Tuuli and Kivi Sotamaa, Atelier Sotamaa

Tuuli and Kivi Sotamaa discuss their very first collaboration and an interest in experiences that aren’t stripped of friction

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

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

This interview is part of that series.

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Aaron Lammer: Welcome, Tuuli and Kivi Sotamaa.

Tuuli Sotamaa: Thank you.

Aaron: You…run a design studio. Tell me what you do. What do you design?

Kivi Sotamaa: That’s a tough question (laughter)

Aaron: (laughter)

Tuuli: (laughter)

Kivi: Really, we have to figure out an answer to this question. Because we’re not specialized in anything.

Aaron: Right.

Kivi: Meaning we’re specialized in everything. In other words we do projects that cross scale and media. For clients who are really, for one or the other, one or another reason are really interested in experiences. And, and, considering every aspect. Everything that contributes to an experience.

So we do projects that range from the scale of buildings to the scale of glasses.

Aaron: What was your relationship to design like growing up?

Tuuli: Well we grew up in a family that has very close relation to design and architecture. We lived in, we grew up in [inaudible 00:03:06] House. And, uh, which was built in the 60’s. Our whole house was full of art, design and anything to do with the 3-dimensional world. And our father is also in the same field. It’s in our DNA basically.

And we used to do quite a lot of stuff with hands.

Aaron: When did you first collaborate with each other? I failed to say you are a brother and sister.

Tuuli: We started, the first project that we did together, was 1999. I studied ceramic art and glass art at the beginning and did a lot of sculptures. And we studies in the same floor, at the same university with Kivi. And Kivi would walk past my studio and once in a while go maybe we should do something together. Like, once, maybe we could bring this stills together and it was a project in 1999 where we could test how would we work together.
And it worked out really well, and ever since then we’ve done projects together.

Kivi: I studied both architecture and design. I could never decide which way to go, so I chose both. We were invited by Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times to participate in a competition to design the Millennium Capsule for the New York Times. And the idea was that the readers of the New York Times would choose objects that would be saved for thousands of years.

So we didn’t know what the objects were, and we decided to use the computer to produce this sinuous, polymorphic digital skins around whatever objects they choose. And then embed them in composites, ceramics, and we ended up with this. The idea was that this object is going to somehow contain today’s technology, design technology, material technology. And aesthetic sensibility.

And we came up with this amazing thing, and when it came time to make it physical, couldn’t figure out how to get it out of the computer. So I went to talk to Tuuli, I said we should somehow materialize this. And then, it wasn’t a problem for her, because she was used to working with complex forms by hand.

And the result was so good that from that day on, we always kept going on between the analog and the digital, and working together.

Aaron: Before you had this track record of work built up, how did you deal with being involved in a cross-disciplinary practice that had no real specific purpose? Like how do you even find work like that before you have work like this?

Tuuli: We used to work what the [inaudible 00:05:44] curators were interested in us. Maybe particularly because we were not designers, we were not the architects, we were not the artists, we would work between these fields. And we were really interested in creating, also, temporary structures because that allows you to test things out. They don’t have to be physically there for the next hundred years.

But we would try things and really test, what is possible?

Kivi: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we were really embraced by the art scene. And then, I think, the world changed in a way where, maybe because of digitalization, people who exist and compete in physical space, hospitality, retail, museums, they actually have to deliver experiences that you cannot download.

Those are the kinds of clients we’re working with now. And the restaurant sector is one example. I mean, fine dining is this world where everything matters.

Aaron: Looking at that analog, digital divide that you were describing in making the capsule. Um, over those 20 years I feel like the default experience have gone from a mostly physical analog experience to where a lot of people’s primary experiences now are digital experiences, and are staring at their phone for the most part.

How has your practice changed along that, um, that curve? How was that changed what you do?

Kivi: What we tend to work, let’s say in a manner of movie directors, who control quite carefully how those other media are part of the environment. So we do consider the digital experience as part of the physical environment. And we are a little bit disturbed by the fact that the design in the digital world is geared towards erasing any friction.

Is trying to make the user experience as smooth and effortless as possible. Which makes sense for most things. But funny enough, we’re actually interested in almost the opposite. We’re interested in the kind of friction the physical space offers. And the kind of friction that, for example, you find in good artwork.

Meaning there’s something that gets your attention and challenges your preconceptions and seduces or provokes or forces you to adjust your pre-existing models of the world. And we see that go away more and more when design is geared towards, you know, the elimination of any friction. And it’s all supposed to be smooth, and you’re not supposed to notice.

Tuuli: Very interested in the opposite.

Kivi: There are certain moments when that’s good, and there are plenty of people working on that. But we’re almost interested in the opposite.

Aaron: Thinking about friction…when you’re working on a project, do you have a discussion like how much friction is there in this experience? Needs a little more, needs a little less?

Kivi: Yes.

Tuuli: Yeah.

Kivi: Yeah. Exactly.

Tuuli: I think in the beginning of maybe 15 years ago, we did a lot of projects where the object itself didn’t tell how you’re supposed to use it. And what is it, the only, the maybe the scale and the materiality, gave a hint. But then, after that, you would have to find with your body, how does this work?

And it was an interesting experiment to see how people reacted to them. And started giving new meanings. And it was more of like hinting towards, use your own imagination, and use your own brain. And be sensitive to what you are offered.

Kivi: [crosstalk 00:09:12]

Tuuli: So you become more conscious about how you, uh, what the world is surrounds you.

Kivi: And the idea, our idea, is that this friction is how cultural change happens. If you can challenge people, seduce them into adjusting their conventions then you can actually change the way they relate to the world. And that’s the kind of work that design can do at it’s best.

So we always think of that. How much friction, where, and towards what end?

Aaron: In software design, user experience research is usually to reduce friction to say, this person is getting stuck here, we need to fix that. And it seems like you can use research, user research design, also to do the opposite. To say this is too easy, or, people are not having the exploratory experience.

So when you’re thinking of a project, like, I actually know nothing about developing a restaurant. Do you do sample meals? Do you let people sort of have the dining experience and film them? Or study them or something?

Tuuli: I think that’s the expertise of the chefs.

Aaron: Got it.

Tuuli: How the food is and how it tastes and how it’s served. We deal with everything else around it.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Tuuli: And of course we work a lot with the chefs. So we have a lot of conversations like what type of plate, what the color is, how the sequence of different plates and settings are gonna change during the evening.
So it’s not when you go to a restaurant you don’t know from the first plate onwards how the evening is gonna go. But it’s gonna be full of surprises that in one moment you have something that is very plain and very translucent and then you get something that is dark and heavy and rough. It’s like a theater, almost, where the diner becomes part of the audience but it’s a participatory audience.

Kivi: And you’re referring to this latest restaurant project that we designed. The chefs wanted to take on the issues of climate change, really. For us the question is then, well, how can we then participate in this project through design?

So one of the things we did, like a concrete example, is you sit down in this restaurant and you look up and there’s some lamps. And they look kind of curious. And then suddenly there’s something moving inside the lamp, and it’s full of crickets. It’s full of insects.

Now everybody knows insects like lamps. They like to be there. So there’s a weird, it’s expected, but in a restaurant, is that appropriate? And they’re white, the lamps, so you just see the shadows. So it’s a little bit like a scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho with the hand on the shower curtain.

And that triggers conversation. What are they? Why are they? They will ask. They talk to the waitress, to the chef who is in the open kitchen. And they get interested in the subject and that’s what we want to do. That’s all we want to do. We want to, like, build in this potential. And it’s a kind of subtle power that design has, but on the other hand, it’s very potent.

Aaron: I imagine, in your careers, you’ve had clients who you’ve said hey we want to fill the lamps with crickets, they were like what?

Kivi: (laughter)

Aaron: Is that something you have to sell people on? Are do you have to compromise with the clients?

Tuuli: There is also a tendency that clients will come to us. Share the same type of attitude with us. So with example of cricket lamp it wasn’t, we didn’t really have to sell it. It was a mutual understanding and a wish to create something like that.

And this was already a second restaurant that we did with the same chefs.

Kivi: We really need the client for our art, if you want to call it art. That we rely on their expertise and we actually, to be a bit bold, we wouldn’t work with every client. We hate styling, design is styling. And we think design more as innovation, as a cultural activity. So we need clients that have similar agenda.

Aaron: In seeking those kinds of clients, I would think New York, London…

Kivi: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Tuuli: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Aaron: This is where the most of these people are. And you’re here, in Helsinki. How does being here in a smaller city, in a smaller, well, this is actually a pretty big city. But, a big city in a smaller country…

Kivi: Yes.

Aaron: That isn’t on the international design tour circuit affect what you do and the visibility of your work and that kind of stuff?

Kivi: To be honest, it’s a challenge. You have to move quite a lot. On the other hand, we’ve had always, an international career. On the other hand, architecture and design is quite local. You need to work in a meaningful way with clients. You need to physically to be present quite a lot.

So there’s a certain amount of friction there. But, I think the upside in being somewhere like Finland is, it’s small, it’s very non-hierarchical. And you can get anybody on the phone, anybody. Any head of a corporation, anybody. So it’s easy to get things done here. It’s more challenging finding clients for the kind of work that we do, that’s true.

Tuuli: So Finland, so far, has been large enough. Of course there aren’t that many clients who maybe would be a perfect match with us. But likely there is also a lot of individuals. So now, lately, we started to work with private clients. Create houses for them.

Aaron: When you’re doing like a house, and you’re describing decisions. I brought up what happens when the client doesn’t want the cricket lamp. But what happens when people sort of think they know what they want, yet they also want you to surprise them and do something different than that?

Kivi: Yeah, that’s the dance, I suppose.

Aaron: (laughter)

Tuuli: (laughter)

Kivi: That’s the dance. And I’m not.

Aaron: For people listening, his face just kind of like a weird shadow…(laughter)

Kivi: No but it is. If you don’t enjoy that dance, and back and forth, then it’s very difficult to do our kind of work. And obviously it won’t work out with everybody. I always thought that, you know, the challenges of the peculiar fantasies and dreams of our individual client. I think the more peculiar they are, the better.

Tuuli: The more interesting they are.

Kivi: Then there’s always the site, the budget, and these constraints. And they give limit to what you can do which actually makes life easier. If we worked in, more like a conventional artist, with a blank canvas, say, without any limitations. That’s more difficult.

We’re used to working. We have a certain agenda but then all of these external forces and inputs that come from the clients, from the site, from the budget. Always think of this, actually, marine biology analogy. If you have a coral, and there’s a kind of internal DNA that governs it’s growth, but the specific form actually comes from the interaction of that internal logic with external forces that have to do with the environment.

And projects I kind of like that. Like, we introduced this DNA but then it works against and works with all of this external factors. So one answer is, we do a lot of physical models. We discovered nothing works like a physical model. So we 3-D print, and we print and we build. And the client gets to see these things.

And they get to move things around and engage. And you can have a conversation through these objects. They are like these objects of friction in a sense. Then that’s how they develop. I mean reasonably VR has helped us actually quite a lot.

Tuuli: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Kivi: That’s being cool. But we give them, we have clients who are based in California. Put the VR goggles on and we can share the space and have a conversation. And that helps this dance quite a lot. I think nothing is as difficult as a client who doesn’t know what they want. That’s difficult.

Tuuli: Yeah. Or doesn’t have an opinion.

Kivi: Doesn’t have an opinion, who is not peculiar enough.

Tuuli: What are the values? What does the client stand for? Like, the more precise…and the more precise dreams the client has, the easier it is then to start work with the person. Because then you get personally, also, attached to somehow. You get a feeling that if it’s very neutral and gray and everything is fine, then you’re supposed to be doing something frictionless. Then it’s really difficult and maybe it’s not for us then.

Kivi: Yeah, of course, it’s almost impossible if somebody says here’s what I want it to look alike.

Tuuli: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:17:21]

Kivi: Then it’s a difficult conversation because that’s of course not what we deal with. We hear dreams and then turn those into architecture.

Aaron: In a way, that’s I think how people are conditioned to respond, as I want this. But how do you get that, like, how do you find out what your clients dreams are? Do you have like an intake dream interview?

Tuuli: We talk a lot. We ask questions and we listen and analyze. And then soak it all in.

Kivi: Depends on the client, of course, it begins [inaudible 00:17:51] from an individual. But you figure out how you can engage them in a process in some meaningful way. Design and designer, people talk a lot about design thinking. But I think this idea of prototyping and modeling is key to having these conversations.

If you can have a relationship with the client where they can, well, they can develop a confidence that eventually we’ll get there. All of the steps, there might be missteps, or moments where it’s a bit scary. Will we ever get there? What are you guys doing? How much is this going to cost? And so on.

So of course you need, they need a lot of faith in us and I suppose it does help to be a little bit further down the line in our career and have a certain portfolio. That people have more trust that, well if they pulled that off, they can pull this off.

Aaron: Speaking of dreams, and being further along in your career. Do you have dream projects that you want to do, but have never met the right client? You’re just waiting for someone to say I want to build a blimp, or something like that.

Kivi: It’s more like…It’s almost like the ladder is more important. That right client. I have to say, honestly, that we are horrible business people. I mean we’ve learned that you need to make money in order to keep things running and do good work. But it’s never been the motivation. And the most fascinating, fascinating part of it is when you get to work with an amazing curator. Or, you know, just a brilliant person wants to design an unusual house for their family. Or you know, top chefs who want to revolutionize food culture.

So, you never, I’m more interested in the client, actually, than the project.
Aaron: I was gonna ask you about business, um. Because usually when I meet duos, of all kinds, there’s the creative person and the business person. And it sounds like you’re both the creative person. And you said you’re bad at business. But you still exist, so you can’t be that bad at business. When you’re two creative, it seems like strong-willed people, with your own drive, like, how do you even make business decisions?

Do you bring in another person to do the business, or how does it work?

Tuuli: Well, of course we do some calculations of how to keep the business running.

Kivi: These days.

Tuuli: These days. (laughter). The last couple of years we’ve done that too. So there’s like a line that we know, that this is what we need in order for the studio to run and be up and running. And we living. But we never actually had, like, conversation of should we grow bigger. How should we start bringing in more money, or that type of thing.

Kivi: I don’t know if this is understandable, but there is, I think, we have a project. Meaning, we have a cultural project. We can position it, we can argue for it, we can defend it. Then it turned out that we actually do need somehow to keep the practice running in order to get that project done. And we’re interested in business as far as it helps us do better work.
We realize that we can’t do a certain kind of work if we don’t get access to engineers, and 3-D printers, and things like this.

Aaron: You almost talk about the project like it’s an organism.

Kivi: Yes.

Aaron: That you need to continue to feed.

Kivi: Yes!

Aaron: But you don’t want to feed it too much. You don’t want it to get enormous, you know. You’re almost trying to just keep it alive, and…

Tuuli: Evolve.

Aaron: Yeah, evolve.

Kivi: That’s a good…

Tuuli: We don’t, like, uh, I don’t think I, I think in a few days to look back to our projects and noticing like can I find something. Like, have we done two projects that are alike? Have we ever repeated ourselves? Have we…and it turns out no. Like every single project is unique. And as Kivi said it feeds into the project that we are after. And which drives us.

If we were business people, I assume we would start creating like, this is the line of work and this is, like, the housing portfolio. And we…

Kivi: Re-use of the idea…

Tuuli: Yeah.

Kivi: As opposed to always developing new ones.

Tuuli: It would…yeah. Sometimes it would make life easier, but then again it makes life much more interesting. And it also forces us to learn all the time new things. And keep ourselves really inspired, and not get lazy.

Aaron: Is there anything new that you’re working on that you’re allowed to talk about? Um, do you talk about the projects that you’re doing in the present, or do you wait until it’s unveiled?

Kivi: No, only in general terms. We have a lot of, we’re working on a number of really interesting houses that are in Finland. Or located in Finland. But they’re all based on very unusual ideas about being in nature.

Aaron: Hmm.

Kivi: And those ideas come mainly from the clients. That the clients had want something beyond the normal. And different fantasies about the life of the family, but also the relationship to nature. So that’s really fertile ground for design. And we’re working on those and there will be realized now over the next couple of years.

And in Stockholm we have a very prestigious client. We can talk about that, right?

Tuuli: Yeah. Of course. We are working on the, it’s called the Royal Engineering Science Academy in Stockholm. And we are helping them to renew the building, the premises, which are really downtown Stockholm. As central as it can get. But we also help them think, how they values and the activities would be visible in their spaces. How to make their day activities visible for others, so that when you enter a space, you actually, without thinking, you start noticing. Like you start to understand what this academy is for and is about. And what are the current projects that they work.

Aaron: Thank you so much for this interview. I’m really looking forward to your talk.

Kivi: Thank you!

Tuuli: Thank you! Thank you.

Nathan Martin, Deeplocal CEO

Deeplocal CEO Nathan Martin on punk rock and authenticity

Nathan Martin’s career path has been anything but conventional. In this episode of Design Notes — the show about creative work and what it teaches us — guest host Aaron Lammer interviews Martin about the wild work of his award-winning innovation studio, Deeplocal, how to make design more like punk rock, and why communication and collaboration help the studio avoid failure.

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Aaron Lammer: Welcome, Nathan.

Nathan Martin: Thanks.

Aaron: You are the founder, the proprietor of Deeplocal. Uh, what do you call Deeplocal? It’s a studio?

Nathan: I call us innovation studio.

Aaron: Innovation studio?

Nathan: There’s not really a good word to describe us so it works.

Aaron: Okay. So what is an innovation studio? (laughs)

Nathan: First, we invent things. Uh, things that have never been seen before. Uh, we do it mostly in marketing but we also work a little bit on the product side for our clients. We are ultimately a service company. So, um, a list of our inventions and the things that we build are for clients like Google.

Aaron: Well l-let’s talk about a project cause that’ll help …

Nathan: Yeah …

Aaron: Ground us.

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: So you did this project with balloons. This is unfortunately one that, uh, does not go well with audio …

Nathan: (laughs)

Aaron: A picture would help sell this better …

Nathan: Yeah …

Aaron: But describe the project.

Nathan: Selfiebration. It’s always good to start so, um, a lot of our work is really marketing. And what I mean by that is, and I’ll describe that project, but it means that we’re trying to put things into the world that are exciting and are authentic stories that people get excited about and talk about. So our clients tend to be Fortune 50 brands that want to tell a story about innovation or, you know, just feel like they’re in touch with cultural trends, as well. So we come up with these ideas and often technology is just a tool that we use, uh, to kind of create experiences that are remarkable, that people are going to take notice of, talk about and share.

So for Old Navy, our retail client, we were working on a celebration of, I think it was, their 20th birthday. Uh, and they wanted to create something that briefed us. The challenge was create something that celebrates our audience, not us. So we came with, up this idea, a marketing campaign called Selfiebration …

Aaron: That’s a, that’s a pretty wide open way …

Nathan: We tend to get really wide open …

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: I mean we are the company that gets the wide open briefs …

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: Like make us feel innovative globally.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: So with, um, Selfiebration, what it really was, well there is a machine component, but the marketing component was what if we kind of allowed people that already had, kind of a selfie trend was in full force, this was a few years back, and we allowed people to kind of create larger than life selfies. And how would we do that in a way that was remarkable?

So, um, we came up with a display apparatus that we actually hold a patent on now that uses balloons as if they were pixels. So almost like halftone images. Have you ever seen them? With large and small dots to help create a visual image. We do that but on a really large scale. So we created a modular system, basically a grid of balloons. Each balloon, the air inflation of it, is controlled, uh, by a hy-hydraulic system, um, so that we can kind of treat them as if they were pixels, making them bigger or smaller in-in real time. What it all-allows to do for a user is the user would send in a picture and hashtag Selfiebration, we would pull those images down, moderate them to make sure they weren’t profane and then we would render their image out in near real time, ou-out of balloons in a matter of seconds, capture a video from that and then share back with them an animated gif of their image.

We installed this as a live event in Times Square in New York for a few days and then, uh, in City Walk Los Angeles for a few days. It’s always connected socially. A lot of the stuff we do in the physical world has some social connections so that a certain number of people can see it in the real world but we’re really doing it for that secondary audience, which is almost our primary audience, which are people who live online, who can’t see it in the real world but can see the manifestation of it through video or through documentation or remote participation.

Aaron: So I think people listening to this will be familiar with the, um, tech, the digital side of that which is like … Okay, photo comes in, you moderate it, it goes off to a server and then it comes up …

Nathan: Comes in …

Aaron: Getting to the Raspberry Pi …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: That’s on the back of it, I can wrap my head around.

Nathan: (laughs)

Aaron: But when you’ve got to do the balloon part …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: Where do you get a balloon engineer?

Nathan: Well, that’s the fun, that’s sometimes, um, that’s the most fun part of our job. It’s because, yes, our staff, you know we’re about 60 people and half those staff comes from different engineering backgrounds, very diverse backgrounds, as well, but robotics, mechanical, electrical …

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: Software combined with industrial designers. All that kind of stuff happening. But then there is those things happening outside like you’re talking about. Like, okay, we need to create balloons. If you think about balloons, interesting challenge because, uh, latex isn’t designed to be inflated and deflated, inflated and deflated. There’s, the physics of latex just doesn’t allow it to do exactly what we want it to do.

Aaron: It’s kind of designed to pop.

Nathan: Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron: (laughs)

Nathan: You inflate once and that’s it.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: And you remember they get more stretched out over time. So you can either like correct for that in software and try to figure out, well what is the degradation over time and all that crazy stuff.

Um, we ended up going to, uh, we found one of two balloon manufacturers in the US. I think this one was based in Ohio. Um, they have a lead chemist, a chemical engineer, who works on the materials. Um, we worked with them to devise a coating based on our needs. So their engineer devised a coating, um, that provided more UV protection since we were going to do this outdoor and that would also degrade the material. Uh, and then essentially balloons are made, you learn all these interesting things along the way, balloons are made by dipping. They have these forms that dip in latex. They come up, it’s why they have a little kind of tip at the bottom of them. So we essentially double dipped balloons. We made them so thick that you couldn’t blow them up with your mouth, just not possible so machine would have to do it. But it allowed them to last for the 24 hours we needed them to last with, like, very minimal degradation. So that’s, that’s what we did.

Aaron: And then you also, I assume, had to figure out a way how to blow up that double thick balloon.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron: Seems like another challenge that I don’t know who you would hire for.

Nathan: And, and those are the problems that excite the engineers that work at Deeplocal because once you kind of figure out the idea, which is pretty difficult to get there. But once we get to an idea, our client gets excited about it and they buy into the, the concept that yeah, this is going to get excite, people are going to talk about this, it sounds good. We do it all. So we’re developing the launch strategy, the partnership, all the marketing side of it. But then there’s all the engineering challenges, as well. And for the most part, our clients just assume we can figure it out. And we do that, too. We assume we can figure it out.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: As long as I have figure-it-out people, um, that are excited by that and problem-solvers then, uh, then we will.

Aaron: The kind of, um, marketing you’re describing, which I’ll call like loosely experiential marketing …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: It can feel gimmicky …

Nathan: Sure.

Aaron: And stunty and part of what really unified a lot of the projects and why I find a lot of stuff that you do at Deeplocal fascinating is it feels like it could fail.

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Oh, yeah.

Aaron: And that live wire element of the possibility of failure can kind of elevate it to a more art-like state.

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Aaron: Um, that’s a quality I identify with. Art I like …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: Is like, you know, when you go see a band play live, they could fail. You’re not listening to a recording, you’re listening to people who are either going to succeed or fail. So how do you look at failure …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: Or at least the specter of failure at Deeplocal?

Nathan: Well, first, I love that observation. I actually haven’t had anyone, uh, give me that observation before and it’s, it’s awesome. Yeah, I think about, we think a lot about the stuff that we do. It is all kind of, uh, on that edge, um, because it’s, it’s, we have a fixed budget, fixed timeline, and the thing I always tell the engineers we have is we don’t have the chance to go back and say I need another week.

Aaron: Right.

Nathan: Or I’m a little behind that deadline. And, and you think about a lot of our clients that do employ engineers, they, those deadlines often get pushed. Our deadline never gets pushed. So what that means is, you have to have an extreme ability to adapt your problem solving along the way because we’re going to hit unknowns. We, we never know everything when we start. We know pieces of like, yes we think based on past experiences this is how it’s going to work. We think that we can figure this out. But along the way, there’s going to be variables. It may be a variable cost buy, um, hey that LED that we need 16,000 of is discontinued and there’s only 12,000 and we better figure out what we’re going to do. You know, or it could be a, be about sourcing or it could be about just technical challenge where something doesn’t behave the way we thought it would behave. Or the user experience isn’t good.

So you have to course correct, like every, you-you’re kind of like constantly solving problems. I think about failure a lot. Like, we-we don’t fail because we control what success is, to be honest. I-I think what that means is that as long as we have really good communication there are a lot of ways to correct, uh, a problem in the midst, in the middle of a, of a work stream.

So because we have these different pieces of the company, we can say, hey if we’re struggling in software to solve a problem, maybe hardware can do some more heavy lifting. Hey, if we’re struggling in both of those, maybe we hire a human to sit and do something that we can’t, we don’t have time to program. It’s because things live for a short period of time, as well, um, most of our work lives for a short period of time. Some live longer but the short period of time work, we have that freedom to say as long as we know what the problem is, the people are talking and not just doing their piece of the work. You never get to a point where it, just, you plug it together and it doesn’t work. Then I think that that’s, um, a willingness that we, that we take that is very much like a band.

It is punk rock, you know. A guitarist breaks a string and step to the side, someone else picks up. You just keep playing. You don’t stop. We never stop playing and I think that that is, uh, it’s really hard to fake authenticity. And I think in marketing often people try to fake authentic stories. And I think that audiences are pretty aware of and we’re seeing this in, in recent ads that have been criticized, um, you know by Pepsi and Kendall Jenner and stuff. It’s, it’s hard to fake an authentic story and it’s increasingly hard to do that with a-a really well connected universe that we live in.

Aaron: It’s rare that an authentic story will have the word authentic attached to it. (laughs)

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, exactly! You just do it.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: And I think that’s what, and that’s why we are, we’re very much like coming to the kitchen to see what we do because we have nothing to hide. And you’ll find in-in-in advertising, the world that we entered, um, because you know we didn’t start there, what we saw is there are so many different businesses that what’s happened over the years is they focused on their slices and in-in that industry there’s what, there’s the advertising agency which will do creative and there’s a production company that produces stuff. And they’ve divided themselves over the years because they’ve figured out where they can make money. And there’s, and production making stuff has risk. So why not leave that up to three people who can go bid on it and put all the risk on them, yell at them if not done on time. We’ve collapsed that back to probably where it started, which is we come up with the ideas. We’re beholden to the user experience. Our success, you know, is measured in marketing language but we’re doing engineering so we have to succeed at that, too. But by collapsing it, we have total control. And that allows us to-to behave like a rock band.

Aaron: The people that you’ve cited as people you work with and collaborate with have a very Pittsburgh flair for …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: You know, um, there’s, uh, some people who can do some machine shop.

Nathan: Yep.

Aaron: Some people who can manipulate the robot arm.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron: And some people who can write the, um, firmware …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: For the robot arm. For one person, yourself, um, who has a pretty varied background …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: But how do you evaluate new employees and people to work on these projects …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: When I can’t imagine you are, like, both an expert welder …

Nathan: Oh, I’m not.

Aaron: And hacker, yourself. So when you’re, like, bringing in someone who is in a discipline that you’re, like, I don’t know the first thing about this discipline …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: I got to decide whether to trust you …

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: On a sprint. What do you look for?

Nathan: It makes me think a lot about when I, so I used to teach and I was a horrible teacher because I’m not a super patient person. And I hated teaching technology. Uh, I remember I taught a class once and it was supposed to be on flash and I think the student went and complained to the director because I said, kind of day one, I know I have this curriculum but I think you need to learn flash on your own and …

Aaron: (laughs)

Nathan: I’m going to talk to you about design. Um, because I really do believe I-I don’t put huge stock in specific technical skills. I think that it’s about personality more than anything else and-and-and who a person is. Now there’s definitely a technical competency level but the people that thrive at-at working with me are people who want to learn, who want to be challenged, who are okay with a subjective goal. I mean, which, a big problem for engineers is, you know, that subjectivity of there is not a clear right. We’re figuring out what correct is along the way. Um, and that’s difficult because marketing is subjective. There’s no guarantee that the thing we’re putting in the world is going to get talked about on Good Morning America. We can, we can use our best judgment and kind of, uh, the things that we’ve learned to make sure that we’re putting ourselves in the best position. There is no guarantee.

So what I’ve learned, uh, is that we, as a team what we did, uh, a couple of years ago is we started to develop these kind of core values. And we have, I think, five that we, that we pay attention to. Uh, efficiency became key. Can I get things done, uh, you know in a quick way?

Resourcefulness, which is hey I’m not going to be given every, you know, every-every piece of technology I maybe need. I have what I have, let me figure it out with what I got. You know, authenticity was important to us. And all these things kind of evolved, as well as understanding over the years who didn’t work and why didn’t they work.

Aaron: Right.

Nathan: And we start to kind of, uh, reverse engineer it and say, you know, the things that don’t work well are big egos. Someone comes in and they’re better than everyone else. They know better. I want confident but I don’t want an ego. So people that walk in on day one and say “well that’s not how it’s done. At my last job we did it this way. Or you need to do this. Or you should do this.” There is no should for us because we’re in uncharted territory. So we need to figure out what works best for us.

Aaron: I’ve heard it described that in things like marketing …

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Aaron: Basically you want to figure out how to do something once and sell it to nine other people …

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Aaron: And do it exactly the same way. And the first one was expensive and the next nine are cheap.

Nathan: That sounds nice. (laughs)

Aaron: It doesn’t sound like you ever get to sell the next nine.

Nathan: No, not typically. Um, and I, you know, I-I don’t know. We go back and forth whether that’s good or bad, you know? I-I-I don’t have a firm take on that. I mean definitely a lot of the work that we’ve done for Google in the last few years, uh, ends up being, um, recreated or traveling to different events …

Aaron: Sure.

Nathan: And they’ve been good about that. I think then our clients see the benefit, uh, a residual benefit of using this work over and over again. You know, for example, we worked on the Chelsea location of Google’s headquarters and in the lobby area, there’s a wall about 6,000 arcade style buttons, old school arcade buttons. These are all custom. Behind them are custom circuit boards, all modular as well that-that have light pipes that go to these buttons and basically it acts as a low resolution touch screen. So you can interact with it by touching the buttons, rolling your body against it, throwing your hands against it. Or it can be a display of 16 million colors in super low resolution. And then we built a software platform behind that so that developers and artists can program for it the same way they program for their Chrome browsers. So it’s super simple, can be fresh. And what we did after we did that is the installation, is we build our version of that with more modular that’s now traveled like the Mobile World Congress event and traveling to some other Google events.

So for us, there is benefit to re-usability. I-I think I always struggle with it because I’m a person and a lot of our staff are people who like that initial challenge. Sometimes it would be nice to have a chance to take another crack at it. I think that’s where we always feel like if we, if that first time you’re always kind of figuring it out and if you have had a second chance to do it again, you’d do things a little bit differently. We never usually get that second chance.

But as a business, our whole brand and our identity is really built on being the first. Doing something that’s never been seen before.

Aaron: This is not what you started out doing.

Nathan: No.

Aaron: This is not the career you envisioned …

Nathan: (laughs)

Aaron: At high school graduation.

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: What were you doing before?

Nathan: It’s funny you say that. I always say that myself. That I’m not doing anything that I thought I would ever be doing. But it’s funny cause my wife also works at Deeplocal as our CMO and she went to school for, for marketing and she says that, in her opinion, I’m doing exactly what I, what I was trained to do. Because, so I went to college at Carnegie Mellon for basically robotic art. But I did a lot of interactive installation work. I was self-taught so I would learn software engineering. I would learn a little bit about hardware. This will date me, like parallel port control and I worked in, uh, lingo like macromedia director …

Aaron: (laughs)

Nathan: And stuff and you kind of work. But at that time, there was no, um, there was, there was no plan to do that to make money, like definitely.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: It was about how much am I going to spend on this thing. And-and I made art for myself. And there is a difference between art and what we do. I realize that but I do think that what I really loved was I started to collaborate with people in different disciplines that had skills that I didn’t have. I realized really quickly in college that, that things that were in my head that I wanted to build I couldn’t do on my own. I wasn’t learning fast enough. I was good at managing, kind of like figuring it out together holistically …

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: At a higher level and then I needed expertise to help pull it off. And I needed the experiences that were different than mine coming from different backgrounds to make the idea better. So I always collaborated and, um, and I ran a band for a long time around the same period. And I was …

Aaron: Was that before or after college?

Nathan: That was around the same time.

Aaron: Around the same time. Yeah.

Nathan: Yeah. My band started when I was 16 years old. It changed a few times. But the last kind of version of, lasted about a decade was throughout college. So the same time I had an art group, I had a band. And I was again a no-talent, I mean, I feel like a little bit like I am now as a CEO. I can’t do the stuff that my team can do. Just like when I was in a band, the musicians that worked with me, um, were much more talented than me.

Aaron: Yeah.

Nathan: And they went on to prove that and be in other bands and do well for themselves. But for me, I was good at organizing them, at motivating them, at planning the tours, at building the relationships, at doing the graphic design for our records, and-and working on the record deals. Like I did all of that and then kind of singing in the band which is where I did screaming, more so, was, uh, was almost like secondary. I was like a manager. And I feel like that’s what I am right now. At Deeplocal my job is to steer the ship, uh, to make sure I have the right people there, that they’re excited and motivated and I have the right challenges for them to keep them motivated, as well.

Aaron: What was that moment like at the end of the time? Like, you’re …

Nathan: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Aaron: You’re in like a punk band.

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: You’re probably not going to do like do that while you’re a CEO.

Nathan: Yeah.

Aaron: What was that period of your life like to-to transition so sharply.

Nathan: It feels, it’s interesting cause I’m reconnecting with some of my old band mates now, uh, recently. Uh, actually I was just texting with one before I walked in here and, um, she had an old photo that our drummer sent me and I was thinking. I’ve been thinking a lot back, I mean I’m 40 years old now. So I think a lot now about, you know, my 20’s and what they were like and what’s different and what’s the same. And I think, um, it is funny sometimes when I think about what I do and that I’m marketing brand. When I think about that, I-I come up with marketing for big brands and I used to be more of a political activist.

And I think I always have, I think people stay, for the most part, who they were when they were seven years old, I think persists. I think I’m still in my core, the same person I was even that, seven years old and I was the punk rocker and what I am right now. I think I am, um, I don’t, I question authority. I don’t like to be conventional. I don’t like conventional wisdom. I don’t like being told that’s the way you do things, that’s just how it’s done. I like to reinvent, you know? And I always have that perspective, of just I want to be doing something interesting and different.

Now the context is totally different so when I think about back then, you know, my-my band was, uh, talked a lot about technology. We were even different in that world because we would play shows and then we would do like hacker workshops. And I ran a, my art collective was called Hacktivist and we would talk about how to reverse engineer technology and how to gain access to mainstream media. And I was, um, the projects that, that landed me in some hot water with the law a few times. And, and I think it-it was contestational but it was always, and it was, and a lot of it was more political. But I always kind of liked to-to stir things up, to get people to notice things.

To me, art and my vision of art is that artists see the world or whatever thing that might be. It could be a flower on the street. It could be a piece of music. They see things in a different way and their job is to then communicate that perception, that experience to someone else. How can you see the world and look at it differently? And why I was a somewhat political artist cause I was looking at things that were, you know, often times critical of advertising and saying, if you just step back and observe, let me try to show you this thing that you’re not noticing.

Um, so things like Washington Mutual Bank used to do marketing with Che Guevara’s image to advertise low finance charge checking accounts. And I was like, you can walk by that every day on a billboard and never notice the absurdity of it or you can kind of reflect on it. And I think artists’ jobs are to not tell us what to think but to get us to think for ourselves about the-the things that we take for granted around us.

And I think I’ve-I’ve, you know, while-while I don’t believe what I’m doing is, uh, a greater service to the world, the service that I’ve reconciled for myself, that I feel like I-I’m doing is I’m trying to create a place, uh, in Deeplocal for employees. And I want to create a space where we are free to solve problems, be creative, be proud of our work, put things in the world that we get the credit for. And I’m-I’m comfortable with that. If I, if I can kind of carve that space of a business I don’t think anyone else has created, that’s what I’m most proud of. As long as I can kind of keep that going and keep a quality of life while doing it.

Aaron: Well, thank you very much, Nathan.

Nathan: Hey, thanks so much.