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.

Alexandra Lange, Architecture Critic

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

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

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

Alexandra Lange: (laughs)

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Yeah. (laughs)

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: Yes.

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

Alexandra: Yes.

Amber: … or the concept of kindergarten.

Alexandra: Yes, exactly.

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

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

Amber: Right.

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

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

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

Amber: (laughs) Yeah.

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

Amber: Right.

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra: (laughs)

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

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

Amber: (laughs)

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

Amber: Yeah.

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

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

Alexandra: (laughs) Yeah.

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

Alexandra: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

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

Alexandra: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

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

Amber: Right.

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

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

Amber: Right.

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

Amber: Right.

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

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

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

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

Amber: Right.

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

Amber: Right.

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

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

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

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

Amber: Right.

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

Amber: Right.

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

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

Alexandra: (laughs)

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

Alexandra: (laughs)

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

Alexandra: (laughs) Yes.

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

Alexandra: Oh.

Amber: … (laughs) the cardboard-

Alexandra: Sure.

Amber: … box is so magical.

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

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

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

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

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

Amber: Great. Thanks, Alexandra.

Alexandra: Thank you.

Mitch Paone, Principle at Dia Studio

DIA Principle and Creative Director Mitch Paone on the parallels between jazz and design practice

In the fifth episode, Liam speaks with Mitch Paone, Principle and Creative Director at DIA Studio, about creating a jazz solo out of the creative process, using a beginner’s mindset to unlock new possibilities in design, and the difference between intuitive and analytical creativity.

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Liam Spradlin: Mitch, thank you for joining me.

Mitch Paone: Thank you very much.

Liam: To get started, like always, I want to ask about your journey. So both what you’re doing now and also what your journey was like to get there?

Mitch: The journey’s been a very, I think, multi-faceted one, and a lot of different interests, and I think people know me quite well — a ton of energy and the kind of directions that I want to pursue things in. But obviously my creative path and creative mission came out of some influences when I younger, and particularly my interest in music, and in jazz, and then also in visual arts.

At quite a young age, you know, I was… started playing piano at four years old and was taking lessons all the way up until high school. And then at that point I discovered some jazz records of Herbie Hancock and John Coltrane and you know, some of these masters. And at that point I realized, you know, this is what I want to pursue musically.

And then simultaneously once I decided I wanted to really, really take that seriously, I was, you know — visual arts and design were actually very interesting as well. Like Fillmore posters and, you know, skateboard magazines, and graffiti, and all this stuff when I was younger, was very engaging visually. So I was taking art classes in school as well. So I had this kind of dual path, so to speak, happening.

And I think in a way is kind of a luxury for me, to know right away that those felt good at such a young age. So as time went on, I ended up going to school in Loyola University of New Orleans. Out of some circumstance, there was really no school that would allow me to study jazz performance and graphic design at the same time, because they’re… they’re usually in separate schools within the university.

And that was only one that allowed that. And their programs in both of these studies were really incredible. The city has a tremendous culture and you feel this depth of humanity, and the people there are so powerful and interesting. And there’s some like unguarded nature about that city that really is touching, like deep down. And that really I think, was quite inspiring.

And then I was like, “Well, naturally I should go into motion graphics.” So really the first half of my career was spent working at, you know, amazing motion graphic firms like, you know, Brand New School, Psyop, LOGAN, I can just run out a big list of these things.

A lot of the people and creative directors that I, you know, worked with there had a profound effect on how I thought about design and… and really expressed that. So that was kind of the journey that got me into this 1.0 of my particular design career. I had the luxury of freelancing a lot through like the late 2000’s, and cherry picked all of the things I liked at different studios and thought about them, and… and I think really the big thing that I pulled out of that, besides the craftsmanship and the work, was how to deal and work with people.

If I were to run a studio, how do I create an environment that I can foster the best possible work that I can do, and then make people feel really good about that? And then I think DIA as it is today, is really a product of that kind of thinking, and merging all these experiences together.

I had a really serious interest in typography, you know, editorial design throughout that whole period with my career, but working in film and motion graphics, you don’t deal with that kind of side, it’s really illustrative and using a lot visual effects and film techniques. So the type kind of plays a back seat in the creativity in that area.

So a good friend of mine, his name’s Ludovic Balland, and actually recently this young woman designer named Giliane Cachin, both from Switzerland, had a huge effect in teaching myself typography. And then just generally interested in that culture and, you know, Müller-Brockmann and the studios like NORM and [Gilles Gavillet] and all these different designers. Like that work was so compelling from a typographic standpoint, but it didn’t deal with this motion or kinetic nature. It was very much like rigid, you know, type, print, editorial books.

Here in America, we’re dealing with like marketing, and we’re dealing with screens and commercials, like it’s pretty standard for us. Where in Switzerland and Germany and a lot of the European countries, it’s not really part of the output. This was a problem that I was like, “This is what I want to solve. This kind of brings it together. I can be in the moment with my music background, but I can bring my typographic interests into it.”

And I think that kind of leads us into where we are now.

Liam: As I was looking through some of DIA’s work, I came across a phrase that I was not familiar with. Kinetic brand experience, that’s something that DIA kind of like specializes in, and you produce these really amazing kind of pieces that are at that intersection of typography and motion.

So I want to explore, first of all, just what is a kinetic brand experience?

Mitch: So, it’s kind of interesting in… you know, it feels like a new idea, but it really isn’t. And… and there’s this idea of futurism in the work, and it’s funny because we’ve done interviews and lectures in the past, and they’ve labeled us as a futurist, which I didn’t really think about at the time. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the artistic movement, like let’s get rid of all the politics because we’re not violent, and we’re not gonna get rid of nostalgic and tradition stuff, but the idea of using new technology and new tools to create dynamic work that’s moving and capturing time, that is very interesting.

Like, talking about a little bit what I said about the idea of taking this Swiss typographic, or the Dutch typographic design cultures and bringing that into an area where we’re going to be interacting with it. So it was like, this has to happen. This wasn’t even a matter of interest. It was like, “We work on screens, let’s take advantage of the experience. We’re going through our Instagram, there’s however many followers. How do we create that experience super engaging with that short attention span, if anybody is going through it?”

And then if you think about the parameters of a design system, like the possibilities of creating something that feels constantly changing and different, but have a consistent voice is like, to me, a powerful thought as far as how we deal with design systems. Not to be hard on modernism, it’s not, “this is the logo, this is the grid system that’s very strict.” Once you hand that over to a brand team, it almost becomes oppressive. It’s like, you have to abide by this brand guidelines exactly.

Where if… if you’re dealing with an idea of evolution and kinesis and dynamism, like it’s exciting because you can… you can kind of create tools that allow continued exploration and evolution in the work that is more supportive in… in a way, than it is kind of just, “Okay, here’s the guidelines you execute.”

Liam: Yeah. I’m interested in the execution of that. So, I’ve seen in some of your work, you have generative identity, or things that supersede parametry, and become these really unique things depending on the application. So I’m wondering like, what are the components of that, and what are the rules?

Mitch: So to be able to work in this capacity, it goes back to learning new things. So we need to be working in the software, or the programs, or thinking about stuff in a way that isn’t traditional. So we start with those tools, whether it’s After Effects, Cinema 4D processing, like I could just rattle off. But if I’m working in a time-based format to create the work out the gate, then you’re basically setting it up that, you know, if I push play in frame five, frame six, frame seven, frame eight, like, they’re gonna be different, they’re gonna be unique.

We think about time and animation in a way that it actually is no different than scale, form, repetition, you know, any kind of design concept. So we’re just layering in basically film principles in a way, and pulling that into the design process. And you know, you can set rules. So this is the keyframe expression, this is the frame rate we’re going to use, these are the typefaces, this is the layout. And then you kind of create, you know, a generative system to apply that, and then the work executes consistently, but it feels like it’s moving or evolving.

It’s a bit of like flipping the design process on its head. So like, new designers get onboarded to our team, there’s always a tendency like, “Oh, we all work in InDesign, you know, we’re setting type.” It’s like the first thing that we do, it’s like, “Get out of InDesign. That is the last place we’re going. That’s when we get into presentation mode, and we’re gonna polish work.” Like we do care about typographic detail, like it’s absolutely insane about all that little stuff, but for us to get through these concepts and exploration ideas, we have to be using stuff that makes us uncomfortable to use, that we don’t know that well.

And that’s kind of where the surprises happen. We don’t have control over it as much, so it’s just like you know, “Wow, that’s interesting. Let’s see what happens there. Oh, let’s try this, let’s try that.” It’s not like controlled, specific direction. It’s really freeing to allow the software or process, kind of take a life of its own.

Liam: I want to go back to that intersection of type and motion, and ask how both of those elements interplay with one another to create an identity?

Mitch: Typeface is an identity, like period. Like that… If you look at, you know Google’s identity or any identity really, the one thing that you’re going to interact with the most content wise, is the text. So illustrations are cool, graphic elements are cool, that’s just layers of other things to add to it. But if we can solve the problem within the type itself, that’s really difficult to do, to create strong expression there. So we know that nuance and subtle detail there.

And what’s crazy about that is that trains your eye to be so dialed in to these details, and then you can do things and play with things, and make intentional mistakes that create personality with that. So then you layer in this idea of bringing this generative work, or animated work within that, then it gets more wild. This is when the jazz comes in. It’s like, “Okay, we have this typeface that works out, let’s see what happens when we do this, this, and this, and just hit play, or execute, or debug, or whatever you want to call it in the application.” And then sometimes it comes out totally disaster, but then you get surprises.

And then you allow this kind of iterative process to produce so much work and you can kind of see it. And all it is, is just affecting type in a certain way, and applying like specific parameters to it, and that generates a specific aesthetic out of it. So with that, while they’re very specific and not very many elements at all, you create a very powerful, expressive identity with very little material.

Like, “Hey, let’s just slant things at 45 degrees and execute and see what happens.” Boom, you have this thing that you could print, repeat in different formats. And anything you want to do to make it interactive, make it animate, you can put it to print and it feels like it has this movement to it.

Liam: So I’m interested in the relative contributions that the motion and the type make to the finished composition. So would you say that applying the motion to this very finessed, and structured, and produced typeface amplifies its aesthetic and identity, or would you say that there’s like a unique contribution coming from the motion that creates something new?

Mitch: You know, this is like a really hot topic I think for what we talk about in the studio, because it can destroy it and make it bad, or it can be really a tremendous asset. The key is that motion, animation, film, all these like multi silos that you’re bringing together in the work, can’t be an afterthought.

I think there is a kind of an… an urge to just, “Hey, let’s animate this logo,” or like, “Let’s make this move,” but like you’ve already figured out design system. That’s when it’s detrimental to the work because it becomes an afterthought, but if you fuse design, and interactivity, and generative work right out the gate, and treat them on the same playing field as type and graphic design, then you have set it up in a way that it’s going to be more powerful. Because you can… you can explain conceptually why we use this kind of animation and then you got formal things that come out of that process that, you know, in way we’re actually animating and doing generative work and bringing it into print, so it’s opposite.

It’s tricky because I think the issue with that, it requires designers. And I think on our team specifically, we have to learn this stuff really well to be able to apply it on the same level as our design craft. And then the people that are interested in exploring this work, there’s a learning curve. Like, and it can be a very intimidating learning curve. Like, if someone’s opened up After Effects for the first time, they’re going to be like, “Whoa, this is a really difficult program.”

Developing a creative process that allows you to take the intimidation out of learning new tools is, you know, because that’s where the learning and the growth is fostered to get there. So eventually you have this toolkit where you can design, animate, generate, all at the same time and it’s all the same thing. And that’s… that’s like the utopia really, but that’s, you know, where we would want to be, um, with our team. And anybody on our team really can just move seamlessly into different mediums and places. Hop behind a camera, hop behind Cinema 4D, it doesn’t matter. We’re all just doing work to try define an idea or a concept.

Liam: Do you worry about becoming comfortable with the tools?

Mitch: I think as soon as you’re comfortable with the tools, get out and try something else. Uncomfortable is good. The beauty of being uncomfortable, and we’ve had problems with this with designers. They’ll come in and I’m like, “Listen, you’re not going to even open up InDesign for like a week.” And then for someone who’s maybe has some insecurity possibly in the work, that’s really difficult to deal with.

I mean I’m not doing this to be like difficult, you need to try this, but this is actually a personal lesson of, once you dive into something new and you realize you’re terrible at it, and like I do this daily, that’s humbling. It’s like, “Oh my God, I really suck at this.” And then you’re like, “Wow, I’m not like this great designer anymore, I’m just a disaster.”

So what’s special about this is, it brings you back to earth. It’s like this process of like, “Oh, I think we’re feeling good about work,” and then, “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then I’m like… I’m grounded immediately. And I think above doing great work, that’s as important.

Liam: Right.

Mitch: Just to be a constant student.

Liam: So in some ways it’s about resetting and bringing yourself back to that first level-

Mitch: Yeah.

Liam: … on a new project.

Mitch: This might be cheesy, like you want to become like a baby again, like every other day, like and just be in this goofy world land where you don’t understand anything, and it’s beautiful. That’s what’s really cool about it. It’s like, “Wow, the possibilities are amazing.” And then you’re like, you learn something and you think it’s great and then you realize, “Oh, I need to actually really, day-by-day set a routine to practice and refine.”

And I… To pull the music discussion back in on this, to study piano and play jazz piano and improvise, there’s no shortcuts here. Any musician will tell you this takes rigorous, ritual practice to be able to do this. Like boring scales, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, over and over and over again.

But 5, 6, 7, 10, 20 years of that daily routine, and then you’re able to execute work… or execute in your performance in a way where that just… that’s your vocabulary. It’s just like speaking, we can use words to express certain emotions and things. So why don’t we apply the same kind of rigorous learning process to design tools? You know, After Effects is a piano, um, Cinema 4D is the drums. You know like, okay let’s think about it like that.

So we’ll sit there and just hammer out like the basics and just work it and refine, and then all of a sudden that becomes just a language and how we discuss things.

Liam: I think in some ways there might even be an advantage of continual discomfort with software, in that, like the way that piano keys are organized has not changed in quite a while, but something like the Adobe Suite or Cinema 4D, like you get an update-

Mitch: Yeah.

Liam: …when there are new features.

Mitch: I think the beauty of the piano keys and the rigid nature of that, the artistic detail in that specific… and music really, comes through the really nuanced, subtle expressions. You know, yeah we have scales and chords, a very classical way of thinking things that are structured like this. But in jazz, like I can play light, I can play soft, I can play in between, I can play staccato, I can play legato. Like, all of this expressive theory comes into the work.

You can never master it, there’s always something new and something different you can apply melodically, or harmonically, or within the expression of that that allows a musician to really be a constant student as well. And I think if we take that back into the design process, that’s where you get really interesting results. Like, you look at ways of being unorthodox about using things.

Liam: Yeah those, uh, subtle nuances of the way that you interact with one given tool. Do you think that those… like the way that you interact with these tools, does that reflect back into your work as well?

Mitch: I think there’s definitely this nature of being very improvisational. You know like, allowing unexpected things to happen is… what’s produced, I think, some of the favorite work that we’ve done lately. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we haven’t even released on the site or anything. But that I think, for any designer, is exciting.

Like, in… I had a really good experience just last week and I was telling you earlier that I did a creative workshop in Moscow with this… a group called the United Notions. And it was in tandem with Hey Studio out of Barcelona and Mime Design out of London. So we all kind of worked together to create this program for these students, and it was the first time that I’ve done a workshop dealing with this subject matter. And it was probably one of like, the most like heart touching experiences I’ve had. To see, when you take a student out of their comfort zone and put them in a tool or like an instrument that they have to create that’s totally different, but then you… All of a sudden, it was just like the brain was like, “Aha, oh my God, I can try this, I can do that. Oh my Gosh.” And once you get into this flow of creativity, you know, you basically allowed yourself to just create anything. And you’ve kind of removed your critical self out of the creative process in a way, and then it becomes like just generate ideas, and get excited about it, and just get it out, get it out, get it out.

Like a project that we’re on creative development on, we could have four or five hundred different things to look at in one day, because we’re not worried about like, “Oh, this has to look good, this has to be like this.” It’s like, “No, let’s surprise ourselves. Let’s come back the next day and then …” And then you’re like, “Whoa, that’s interesting, let’s go there.”

So you’ve totally removed yourself and it becomes this collaborative generation of improv, that guides the work in a way. And then we back it in when it’s time to like, present. We’re like, “Okay, we need to get focused here, and bring things home.”

Liam: I want to touch on that too. The, um, notion of learning to improvise, or learning to create something that feels very dynamic and on the fly, but actually takes a lot expertise. And so something that I’ve seen you talk about is this idea of analytical versus intuitive creation.

So first, what are those conceptually?

Mitch: Designers, I think we know how to make things look good at the very base level. Forget ideas, forget concepts, forget the content and meat, we can execute something that looks pretty. And I’m kind of saying this in a cynical way. So that to me is our brains getting in the way of being analytical. It’s like, “Oh yeah, let’s just you know, kern the type and set the leading just right, and create this kind of sterile thing that looks good and it’s pretty and people will accept.”

But I think what the problem with that is, is that it’s familiar to people. Like when you present work like this, and it seems to carry this, “Oh, I’ve seen that, that’s fine. It’s good, you know. It’s easy to digest,” because it doesn’t challenge yourself creatively, you haven’t put yourself out of the comfort zone. And you’re definitely not putting your viewer or their audience out of the comfort zone.

And I’m not saying we have to do this in a provocative way, but intuition… It’s really easy to talk about this in the jazz context, because when you’re performing and playing a solo, you’re deciding those notes right there, in time, and you’re going to make mistakes and do whatever you want. But I think the beauty of understanding jazz improvisation, is that no one knows you’re making a mistake if you play things with like a level of conviction. Like, “I’m gonna go for this, and I’m just gonna try to own it. And I’m gonna screw it up, but I’m just gonna roll with it and just keep playing through it. And no one in the audience is gonna know that.” You know that you totally missed the chord.

So let’s do the same thing, like in design. We’ll establish a very structured process that gets you to the point where you can just create this flow. And this gets into, I think a deeper personal level of understanding yourself, what you like, and your tastes, and who you are, and what makes you tick. And I think… There is a bit of self discovery to get to a point where you can say, “I’m gonna remove my critical self out of the process and just make stuff and be free.” That really is the process that we’re going for, that’s the aim.

And then on top of that, it’s like, “Hey, let’s trade art boards. I’m gonna take your ideas and do the same thing again. And then let’s switch it back.” It’s about as democratic as it gets. We share, we make. You know you’re gonna run into a limit of, “Okay, I can’t do anymore,” and then it’s like, “I’ll take that and see what happens.”

So basically what I’m saying, is that I’m creating like a jazz solo out of the creative process. So, say you record your jazz song that you played live at the bar, or you’re recording your whole process of the design that you created, the next day put it on the wall, throw it on the floor, put it on the screen, it doesn’t matter. Then you can look, and refine, and see things that are interesting, or find mistakes, or something that we can kind of improve on.

But I think what’s really special is, everybody on the team’s like, “Oh, that one. Whoa, that one.” And it’s not like, “Oh, I created that one. That’s my idea. This is the one we should go through.” We don’t care about that anymore. It’s like, that feels super good. It kind of goes, mmm. And then you grab those kind of soulful pieces of design that have a special nature to them, and then that… Then we do the same again, let’s work on that, refine that, let’s kind of produce more in that.

So I think the goal with this sort of process, is that if we’re getting these reactions collectively, the clients gonna have the same thing. Their audience is gonna have the same thing. We’re gonna present work and it’s gonna be like, “Oh, it made me feel something. It feels weird. I have a little bit of gap before I know why I feel weird about it.” And I think that’s really, really interesting, and I think to really connect with people in a way, that’s where we try to push things.

And I mean this is difficult to present work like this, because the clients like, “I don’t know what that is. I don’t understand this.” And I like to create the analogy, if you like listen to a song, it’s one of your favorites and you know it really well, you can sing the lyrics to it, and then you have a new song that just came on the radio by the same band, or same musician, and you’re like, “Man, I don’t… I don’t know if like this, but there’s something about it that brings me back over and over again.” You know this unfamiliarity. It’s different, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But then like five months of listening to that, that becomes your favorite song. The one that you liked is kind of boring.

Why not approach that for branding projects, or an identity? Like why don’t we do this for our clients and their audience? Why don’t we just go for this?

Liam: I think the analogy to old and new songs is really good as well, because that suggests that like a dynamic and generative approach to things like identity and design projects, actually works against that. It means that the song is always new, it’s always unfamiliar.

Mitch: So part of my ritual, every day I play 30 minutes to an hour of music scales, then I perform a song, then I want to practice. Every time I played, that song has been different. It’s been faster, it’s been slower, it’s been with like a groove, it’s been with a swing beat. So then you… you can switch it and change, but what’s beautiful about this, if you know the song, regardless of how I play it, the melody is there, the structure is there, and that is a parameter that defines an identity to music, that also defines parameters in design. And what I really like about that, is that it is not restrictive. It’s… you can create a huge identity that has this inner kind of connective web of rhythmic changes and colors and stuff, but people all know it’s part of the same thing.

Liam: So your studio works on these like super contemporary techniques to create these things, and your studio’s been described as futurist. So I want to wrap up by asking like, where do you see your creative process going in the actual future?

Mitch: (laughs) I think it’s funny the fact you wake up and think of yourself of a baby seeing the day as a new way, or new ideas are coming. Like if we keep this kind of lively humanity within the studio, we’ll be able to kind of receive new technology and new thinking as we move forward. So that’ll continue to progress.

And I think we’re gonna constantly think about new tools and new directions. And I think, how do we evolve these ideas into different ways? If we start working in different mediums, if… Say we start working in film more again, or like different creative ways to bring this stuff together in the work, I think that’ll be continuous.

But the thing that I’ve felt as a creative person, is… more important than doing great client work, is the connections we make with the people, the team members. I think creating a studio environment where you have dedicated a day, or a few hours a day, where you’re experimenting and learning and trying new things, and working together, that’s gonna keep us fresh and new. We’re gonna look back at our work two or three years ago, and think it’s ridiculously terrible. It’s not going to flat line.

So personally you get the… the evolution, but I want to share this with people. I want to go to the universities and schools, and luckily have some opportunities coming up that I get to do that, so. That I want to like make sure is a very big part of our studio’s kind of process.

Liam: Thank you again for joining me.

Mitch: Cool. Thank you.

Luis Von Ahn, Duolingo Founder

Talking Turing Tests and gamifying education with Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of DuoLingo

The fourth episode is a special edition recorded at SPAN 2017 in Pittsburgh, and features Luis Von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of the language learning app DuoLingo. Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala and came to the United States for undergraduate and then graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where one of his first student projects led to the invention of CAPTCHA. In the interview, Von Ahn and guest host Aaron Lammer discuss the benefits of choosing projects based on immediate impact and how language skills picked up on DuoLingo — the world’s most downloaded education app — can increase earning potential in the developing world.

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Aaron Lammer: Welcome Luis.

Luis Von Ahn: Thank you for having me.

Aaron: You grew up in Guatemala.

Luis: I did.

Aaron: When I look back at the different projects you’ve done, uh, I see interests in games, and I see interest in human computational power. Going back to your childhood, what where the things that got you into that kind of stuff?

Luis: Um, I … When I was eight, I … all my friends were getting Nintendos. I, I wanted a Nintendo. I asked my mom for a Nintendo but-

Aaron: This is original Nintendo.

Luis: The original Nintendo.

Aaron: The 8-bit.

Luis: The NES. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Uh, but my mom did not wanna get me a Nintendo. Instead, she got me this computer.

Aaron: Right.

Luis: It was … At the time, it was a Commodore 64, and, um, she said, “This is what you get.” And, uh, I don’t think she realized those things were not very easy to use, and I didn’t have anybody to learn from. So I, you know, I kinda figure out how to use it, but it took me a while. Um-

Aaron: Do you think your mom was trying to push you down a specific path with a computer or-

Luis: Yeah.

Aaron: … she just had like a anti-Mario kind of fixation.

Luis: No, no, no. I, I think she really thought … She probably talked to somebody and they said, “Look, you can play games with a computer, too, but-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … you may learn something.”

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: That’s probably what happened. Um, so I figured out how to, how to use it, uh, but unfortunately, I didn’t have very many games, and I didn’t really have very many people that I knew that also had games kinda to share.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Uh, so I started trying to figure out how to make my own. Uh, and that’s, that’s kinda how I started getting into games and programming, et cetera. Ev-eventually, I convinced my mom to buy me a Nintendo and, and that happened. (laughs)

Aaron: Were, were Nintendo and computers widespread in Guatemala at the time or was that a rare thing to see?

Luis: Nintendos were widespread. Computers were not particularly for … I mean this was in the, in you know, kind of late ’80s. Uh, uh, an, uh, eight to 10-year-old kid did not have a computer.

Aaron: Yeah. When I think back to, um, programming during that period, one of the things that I realized is a bias that you don’t notice as an American is that most programming is written in English.

Luis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron: Um, and, and, not just the programming but the instructional manuals.

Luis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: The way to learn are in E- English. So did you speak English at that point in time?

Luis: Yeah. I did. I mean I was, I was fortunate that I went to an American school.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Luis: So I, I spoke … I mean probably my English was not as good as the native speakers of English, but it, it was kinda good enough to, to read-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … to read that stuff.

Aaron: What’s it like … What was it like write- learning the sort of other language that’s neither English nor Spanish while you were also a novice English speaker? (laughs)

Luis: I don’t think that was the biggest difficulty. I mean the biggest difficulty was I literally had nobody to learn from.

Aaron: Ah.

Luis: Uh, so I sometimes spent hours and hours and hours trying to figure things out.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Luis: Um, and sometimes it was just … There was a typo in the instruction manual or something, and I just, uh, that just cost me 10 hours or something. So, it was tedious.

Aaron: And what brought you to Pittsburgh originally?

Luis: From Guatemala, I, I decided to come to college to the US. That was not in Pittsburgh. I went to college in … at Duke in North Carolina. And then, um, I finished my undergrad, and I wanted to get a PhD in computer science. I mainly wanted to get a PhD ’cause I didn’t wanna get a job. And all these people are getting jobs. At the time, the big thing was to get a job at Microsoft. Um, most people were getting jobs at Microsoft or either that or kind of at Wall Street. I didn’t particularly wanna do that.

Um, so I decided I wanted to go to grad school, and then applied to a bunch of grad schools. I got into a few and CMU was one of them, and it was, uh, kinda ranked number one in computer science. And then I came and visited and I really liked my PhD adviser. Well, I mean the guy who eventually became my PhD adviser. I just liked this one guy. And I decided to come to Pittsburgh.

Aaron: And was it during that period that you started working on CAPTCHA?

Luis: Yeah. That … I was very fortunate. I mean I, I showed up at CMU. This was in August of the year 2000, and maybe two months later, or not even two months later, like a month and a half later, I was lucky to be in a, in the audience. This guy, um, who eventually ended up working for Google, but at the time was the chief scientist at Yahoo, came and give a talk at Carnegie Mellon, and he said, “Here are 10 problems that, uh, we don’t know how to solve at Yahoo.” Uh, and at that time, Yahoo was kind of the biggest, the biggest, you know, internet company.

And, you know, I went home, and I, you know, tried to think about all 10 problems. Nine of them I had no idea what to do.

Aaron: (laughs)

Luis: Uh, and then there was one. The problem was look there are these … Yahoo is … was offering free email accounts at the time. Sort of … It was sort of revolutionary that Yahoo and Hotmail were offering free email accounts, and they were. Um, and they had this problem that some people were writing programs to obtain millions of email accounts from, from Yahoo. The problem was how do we stop them, you know.

Um, I went home. I thought about it. Then I discussed it with my PhD adviser, and together we came up with this idea of a CAPTCHA which is these, these distorted characters that you see all over the internet and you know that you have to type whenever, you know, whenever you’re getting an account or whatever. You know, we came up with the idea. Uh, we implemented the first prototype and within, within a couple of months, it was live on Yahoo, which is I now in retrospect realize how fast that was for such a large company, and it’s because they just had a really huge problem.

Aaron: It’s, um, kind of incredible to think of that in 2000. I, I feel like everyone you meet at a conference now has some side project that they’re trying to turn into something, but the tools to build something like that must have been kind of all hand done. I mean there’s not like, uh, APIs and stuff to tap into.

Luis: Oh, yeah. There was nothing at the time. There was nothing. I mean we had to build even the … even, even writing a program to distort images.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: I mean today that is so easy because almost every kind of … almost every programming language comes with, you know, image manipulation tools. At the time, it didn’t so-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … you had to basically get the image, turn it into a matrix, and then you apply the actual transformations, et cetera. Like it was all handmade. Yeah. That was … It’s a different time.

Aaron: I’m assuming that people listening to this are familiar with the CAPTCHA because it’s gonna … it would be difficult to have say an email account right now if you have not, uh, filled out a CAPTCHA.

Luis: Yeah.

Aaron: But at its core, you’re basically creating a little tiny game that a computer is terrible at and a person is pretty good at.

Luis: Yeah. And there’s one more thing.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: A computer should be able to grade it-

Aaron: Hm.

Luis: … which is an interesting thing because the computer should be … So, this is a paradoxical thing that a computer should not be able to pass it, but it’s a test that a computer can, can grade, but it itself cannot pass.

Aaron: So as you were developing it and you’re starting to see people use it, how did you, how did you approach the idea of a computer grading the results?

Luis: I mean this was, this was part of the thing. I mean, uh, it … So this … Ultimately, a CAPTCHA is a, is a test that can distinguish humans from computers. Um, it turns out that computers are worse that humans at reading these distorted characters, but we couldn’t have a human on the other side kinda having to grade these. They have to be graded by a computer because it’s done millions of times a day.

Very similar to this idea of a Turing test which was, you know, it’s this idea from the 1950s. The idea is that if a Turing test is a test that can tell humans from computers apart, but in the Turing test, there was a human judge trying to figure out if it was talking to a human or a computer. But in the case of a CAPTCHA, it’s a, it’s a computer judge that gives you a test, uh, and it’s trying to figure out if it’s a, it’s a human or a computer.

Aaron: Do you think CAPTCHAs are getting harder now?

Luis: Yeah, they are. What’s happening ultimately is that computers are getting smarter.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And it’s getting harder and harder to find things that humans are much better at than computers. The thing about a CAPTCHA is it has to be doable within 30 seconds, and it should be graded by a computer, and it should be that computers cannot do it almost at all, whereas humans can very easily do it. It’s getting harder and harder to find such things. And the way CAPTCHAs have evolved is basically, the distortions have gotten harder and harder.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And now that’s happening. And, and at some point, uh, the whole concept of CAPTCHA won’t exist. I mean at some point, computers will be able to do most everything that humans can and that, that will be it.

Aaron: So when you started Duolingo, what kinds of ideas about this like human-computer interaction did you take with you to Duolingo. Like we kinda broke down like what a CAPTCHA is doing.

Luis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: What is Duolingo doing at that very core level?

Luis: Well, Duolingo was, I mean it was, uh, st- you know, started about, about six years ago. The, the idea was to teach people stuff. Um, I actually didn’t know what we wanted to teach. Um, it turns out, we ended up teaching languages. But at the time, I just wanted to do something that would teach people stuff. Uh, I thought that learning on the internet would become, uh, a really huge thing-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … uh, that a lot of things would be learned on the internet. I also … This is very related to the fact that I’m from Guatemala. I, I wanted to do something that would have immediate impact on people. You know, I really love math for example, but teaching math doesn’t have immediate impact because you usually learn math in order to learn something else, in order to learn something else to eventually become an engineer or something like that.

Whereas, languages, and this is why kinda we ended up designing on languages, for many countries in the world, particularly knowledge of English, if, if you, if you’re a non-English speaking country and you know English, usually, you can make between 20 and 100% higher salary just by the fact that you know English. I, I guess if you’re also in an English-speaking country, you need to know English. (laughs)

Aaron: (laughs) Yes.

Luis: Uh, but basically, learning English is something that has immediate monetary impact … right? … you know, to improve your life.

Aaron: Starting with the idea that lang- the language part is almost arbitrary and it’s a training regimen, when the big wave came to online education, it was kind of skeuomorphic. It was kinda like how can we put a university in your laptop.

Luis: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was different. Yeah.

Aaron: And what you’re doing is a little bit more … I … It reminds me more of like when I was playing sports as a kid, like trying to learn basketball, and the coach was like every day we’re doing layup lines. You got to learn the layup. What kinds of inspirations did you take for the way that you wanted to teach people?

Luis: Yeah. In this case, it really was games. And this is, this is very different. I mean so Duolingo started at around the same time as all these companies started that, that were trying to bring online education, you know-

Aaron: Yup.

Luis: … to, to fruition. Uh, so like Coursera-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … uh, companies like that where, you know, their approach has been “okay, we’re gonna take whatever is happening in the real world which is a lecture…”

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: “… We’re gonna record it. We’re gonna put on video and that’s online education.” We had a very different approach. Our inspiration really at the end was games. We very early on realized that we wanted to teach something to somebody over the internet. The biggest problem, uh, learning anything by yourself is staying motivated.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Luis: It’s really quite difficult to stay motivated. It’s very similar to going to the gym. Everybody wants to do it.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Uh, but, uh, when, when you start showing up, man, it takes a lot of time, and it’s kinda painful and you don’t see results immediately, so you give up very easily. And this is why you see for example these, these online courses or the completion rate for these online courses is like it’s like 2%. So, we knew that that would be a problem, so this is why, you know, we, we went and looked into games. Games have this very nice property that, you know, uh, a good fraction of the people can spend months if not years playing a single game.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Luis: Um, so we designed Duolingo to be as close to game as possible. Of course, we want it to be, you know, educational and the results are much better. I mean of the people that sign up to Duolingo, about a quarter, so about 25% become active users, kind of regularly active users for months. So that’s much better than 2%.

Aaron: What kinds of longer term outcomes and effects, um, have you found from people who learned in a game as opposed to say like a college classroom?

Luis: So we know about Duolingo how, how well it works. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s very good at taking you from zero knowledge of a language to a level that’s called independent. So it’s not quite yet fluent. So basically, you will make a lot of mistakes at the end of … You know, if you, if you use Duolingo for a while, you’ll make a lot of mistakes but you will be able to kinda navigate the world. You may not be able to have a conversation about 18th century philosophy, but you’ll probably be able to, you know, order food at a restaurant and maybe even like go out on a date.

Aaron: Sure.

Luis: Um, you’ll still have a thick accent and sound kind of funny.

Aaron: (laughs)

Luis: Uh, but our philosophy with Duolingo is that’s where we wanna get you afterwards if you’re really interested. You should probably just practice a lot actually speaking the language, uh, you know. And our philosophy is to get you from zero to this independent level. That’s … It’s a little different, the outcomes in a classroom. It turns out, learning a language in most classrooms are very ineffective. I believe that a very large fraction of the US population was supposed to have taken a foreign language for three or four years and a very large fraction of them can’t say more than like taco.

Now, what I think is better than a language classroom and also better than Duolingo is a one-on-one personal tutor. The problem with that is it’s very expensive.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And of course, the school system can’t quite do that ’cause you got to get one tutor for every student, and that, that’s just not, not scalable. Uh, I would say for most language classrooms, Duolingo is probably better if you actually stick with it, but we’re not yet as good as a one-on-one human tutor.

Aaron: I’m curious like what kinds of models you le- you use when you’re thinking about like learning in that way and particularly when you have access to a big data set. Do you find, “Oh, this vocabulary word actually has a lower success rate than this other vocabulary word?”

Luis: Yeah. Yeah. And this is one of those things with Duolingo that a lot people don’t realize. So, you know, most people think of Duolingo as the computers teaching people human … uh, teaching humans, uh, a language.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Um, but the other way around is happening, too. Basically, humans are teaching the computer how humans learn. And so we’re doing a lot of experiments with that and that’s, that something else. I mean when you download Duolingo, very likely, you will get a slightly different version of Duolingo than, uh, you know, if your, your friend downloads Duolingo because we are doing a bunch of experiments.

At any given time, we’re probably running about a hundred experiments where we’re, we’re just trying something a little different. I- it … Sometimes it’s really big. Sometimes it’s really small. It maybe that for you, we’re teaching you plurals before adjectives. For the next person, we’re teaching them adjectives before plurals, so the other way around.

Aaron: I think Duolingo thinks my wife is smarter than me.

Luis: (laughs)

Aaron: It always like pushes her a little harder.

Luis: (laughs)

Aaron: It just … And it kinda knows that she’s gonna like follow through-

Luis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: … whereas with me, it’s a little like, “All right, all right, all right.”

Luis: Yeah. So, it’s pretty adaptive i- in, in many ways. And, and we’re trying just different things a lot of times, and we are finding that certain things that we try actually really teach better. Um, and so over time, Duolingo is becoming better and better, uh-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … at teaching. Um, and it’s just because we’re, we’re watching people learn. Um, one of the key things that we do is we also, we measure everything, you know. People may not realize, but some of the exercises that we give them, they’re not quite there to teach you. They’re just there for us to determine how well we’re doing at teaching you. Within a few years, we should be able to be as good as a one-on-one human tutor. That’s, that’s our goal. Our goal as a company is to become as good as a one-on-one human tutor.

Aaron: Humans are good at language. It’s like one of the things we excel at. When you take this network of all of these brain, like every, every brain that’s connected, do you find massive differences between the languages? Like what does the big, big graph of Duolingo tell you?

Luis: It depends a lot on what your native language is. So, for example, it’s easier for Spanish speakers to learn English than it is for Chinese speakers to learn English. It just is.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Uh, and that has nothing to do with their intelligence. It’s just the languages. Basically, the closer to languages are the easier it is to learn. It turns out different people are … Some people are much better at learning a language than others. Uh, they really are, and a lot.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Like you see these people that can speak like eight languages and this is great.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And then you see these other people that have been trying for years to learn the same language unsuccessfully.

Aaron: Same thing with the basketball coach.

Luis: Yeah. (laughs)

Aaron: Some of these kids are gonna be good at basketball, some of them are not.

Luis: Yeah. And what’s weird is, um, I … If you had asked me before Duolingo, you know, what’s the difference, I would have said, “Well, you know, it’s probably some sort of intelligence.” Like, “Ah, this person have some, some type of intelligence behind them.” But it turns out that, that there may be something to that, but the real biggest reason why some people are better at learning a language than others, uh, and this was …

I mean the first time I heard it, I don’t know who discovered this, but the first time I heard this was from a study that the US Army did. So, it turns out the US Army needs to teach people Arabic in particular. That’s what they’re interested in.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: They need to teach their soldiers Arabic. Because it’s the US Army, everything is very expensive for them, so it cost them like 50,000 bucks to teach somebody Arabic or something.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: They had this problem that they would try to teach some soldiers Arabic and some learned really well, whereas some didn’t learn at all. So they had this great idea that they were gonna come up with a test that, uh, before they started … before they spent the 50,000 bucks there would be like-

Aaron: An aptitude.

Luis: Yes. An aptitude.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And they came up with the aptitude test, and what they found actually … Uh, so intelligence matters a little. Obviously, if you, if you have very, very low intelligence, you probably shouldn’t be trying to learn a language. It’s just very low intelligence but-

Aaron: Yeah. I- if you’re gonna fail all your classes, you’re also gonna fail Spanish class.

Luis: Yeah, yeah. If you have very low intelligence, don’t bother. But, but the thing that matters the most is this basically, uh, resilience to sounding stupid. So if you are okay sounding stupid, you’re very good at learning a language because what ends happening in practice is … Look, at first, everybody who learns a language sounds stupid. They, they, they had this super broken, makes all kinds of mistakes, et cetera.

Uh, but those who are resilient to that, to … they just, they just say stuff. And then they practice and practice because they’re actually saying stuff. Then there is the shyer people like me for example. I’m not very good at learning a language because I want to sound perfect. So, I just don’t practice. I just don’t say anything. And because I’m not practicing anything …

So at the very beginning, I’m about as good as somebody that who is, who is just very good at learning a language at the very beginning, but the thing is they start practicing like crazy, and I’m not saying anything. I’m just the other quiet kid on the other side, and, and that’s it. That’s, that makes a huge difference.

A lot of people wanna practice with others when they’re trying to learn a language, um, but it turns out, most people, um, feel too uncomfortable with it. This is, this is the, the issue that-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … they do not actually wanna do that. So we just launched this thing. We actually can practice a language but you’re actually talking to an AI. So we’d launch these Duolingo Bots. It’s a chatbot. And the beautiful thing about the chatbot is people don’t feel like the computer is judging them. Everybody actually is, is very happily practicing with a chatbot. Uh, even though the computer is judging them, um-

Aaron: Do you employ like psychologists at Duolingo ’cause it seems like you’re getting kind of … This is as much a problem of, of humans and the human mind as it is a problem of machine learning or, or programming?

Luis: Yeah, yeah. So we have, we have a couple of people like that. Um, we have, we have also second language acquisition experts, um, and, you know, probably the ones that spend the most time with this are actually our designers. Our designers are actually, uh, doing that. We have, we have some designers that are, um … It’s funny. You know who’s actually the best at teaching languages? I find the ones … the people who are shitty at learning languages themselves.

Aaron: Ah.

Luis: Uh, because they know it’s hard.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: And they’re kind of … They’re pretty good. So we have … And that includes me. We have a, we have a, a good number of people at Duolingo who are crappy at learning languages who spend a lot of time thinking about how to better teach languages.

Aaron: Yeah. I’m interested in … So now that you’ve kind of learned about how to teach someone something. Is there an urge to do Duolingo math or like to, to teach people-

Luis: Yeah.

Aaron: … other things with the same tools?

Luis: There is. Um, and we, we really have been talking a lot about that in the company. I mean the first thing we’re gonna do is, is probably something for kids. Um, so teaching … So right now Duolingo works for ages eight and up.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Um, ’cause we need to know how to read and write. But we’re gonna, we’re bring that age down.

Aaron: Mm-hmm.

Luis: Um, so that’s kinda first thing, but we’re, we’re also thinking about teaching people basic literacy. So reading and writing. Um, a- and not only kids, um, adults. It turns out, there’s a billion adults in the world that don’t know how to read and write. That’s a lot, and I think we should be able to do something. Weirdly, um, it turns out that about 10% of these people have a smart phone. That just tells you how successful these phone companies are at selling people smartphones that don’t actually need them.

Uh, but, you know, the good thing is they have a smartphone, so maybe you can, you can reach them with an app. Uh, and then, you know, people have been talking about math or physics or stuff like that. I don’t know what we’ll end up doing, um, but, but I’m, um, we’re very interested in this.

Aaron: I think that there’s a, a fear of the Englishization of the world, you know. That has all sorts of impli- implications for culture-

Luis: Yup.

Aaron: … and, um, identity. That’s a dystopian view now, but in the 1970s, we’re trying to create Esperanto-

Luis: (laughs)

Aaron: … which was this k- kind of almost like a computer. I don’t think it was made by a computer-

Luis: No.

Aaron: … but it did a lot of things that a computer would do if you fed all of the languages in-

Luis: Yeah.

Aaron: … and tried to get like a, like, um, a common average language.

Luis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: So I wonder how you think about those kind of ideas at Duolingo. Is Duolingo like merging all the languages? Is it exploding them?

Luis: Yeah. We think about this a lot. We don’t know the answer to that. I mean there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s evidence for both. I mean we, we do teach Esperanto by the way.

Aaron: Oh, you do.

Luis: Um, we do. We do teach Esperanto.

Aaron: Do you … Are you an Esperanto, um, speaker?

Luis: No, no. I don’t know … No, no, no. But it’s actually quite easy. So what is true? So Esperanto is a made-up language.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Um, and it was made up so that it was easy to learn. It is actually quite true that Esperanto is very easy to learn.

Aaron: Right.

Luis: I mean we have the data. People can learn Esperanto quite quickly because everything is very simple, and the words are really picked … You know, they’re kind of usually cognates to most kind of, uh, you know. If, if you speak a European language, you can understand a lot of the words. Um-

Aaron: Yeah. It’s the Ruby on Rails of languages. (laughs)

Luis: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s good. It’s … I mean I don’t think it will ever happen that everybody starts speaking Esperanto.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: That just won’t happen. But, uh, but a lot of people learn Esperanto in Duolingo. We have over a million people learning Esperanto-

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: … which is kinda weird. So there’s evidence for both. I mean we … For example, we teach some and we tried to do this. We, we teach some languages that are kinda smaller. Um, for example we teach Irish. Irish has 94,000 speakers. I actually did not realize that Irish was a language until I started working on Duolingo. I thought they all spoke English there, which most of them do, but there’s 94,000 native speakers of Irish. We have two million people learning Irish in Duolingo.

So there’s a chance to actually multiply the number of speakers of Irish by 10 through Duolingo. So that’s one way in which we’re kind of growing these languages, uh, but at the same time we’re also, you know, a very large fraction of people are learning English. So, it’s kinda both. I personally don’t … I’m not … After having worked on Duolingo for, for so long, I, I am not particularly worried about everybody in the world only speaking English.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Um, people are way too, you know, uh, attached to their language. A lot of people will say like, “Well, you know, most young people in the world speak English.” This is just not true. A lot of young people in … Even in countries that you would think … Uh, you know, even in Germany, there’s a lot of young people who don’t speak English.

Aaron: Do you get lobbied? Like where someone is like-

Luis: We do.

Aaron: … “Come on. Please add Icelandic.”

Luis: We do. We do get lobbied a lot.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: Like governments, too. I mean we, we’ve had, we’ve had offices of presidents of all kinds of countries saying, “Please add our language.” Um, we got a, we got a prize from the president of Ireland, uh, for teaching so much Irish. Um, one … Some of the hardest lobbies are from the Scandinavian countries.

So this was kind of this funny thing. We, we added one Scandinavian language. By the way, Scandinavian languages, they all speak English there.

Aaron: Yeah.

Luis: So this is why we haven’t quite added too many Scandinavian languages. But, but we start-

Aaron: They speak English better than most Americans there. (laughs)

Luis: Yeah. So, so we started a- We added Danish first. On, on the day we added Danish, the, the Swedes and the Norwegians went nuts on us. They’re like … Oh, my god. They have petitions in change.org about like adding. So fine, so we added … At the same time, we, we added Swedish and Norwegian. And immediately after that the Finns are now going nuts on us. And we haven’t quite added Finnish yet, but, um, they are, they are really … They have this … You know, people from the government keep contacting us, and there’s all kinds of things.

We haven’t quite added it. It turns out learning Finnish is pretty difficult. Um, but at some point, we’ll add it. Uh, at this point, it’s become more of a joke where I publicly have said we’re, we’re not gonna add Finnish. It’s the one language we’re never gonna add. (laughs)

Aaron: (laughs) Okay. Well, you’ve, uh, you’ve heard on this show first. There will never be a Finnish Duolingo.

Luis: (laughs)

Aaron: Um, thank you very much for, uh, for this interview. It was great.

Luis: All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Aaron: Um, I’m really looking forward to your, uh, to your talk.

Luis: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Fashion designers Lizzy and Darlene Okpo

Exploring the intersection of expression and utility in fashion design

The third episode features Lizzy and Darlene Okpo, the designers and sisters behind New York-based fashion label William Okpo. In the interview, Lizzy and Darlene detail what gives their line its identity, the personas that shape a collection, and the intersection of expression and utility in fashion design.

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Liam Spradlin: Darlene, Lizzy, welcome to Design Notes. Thanks for joining me.

Lizzy Okpo: Thank you.

Darlene Okpo: Thanks for having us!

Liam: Just getting right into things, something I always like to ask is what do you do, and what has your journey been like to get where you are? So, let’s start with Darlene.

Darlene: Absolutely. I am one half of the William Okpo label, fashion designer, along with my sister, who’s my partner as well. And for me personally, the journey has been long, but it has been a very humbling experience to be able to just own your own business and design alongside, you know, your family member, too.

Lizzy: As Darlene said, our journey has been long, but so short. I think, quite often I’ve been just thinking, rewinding back in to 2010 in the beginning stages and now coming in 2017, it’s like, never ever … I mean, yeah, I- I felt like we were gonna have a brand, and I still feel like we’re gonna have a brand that’s gonna last for 100 years; that’s the goal. But even seven years ago seems so long. You know, I think about how … You know, what we thought about the brand.

It was like, “Okay, it’s gonna be this whole masculine thing and we’re gonna be undercover. We’re gonna be like, two females and it’s gonna be named after our dad so everyone’s gonna think it’s a man,” which is still the same thing. Everyone thinks that we’re men, and everyone thinks that we are William, which is cool. Being the face behind the brand, actually shifted the direction of the brand, um, and it has been really inspiring for other young women around the world as we receive so many emails constantly just saying that, “I love you guys’s story.”

So, we never really thought that it was our personal story that was gonna tell the brand story. We thought it was just gonna be the designs, you know. That’s what every designer thinks, that we’re gonna make some amazing designs and people are gonna like, “This is amazing,” and then never think about the backstory. We’ve grown to love so many people. We’ve met amazing people. Uh, we met crazy people. We’ve fallen. We’ve risen. Um, and we’re still learning.

It’s like the biggest education we’ve ever received in life. Never thought it would be this.

Darlene: Right.

Lizzy: We learn everyday.

Darlene: We didn’t really go to a traditional design school. Everything was pretty much self-taught. You know, Lizzy went to Pace University in the city and she stud- she studied entrepreneurship, and I went to Lehman College in the- the Bronx, and I studied African American studies with a minor in Women’s Studies. So, we didn’t really have that FIT, Parsons, Central Saint Martins type design background. We kind of just said one day, “Okay, we wanna design.” You know, um, it wasn’t just like two girls that just love clothes and playing in the closet. It was more of, we wanted to design clothes for women that look like us, and women who are just really outgoing, confident, um, just loved color, print, you know, everything of that nature, and for us, it was kind of like, we just went into the garment district. We did a lot of research, and like Lizzy said, we met some really great people, but we also have some really great mentors who actually sat us down and told us- taught us about the business. ’Cause most of the times when it comes to fashion design, a lot of people don’t look behind the scenes of the business side-

Lizzy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Darlene: … and what it takes to actually produce a collection, sell it to masses, um, dealing with buyers. I mean, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation-

Lizzy: Marketing.

Darlene: (laughing) Dipping into marketing. So, within that seven years starting from 2010, we’ve done so much. That was our journey from collaborating with Puma to Pepsi to, um, GenArt, which was a- a fashion fund that used to house, like, young fashion designers to do a runway show, from just selling at Opening Ceremony-

Lizzy: And opening a popup store-

Darlene: … and opening a popup store at the seaport. It’s kind of, um, unheard of for two young fashion designers out of New York City where, you know, they’re still not in the mainstream stores in America. We kinda really just did our own thing, and that’s our story where we just don’t follow what the rules are in the fashion industry. We just kind of just do it and what feels right to us.

Lizzy: It’s like, that’s the epitome of our journey, if you think about it. When we started, I wouldn’t say we started in a chaotic situation. I mean, Darlene and I, when we started we were both in school. So, you can imagine us having New York Fashion week, having shows, having to present, and also having to take finals. And at the time I was like, “This is ludicrous,” but, that- that story is still our story. We’re still doing five different things and also having to do other- ten other things. None of them even align with each other, and still have to make the brand work. And that’s kind of been a theme-

Darlene: Yeah.

Lizzy: … of our brand. It’s like, very unconventional. Nothing is really like this then this. It’s like, “Yeah, you’re gonna be producing a collection overseas, and then you’re gonna have to like, figure it out in 24 hours, and then you’re gonna have to present it. Oh yeah, and meanwhile you also gotta go to work.” (laughs) “And, you know, do your other job, and also gotta go to school and fix that final.” That’s what’s keeping us motivated in a sense that nothing’s ever set in stone. Things are getting thrown at us from left to right, and it’s like how do we face our challenges? Can we get over those challenges? We have. We’ve learned from them, which has been the greatest part of the journey.

Liam: So, knowing all of this, I want to explore your process and how you work on a day-to-day basis as all this is going on.

Lizzy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: From a high level, what goes into designing a new piece? Like, what are your thought processes? How do you get started? What are the considerations that you make?

Lizzy: Everything.

Darlene: Yeah.

Lizzy: Darlene and I used to come up with ideas and our mood boards on the train. Um, anything. It’s never really like, “Okay, I sketch or Darlene sketches. Then we, you know, go fabric swatching.” Sometimes … Darlene, you can explain it.

Darlene: One day we were on a train, and this guy, he had on about three pairs of jeans, but each jean on a lower bottom was cuffed, and it was (laughing) like three layers and it was cuffed, and I was like, “Man.” Lizzy and I looked at each other and at the same time we said, “This guy looks so cool.” And we were inspired just by his silhouette and how he dressed, and we ended up making these denim pants called the triple cuff pant, just off of just visualizing and seeing people in New York City. I’m always inspired by just people in New York City and just how they’re able to just express themselves freely. Um, Lizzy, literally is inspired by travel.

Lizzy: Travel, color, and also- also, I get bored so easily.

Darlene: She does get bored.

Lizzy: I get bored, so it’s like, “Yeah, sure, we can see another button-up shirt. We can see another a-line dress. We can see another whatever’s in style.” But I’m just like, “How do I make that one …” And I hate to use the word special or unique but it’s like, “How do I make that one so rude” that people are like, “Oh, that’s such a cute dress, but like, why are there, you know, garments in the most obscure part of the dress?” Like, some of it can be so unflattering, but then, it’s like allowing the consumer and the designer to feel comfortable with just actually realizing like, “Actually, this is the most prettiest part of my body; I should’ve showed that off more.”

Darlene: Right.

Lizzy: So I think that’s what we play with, you know, when we’re designing. Just figuring out … Before we start a collection, like, how to make something that’s so everyday for all of us, but just tweaking it a little bit that it will allow us to show off our bodies or feel comfortable in- in a new way.

Darlene: So a lot of it is a thinking process. It’s like throwing all of our ideas into this big thinking pot and then coming out with like, this beautiful masterpiece in our mind. And, most of the time, it’s pretty much like, not even on trend. It’s- we predict the future of what we wanna see on young women. So, a lot of our design process is just saying, you know, I don’t wanna see what’s in stores, I want to start something that is going to be predicted in the future, where it’s like, okay, it may not work right now and they may not see it, but two years, three years from now, everyone is gonna start doing it. And that’s pretty much always-

Lizzy: Been the case.

Darlene: … been the case with us. We have so many, um, big design people in the industry say, “You know, you guys were doing this before it became a trend.” Because we always want to make sure that we’re not doing the same thing as everybody else. And sometimes it’s really hard, you know? Um, to constantly always think that way because you get burnt out sometimes as a creative, ’cause it’s like you want that masterpiece and you want it to sell, and some items don’t sell, but we’re okay with it.

Lizzy: And one thing is like, we don’t want clothes that you throw away. I think in our day and age, we overproduce, and there’s just so much of so many things. There’s just so many clothes around, so it’s like, do … I don’t want you guys to empty out, or our customer to empty out their closet and like, “Oh yeah, I can get rid of that old dress. It’s so 2000-whatever.” Like, that would be the last thing. I want someone to say, “Oh yeah, this dress is forever. I’mma keep it. It makes sense now and it will make sense later. It’s just my favorite piece.” So I think that’s what we design for.

Darlene: Color’s important to us too.

Lizzy: Yeah.

Liam: I’m interested in that. In the- the focus on helping people embrace color.

Lizzy: Our dad- When we first started the collection, he would always tell us, he’s like, “You know, when I first came to New York, and America period, everyone was wearing black, black, black.” That’s how he said it. “Everyone was just wearing black, black, black.” And I was like, “You guys don’t have no style?” He goes, “I want to wear a gold suit. I want to wear a green suit. You gotta play with color.” And then growing up, we’ve always seen him wear that purple, magenta-looking suit. (laughs)

Darlene: That purple suit.

Lizzy: And we look back and he had that banana yellow suit with bell-bottoms in the ’70s, and- and then we got it and we’re like, “You know what, we don’t wear black either. Why would we?”

Liam: I’m interested in when color comes in in your process. It might be tied to factors like selecting color and material and things like that, but I’m interested in where that comes in, and also how you use that as an expressive tool in your pieces.

Darlene: For both of us, we both have very vibrant personalities. When I say that, we’re pretty much always outgoing, bubbly, um, always full of laughter. So for me, I want to express that in our clothes, and we want it to be a conversational piece. You know, when you’re walking down the street it’s, “I love your shoes.” Most of the times, someone loves something because it’s a certain silhouette or it’s a color. So for us, it’s always something that is just bright and happy.

The first thing I think about in the morning time when I get up is, “What am I gonna wear today?” Even if it’s sweatpants or a sweatshirt, but you best believe it’s gonna be a color, you know, because it just brightens up my mood. So for me, when it comes to designing, I want something that’s kind of subtle but it has that warm, energetic feeling, and um, color plays a huge part in our design process.

Lizzy: Right.

Darlene: We probably used black for like two seasons, just as, you know, as a …

Lizzy: A request from other people, like-

Darlene: (laughing) A request.

Lizzy: … “Can we have this in black?”

Darlene: But yeah, if you look at our previous collections, we use patterns, neon pink, (laughs) like, we use crazy colors.

Lizzy: Lime green.

Darlene: Lime green. You know, colors have meanings to them too.

Lizzy: Yeah. Confidence. I feel like … We design for women with confidence, so it’s like, nothing- nothing against people who wear black or dark colors; that’s fine. But it’s like, I can’t see the product. We like to play with details, so I feel like if something’s in black, you’re not seeing the shape. You’re not seeing the little details and the hints of the playfulness that we’re doing in the garment. You just see a little black thing hanging, and that’s not fun.

This year, we’ve been playing with a- Darlene loves this red denim, and every time I see this denim, it just goes with everything. It goes on everyone’s skin. It just does no one wrong. It makes everyone happy. Uh, and it’s just a really hard, rigid, red denim. It’s like crimson red.

Darlene: Yeah, it’s a rough texture.

Lizzy: It’s- and it’s so rich in color that it’s like-

Darlene: It’s beautiful. And most of the times, everyone’s like, “This is pretty hard,” but we never sacrifice, (laughs) the texture of the design.

Lizzy: Yeah, but it’s like, but it’s beautiful!

Darlene: It’s beautiful, and maybe it’s not for you, but it’s for someone that wants to feel like they’re wearing a piece of art on their body-

Lizzy: Exactly.

Darlene: … when they leave home, so.

Lizzy: And that comes first.

Darlene: And that’s what happens with a lot of designers is, you have to be comfortable with your designs. You can’t really say to yourself, “Well, this person doesn’t like this.” You know. You kind of have to be true to yourself and you kind of have to be like, very persuasive and convincing.

Lizzy: I would love to convince one of our customers to wear the most neon colored wedding dress if I could. Like, “Just go with that neon pink.” (laughs)

Darlene: That’s tacky.

Lizzy: It is tacky, but you gotta- you gotta be happy. It all goes.

Darlene: (laughs)

Lizzy: It’s just, you know, it’s a happy day.

Darlene: And that’s another thing, it’s two of us, so sometimes, we always have to meet in the middle, so sometimes I’m a little bit more simplified and Lizzy’s very avant-garde with her design process-

Lizzy: I like that you called it avant-garde.

Darlene: She is.

Lizzy: (laughs) She uses other words.

Darlene: (laughing) Most of the times, I have to come in and I have to kind of bring Lizzy down to a level of, like, “Okay Lizzy, that’s a little bit much.” So I think that’s what really helps with the process is that it really is both of us. Sometimes, you know, I could get a little boring sometimes, to be honest, and Lizzy comes-

Lizzy: You can.

Darlene: … in and she really shuts it down. She’s like, “That is just bland. I don’t like it. Come back with something new.” So we’re constantly always pushing each other, and I think that’s the beauty of being partners and being family too, ’cause you’re able to be very honest with each other, where sometimes, you know, I’ve seen a lot of design partnerships crumble because there’s two totally different personalities and they just can’t compromise. You have to learn how to compromise in the design process or it’s really not gonna work, to be honest.

Lizzy: And take risks.

Darlene: Yeah.

Liam: Coming from an interface design background, I know that there are expressive elements in the interface, like color, imagery, voice, things like that, but then practical constraints of like, user experience and is the interface usable and things like that, so, I’m interested in- in exploring what the counterparts of those would be for fashion design, and how those interplay with one another when you’re making a piece.

Lizzy: That’s been the theme of our year.

Darlene: (laughs)

Lizzy: Recently we had a focus group, and it was just gathering about twenty something women at one table, and we said, “Guys, just give us what you got. Tell us what you think. Tell us what matt- Like, what about this collection matters.” The reason why we had to do the focus group is because, again, Darlene and I, we design, we close our eyes and I say, “I see a silhouette. I see a fabrication. Go.” And then when it comes into fruition, it’s this beautiful piece but it’s like the shape of a cardboard. But it’s so beautiful. And then I’m just like, “Yeah, so what? People walk around with cardboard. What’s wrong with that? What’s the big deal?” And then she’s like, “Uh, it’s commercial-ability, Lizzy. People have to be able to walk and sit.” I’m just like, “Well, they can go somewhere else for that. Like, you’re buying a piece of art.”

So we gathered all these women together and we said, “Guys, what do you think about this denim, the red denim that we’ve been using?” Because it means so much to us because- it’s only- it comes in blue and it comes in red, but it’s so rich because it’s a raw denim. It’s like a Japanese raw denim. And we actually … Buyers also said, “I love it, but customers are all about feel,” and I’m just like, “I lost you at ‘love it.’ Like, all you have to say is you love it and everything else doesn’t mean anything.” And I’m- We’re trying to learn, like, it’s not about just loving things. People want to be able to wear it no matter how pretty it looks.

So I think that’s been our ongoing challenge of like, how to meet in the middle, and I’m on the side where it’s like, there’s no middle to be met.

Liam: I want to get a feel for what a collection means, like a fashion collection, like, what does that represent conceptually, and what goes into making pieces that go into the same collection together?

Darlene: A collection is pretty much a body of work, right? And for me, how I look at it, it’s basically a- a group of women that are- have very different personalities, but they all have the same taste, right? Did that make sense?

Lizzy: Yeah.

Darlene: I know, that sounds pretty cool. (laughs) But um, when building a collection, it is pretty difficult because you want all of your pieces to be married together. You want them to be cousins, sisters, brothers. You don’t want each piece to- to be kind of like sidelined, to the side. It has to be cohesive. So we do this thing where, if we’re doing straps or hardware, we have to make sure that it’s across the board throughout the whole collection, and again, for- for me, I think of the many different women who represent our brand. It’s not just one person, but they all have this one common interest which is, you know, looking beautiful and having a piece that is- really just describes their personality.

And I kind of- It becomes like this scientific research type project to me, ’cause I really do think of different women, like our friends. Like, this person’s very outgoing and they’re into tech. You know, this one’s an artist. This one’s a lawyer. So that’s how I build upon a collection.

And it does get pretty overwhelming a little bit because you have to tell this story, but you also have to sell, so from a buyer’s standpoint, I feel like sometimes they don’t even care about the collection; they just want something that’s gonna sell-

Lizzy: Right.

Darlene: … and is doable, so it- it kind of … We have to be two different people. We have to be a designer … Not even! Three different people, sorry. You have to be the designer, the consumer, and the buyer. But now we’re kind of going back to our old roots where we’re just simply the designer.

Lizzy: We started a new process, because as young designers, we started trying to compete with the big guys, um, and we realized, ’cause there’s usually four seasons in a year … Four- Would you say? Yeah, four seasons-

Darlene: It’s four. It’s like, four. Some designers do about four collections a year.

Lizzy: Four collections a year. And to us, that was a really quick roll around for us, so it’s like, “Geez, I just showed that! How am I gonna tell a new story and- and make it cohesive and make it sellable and make it cool and make people remember us?” And before you know it, we’re just popping out anything.

Darlene: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lizzy: And that kind of diluted the storyline. It took away what we wanted to do, and we just became factory workers, like just trying to push out things for the sake of saying we beat the deadline. It was like, honestly, doing a paper for school, and you were just like, “Ah, let’s just get this out the way.” So we said, “Hold up. We’re not them. We shouldn’t have to try to keep up with people. We have to do it our own way.”

So now we started doing something where, the collection is the whole entire year. So it’s no longer four different collections. It’s like, we are telling a story from January to December, and it’s all gonna be a consistent story.

Darlene: And that goes back to what I was saying about, when building a collection is- everything has to be married to each other-

Lizzy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Darlene: … and it’s all of these different personalities, and it’s really just making a piece for, “Okay, this jacket, I know it’s for our art curator. The dress, I know it’s for our, you know, mom that lives on the Upper East Side that just is very quirky and once in awhile, she just wants to wear something extravagant.”

I observe on the train. That is like, my design inspiration. I just watch, and I look at what they’re reading, their hair type, their glasses, what type of bag they have, what dress they have, and I really observe, and I build that character and really come to Lizzy and I’m like, “You know, I seen this lady on the train and she had like these really cool, funky shoes. I wanted to design an item for her shoes.”

Lizzy: Right.

Darlene: Yeah.

Lizzy: Right.

Liam: When you talk about fashion pieces being art that you’re wearing, I think like, in my practice of interface design, like, we’re used to using shapes that are positioned very predictably. If they move, they move in programmed ways that are very strict and predictable, but I get the feeling that fashion isn’t like that. Uh, the shape of a garment interplays with the person’s body, it interplays with what they’re doing, so, I guess I’m wondering like, how that impacts how you think about a piece, knowing that once it’s actually out in the world and in use, as this art piece, it still remains like very dynamic.

Lizzy: That would be a reason behind, like, the Pope jumpsuit, how everyone thinks it’s a dress, and then … A lot of the stuff that we sell, people think it’s one thing and we’re like, “We’ll just let them figure it out later,” and they’re like, “Oh, it’s a jumpsuit,” or like, “Oh, it’s a skirt,” and it’s because we kind of play with a lot of secrecy. So it appears to be one thing and then you stick your leg out and another piece of fabric is flowing through it.

Darlene: But if it is something where it has a specific shape, we do, before we even put it out into the market, we do a trial and error where we have to make sure that it’s fitted on a body. Like, we do a fitting, or we just do multiple prototypes to make sure that we have the exact shape and on how we want it. And um, sometimes that takes up time when you’re doing a really intricate item or piece, where you pretty much have to try it on different body types. So for a woman that is 5'4", you know, she may not like a triangle shape jacket. Or a woman who is 6'1", you know, and slender, athletic build, it may look a little different. Sometimes it doesn’t work for every body type. So you kind of have to find your way around it to make sure that your piece is still what it is that you want it to be, but your customer is happy too.

Liam: So, speaking of making these kinds of alterations to the art while maintaining, like, the core of what the art piece is that you created, what would you say is at the core, underneath any of the alterations that you might make for specific customers? What- what gives a piece its identity, or is it- or is it a combination of everything we’ve talked about?

Lizzy: It’s a combination. Like, we’d never compromise the shape, you know, and I think the customer understands that. Like, they probably wouldn’t order something if they’re like, “Hey, this is a long dress. Does it come in a mini skirt?” I’m like, “Well no, that’s a different product.”

Darlene: (laughs)

Lizzy: “No, it doesn’t.” For the most part, like, the triangular shapes and the really like, narrow top fittings with the bellowed out jumpsuit- like, wide-leg jumpsuits, I think they understand that, so they’re like, “Okay, that’s what I’m looking for so I’ll get that.”

Darlene: They know that- that it’s our aesthetic.

Lizzy: Yeah.

Liam: I want to wrap up by just asking … I think we’ve covered a lot during this conversation of how your creative process has kind of grown and changed over time, but where do you see it going in the future as- as the fashion industry continues to evolve?

Lizzy: Even outside of apparel and accessories, and I realize over the last seven years, we’re just people. We’re just- We’re always around people and we love engaging, and working with people from all over the world. So, and I think when we’re so involved in fashion and clothing, we get sometimes uninspired; I gotta be honest with you, and we feel like, are we really doing something that’s sufficient? Like, like- After I was like, “Alright, who cares?” You know? We love what we do, but it’s like, I don’t want to talk clothes all day. I want to engage with people. I want to get to meet people. So, I think it’ll be really nice for us to like, figure out again, reestablish, like, having foundations and programs when we’re working with, like, young students, like Darlene’s program, Building Bridges for the Arts, where she worked with teenage students, just working with them in- in the art field, helping them explore different art industries and teaching them that, “Yeah, you can be a graphic designer. You can be this.”

And even probably expanding in the sense of, working with the women that we’ve- we work with today. Again, over the last seven years, we’ve met amazing women who happen to be our customers, friends, mentors, so it’s just … We’re trying to figure out how we can make more of a community.

Liam: That’s great. Thank you both for being on.

Darlene: Thank you!

Lizzy: Thank you, that was fun.

Darlene: That was fun.

Material Design Awards 2017

Talking design systems and user-first experiences with the winners of the 2017 Material Design Awards

The second episode features the winners of the 2017 Material Design awards, who sat down to talk with Liam while being honored at SPAN Pittsburgh. The creative teams from NPR One, Eventbrite Organizer, momondo, and Blinkist detail how they each built experiences with a distinct personality, and discuss elevating content, the emotive qualities of white space, and how to use the Material Design system as a springboard for unique expression.

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Liam: I want to get a little bit of history on the NPR One app, both as a product and especially in terms of its design.

Tejas Mistry: The idea of NPR One was really to reinvent radio in a world where people are interacting with audio content and media content away from the radio, whether it’s on their television or on their phone, in their cars … And so, really trying to figure out how we can repurpose radio for the digital world.

Liam: In terms of its design, I guess, how do you compare where it currently sits to where it maybe began as an app.

Michael Seifollahi: Yeah, that’s- that’s interesting, so it’s- it’s definitely taken kind of a, quite- quite a bit of evolution over the last four years. One of the most important things was determining that core functionality. And from the onset we wanted to maintain … That simplicity of, you can just turn it on and go. You can just press play, and we’ll take care of the rest, you know, should be as easy as turning on the radio. And we still maintain that simplicity with some additional features and representations as we’ve kind of evolved both the content and, you know, the discovery aspects of the app.

So it started with just the now playing, so what you’re hearing now, and that was it in the very first beta. And then, from there we moved on to here’s what’s coming up and here’s what you’ve heard before on the left and the right. And as we introduce more discovery options, we brought in the explore section, which is kind of a personalized grouping of editorial curation and personalized selections for you as a listener.

Liam: I’m interested to know how you accomplished such a consistent experience across so many different form factors and platforms.

Tejas: We wanted to make it as simple as just turning on the radio, as people have been doing for over 50 years. But as folks stopped tuning into radio or don’t have radios anymore, how do we carry that paradigm over to new platforms? So we started at that core and that’s that primary experience that we need to get people to do immediately. Everything else becomes tertiary or even secondary.

Michael: The framework that we come up with for these interactions of, what is the core functionality? Okay, press play and go is the core functionality. And then, if it’s an interactive platform, something with a scr- you know, a touch screen and not a steering wheel, for example, then what are some of the secondary actions? You want to be able to share that item and, you know, maybe save it for later.

If you’re in a different platform that’s maybe screenless or in a car, for example, search might be more important than some of the other discovery features where you’re browsing, because you have less- less ability to read in a car and no ability to read on, say, a smart speaker. So being able to intuitively just search for the thing or say the topic you’re interested in hearing becomes more important on those platforms. So outlining the kind of platform’s standard set of features … What’s primary, what’s secondary, what’s tertiary … And then, finding the right balance of those on the particular platform that the experience is being built for.

Tejas: And our approach, really, when we build any new interface or new interaction, is to think about how it translates to other platforms, so we don’t take a mobile-first or a connected-car-first or a wear-first approach. We really take a platform approach. So we ask ourselves really hard questions about any feature or interaction we build and how it translates.

And if we can’t necessarily solve it for all those platforms at once, we at least have called it out and have it in the back of our minds that we need to come back around to solve it. And it really gets to a point where, we iteratively build something learned from how people are interac- interacting with it, and then come back around and try to figure out that platform solution. So we’re not afraid of experimenting and really, at times boxing ourselves to one platform, but we’re all self-aware that this is meant to be cross-platform and that it will need to evolve.

Liam: I keep thinking about this comparison that we might make between something like the NPR One app and in actual radio, in the sense that in actual radio you turn it on and things are happening, and it has no, like, graphical interface beyond that.

Michael: It opened up some additional, kind of different avenues of design. You know, one of the goals of the design is to get you to press play and then put it in your pocket, right? You know, designing for something that ideally, you don’t have to look at again. Maybe you take it out and hit skip or rewind to catch a name you missed. But, if we’re doing our jobs correctly then you’re just going to continue to hear something informative or interesting or, you know, you otherwise wouldn’t. So bringing that aspect of design also into what you hear next has been one of the really unique and interesting challenges that this team’s tackled.

Tejas: That’s a good point. It’s really the content that shines, whether it’s a Planet Money podcast or that local story from WWNO in New Orleans about race and culture, how do we really elevate that and the sound and the story rather than worrying about the buttons and the opportunity to dive further when the content is really, speaks for the application and the experience in and of itself?

Liam: You know, this is like a very essential, paired-down kind of interface that you’ve created. But I’m interested to know, have there been any unique constraints that you’ve run into, building across all of these different platforms, even with such a minimal experience?

Michael: I mean, there’s- there’s kind of a- a fine line of … Keeping that brand representation, like this is an NPR app, this is an NPR One experience. But also, making it feel like it belongs on the platform that you’re using it.

Tejas: We always say that we take an 80–20 approach, where we try to solve 80% of the problem and then leave 20 on the table. And that 20% is the hardest percent that we kind of incrementally iterate over months or even years. Or even, as new platforms come out, some of these questions don’t even get answered until further down the line.

Liam: So as you’re thinking about both this, like, platform approach of thinking of all platforms at once and kind of this system that you’ve developed … And balancing that with brand expression that’s appropriate to each of the platforms, what is the relationship like with Material Design in the app? Or how has that contributed to or changed the effort to build an experience across platforms?

Michael: Yeah, I mentioned before that kind of balancing act of … Our platform vers- you know, the platform that the user is currently experiencing it on. And Material Design’s principles have been a great kind of expression of that balancing act, helping us to identify and elevate what’s the most important thing in your current context.

So, you know, as we mentioned on any- any platform, pressing play is the most important thing, so bringing an element like the FAB to be the kind of primary action. The first thing you see when you open up the app is the now playing screen with a giant play button. And the promise there is, you press this button and we’ll take care of the rest. And if you wanna go and look for something else, there’s plenty of avenues to do that in some of the secondary navigation and tertiary navigation, based on the content you’re listening to. But, the most important thing there is to just play the thing that’s on the screen or get that flow started.

Tejas: The Material Design guidelines really hone us in on the right approach, and we trust that those have been tested, and other apps are picking up those same patterns. So there’s no need to reteach a listener or a user on a completely new paradigm, whether- whether they’re going from one app to another to another. So we want to stay within those constraints, and I think that’s actually more helpful than that actually being a detriment towards our approach. We’re a very small team, and we have a lot of platforms that we support. So how can we minimize that burden of overthinking solutions, and really just move forward towards shipping, and I think that’s been the real benefit of us moving across platform, is that Material Design has allowed us to adopt newer platforms at a quicker pace than if we were- had to think about this from the ground up every single time.

Liam: Eventbrite Organizer is built for accommodating the wide range of tasks an event organizer is responsible for, from planning to the day of the event and beyond. The app received this year’s Material Design Award for Interaction Design.

In the interview, I learned how Eventbrite integrates Material Design into their own brand identity, how the app enables organizers throughout the event’s lifecycle, and the importance of pausing to take a break.

Liam: Organizing an event is obviously a very complex process. There are a lot of different tasks that organizers need to do and outside of the app it’s, I would say, maybe unpredictable how complex it will be from organizer to organizer. What are some of the concrete approaches that you’ve taken to simplify event organization through this app?

Lumen: I think of the things that I always mention it to Dan was like, we should start using more animation, something that is just, like, delightful, using it more as a tool to remove steps or make people feel that they are not jumping between pages or experiences. So, working very close with engineers and just, like, communicating this and just changing their mindset to be- animations needs to be for us, more about removing that friction between pages and, like, make it more smooth. And then it’s not gonna be about, you know, doing fun things necessarily, because also, if you think about organizers that are using the app to finish something, and they don’t have time to, you know, just see something or play with something. They just wanna get something done, so different from the consumer’s side. It was more about, you know, removing stuff and just making it more, like, streamless than … Just delightful, in a way.

Liam: Yeah, given that the experiences of organizers are so varied, I wonder if there have been times where you get feature requests from organizers that actually don’t make sense in the app, and how you decide what features should be adopted.

Dan: The more we put into the app, the more we are at risk of, just muddying the experience and making it too bloated that people don’t want to use it. But there’s features that we want to put into the app that don’t necessarily make sense being solely native. By solely native, I mean, you know, built out in native experience. The- we’re starting to consider, like, web views and things for small tasks that are really key to an organizer’s lifecycle of, I think we mentioned, payouts and things like that. That are one-time things that we don’t necessarily need to create those services. So those kinds of questions are coming up now was to, like, as we, again, close those gaps.

Lumen: Yeah, just thinking about, you know, making or breaking the current experience just to put something new or, like, add something new. So if- we ask a lot, like, is this gonna hurt the experience? Is this gonna make it more complex? Is this gonna really change how things work right now? And that just inform what we decide to do.

Dan: It is definitely a push and pull of, like, what’s- what would benefit the organizer versus what would be, you know, kind of work but unnecessary to put in all that effort to make it work in that experience. So yeah, I mean this is something we’re facing now. Um, since we’ve got the kind of basic functionality … Like, it’s not quite basic; it’s, you know, quite broad functionality, you know, that’s quite complex. But the more we try and make this app like a superset, almost of what the web does now, in the- in that you can carry it with you, you can check people in, you can scan them with your camera. That kind of stuff you can’t do on web, obviously. So these things, we’re trying to take all of that stuff from web and put it into the app. But it’s definitely a difficult task to kind of decide which pieces go in and how they go in.

Lumen: Especially when everybody is getting excited about putting it in the app. (laughs)

Liam: The first thing I noticed as soon as I signed in to Eventbrite Organizer was this empty state that had, like, kind of hot air balloon, like, swaying in the wind. That reminded me that even staring at the app is, like, its own kind of interaction. So I’m interested in other ways that Interaction Design can influence these kind of, like, blank states or introductory states, both in Eventbrite and elsewhere.

Lumen: Yeah, I think, if you think about an empty state, for us it wasn’t an empty state or, like, a specific page. We thought about, OK, let’s log in. Let’s create an account. Let’s do all of the things. And then the empty state was actually part of the onboarding to us. That was, like, the first point where you can start creating or doing something with the app. So we didn’t want to approach it, like, a negative thing or something that technically is just a negative thing. But for us it was just, like, the first thing that you see actually after you completed your name and last name and all of these things. So that was like, this is like the first phase of the entire onboarding. Like, how can we make it delightful and feel like we are with you. You’re gonna start creating your first event. It was gonna make you successful, because you’re gonna complete something. So that- that was the way that we wanted to approach it.

And then, again, just thinking about that all the time and just, taking a second thought every time that we wanted to add something in the app and think about animations and interaction and being mindful of adding new steps all the time. And we really needed it, we thought about incorporating interactions and animations to that, so it didn’t feel like an extra step.

Liam: Momondo is a travel booking app that received this year’s award for Innovation.

In Momondo, the tasks of booking a flight and booking a hotel are split into two distinct actions in the app and are presented to the user as physically separate, but easily accessible. The unique multi-tasking experience makes Momondo feel like two apps in one, using Material Design’s notions of light and shadow to build a strong and intuitive mental model.

In the interview I learned about the importance of staying curious, how Momondo naturally blended Material Design with their own strong design language, and how they customize components to meet their users’ needs.

Liam: Taking Material Design as a system and kind of pushing its core principles and creating new patterns and really unique interactions like Momondo has done is something that a lot of designers tend to struggle with. So I’m interested in how Momondo manages to kind of strike the right balance between user familiarity and kind of the expectations the users bring to your app from the platform and the totally unique interactions.

Emmet Fërdle: Yeah, we do also have a really strong brand. We have a really good, like, web product and iOS app as well. And I think, as a culture, the way we work … Momondo’s slogan is, “Stay Curious”, and that’s kind of like a call to action for customers to, like, stay curious, but it’s also like a working methodology that we, um, have where we just kind of question everything. So, I mean, I tend to kind of start with pure material, so to speak, religiously following the guidelines and stuff, and then picking it apart and, like, questioning everything and just trying to see if there’s a different way we can achieve the same results, but, um, still remain true to the platform.

Liam: One specific thing that really stands out to me about the app is that inside of the app, you have this kind of, like … Internal multi-tasking structure where a lot of the search functionality for, like, flights and hotels, exists inside of these screens that almost serve as apps within the apps. So you can be executing flight and hotel searches and then toggle between them and the menu space. Because this is such a unique kind of structure for an app, I’m interested in the rationale and kind of how these interactions developed.

Emmet: There’s no kind of linear path in, like, booking travels or, like, we know we have, like, a massively diverse range of users and it- they all wanna book in their own kind of ways, so we kind of use the app to enable their own way of traveling — that kind of menu space and the kind of mini-apps within the app kind of thing conceptually came out of that, like, allowing people to play around and just, like, maybe be surprised by something that they didn’t expect. So they’re looking at a flight ticket and then they can jump out and check if hotels in that city are, you know, worth looking at.

And it’s also like a fun kind of interesting pattern. Cause, I mean, it would have been very easy to kind of stick on a bottom nav or like a hamburger or something. But that wasn’t Momondo enough. And, um, yeah we just wanted to try something a little bit out there.

Liam: I’m interested in other areas where these kind of unique features and components that you’ve implemented end up simplifying what, at least for me personally, can be a very complex and stressful experience of booking travel.

Manu Somonte: Yes, I know that it can be a stressful experience, but I think that’s one of the goals of Emmet, in this case, it- actually he has made it possible to put that stress level away. And I think that’s why his contribution to design in the ecosystem that we have in hand … It’s fresh and it’s- the delivery of the design doesn’t have any ego. And that’s what makes it so good. And we- that’s why we think it’s great. And it creates great value for us. We think that good design generates great value. And we see it on our users, and we see how happy they are of using the product.

Emmet: And just, like, Momondo, like, strongly encourages to travel all the time, so like, we use the product all the time. And just having such a diverse kind of range of people just within our office is, like, a really good starting point to kind of hear people’s frustrations and things and try and solve them.

Liam: It’s funny, I was in Krakow recently, and a cab driver told me that he had used Momondo to book a flight to SF. And then he also used the app to check daily for updates on flights to Hawaii. So that just kind of highlighted to me the kind of, like, global nature of the product. And I’m interested in how you kind of take this highly diverse set of users and use cases into account as you’re designing the app.

Emmet: Yeah, really good question. Um, well we have, like, some user personas that we’d kind of, like, hinge on every now and then, but there’s no, like, right answer to solve everyone’s needs. But we just want to, you know, create a good experience and kind of let people be their own best travel agent. That’s kind of, like, another slogan that we tend to shout about.

And we think, yeah, like, difference is something to be celebrated and, I don’t know, it’s hard to define how we think of our users. Obviously we’re in constant communication with people. Like, we take every bit of feedback very seriously, and there’s always dialogue with them- users from all over the world.

Liam: Blinkist has distilled more than 2000 bestselling non-fiction books into 15 minute texture audio overviews called Blinks. Blinkist got this year’s award for Brand Expressiveness, making bold and intentional statements about its identity in the app. And using Material Design to craft a comfortable, human-centered reading and listening experience.

In the interview I learned how Blinkist used its brand to create distinct personality for the app, how the app uses color as a mode of communication, and why design should be emotive.

Liam: I’m interested to learn, first of all, about Blinkist’s identity. So, I want to know the history behind it and also how it’s changed over time.

Temi Adeniyi: At the beginning of last year, we were all very interested in kicking off a branding project. Blinkist had grown a lot, and we wanted a way to kind of represent that evolution, but also to represent the kind of company we wanted to grow into in the future as well. So from there, we kind of, like, went back and looked at the- the bare bones. Like, on a strategic level, defining things like what should our brand personality be? How do we want to represent ourselves externally to customers? Who are we to ourselves internally? So we kind of put many months into this exploration and after that, did we come on to the actual, like, visual branding design side of it. And in the end, we did basically all the branding in house.

Natalia: In terms of visual design, we decided to go in house. And I was part of this, let’s say, branding team. We had some- several workshop, and we were trying to encompass this product and our product was expanding, with the podcast, a magazine, and a potential to also cover other aspects of the learning experience. And we wanted to shift it away from the visual, literal representation of books. Like, we not only offer books but we offer mobile way of learning.

Liam: A question that I commonly get when I’m talking to people about Material Design is, “How do you brand a material app?” How did you brand a material app, and what was that experience like?

Temi: Yeah, I think for us, I guess we had an interesting starting place, because although the Android app definitely existed before we rebranded, that experience, again, was something that we weren’t super happy with. And we were lucky that we have, I think, a really active customer base who give us a lot of feedback. So, even before we, you know, set about looking at, OK so now we’ve rebranded and now is best- like, the best time to not only just, like, refresh the look of the app but also improve the actual functionalities and so on. So we kind of took all of this information from the- from our customers, but then we also, as having the starting place of this rebrand, looked at our core principles and what we wanted to offer in terms of this visual branding in the app.

I would say, one thing that we defined early was, how should we approach brand expressiveness, if you like, between product and also marketing. So on the product side, what we aim to do is to allow the user to, like, realize that they are using a Blinkist product. But at the same time, to kind of get out of the way. And I think for this, using Material Design to strengthen that was really helpful for us, because we could offer users who were on the Android platform a way to have this familiarity with the other apps that they were using on their device.

But then, kind of taking the core component of our brand, like, certain principles like how we use white space and so on. We could kind of take these core values and make sure that they are, like, presented in the app in a way that, yeah, gets out of the users’ way. We weren’t trying to be, like, pushy with the brand. But at the same time, we wanted the user to feel comfortable that this was a Blinkist experience. But they weren’t using a product that was, like, so so different from the other apps that they had on their device that were use- that were also utilizing Material Design.

Natalia: The design team, we were designing and then we were lucky to have our lead Android engineer that is really proficient in the Material Design, so yeah, it was a lot of front and back, like, look- can we change these, can we adapt this pattern, can we adapt this …

Temi: Just to add as well, like, in terms of having developers at Blinkist that are super switched on in terms of, like, design in general … I think somehow, that’s something we end up, like, being really lucky with. Like, all the developers have, like, really great design eye. But, specifically our developers on the Android platform also are very well versed in Material Design. So as Natalia said, it was, like, a lot of back and forth, which I think was, like, pretty great to challenge us. Like, OK where could we push it further? Where might we need to adapt it so that it still feels like Blinkist and so on, so I think, just … The discussion around it, I think, was, like, really really helpful.

Liam: I want to kind of break into some of those brand components that you mentioned. And I guess we’ll start with typography, because it seems so central to the experience of the app. You know, one of the primary things that people are doing in the app is reading, so I’m interested in kind of the typographic system that you set up, both in terms of typefaces, like you said, and also type treatments throughout the app.

Natalia: Uh, we went through a lot of typefaces. And we were just trying to create all these mockups to see how legible, how would they just appear at the first glance, uh, like for all the apps and our reader especially.

And then we decided to stick with what we already had, which was Tisa Pro. And nobody ever complained, but not only that, people- our users actually liked it. So we thought, like, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel. Let’s just keep what we have. It’s very clear. It’s very legible and very- every letter is very distinct and it really works well.

And then we ended up adopting Cera Pro for also the rest of the app and the web app, which we- again, we really like. It’s clear. It’s very neat. Very simple but at the same time there’s this element … The kerning and the spacing between the letter is a bit wide, is a bit generous. So it works well. And, it not only- it’s really distinct. The first feedback that we had post-rebranding was actually “great typeface.” Very elegant, and some letters are pure, like, they’re very- pure beauty. Like, the Q or (laughs) the B again. And I think it worked well, and it really translates what we were looking for.

Liam: I just wanted to explore, uh, your use of white space, which obviously kind of interacts with- with the typographic system. But I think there’s a common misconception that white space is wasted space. But I think Blinkist does a really good job of demonstrating that it’s actually a really important tool in-in creating visual hierarchy. I would like to get into your approach to white space, especially when you’re designing for small screens like phones.

Temi: So I think for us, like, the main thing that we do is actually really just thinking about it in terms of hierarchy, so … OK, what is the most important element? Or, what do we want our, like, readers to be doing first? And then, once we have that, I think everything else kind of comes, yeah, comes into play.

In terms of the white space, I remember initially when we were doing the first mockups for this and it was, like, so different from the app previously. And it was like, OK, maybe this is wasted space, but when we, I think, when we thought about it some more and kind of, like, slept on, like, these initial mockups, I think one of the main things that we kind of stuck to is what kind of, like, mood that we want to evoke with this app? And I think that’s something that you can kind of lose when designing cool products, is that, design on some level should be emotive, and it’s about creating as well, like a more, like emotional connection and not just, like, purely delivering information in a way.

So, I think the way that I personally like to think about it is, when we use white space, the user should feel, like, comfortable using, like, our product, whether it’s on web or on Android device. I think, it shouldn’t feel cramped. The experience should feel, like, expansive. But, when we take into account as well, what should be priority … We don’t make the user, like, search for things. They are able to do the first things that they need to be able to do. But that doesn’t mean that it needs to be, like, everything needs to be super cramped or something.

Liam: So you touched on, kind of … Using white space as a way to add this emotive quality to the interface. And is that kind of conveyance of emotion part of the identity of Blinkist?

Temi: Yeah, I think so. Like, as Natalia mentioned, with the typeface we didn’t just pick, OK this, you know, type is super clean and that’s it. We were looking for something that had just, little bit of quirkiness. And I think in general, like, with the brand personality, you’ll see it from, like, the choice in typeface, the choice in color, from the way that we communicate.

So then, in terms of creating an emotive experience … We always try and think about, OK, what is the brand personality? So for us, like, in house, we kind of have these values like, it should be human, it should be insightful, it should be curious. And we think about, OK, how can we make sure that we adopt this in all of our collateral, in all of our- all of the things that we do? And basically just make it appropriate for- for each platform, for each touchpoint the customer has.

Talbot & Yoon, furniture and object designers

Talbot & Yoon discuss designing objects that encourage play

In the premiere episode, Liam speaks with Mark Talbot and Youngjin Yoon of Talbot & Yoon, a New York-based design firm focused on objects, furniture, and home goods. The designers discuss making play a central tenet of their practice, how objects evolve, recontextualizing architecture to make it more accessible, and what happens when you put a seashell in a jewelry box.

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Liam Spradlin: Welcome Youngjin and Mark, thanks for joining me.

Youngjin Yoon: Thank you for having us.

Mark Talbot: Thanks for having us.

Liam: Just to get things started, something I always like to ask is about your
journey so I would like to know what you’re doing now and what the journey was like to get there.

Youngjin: Well we’re currently product designers, mostly focused on home goods, but we initially started out as architects, and I think our interest in this type of product design started mostly because as architects we realized that lot of architectural projects a) it takes a long time to realize these projects, a lot of the projects that we worked on take anywhere from like three to five years to realize from design sketch to construction, and then also for working for a lot of larger companies we realized that as a young designer, you don’t really have a lot of say in the designs that we are participating in. So I think that kind of stemmed the interest in focusing on a lot of the smaller products that we surround ourselves in, and also as architects you usually can’t afford the things that you can design so (laughs) by doing these smaller product designs you can design the things that you actually want and surround yourselves with it and hopefully other people want it and like it too.

Mark: And as far as the journey is concerned, we’re very much still on it obviously.

Youngjin: Definitely.

Liam: As we all are —

Youngjin: Yeah.

Mark: We’ve only started and and been active for maybe two years so still a long way to go.

Liam: In reading about your work, you talk a lot about this notion of play as part of design, so what is that exactly?

Mark: So again like, everything from our recent experience kind of stems from our architecture. So we realized pretty early on that there’s a myth about the lone genius designer that’s just a myth, when you work on a large scale project with multiple moving pieces, it really takes a whole team of people to make something come to fruition, it’s never just the labor of one, one mind even.

So what we see as being most important to the design process coming from that background of doing more complicated design is collaboration and in our mind there, there are couple of approaches to collaboration. In the firm that we used to both work at together actually, [there were] projects were given little bays within the overall studio where clients and architects and all of the consultants that were involved would kind of congregate to have discussions about the project, and the rooms that those things took place in were called war rooms and we thought well that is one approach to collaboration but it seems a little bit antagonistic for our taste. That’s maybe not as productive as something like a playroom for instance. So we see [as] play as like the most appropriate ethos through which to, to address collaborative processes in general. And I think that’s where we kind of started with the notion of play.

In doing our research on play and this notion of collaboration and what play is relative to a collaborative process, we started to do a little background discovery I guess. We found the Dutch cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga, who wrote this entire book about play being an element of culture, and in it what’s interesting is that he notes that play is not just a product of human culture but it’s also the way that animal culture develops as well, the way that a newborn animal learns to socialize and learns to interact with objects within its world is through playing with other animals, and going through the process of discovering how the world works together as a group task. So why wouldn’t we adopt it as kind of central tenet of our design practice?

Liam: So how does that manifest in, in your work or how do you reflect that thought process in the things that you create?

Youngjin: There are a few branches of where we try to develop products with play, one of the branches is for instance, just being as architects, and always working with scale models to develop these larger scale buildings and thinking about these smaller scale models as things that children also play with, like doll houses and so forth, so I think one branch of our practice is to take some larger scale architectural elements and bring them down to a scale that is… so for instance, we developed this tray that’s derivative of a waffle slab system in concrete buildings and, while we were making prototypes of that, we would put scale models to it and imagine the space in a larger scale. so that is one branch of it.

Mark: One of the branches that we started out with was a very early project for table or set of stools, it’s kind of a modular project and we thought about our childhood play experiences. So one of the ways that we develop design is by thinking about how we used to interact with you know our parents’ stuff and the way that we used to think about furniture when we weren’t just consumers of furniture but when we could see furniture for maybe what it wasn’t intended to be. So one of the examples that we like to use is the, the play fort and how the play fort is kind of an early manifestation of a child’s interaction with a couch.

There’s nothing about a couch to an adult that would suggest that it should become a fort, there’s nothing that makes a pillow a simulacrum for wood or stone, but a child kind of looks past that understanding that you know couch cushions are only removable because you need to clean them more often — they say no, couch cushions are there so that I can make walls out of them and then with a sheet, make it into you know a space of my own inhabitation.

And the idea of the play fort specifically as it relates to my own childhood where we were allowed to like write on the underside of our coffee table, it was an IKEA coffee table, it didn’t hold much value to my parents uhm the underside of it is obviously not visible and draping a sheet over it or boxing it in with couch cushions made it so that it was our own uh kind of Sistine Chapel ceiling, we’d all sit, my brother and sister and I would sit on our backs and color this thing until there was no more space left.

Vaulting is the technique used in a lot of uh old European churches and here in New York you can see vaulting in a lot of churches, but it’s the technique for producing the kind of height of the ceiling that would be painted in order to provide some kind of ethereal feeling in the presence of God or whatever. So with the coffee table and stool we thought well you know, my- my child experience with painting the ceiling could be translated to a small scale in a more majestic setting than the underside of an IKEA table and uhm, and then maybe you know how do we, there’s always the question of okay so the child might understand what we’re going for but as an adult you don’t see this thing from the underside so much, you don’t typically crawl around unless something’s wrong, you’ve lost something or something.

So we introduced this concept of modularity as well, because re-organizing the furniture is something that adults do, so how can you make the reorganization of a furniture piece into a game of sorts, or if not a game then at least open ended enough and interesting enough that they might develop their own method for doing it and therefore interest in re-arranging it.

So then the objective becomes like how do you develop a hook for an adult to be in involved in it that’s not the drawing on the bottom of it and one of the hooks that we thought of is inconsistency, introducing some kind of inconsistency that breaks the possibility of them arranging this so that it’s a satisfying organization without the introduction of some, some kind of logic of their own, like they would have to make it their own by making a decision about how these ill-fit pieces come together that satisfies their own notion of what fitting together looks like. Uhm, so I think in … that’s another aspect where we used play as like to take this thing through all of the criteria.

Youngjin: I think the funny thing is children have enough imagination that they don’t need functional necessity whereas adults need the functional necessity to even start engaging.

Mark: Right which is why there’s like extremely long complicated process that I was just describing —

Liam: What are some other cues or ways that you encourage, I guess you would call them users, to uh to engage with the objects that you make?

Youngjin: Our jewelry cabinet for instance, uhm when it’s closed it’s just a seamless box, all you see is a hole, a copper tube in the middle and then there’s some hinges so you know that you can open it but once you open the jewelry box you see all these different little compartments that are of different shapes and sizes, the copper tube becomes the ring that you can hang jewelry off of or other things and I think not only the fact that it is produced in smaller quantities and uh, has … they are hand-made, there are only 10 of them in the world for instance.

Uhm but also the end user it just varies depending on what type of person you are or what type of objects you would insert into these different shape boxes. So for one of the longer compartments, Mark might use- put his brush in that compartment whereas I might put a little sea shell that I got, it becomes this uh very customized cabinet of curiosities.

Liam: Having so many different uh types of compartments kind of removes the suggestion of what should go in them, right?

Youngjin: Exactly. There is this really interesting, Walt Disney test, I- I don’t know if they still do it but it’s based on the animators and apparently if you wanna become an animator at Walt Disney you go in and you’re given a test that you need to draw a series of pillows that look like they have motions without drawing any faces on them. So based on the uh fold that’s in the middle or on the side you can make a grumpy pillow or a happy pillow or an angry pillow and it’s kind of like this uh kind of what do you call it, the anthropomorphic experience on it and uh, our candles are kind of made in the same organic way where we’re just testing different shapes and seeing what kind of uh expressions that these guys have.

We have a lot of followers on Instagram and they kind of post these things tagging us sometimes and they say like, “Oh this is how I feel today” and it’s just .. of this candle, it’s just kind of like grumped over and uhm that’s another end, a different kind of way that our customers interact with some of our products which we think is very interesting.

Liam: And going back to, to the example with the table and stools — I’ve read that you believe that objects continue to evolve and remain dynamic with their owners so once owners start making choices about the objects, things start to change. So I’m interested to hear more of your thoughts on that concept — is that something that typically happens organically or do you build that intentionally into an object?

Youngjin: As designers, we’re not interested in the mass produced, I think that’s key. For this chair or for this table or these cups for instance they’re just objects that you don’t really attach yourselves with. Uhm I think we always try to design objects that are carefully considered and the materials that we choose are also carefully considered, we wouldn’t just use you know wood dust glued together so just in that sense alone I think the end user has this kind of emotional attachment to it throughout the life of the product. Candles obviously they burn, they’re not meant to last forever, uhm but some of the other products we definitely try to design that lasts for a long time and we’ve uhm you know I guess the emotional attachment kind of evolves over time. What do you think Mark?

Mark: There are less and less objects in the world that have the inherent staying power of some of the objects of older generations, and I think the objective of a lot of our peers within the kind of design world that we’re interested in, their objective is to re-imbue objects with the kind of quality and the staying power that would keep them around long enough to remain dynamic but in like a more short term, we had discussions where we don’t necessarily like offering different options, like using the table as an example we had a larger version of it that was a dining table, and we started to say well what if somebody wanted a dining table for eight people? What would be different about it than a dining table for six people? And we kind of decided that we don’t wanna just sell different sizes of planks, we would rather sell leaves instead of just having the central leaf that you can insert to a pulled apart you know dining table. We would just wanna sell the leaf part and not the table part and the leaves would make the table, so if you had another person added to your family you’d just request another leaf you know instead of having to buy a whole new table.
I feel like the idea of investing up-front in something that will last for a long period of time, is something that’s even based on your ability to stay in one place for a long period of time which is something that entirely has to do with your ability to you know hold a job in a certain city to be able to afford the astronomically rising rents in said city, you know all kinds of factors play into it.

Liam: I’m wondering how you kind of detect this quality up front, because thinking about it, all of the things I can think of off the top of my head that I feel are objects with real staying power in my family already are heirlooms. So is there kind of a way to detect this from an object designer’s perspective without knowing kind of the design or production process that went into making something?

Mark: I think that if the object has a kind of a unique hook and it doesn’t look quite like other objects and maybe as a user, you can’t read the manual and understand how it’s supposed to be put together, like I think there’s a whole series of those kinds of qualities that announce it as being slightly unknowable but at the same time fairly familiar.

Liam: I would like to know from a designer’s perspective how you would think about the way that your objects are contextualized in end users life.

Mark: Youngjin mentioned earlier the uh candles, one of the people who purchased one of the candles earlier on had- had mentioned to us that the candles look like you feel when you want to light a candle which we thought was a great like, so that kind of contextualizes that piece within their life, that’s you know when they’re feeling down they wanna light their scented candle, you know. I have also worked at a developer’s office before and we all know the kind of real estate development that’s going on in the city and one of the things that also got us into this is that we don’t like the ubiquity of interior space that’s being produced in new apartment buildings. And we feel like the objects are the context of people’s lives, not necessarily their- the spaces that they occupy everyday. apartment buildings in older buildings generally have unique qualities about them that can help to characterize a person’s living environment but in the majority of new buildings there isn’t that. So, to us, the idea of having morally empty objects that are just made of white plastic laminate that you buy and you don’t really care about is the reason to have objects that have more character.

Youngjin: We have this person on Instagram that uses our candles and she always posts a vignette of her everyday life, and it’s always uhm a picture of a white drawer it’s very generic, a mirror, very generic, and then a few select objects that change every day and the candle is obviously very much a part of her everyday life because it’s right next to her bed, she takes a contextual picture every day, a snapshot of her daily life and we think that’s very important because there’s only so much that you can afford and it really is the objects that you surround yourselves with every day within the space that you occupy every day that makes your context more personable and uhm kind of creates an identity for yourself.

Liam: I want to wrap up by just asking about your creative process as you’ve been designing and building these objects. How it’s changed up to this point and where do you see it going in the future.

Mark: So like we were saying, we’re kind of a fledgling company so so the way that our process evolved is from this kind of general notion of play as being important to the collaborative design process,we understand that design is a part of this kind of culture, it’s a part of a culture that has a longer history, if you’re going to make something that’s not just going to be around for a short amount of time that needs to be around for longer amount of time, uhm such as a building or even a piece of furniture, we feel that it’s not only important to make things that you like at the moment, but engage things that are part of our shared cultural past as well.

Youngjin: I think Mark’s point is we’re interested in scaling back up. So we’ve scaled down from architecture and uhm, playing with these scales is I think very important to us so I think we’ll just continue to do that throughout our profession, we’ll scale up at one moment to like the living environment, to a larger uhm interior environment and then back down and we’ll just keep playing with scales.

Mark: So, so when we departed our profession, it was out of a frustration for the amount of time that the thing took to produce and about the overall seriousness with which it took to produce it.

We’ve kind of realized that maybe we jumped ship too early and like what are the ways we can get back and still use play as a driver for larger projects and one of the key ways that we see the development of a larger object that has more staying power being done is through treating buildings as if they were play things, in essence to start developing models of buildings and playing with them for instance Youngjin was mentioning uh taking these historical structural systems from buildings and scaling them down to the size of a soap dish, like the idea of doing that is to in a way profane the place where it came from, like we have this soap dish that comes from a, a Louis Kahn building at Yale, this big haughty thing has now been shrunk into the size of a thing that you keep in your bathroom you know and it’s almost profane the way that that action takes place.

So I think moving forward we would seek to create actual buildings uhm, that were developed using a more playful manner to make them more interesting to be in, to make them less similar to one another et cetera, just to make something different.