think a lot of times, stories comes in first, and then the media will come, and a lot of times the media actually will just, you know, they are fluid. You can transform from the ink work to web work sometimes.

Liam: Yeah. I’m interested in that idea of differences and similarities between the kind of unpredictable, organic nature of the ink work, and the very structured, and structural nature of code. You mentioned in that same interview that technology could just be another way to create art. But I’m interested in those differences, like, what might make technology unique among this pure media. Does it provide new capabilities for expression, and if so, how do you think about that?

Qianqian: Yeah. I think the fact that I’m leaving Silicon Valley make me a really tech savvy person. So, technology for me, I think, really brings the accessibility and scalability to works. So, for instance, the ink that I painted on the web, uh, bad joke, that actually can be accessed by my parents in China. They can go see the interactive work in the website. Like, when you move around, the mountain moves and stuff. So, they were, like, impressed by that. But they were not really impressed by any of my ink work on paper. Because they can’t really see them, they don’t know how [inaudible 00:18:31]. So, the fact that technology really helped to, to make a lot of works really accessible is very magical moments.

So, there was this project that I was working on, it’s called Portrait of City. So, because of my background in architecture and urban design field, I’m always very curious about how a city could look like. So, I was working to collect a lot of influencer images in certain cities. And ironically, a lot of them look very similar. So, I was trying to use [inaudible 00:19:03] to train the machine to draw how the city could look like if we’re all using that set of influence images. Like, will we be able to generate a portrait of the city using that sort of database? So, this is something I felt like I’m so grateful that there’s a lot of open library out there that I can use, and give me this potential to think about a new way of giving a city a portrait.

Liam: You mentioned that technology can make your works a lot more accessible in the sense that the things that you’ve created for the web can be accessed by just about anyone, and experienced that way. But, that your ink works may not be the same, in the sense that someone can’t, like, really see it physically and understand how it feels. So, is there still something that technology can’t capture in that case? Is it the physicality of the work? Or, I guess I’m interested in the gap there.

Qianqian: Yeah. I think the physical and di-digital relationship is something I’ve been thinking a lot. With some of my work, uh, very primitive, and physical, and some of my work, uh, really digital. And, currently, I felt those other elements sometimes can transform. So, for instance, the ink paintings, after I did a lot of ink paintings, I can’t resist the urge to start to paint them in 3D. So, I used VR sculpting tool to start to paint, like, when I was doing ink on paper. So, I produced a set of my very blobby, lonely people in VR. And I then exported them, and 3D printed them. And then, of course, I did render, and, uh, the 3D printing, so that was a set of work that I have the ink painting, that in 2D, on paper, and I have this virtual sculpture that I made in VR, and did the 3D printed version of that.

So, that entire process, it kind of like a ritual for myself of, how can I transform the vulnerability or awkwardness from the paper to the physical world? And you will see, actually, that some people, there’s some of the sculpture that I did afterwards. So it always feel like this sort of different media can assist each other in a way, and create a flow of work, and then maybe on the flow, you would see different potentials of new type of work. But right now, a lot of this work has to account in their prototype, or experimental stage.

Liam: Yeah. But, something new was perhaps revealed by the process of translating something from 2 dimensions to 3.

Qianqian: And, or to physical world to digital world.

Liam: Yeah.

Qianqian: Yeah. It’s some question that I keep asking myself. But, maybe I can answer that question with a observation my friend told me. She told me, “You know, your work actually really resonated with a lot of people in Silicon Valley particularly. Because here, you know, technology is so advanced that everybody is talking about [inaudible 00:22:15], and AI, and, you know, self-driving car. Then you work about, oh, actually, if you were vulnerable on Friday night home alone, petting cats.” So, that capture actually really resonate with a lot of people.

So, that kind of vulnerability that I express in the physical work resonate with a lot of people who spend a lot of time in the digital technology world, in a way.

Liam: Yeah. So, although we always have Friday morning, and Friday afternoon with the technology that’s shaping our lives, there is still Friday night.

Qianqian: Yeah.

Liam: I want to close by asking about the future. I’m interested in how you see your work and your pursuits continuing to evolve as technology continues to change, and perhaps as human vulnerability continues to stay the same.

Qianqian: Yeah. I think alternative futures are something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, particularly single futurism. Like, because I think the fact that at least you’re trying to figure out why did I pick up my ink and a brush in the first place, and second place. So, I’ve been thinking about how does that affect where I am right now in my life. And I think the Chinese-ness of the ink, the water, the paper, is something so embedded in me, and I really want to understand more about my root, meanwhile, understand more about how this root will guide me to the future.

I can share some books that I’ve been reading a lot. One of them is called Techno-Orientalism. It’s about alternative future in the oriental world with a lot of science fiction and futuristic writings. So, this sort of future reconstruction is something that I find very interesting. Meanwhile, in the future of my work, I know that I want to do a lot of things about China, about technology over there, about social justice over there, about gender inequality over there, about how I am as just one single human being in that grander narrative.

Liam: And what are your plans for that?

Qianqian: Um, so, right now I’m working as a fellow at Processing Foundation. So, my project is about to make P5.js, which is a library that I mentioned earlier, more accessible in China, particularly in the under presented woman and non-binary group. The reason why I want to do that, is because most of the education resources in the Western world are not very accessible in China, because most of the social medias and, uh, video sites, are not accessible there. So, the fact that I learned coding by myself watching YouTube videos is actually a huge privilege compared to a lot of my friends back in China.

So, in that project I am working on right now, I am recording myself teaching quick coding in Chinese, and I’m going to release some on Chinese website so everybody can have access to that. So, my goal of that project, like, my personal goal for that project, is to teach my mom how to code. She doesn’t speak English. She has never seen anything from YouTube, so I’m wondering if there’s something that I can teach her to do. And I always felt if I can teach my mom to code, I can probably teach a lot of people how to do that. So, this is one of the project that I felt like I’m working right now about the key words China, technology, feminism, woman, new type of future. Yeah. Thank you.

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

Qianqian: Thank you for having me.

Harvey Moon, New Media Artist

On getting to know your tools and the art only technology can create

In this episode, Liam speaks with new media artist Harvey Moon in his San Francisco studio. The duo discuss how Moon’s work reveals unseen properties of the world around us, the process of creating one’s own creative tools, and the kind of art that’s only made possible through collaboration with machines.

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Liam Spradlin: Harvey, welcome to Design Notes.

Harvey Moon: Good to be here.

Liam: So, to start off with, I’m going to ask what brought you to your current work. And also, how do you think the journey there influences the kind of things that you make?

Harvey: I think the journey started in the dark room. My father was a photographer. And when I was growing up, he built a dark room for my sister and I in the basement. And I use to spend hours and hours in there. And I feel like there was a lot of freedom and constraints in that tool, in that process, and I really fell in love with it. All of the techniques that you could experiment with and all of the different types of cameras and really the history of photography really excited me.

And as it started to evolve and digital became a lot more prevalent, the process and the art evolved with it. And so, the way I thought about photography in the dark room was very different than how I started thinking about photography digitally and how I started working with photographs using a computer and not a dark room.

And so, there was some organic growth. And as different things started fading in and out of my interests, it would combine in different interesting ways and kind of produce a new trajectory. And so, I don’t think I ever really had an intention of the work I would make today. It all sort of happened piece by piece just following different passions and putting them together. Um, but I think photography is really the, the beginning and the core of where, you know, a, a lot of my love for technology, and tool making and that process of making a final product really started.

Liam: So, you describe your work as being centered on the ways that technology can mediate how we perceive the world. And I want to start by getting in to what you mean by that.

Harvey: Yeah. I mean, it’s a big one. So, I think if you trace back a lot of the pivotal inventions that we’ve relied on, they’ve really extended or changed our understanding of the world. We can go back to photography and think about Muybridge and how he would use photography as a way of seeing things that we could never have seen otherwise. And now we kind of take that for granted. We know in our mind what a slow motion video looks like or what a horse looks like as it’s running.

But we couldn’t have known that unless those techniques had been invented. And through that, we were able to see beyond our own potential. You know, I, I was really driven to photography for that reason that you could perceive time in a different way. You could freeze time. You could use it in a sequence in creating animation and changed your duration of your experience of time.

You know, Henri Cartier-Bresson would talk about the decisive moment. There was always this one special second that you could only capture with a photograph. A photograph now is so drastically different than the way we can perceive the world, but we’re so accustomed to this that we have a, a really understanding of what a freeze frame is.

Liam: So, as you mentioned, there’s the idea that technology has historically been about extending our capabilities or unlocking new potential for us as humans. And I’m interested in how we can remain aware of those influences.

Harvey: I think it’s really important to recognize that everything we do has some impact on us. It’s kind of a collaboration where you collaborate with the tool or the machine, and then the tool sort of teaches you what it’s capable of. And we all have this relationship with a camera, or with a pencil, or a, a paintbrush, or if you’re a writer, a typewriter. We have … We learn how to use it. We learn how to type. We learn how to change your f-stop. We understand, you know, what pressure to give on your, on your paintbrush. We learn those things over time, and we learn what a tool can do and can’t do with those abilities.

And we kind of get this relationship. You have a favorite camera and you know just intuitively how it works, and it becomes a part of you. Your eye can just see through the lens. And at a certain point when you’re good at typing, your thoughts can just extend into the page.

So, I think we have this constant relationship to our tools that we kind of ignore and forget about, but all of those tools end up influencing how we use them. There’s only way to use a pencil, and you can’t go sideways. And you only have a certain number of letters to work with in language. And I think these sort of tools have constraints built into them that we should recognize when we are using them.

You know, a typewriter or the keyboard we see today was made to be slower because of how typewriters would jam if you type too quickly. And so, nowadays, we’re maybe limited by how our history of this invention has dictated our use of it. Whereas, we know there’s other faster ways of inputting text, but we’re kind of at the mercy of these technologies that have become so pervasive.

And I think it’s a really difficult question, because it’s really impossible to see how people will respond once they become accustom to it. And that’s why some things like cameras, which have been around for so long, have morphed into this tool that we’re really comfortable with. It fits your hand. It didn’t use to. It had to be done over years and years of experiment, and practice and trying. There’s no way that the original photographers could have imagined that a camera would be in everyone’s pocket.

So, it’s impossible to know what effect these technologies will have ten or 20 years down the future. But it’s important to recognize what impact we currently are having with these, at least to think about ten or 20 years down how it will impact everyone. And I think it’s hard to be aware of the momentum that can happen when something becomes so ubiquitous and the good or bad side effects of how those sort of technologies will start mediating the world. Probably an important topic for Google to consider. You know?

Liam: Absolutely (laughs).

Harvey: Like, these sort of tools are extremely powerful, and decisions that are made today will definitely have a lot of consequences, good and bad, ten years down the line. And it’s impossible to know, like, how the world will respond and reflect on these technologies.

Liam: You talked about the evolution of the camera and how it went from this, like, very manual large thing into something that fits quite naturally into your hand and seems like a natural extension of your expressive capabilities in some ways. I think we think about taking a picture as capturing something accurate when in fact it’s like a representation of something accurate. I guess I’m wondering how you think about, uh, the way that our relationship and understanding of the thing that we’re creating with the tool has changed because of how we’ve changed the tool, if that make sense.

Harvey: Oh, what is the feedback loop.

Liam: Yeah. Since cameras have become so easy to use, maybe we’ve lost sight of the fact that you can create something with a camera that is unique and cannot be captured in another way.

Harvey: Well, I think there is a couple points there. I definitely notice a different value to images. Before when I would work in the dark room and you were shooting 35 shots to a roll, you had some sense of value with each shot, you know, actual monetary value because this shot would cost money for film, and processing, and, uh, chemicals. And so, you knew that each picture you took was limited, and ephemeral, and, you know, it was on something physical. And that, in a sense, gave it a different weight of value. There was only negative that could exist.

Once we went digital, it really shifted our perception of these images and, and this sort of media into something that was a lot more readily available. So, I think, uh, you know, when we’ve shifted to a digital realm, we’ve taken accessibility and ubiquity over the individual, the physical, the tangible.

Liam: What do you think the implications are of that?

Harvey: Well, I think there’s, there’s a couple things. I think it’s a natural growth. I think there’s always going to be a time that we become accustom to our technologies, our tools, and then we can grow from that. And it extends our understanding of the world, and then we push you even farther.

It’s similar to, uh, photography. Telescopes have been a really great way of, of us to extend our vision beyond what we were capable of. And so, once we get an understanding of what’s possible and what’s up there in the sky, then our understanding, we reach this level of, “Okay, well, there’s a universe we’re in. You know, there’s a black hole in the center.” And now we’re able to photograph black holes. So, I think there’s some really interesting growth that we just have where we will become accustom to it, and then we just yearn more and we’re always growing and evolving with these tools. As I said before, like, digital technology has made us value these images less, but it’s made it a lot more accessible.

Liam: Yeah. Totally.

Harvey: But, yeah. I mean, I think who am I to say what is, like, a good outcome or a bad outcome based on these technologies. I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to grow and incorporate these tools into our lives and then add more and extend our ability even further. And I think we’re never going to be satisfied with our current level of understanding our reality. We’re always going to push our abilities and our senses farther into the universe.

Liam: (laughs) Speaking of the universe, (laughs) it strikes me that your work also deals a lot with our relationship to more fundamental aspects of existence like time and space. In particular, the slow scan project seems to be concerned with how we experience time and place and also using technology to, again, expose to a way of looking at these fundamental mechanics in a way that we couldn’t before. So, first for listeners, I’d like to get a description of what slow scan is.

Harvey: It’s a software-based video work that continuously grabs from security cameras around the world. It takes 12 hours of historical imagery and it collapse it into a single frame. So, what you see in the photograph is a bunch of interspersed slices, each one a different moment that consecutively creates one photograph. And in that image, you’ll see both sunrise and sunsets simultaneously.

And in the live version, which I have a couple on the wall you can see, it will continuously update throughout the day. And so, you’ll never have the same image twice. And that image is constantly flipping through hours of the day. So, I think with our understanding of time, we can only really perceive it in one way. We can only perceive time linearly. And there’s no other way that we know how without the help of tools to experience time or flash back in time. And we can never go in the future.

I was thinking about new ways that we could use tools to extend our ability of sensing time and existing by putting time together and making new layers of time that shows how things can change and adjust in a way that we couldn’t perceive before. There’s another piece that, that’s kind of similar to that. I had … I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Drawing Machine Project. Did you see some of that?

Liam: Oh, yeah.

Harvey: So, these are all robot created drawings. And so, one of the more recent drawing machines I had was a robot installed in Antwerp. And it was in a six month installation in a museum where the robot would be hanging on the wall and drawing one line per day. And each line was about five meters long, and it was sensing the amount of light that came into the space. And so, over the course of six months, you would see the seasons adjust the length of the day represented by this line. You couldn’t see the pen moving. If you walked up to it, it was moving so slow that for any of us to look at it, it would look like it wasn’t moving at all.

But I don’t think the piece was for that experience. It was for you to come back a few weeks, a few months later and to see that progress and to recognize that we could not make a work like this. This work could only be built in a six month continuous drawing 24/7. And that level of existence of time is way beyond our understanding or our perception but in a very simple poetic way.

Liam: There’s something in there about, like, in contrast to using technology to augment our own skills. In some cases we allow technology to take on its own skill by itself.

Harvey: Yeah, so I think, you know, people have asked me this a lot with my work, especially with The Drawing Machine Project is, am I trying to put artists, you know, out of business. Am I trying to build tools and machines that make art obsolete? And I think I mean to do quite the opposite. I intend to show what we’re capable of in relation to what a machine might be capable of and how we might approach the same issue in a completely different way.

And through seeing those differences, we can start to recognize and appreciate the sort of things that we’re really good at. Uh, and I think we can continuously see that. I think with … especially with a lot of this AI machine learning algorithms we’re seeing today, there’s always some uncanny valley of what it’s able to do and what we’re able to understand. And it further accentuates our differences and what our abilities are in relation.

So, I think there’s a lot of fear these days about, you know, like is our technology taking over our skills and abilities and what we’re good at. And I think there’s always going to be room for us to show our strengths and to recognize what a machine isn’t correct for, isn’t good for, or what are some things that technology can teach us about ourselves or how we interact with it. I think there’s more lessons to be learned than existential dread to be gained out of the technologies that we have in our world.

Liam: Sure. Perhaps by creating a robot that creates art, we might discover something new that we can do. And there’s also, like, a question about who did create the art. You know?

Harvey: Yeah. I’ve really liked that question. I don’t want to answer that question.

Liam: (laughs)

Harvey: I’d rather that question be open. And, and I’ll say that the way I think about it is like a collaboration. So, you know, when I build a, a machine that draws, there’s a lot of trial and error and changing to my code and my algorithms. And I feel like the intention and the idea is never … it’s never something that I completely know. I, I always have to leave something up to the machine. And there’s always some play that I’ve built in so that something unexpected will trigger another insight or another interesting element.

So, I’m never trying to build something that’s perfect. You know, if I was thinking about that, I’d be building printers. I’m, I’m building a drawing machine in, in the way that I want it to be drawing and producing something as it, as it builds. So, for me, I always see this as, like, a partnership where I kind of embed my idea. I’m the architect of what should happen. But once it’s released and once I start it, I’m hands off and I let the machine run its course and fulfill the algorithm as best it chooses. Sometimes that takes months to complete a drawing. Sometimes it’s just a few weeks. And it’s sometimes hard for me to know how long it’ll take. But I really like that sort of anticipation that it’s not all me controlling everything that’s going on.

And I, I like to kind of relate it to the work of Sol LeWitt who use to make these wall drawings. And the wall drawings were a really interesting conceptual project where he would write the instructions for what the artwork would be and he would send them to the museum, and it was up to the museums installers to interpret those instructions and create the work. And he would create a detachment between the idea and what the work ended up being.

And I feel that relationship is really prominent in software generated art where the idea becomes the machine that makes the art, in his own words, where the idea is the code and, and the algorithm that starts it. And the work that comes out is, is kind of the epitaph of that process.

Liam: So, do you believe that the code and the machine are art themselves?

Harvey: Absolutely. The way I, I like to think about it is the machine is enacting a performance. So, in a gallery or in a museum, you can come in, watch it create the work and perform its action. And so, in that case, it’s a sculpture. It’s performing the work. And then the drawing is really just an artifact. It’s a representation of what happened.

Um, so there’s layers to it. There’s the process. I want to be more transparent, and I want to reveal what created that piece. And I think one of the really important things about it being a drawing is that you’re embedding a space and time into the piece. So, whereas a digital piece can exist indefinitely and infinitely, a drawing can only exist in one place at one time. And it took time to create. And I like to make sure that each piece is embedding a little sense of its own place and time of where it was created. That might mean incorporating data sets of what’s happening around, whether it’s light, or radio frequency waves, or some sort of external input that informs the drawing and embeds that sort of sight specific time and space into the piece. So, each drawing ends up being completely unique and based off of where and when it was made.

Liam: We’re recording here in your studio, and behind you on the wall is a drawing that you pointed to earlier that’s composed of a lot of lines and curves. And I want to get a little bit better idea of how that was made and what it’s made out of.

Harvey: Sure. So, that project is called Sinew, and it was series of drawings that was made using a software defined radio. So, a software defined radio is a fancy car radio that you connect your computer. And instead of hearing audio, it listens to the digital signals transmitted through the airwaves. And you’re able to tune it not just to the radio frequencies but also to GPS, or wifi, or Bluetooth, or GSM or all sorts of different radio waves that permeate through our world.

And they’re completely invisible. And all of these technologies and all of these frequencies that we rely on are flowing through us and through our world constantly. And the project was an aim to visualize those invisible muscle structures or the invisible sinew that kind of makes up our world. And the project grabs this data set wherever it is and in real time converts it into a line drawing.

Harvey: We’re actually taking that data and interpreting it into an abstract representation of that data. So, you’re not going to be able to look at it and say, “Okay, that’s a wifi and that’s a radio.” But it is informing the line work and how these lines are put together. And so, what you see is this very unique formation of the current spectrum in that area. And here in San Francisco, there’s a lot of activity. So, everywhere I do this piece, you get a very different result. And I think there’s something really interesting about the time and place of those invisible frequencies embedded into this project into this final drawing.

Liam: We talked about how when you approach a tool, like a paintbrush or a typewriter or something like that, that over time through your experience with that tool, you learn certain things about its behavior, and capabilities, and how you can use it to create things. And I’m interested, again, we’re sitting in your studio and there’s all sorts of things around like moving and blinking. And it strikes me that you work with a number of different tools. And I’m interested in what you’ve learned from these unique tools that you choose to work with.

Harvey: Well, that’s a big one. I think it becomes a bigger question, because more and more things are being invented every day that I have to keep an eye on-

Liam: (laughs)

Harvey: … (laughs) and keep note of. I think I’ve always considered the tool as a means to produce an idea or to fulfill a project. And so, it’s always been conceptually based initially. And then I’ll try and find or invent a tool that fills that need. So, I try to be a little more proactive about what best fits what I need to convey. And that starts an entire process of creating, and learning, and generating this tool and working with it. And it might take years before I get to where I feel like the idea has come to fruition.

And, you know, part of me really likes the slow process. But it’s really picking and choosing different pieces that eventually grow and become something. I’m never thinking about the tool first and saying like, “Okay, well what does this do? How does this change how I interact with it?” It’s more so like, “Okay, I’m going to make something new and see what happens when I play with this,” or, “I’m going to see what comes out because I made this change.”

Case in point, there’s an electronic drum set that I built behind you. I used to play drums for a number of years, and once you switch to an electric drum set it’s really a different instrument. Same thing with photography. The way in which you use it ends up really changing, and you don’t know until you start playing with it. And it’s not something that you come into expecting. You, you sit down and you, you start playing and you feel this totally different emotion about it, and you play differently.

So, I think it’s always kind of an unexpected. You have to be open to being playful. And, and especially if you’re making your own tools, you have to be open to failing with them. And, you know, I, I think there’s a lot of freedom when you’re making your own tools or software or hardware that you can kind of shape it based on your experiences with it. Um, if you can’t tell, I’m, I’m kind of a stickler for DIY. Like, I prefer to have that control. If I use someone else’s something, there’s always a little bit that I would wish I could change. And there’s always something that through using it, I feel like I could do a little differently. So, I end up sort of making my own tools for everything,-

Liam: Yeah.

Harvey: … everything that I do.

Liam: So, it sounds like you almost approach the interaction with the tool from the opposite perspective where you might say, like, if you were envisioning what we would call a painting, you might think, “I need something to deposit paint on a surface.”

Harvey: Yeah. And I think it’s much more, like, starting from a conceptual standpoint of, like, “Okay, I want to think about this, this process of painting as, you know, what does it take to make a gesture on a piece of paper?” And I’ve done experiments with, with painting machines. And I think it starts with like, “Okay, well what are the sort of physical influences that we put into a brush and how we hold it that I might want to see about emulating?”, or like, “What sorts of things can we, can we do really well that I might want to try with a machine and watch it fail or learn from that?”

Um, the painting machine was not a, a great painter, but it really kind of taught me a lot of, like, what it takes to be gentle with a brush or what it takes to understand the physicality of it. And you can see that sort of inhumanness in the paintings. It doesn’t have that sort of gentle touch that we do.

Liam: So, understanding that as humans we will never be satisfied, uh, by the amount of technology we have and the impact that we have made on our own skills and the world around us. As we move into a future where we have this constantly expanding set of technological capabilities, how do you see the concepts behind your work evolving?

Harvey: It’s important that we’re more conscious of how these tools influence us, because they’re only becoming more ubiquitous. The rate in which these technologies are becoming, you know, coming into our lives is only accelerating. And I don’t think people are spending enough time considering their effects or how much it’s changing our world and how rapidly. I think that formulation in my work is only going to become stronger. The value of being introspective about our technology is only going to be stronger.

I feel like, uh, I’m very excited about taking this approach with my work. And it’s really exciting that what I’ve been passionate about is only accelerating and continuing. And may-maybe a little daunting as well to keep up with the changes that are happening, but I think the statement and the intention behind my work is only becoming more powerful.

Liam: Do you think that our experience of the world is already being informed by the influences that these new technologies like AI and machine learning have?

Harvey: Absolutely (laughs). I mean, it’s naïve to think that we live outside of them. I think it’s … You know, I understand that maybe for some people they feel like it’s not influencing them-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Harvey: … or it’s not impacting their daily life, but what’s happening behind the scenes that we don’t acknowledge is so huge. And without having that understanding or without having the intellectual curiosity of understanding or, or doing your research, it’s really impossible to see behind, you know, the curtain of, you know, what a, what a cloud really is. What is it that your data does when you pick up your phone.

I think it’s vitally important that people start understanding this a bit more, because we are so reliant on these tools that we’re really forgetting how important they are to our lives. And I, I think that’s a big part of what I want to do with my work is, like, recognize there, there’s a lot of invisible infrastructure that we rely on, we, we exist on. So, I think it’s vitally important that we are paying attention to the systems that dictate our world. And at least personally for me as an artist, I find it to be, I find it to be a social responsibility to make work about the systems that dictate the world we live in.

Liam: All right. Well, thank you again for joining me, Harvey.

Harvey: All right. Thanks for having me.

Conor Grebel, Bedtimes

Artist Conor Grebel unpacks the relationship between his personal experiences and creative work

In this episode, Liam speaks with Conor Grebel about how lived experiences inform and are conveyed through creative work.

Our conversation traces Conor’s journey toward creative work and the “ingredients” that help him craft soothing art for himself and others.

Note: The first half of this episode deals with topics of panic attack disorder, anxiety, and psychological abuse.

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Liam Spradlin: Conor, welcome to Design Notes.

Conor Grebel: Oh, thank you.

Liam: To start out with, I wanna know about the motivation and the journey that has brought you to your current work and how that has influenced the sort of things that you’re making.

Conor: Yeah. It’s a bit of a story. That’s okay. Yeah.

Liam: Yeah. Tell it.

Conor: Um, I wasn’t always gonna be an artist. That wasn’t always gonna happen.

I was born and raised in Southern California, and then my parents moved me when I was ten years old to Wisconsin, which is not inherently a bad thing, but I think the place we went heavily affected my journey a little bit. We moved to Wisconsin in a place that individuality and creativity was not respected at all. At first, I wanted to be an entomologist actually, and a lot of that still kind of exists in me. I’m really, really interested in insects, so, I wanted to be an entomologist, and then, when I got into understanding that I was terrible at studying, that died.

I always loved drawing, always wanted to be an artist, but going to a high school where being a creative, unique person, was grounds to like, beat you up, and then, my high school didn’t have an arts program at all. My arts program was just like drawing instead of taking notes.

So after that, all hopes of wanting to be an artist, all confidence in that was completely gone. So I graduated high school with like, a D average. Didn’t have plans to go to college. Absolutely did not think I could be an artist. And I traveled a bit. I traveled a bit and went to Japan and I was decent at speaking Japanese. I would categorize this part of my life as like, the times in which I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and I didn’t have any confidence. Kind of like, whatever roles that society put out there, like, “You need to go to college,” “You need to do this,” “You need to work in business or something.” Because I had no definition of myself, I just assumed that stuff.

So like, I went to Japan. I thought “Oh I can speak Japanese. That means I can go to college now.” And that meant I was doing something right with my life. So, I decided to get into school, with the help of my high school teachers, and they had confidence in me that I did not. So they wrote some recommendation letters for me and they got me into UW Milwaukee through a second chance program, which means that for my first year of school, I had to take special classes. It was pretty cool, because everyone that was in that class really appreciated being in college, so I made some really good friends there. Everyone there was not supposed to go to college, but they’ve been given a chance to do it. They had to take these special courses to like acclimate themselves to getting good grades and being a good student again or something. But, it was a really cool class actually. It was really awesome.

I, at all points in my life, don’t relate to anyone of my generation. When I was in high school, I hated high schoolers. When I was college, I fucking hated college kids.

Liam: (laughs)

Conor: I never went to parties. And I definitely don’t like people my age right now.

Anyways, this is all leading towards me hitting rock bottom and then giving up on listening to what anyone else tells me to do. And then deciding to be an artist. That’s leading towards that. But this is like me, ignorantly walking towards that bottom.

So, studied Japanese language. I think I was pretty good at it. I was able to pass into a higher level. Transferred to UW Madison, which is a really good college, and like the second in the nation for learning Japanese, and I went as hard as I could in the wrong direction. This is me going as hard as I can in the wrong direction with not any concept of what I’m gonna do with my life later. Like, ah, I’m studying Japanese ’cause I can do it. It’s the only thing I know how to do well. So, I graduated with a Japanese language degree in six, (laughs) yeah, it took six years because I was paying for college and working and a terrible fucking student. I’m a bad, bad student. I’m really bad at school.

So I graduated, and this is key in explaining why I make the art I make now and what informs the decisions I make and why I even want to be an artist.
The key is that in college, of course I was very depressed, and I didn’t know it at that time, but one of the most driving forces in my life has been there since the beginning, and it started to first rear its head in college, which is panic attack disorder. And, in college for the first time, it showed itself in a way that I didn’t understand at that point yet.

For some reason, every time I would ride the buss to school in the morning, if I could not sit on a seat, I couldn’t breathe. And, I was standing on the bus. It was ever morning. It didn’t make any sense. I w-, I didn’t know how to diagnose it, ’cause it wasn’t like, oh, there’s something wrong with me because I, at random times, would feel nauseous and lightheaded, I’d be like “Oh. Something’s wrong, like physically.” It was like a mild panic attack before I knew what a panic attack was. And it would happen every morning. It didn’t make any sense.

As soon as someone got off a seat and I was able to sit down, it like, washed away from me. As soon as I got off the bus, I could breathe again. I went to a doctor at the time that said, “It sounds like you’re having panic attacks.” And I’m like, “Because I’m riding the bus? I love riding the bus. Like, it’s fun.” And I just kind of let it go.

Of course, this is at a time in college where things were very stressful. I was not meant to be in school, I think. And, every step I took in that direction, was like I was running out of a fuse. It was fuel in my body that was depleting that’s not replenishable. And I was just going in the wrong direction. And every step dug me deeper and deeper towards this black oil that was deep in my body that is panic attack disorder.

So it started to rear its head. I was in a terrible living situation. I wasn’t sleeping. And, uh, for the next year or so of college, I was in a relationship that was really good, for the most part it was gone. But, um, I decided to get a job in Japan. And I remember before I had left for that job, I was fishing, and I loved fishing, and, um, I remember thinking, “I don’t want to leave America. (laughs) I love it here. I don’t want to leave. Why am I doing this?” But I kinda like just ignored that and I went to Japan.

It was a terrible decision. And for the longest time in my life, what happens in Japan, was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I resented it, and I was angry. But of course, now, with perspective, it was a gift. But, I go to Japan to work for a toy company. And I worked in the creative toy department as a toy developer, which I thought was gonna be creative and fun. I always wanted to have a creative position, and this is when I started to have daily panic attacks. I started smoking heavily again, I was drinking heavily again, my ribs were showing. The worst, worst thing though, was that I was brought there through this American HR employee in Japan, and I went through for three months, the most severe abuse in my life. Like mental abuse. This person made a point of making my life hell there in a way that would be illegal in the United States.

Because in a lot of these companies, superiority, you know, and seniority is something that you can’t question. You just kind of have to do whatever they say. So this person could insult me on a daily basis. He could accuse me of things. He would intentionally create situations in which I had to apologize for stuff I didn’t do just to embarrass me in front of my co-workers. He would make up stories and make me apologize for them. He would tell me I’m worthless and I don’t deserve anything that I’ve gotten to this point. On a daily basis. He’d walk into a room, and he’d ignored everything I said, walk up to the person next to me and then laugh at nothing they said, and then walk away. He’d called me into private meetings and accuse me of stealing company secrets and he’d say, “I know you’ve told some company secrets and I know that you have them on an SD card.”

I was like, “I don’t.”

He’s like, “Well you could have deleted them.”

“I, wait, I didn’t do that.”

He’s like, “How do I know? That’s illegal. I have the power right now to send you home.”

He’d do stuff like, take this book on like their corporate sustainable programs. It was a giant, thick, heavy technical Japanese guideline book, and as I was leaving, he was like, “Translate this.”

I’m like, “Oh. Okay. I’ll start translating it.” You know, come back to work the next day, of course it’s like six o’clock, he gives it to me and I didn’t expect to work on it all that night.

He’s like, “Did you finish translating the book?”

I was like, “No.”

“Did you go home last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you go home last night if you didn’t translate that book?”

It was like, “Fuck man.” Just like everything. It was killing me.

It was like, from the overt to the subtle, he was abusing me, and he hated me. And halfway through, I broke. Everything he said to me was like, the first half I was like, “This is wrong, something’s wrong with this.” And the second half, after he threatened me so many times, I just gave up, and my fight or flight broke. And all I had was nothing.

Eventually, he fired me. Went back home to America, and then for the next two years, the aftermath of that experience set in, and I wasn’t sleeping. I was having daily severe panic attacks, and I had lost a lot of weight, became extremely agoraphobic, which is not necessarily the fear of leaving a house, although it ends up being that because it just means like the fear of encountering something that will trigger a panic attack. And at that point, it was everything, you know. A stressful time in my life. It was just riding the bus. But now it was like, my leg tingling, standing in line, the temperature being a little bit off, being slightly out of breath, not knowing who touched my water glass before I touched it.

And like, all these crazy phobias became part of life. It was very tough. And my body broke down. My chemistry changed. My thyroid got destroyed from all the stress. And ever since I came back from Japan, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol, don’t even take ibuprofen anymore. My body just changed after that point. And this is where it’s leading into it.

Panic attack disorder became everything in my life. It was all I was battling with for two years and I still am now. This was like 12 years ago and I just got out of therapy last year, because I have relapses and stuff. But, my life became so hyper focused on things that… I would say that I became so sensitive that things that made me slightly uncomfortable before made me feel like I was gonna die now. And things that were slightly relaxing before, were like a drop of water on tongue in hell kind of thing, you know? It was like they saved my life, whereas I enjoyed sparkling water before, now sparkling water helped me get out of a panic attack. It just basically saved my life. I didn’t really enjoy crowds before, now crowds made me feel like I was gonna die.

So I would say that this tool in my mind became hyper sharpened, and it was a gift. It was painful. The world became this landmine of things that I would step on and then it would just send me into hours of panic attack, but it also became this beautiful catalog of things I knew that would make my life feel so much better.

So, things like the sound of a creek, or the sound of like hollow pieces of wood knocking against each other, or the ways in which petals rotate around flower, or one point shadows on like a natural, organic surface. Those things, I may have not noticed it too much before, but I loved them so much they became like a driving force in my life.

And so, at rock bottom I decided, this is what I get for going so far in the wrong direction. This is what I get for not having confidence and not wanting to do what I want to do with my life. This is my punishment. And my reward is that I don’t give a shit about that anymore. And now a core tenant in my life is, I don’t care what you want me to do. I’m gonna do what I need to do to be happy, what I’ve always wanted to do.

And I didn’t give up and I started learning an- the tools of animation and design, and I emerged, literally, from a basement two years later and I decided to jump into the field. And now I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to make those sounds that I love, because they’re not just sounds I enjoy, they’re sounds that save my life. They’re not just visuals I enjoy, they’re visuals that save my life.

And I think about them all the time because not only have they literally gotten me out of grips of death, and it makes me very emotional to think about how fucked up that is, but that is like, that’s just what my life has turned into, but I’ve been given a gift as a result of that. And I, I love that about my life. I love my life. I actually do really love my life, and it’s been given to me through all this suffering, I guess. But, these things, these visuals that I make and these sounds that I make, they are directly related to things that I feel have saved my life, because I’ve had panic attacks that were so severe and so long that I didn’t think that I wanted to live anymore. That’s happened many times, but I design with a lot of passion from that experience I guess.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: That was a long story. Sorry.

Liam: No, never apologize-

Conor: Yeah.

Liam: …for that.

Conor: That’s why I design what I design. That’s why I make the music that I make.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: That’s where that stuff comes from.

Liam: I don’t think I have ever gotten as complete an answer to that question. (laughs)

Conor: ’Cause I think about it all the time.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: (laughs) I have to. It’s not like a passing decision just like, “Oh, it ended up like that.”

Liam: You’re creating these things out of a place of experiencing the things again that have helped save your life, but you’re also giving those things to other people.

Conor: Yeah, and that’s the best reward I’ve ever gotten on music that I’ve made. Like the It’s a Trick song, my first album, which I made while seeing the most successful therapist, and I don’t mean his personal success, I mean like the most success on my life was a therapist called Dr. Bob, and he changed a lot and he made me love myself again, and he redirected me towards how to think about my art properly.

And I was working on this album and I was struggling, you know? I was trying to make it. You know, I still get lost even though I have this big revelations, I still get, I still get lost, like you know, I was trying to make music. I was trying to make it sound a certain way. I was trying to like, “How am I gonna make it big on Sound Cloud?” You know? At that time, I was thinking, you know, “How am I gonna make it sound like these other artists who are really successful?”

And he’s like, “What are you doing? Stop that shit. What do you want to hear? Why are you trying to make a song?” It’s not a destination, it’s a journey. You know? He got really Ellen Watts on me. He’s like, “Why are you trying to make a song? Why don’t you just like go play something you like and don’t care if it turns out to be something that’s a product or not. Just like, go home, play some tones that sound good, and don’t have a goal with it. Just enjoy it.”
And I started to think about that more. And everything he said, he would say it and I’d be like, “Yeah, you’re fucking wrong,” you know? And then I would go back and then during the week, before [inaudible 00:15:33], “Yeah, he’s fucking right,” you know. (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Conor: He’s always fucking right. He’s an awesome guy. But, I took that to heart, and then that became how I made this album. That’s where all the sounds of my music came from, from that conversation, where it’s like, “Yes, I love hearing these things. I love when it wants to be this way. It doesn’t need to have the structure or fit into some category that I’m trying to fit to. Stop. You’re still trying to fit a role that society has define.”

So, I changed that. I made that album. That album was made in a time where I was in a very low point in my panic attack disorder. And he was helping me through it, and the music was helping me through it, and I still get Sound Cloud messages like, not as much anymore because it’s just like, you know, four years ago, five years ago, but I still get them like once every few months where someone says, “I was battling with depression, this song helped me so much. I was battling with anxiety, this song helped me so much,” and that is all I care about.

I don’t ever sell my music. People ask to use it for whatever. I don’t ever tell them they have to pay for shit. That is worth it 100%. And, yes, to answer your question, in a long form again-

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: …yes, people do get that out of it and that means the world to me.

Liam: Do you think that there’s something about your mindset and the process of creating this music that somehow translates into the product itself and… I guess what I’m interested in is how that connection gets formed that, uh, the people would have those experiences with it.

Conor: Oh. Yeah, might be more thoughtless when I design. I don’t wanna give myself too much credit. I think it just happens naturally is what I’m trying to say.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: You know, maybe I design thoughtlessly, maybe selfishly, but those things come through somehow.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: With that song in particular, I used to record him, and I sampled some of the things he would say.

Conor: It’s a trick. You just flip it and then you’d understand, you just enjoy. And that’s what he said in the song and maybe those, maybe those direct messages helped, but I try to infuse that stuff intentionally with a lot of my music, but what people get out of it, it must just happen naturally. I don’t want to give myself credit as some like master manipulator of emotions. I think that, that is just all I am, so what I create must be filled with that.

Liam: Yeah. I’m interested in this idea of somehow, unintentionally, there was some intangible thing that is conveyed through our work.

Conor: Yeah. I guess if that’s all the ingredients you have-

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: …that’s all the product’s gonna have. (laughs)

Liam: Yeah, I guess so.

Conor: You know you’re… That’s what you’re cooking with, and they’re like, “Oh, you put a lot of, you put a lot of salt in this, huh?”

It’s like, “That’s all I got. I’m sorry.”

Liam: Yeah. (laughs) Do you think that there’s similar processes at play in the work that you do with animation, for instance?

Conor: Yeah, definitely. I did focus a lot on music in explaining this, but I meant this a lot with visual too, because it’s always paired for me. My dream project in all ends, for anything, is always to make music and then a visual component with it.

Liam: How do you view the relationship between audio and visual? Like, you say that you want to create one work that has the music and also a visual component. Do you think that those two are necessarily tied together, or do you perceive them together, or how are they related to one another?

Conor: Wow. Yeah. Interesting. I don’t know if I’ve really thought that deeply about it. I just… Hopefully this answers it. All I know is that I design some visuals, it has sound to it. I design some sound, it has visuals that I’m thinking of. They just, maybe always happen in tandem.

Liam: Yeah. Something that I’ve learned in type design is the idea of a design space-

Conor: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: …and that, when you design one style of a type-face, the other styles are like theoretically in the universe-

Conor: Yeah.

Liam: …somewhere, but you just haven’t captured them.

Conor: It’s like when you’re designing something, it’s pairing is always in your mind. Your Alpha Omega is not the thing you put on the page, but it’s what you page in tandem with what you’ve visualized the context around it. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Liam: Right. Yeah.

Conor: Yeah, that always happens. If I’m designing music, it’s got a space that I’m listening to it. And that’s actually, I’ve got an upcoming album, and that is the whole theory of the album is like, all of these songs are a place in nature, and a time in nature. All of these are like in the forest as the wind is blowing as a storm’s coming. That’s what this song is.

So, everything I make, it’s context is not limited to the product itself, but there’s a visual component or an audio component that’s always paired with it. Whatever I design visually sounds a certain way in my mind.

Liam: And it sounds like this pairing is not necessarily something that you have to think about during the creation-

Conor: I guess not.

Liam: …but that it’s just kind of there.

Conor: Yeah, through experience or imagination, it’s always there. Maybe it’s never been separate to me, but you can only work on one at a time sometimes, yeah.

Liam: To go along with that, do you know that thing that you’re creating is about the forest when the storm’s coming and like the breeze is blowing, or, or is that something that emerges as you create it?

Conor: It’s very easy, you know, the human mind is full of fallacy, and it’s very easy to post-rationalize-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Conor: …and then remember it as though it always happened that way-

Liam: Right.

Conor: …which I’m sure that does happen sometimes, um, but I want to say 50%, yes, but 100% before I start these sounds were experienced in some way.

Maybe it is just 100%. There’s a narrative that fully forms at the end, and the narrative isn’t always fully there in the beginning, but when in regards to sound, yes, especially because all my percussion has a memory attached to it because I’ve recorded it all-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Conor: …on a hike, or here and there. And I usually layer an ungodly amount of percussion. I love that lushness, just like in nature being in a forest. That lushness is overwhelming and relaxing. And I try to create that in music. Every sound has a memory to it. So, every knock of wood, every coin rubbing against itself, everything is a memory. So I listen to a song and I remember I was here, this is what it looks like, this is what the breeze was like when I recorded that. So, I guess a lot of it is, inevitably, tied to a physical experience with a physical place.

Liam: I also want to talk about how you apply these ideas of creating music and visuals in the same design space as one another to collaborative projects. We were speaking before the interview about the WoodSwimmer video-

Conor: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: …and how that was a collaboration where you created the music and someone else created the visual through like this long process. I want to talk a little bit about that.

Conor: Okay.

Liam: So I guess first of all like, how was that created?

Conor: This was a collaboration, and not a lot of videos on my site are sort of that collaboration, but he’s a genius stop motion animator. His films take 10 years to make, and I joke with him because for me, I can make, I can kick out a bunch of animations in a year, you know. Not all of them as deep as what he makes, but he’s got like three films left in his life. (laughs) I was always joke that you gotta pick them right, you know?

Liam: (laughs)

Conor: You gotta really think about them because you got like just a few left, uh, because he takes so damn long. But, WoodSwimmer, he came to me and he’s like, “I got this footage. I’ve just been recording footage.” And if you’ve seen WoodSwimmer, it’s just layers of wood, almost like a MRI scan, layers of organic body, and you see how the layers and veins of wood warp through like a Z-distance through the wood.

He set up this stop motion little robotic camera rig where he had a piece of wood facing the camera, lit right, and, um, he had a camera capture frame, shaved off just a super thin layer, capture another frame, a robotic mill shaved off another thin layer, capture another frame, and it would just run. I think he just kept the frame clean every time. I think it took like 5 to 10 minutes per frame, something like that, and it took half a year to a year to record everything, and he came to me with all this footage and he’s like, “I got all this stuff. I don’t know what to do with it.”

And I was like, “This is so fucking cool, dude. This is a lot that I care about. It’s so awesome. I’d love to make music for this. I’d love to edit it.” And so, uh, we worked together concepting what the piece would feel like and look like. And he shot some more, and I added things together and then tried to make music that felt hectic and like sawing and like eating through wood, and, uh, I really like the song how it came out.

It was a really good collaboration, and it exploded like everywhere on the internet. Even like GQ wrote about. It was very cool. That was fun. That was a fun collaboration. I would say I’m not like the best at collaborating. I don’t think I really am. The things I care about only exist in my mind and I don’t really care about sharing that, and it’s difficult to try to make someone else do that.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: I’m a terrible employee for that same reason. It’s really hard for me to care about something else someone else thought of, unless it like somehow is important to me. So, I don’t know if I’m that great at collaborating. I’ll always try to be, but that was a good collaboration. He’s just, he’s a master, man. He’s really good.

Liam: What was it like to approach that with the goal of creating music for it? How did you-

Conor: That is-

Liam: …translate that concept?

Conor: That is tough for me ’cause I’m only a few times have been commissioned I guess, now I wasn’t getting paid for this, but I guess it’s the same idea. It’s like, I want music for this thing that was born outside of my mind. And so, that always scares me. I feel like I can never really perform well, and I feel like I’ll fuck it up.

So, it was challenging. I just tried to think of like what it sounded like to move through wood and if that felt calming or scary and it just, it was kind of scary. It was like you’re ripping apart going through this like new world, destroying this wood. I tried to capture the sound of sawing and confusion and I had the song change up a lot. And I had a lot of really heavy sawtooth, no pun intended because that’s the wave form of the synth, you know-

Liam: Right.

Conor: …sawtooth synth and it’s got this really like buzzy like vvv-vvv, you know, sound to it. A lot of, it had a lot of air to it as well. And I tried to capture that feel of it, um, and I felt like it came through okay.

Liam: I also want to talk a little bit about some of your more purely visual work.

Conor: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: Like the Cal Academy of Sciences Vortex-

Conor: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: …that you created. What was I guess both the motivation and also what was the process like as you were creating it?

Conor: So, Cal Academy of Sciences is an awesome project. I love the academy over there, and this came across so serendipitously because I love science education. I love thinking skeptically about the world. Not cynically, which people always criticize me for. (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Conor: It’s not cynicism, it’s skepticism. It’s just about questioning information you have and respecting science and respecting education and respecting people with history and knowledge in certain things, and science education matters a lot to me, and I wanted to like change everything, just to work for the Academy of Sciences on this project, but that’s not financially pliable for them, or me even, but I saw a planetarium show and I thought, this is so cool. This is amazing. I’m gonna come up with a pitch for the Academy of Sciences that I want to come up with a purely like scientific inspired artistic experience. A way with connecting people to top level scientific concept, you know, and mathematics and biology. Just like the repetition of life on different scales. Just opening up people to basic scientific and mathematical concepts because a lot of my calming thoughts come from nature.

So, I wanted to make that happen really bad. I was coming up with this pitch. I talked to a friend of mine and he’s like, “Oh, I know the director of NightLife and the planetarium shows. He’s been coming up with the same idea.”

I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

So like we met, and we literally had the exact same idea. It was like, “Oh this is perfect. Let’s make it happen.”

So, I felt like in rare form, I got a bunch of friends together and tried to make something happen and was like, all right, get some friends together, be the organizer, produce, and design, and try to make everything mesh together well. And I was temporarily a mature designer at that point, and got everybody together to collaborate towards a common goal.

And it was very rewarding, and what you see that Vortex 2.0 show is a teaser, it’s a proof of concept that will hopefully turn into a much larger show. I’ve submitted a budget to the Academy of Sciences and it’s gonna be a slow journey, but I want this to be a reoccurring thing where we take information and concepts inspired by their research, inspired by science, things to trigger peoples’ curiosity. Don’t make it educational. Don’t make it like, “Did you know blah blah blah?” You know, and like explain something. Just take a core concept and then turn that into art in a way that maybe they don’t even like walk away from that knowing like, “Oh, now I know more about blank,” just kind of inspired and curious about like these forms and why this is happening. Somehow inspire curiosity towards science through a purely art music space.

Liam: Yeah. There’s something interesting in there about like creating something with the intent of not directly communicating maybe the scientific concepts-

Conor: Yeah.

Liam: …that you’re trying to convey, but just inspiring a sort of open ended encounter with the work.

Conor: Yeah.

Liam: I guess I’m interested in how you think about that, the possibility of creating something and then putting it into the world where people can encounter and experience it and perceive it in different ways.

Conor: ’Cause it’s really out of your hands.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: You know? However people think of it. Happens a lot with all major works of art, you know.

Liam: How do you think about that in relationship to your work? I mean, I guess ultimately it’s something that you must accept, but-

Conor: It is, but I do have high hopes that what I intend with it is how it’s perceived.

Liam: Right.

Conor: I always have high hopes, especially the more that you pregame a concept. I’ve got a project I’m working on right that I’m basically writing a small book on like the mythos of this world I’m building and how it relates to our existence.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: Death and life and the normal shit that I do. And I’m really hoping that it comes across like that, but same with Academy of Sciences, I’m not nailing into the forefront of the imagery, so maybe it will never come across but if I ever get the opportunity to explain it, hopefully I don’t always need to, but hopefully that adds a depth to it and a curiosity that drives people towards questioning things that I’ve been, that have inspired me towards certain pieces, you know.

Liam: Yeah. Maybe somehow these intangible, imperceptible ingredients that you’re working with are recognized.

Conor: Hopefully. That’s the, yeah, definitely, like I said, that’s like, I really do want that, you know.

Liam: Yeah.

Conor: I know it’s out of my hands, but I wouldn’t be doing it unless I had a mission, unless I had a mission statement for every piece and a way of thinking that I wanted people to share. It is about connecting.

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

Conor: Yeah.

Liam: This was great.

Conor: Yeah. For sure.

Katie Garcia and Dustin Payseur, Bayonet Records

Bayonet Records founders Katie Garcia and Dustin Payseur on collaborating with musicians

In this episode, Liam speaks with Katie Garcia and Dustin Payseur, who together run independent music label Bayonet Records.

Garcia and Payseur (who also leads the band Beach Fossils) break down the complex relationship between a record label and the creative work it supports, the qualities of sonic design, and the magic of releasing an album on your own terms.

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Liam Spradlin: Katie, Dustin, welcome to Design Notes.

Dustin Payseur: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Katie Garcia: Thanks for having us.

Liam: So, I want to start off the same way I always do by learning about each of your journeys. Um, I want to know basically, how you got to where you are creatively now, and how the path that you took there influences your work.

Dustin: It depends on how much back story we’re looking for (laughs).

Liam: All of it.

Dustin: I- I grew up in like, a very musical family. My mom’s Cuban, my family’s Cuban on my mom’s side and so, like, her father, my grandpa, he’s a percussionist, like, Latin percussionist and, um, he still performs. And my parents are both musicians. And, like, my dad has a recording studio, so I kind of grew up around all that, so music was just always in my life. And, um, yeah, I just started really young, you know, just self recording and working on stuff. And whenever I would record a little tape on my 4-track, I would put, like, a fake record label name on the back of it, you know? And I… that was, like, always my dream to record my own music and be able to release it myself. And it’s just something that I’ve always thought about as, like, the only option, you know?

Dustin: They had career day in school and everyone came to school in, like, suits and stuff like that, and I just showed up wearing, like, a Marilyn Manson t-shirt.

Katie: (laughs).

Dustin: And people were like, “Why are you dressed like that?” And I was like, “Because I’m going to be a musician” (laughs).

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Katie: That’s amazing. Tell everyone what your record label name was.

Dustin: Oh.

Katie: You had a few.

Dustin: There were a few. I mean, it’s dumb. I was, like, you know, a little kid, so it was, like, 420 Records.

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: Nice.

Dustin: And, like, Morbid Records with a backwards R and stuff like that.

Katie: (laughs) Yes, I love Morbid Records.

Dustin: Yeah.

Katie: That’s one of my favorite ones.

Katie: So, for me, I was just a huge music fan growing up. Every time I would get a new CD, I would open it up and just, like, read the liner notes, cover to cover, who did what, what are the lyrics. I was just constantly consuming music. And then when I got older, I actually studied film in school, so I moved to New York with the intention of, like, working in film. I worked for a set designer for a while. And then when that fizzled out, I just took a step back and was like, “What is it that I’ve always been passionate about?” And I was always going to music shows. I was like, “I should just work in music. It’s a field that I know for a fact that I love.”

So, I emailed a ton of record labels asking if they had any internships open. I even called Matador and they just laughed and hung up the phone, which I think is pretty funny.

Dustin: (laughs).

Katie: And pretty on-brand. And yeah, and then I emailed Captured Tracks, and they were like, “Yeah, actually, we could use some help,” so I started interning there. Um, I was interning there for, like, six months and then the girl that was the label manager at the time, Autumn, left to go move back to Detroit. And then I became the label manager, which was exciting and also scary. And um, that’s also where Dustin and I met.

And then yeah… And from then on, Dustin had always talked about wanting to start his own label. And so, it was around the time that we got married that we talked about it more seriously and we basically told everyone to just give us money as wedding gifts, and we used all of that money to start Bayonet. And that’s where we are today (laughs).

Liam: Nice. To start off with kind of a broad question, what would you say is the creative role of a record label?

Katie: Hoo, the creative role of record label? There are a lot of different things. You know, I think the creative role of record label is just helping an artist put their music out into the world so that they don’t have to think about that. You know, like, an artist should focus on the creative aspect of their art and working on songs, and maybe what they want the photography to look like. But, label can help facilitate some of those things if they have a general vision, a label can be like, “Oh, well, this photographer would be great if you want this kind of photo.” Or drawing from what the artist feels passionate about.

I always really like to get to know the artists that I work with pretty closely so that I can come up with creative ideas that are suited for them, and that I know that when I present it to them, the chances of them being into the idea are pretty high. I don’t want to waste my time, and I definitely don’t want waste their time, bringing them a shitty idea.

Dustin: Yeah, I think record labels play a really different role than they used to as well, you know? Things are changing a lot because of streaming. You know, physical’s not the main focus of most labels these days. It’s a big focus for us because we’re a smaller indie label, but in general, people focus more on different sides of things that labels didn’t used to really think about as much. With artists, there’s, like, a really big ego, and a lot of them have, like, a clear vision where it’s like, “This is my record no matter what. This is the artwork. This is the video.”

I mean, I still feel like I don’t know what I want a lot of times. I kind of hate music videos and don’t want to do them, and Katie’s like, “You have to music videos.”

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Katie: Yeah, I basically have to, like, Inception artists.

Dustin: Yeah.

Katie: To be like, “Oh, cool.” And then they’re like, “What if did this thing?” And it’s this awesome idea, but it’s secretly something that I have planted in their heads all along.

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: (laughs).

Katie: I feel like I do that a lot with you, actually.

Dustin: Yeah.

Katie: Because you’re the hardest artist to A&R for me, personally.

Dustin: What?

Katie: Yeah.

Dustin: Really?

Katie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

Dustin: Wow.

Katie: I feel like other artists, I’m like, they’ll send me their demos and I’ll be like, “Great, okay. Here… Like, here are my notes. These are the songs that I think should be singles. This is this.” You’ll be like, “No, I’m not changing those lyrics.”

Dustin: I think I’m not good with constructive criticism (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Katie: (laughs) Yeah.

Liam: It seems like there must be a lot of that interaction with people’s art and creative work, and then viewing that through a strategic lens.

Katie: For sure.

Liam: I want to know about how you approach that.

Katie: Yeah, it’s really fun, but also really challenging because we can get really creative with certain ideas. Like, recently, this was something I worked on… I also do A&R at Secretly Group, which is Secretly Canadian, Jagjauwar, and Dead Oceans. And, um, I was working on this project called Better Oblivion Community Center, which is Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst, and for that, they wanted to do a surprise drop release, which we had never really done before. And we started brainstorming things, and then we came up with this idea to have, like, a hotline that people could call as if they were calling some kind of Better Oblivion Community Center, and it really took off. And it made people aware of Better Oblivion Community Center, but they didn’t know what it was yet, the album hadn’t come out. So, it was just this, like, mysterious little nugget of information.

And I feel like doing stuff like that is always really fun and exciting, and just trying to find different ways to reach audiences without it being too creepy (laughs). You know, and also, keeping in line with the vision that artist has, making sure that it’s something they’re excited about, too.

Liam: Also, just to define a term, what is A&R?

Katie: A&R is Artists and Repertoire. So, it’s finding new artists to bring to the table to a label. So, scouting new artists, new talent, and yeah… And then developing it, and maintaining a really great relationship with that artist, developing it creatively. You’re kind of the liaison between the artist themselves and the record label, so it’s a really fun job. And I get to go to a lot of shows and hang out with a lot of musicians.

Dustin: Wha- I think you’re also in the unique place where you’re close friends with the artists that you work, you know? And I think-

Katie: Yeah.

Dustin: That’s also unique to your personality, but, like, these are people that… I’ve become friends with the artists that she A&Rs, you know, because they’re just that close. Like, they come over to the house or we’re hanging out at festivals or something.

And, like, there’s just this relationship that sort of transcends the work environment and it becomes, like, a very personal connection. Because I think if you’re working with someone that close on something that is that personal to them, it’s inevitable to get that close with them, you know?

Katie: Aw.

Dustin: (laughs).

Katie: Thanks, Dustin (laughs).

Dustin: Yeah.

Liam: As you’re going through this process, I’m working about, like, the organizing principal or the quality that you’re looking for in artists that are signed to Bayonet.

Katie: We’re always looking for new and unique songwriters, people who have a unique voice, and people who are writing about really interesting things. Yeah, and who want to grow creatively and just, like, keep expanding. And I feel like that’s always really exciting.

And I think sonically, we’re just constantly trying to diversify the kinds of sounds that we’re putting out. We don’t just want to be putting out like “indie rock.” And I think so far we’ve done a pretty good job of that. You know, we talk about this a lot Secretly, as well as Bayonet, which is that we want the type of music that we release to reflect the kind of music that we listen to in our every day lives. I think before, you know… especially at Secretly, to see how much the roster there has diversified, like, sonically is amazing in the last couple of years.

And so, I think that that’s something that we consciously think about.

Dustin: Yeah, I think a big part of it is just a gut feeling, you know? You just… you listen to something and you can tell if it’s real, you know? I has a substance, there’s a real person behind it, you know? And something that has a lot of personality and is unique and is willing to take risks, and you hear it, and you’re just like… You can just kind of tell when people have something special to them, and there’s no way to really quantify that in, like, a concrete way, or explain it in a way that someone could learn. It’s just… it’s… a lot of it is just based on feeling.

Liam: I think that gets into my next question, as well, which is more about the qualities of music.

Because I’m a designer who works primarily in a vision medium…

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: So, the idea of working on something that’s mostly a sonic or auditory medium-

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … Is not only interesting, but also foreign to me, and I’m interested-

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … in how you conceptualize that and, like, what are the pieces that you identify?

Katie: One of the things… I feel like this is applicable to this question, is Jeff Buckley has this amazing quote where he says that music is trying to shape sound to fit a feeling. And I feel like that’s, like, really apt. And I think that that is something that I connect with in a really big way because I feel like music is so emotional, and this work on our side is so emotional and, at sometimes, it can be emotionally draining.

Dustin: Music, it’s kind of like… My objective with it, when I’m creating something, is to… it’s almost like, um, if you were able to send, like, a psychic message to someone in a way. It’s like, I have this feeling and this emotion that’s so overwhelming and so powerful, and there’s no way to express it to someone else outside of this form, you know? It’s like trying to condense all these feelings into a way that you can share with someone else and give them a piece of your mind and be like, “This is where… This is exactly how I feel and what I’m experiencing and I want you to feel this exact same way.” And I feel like when you hear a song that gives you the chills, that person has done that right. They’ve been able to send you this little personal feeling that no one else can understand and like inject that into you.

Liam: So, Katie, going back to something that you said earlier about the kinds of artists that are with Bayonet.

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I read in an interview with Forbes, uh, you said that Bayonet tries to get artists that sound different from one another or use different sonic palettes.

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And I’m really interested in that phrase and what it means, and also why it’s important.

Katie: You know, a sonic palette just means it’s like when an artist has their palette and they’re picking all the colors, and which colors make sense for this painting. It’s similar to an artist having access to all of these sounds and which sounds make sense, and Dustin was saying before, like, can creative something new and fresh, and something that can resonate with people.

We just want each artist to be as diverse and as singular from the next. Um…

Dustin: Yeah. I mean, music is all about textures. I think that’s something that people don’t think about enough, is that everybody is kind of working with these different textures, almost like how painters have a different way that they work with the pain, you know? Sometimes it’s really clumpy, sometimes it’s really smooth, sometimes it’s very watery and drippy. Artists can work with different instruments, if you’re using a synthesizer, or if it’s, like, a vintage synthesizer or a soft synth, something very contemporary. Or the way that your drums sound, I mean, there’s a million different things you can use for drums. I mean, now you can do anything. You can drop some keys on a table and sample that and use that.

So, the sonic palette is almost, like, infinite these days. And there’s so many ways for people to combine these different sounds in ways that people haven’t, you know, with electronic versus organic. And then, also, subject matter, which is pretty infinite as well, you know, you can go anywhere with it. And someone who’s able to blend all that in a creative way and a technical way at the same time, that’s when, you know, you’ve stumbled upon something that’s very special and unique.

Liam: I also want to talk about, uh, Beach Fossils’ 2017 album, Summer Salt, because it was released on Bayonet Records and I’m interested… Knowing now, like, a lot of the logistics that go into a label and, like, the creative involvement and things like that. Dustin, I’m interested what impact the association with your own label had on the album’s creation?

Dustin: I think it was the first felt full creative freedom working on something. I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines, and I think it’s more on the hate side, where I work very poorly knowing that I have to have something done at a certain time. And so, part of this, for me, was being, like, “Okay, I have the freedom. I don’t have someone yelling at me about when this thing needs to be done,” you know? And I work in my own studio as well, so I can go in there every day and feel this freedom that I’m not restricted by anything, you know? It’s this life path that I chose for myself that I’m very fortunate to be able to experience because I know it’s rare, and I know a lot of people don’t have that amount of freedom.

But I have issues with, like, authority, (laughs) you know, I kind of always have. And even if it’s helpful authority, like a label just being like, “You need have this thing done,” I feel claustrophobic and suffocated knowing that I have to have something done at a certain time. So, when I go in and I don’t have a deadline, sometimes I can work even faster because I don’t have that hanging over my head. And it gave me the freedom to feel like I could do anything with that record.

And, like we were talking about before, the sonic palette, this record opened up in a huge way that I never been able to do before. I had enough time to think about how do I find a way to get all these different instruments on a record? How do I find… I- I made a list of instruments, and it was like, harpsichord, flute, pedal steel, saxophone, string quartet, all these things that I wanted to have on the record, and I had enough time to figure out how do I find all these people that play these things and actually get this on the record. And, if I had a crazy deadline, I probably wouldn’t have had all those instruments on the record.

Also, I write so much. We must’ve written, like, 70 songs or something for the record and then just thrown them all away or recycled them. But if I was rushed, I would’ve put out a record that was probably a bunch of those songs that I threw away, and I’d be really unhappy with it.

Liam: It strikes me as you’re talking about deadlines and timelines for creating this stuff, that a song or an album is not created all in one sitting, so I think there’s something interesting that between using music to shape sound and convey an emotion, but over a timeline.

Dustin: Yeah.

Liam: Like, there must be some refinement process over that timeline to get it right, and I’m curious, how do you know when it’s right?

Dustin: It’s so hard to say, you know? I feel like… I sit with a song for a really long time. I’ll work on it and I’ll keep adding stuff to it. And I think when you know it’s right… This is something that, I guess, works for me, personally, is like, I add so much to the song and then I start stripping things away and pulling stuff off. And when I feel like it’s reached the point that I’ve taken enough things away from it, and it’s minimal enough, and it’s working, and it’s not cluttered, that’s kind of when it feels right for me.

But I have a problem where I write all the music first and then the lyrics last. I think that’s because when I first started recording music on a computer, I was making rap music (laughs). I was, like, making beats. So, you know, you make all the music first and then you do the vocals on top of it, and so, for me, that was just, like, a natural way to make music, and I still think about it that way. I get this instrumental and then I put vocals on at the end. But it’s like the song is so cluttered at point, I’m like, “Where am I going to fit vocals?” So I have to start stripping things away and getting it really empty and turning things into, like, little one shots instead of loops and… I don’t know. So, you just know. Like, I- I- I listen back until there’s not one second of the song that I don’t like and then I realize it’s right.

Liam: You said that doing the instrumentation in the song itself first and then adding vocals is a problem.

Dustin: Yeah.

Liam: But what would it look like if you did the lyrics and vocals first?

Dustin: I’ve actually been doing that recently for the songs that we’re working on for the new record because it’s kind of the traditional songwriter, that’s the way it’s done, you know? It’s like… a person sits down with an acoustic guitar or a piano and they come up with the melody and they start to figure what fits on top of it. And usually, yeah, people have the vocals and the main thing already going together, and then they just bring instruments and layer everything on top after the fact. Whereas, I’m doing the total opposite, I’m just layering it all up and I’m like, “There’s no room for vocals. I have to start taking stuff off” (laughs).

Liam: (laughs). I also do want to try to dig in a little bit to the visual aspects of the label, as well. You said that for Bayonet, physical media is pretty important.

Katie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And I think there’s a lot to go into that, whether you’re making vinyl or cassettes or- or anything like that. So, first I want to understand what all the pieces of that are.

Katie: Oh yeah, it’s a lot. So, we work with this awesome designer, Andrew Lawandus, who’s based in Atlanta. He helps us lay out everything we need, the record cover, the inner sleeve. Sometimes it’s a gatefold, so you need to figure out what’s going to go in the gatefold. Sometimes there’s a poster that’ll go inside. You have figure out what the marketing sticker is going to look like. The CD booklet, what’s going to go on the CD booklet. What is the CD itself going to look like? The labels that go on the center of the vinyl. The J-card for the cassette tape.

Katie: Like, there are so many things and, you know, you’re- you’re drawing from the same set of images or designs, but you kind of have to change it according to the layout, because all the layouts for each item are different. So, you kind of have to distill, like, what it is you really, really want on certain things.

Like, for example, cassettes, like, there isn’t much room to have a lot of, like, artwork or words. Whereas like a CD, you have a booklet, you can add as many pages as you want, then it becomes like, “Oh crap, what images are we going to have (laughs) inside the CD booklet? And, like, do we want to have the lyrics or do we not want to have the lyrics? Do we want to just have production notes?” And then the vinyl is kind of like this… the in between of those two.

It’s always a challenge.

Dustin: Yeah.

Katie: Um, but it’s a fun one.

Dustin: That part’s kind of fun. You can hide little Easter Eggs in there, you know?

Katie: Oh yeah, totally. For most of our records, this awesome guy Josh Bonati masters them. And when we did our first record on vinyl, he was like, “You know, I can always put a secret hidden message in the etching of the lacquer of the vinyl so that when you press it, it’ll be on, like, every single copy.” So we were like, “Whoa, that is sick.” So then, we started asking our artists to do that and started asking them like, “What do you want the etching to say?” And so, if you look closely in the light of a lot of our records, in the inner loop of the vinyl you’ll see, like…

Dustin: There’s a little etching. There’s a little-

Katie: Little etching, yeah.

Dustin: Quote on all of them (laughs).

Liam: That’s awesome. Going back to something that Dustin said earlier about music videos and, like, preferring to focus on the music rather than the video, I’m curious how you translate the aesthetic of the music into something cohesive that can cover all of this physical media.

Dustin: It’s difficult. I mean, I can’t speak for other artists, but for me, I try to make my artwork as minimal as possible because it just goes back to me liking the music to speak for itself. Because I take so long working on stuff, this last record, it took me, like, four years… Four years? Five years? Something like that.

Katie: Yeah.

Dustin: It was long time. But it was like… I spent so long thinking about the music. I was like, “I don’t like to put an idea in people’s mind about what this is. I like them to make up their own minds.” So, like, it’s just white album cover with the name on it, and that’s it. It’s just… I- I want people to have their own visuals, you know, when they listen to the music. They can lay in their bed and whatever, and just imagine their own little story or music videos because people always interpret their own things.

And it’s funny how people will interpret your music or your lyrics when you go and meet with someone who is a music video director, or even just talking to someone who listens to your music, because the lyrics mean a very different thing to a listener than it does to you as the writer. Because I’ve had people be like, “This line is like the most important thing ever,” and, like, tell me what it means to them and I’m like, “That is not what that means at all, but I’m really glad that you took that from it.” And I think that part is really important, like, not correcting people if they get a different idea because I feel like there’s no such thing as, like, a wrong interpretation, it’s just your interpretation.

But, anyway, going back to visuals, it’s funny to see how people will kind of interpret themselves, you know, if you give somebody free rein for a music video. They’re like, “Oh, what if we did this.” It’s like this crazy storyline. And, in way, that kind of bugs me because I don’t like the idea of different story going on top of the story that I’m already telling.

Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think every artist is different. You know, some artists will want the music video to be a very literal translation of what the song means. And other artists, kind of like Dustin, will want it to just be them, like, signing the song or whatever, and let people kind of interpret the meaning of the song for themselves (laughs).

Dustin: Yeah. Well, some artists are really visual and they do have like a whole idea. Like Jerry Paper, when we were working with him, he just had all these crazy ideas because he, like, does collaborations with, like, Adult Swim and stuff. And he’s like, “Yeah, like, it should be, like, this big human cockroach, like, smoking a cigarette.” And he’s got, like, this whole idea, you know? He’s somebody who like… he would turn in a full record and be like, “Here it is, here’s the artwork.” And it’s like, we hadn’t talked in months and all of a sudden he’s just like…

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: … got it, you know? He’s, like, got his whole, like, aesthetic. He’s created a whole universe.

And that’s really fun, too, because you don’t want to step on that, you know? It’s like… I think there are certain record labels that are just so big that they will sign somebody and then try to change them and be like, “Okay, cool, like, this is who you were and how do we make it more marketable now?” And it’s like, “Oh, you can’t do this big, weird human cockroach thing that you wanted to do.”

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: But for us it’s like, “Hey, the more the merrier. Like, this is why we signed you,” you know?

Liam: Yeah. Speaking of creating an album and all this art and everything as it’s whole universe…

Dustin: (laughs).

Liam: I’m interested in how you think about an album as one work and what it means, how you decide, like, on what goes on an album versus what doesn’t out of those 70 songs or whatever.

Dustin: I guess just trying to create, like, its own universe that kind of works, but also it shouldn’t contradict itself enough. You don’t want to have an album where every single song sounds exactly the same because then it just gets boring. Unless you’re the Ramones, that’s- that’s the only time it’s legal.

Katie: (laughs).

Dustin: But, for me, I do think about records. I can’t think about singles. I just don’t see it that way. You know, I feel like an album is like a film and there are all these different acts. And, actually, that’s something that I do when I’m thinking about what songs should go on an album and how to sequence the songs in a certain order.

I always thought of it in four parts because, traditionally, a physical records has two sides and so you want to have two movements. And so, I like to have where it’s upbeat stuff in the beginning, then it slows down a little bit for the A-side, slows down a little bit, then picks back up. And then the B-side does, like, a similar thing where it’s a little upbeat, slows down, and picks back up. So it’s, like, there’s these four separate chunks and it flows like a movie.

And that’s- that’s the only thing I will say that bums me out about streaming, is that I sequence these songs where sometimes they blend into each other, and if you listen to the song just by itself, it might cut off weird or like not quite sound right, you know? Like, I make some songs that are just made to fit in between other songs, and if you’re listening to it on shuffle, it’s like, “What the hell was that? What did I just listen to?”

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: “What was this weird… that’s not a song.” But I think an album is still really important. And I- I know a lot of people still think about albums, it’s not a dead thing by any means. But, for me, I can’t help but to just be conscious of it. I- I can’t think about singles. I don’t know, I’m not a pop star, so that’s just not how I see it (laughs).

Liam: Speaking of streaming and kind of making the decision whether to listen to, like, the complete album or if you just hear a song pop up on shuffle, I’m interested in moving into the future, like, what impact or influence you think evolving technologies are going to have on both music creation and also being a label.

Katie: Oh…

Dustin: Hard to say.

Katie: Um, I think AI is going to have a big impact.

Dustin: I’m all for AI.

Katie: Yeah, Dustin’s very pro…

Dustin: I’m super pro-AI (laughs).

Katie: …AI. He’s ready for the singularity (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: Yeah, I’m ready to merge.

Katie: (laughs). Yeah, so I think AI is going to play a big role.

Dustin: Sometimes I try to think about, like, what is the next thing that comes after the internet. And you’re like, “Well, you couldn’t imagine it because you weren’t able to imagine the internet a 100 years ago, so how are you able to think of what can be next?” I guess quantum computers and AI would be the biggest things, but I don’t know.

That paired with, like, the creation of art and songwriting and stuff. Like, yeah, I like the idea of, like, getting music made just for you, that’s cool. It’s like, “Hey, uh, I want to have an artist that is Metallica and 2 Chainz.”

Katie: (laughs).

Dustin: “And they made five albums and the fourth one was acoustic, and it was love songs.” And it’s like, “All right, generating, just for you (laughs).”

Katie: (laughs).

Liam: (laughs).

Dustin: Like, I’m ready for that.

Katie: Oh my god (laughs).

Dustin: (laughs).

Liam: That sounds amazing.

Cool. Well, thank you again for joining me.

Dustin: Yeah.

Katie: Thanks for having us.

Dustin: Thanks for having us.

Liam Spradlin, Host of Design Notes

Host Liam Spradlin reflects on the first 25 episodes of the podcast

In this episode, guest host Barbara Eldredge turns the tables, interviewing regular host Liam Spradlin about his own creative journey and reflecting on the themes that unite the first 25 episodes of Design Notes.

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Barbara Eldredge: Welcome to Design Notes.

Liam Spradlin: Thank you. It’s-

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: … very interesting to be welcomed. (laughs)

Barbara: Today we’re gonna be doing a little look back at some of the past episodes, and also dig into who you are, and what you do, and the lessons you’ve learned hosting. So to kick it off, Liam, who are you, what do you do? (laughing)

Liam: That is a profound question. I am Liam, I’m a designer, I am originally from Kentucky. I moved to New York in 2015. I first came to New York on the advice of a psychic.

Barbara: What?

Liam: (laughs)

Barbara: Okay, we gotta, you gotta explain that.

Liam: There was a time back when I was in college when I was a photographer, I worked for a small studio in town where I went to school. And one day at school during lunch they were having a psychic fair (laughs) so I went upstairs and talked to the psychic, and it was fine, whatever. I don’t remember anything she said besides us coming around to the fact that I was into photography. And, um, she was like, “Well, have you ever been on a real fashion shoot?”

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: And I was like, “Oh, gee, I guess not.” (laughs) And she was like, “Oh, I know this great photographer in New York. I’ll connect you. Maybe you could assist on a shoot, or something.” And I was like, “Okay, whatever.” (laughs)
Barbara: Oh, so the psychic wasn’t like, “I predict that you will go to New York City-

Liam: No, no.

Barbara: … the psychic was just-

Liam: She was like, “You’re gonna go to New York City.”

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: “I’m gonna make you go to New York City.” (laughs) And she actually did it, and I went, and it was such a chance occurrence, but it was so important to me.

Barbara: And how did you get from photography to design?

Liam: It’s a hard question. I mean there was a certain point that I reached with photography, at the time, where it wasn’t an industry that I was super happy about the idea of participating in, for a variety of reasons. And also, I reached a point with the craft where I felt like I had taken the picture that I wanted to take, at that point. I would go on after college to do more freelance gigs and stuff like that, for money, but I don’t think it was my passion-

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … anymore. And in school I didn’t study design, I studied sociology and studio art. And my rational for that was just that those were things I was interested in. My story on it is that there’s something at the intersection of the way that people experience the world, and interact with things, and art, that is represented in design.

Barbara: I wanna connect the dots from psychic telling you to come to New York, to you sitting here at Google as a design advocate-

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: … hosting this show. Maybe it would help if you explained what a design advocate is, and what you do?

Liam: It’s a question that I feel like I answer all the time, but the answer is always changing. What I tell people, usually, when I’m working with partners is, “I’m a designer at Google who spends a lot of time working with designers outside Google.” And those relationships take many forms. It could be me giving direct design feedback and guidance to a partner team who’s trying to solve a challenge, or implement a new feature. Or, it could be me sitting at a table with another designer, talking about what they do and how it relates to the world, and to our experience as designers, together.

Barbara: So how did you get here?

Liam: During school I started writing for a blog called Android Police.

Barbara: I’m familiar.

Liam: As I started writing for them I started getting more connected with the community, and eventually the blog and these designs and stuff connected me to community developers who were making independent apps, and then Material came out, and-

Barbara: And so that was 2014?

Liam: Yeah. So, I started working with developers on bringing their apps to Material, inventing new apps, and eventually I applied for a job at Google, and I made it all the way to the in-person interview, which was stunning to me, first of all. (laughs) And I didn’t get the job.

Barbara: Wait. What was the job?

Liam: Oh, design advocate. This was-

Barbara: You interviewed for your job you do now, and you didn’t get it?

Liam: I didn’t get it. But what I did get was feedback from the hiring committee. The feedback was basically my public speaking skills were not where they need to be for a role that’s really public facing, and has you talking a lot. Which was fair, and accurate, and true.

Barbara: But how did you feel?

Liam: Oh, how I felt was, “I will prove them wrong.” (laughing) So I started applying to conferences, and conference that I applied to was droidcon NYC, which is like a global community-run conference that happens in different places around the world. But when I was applying for that conference I noticed the company that organized it, Touchlab, I went to their website, and I saw that there was a job listing for mobile designer, and I was like, “I might as well just send in my resume.” I was at Touchlab for probably like 18 months. I worked on a huge variety of stuff, from Android apps for, like, ClassPass and Tim Hortons, to smart appliances, to sneakers that would order pizza when you press a button in the tongue, to-

Barbara: (laughs) Oh, of course.

Liam: … street kiosks. It was a really fun experience. And-

Barbara: And you also did public speaking?

Liam: Yeah. And then, eventually I felt like it was time to apply to Google again, and it just so happened that the same role was open again, and I was like, “This is pretty much what I’m doing now, except it can be my full time job.”

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: “Plus, I can be at Google where there so much cool stuff going on.” So I was like, “All right, let’s do it.” And that time I got it.

Barbara: So, maybe this is a good opportunity for us to dive into Design Notes. Because you started it before you came to Google.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I started it when I moved to New York. Um, I- I was looking at the old SoundCloud the other day, and it said three years ago.

Barbara: Wow.

Liam: So, that was when the first episode was published.

Barbara: And what sparked the idea to do a podcast, and about design, about creativity?

Liam: I distinctly remember I was going to write an article about a new app, it was about YouTube Gaming actually. It had just come out, or there was a pre-release build going around, or something, and I looked at it, and I was like, “There are a lot of really interesting decisions going on here. There’s a very unique design in some ways.” And, um, I was going to write an article called Design Notes. (laughs)

Barbara: Oh.

Liam: I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, but it’s the truth. I was going to write an article called Design Notes. It was going to point out, like piece by piece these really unique things about YouTube Gaming, and like what they’re doing, and what I thought the rational was, and what they meant for the interface. As I was writing it I was like, “Actually, this is a conversation that could be a series. Like it could be something that I talk to a lot of people about. I’m curious what other designers are doing, and what they’re thinking about, and what the important parts of their work are to them. And it would be great to talk to them. And if I can record that conversation then everyone else can hear from them, as well, and learn the things that I’m learning.” I felt like a podcast would be, I don’t know, it felt right, and it was something I hadn’t done before, so I wanted to learn about it, and I did it.

Barbara: And then when you came to Google you relaunched it?

Liam: Yeah. I-

Barbara: And so that’s the latest 25 episodes?

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: And how is that different?

Liam: It’s quite different. Before launching at Google, obviously I’d taken a little bit of a break from it. But it was something that I wanted to work on, especially after meeting the [GDS 00:07:25] team, who are the ones who run the studio that we’re recording in right now, who edit all the footage. I had talked to them about series ideas, and I was like, “Well, I have a series.” (laughs) And then I talked to [inaudible 00:07:38] Design, and I was like, “I have a series.” And Google Design was like, “Cool, that sounds like a cool series, let’s try it.”

Barbara: Yeah, I remember you sent us the link to your old episodes, and I was like-

Liam: Oh, yeah.

Barbara: … “Oh, this-

Liam: (laughs)

Barbara: … this is cool.”

Liam: And through the work of people like Victor, who did the music, and Anthony, who proposed the original concepts for the identity through you, who have so graciously edited the content to make the show not two hours long, and make it something focused, and something with a story, to Amber, and Bryn, all the folks on the team who have contributed to it, just made it better-

Barbara: Hmm.

Liam: … and more focused, and more polished, and more communicative.

Barbara: So this phase two of Design Notes has this whole team behind it, and, uh, perhaps a higher production value-

Liam: Oh, absolutely. (laughs)

Barbara: … but I suspect that there are certain things that have not changed, and part of that is you and the things that you’re interested in, and the threads that you pull out. So one of the things I wanna get into is what are some of the common themes you’ve noticed in these last 25 episodes? Or some of the moments that really stick out to you, and impact your creative work?

Liam: Yeah. Everything impacts my creative work, for sure. I think any information, or experience, or person that you encounter, there’s something in that that applies to you. It’s all related. And you can take something from that and apply it to your own life-

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … and I think knowing how to do that is so critical, and I hope that that’s what I’m doing with the show. So everything applies to my creative work, that I’ve learned on the show. One thing that I’ve noticed that’s always the same, I don’t tend to ask questions about process that often, unless it’s like a very specific sort of process, like how do you make X? Because I found that when people talk about process it turns out that everyone who’s doing creative work, and especially design, is actually just concerned with solving problems. I also always ask people about their journey, and I had one guest recently say, “If I tell the story of how I got started in my career one more time I’m gonna scream.” (laughing) And I was like, “Well, I’m gonna ask you, but …” (laughs)

Barbara: And did they scream?

Liam: They didn’t scream-

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: … but it’s because I explained that the reason that I ask the question about your journey is not because I wanna hear how people got started in their career. It’s not even about the answer. It’s because I want to point out the fact as often as possible that people come to this from like very different backgrounds, and directions, and perspectives. I didn’t study design school, and a lot of the folks that I’ve talked to didn’t study what they do in school, either. They came to it over time, and for different reasons, and they get something different out of it, and I think that’s so important.

Another thing that I feel like has really emerged recently is how our work relates to us, how it relates to other work, and how it relates to the world. And also, how either our identity, or some expression that we’re trying to make, flows through those relationships, and either comes out on the other side, or doesn’t.

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Break that down for me. I really like this idea of personal identity. I think it was, was it [Ksenia 00:10:58] who said, “I don’t really believe in neutrality. I think our values, and our histories, and our experiences are everywhere, and in everything we do. And instead of trying to hide them we should own it.” And she’s basically saying like, you can’t help but put yourself-

Liam: Yes.

Barbara: … in your work.

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: So that’s the identity side.

Liam: I absolutely believe that. It’s like another discussion I had recently with Conor Grebel. He said, essentially, “I try to put my experiences into my work, because I think that’s all I am, so it has to come through in whatever I make.” And I think that’s true. One’s work exists in a dialogue with one’s self. You have to recognize … well, you don’t have to, you don’t have to do anything … but (laughs) it’s important to recognize that we are in our work. And I said this in a post that I wrote, but as a designer, especially working in a corporate setting, it’s important to be able to detach yourself, and your personhood from the work that you make, but it’s impossible not to see in it your own reflection. So that’s one kind of relationship.

Barbara: I wanna tie that to Alexandra Lange’s episode, too. Because one of the things that stuck with me is that Alexandra was a design critic, and then she became a mom, and then because of that she said she couldn’t turn off her design critic-ness. And so all of these toys that she was getting, all this kid stuff, she couldn’t help but look at it and be like, “What is this trying to teach us? What is the pedagogy? What is the cultural importance of this kind of block, versus this kind of block?” And it all ties together with this common thread that you just pointed out about how we see ourselves in the things, or we can’t help but apply our own lens.

Liam: Right.

Barbara: And we should embrace that.

Liam: Yeah. There’s an impulse to moderate that-

Barbara: Hmm.

Liam: … and to say, like, “Don’t overthink it. Don’t think about things so much.” But I think it’s okay. I think it’s good, actually.

Barbara: Well, where do you think that impulse comes from?

Liam: I think for me it comes from a place, like, if we’re talking about this inability to switch off, it comes from a place of like, “Well wouldn’t things be a lot easier if I weren’t thinking about how things are designed all the time?”

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And like certainly it would. I would just live my life and use the things that I use without thinking about it. But I also wouldn’t be myself in that case.
Barbara: One of the others threads in all of these conversations is tension between the system and intuition. And I feel like a lot of people lean maybe too hard on the system. Like they want a set of rules, we want a set of rules for how this thing should be, and how it should look and behave, and maybe they don’t trust their intuition or their identity.

Liam: Yeah. This is why I have such a problem with the term best practices-

Barbara: Ooh.

Liam: … in design. (laughs)

Barbara: Why?

Liam: It’s just that I think there’s no such thing. I think that terms like that are empty containers into which we put our ideas about the things that we want. (laughs)

Barbara: Okay. But I wanna push back on that, because you work so much with Material Design.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: With Google’s design system.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: A set of best practices.

Liam: I would disagree that they’re best practices.

Barbara: Oh.

Liam: (laughs) I think for me what Material provides is a set of components, basically like a palette of colors, all the colors in one system of Material, I would compare the entire system to a palette that you can mix to create something. Especially now that it’s more customizable. The thing that I’ve always talked about when I talk about customizing Material is that the important part of Material is the mental model that it provides about how interfaces should work, and what they’re made out of. And the rest is kind of up to you, as long as you’re respectful of that, and respectful of user expectations.

Barbara: That’s super interesting, ’cause that actually reminds me (laughs) in Mitch Paone’s episode, episode five, he talks about practicing musical scales, and so maybe like a design system is like a set of musical scales, it’s like your toolbox. And then what he does as a musician is he’ll remix it, or he’ll improvise with that tool set-

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: … to create something new.

Liam: Yeah. And he says, like, “As long as you know the song you’ll recognize it no matter how I play it.” Which I think is part of that, I call it like intuitive composition. I believe that intuition has power and design. But it’s so important to also recognize what we said earlier about how we bring our own experiences and perspectives to the design. If you’re going to impose intuitively you must collaborate. Because one’s intuition will only apply to oneself, and people like oneself.

Barbara: Ah. So- so the danger there is boxing yourself in, or only designing for people who are like you-

Liam: Yes.

Barbara: … or only for yourself.

Liam: Yes.

Barbara: How- and a way to get out of that is to collaborate?

Liam: Yes. It is to take from everything what you can.

Barbara: This is tying into that middle ground, right? So we’ve talked about like design for oneself and identity, and then there’s sort of how design relates to other design?

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: ’Cause the other thing that I remember from that Ksenya episode is the Barcelona typeface.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: Do you wanna explain that idea?

Liam: Yeah. So basically Ksenya was saying like type can absorb identity or meaning from what’s around it. So she said if a certain typeface is always used in cafés in Barcelona, before long that typeface will feel like a typeface from a café in Barcelona, even when you don’t see it in that context. So that just highlights, I think, beyond the dialog that we have with our work, the dialog that the work has with the world, and the context-

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … in which it exists.

Barbara: That also reminds me of the William Okpo episode with Darlene and Lizzy Okpo, these fashion designers, because they talked about creating like normal looking clothes. It’s Lizzy, and she said, “Oh, we can make just another button up shirt, or- or another A-Line, whatever’s in style, but I’m just like how can I make that one rude? How do I make that so rude?” Because she wants to create something surprising. Like we know what a button down shirt looks like, but if she adds another button down shirt under it, or like a weird ruffle, or she like tweaks it in a way that it breaks that expectation, because it breaks the pattern.

Liam: Yeah. There’s something really important to that, because clothing can be a really functional design, too.

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: We think of UI in apps, I think it’s very tempting to think about that. It’s like the height of utilitarian design. It just does a purpose, and it gets you to checkout, or whatever, and that’s all we want. And in the same way, clothes can be very utilitarian, as well. But there’s a power in like achieving the utility of the object, but making it just challenging enough, just interesting enough, just unique enough, through your own expression, that it becomes something more than what it is.

Barbara: So creating something that goes beyond itself, like a design, or a technique, or a typeface that accrues this cultural meaning, and impacts the world, I do think part of that creative process is taking something that has meaning, and then flipping it, or tweaking it like-

Liam: Yes.

Barbara: … Lizzy and Darlene do. Or like taking it out of context and putting it somewhere else.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: And I feel like you’ve had a few conversations that have that-

Liam: Yes.

Barbara: … theme, too.

Liam: That is definitely another thread that has emerged, is that re-contextualization is such a powerful tool. It’s so powerful, because even removing something from its context is enough to break your expectations about what it is.

Barbara: And are you thinking about anything in particular, like do you have an example?

Liam: One example that I always go to is Talbot and Yoon from the very first episode, their soap dish. Which they do this a lot, but the soap dish-

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … is a really concrete example.

Barbara: Well they’re architects who create-

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: … also, like beautiful designed objects and furniture.

Liam: Right. Um, so this is one concrete example, no pun intended-

Barbara: Ha.

Liam: … that, um, they have a soap dish, and it’s called the Waffle-Slab Soap Dish, and for me, um, just some guy with no experience in architecture, I was like, “That’s a really beautiful soap dish. Like that’s very nice. And it has the slots, so, you know, the water can drain out, and all that stuff. Very beautiful, and functional.” And through the interview I learned that it’s not just a beautiful soap dish. Their experience in architecture showed them that you, as an architect, can’t really own and have the things that you design in your home.

Barbara: ’Cause maybe it is the home.

Liam: It could be the home, it could be much larger than the home. Not very portable. But what they found is that they could re-contextualize a piece of that into something that could fit in your home. So they took a waffle slab, which is like an architectural component, they took that and shrunk it to the size of soap dish. And even though it represents this huge utilitarian thing that is not necessarily meant to be decorative, or meant to be enjoyed at a four-inch scale (laughs) it can be approached as a soap dish, and that’s enough.

Barbara: But it has, in a way it still carries with it all of the cultural meaning that it has as part of an iconic building.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: And yet it’s in your bathroom-

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: … and it’s this beautiful, practical object.

Liam: The reason that I’m fascinated by it is that it does carry that meaning and that history, but only if you care to access it, and you don’t have to, but it’s there.

Barbara: Oh, I love that. Because I feel like one of the things that you pull out in your conversations are these stories that make you see projects in a different way, and I think about the interview with Madeline Gannon. She’s like a technologist, and a designer working on robots, episode 11. And she did this piece that’s like a giant industrial robot arm.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: She programmed it to see people, and behave in what feels like a social manner. And just hearing her talk about this project made me think about robots differently. Do you know what I mean?

Liam: Yeah. Like even seeing a robot in person is one thing, but then feeling like this arm, like this huge arm-

Barbara: It’s like a one ton metal-

Liam: (laughs) Yeah.

Barbara: … instrument that could cut open a car.

Liam: Yeah. But it doesn’t, and it can be friendly-

Barbara: Yeah.

Liam: … and like it challenges-

Barbara: And curious.

Liam: … your idea of what that can be.

Barbara: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And also what robots can be in relationship to humans.

Barbara: Ah, yes. That’s another thing that breaks the pattern of what we might expect. Like she flipped it. She took that industrial robot arm from its context in a factory, and put it in a gallery-

Liam: Right.

Barbara: … and made it something that kids would wanna play with. What other episodes are memorable to you?

Liam: I think something that still really interests me is the episode with Bennett Foddy, who did the game Getting Over it.

Barbara: This was my favorite episode.

Liam: (laughs) Because it gets at two things that I think are really important to me. The first is the idea of creating a game that’s not fun on purpose.

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: Because again, that’s like breaking your expectation of games in the first place. But it’s also exploring the concept of the magic circle, and like game experiences, and like-

Barbara: What’s the magic circle?

Liam: The magic circle, I hope I’m getting this right, it’s a concept where basically the things that happen in a game don’t leave the circle of the game. Those experiences stay associated with that, and like don’t come into real life. So it’s the idea that in a game, while you’re playing Getting Over It, you can experience frustration, and anger, and disappointment, and all of these negative things, and really sit with them, and have some time to feel that, and understand it in a new way. And it’s safe, because it’s in the game. So you come out the other side having learned something about yourself, and about emotions, but without anything bad happening to you, which I think is important.

Barbara: That makes a lot of sense, and it goes back to this phrase that Rob Giampietro said that I love about how design is this interface to the world.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: And so that game is like, it’s a way of unlocking this part of ourselves, or interfacing with ourselves-

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: … and with emotion in a new way.

Liam: It’s like an emotional interface.

Barbara: (laughs)

Liam: The other thing that stuck out to me in that interview is, again, concepts about identity and expression. Because we talked about how, for Bennett, a game is a complete expression. Like he’s making a thing, and expressing a thing, and it’s complete, and that’s all it is. And you don’t need to change settings, like the user shouldn’t have to customize everything, they don’t need to change the colors of the game, because it’s his expression, and he wanted to emphasize with that game that there’s a person behind that, creating it. And so he has a voice over that runs through the whole game, and he’s like, “Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.” Like, “This is me. I made the game. I’m here with you. My name is in the game. I expressed something through the game.” And I think there’s something so powerful about the idea of like creating a complete expression, and knowing when you’ve done that.

Barbara: Are there any interviews, or interview stories, of things that happen behind the scenes that a listener wouldn’t know about, but that were entertaining to you, or?

Liam: Oh, um, I’ve recorded all over the place. When I’m traveling I have a set of two mikes, two stands, two shock mounts, and a handy Zoom H6 recorder, and I’ve taken that to conference rooms, art studios-

Barbara: Where’s the weirdest location you’ve recorded an episode?
Liam: The weirdest location, for sure, has to be at SPAN last year in Helsinki, because we were recording in a hotel that used to be a prison, but beyond that we were recording in the chapel of the hotel-

Barbara: Slash prison.

Liam: Yeah. And also, we couldn’t use the overhead lights because they produced some kind of interference that was picking up on the recording, so as the day went on, I mean we were running like 10 interviews or something that day, so as the day went on it got darker, and darker, and darker. (laughs) And they eventually brought us this little tiny lamp to put on the table.

Barbara: (laughs) I’d love to know, since you’ve interviewed so many people, what’s your approach to interviewing, how do you like to think about interviewing people in disciplines that you might not be so familiar with?

Liam: I love interviewing people in disciplines that I’m not familiar with, because I think that’s like the area where I can learn the most really quickly. I want to ask questions that … First of all, a note on the format of Design Notes is that I thought audio would be a really good format, because we’re talking about things that are often manifested visually, but I think it forces us to have a different conversation. And the conversation that we have is less about the work itself, and the mechanics of the work, and how it was produced, and more about the rational, the relationship that we have to the work, how people think about things, how they conceptualize the ideas that they use in their work. And so I wanna ask questions that get at those things, and get at them in hopefully a unique way, and also a way that doesn’t get too esoteric.

Barbara: How do you do that? Do you ask particular questions, or?

Liam: I do a lot of research before an interview, where I learn about the person that I’m interviewing, the work that they do, and like maybe, if I can, what they’re thinking about when they do the work. And in that research I try to find things that I haven’t encountered before. Whether it’s a thought, or an approach, or like some combination of the work that they’re doing. And I wanna ask where those things come from, and what they mean. And I think through knowing that we can at least see some common origin among creative works, and from there it will hopefully be easier to draw connections between them.

Barbara: And I know we’ve talked a lot about certain past episodes and- and threads, but do any other connections come to mind?

Liam: I guess I believe everything is related, so in some sense (laughs)-

Barbara: You’ll always find-

Liam: In some-

Barbara: … the connection. (laughs)

Liam: Yeah. Maybe it’s a cop out answer-

Barbara: No.

Liam: … there is always a connection.

Barbara: Okay. I’m gonna, I’m gonna name two episodes-

Liam: Okay.

Barbara: … and you have to find a connection.

Liam: Okay.

Barbara: Cameron Koczon, episode nine, who is a partner at Fictive Kin, and Ryan Snelson, episode 14, who redesigned Myspace. Go.

Liam: Okay. Um, I think one thing that both of them talked about, or at least that came through for me, is the idea of being experimental, and iterative, and collaborative. In Ryan’s case he has an extremely unique aesthetic that he’s established overtime in his own work. But he also worked on Myspace. He felt like during that time in Myspace’s history, because things were pretty shaken up there was an opportunity to break out of convention or expectation for what the site would do, and like try new things. And similarly I think about Cameron’s work on the Rookie site with Tavi Gevinson, and how he talked about how they have such a unique community that you could really try a lot of things, and like bring a lot of things to them through the site. And those were both unique experiences that I think gave each designer an opportunity to try new things.

Barbara: Okay. You win this round.

Liam: (laughs)

Barbara: Do you wanna try one more?

Liam: Yeah, let’s do one more.

Barbara: Okay. Let’s try, um, episode 22, Punanimation’s Bee Grandinetti-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: … and Hedvig Ahlberg. And episode 13, Sang Mun of YAW Studio.

Liam: Hmm. Oh, I think this one is quite easy, actually.

Barbara: Ah-oh.

Liam: (laughs) I think their creative output is quite different, but I think that in both cases the people that I talked to are motivated by a mission that they have to affect positive social change. In Sang Mun’s case, he made a lot of work that dealt with ideas of surveillance and propaganda, and like how we get information, and how we encounter it, how governments and corporations can manipulate that and just basically getting people to think more about it, and also to think about the tools that they have to exist in that system and remain critical. In Punanimation’s case, they created an incredible community, in their words, “… to answer the question of where are the women in animation and motion design?” And they answered it.

Barbara: They’re here.

Liam: They’re a great community of women, trans, and non-binary folks who are doing amazing work. But both of those creative pursuits are manifestations of their causes.

Barbara: Okay. I believe you.

Liam: (laughs)

Barbara: Everything is related. (laughs) So, 25 episodes so far.

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Barbara: I assume you’re not stopping here.

Liam: No.

Barbara: What do you have in store for the next 25?

Liam: I’ve already recorded a lot of interviews, actually.

Barbara: Ooh.

Liam: I’ve spoken to an artist who delves back into the idea of like collaborating with robots, and what that means for art and creation, and how we relate to technology, and how we can be more aware of how it influences our lives, and the things that we’re doing. I talked to an artist about the expression of human vulnerability, and how our histories can influence the things that we create. I talked to a musician and animator about, again, how our past influences our present, and how expressions of ourselves come through in a very pure way, how you can communicate something through art and design that the other person receives, reliably. Like the message comes through, perhaps with even more information than you put into it. And I’ve also talked to a couple of folks who run a band and a record label about-

Barbara: Ooh.

Liam: … how you conceptualize sonic design, and design that you can’t see, and what are the characteristics of that, how do you think about it? How do you then translate that into a visible aesthetic? How do you approach that in a strategic way so that people can receive it?

Barbara: Oh, exciting. Well I look forward to hearing all of those interviews, and more.

Liam: Yeah.

Barbara: Thank you, Liam.

Liam: Thank you.

Rob Giampietro, Design Director — MoMA

MoMA’s Rob Giampietro on how design shapes our understanding of the world around us

In this episode, Liam speaks with Rob Giampietro, Design Director at the Museum of Modern Art. Giampietro shares his journey from studio designer to design manager, explores the unseen details of a museum experience, and describes the responsibility designers have to create impact.

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Liam Spradlin: Rob, welcome to Design Notes.

Rob Giampietro: Thank you so much.

Liam: I wanna start off by hearing about your journey, both to design, and to design directorship.

Rob: I started, um … I was a … a designer, and running my own business very young, I think, relatively speaking. So I started a … a design studio at 23, with a partner, called Giampietro and Smith. And very quickly we kind of have had two main focuses to our business. One was design for culture, and for arts, so we had a lot of art galleries, like Gagosian, and White Cube, and Luhring Augustine, and things that we did a lotta work for. And that was a passion.

And then we fell into a lot of work in doing global nonprofit work. So we worked for, like, the World Health Organization doing annual reports, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria was another one of our big clients. So our, kind of, money jobs were actually feeling really good in terms of, like, our own values and things like that.

At a certain point, we went separate ways, but I was still really passionate about working in design and culture, and partnered with a studio called Project Projects that was run by some friends of mine, who were doing similar work. Brought some of my clients over there. Joined them as a partner for five years. We started at around four, and we grew to about 18.

Did museum rebrandings. I made about, hm, 20 websites during that time, for clients in architecture, fashion, different things like that.

So I think that was actually the beginning of my time scaling myself from being kind of an individual designer, or a design lead, to being more of a manager of a team. And also manager of an interdisciplinary team. Like, not just designers, but, you know, project managers, developers, different things like that.

About right around 2014, I was kind of encouraged to apply for a fellowship called the Rome Prize, which lets a designer spend a few months in Rome doing independent research.

And I was at a point in my career where I was trying to figure out what was next, whether my future was to continue to grow Project Projects, or whether it was something else. And a lot of our technology projects there were getting a little bit repetitive, like a lot of architecture portfolios and things like that. They were wonderful, they were for important architects. I was proud of bringing their histories, and the work of their practice, online. But I was also a little bit like: “What is it like to make real tech?” You know?

And so, when I was in Rome, my project was around mobility, and using mobile devices in an ancient city. And it was during that time, that … I think just sometimes your headspace moves you in a certain direction, but it was during that time that Google reached out with an opportunity to kinda help lead the New York site for Material Design, and grow the design advocacy program that became Google Design and SPAN.

And I think that was actually a conscious moment of transition where, when I was interviewing for the role, I remember there was … Jonathan Lee at Google said to me, “You know, this is not a designer role, it’s a design manager role. They’re different.” It was the first time I’d ever really consciously thought of the difference, and, I think, tried to learn a lot about how Google thinks about that difference, and conceives that difference, and, you know, try to be the best design manager I could be.

Liam: What was that transition like, in terms of the work you were doing, and how you were feeling about it?

Rob: I was never the fastest designer, so I was always a very detailed designer. Really sweated things like baseline grids and kerning, and things like that. But I also was never quite the fastest designer. Like, sometimes it would take me a little longer to come up with a … an idea, or an approach. And, yet, I was always really good at communicating design, at evangelizing design, at being an ambassador for an ambitious idea, to help it reach a public, and make it through all those levels of review and things that design has to go through.

So I think I had started to get a sense, as I was running my business, that my role was shifting from just actually making the work, which is what I was hiring people to do with me, and actually advocating for the work, or showing work and talking about how it could be indicative of how we could solve another new problem for a client. So growing business, and things like that.

So I think I could sense my role starting to shift there, but then I think any designer that’s in that transition goes through an identity crisis, or an impostor crisis, where you sort of say: “Well, if I’m not making design every day, all day, am I still a designer? You know, what does this mean?” And I think that, actually, was, for me, like a multi-year transition. It was not, like, an overnight thing where I just woke up one morning and said,

“Okay, I’m okay with not designing any more.”

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: You know? (laughs)

But I feel like the vision that I help bring to my team, and the way that I help digest problems and frame opportunities for them, or encourage them to bring me solutions, and have me help them move forward in the organization. Like those kinda things. It’s a different kind of design process. It’s a little bit more of an editing process, of a selection process, of knowing organizationally, like, where the most important bets are that you can place with your team’s time, or those kinda things.

I like to quote Rem Koolhaas, he talks about himself being an editor in the studio at OMA. Like, he’s not making the models, but he’s refining the selection process, and helping frame the goals of the project, and continually reinforcing those goals to his team, and you know …

That makes him more an editor or curator than a kind of pure designer, but he’s a very important element of the design process, especially in terms of bringing that process to excellence. So.

Liam: So maybe that’s a characteristic that all designers should strive for.

Rob: Excellence?

Liam: Well-

Rob: (laughs)

Liam: (laughs) Well, I think remaining critical, and thinking as an editor, even as you’re making things.

Rob: I was actually just reading John Maeda’s Design in Tech Report, and he was talking about designers that are a very special kind of introvert. Like, designers are introverted. We’re not the life of the party often. But we’re, like, social introverts. So it’s like we want to be quiet together. And I do think that there … A lot of times, when you’re working visually, the, the transition to words, or to describing what you’re doing, isn’t necessarily easy or seamless.

And so when you have someone there, like, whether it’s another designer or a manager or someone like that, to help discuss an idea, and, uh, help you … give you words to describe what you’re doing that is making visual sense, but maybe not verbal or strategic sense yet, I think that can be very powerful.

And so a lot of my job is to really just be available in the studio, to be that sounding board for people as they’re making work, to say, “What do you think of this? Like, what is working about this? What is not working about this?”

And for me to have a muscle that’s much more a quick critical reflex, rather than that kind of slow, visual development reflex.

Liam: And just staying on this topic of remaining critical, and kind of having an editorial eye, and, like, identifying these opportunities: you’re a senior critic for the Rhode Island School of Design’s MFA Graphic Design Department, and I’m interested in the ways in which that sort of criticism compares to the kind in the studio. The kind where you are involved in the process of making the work, and the one where you’re not.

Rob: Hm. Yeah. It’s really fun. I would say that, like, when you’re working on a team, everyone has a lot of the context for what a design solution is trying to do. But when you’re in the classroom, students are bringing a lot more of their own context. So there’s no better way to get really good at being a design critic, than to be a design teacher, I think. Because particularly for the work that I do with my MFA students at RISD, I’m a thesis at critic. So each of them is working on their own thesis research, and presenting that to me.

So if I have 14 students a year, I’m switching context 14 times. Each time I do a review. And that actually is really good at building that critical muscle, and it lets me do a lotta different things.

One of the things it lets me do is bring lessons from my practitionership, and the world that I’m practicing in, to the students. So I’m constantly able to apply things that I’m learning at Google, things that I’m learning at MoMA, in new ways in the classroom, that I can’t necessarily apply within the organization I’m working in.

And then, I think, the other thing that it helps me do is, as …. Uh, I’ve been teaching there for 13 years now. I start to spot patterns of: where is the design thinking here sound? Where is it going off-track? This student is making this kind of project, and other parallel projects to that have been successful by doing these critical things. And so I have to be there for them, to be interested in it with them.

And that’s been a learning process for me, very often. Like, exposing me to areas of design that I wasn’t drawn to naturally. So I really get a lot out of teaching, and I think a lot of my role as a manager as a kind of teacher or coach. So it also has helped me not be, I think, a micromanager, or someone who is wishing they were designing but just doesn’t have time. You know, it’s a different level of support, when you’re there for someone else, and for them to be successful, and to grow.

So I think there’s a lot of parallels. There’s also some distinctions.

Liam: But I feel like we would be too easily glossing over something if I didn’t talk about the fact that we actually met at Google. When I started back in 2017, there was some overlap between us, and … and I always wished that I could have you on the show, and it’s so convenient now that … (laughs)

Rob: Oh, I’m so … I’m so honored.

Liam: Now that you’re at MoMA, we have-

Rob: I always wished I could be on the show.

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: (laughs)

Liam: We have, uh …

Rob: Wishes come true.

Liam: Yeah, we have so much more to talk about.

But I wanna get into some of the initiatives that you worked on at Google around Material Design, and the sort of idea of design outreach.

First of all, how do you conceptualize design outreach?

Rob: So, I mean, I think when I arrived at Google, Material Design had launched v1, and I think it was really incredible to me, as an outsider, both as an educator and as a designer making websites and projects … Just in terms of the education that it brought to my students who were maybe just becoming familiar with patterns on the web. Like radio buttons, and drop-down menus, and usability best practices and things like that.

I think the academy actually hasn’t quite caught up to the self-education that’s happening by people all over the place, especially at that moment. So I was really inspired by the educational mission of Material, as well as the kind of incredible way that it let you build on top of it. And I thought that that was something that … Often we were, you know, building our own frameworks at Project Projects, and then to have someone come along and give us those frameworks so we could focus more on the design and the design expression for our clients, was just incredible.

So I was really inspired by that, but I think there was a moment to say: “Okay, we’ve put this amazing thing into the world, and now do we continue to help that community around it?” And I think that that was a moment that I was really interested in when I got to Google.

We approached that in a lot of different ways. You know, one of them was we launched the Google Design website, which had been started before I arrived, but I was part of the team that launched that, and also part of its new design iteration. I think, you know, working closely with Amber Bravo, and a lot of the content team … Just talked about, like, “What is our voice when we talk about projects? How do we help make someone who is maybe working on a team of one or two understand what it’s like to work on a team of 30 or 40, and that there are parallel problems there, but there are also very different types of problems that are maybe interesting for Google to talk about when it talks about its own work.”

And I think we felt, like, always worried about monopolizing the conversation, or having our voice be too dominant. And we feel like design is made of many voices at many different scales and positions within a community. So SPAN, I think, became very important as the kind of corollary to Google Design, where, you know, if Google Design is where Google speaks and talks about what it’s proud of, SPAN is a place for Google to create a platform for other people to speak and talk about what they’re proud of.

And I think one metaphor we used while we were developing SPAN was the idea that it should be as good as a Google search in any market. So it’s like if you go into Tokyo, Google should know, just like it knows the great restaurants and can help you find them … It should know the best designers, and it should help you hear from them.

So this idea of, like, the hyper-local really came from that. And, you know, that involved a lot of boots-on-the-ground research to find those people, and hear their stories, and help them draw those stories out and make connections to those stories.

Liam: So we’ve talked now about remaining critical of design, understanding the context of the design, existing in the context of the design, and also involving the kind of place, either geographically or culturally, of the design. But you’ve also spoken about designing in one’s own time, and that’s a concept that I’m really interested in. Could you explain that a little bit?

Rob: Yeah, definitely.

I mean, this was an idea that I’ve had with me throughout my career for many years. But I think the origin of it was that … Before I taught at RISD, I taught at Parsons, and one of the nice things about teaching at Parsons was that if you taught a class you could take a class for free. And my mom is an educator … And just like we say design is never done, her idea is education is never done, you know? So lifelong learning was something that I was really interested in, and wanted to take a web design class. ’Cause I could see that that was training that was important, and growing, in terms of design impact.

And at the time, a number of designers who were trained, as I was, mostly in print and some kind of identity design, were kind of asking me, like: “Why would you wanna make websites? You know, you don’t really control them. They’re impermanent. They change all the time. You know, why not make a book that’s gonna be on a shelf for 50 years, and be durable, and be very much controlled by the designer from end to end?”

And, you know, that was something I really had to wrestle with, as I began to work more and more on the web, and the way I kind of anchored myself to that was to be a designer is to be of your time, and this is an emerging form of our time that needs designers, and where designers can have a greater impact than in so many other forms.

I mean, the form of the book is incredible, but very slow in terms of its evolution, and that’s what’s wonderful about it, is it’s so deliberate and enduring. But if you are someone like me who’s really interested in dabbling in lots of things, and super curious in lots of areas, websites had a different texture and quality, and rhythm to them. I loved the democracy of them, and that you could send a URL to a friend when a project launched, and they didn’t have to go buy the book, or fly to see the show, or something like that. They could actually directly experience that thing.

And yet their experience of it would be super variable. Like, depending on the device that they had, or the moment that they hit refresh on the URL, or whatever. And I just … I thought that dynamism was so amazing.

And I think that was sort of a part of becoming more comfortable with design leadership, was also learning that I was beginning to make a type of design that I couldn’t make completely by myself. There was gonna be different sets of experts, and different types of people that were all gonna be involved in this project. And my goal, as a designer, was to keep reinforcing what the intent of the design was, and how it was solving the problems, or it could solve the problems better.

So I guess I see that as being what that means to me, and, you know, at Google it took a sort of second turn. Because I had opportunity to work on a team here that was under the research and development part of Google, called Google AI, in my last few months at Google, and, you know, that was another amazing opportunity to be part of the design of our time, you know. And to learn about AI systems, and things that were not fully understood by designers in a lotta ways, and to try to both help designers understand that, as a designer, and also begin to learn how to think about those things, and the ways that they could be more ethical, increase liberty, be more inclusive. And where the levers of that would be within a design process.

Liam: So in contrast to designers getting to know technology, there’s a new show opening at MoMA, New Order, that asks how art pushes the boundaries of technology. In the opposite direction. And that’s something that I’ve been really interested in lately, so I’d like to get your thoughts on that question, and also the relationship between art, design, and technology.

Rob: You know, I think the show, New Order, which is curated by my colleague Michelle Kuo, is, uh, using all works from our permanent collection at MoMA, to look at the present moment. And it’s interesting, because a number of different art museums and different institution have done quote unquote “internet shows,” art in the age of the internet, you know, Painting 2.0. These sorts of things.

I think it’s been really interesting to see those efforts come about. I think, particularly … You know, I was able to attend Painting 2.0 in Munich, and just seeing the way that the art world was drawing metaphors from the technology world to talk about painting as a social network, or these different things, almost is the reverse, in some ways, of thinking about the internet as a highway, or something. Like, where instead of metaphors going from the real world to a virtual world, they’re coming back from a virtual world, back to the real.

And I think one of the things that is really important to understand about the show at MoMA right now, is that it’s very, very interested in the real, in materiality. There are a lot of metaphors, but it’s actually very much about the materials as much as the metaphors. And I think that’s an important next step in the critical understanding of art right now, is that it’s actually made of stuff, it’s made of bits. And when you go to an art museum you experience those bits, as stuff, not just as bits.

And so there’s tubs that are filled with ultrasound jelly. There’s a vending machine that not just has Soylent, but has cocaine and blended up dollar bills, and crazy things, by Joshua Klein. Anika Yee did these incredible tubs of ultrasound jelly with things growing in them. There’s a piece by Ian Cheng that uses AI and a gaming engine to create an ambient virtual world.

So there are all these things that really help us to reimagine, and understand differently, what stuff is in today’s world. What a world is in today’s world. What human agency is in today’s world. What a human can make by themselves, and what they can make with other technology, in today’s world.

And I think artists are often at their best when they’re talking about those types of questions, and helping us understand those types of limits, as well. And not directly critiquing society, maybe, but placing objects in society that help us have a debate with one another.

So I think those are all good reasons to see the show.

Liam: So throughout our discussion, it’s become clear that your career has touched on a lot of design disciplines, from typography, to machine learning, to art criticism, to the kinds of meta-design that you do as a design director.

And we’ve touched on the patterns that start building up as you encounter all of these things, but I’m curious if you’ve found any sort of through-lines that intersect all of these things, or, like, commonalities that bring them all together in any way?

Rob: It’s so interesting to hear that.

I think one of the things that I’ve stayed truest to is that I love making culture, as a designer. So, you know, even if I’m working on a branding project, or an app, or something like that, you’re still making a thing that’s going in the world and is part of culture.

And I think one of the very powerful ideas that drew me to Google was that Google is a kind of a cultural institution as much as it’s a technology company. And it has a responsibility … Its public wants it to make good culture. And I think I felt a real connection to the mission of that drive. And I think it does make very good culture. But I think it was fun to be a part of that.

And I think at MoMA, it’s even more present for me, to have the importance of culture, and the way that culture shapes our understanding of who we are, and what is meaningful in life, and … You know.

I remember hearing a philosopher talk a lot about whether or not you should go to an art museum. (laughs) That is seems like an obvious thing that, like, everyone should go to art museums, but, you know, assuming that you’re in mid-life, and maybe you have a family, and you only have so many weekends left in your life, why should you go to an art museum and not go for a walk outside, or something like that?

And I think it … It actually just helped frame for me the kind of scarce resource that time, leisure time, time with ourselves, really is in our world right now. And as someone who is sort of a cultural producer, I really think a lot about that, in terms of: are we asking people to spend time with culture that’s of value to them, and that is really gonna make their lives richer and more thoughtful and more … Maybe even spiritual, you know? To … To use that word. I think people have very spiritual experiences at an art museum that are different from experiences they can have in other parts of life.

So I think the thing that’s fun about working at MoMA in particular, but also I think I experienced this as Google too, is just: in order to get culture right, you’ve gotta sweat the details. You know, it’s all execution at the end of the day, and whether it’s a corner radius on a button for Google Material, or, uh, making the shadow a little bluer, so that it feels a little brighter on-screen, and more connected to the colors of Google’s brand. Or it is the positioning of a wall label, or even removing the label and silk-screening right it on the wall so that it almost becomes invisible, so that you can focus on the art.

Those sort of subtle decisions, when you make them serially, build up to something that is difficult to say why it’s working, but it’s beautiful, and it’s incredible, and it’s not something that someone has the time to conceive of themselves, which is why they’re paying the ticket price for a museum, or the price for an app, or whatever it might be.

So to answer your question in, in a very looped way, I would say: I’ve always been drawn to making culture as a designer, and the thing that’s connected that for me is how detailed it is to make culture, and how sophisticated it is to get culture right.

Liam: Right, and I think someone would argue that, given that most of the physical environment around us every day is designed on some level, anyone who touches that is creating culture, in the same way, since-

Rob: Absolutely, yeah.

Liam: Perhaps about the intent that you mentioned, and really being observant of that, and respectful of it.

Rob: I think often designers are overwhelmed by what they have to produce, but it’s such a privilege to get to make the world. Like, the interface for the world. Whether you’re working virtually, or with materials in the real world. You’re deciding when someone should turn the page. You’re deciding how heavy their phone is that they left up every day. You’re telling them whether they need to swipe to get more information, or they can have it right on the screen.

All of those things are ways that you’re actually changing someone’s experience of their life, and the fabric of their life, through design. And I don’t think there could be a more transformative discipline than that.

I think it creates an even greater imperative for designers to be really good listeners, and I think that that’s something that is another learning, maybe, from my life, is just like: as you go, as a designer, initially you struggle to have your skills, and once you start to master your skills, you wanna show off how great you are at them, and so then you’re very eager to show that you’re capable, and that you have the answers.

And I would say that’s, like … For me, that was, like, a six-year arc, to getting to a place where I no longer felt like I needed to show off what I knew. I could actually have confidence in that of myself, and be patient enough to listen to the problem, and really understand it, before I applied those skills, or made suggestions to people.

And I think the better I’ve gotten at listening, the easier leadership has become, too. Because often you think, like, a leader is there to have ideas, and … and make declarations about what should be done in a certain situation, but really, I … uh, most of the problems that arrive to me, like, no one really has the answer. And it’s sort of just about listening to what everyone thinks the answer could be, and trying to help guide the team through the confusion and the ambiguity of that, to get to something that everyone is excited about executing.

If I just said what I thought without having a lot of context, I think I would make a lot of very bad decisions. (laughs) You know?

Liam: Yeah, maybe after the point when you think you have all the answers, it turns out that the answers are just questions.

Rob: (laughs) Exactly.

Liam: (laughs)

Rob: Yes.

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

Rob: Thank you so much for having me.

Clinton Cargill, Visual Director — Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair’s visual director Clinton Cargill on looking at photography with intent

In this episode, Liam speaks with Clinton Cargill, the current Visual Director at Vanity Fair and former photo director at Bloomberg Businessweek. Cargill describes how he mastered the art of critically looking at pictures, what it takes to craft a compelling story with the expressive capabilities of photography, and why intent is central to creative work.

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Liam Spradlin: Clinton, welcome to Design Notes.

Clinton Cargill: Thank you.

Liam: I wanna know about your journey up to now. So building up to being a photo editor at the New York Times, photo director at Businessweek, and ultimately the visual director at Vanity Fair.

Clinton: I have a fairly circuitous and unplanned career trajectory. I came to New York to go to NYU and study drama, and, uh, could not pay four years of tuition, so I dropped out and got a job working backstage at an off-Broadway theater company, being, like, a wardrobe supervisor, a dresser.

And I did that for a couple of years, and I felt like I was adjacent to the work that I wanted to be doing, and … but not really on a track. And it seems cliché to say but, actually, like, right after September 11th, I kind of rethought everything, and I think I was interested in directing and the kind of larger theatrical premise which, in its way, is a visual art form.

But I felt like, at the time, the work that I was involved with, or that I was seeing, wasn’t really in dialogue with the world in a big way. And I also felt like I just wasn’t helping people, so I decided to go back to school.

My plan was to become a therapist, and at that point I had like 32 college credits accumulated, so it was gonna take me a really long time to go at night, and I had to find a job that I could stand to do while I was going to school, and I ended up, through a temp agency, getting a job at a magazine called Biography, which existed, like, in the late ’90s, early 2000s. It was a spinoff of the the A&E television show, which I remember from cable in the ‘90s.

And I liked being in magazines. I had been the editor of my high school newspaper. It was something that felt, like, familiar and sort of right, but I was working on the business side, and it wasn’t really the best match.

So I interviewed at a bunch of places, and ended up getting, like, a clerical job at the New York Times. There’s a sort of department of admin assistant types that move all over, and some of them float, and some are more stable positions. And they saw my resume, and they said, “Well, we have a job at the magazine, and you have magazine experience.”

I was kind of like: “That doesn’t really seem … Okay, yes.” (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Clinton: “Yes, that’s all true.” And it ended up being in the photo department. And it was also basically temp-to-hire, and I really felt right away like I … I liked these people and got them, but that I had really no experience with photography. You know, that I was sort of disadvantaged, because this wasn’t really what I had studied or sort of thought of.

And I had the privilege of working for Kathy Ryan, who’s the longtime photo director there, who really doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on pedigree. She’s really just inserted in people who make things happen, and positive energy, and curiosity.

Very shortly in, I realized I had really fallen into, like, an incredible spot, and kind of … What I think of it, is like apprenticing. I was the assistant for about a year and a half, and then an editor position came open and she moved me into that role. And then I was there for like 10 years.

So I really learned everything I know about photography on the job, which is to say I wouldn’t trust me with a … with a fancy Canon camera.

Liam: (laughs)

Clinton: But I learned a lot about how to look at pictures, and how to sort of read them.

Liam: I wanna get into that. When you say you learned how to look at pictures, what does that mean?

Clinton: We take in imagery everywhere, all the time. And there is intention in every step in the process of making a photograph, or a video or a film, and as casual viewers we’re not really burdened with thinking about what those intentions are. Sometimes they’re quite obvious. You know, a billboard that’s selling you something, you kind of understand.

But the question I learned, actually, in college studying theater, was … I had a great design teacher. A costume designer named Michael Krass, who … his whole premise was: “What do you see? And how does it make you feel?” You know, not: “What is the hyper-intellectual meaning of it?” Not: “what’s it’s art-historical significance?” Or anything academic, but: “What are the base elements that you’re looking at, and what are the feelings that it conveys?”

And he would send us on trips around New York with a sketch book, and say, “You have to three sketches in all these places.” He sort of took it upon himself to indoctrinate us into New York City. So if you go to the Port Authority, like, what do you see, and how does it make you feel? Like, these kind of big, heavy, brick columns in a dark red. The particular fluorescent light. The way the corridors are aligned. All of those things contribute to, like, your experience of what that is.

And that was how he thought we should be thinking about costume design, theatrical design, directing, all of these things. And I sort of start there, with pictures, is: “What am I looking at? And does it generate an emotional response?”

So then I learned … The way Kathy taught me to think, is like: “When you look at an image, where does your eye go first? Like, how … what’s your point of entry into the story that you’re telling?” And, again, I think that’s very much about emotional connection.

I know, from years of working with editors, we don’t all read images in the same ways, but there are a lot of commonalities, in the way that we … in the visual lexicon that, like, certainly, we have as a culture in America, and I think, certainly, there are things that resonate across cultures.

Liam: You mentioned photos having, like, an entry point into a story. And I think there’s something really fascinating about the work of being an editor or, um, perhaps, a visual director, in maybe crafting a story using these pieces.

In my mind, it seems almost like working with an indirect medium, which is, like, working with the photographer’s style, and approach, and, like, method of storytelling, in order to tell a story and, like, create this larger piece.

Clinton: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

In thinking about doing my work, as often as possible you’re reading a draft of a story, or talking in detail with the writer, or an editor, about: what are the themes, who are the characters, what are we trying to convey?

And then, because I work in media, what’s the goal? It’s to get you to pay attention and care about whatever the subject is.

So I have to think both about what is reflective of the underlying narrative, but also what’s gonna grab your attention and command that you stop and look, in a world where there’s just an onslaught of words and images.

I always talk about tone. You know, is this an informative piece? Is it a personal narrative? Is it serious, is it light? And then: you know, should we playing into that, or is there a kind of … is there a jarring juxtaposition that will actually heighten your experience of what the tone of that piece is?

So my kind of visualization is: you have to have, like, a tether to the subject matter. And it can be, like, spiderweb-thin, and it can float out into something amazing and creative, and totally unimaginable to the person who wrote the piece. And as long as you have that thin, strong connective tissue, you’re fine.

But you just can’t come in and do anything that makes no sense. You know, you have to throw the viewer a bone.

Liam: Speaking more on what it’s like to capture and image, versus planning it, and then actually integrating into the story: you’ve taught editorial photography as well, and I’m curious how you view the approach of seeing things through an editorial lens-

Clinton: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … at different steps during the process? Including planning it, capturing it, and then using it.

Clinton: The way that I talked to my students about it … And I, I taught a class called Visual Thinking for Magazines at the International Center for Photography for, like, about five years. And the thing I caught onto pretty quickly was: despite being smart, interesting people from a variety of backgrounds, and who taught me a ton, for the most part the notion of what’s possible in a kind of editorial picture-making context, was … They had vastly underestimated what could be.

So I would always say: you know, you have an have an empty rectangle. And you can put anything in it. Anything. So every choice you’re making has to be measured against the infinite possibilities of what can go in a rectangle. And even the rectangle is sometimes up for debate. You can do anything you can get away with.

When I go through process now, there’s a question of: what’s the story? Again, what’s the thesis, or who is the character that we’re trying to introduce?

Magazine journalism always has a take. I think that’s a real distinction between classically newspaper journalism, and magazines, is that magazines are built on having a point of view. And I … I would say, over the last 10, 15 years, the internet has sort of magazined all of journalism, in a way that’s sometimes great, and sometimes not great.

But working from that vantage point, I always know: we have a take. We have, at least, a question to pose about a subject that we’re introducing. So, again, what’s the ultimate potential for that empty space, when you’re telling a story about X? Or when you’re telling a story about this person?

And then you have to be able to articulate your case, or make a visual representation of what you want to do, to get editors to come along with you. To get the subjects to agree or sort of understand the story that you’re trying to tell.

So there’s negotiation throughout the process, like, it’s from the moment of idea generation, to when you actually assign the photographer, to when you choose the pictures and publish. But there’s also, like, several sort of mini stations along the way where you have to, sort of, I guess, essentially pitch your notion of what something should be.

And that very often sharpens concept along the way, but you go through this process of iterating and sharpening what your thesis is, so that by the time you get to the point of putting things together, you’ve made something that hopefully makes the narrative more interesting more intelligent, more lively.

Liam: You mentioned keeping in mind the publication’s point of view, or the take, or what … what they’re trying to say. And it seems like the visuals of a publication being probably the most readily-absorbed method of communication the magazine has, would play a big part in that, and also in, like, the identity of the magazine overall. I’m interested in the ways that the visuals contribute to that, how they might even form or evolve it or over time.

Clinton: Sure.

Um … Yes to all that. At Businessweek, when I started there, they had been through a period of a lot of on-camera flash, really hard light. It was a really unbridled aesthetic, in terms of its design. And I learned so much there, because I think I had spent a decade trying not to mess up the New York Times Magazine, and feeling so privileged to be in that space. And then I got to Businessweek, and, you know, the first rule is “we break all the rules.”

So what I saw when I started there, was: you’re not really using this medium to its full effect. And there are things like shadows that actually sometimes bring a lot of meaning and texture to a picture, and allow a reader to relate into an image, that just weren’t always on display. Despite, like, again, really, really full-throated, interesting photography.

You know, that job was exciting, because business journalism, if you can get through the first day, is a deeply fascinating sort of sub-category of what we do, and there’s a business angle to any story. So I really spent a lot of time, too, thinking about, like: how can we produce photo-essays, publish photographs, that … that carry the weight of the business narrative, that speak to economies and markets in a way that, again, like, matches the volume of the great journalism that was taking place in the written word?

And then coming to Vanity Fair, that’s all kind of out the window. It’s a magazine about … about access, about the kind of intersection of power and personality, about a certain kind of aspiration. And it has this incredible history with Helmut Newton … Obviously, Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts. Um … These really iconic photographers that were a constant at this place, and who, you know … They made the brand and the brand made them, in many ways.

So what does aspiration look like in 2018? What is power in 20 … 19, I guess, we’re in 2019. And, you know, working with a new editor there, who’s really interested in looking at a more diverse range of subject matter, and who also comes from a strong intellectual background, how do you make glamorous pictures that speak to the world we’re living in right now? Which in many ways is different from what our historic sense of Vanity Fair is.

I don’t have the answers to that yet, but I feel like we’re … we’re working out.

Liam: Do you feel like, in terms of speaking about the rectangle with which you can do anything … Do you feel that paleographers are working with a similar set of tools across these publications? I guess the parameters that you would use to intone an image with a certain mood, or bring forward the focal point, or use light and shadows to-

Clinton: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: … relate the image.

Clinton: I think the parameters are largely the same. There’s … There are definitely budget questions that inform, you know, to what degree you can really produce a picture. Um, and … Not gonna lie, budget is an issue at any publication in where were are now.

For example, at Businessweek, we started our production cycle on Thursday, and we would go to press on Wednesday, and sometimes we wouldn’t know what was the cover until Friday or Monday. So we had a little studio. Occasionally we would put together, like, still-life covers, or some simple concept, and shoot it in the studio that had, like, drop ceilings and was just a little tiny room.

So, there’s part of the character of the brand that comes through, with the sense that maybe it was put together with duct tape sometimes, and you can’t do that with a magazine like Vanity Fair. You would only make a choice like that in the New York Times Magazine to match the kind of ideas of a very specific story.

But that said, the essential tools are the same. And I guess one of the challenges of what we do is that, in a lot of ways, the sort of language of photography is moving fast into whole other realms. The language of, say, photojournalism, we’re still working with a lot of the ideas that we got from, you know, Robert Capa and Cartier Bresson.

And I happen to love that kind of photography, but I also think we have to be making imagery that is translatable on Instagram, that can be a story that fits in this vertical frame that isn’t exactly a 35 millimeter or medium format proportion.

And I think I’m trying to say that one of the challenges for people who do what I do is to kind of always be thinking about where the medium is going, and how to bring that into the work that we do.

And then some of the other is: how do we bring the kind of enthusiasm and spontaneity, and intimacy of digital mobile photography into the world of highly-produced, curated, edited magazine experience?

Liam: When you talk about the realities of production at Businessweek coming through in the photos, do you think that that happens at other publications as well? Like, at a publication like Vanity Fair, where you have a very high production, do you think that there are still intangible aspects of the magazine’s identity, or the realities of how it’s made, that are somehow conveyed through the imagery?

Clinton: Well, I think at Businessweek there was a conscious kind of … I don’t have a better word than “postmodern,” and I always hate using that word. But there was a real conscious embrace of the sense that you, the reader, know and we, the makers of the magazine, know that this whole thing is a conceit. That there’s a cover and a back page, and everything in between is , like, an agreed-upon form. And, since you know that, we can play a lot with it, and we can wink at making it on a shoestring sometimes.

And I think most magazines do operate within that construct, that we are making a world for you, that you can aspire to, that is making you smarter, that’s telling you interesting stories.

And so, I don’t think, in that sense, that there’s a lot of winking at what the production value is. But there are technical concerns, like: the kind of paper we print on is served well by photography with strong lighting, and there’s a kind of mode among contemporary photographers, whose work I love, to be shooting in natural light, and there’s this autumn light with tree branches behind, and a dusty road. They’re unadorned, right? And that makes them naturally softer.

Those pictures don’t always translate well onto that paper, and they don’t take you to a place in the same way. It would have to truly be a specific story where that would be the right approach, in this magazine.

And if you think about one of its primary subjects, is Hollywood and celebrity. So it lives in a world that is produced. And I think, in that sense, the answer to your question is: yes, like, that is very much … The production values of the magazines are an expression of the character of its subject matter.

Liam: In an interview with Photo District News, you said something really interesting to me, which was about capturing subjects, and telling a story in a way that made sure not to glorify them too much, and to challenge the expectations of, like, how we expect to see these things presented, and I’m curious how you find ways to continue to present things in unexpected ways that don’t change, or do change, the story.

Clinton: When I started working at Businessweek, it already was this very iconoclastic publication, and that’s down to Josh [Teringul 00:19:38], who hired me, and Richard Turley, who was the creative director before I was there.

They were allergic to CEOs in suits. And it was a real response to what the other magazines in their sort of competitive set would be. So it’s like: Forbes, and Fortune, and, um, Inc., and Fast Company, and others. But this is a business news magazine, and its role is not to anoint masters of the universe. Its role is to report on, and engage with, people who are news-makers in this space.

So we had to think a lot about who you assign, and how you think about photographing those kinds of characters. How do you get them out of their well-practiced camera face? How do you shake them up a little bit?

And my point of view about it was always that the lights, and the backdrop, and the kind of tight head shots, all those things, they’re just a kind of glorifying artifice. And you can totally do it, and it’s fine, but in my mind I knew what that picture looked like. And that’s a case where I was like: “Let’s get some natural light. Let’s get this person outside.”

Um, we photographed the CEO of Microsoft, you know, in a stairwell in one of the buildings on their campus with great southern light, and it was me and a photographer with one assistant who was maybe holding a reflector, and we were just trying to get: what kind of sweater is he wearing? Who is this man? And really enter the conversation at that place, as opposed to having, like, a real idea about the CEO of a large company.

And, I mean, I would say the same when we photographed President Obama. Like, at that point, it was late in the administration. There had been a lot of pictures of him. Who would bring a kind of intimacy, a kind of eye-level interaction with this person? And that was what was exciting.

Then, if you compare that to where, in the New York Times Magazine … I think that is a publication that’s re… really fundamentally about ideas, and so even when you’re meeting a character, when you’re meeting a news-maker, there’s an underlying narrative about what meaning they have in the culture in a certain moment.

And, this is just me saying this, this is my take on … on that place, but you always kind of thought about: what’s the working headline? Or what narrative are we trying to cut against? Mot for reasons of politics or anything like that but just purely to hit on what’s most interesting about the person, and to, you know, really surprise and engage the reader, again, which is always the goal.

But, again, that … like, being part of the New York Times, you had to always do that in a way that posed the question to the reader, as opposed to giving a very blunt take.

We photographed Glenn Beck, right when he was sort of at the height of his career on Fox News, and it was a very difficult negotiation. And they had basically felt that they had been burned by other publications, like, been told one thing and had something else happen. So on that one, I spent a lot of time, like, one to one talking with the subject’s reps about what we were gonna do, and basically saying: “We just want to give you a fair shake. It’s a cover story. Our only intention here is to make a portrait that works for the cover.”

And in modern media, a lot of people approach coverage with already so many assumptions about what’s gonna happen, that a lot of times you have to really state your case and try to be very thoughtful about not only how what you do will be perceived, but how the perception of what you will do is perceived on the part of the subject, like, before you eve enter the conversation.

I mean, like, my name is Clinton, and I’m a gay guy who lives in New York, so I always have felt like whenever I was on the phone with anybody from a Republican point of view, like, that I had so many strikes against me that I just wanted to be really clear that my intentions were just to, like, tell the story. If that makes sense.

Liam: Yeah. It sounds like part of it about undoing some of the ways that we tend to contextualize these people, who really are people.

Clinton: Yeah.

Liam: And then contextualizing them either within the story, or within their own personality, to let the story come forth.

Clinton: Absolutely. And you can have that as your goal, and still make really interesting exciting pictures. And one key job of magazine journalism is to provoke, to ask you questions that challenge your assumptions about things.

And so I don’t wanna suggest, in any way, that we weren’t out to make strong, pointed photography, but that part of the job of doing that is asking: “What the are the assumptions about this person, and how do we turn them on their head?”

We think a lot about … Sometimes you’ll be in a conversation, and everyone has the same idea, but a lot of times what that means it that if we all thought of it as our first read on a subject, that’s exactly the wrong idea. And that you have to do several layers more work to get at something that will feel new, that will surprise the viewer.

Liam: I wanna close by referring back to that same interview that I mentioned earlier, because you said something in there about intent, and asking someone: “Why did you take this picture?”

What is the underlying intent that you’re looking for, and how does that reflect in the image?

Clinton: There’s, like, a circuit of people who do what I do. We go to places and gather, and do what’s called portfolio reviews, where you sit with a photographer and look at their pictures, and … It’s a networking thing, but it’s also a moment when you can have an honest conversation with someone about their work, and where they’re trying to go, without the explicit request for an assignment or request for work coming through.

So I’ve done a lot of those over the years, and I find that: “Why did you take this picture?” is a question that, like, puts people back on their heels, and people who can answer that question, are really accessing what their kind of innate curiosities are. The answer can be: “You know, I just really love red, and, like, my pictures are about color, and this is a thing I saw in the world that was red in an interesting way.” Like, that’s a perfectly reasonable, acceptable answer to me, and it also helps me catalog how this person is gonna approach an assignment.

But I would say, generally speaking, I’m interested in photography because I’m interested in ideas, which is, like … I became a journalist ’cause I’m interested in ideas. And we photograph a lotta portraits, we photograph, you know, a lotta different kinds of things, that you wouldn’t look at necessarily and say: “What’s the idea here?”

But, really, the best work, like the work of a true artist, or the work of a master, is: they brought themselves, and their intellectual and emotional drives to the subject, and illuminate it with those things in mind.

So when I think about intent, that’s really what I’m asking is, you know: A, do you know what you’re bringing to this picture? And, B, how are you harnessing what you’re photographing, or the way that you’re photographing to sort of get at the ideas that excite you?

Um, it’s a hard question, but I feel like it’s one that we should always be engaging with, and so I try to.

Liam: Yeah, maybe it relates back to what they wanted you to see, and how they wanted you to feel about it.

Clinton: Exactly. I think that’s exactly right.

Liam: Well, thank you, again, Clinton, for joining me.

Clinton: Yeah, thank you. It was a lot of fun.