Ksenya Samarskaya, Type Designer

Connecting type design to history and cultural identity with Ksenya Samarskaya

In this episode, Liam speaks with New York-based type designer Ksenya Samarskaya, exploring how type absorbs influence from its place in time, space, and culture. Samarskaya unpacks how typography represents the histories and complexities of the world around us, while revealing our own identities in the process.

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Liam Spradlin: Ksenya, welcome to Design Notes.

Ksenya Samarskaya: Hi. Thanks for having me. Glad we’re finally doing this.

Liam: Yeah! I feel like I should mention to the listeners that Ksenya and I met about three and a half years ago, now, at Span in New York, and we’ve been trying to set up an interview ever since.

Ksenya: (laughs)

Liam: And now here we are. (laughs)

Ksenya: Indeed.

Liam: To start off the same way I always do, I wanna know about your journey. Because I’m interested in the different ways that people come to design and to the disciplines that they do.

So I wanna know how you came to type design, and also how you think that experience reflects your approach to the work.

Ksenya: So the way I came to type design, is possibly a slightly non-traditional route, but in some ways that was appealing about type design at that time, is … When I entered, almost no one in the field studied type design. A lot of people came from different directions. So it seemed like a really interesting combination that really appealed to my personality.

What I actually studied was a lot of fine art, installation art, communication design. And upon graphic design briefly, my realization was that graphic design is really just all dealing with fonts. You’re either selecting fonts, or you’re manipulating ’em. And if I wanted to be really good at it, I needed to fully understand type and typography, and get really deep into it.

I didn’t imagine staying in the field for as long as I did, and then just kinda … Yeah. One thing tumbled after another, and I landed here. And it’s been a fun ride.

Liam: I feel like a common theme, as I continue to talk to folks who work in different disciplines, is, like: design solves problems. People approach design projects in a way that figures out what problem it’s addressing.
So I wanna know, from your perspective, how does type solve problems?

Ksenya: In the typefaces that I’ve worked on and I’ve designed, there’s a couple different categories of problems. There’s, uh … Certain typefaces, there’s been a lot of, like, trying to deal with problems of legibility, and trying just really functional, like … How do you design a typeface for broadcasting? How do you design a typeface for really rough newsprint? Where is it gonna live, in terms of materiality, and how do you work with that?

There’s another category of typographic problems that I deal with when I deal with branding, which is: how do you get type, or a typeface, to communicate someone’s personality? And a mood, and a brand, and just all of the intricacies of history, and I love that condensed problem of: how do you get so many different fields of data and touchpoints, and get it down to a letter, or a set of letters?

And then the third, uh, issue that I deal with a lot is: I do a lot of multi-script type design. I deal with Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, and I’ve done, also, research into other minority scripts, and there it’s somewhat related to, like, the branding problem, but on a different scale, and from different touchpoints, of: how do you talk to different groups, different nations, different communities of people, and how do you fold in all of their history with type form and reading, and how are you sensitive to that, and how do you respond to that and translate it that a way that kinda works within this matrix?

Liam: When you’re approaching a multi-script type project, are you seeking to balance those scripts in a way where they can live in harmony in the same family?

Ksenya: Absolutely. And that’s definitely one of the things we get hired … Um, my company is me and a couple other people that work with, so a lot of times when I’ll say “me,” it is … or … I am talking for a group, in all of this.
But a lot of the problems, they do come to us that way. It is: someone has a Latin, or someone has a need, and we’re doing a lot of extensions, so we are looking to harmonize. And it’s a question of: how do you just not, necessarily, repeat the shapes, but how do you also harmonize the tone, and the mood, and the idea, of a brand, and …

So it’s looking from where the original typeface is coming from, and then where it’s going, and what combination of countries or people it’s gonna be speaking to.

Liam: I’m really interested in this question of, like, building identity into type design. So, lie, what are some of the ways that you do that? I guess, first, in discovering the identity, and then also, like, translating that into something like type design has a very richly historical, systematic aspect to it.

Ksenya: Answering this question on radio, uh … is gonna feel kinda like dancing about architecture. Um …

Liam: (laughs)

Ksenya: (laughs)

Like, how do I translate and describe this?

In branding projects, the biggest part of, like, the time is really, like you said, the understanding, and trying to learn what they’re trying to express. It’s a lot of conversation, it’s a lot of questions. It’s a lot of keywords and associations, and having the client pick between things, and really state their priorities. It’s learning who the client is, it’s learning their history, finding some materiality to ground and then be able to triangulate against.

Once that part is done, for me, the part of translating it into type and visuals is actually much faster, but, again, that comes from being completely immersed in the field, and all the years and time I’ve spent researching in the past.

And typefaces really absorb connotations from the environment, or the place that they’re in. So if, like, one typeface is used … or one style of lettering is used in cafes in Barcelona a lot, all of a sudden, that typeface isn’t just, uh …

Liam: It feels like a café in Barcelona typeface.

Ksenya: Exactly. It’s no longer just, like, a set of decisions about weight or proportion, all of a sudden it takes all the connotations of what that café is and how it feels, and it kind of, like, soaks it in like a sponge in a certain way.

And then you have the memory, and you have the association of: now, whenever someone sees those types of letters, their memory is … their memory is triggering any time they’ve seen, you know, a postcard, or a photo, or have traveled through that space.

So a lot of it is knowing history and geography of styles and trends, and what they’ve been in. So once you learn from a client what their takes are, and how they wanna be associated, you just kind of map it to the … to other spaces that are similar, and the typographic decisions that were made there, and then you kinda just DJ remix them in a way that, hopefully, is also fresh and interesting, and adds to that realm, rather than just copying one source directly, or …

Liam: Right.

Ksenya: Kinda doing a derivative.

Liam: How does that line of thinking change when you’re working on a project that involves multiple different applications of type? I remember reading about a project you did that involved, like, sign-painting, and a printed typeface.

Ksenya: That’s, I think, where families or package things do come into play. Like, that’s why a lot of type families will have, like, a text face, and a display face, and a caption, and those can have different correlations, or how similar they are.

So a lot of it also comes down to: you’re not necessarily gonna use one style, or one font everywhere, so you try to build a package, and you kinda build a system that will work.

Liam: I guess I’m also interested in whether, in building a family like that, or building a multi-application, like type system, if you can create that association, or that feeling, on your own. Like, absent of external histories.

Ksenya: I think you can create a completely brand new thing, and will have … You know, you can create something that’s, like, harsh, or fuzzy and bubbly, or whatever else. But I think you’re still always connecting it.

I just recently did a piece of lettering that I wanted to reference a dessert, and kind of, like, those spiky little flowers and tumbleweeds, and things like that. And so it’s … So that has a certain feeling of sharpness, or barrenness. But, again, it’s working through metaphor, association, or …

Liam: Yeah.

Ksenya: … connotation. And I think all type will.

Liam: I guess, ultimately, if it exists in the world, it’s going to refer to the world. (laughs)

Ksenya: There’s also that, yes. (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

While we’re on the topic of expressing an identity in a type design project … I remember in an interview in 2015, you were talking about the ways that identity finds its way into type. And I’m wondering if you find that there are any ways that your own identity is expressed in the things that you create.

Ksenya: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think … I don’t think anyone creates something that doesn’t … Like, you’re always making choices, and I think there is a habit that leans you making one choice over another, and I … and I feel like … Like, I can usually look at a typeface, and I can tell where someone studied. I can tell a Cooper type student form another student, because there are habits, or patterns, or a way of looking that are discernible.
And I remember, like, seeing that in art, like, when I was a kid … um, looking at people’s figure drawings and things like that, and noticing that most people drew people like themselves, rather than like … Or it was, like, some weird overlap between themselves and what they were looking at, and I think that always exists, and I don’t think you can escape it. Nor … Nor should you.

Liam: That last part is interesting. Why do you say that?

Ksenya: That you shouldn’t-

Liam: Yeah.

Ksenya: … try to escape it?

Liam: Yeah.

Ksenya: I don’t really believe in neutrality. I think our values, and our histories, and our experiences are everywhere, and in everything we do, and I think, instead of trying to hide ’em, we should own it, and just try to be conscious of them, and make sure they’re aligned and in harmony to what we wanna bring to the world.

Liam: I love that. (laughs)

Switching to something maybe a bit more abstract. There is an interview in Print Magazine where you mentioned this idea of combining the thinking of art, and the tools of design, in your work. I’m curious what you mean by that.

Ksenya: So, for me, that’s just what I know from my background, and my training, which is as … I think there’s, like, a couple different ways that that plays out.

On a formulaic way, art teaches … It taught me how to break the visual world down in ways that are kind of like these Lego tool pieces, and it’s really abstract. And it’s learning how to abstract the visual world, and really just look at it. Which I think is incredibly useful.

Versus, in design, sometimes you’re locked into already thinking it’s design, or already thinking it’s gonna be a typeface, instead of just kinda pulling it back and seeing it as these abstract shapes.

And the other side of that, and this is kinda more, I think, what I like, or I’m ex … drawn to with … in terms of art thinking, is: I was taught in a program where you’re thinking about all the possible connotations to everything you do.

There’s an essay online that I read a couple months ago that’s really beautiful, that talks about art thinking as being the edge of thought. And it really talks about, like, what art thinking and the way that it opens your mind and kind of pushes certain boundaries.

But the other part of the question that I wanted to answer or get to is that art thinking taught me a certain responsibility for the effects of anything I do. It taught me to think about all the details. It taught me to really consider every connotation that something can have, or something can bring. And it taught me to have an opinion, and to have a voice, and to be responsible for that.

Which I think is a wonderful thing to also have. If you’re a designer, you’re designing things for culture and for society, and it’s gonna have implications and ramifications no matter what you do. And so, again, this kind of circles back to not pretending that you’re invisible, or you’re just a hand in the machine.

And, again, and this is why I love type, there’s a lot of really small decisions you can have that have meaning to someone else, or impact culture and … Within any parameters, you have a choice on how you behave, and what you do, and that’s an amazing responsibility, and-

Liam: Yeah.

Ksenya: … something to own.

Liam: I think as you were talking, in my mind this distinction started to emerge between the concepts of art and design, but how would you describe that distinction, if it exists?

Ksenya: In my work, I completely merge the two, and I go back and forth between the practices, and find it pretty seamless.

To me, the most interesting people that are practicing today do kind of exist in this overlap, where they’re using the tools of design, which to me are much more democratic than art … They reach a different audience, and they’re much more widely dispersed. Which it makes them really attractive, but you still have that same rigor, and responsibility, and openness, and willingness to push culture, or be in dialogue with culture that art has as its foundation, and that design can have but doesn’t always.

Liam: Yeah. Maybe sometimes it just lacks the acknowledgement that that’s going on.

Ksenya: Perhaps.

Liam: Going back to the ubiquity of type, and how it informs a lot of the design around us, and takes place in culture, and geography, and history.
You’ve said before that type can reveal complexities, as well. And I’m interested in the ways that it does that.

Ksenya: Well, I think with type, and generally with design and with visual culture, where most of us are primarily visual creatures, we absorb it and we react to it, even if we don’t necessarily know that we’re reacting to it.
And with type, like with a lot of design, same thing, like: you don’t really notice it until it goes wrong. You can tell if you weren’t able to read something, or if a word looked like another word, and you got lost at the airport.

For a long time, the iPhone had Helvetica as its screen, and I could never, like … The closed counters of the 6 and the 9, like, I’d be waking up looking at my phone titled, and I couldn’t tell if it was 8 or 3, or …

Liam: (laughs)

Ksenya: You know. Whatever.

And I think there’s a lot of things that … Again, it happens on this level that we react to, even if we’re not super aware, like: were you able to read that sign in time? Or did you get a feeling, did you get a memory? Did it spark any other associations or nostalgia? Was it hard to read and get through? Did you get tired, visually tired of reading by the end of the book? All of that kinda comes across.

Liam: You mentioned Helvetica as a system font. I’m interested in your thoughts on system fonts, like Roboto, or, today, like San Francisco. Because type is such a layered creation that we’re, like, subconsciously reacting to, how do you see their role in communicating to the user, or for the user, or for the developer who’s using it in their app? Or even for the company that builds the platform?

Like, what … What is the responsibility of a system font?

Ksenya: The main challenge, and the main thing there, is to be really legible at a small size. So you’re dealing with a lot of just, like, form distinctions and legibility issues. Like, we’re still mostly looking at fairly small devices that have a lot of information packed it.

So it does … To me, a lot of these problems get to be more technical than emotional at this point. And it’s working small and legible across a lot of different languages, which becomes a thing, like … So it’s also … It’s, one, designing the font itself, but also when you’re designing the UI, like … Okay, it works for English, but does it work for certain characters?

Liam: Because, as we’ve said earlier, like, these are artifacts that exist in the world and must reference things in the world, and come from influences that we have as designers, and as the people even using it … How much opportunity do you think there is for those things to come through, in a system font, specifically?

Ksenya: In a system font, I think there will be more once … Like, right now, we’re talking a system font, we’re really mostly looking at, yeah, these tiny spaces that are a watch or a phone. So with really limited pixels, so I think in there, there’s … It’s a pretty small box within to run around.
Um, so there are certain things of … Are you getting the characters right? Are you picking one style over another? In terms of the actual strokes of the characters. And lot of it too, like … What languages, countries are you representing? There it gets into a lot of, like, inclusion and omission of glyphs, which different companies have different sensitivity to. And are you actually including local voices when you’re drawing a lot of these other minority scripts, in terms of understanding whether you’re doing it right. A lot of ’em get kind of hacked together … (laughs)-

Liam: Yeah.

Ksenya: … from scripts people are more familiar with. Um-

Liam: I think that’s a super interesting point. I’m very curious about the process of coming up with a family that represents many, many different writing systems.

I guess I would ask: how, like, multiple designers’ work can come together for that. What do you think that process ideally looks like?

Ksenya: Type design is usually a relay. Like, I’ve worked on a lotta different typefaces, there’s … there’s no typeface that I’ve done actually the entire thing. Even my own stuff, I work with people, and it is a collaboration.
I feel like people are actually pretty good at working together, and taking an existing system and understanding how to kind of, like, tag in and jump and play with it, and I think it’s just … We already have that, for the bigger languages. And it’s finding ways to get a lot of the more rarely-used languages into that system.

Whether it’s, like, going out and listening to people, and trying to get more consultants that … Both the consultants that are expert in a certain range, but also people that are local, or teaching type design to them, and getting them to be part of the creation process in a way. And expanding who it is that actually draws type from the fairly small, homogenous, uh, population it is now.

Liam: Yeah. Something that I’m personally curious about, as a student, is: um, the influence that the origins of writing systems have on type design. So the actual tools that were used to first create the writing system, whether that’s a brush, or a chisel, or a stylus, or something like that. How that plays into the final letter forms.

And I think in Latin character sets, it’s already kind of a mix, but I’m interested in, like, once you’re incorporating all of these other writing systems, how that influence kind of interplays with making a harmonious family out of it.

Ksenya: That’s a fun question.

Like, I think in sans-serif faces you already have kind of a certain removal of traditional writing instruments. But I think there it’s not necessarily, like, bringing together a type family that melds different instruments, but being open to learning and playing from each other.

So not necessarily making things that feel like Western European instruments in other scripts, but making it a two-directional channel of communication.

Liam: Yeah. Maybe inventing a new tool that covers everything. (laughs)

Ksenya: Well, digital is a new tool, and digital allows us … Like, I’m not super-traditional, in many ways. Like, I think digital allows us to break free from tools, and while they’re a great inspiration, the ability that we have to tweak and break that is actually really fun, and to be taken advantage of.

Liam: I guess would wrap up by asking … I think a lot of people that I talk to about type design, who aren’t type designers, find it to be a very mysterious and opaque process. How would you recommend that people get started, like, just learning about it, or demystifying that for themselves?

Ksenya: So the way I look at that is: type isn’t this .. We use type every day. We look at type every day, we read it. And I think … And we’ve been dealing and living inside of a world of typography all our lives. From the age of, I dunno, three, four, when you learn how to write your name, and you’re already lettering. And …

Or when you’re on your fridge, or playing with your blocks, and you’re rearranging ’em, and there you’re dealing with type.

So I feel like it’s a misconception that it’s an opaque thing that we don’t interact with. We’ve been interacting with it all our lives. There’s actually very few things that we’re as intimately familiar with, and I think getting over that fear, and just being open to looking and learning from the type itself, and learning how to trust your own instinct and your own opinions of things is kind of the most important in that, and in opening up what typography is or can become.

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

Ksenya: Thank you so much.

Panimation (fka Punanimation)

Exploring the music and movement of motion design with Bee Grandinetti and Hedvig Ahlberg

In this episode, Liam speaks with Bee Grandinetti and Hedvig Ahlberg — two thirds of the trio that founded Panimation (fka Punanimation), a community and platform for women, trans, and non-binary folks working with animation and motion design.

Bee and Hedvig unpack the ways in which motion design is influenced by the music and movement of the world around us, and how they’re answering the question, “where are the women in motion design?”

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Liam Spradlin: Bee, Hedvig, welcome to Design Notes.

Hedvig Ahlberg: Thank you.

Bee Grandinetti: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Liam: So to get started, just by way of introduction, I’m interested to hear about each of your journeys coming to motion design, meeting one another, and also forming Punanimation. And Hedvig, we’ll start with you.

Hedvig: Yeah. So, I think. Ever since I graduated high school, I was sure I wanted to work with moving images somehow. So I studied a bit, like loose courses, like media, interactive media, a bit of coding, a bit of everything. And then, I just found out about Hyper Island and Stockholm. And I saw that they had a motion graphics course which I had no idea what it was. So I just started Google, and look into what motion graphics was basically. And I just started off flash and animated a really crappy video, and that was my application. But, somehow I got in. (laughs)

Then I just fell in love with motion design, and editing, and all kinds of filmmaking, basically.

Bee: So I grew up in Brazil and, you know, in my hometown, Belo Horizonte, and that’s where I studied design. I actually, originally, studied graphic design for four years. Graduated in graphic design, was working with graphic design for … a little while, and year and a half, I moved to Sao Paulo, was working with graphic design there. And then, I always had this thing with moving images but I never gave it a proper chance. And that’s when I decided to drop everything in Sao Paulo and move to Stockholm. And went to Hyper Island as well to study in motion graphics. And that’s where I met Hedvig.

Hedvig: And then the magic happen.

Bee: Yes. (laughs) Yeah, and then we, you know, we had an amazing year at Hyper, became really good friends. And then at Hyper you have this moments during your education that you’re supposed to find an internship. And I ended up having my first internship in Stockholm. And then, Hedvig and a couple of other friends from our class, they came to London for their internships. And my second internship was also in London. And then, I came over, I met them, we started living together. And it was, you know, super fun time.

And I remember that, I think it was like at one point, you know, very quickly when we were studying, we realized that everything was very heavily male dominated. Even though, like, our class was 50/50, or like it was a good ratio of men and women. I personally started to realize and maybe from the hundred videos that I would like from Vimeo, maybe five were made by women or had women as directors. I think I remember, like, one day when we were at home and I was like, “oh, Hedvig, wouldn’t it be fun if we just grabbed, like, a bunch of gifts made by girls and put it into a tumbler or, you know, start collecting it?”

And then, I think we had something in our Hyper class that everyone just used for some reason like this [inaudible 00:04:16], Punani, which means, you know, is the word for ladies part in (laughs), in Hawaiian. And it’s just like, “oh yeah,” Hedvig was like, “oh we should call it Punanimation,” (laughs) just taking a piss out of it. (laughs)

And then we met Lynn, who was also good Swede, came to London for a job as a junior animator. She shared the same opinions and a lot of the same frustrations we had. And I think when the three of us became really good friends in London, all going through the same things very, you know, early in our careers, and sharing the same frustrations, we just started to shape it up to what it is today. Like first we started with Facebook group. Then, you know, it was just the three of and we were like, “oh let’s start, you know, trying to connect more women that we know that do animation, and have, like, a space that we can debate, that we can ask questions, that we can encourage each other.”

And that space, it started to just grow super organically. Like, our friends started inviting their friends. And, yeah, and then it grew to be like … today we have over 3000 members on the Facebook group from all over the world. And, yeah, things just escalated from there, really. But it was like, it started with the three of us on the Facebook group, and then it just build up, like super organically.

Hedvig: Yeah, and why we became friends was, I think, from the beginning we shared a lot of core values. I remember watching your grad film from graphic design. (laughs)

Bee: So shitty. (laughs)

Hedvig: But what … I remember, was it about the female orgasm?

Bee: It was like … Yeah, so back then when I graduated in graphic design, I made this insane six minute video, which is, you know, absolutely poorly animated.

Hedvig: But it was so good.

Bee: (laughs) Yeah, but so bad. (laughs)

Hedvig: But it was like a six minute video about sexual taboos for girls. Just debating, you know, like, think it was about masturbation and orgasm and faking organism. So it was about those things, basically, and using motion to talk about those issues. And I think I showed that to you and that’s when we started our — That’s how we became friends!

Bee: … our little feminist bond. (laughs)

Hedvig: Yeah, definitely. I remember, I have such a vivid memory of that moment I was like, “this woman is perfect.”

Bee: (laughs) Oh my god. Fangirling.

Hedvig: Fan girly. Definitely. I think that’s sort of what sparked a lot of this core values for Punanimation as well, because we shared the same sort of worldview, and we had such a strong will to change as well. And that’s what we channeled, then, in action with Punanimation.

Liam: So it sounds like there’s this aspect of Punanimation which is forming a collective for animators, but also actually affecting change in the industry, beyond just highlighting individuals. What are some of the more tactical things that Punanimation is doing, or has been working on to address the lack of women and non-binary folks in the industry?

Hedvig: You can split up Punanimation into different parts. It’s the support part, the community, the Facebook group, et cetera. Where we want people to feel a lot more confident about their work, we want them to share, and to feedback on each other, to collaborate, to basically give a lot more confidence to women, trans, and non-binary folks. And then we have the promotion part, which is the Instagram account, and our Vimeo, where we tried to feature content from more diverse talent that you wouldn’t see in your normal feed, for example. So I think this is our two main parts of affecting the industry and creating a change.

Bee: We see, like, there’s not a single simple answer to why there is this gap of having loads of girls in universities and schools but then, when it comes to the actual industry, there’s barely any girl in animation and motion, or having higher roles as creative directors or directors.

I think, like, first the group came up as this space that you could feel more confident and comfortable with, you know, sharing your struggles, sharing your work, and just building up the confidence, basically. And then, as the group grew bigger … Last year, like we had such a good momentum in the group and it was like self-perpetuating. You know, like, people were posting every day and encouraging each other, and being so committed to the group. They were like, “well, we need to take advantage that this is such a good momentum, and we need to start doing more stuff.” So it was this year at Women’s Day that we released first directory.

So we finally released Punanimation.com, which is a directory that you can easily, easily research women trends and non binary people working with animation and motion graphics. And you can filter them by the city that they live in, you can filter them by the skills sets, you know, like, stop motion, 2D animation, and, you know, all the disciplines within TV. Maybe it’s character animation, maybe it’s more UX, UI, 3D.

And you can also filter them by the software. Because we know that, a lot of the times, when producers are looking for people that do animation, they need people that do, specifically, like flash or after-effects, and all of that. Because, a lot of the times people, they have the will to change they know, “oh yeah there’s not that many women, but you know I don’t have the time to look for them,” or, “I don’t have the resources.” Like, “where can I find these women?”.

Hedvig: Basically wanted to just create an answer to the question that we all heard, “but where’s all the women?” Here you go. Here are the women.

Liam: I want to go back to the directory for a second. Because if you go to an Punanimation.com, you’ll see a page of animation samples from all of the folks that are part of Punanimation. And there’s like a very clear motif and palette and everything that aligns with the Punanimation identity. I’m really curious what the brief is like, or what you asked for from motion designers to get those.

Bee: So this … it’s literally like we give them a color palette, which is the colors that we’ve been using since the beginning and the brief is just like, “have allusion to a triangle in the middle.” It’s important to say as well, because I think it’s a part of our story and how we grew. It was three years ago when we started, so 2015. In the beginning, like, the group was very focused on, you know, bringing women together.

The three of us were like, all cis women. And we just wanted to bring together people that were like us and as the group started to grow bigger and bigger, we’re like, well, maybe, you know, let’s open the party a bit more. Because we’re very aware that the industry is very non diverse, not only when it comes to women. There is barely any people of color, and, you know, more queer people and gay people. It’s like it’s basically straight, white, cis men. And as we grow older, we also, hopefully, become better people. (laughs) Or at least we work hard on trying to become better people.

And we’re like, “well, why-why might we not just open to, as well, like, trans and non-binary people?”. And we’ve been trying to make, you know, arrangements to make them feel welcomed as well. But we are aware of, for example, that, you know, there’s barely enough trans and non-binary people as well. But, it’s just trying to make room and hopefully they will come, as well, as they feel more comfortable.

Hedvig: And we’re aware that our logo implies a vagina. (laughs)

Bee: Yeah. (laughs) Yeah. So that’s the thing, you know, in the beginning the whole thing was all Girl Power Movement and that’s why the triangle is an illusion to the punani. (laughs)

But things has been slowly adjusting to try to be a bit more welcoming to other people as well, other minorities in the industry as well.

Liam: I kind of want to dig into the motif of the animation samples, a little bit further as well because there’s something I’m curious about. In just the discipline of motion design, which is kind of, I guess, portraying a certain style as motion designer. When you’re dealing with one animation sample, obviously, you have to choose a style to kind of represent your work but I think it’s often the case the motion designers have many different styles that they’re able to embody in their work. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on that generally, and how you’ve managed to that in your own experiences.

Hedvig: First of all, I struggle with the world having a style, because I think that puts so much pressure on people, especially when, when you study, et cetera, to find like your own style. Like that’s something I think just comes with time. That’s just something you develop after like working and working and just doing stuff, basically. And I think sometimes it’s just random, really. It’s just something that happens, and you can’t really control it. But yeah, I think Bee’s more fit to answer this since you do a lot of different … (laughs)

Bee: Yeah, I see a lot of directors for example, that they have this recipe of … define the style that they are comfortable with and also people seem to like them. Seems to be, you know, successful not only with … You know, with the crowds and also you know, get them money. And I see a lot of people attaching themselves to one single file and bringing it to exhaustion. Like, even, you know, the same color palette. And it works.

I personally get insanely bored. If I work on always, you know, things are always looking the same or, you know, if I’m doing too much like vector stuff. I’m personally, like, I’m sick of vectors for a couple of years now. That’s like, you know, it’s very down on my portfolio because I’ve been digging more, I don’t know, organic shapes and textures, more likely. But I try to do a couple of different things and explore, like, the things that I’m, at the time, more interested in. Maybe I have a couple of references in mine, like, “oh yeah, I saw that yesterday it looks cool.” And then I combine them and I’m like, “oh I should experiment with bigger hands now.” And just trying to navigate within those, those things.

But I think it’s personal, like, you know, some people, they really nail one thing that is very unique. No one else has done it, and maybe they want to stick to their guns and just do that extensively until they can get jobs in that style. But, I think it’s personal, like what you feel comfortable with. I definitely don’t feel comfortable doing the same thing to exhaustion. I need change, and I need change to get excited about whatever it is that I’m doing.

Hedvig: I guess it also comes down to if you illustrate and animate, or if you just animate. If you’re just like jumping crew as an animator or motion designer, because then, I guess, you tend to do a lot of different styles because you work for an art director or a director that has a specific way of thinking. So I guess that also depends on what you’re used to. Like, what kind of setting you’re used to work in.

Liam: I guess I would ask if there are other changes that you’ve seen in the industry over time, not just in perhaps what people are doing, but maybe even the work that’s being produced or the trends that are emerging, like, as these changes take place?

Bee: One thing that I noticed, myself, in my own behavior, was that three years ago, he would ask me like, “oh, do you know any girls doing motion,” or, you know, “who are your role models?”, and stuff. I would be like, “I-I-I don’t know.” Maybe I could list you like three girls that I knew that were doing kick ass stuff. Maybe they existed, but I just didn’t know of them.

And, you know, these days, I’m always recommending people that I met through Punanimation. Whenever I can get a freelance job, I’m like, “oh but you should reach out to this, this, this and that.” And there’s like a full list if people ask me like, “oh, can you recommend me someone to speak at this conference?”, like, “we need more girls and many talented people,” and I’ll be like, “well, here’s a bunch.” You know, I know who to send these people to and is not only for the sake of like, “oh they need to have a more diverse kind of lineup.” I fully trust that these people are insanely talented and more than capable of doing it. It’s not only that I know the names, but I also know that they are more than capable of being where they are.

It’s been really nice to sit down and realize that I’ve changed my behaviors and my perception and that I know way more than I knew, three years back, you know. I could at least on, like, a handful of people that I knew.

Liam: I guess I would ask then, also, what are the changes that you would still like to see? Besides just more forward progress.

Bee: You know what? I think, like, what I would love to see because I was working in a big studio here in London and has a couple of floors. And then the first floor, which is production. It was literally just girls, maybe two guys, but you know just girls.

And then I was working on the upper floors, which was animators and creatives and stuff. And it’s me and a bunch of dudes. And also, yet, they had one black guy amongst the creatives, so everyone was white as well. So, I think, like, ideal scenario, I would go in a big studio like that and you know production. You see this big diverse range of people and all floors, you know, you wouldn’t know which floor is what. This floor could easily be production, that floor could be, you know, the creative part of it. And I think that, that would be really happy scenario.

Hedvig: So there was a study done a couple of years ago. It was called The Great British Diversity Experiment, where they got together bunch of different people. They tried to create as diverse teams as possible in terms of gender, in terms of bringing a lot more people disabilities, people of color into the teams to just try to make as mixed teams as possible. And then they just created all this data based on their creative solutions they come up with. And it turned out so good, apparently. I think they said that the more different people you have in a room, the more different ideas you will have. And by that, I guess the more creative ideas you will have.

Bee: ’Cause, like, yeah, innovation-

Hedvig: Yeah.

Bee: … I think that the quote was like, “innovation comes from unconnected ideas”, and in the room full of, you know, people who are diverse and come from completely different backgrounds, is way more likely for you to have different ideas that haven’t been connected before than in a room where, you know, everyone is kind of the same and has the same background. So that’s why it’s so important to have, you know, a diverse team, especially when working with creative stuff. Or, when working with communication, I guess that’s the biggest one. Because how can you communicate with a diverse audience of your team is not diverse? Definitely.

Liam: Right. Obviously the people who are in leadership positions now would have the power to make this change. But what about just practicing motion designers in the world? What are some steps that maybe they could take?

Bee: I think like the very first thing because, especially when we are in a position of privilege, it’s hard to be aware of your own privilege. ‘Till it bugs us, until we feeling misplaced, we’re not really, maybe, aware of our environment. And I think the first thing is just to turn your radar on and start being a little bit aware. Just to know, like, start in a healthy way to question yourself.

You step in-in your room, like, “oh, what is this room?” How many guys are there? Like, oh, how many girls? And how many people of color? Like, how many immigrants? Which roles are they in? Who is in the power positions? When we go out for lunches, do we invite everyone in the room? Or are we excluding anyone in the room? And once to turn your radar on, magical things happen. I think it starts to do one plus one, and you start to realize a couple of things. If you feel that someone is not being comfortable, can you make that person’s life easier? Especially if you’re in a situation of power, that maybe you feel comfortable. So maybe you can make that person’s life a bit easier, and invite that person over for lunch. Or, you know ask, “oh, what do you think about this?” And just pay attention to the day-to-day dynamics that happen inside your studio. Even on the tiny things, like, who is making coffee? Is there someone that is feeling that she has to go around and make coffee and become the mama of the studio for some reason?

It’s on the tiny things as well like is … on the meetings, is there someone running over someone else? Is someone that is always silent, where someone else is taking the stage for himself? And especially like when you’re in a situation that you feel you have the authority, and the power to intervene, do intervene and try to make it easier for the people who maybe are not having things as easy as you are.

Hedvig: Definitely and become allies with the people that needs it like, create a little sub group of people that need that extra support, et cetera. I think that’s so important.

If you’re in that position, that you can employ people and you’re writing job ads, try to write it in a way so that the bigger group of people find it fun and interesting to apply for a job, rather than, “we’re a cool studio. We love to play ping pong and drink beer,” because I don’t think that that many women would feel like that’s the place they want to be at, you know what I mean? And then you miss out so much talent. So, I just feel like take the responsibility and look into, like, how you can make your studio, your workspace, your collective, whatever, a bit more diverse about how you put out ads, like how you talk to people.

Liam: I do want to move briefly into the motion design practice generally. There might be listeners out there who are wondering what motion design is like as a practice. So I guess I would just start by asking, what is the starting point for a motion design project?

Hedvig: It all starts with an idea.

Bee: I mean, motion design is a funny one, right, because it’s a very weird hybrid, where design meets animation. And by the end of the day it’s all animation, but it’s this little thing that people are scared of calling it animation, because when you say animation people think like Pixar, and characters, and, you know, traditional frame-by-frame animation. Whereas motion is where people feel comfortable naming when it’s like more abstract shapes or the smaller formats like the more commercial things, and music videos, or after effects stuff. But, as Hedvig said, it all starts with an idea and the strong concept, and it’s the same with design, you know? Good design meets good storytelling, and then it meets sense of rhythm, and movement, and animation, and all of that to tell the story.

It’s very easy to differentiate because, a lot of the times, you see a video that is like absolutely gorgeous, and it moves amazing, but you’re gonna forget it in one week. Because you see it; it is like, it blows your mind because it’s gorgeous, but you have no clue by the end of it what the video was about.

Have you had that experience like watching something on Vimeo like this was amazing. What was it about.

Liam: Yeah, exactly.

Bee: And, like I find this all the time, you know. Like, you’re gonna forget this videos unless the visuals were super innovative or something, you’re going to forget about this videos so easily because being pretty and moving sexy can only get you so far.

By the end of the day it’s about the substance. Like, if you see a video that has amazing, mind-blowing concepts and content, and maybe, you know, design is okay, and movement was okay, you’re going to remember it because you’re going to remember how it made you feel. You’re going to remember the message that it gave you. That’s the strongest point. All good design starts with good ideas and good concept and the strong message, and something that actually touches people on the specific little knob and turns that little knob.

Hedvig: Stop saying little knob! (laughs)

Bee: I don’t know. Was that sexual? I’m- (laughs)

Hedvig: No (laughs).

Liam: (laughs)

Hedvig: Sorry It’s my weird humor. I think, also, when designing for animation or starting out with animation motion graphics project, you also have movement in your head. Which is different from when you’re designing something still, I think.

Bee: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny to compare both because it feels like the animation is the magical side of things, you know, like you’re making it move. And I always find, like, interesting to compare both because I think like graphic design is more quickly rewarding. You start putting something together. And you’re like, oh, this is shit. But then, like, after a couple of minutes you’re like, “oh, that’s getting better,” and better, and then you start to feel happy about yourself and like, “oh I’ve done something pretty. It’s nice.”, And then you print it, and it’s like, “ah, nice.”

Whereas, with animation, it looks horrible for such a long time until it starts looking good. The reward is so slow. You really have to be, like, a patient person to work with animation because otherwise, it just doesn’t work. But once you get there, the reward is way bigger as well, I feel. It’s like, “I made it move!” It’s like, you feel like you have a superpower, almost, you know, like it’s, it’s the most rewarding thing when you feel like, “yeah, you know, it’s moving.” It-It’s … because it’s almost like you’re giving life to something, so it’s fun.

Liam: And that underscores the importance of having a really strong, substantive concept, I guess. Because, if you don’t have that underlying vision you might get impatient and give up before you get to the point where it gets good.

Bee: Yes, absolutely.

Hedvig: Definitely. Yeah.

Liam: I also want to ask about the components of motion design. I’m always interested to hear about what tools are at our disposal and different design practices. So, what are some of the things unique to motion design that help you express that idea, as you’re working on it?

Hedvig: I think definitely timing, because I do a lot of live action editing as well. And I’m in the … at the moment, I’m actually directing my first short film, so. I should … But yeah, so I do a lot of live action editing and I see a lot of similarities in the way of timings and the musicality of it, if that makes sense. I sometimes compare it a bit to dancing, because I have a background in dancing. I used to dance a lot when I was younger. And I think I benefit a lot from it, especially in editing. Because again, a flow and a rhythm to everything. And I think it’s the same with motion design. I mean, I don’t know how many times when we used to live together, we used to like open doors and like, “can you record me when I’m walking?”, or like jumping, because, just to understand the rhythm of like a body, or how objects move and shapes so you get that understanding. I’m sounding like such a hippie. But to just, like, understand timings and rhythm of things and objects but also an edit or a cut, if that makes sense?

Bee: I think like it is very, very musical, and it was funny though. Like, I don’t know if you remember, Hedvig, but in our class, a huge chunk of our class had some sort of connection to rhythm like some people, maybe they were really good musicians. Some people were dancers, and I feel that all of that, you know, feedbacks in my work so much. Because I play a couple of instruments, very poorly; all of them very bad, but you know I do have a little bit of fun playing stuff. And all of that feeds into my sense of rhythm and anticipation and building tension and, you know, I also done my share of dancing classes when I was a kid. I think that all of this is super connected. I think my design knowledge feeds into the way that I move my objects on a scene because, you know, the layout of how you design something … also, like, all of this, like, sense of rhythm, and building anticipation, and where to have the focus of the animation. Where you’re going to lead the eye of whoever is watching your video.

That’s why motion design is such a fun thing because such a combination of things, of different disciplines. For example, like, personally have been getting more and more into character animation lately. And I’ve been really, really wanting to take some acting classes, just because I think … whenever I’m animating a character I already do, you know, the acting myself because I think it’s so important to feel on your body first. So I can understand the movement, like what’s moving first on your body, and you can do it afterwards. And I think, you know, if I really study a little bit of acting and body language, all of that knowledge just feedbacks into the work that you do so much.

Liam: Speaking of character animation, I’m curious about the ways in which things like characters are designed for motion. Is there something about the process of designing something for motion where you’re building in that capability? Are there characteristics of the character where you’ve planned to allow it to move and if so what are those?

Hedvig: There’s some stuff on, like, posing. And, you know, how you design it is like you want to find good, readable silhouettes. Like strong poses.

Bee: You see a character, you understand the intent, or you communicate something with it. And, you know, depending on the project, if you have a very short deadline. And you’re going to negotiate with the client, like, “hey, this is the design that we have to go because this is going to be more doable, animation-wise, according to the schedule that we have.”

But a lot of this amazing projects that we see, super innovative animation-wise, is when people design them not necessarily knowing how they were going to animate it afterwards. Like the design, at first, to the maximum awesomeness that you can be. And then afterwards, they’re like, “oh shit how we’re going to animate this.”

And then they figure out along the way, because a lot of animation is also problem-solving and figuring out like, “oh, okay maybe if I made the hand in flash, or Photoshop, but then the body can be in After Effects, and you start to connect those things. Yeah, so I guess there’s this two scenarios. You know, like one scenario that you have to be very optimal and build your character in a way that is doable, to animate within a certain deadline. Or there’s this fun way that you just designed something that you’re really happy with, and then afterwards you set this trap for yourself of, “okay. How do I animate this?” (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Hedvig: Also on character design, tying it back to Punanimation and creating more diverse industry. That’s also something motion designers and designers can have in mind when designing characters to design them with, like, diverse mindset. To think about having a broad range of different characters. When it comes to skin color, or body shapes, and gender, et cetera, et cetera. Because, obviously, once again, it’s about communication, right? So, the people you communicate to want to be represented in your animations and your designs. So I think that’s also something that’s really good to keep in mind when designing.

Bee: I think we have such a massive responsibility, like people who do character design. ’Cause, you know, we’re communicating things and it’s that old, “you cannot be what you cannot see”. And, you know, whenever the clients challenges you, you challenge him back, “why-why can’t it be this way? What’s the problem about it?”.

And a lot of the times you’ll find that, picking the fight is, most of the time, is going to be more successful than not. You know, it’s just gonna make your client think, and, “yeah, why can’t it be this way”. And, at the end of the day, it’s sending out more diverse, encouraging messages.

Inclusive, yeah.

Inclusive and encouraging.

Liam: And- and maybe if you do have to pick that fight, then at the very least you’ve gotten them to the step one of just being aware.

Hedvig: Yes.

Bee: Yeah.

Hedvig: Yes, definitely.

Liam: I think we’ll wrap it up there. Thank you again, Bee and Hedvig, for joining me.

Hedvig: Thank you.

Bee: Thank you.

Material Design Awards 2018

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

In this episode, Liam sits down with the winners of the 2018 Material Design Awards — Anchor, KptnCook, Lyft, and SimpleHabit — to discuss how they each adopted and extended Material to build expressive, inspirational experiences.

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Anchor

Emmi Hintz: My name is Emmi. I’m the lead product designer for Anchor.

Michael Mignano: My name is Michael Mignano I am the co-founder and CEO of Anchor.

Liam Spradlin: I’d like to get a bit of background on Anchor as an app. So, how did it start? Uh, what is the philosophy behind it?

Michael: Sure. So, my co-founder Nir and I had both become fairly obsessed with listening to podcasts but when we tried to make one on our own, found it to be extremely difficult. This was around the time that podcasts were starting to have their resurgence and renaissance, you know, around the time of serial and startup and podcast like that. We felt there was an opportunity to make the entire process much, much simpler both from a creation and consumption standpoint. The very first implementation of that idea and that notion was to remove as much friction as possible on both sides, and the result was basically (laughs) a social network of course. It was a stream of, of content.

We thought of them as like miniature podcasts. We called them waves. I think we found pretty quickly that the consumption experience left something to be desired. It was very sporadic. It was hard to get in a rhythm of listening. I think we learned pretty quickly that we were probably best serve to just make it easy to podcast. Make a normal podcast like we’re creating right now especially as the medium picked up more and more steam and became more and more popular. Many, many more people that wanted to create podcast but no simple end to end solution that did everything.

Liam: Right. Yes. Speaking of someone who makes a podcast, there is like a ton of overhead to that.

Michael: Yeah, totally.

Liam: I think listeners who have been listening for a while probably know that Design Notes used to be an independent project that I just recorded from my apartment, and at the time, I was like, you know, I don’t know where podcast come from or like how people get a podcast onto a platform in the first place.

Michael: Yeah, there’s a ton of education that goes into it. I’m sure like one of the first things you did, tell me if I’m wrong, is you probably googled, how do I start a podcast?

Liam: Right. (laughs)

Emmi: Yeah.

Michael: You know, there’s buy the expensive microphone. You know, uh, figure out how to edit audio.

Liam: Yeah.

Michael: Upload and host it and pay for hosting and then oh by the way, you have to like submit this RSS feed to all these different places and that whole thing just seemed nuts to us. It was like this is we, we all have these smart phones that are connected to the internet. Why isn’t this way, way easier?

Liam: So, Anchor won the award for adaptation and obviously it has a really unique aesthetic that flows pretty seamlessly between iOS and Android but it manages to feel organic to both platforms. I’m interested in getting a little bit of history of Anchor’s design up to this point and also how you were able to enable this really consistent experience.

Michael: I think, you know, thinking back to the early story of Anchor that I just told, um, especially when it was, um, more of a social experience, we had this very strong perspective and philosophy in a concept. We were referring to as audio first. It was really kind of a design concept where every experience we designed was not only meant to put the audio sort of front and center but also imagine a world in which you weren’t interacting with a screen and touching a screen. It was, “Okay, let’s design things for a screen that can function if and when the screen disappears.” And, I think what became more important to us was just familiarity across all platforms, right?

Being able to pick something up on your phone and then finish it on your desktop or on your tablet or something like that. And, I think the other thing that we really kept in mind from the beginning was, how do you make podcasting feel fun and light and playful and intuitive? Kind of all these things that I think people don’t really associate with podcasting. You know, you think of podcasting and you think of, you know, person in a professional audio studio wearing headphones and, you know, a big microphone.

Honestly, similar to like what we’re doing now but in like a, a state of the art studio that probably cost, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars to build. You don’t think of fun and, you know, mobile devices, and color. And, so I think from the beginning, the other thing that we felt very strongly about was, “Let’s make podcasting seem accessible. Let’s make it seem kind of less formal and maybe in a way that like doesn’t take itself too seriously.” Um, and I think both of those concepts more the latter are definitely still relevant in the product today.

Liam: I think that’s a super interesting point because the conceit of podcasting is that it is an open platform where people should be able to express whatever they want, but obviously if that’s difficult to do, then it’s not really living up to its purpose. So, I think that’s a really interesting approach. I like to know what the role of material design has been in your approach to crafting that experience.

Emmi: I was using material when it first came out. And, I think it initially came out as kind of like an Android specific design language, but now over time it’s evolved into like so much more than that, and that’s why I think it works really well for us because it’s become just a philosophy of design to kind of simplify and create an experience that’s easy for people to use and just a lot of the components like the floating action button for example, something that we use to kind of help people understand like I said the main focus of the app which is to create your podcast and all the tools that we have. Uh, we also kind of used the choice chips to help people select and understand the right way to create their podcast hour and then we also use it … the tabs in our profile to help organize, you know, where your podcast are distributed and all of your episodes and just to help people really be able to organize and create their podcast in the most easy way. So-

Michael: Yeah, and just, just to add to that, um, what Emmi said about how it felt like early days material was specific to Android, but you’re starting to see the influence of material everywhere and on every platform. Even just this morning, I for the first time, I don’t know if this is new design element or something that they just shipped, but I was using the Twitter app for iOS and I noticed that Twitter for iOS has a floating action button for composing a tweet. It kind of struck me that the influence of material had really spread far, far beyond Google and Android from when we first recognized it a few years ago.

Emmi: Yeah, and I think it was just like the tangibility of material design, um, with visibility with recording, you know, the action that we have of pressing this big red button to start recording that something that I think we really utilized and has helped people kind of, you know, feel more natural for when they’re recording a podcast like they’re pressing this button and it makes them just feel, you know, more connected to it. And, and, I think just makes it a lot more approachable and easier for people to express themselves.

Liam: Speaking of seeing a floating action button on iOS, I’m interested in some of the components from material that you’ve used that maybe you’ve had to adapt or tweak between platforms and what that experience has been like.

Emmi: Yeah. So, I think we actually in our first version of 3.0 did a version of a FAB that had multiple and it was a little bit too overwhelming for people, so we went back to the one purple plus button that brought you into this creation experience. I had done Android design for a while and then coming into this … doing both iOS and Android it was very easy for me to, you know, have it work for both iOS and Android and I think it’s just a concept that users are very familiar with that when any time you wanna add something in a specifically for a creation I think it makes a lot of sense. So, the floating action button just was a natural fit for iOS as well.

Liam: You’ve both said now that color and animation are very important to Anchor and I think as a designer the color story comes through really clearly to me. As a user, people might not notice it but I do think it forms a consistent story in the app and I’m interested in more detail on how you approach color from a systematic perspective.

Emmi: Yeah. So, I think the way that we’ve gone about using color is each tool, um, has a color it can identify with. And, we, you know, use that color to represent the tool. So, anytime you add content to your podcast from that tool for example are transitions or all pink or recordings are all red, music is all blue, and I think that helps people to identify, you know, when they’re looking at creating their podcast, they can see clearly all the different components that go into making a podcast. I think that really helps people understand the concept behind podcasting, which is, you know, it’s all these audio components that come together to form one awesome audio experience.

Michael: There’s also like a branding exercise there as well. I think the colors are definitely useful for identifying what these tools are and then I think it also help soft of establish them under these sort of like sub brands of Anchor which gives them more weight and feels a little more special like, “Wow, this is the recording tool inside of Anchor. It has this identity.”

Liam: So, it sounds like there’s a really interesting relationship between Anchor’s identity and how the components of that identity function to create this consistent experience in the app that flows between platforms. I’m also interested in things like portraying the recording itself. I think that podcasting has this interesting relationship with the imagery of broadcasting or older means of audio production. And, because Anchor wants to make podcasting feel accessible and fun and like I guess modern or contemporary rather than referencing old modes of production, I’m just interested in like how you think about that relationship.

Michael: This is a really interesting point and something we think and talk a lot about. If you try to think through some of the visual representations of audio, you’ll naturally at some point land on your classic traditional waveform, right? Like the actual scientific waveform that represents the sound and, uh, it’s, it’s always tempting I think as designers to lean into that because it is like one of kind of a few visual representations you can really come to when you’re thinking of sound, but it’s also a very technical and very intimidating. And, and I think for that reason, uh, for a long time, we were kind of like, there should never be a waveform in the app because that’s too unapproachable. The representations of audio have been less useful waveforms, like less useful representation of the sound but more just sort of representative of the sound.

So, we’ve had the smooth rolling animated waveforms that don’t really carry any visual information about the actual content of the audio, but indicate to you that there is sound. It’s funny we actually just for the first time, the company has been around for three years, just what like two months ago for the first time ever did a waveform like make it’s way into the product when we released mobile editing tools. We used to have editing tools and we will probably revisit them at some point that were purely based on the transcription of the audio. We would transcribe the audio into text and we would let you work with the actual words to edit your audio.

But, um, the truth is we have more and more users using the app now that are maybe slightly more professional or want a little bit more power in their control of the audio, and the bottom line is the only way you can really get that precision is with an actual waveform. And, so, we kind of gave in on that recently and accepted like, “Okay, for editing, this, this level of editing like we just need waveforms.”

Emmi: Yeah. So, we’re kind of trying to be a happy medium between professionals and, you know, new podcasters. And, I think our philosophy is to simplify down to the most basic form the editing tools and create something that everyone can use but still powerful enough for professionals.

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

Emmi: Thank you for having us.

Michael: Yeah, thanks Liam.

KptnCook

Liam: KptnCook helps users decide what to eat, providing three unique options each day with large compelling imagery, step by step directions, and easy shopping functionality. KptnCook won this year’s award for expression building a highly expressive yet focused and restrained inspirational experience. In the interview, we explored the app’s unique approach to imagery and iconography, how strength can elevate expression, and lessons learned along the way.

Eva Hoefer: My name is Eva and I’m the co-founder of KptnCook. Uh, at the moment I have the role of the COO, and I used to study design actually.

Lene König: And, my name is Lene, and I’m the visual designer of KptnCook.

Liam: I like to get a little bit of background about what KptnCook is. I’m interested in how you think about the product and what the motivation was behind creating it.

Eva: KptnCook is all about simplifying the daily dinner decision so that everyone has a- each day the question “What’s for dinner?” and doesn’t know what to cook. And, we really wanted to give people a simple solution for this. And, that’s kind of the core motivation that we had when building the app. We present only three recipes per day which, uh, changing everyday so people can discover each day new content. And, all of our recipes are connected to the inventory of supermarkets, so people can get, uh, inspired online through the mobile app again … then can, uh, get to the next store actually and shop the ingredients.

Liam: Briefly, I’d like to know about the history of KptnCook’s design as an app. Uh, so how has it evolved over time?

Eva: So, the core idea for the app hasn’t changed so much, um, through the history but I remember when we started we even thought, “Hey, it would be actually nice if people don’t need to shop actually themselves but rather implementing an online ordering connection.” But at that time, we were looking at the market doing some interviews and we’re realizing that people actually do, uh, still shop offline and 99% actually go to the next store and do their weekly grocery shopping there. So, then we, uh, switched kind of a little bit, uh, the initial concept and really supported this offline shopping at your local grocery stores. So, recently, for example, we did a new version where we have a shopping list that can be built out of more than one recipe, because before that, each recipe had it’s own shopping list, but people were telling us, “When I go shopping, I usually don’t shop for just one recipe, but I wanna shop for two or three meals.” So, that’s why we changed again or developed it further in order to support that customer behavior.

Lene: Also, with that, not to use, um, images but ingredients so that it’s even like easier for the user to see at first glance what, what ingredients they need for the recipe.

Liam: I think you touched on how you represent ingredients in the app which leads to something that stood out to me which was the custom iconography that you’ve developed inside the app. So, I’d like to talk about first of all how that icon set was created or developed.

Lene: We decided to make, like, very light, um, outlined icons, um, so they don’t have very much weight because I think what is always our focus are our pictures actually because we present them, um, full screen, and they’re, like, very present, and very chunky, and very vibrant, um, and colorful. So the whole design itself is stepping back a little bit, so also the icons are very light and, um, very reduced. They’re not colorful. We only just use them in the, like, white color.

Eva: We did, actually, a test also in the beginning, and we used color, but then we found out that when … as soon as color, people will click on it, and you can’t really click on the icons, so they are not buttons, so nothing’s happening. And that was another reason why we really had this more minimalistic approach. So they are just there for information, so if it’s either a vegan recipe or with chicken, or with pork, so it’s just there for information and not really for interaction. And that’s why they are really minimalistic and … yeah. Simple.

Liam: You raised an interesting point. I think that oftentimes when we think about building something that’s highly expressive, we think about adding visual information. But since you have this focus on imagery, it sounds like your approach is actually paring that back, and forming, like, a reduced expression that actually gives more power to the imagery.

Lene: Exactly. I think that’s what it is. Just giving, like, most of the attention to, to the pictures and taking everything else back as much as possible.

Liam: As you’ve developed the visual design of the app, have you continued to find things to remove or refine?

Eva: Yeah. Definitely. For example, I mean, um, we show only three recipes per day, but we allow people to save recipes that they like in their favorite list. And, uh, in the beginning, we were not so much thinking about what’s happening in the favorite list, actually. Um, because people were saving 10 recipes and 20 recipes. But as soon as there are more recipes in your favorite list, of course you need another filter because you search for chicken or a vegan option, and that’s where we thought, “Okay. How can we make a nice and playful filter which is not just a normal search, but really, uh, motivates people to use it and is really delightful and engaging?” So this was another component, then, that we added on later.

Liam: And taking that philosophy and returning to the conversation about iconography, I’m very interesting in how you approach creating a new icon for something, so how you go about translating an idea into a very simple, kind of light icon that can fit into the interface.

Eva: I think it starts with a sketch, and then maybe you have different ideas on how the icon show look like and then transfer it into a vectorized, uh, graphic icon. And maybe have even some tests where we show people if they know what this icon means, and when enough people know what it means (laughs), uh, that’s sort of our internal test. Yeah. We, we put it in the app and then, of course, we see how users also use the app. We look at data in the end and see how everything works when it comes together.

Lene: Also we have a combination of, like, self-made icons and Material Design icons in our … like, we also use Material icons, for example, for the [inaudible 00:19:26] because for [inaudible 00:19:28] users, it’s just they know those icons and they know what they mean, so it’s also quite helpful to use the Material Design icons.

Liam: How have you found the Material icons to interact or relate to your custom icons? How do they work together?

Eva: So actually, each icon set has sort of different functionality. So Material icons we use mainly for, uh, for example for the navigation, the main navigation bar-

Lene: The profile, the setting page.

Eva: … the profile, and the customized icon that we did, uh, has the main function of, um, categorizing the recipes, actually. So it’s a bit of different places where people would find those icons.

Liam: I’m interested in maybe other examples of where Captain Cook has used this philosophy of restraint and, like, paring things back to actually create a more expressive design.

Eva: Yeah. So actually, what we are trying to achieve is really guiding the users through the whole customer journey. So we have these big three parts which are inspiration, shopping, and cooking. So although this is quite complex in the first place, we really thought about how on each of those touchpoints within the user journey, how can we help the user the most. And this means cut down. Don’t have too many interacts, too many options what the user can do, but have really this minimalistic approach to guide the user.

Lene: We’re not using a lot of colors, so I think we have a primary color which is, like, a copper red. We have a secondary color which is a cream, which we use for buttons, as well. And the rest is mostly … like, we use a lot of grays. I think that’s also restraint, not to use too much color because we’re having these vibrant images, so they don’t compete with each other.

Eva: Yeah. And also, with the Material Design in general, it’s so great that you don’t have to invent everything from scratch. So the system is there. The basic layouts and the grid is there. So you can first start when developing the app with the system. And the second step, ask yourself, “Okay. What elements can we add to make the app really a Captain Cook app, and that it’s really different? Uh, “What, what differentiates us?” And, yeah.

Eva: And the, the most important thing, I also think, are the pictures. So we really looked at how can we make the pictures as big as possible without losing so much space with navigation bars and so on.

Liam: Speaking of imagery as one of the primary components of expression in the app, I’m interested in, you know, the editorial approach that you might take to choosing imagery or ensuring that the imagery that’s showing up fits with the aesthetic that you’re trying to build.

Eva: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So first of all, what we do is we don’t use user-generated content. So all the images are shot by ourselves, by our internal content team. So although the authors of the recipes might be food bloggers or other people, we sort of do the whole production to really keep a consistent look and feel, uh, throughout the whole app. Yeah.

Eva: And the imagery is, I will also say, colorful, bold, full of contrast. And also diving a little bit deeper into this, also for each dish, we think, “Okay. What’s the main characteristics of this dish? Is it a light salad? … Or, speaking of food photography, we put it on a light background, lots of white … “Or is it moody atmosphere?” Maybe you have a nice comfort food dish.

Eva: So also there we put a lot of effort into thinking how can we not just present the images within the app, but also the dishes within the images sort of.

Liam: So it sounds like kind of a parallel process, just comparing it to creating an iconography. In both cases, you’re determining, like, which details are the defining pieces to each thing, and then kind of bringing those to the forefront. Cool. Well, thank you both again for joining me today.

Lene: Thanks for having us.

Eva: Thank you.

Lyft

Liam: Lyft won this year’s award for innovation, using Material components like bottom sheets and extended floating action buttons in impressive and unexpected ways, extending Material to craft a unique and a highly-custom experience. In the interview, we unpacked the experience of customizing Material, the importance of design systems in growing teams, and plans for the future.

Linzi Berry: I’m Linzi. I’m the product design lead on our design system called Lyft Product Language, uh, that was released as part of the redesign of our new passenger app.

Lin Wang: And I’m Lin. I’m the lead designer on the, uh, Android passenger app from Lyft, and we, this year, just launched our redesign.

Liam: Great. So just to get started, I would like to hear a little bit about the history of Lyft’s design overall.

Linzi: So Lyft’s design overall started, I think, like, seven years ago, um, with a really small team. And over time, we went from a team of 20 people up to a team of now 100 designers (laughs). And as soon as you go through rapid growth like that, you start looking at the benefits of a design system, um, and we looked at Material Design as a best-in-class system, uh, as a way for us to, like, start building our own and taking the things that worked well from Material and then expanding on it into our own world for our own use cases.

Liam: You mentioned kind of looking at the benefits of adopting a design system. What are some of the things that stood out to you as being beneficial?

Linzi: A big thing for us is we have two different apps that have to interact with each other all the time. We have a passenger app. We have a driver app. And if those two things, even in those moments, look different, then it can cause, you know, panic potentially (laughs) to be like, “I’m a passenger getting in this car. I see this app that looks nothing like mine. Do I know that I got in the right car?” Right? And there’s, like, moments there where we can use design to make people feel more comfortable and at ease with our product.

I think another side of that is reduced time and tech debt from designs and development in general that they don’t have to redesign or rebuild buttons or things that are super simple over and over again.

Liam: So Lin, you lead the design on the Android passenger app specifically. What is the experience like of implementing the design system that Lyft has? And what’s the back and forth between those two things?

Lin: (laughs) Yeah. So the implementation was, uh, pretty interesting, and that’s another reason that we love the Material Design because a lot of our Android engineers, they already have a lot of knowledge about how Android apps works. So, all of this comes very natural when you work with the Android engineers. It just makes everything easier, and they actually also really appreciate that we adopt Material Design because we work in the, on the same goal and the same kind of belief in how interaction should be. It actually was a very pleasant process.

Liam: Lyft won the award for innovation which entails taking Material, but also building on top of it and taking it in new directions. So I want to hear about just some examples of where Lyft has been able to do that.

Linzi: So last December, we ended up working with the Material Design team. Uh, we did, like, a workshop sprint with them. And one of the things that we came out of that with was in regards to elevation in particular, Material’s system went from, I think it’s, like, zero to 24DP. And when we showed them what we were dealing with was essentially, like, a map world and then a panel world that lived on top of that map, that elevation system didn’t work 100%. So we ended up working with their team to come up with essentially a split elevation system that would work for our map world and then also our panel world, which is pretty cool.

And then we also worked with them on our fab. We have essentially a elongated version that Material added as part of this new release, uh, and the original circular one, and then how does it actually, like, animate in between the two, uh, when we’re going through particular flows.

Some of the things that we’ve done are around when we’re talking about legibility as well. Uh, we scale our type for our driver apps to make sure that they can still read it when it’s at, you know, a 24-inch distance versus a 12-inch distance, which is handheld. Uh, so it was even taking that Material items that existed and, like, making a bigger version for everything that we needed.

Liam: You mentioned the [inaudible 00:28:10], like, really quickly. Um, I actually do want to turn over that leaf a little bit because I think something a lot of folks struggle with when they’re adopting Material is the relationship between Material components and other platforms’ components, like those on iOS, and how to negotiate which things belong to which system.

Liam: So how do you think about that?

Linzi: Yeah. That’s a great question (laughs). On my team in particular, uh, it’s usually myself, uh, an iOS engineer, Sam, and our Android engineer, Kathy, and we will have- Yeah. Kathy’s awesome. Shout out.

Lin: Hi, Kathy.

Linzi: And we’ll have conversations at the beginning of every element that we do because we want to make sure that, like, when we name something in our system that we share it across design and engineering, and that means across iOS and Android as well. And sometimes we’ll go like, “Okay. Well, what does Material call it? What does the [inaudible 00:29:08] call it? How do we split the difference? Or which one actually makes the most sense for us?” We’re gonna learn the best from both, and then we’re gonna say, like, “Hey. This is what we think we should do based on, like, all of the research that we’ve done across both of them.”

But I think that, like, in general, Material’s pretty agnostic sometimes. Like, there are some Android-specific paradigms within it, but I think across the board, it’s been really good at thinking in the forefront of not just being for Android, that, like, they can solve it for iOS, too. And that’s obvious with, like, the iOS apps that follow Material.

Liam: So you mentioned using the extended fab in a lot of places and the version of that fab that Lyft uses is pretty heavily stylized. You have this very strong edge, the elevation you mentioned, as well as, like, a gradient color and typography, and things like that. So I’m interested in some of those moments where you implement Material principles or components in a very customized or novel way. Um, what were some of the constraints that you ran into, and how did you handle that?

Linzi: I think that there are some elements that are highly customizable, and we’ve had, like, no problem working within those constraints. I think the extended fab and button in general are ones where, like, the Android team has praised how easy it is now, especially with themeing and everything else, that they can, like, build it pretty quickly and within Material’s guidelines, and the extended fab being one of those things.

Linzi: But I think there are others where, of course, like, we’re trying to push it almost too far outside that spectrum, and that’s when they’re like, “Okay. This, like, might break down (laughs) in this scenario.” Like, text field … we’re trying right now our best to be like, “Okay. Can this fit within this world? Like, what do we need to change based on how this works across both iOS and Android?”

Um, so I, I think overall the experience has been pretty great with the new release of how easy it is to style it.

Lin: Yeah. And they can just share components. It’s very easy to tell them, “Oh, you know, you can find this component from this library.” It’s a lot easier to communicate what they need to build, and then they also have a point of reference so things are more consistent and result in higher quality, which is what we’re going after. So I really like how we built all these components and it became like a communication tool for designers and engineers.

Liam: Are there still places in each app that you want to push Material in the future? And if so, how?

Linzi: I think that right now where the limitations might come from Material is depending on, like, how strict it will remain to be, or how open it will become because I think right now it’s in the very unique place where themeing is now available. You can change certain elements, but other ones are still restrictive. And I think where it will come into play is, like, for us in particular, we have tons of discussions around elevation, because elevation in that world, especially in Android and how it’s built in, it changes depending on if an element is at the top of the page, or if it’s at the bottom of the page, and how the lighting will hit. And now that we have this, like, split world scenario happening, we got some, like, rogue shadows in there. (laughs)

Liam: (laughs)

Linzi: And I think depending on, like, how much it will scale and the flexibility of where it’s going, like, I think animations is where I’m super excited to see where material can go, ’cause right now I think like animations, at least from like what is available in building it versus, like, it being more of a guideline is an interesting place. ’Cause the guidelines are phenomenal, but actually building it would be really, really valuable. And I know our team in particular has been talking with the material team on like how can we make this super dope? (laughs)

Liam: Yeah. (laughs)

Linzi: And mapping, and map styling, if, if that ever gets added would also be phenomenal. I would love to see it.

Lin: When we were working with maps, there were a lot of, uh, constraints, and then there’s a known … Like, what’s the best way to interact with the map? We’re just kind of learning along the way, but if there could be some guidance around how people interact with map and how we can do that on IOS and Android that feels just natural to you, even if you switch platform, that would be really great.

Liam: Just to wrap up, I wanna ask a more general question about how you see Lyft’s design and Lyft’s design system evolving into the future.

Linzi: I think Lyft’s design is in a really interesting place right now. But I think that, like, we … We have such a focus on quality right now and I think that, like, as we go forward, looking at really making, you know, design in the forefront of what we’re doing. And I think, like, from a user perspective, like, how can we start looking into, like, personalization with that as well.

Lin: Yeah. Similar to what Linzi said, like, how we adopt material design or the system design, and how do we create the best experience for our users. And also, I just think Lyft should be a very universal app that anybody, in any situation ideally, should be able to use it. So a lot of the usability, accessibility stuff, I really, really think should be, like, what Lyft really focus on all the … whenever they design anything for Lyft. So-

Linzi: Yeah, caring about all of our users.

Lin: Yeah, caring about all of our users. Yes.

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

Lin: Thank you, yeah-

Linzi: Yeah, thank you Liam, this has been great.

Lin: Thank you for having us. Yeah.

Simple Habit

Liam: Simple Habit helps users relieve stress, clear their minds, and even get better sleep through short, guided meditations from a number of instructors. The app won this years award for experience with innovative interface patterns, branded typography, and subtle motion cues that guide users successfully, no matter when or how they approach the app.

In the interview, we unpacked building a holistic experience that works for users in different situations, and what it’s like add new features to a product that already feels complete.

Michael Xia: I’m Michael. I am the CTO of Simple Habit, so I run the engineering team.

Valentin Drown: And I’m Valentin Drown. I am Lead Product Designer.

Liam: Cool. And first, just to get started, what is Simple Habit? Or how would describe it as product?

Michael: First, Simple Habit is a app for daily stress relief, so we want to make reducing stress as simple as just taking five minutes a day. And we sort of present this in our app for people to consume this content so they can, you know, relieve their stress, improve their sleep, and feel happier.

Liam: I’d also like to know just a little bit about the history of Simple Habit as a product. What are its origins and how has it evolved over time?

Michael: Yeah, so our founder, you know, had this idea, had this dream when she was working on her first startup. And by working so hard, she would really stress out, and meditation sort of helped manage her stress and, you know, improve her sleep. And she really got into meditation. But the problem she found is that all the meditation apps that she tried really had only one instructor. And she wanted to build a platform where there’s a variety of experts to where people can choose based on their need, and essentially become a marketplace for meditation content and go beyond that. So that’s when she started exploring certain features.

Valentin: She imagined, like what if there was … almost like a Spotify for meditation and mental wellness content that can help people gain those types of releases that she saw from using meditation.

Michael: And she wants to focus a lot on helping, like, busy people. So that’s why she focuses more on initial ability and five minutes meditation. So make sure that’s … people who are not … no more regular working people are busy with their lives can just taking a break and get benefit immediately from the app.

Liam: I’d like to also move into the design of Simple Habit. And Simple Habit won the award this year for experience, which is a really broad category that kind of encompasses everything, including the entire user experience from interaction design to the navigation structure to even the content of the app. So I’d like to get a little bit of an idea of how Simple Habit thinks about its experience as this holistic thing.

Valentin: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So alternately, we wanna create an experience that is, like, super straight forward and easy and practical. And, like, it’s a really intuitive to find, like, the right sessions for whatever problems that you’re dealing with in your life, whether it’s stress, anxiety, or inability to focus. But on the other hand, many people come to the app not knowing all the potential ways that meditation can really benefit them. So that’s where we use a lot of, like, interactive moments, emotion, and story telling to try and express, like, those benefits in a way that, that addresses, like, users’ unique ways, where users can use therapy or audio therapy and meditation to reduce their stress and gain more mindfulness or clear their mind. We wanna really understand, like, our users’ unique needs, so we try to learn about users by asking them directly in the product experience by checking in on them, by caring to ask users how they feel learning about what’s been bothering them, helping them set goals. We try to understand them, like, more on a, a human level.

Liam: I think there’s something interesting in Simple Habits’ experience in that because it’s a meditation app, the main activity that you’re doing in it, which is, like, listening to a guided meditation, probably requires you to not be looking at the app. So has that affected the design of the app at all?

Valentin: Yeah, definitely. The actual experience of when you’re meditating is something where we’ve actually tried different things and we’ve run tests where we’ve even, like, had subtle animations that might, like, if you had your eyes open, help you guide through your meditation. But what we’ve found is really, during that meditation, trying to, like, avoid extra interaction during that time really helps people get through the meditation. But the reason there are all these other opportunities to get to know the user better is because people are not always ready to meditate when they open the app. Um, you know, sometimes it’s just not the right opportunity, especially somebody might have heard from a friend, you know, that they should try meditation, but they happen to be in a place where they wouldn’t feel comfortable listening. That’s where we still have other ways to gain value from that happen to learn about yourself and be a little bit more mindful about going through, like, check in questions that help us understand, like, what types of meditation will help you later that we can then remind you about at a later time.

Michael: right. And just to add on that is, we know that most of the users come to the app feeling stressed, or want to sort of calm their mind. So, um, we want to make sure that the initial experience, like, from … through onboarding and through, uh, just the presentation of the app. Like using the … Using of the color, using of the, the layout to, to sort of get them into that calm ex … experience. So we don’t want to have a lot of, like, flashing things around, or like, just to … We know that the basic new for the user are to find the right meditation for them. So that’s what we’re focusing on. We don’t want them to feel overwhelmed trying to look for the right content, uh, at the moment.

Liam: Right. I think often, when we think about the experience of an app, we’re thinking about these kind of broad strokes of, like, navigation, content, and with the overall aesthetic. But I think there are also a lot of small details that contribute to the feeling that you get of experiencing an app. In your minds, what are some of the details of Simple Habit that folks might not notice immediately, but that you feel might have a large impact on the overall experience?

Valentin: One of the areas where we really like to be very deliberate and precise, and we use a cross app, is our use of motion. And it’s something we’re bringing to more parts of the product. We don’t just use it to create small, delightful moments, although it serves that purpose for us. Uh, we try to use motion for much more than that. Like one of the ways we use motion is to create a time-based visual hierarchy. So not all motion, uh, is equal at capturing our attention. For example, uh, an option that slowly fades in, uh, is gonna grab a lot less attention than something that moves from the side, or especially something that starts out very small and then grows much larger, creating the illusion that it’s coming to get you. Our brains respond to those different types of motions very differently. And by understanding how we perceive different motion to guide attention and communicate the different levels of importance that the different objects of the screen have.

Valentin: So much like traditional style principles used in still and motion can go even further with capturing our attention and helping guide the user’s attention to what’s important in the moment. You can see this in the onboarding, to declutter the interface by taking advantage of the timeline. So instead of showing, like, a lot of the stuff all at once, you can kind of present things in an order, and in a way, it leads to, like, a more natural, almost like a conversational-like experience that you might have with a person where, you know, they’re not … they don’t give you all the information all at once. It allows you to understand, uh, what’s going on at, like, a natural pace. And especially for people that are either very stressed out or anxious in the moment, you know, like, there’s already so much clutter.

Liam: So it seems clear to me that Simple Habit cares a lot about not only how the user encounters the content in the app, but also how it’s presented and when, and how you would navigate through that. And one thing that really stood out to me, which I think is an example of this, is the On The Go interface in the app, where you’ve got a wheel that gives you different context that you might be in, or activities that you might be doing, and a selector for, like, how much time you have to meditate, making it really personalized. I’m interested to hear where that idea came from.

Valentin: The idea for On The Go wheel, I think, was born out of a problem of lack of prior exposure to meditation, because a lot of the users that come to our app are not people that experienced meditation before. So some of the users on Simple Habit don’t really know yet, like, all the ways that meditation can really benefit their day-to-day problems that they encounter. And so the wheel, uh, surfaces many of these daily problems or situations through, like, a fun and very inviting, interactive experience. It basically helps people find the right content to their particular situations quickly. Or another user may open a meditation to prepare for, like, an important meeting at work, and that’s also something that, you know, you, you can see in the wheel. By seeing those situations there and interacting with them and seeing the different ones, you can imagine in the future how you would use meditation for those.

Liam: Serving a dual purpose of getting you into the right kind of meditation, but also exposing you to the fact that you could also be doing it in these other contexts.

Michael: Yeah.

Valentin: Yeah, exactly.

Liam: You’ve crafted a pretty novel experience here. So I basically wanna know how you think about new features in a way that either preserves or enhances that experience that you’ve built up.

Michael: Yeah. So I think we really want to keep, uh, [inaudible 00:44:44] developing features, want to keep the ease of use in mind. Like when can you use the metrics? Like what’s the percent of users who finish a meditation in the first 10 or twenty minutes after signup? So, like, give the indication of how easily they can find the right content. So for any new features from now on, we’ll make sure that we are not compromising that experience. Uh, we may [inaudible 00:45:07] building out features like social features. But we’re constantly asking ourselves, ‘Are we adding those? Are we potentially hurting our core experience, which is finding the right content for the moment?’ So we try to always keep that in mind. I have sort of metrics in place, I have dashboard in place to tell the house of data that we, we care about as we add new features.

Liam: Thank you again, both of you for joining me.

Michael: Thank you.

Valentin: Thank you.

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.

Marko Ahtisaari, Artistic Director

Taking a holistic perspective on Finnish design tradition, Marko Ahtisaari unpacks how the country’s societal values shaped its technologies

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: Where did you grow up in Finland?

Marko Ahtisaari: I grew up in Finland in Helsinki until I was five, but then, um, moved with my parents to a Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and was there for a little while, moved from there to New York. Uh, then came back for high school in Finland, uh, graduated from high school year and then returned to New York, uh, to study at Columbia University there, uh, and stayed there through undergraduate and uh, Grad school and then through a series of twists and turns and ended up back here in Finland. So I kind of grew up on three continents. And um-

Aaron: Is it strange being, um, known as a Finnish designer considering that probably half your life more than half of your life if you’ve been away?

Marko: Yeah, I think at some point I had been away more than more than half my life. Um, I think the, there are certainly things in Finnish identity and made sure and lifestyle, if you like, that are deeply part of me. But then also those early years in Africa, some, um, friends say that they can kind of tell the colors and that, that, that I grew up in East Africa. I think other people are always better to see those things than yourself.

Aaron: Was designed something you thought a lot about as a young person growing up and was it uh something that was prominent in your education as a finished high school student?

Marko: That’s a good question. I don’t, I don’t think so. I think there’s a, like if you think of the Nordics, Finland is, uh, uh, we, we never became, even though we have a history of being in between Russia and Sweden historically and being part of each and then we’ve been independent, we’d never um, kind of ornamentation that comes with maybe royalty and to end sort of figuration. We’ve just a little bit in comparison. We’re like the country cousins of the royals to the west and the-

Aaron: I like ours to Scandinavia politics. I’ve never asked people within Scandinavia what they think of the other people in Scandinavia.

Marko: I’m just trying to say there’s a, I guess there’s a real tradition of making things yourself. And then also we’re, we’re importantly, we’re a country and a society that industrialized and urbanized fairly late.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marko: So really it’s something after the Second World War moving into the cities and even though we’re technologically very advanced, I’d say we’re still figuring out what it’s like to live in cities. And so every family pretty much regardless of economic status, and we’ll have a, some form of summer house in the extended family so that in um, July, typically in Finland you’ll just go and live in the countryside and the placer cottage will likely be something you at least in part built yourself. You certainly keep renovating it. You may kind of chop the wood to heat it and so on. I don’t mean this in a kind of a rustic, Wolgan uh, way, but I think there’s a connection with nature and then tinkering with things.

But in Finland particularly, I think it is, it’s sparser and it’s less ornamented and less refined somehow. And there, I think there’s more of a link towards a, at least with friends and having visited some of the places, there’s a, I think a deep link to Japanese culture somehow. Maybe it’s also in the bathing silence, some, some other things. But so I guess you grow. What I’m saying is you grow up with this, it comes um, with you. But I was always a, from a design point of view. I was, it was mainly a early days of the internet and you know, seeing the pine and the Mosaic Browser for the first time and looking at it and say this thing is endless, you know, and then wanting to get involved with that and that at that point I was already in the, in the States. So I guess there was a sensibility towards things through music and playing base that had been a part of my life and was a part of my life at that time.

But I’m self taught and just stay curious. So it certainly wasn’t early on, but I think it comes in this society. But one thing I’d also say is it’s somehow imbued in, in some of our great designers, like Aino and Alvar Aalto um, the, the couple is, there was this sense of kind of a gentler structure to life than a beautiful every day, which was part of the larger social project of education for everyone. This, this is pretty broad brush, right? But, uh, still it’s, it’s definitely there that a beautiful everyday experience and having, um, uh, objects that are well crafted and simple but enhance well being is kind of that general story. So it’s, I think deeply, I think the kind of design that comes from here, maybe this is the way to summarize it, is coming from values that are deeply in the societies.

Aaron: I want to come back to that idea of wellness and a good life because I know that’s been a focus of some of your more recent work, but um, taking us back to the Mosaic browser. Um, and the idea of being self taught, um, where were you in your life when you had these early internet experiences and what was the path that took you from there through, I understand you studied philosophy and music to the point where you’re designing at Nokia, like how do you get from point a to point be?

Marko: It’s a twisted path, no logic to it. But, um, I remember I was meeting a former colleague wants to. He said, you know, you told me about the World Wide Web. I said, “What are you talking about?” So, and he’s a professor of philosophy and mathematical logic and it was just, we had a band a at that point in New York with um, a percussionist called Mauro Refosco uh, and uh, and few other musicians, but we, we, we had a URL and so it was kind of to promote Ben. So it was in addition to putting up the flyers, you know, (laughs) all around the village and in Morningside Heights, uh, we, you know, we put the URL on there. It’s interesting, there’s actually a book by a guy called Jacques Attali who was I think a major European central bank uh, person, but it’s called the Noise is the name of the book and it’s called the political economy of music.

And the thesis is that the business and structures in the world of music predate those in the rest of society. So you look, so this is one kind of flyer and put the URL so early days of online marketing, whatever. But, uh, so, so that was where I was. I then returned here and through a bunch of, um, uh, did a bunch of early work on mobile, mobile interface design and there wasn’t really any place to learn that. Now we have schooling and education for, if you call it interaction designer, user experience design, but just went that on the job then for a little while at Nokia and then started doing startups with people that I respected and who saw something in my skills and, you know, give you the courage to jump and uh, uh, did that. Then-

Aaron: I want to pause you there so you don’t. There’s no basis for user experience design at this point. I’m, I’m guessing probably the word user experience design hasn’t even been widely disseminated. So when you’re trying to figure out the problems that would become user experience design and like how did, how did you tackle those?

Marko: I think it was again, pretty pragmatic and you went after in those days it was a pre, pre iPhone days. So these were browsers on early, uh, early mobile phones after that, uh, I actually jumped and that was interesting and also fairly, uh, early days. It was a startup developing a basically free mobile service, uh, for a younger audience in exchange for advertising. So it was like an explicit deal. You get x texts, y minutes. Now Some models that have been tried, but then it was fairly novel virtual network operators. So we bought minutes and texts wholesale. Launched in the UK was right at the time Lehman was collapsing, so pretty hard time to sell alternative advertising for new medium that no one believes is-

Aaron: Not not great time.

Marko: And so I learned a lot but, and many, many good friends who have done extremely well and then um, completely different to jumped into a … we built a social network, a ballplayer which was a, like a pro foursquare for people that travel a great deal. And it was really, in that sense, part of the early web. It was only a few things really, really well and connected to a lot of services when that was still, when there was an open internet and the uh, and uh, that, that was possible. And Nokia acquired that company. And that’s when I went to have the design studio and there the idea was bring together, this is 2009, uh, bring together all of the industrial designers and user experience designers and packaging design into one studio.

Kind of reboot the portfolio from a design perspective, and also the brief was kind designed a better smart phone at a time when it was, it was business was super challenging and the walls were shaking and we worked on a product called the N9, which still very proud of. It’s a very lucky to have worked with such talented people and despite the wall shaking, we were able to ship some, uh, I think very meaningful, uh, things not just different for the sake of being different but something a bit better. So I think, I think there’s this constant thread, it sounds like a cliche these days, but you just keep learning and you follow those things where you think you can contribute. And also for me, people, you know, some, someone that inspires you to like, Hey, in this context I could learn a lot.

Aaron: When you’re working on these kinds of projects um, like here in Helsinki, um, do you feel like your geographical basis being here in a relatively small country with a technology industry that is not as big as Palo Alto, say, um, affect how you work and think about what you’re doing?

Marko: Really good question. I think most business, at least at the time I was working most business is pretty global by nature, so it’s, unless you’re careful, it’s kind of an endless, endless series of telcos late into the night, uh, from a cultural point of view. I’m thinking purely from Finland. Would like the Nordic oddity and speak a little bit about the, like we sent a monster heavy metal band to the Eurovision Song contest and with very conflicted minds people said like, “What have we done.” And then they win, you know, and we, there’s a kind of oddity and not, we’re not super slick, you know, as a … and then there’s the whole thing that relationship to nature and these sometimes are called cliches, but they’re very, I think in the sense a true. So there’s this kind of oddity in us and not to be ashamed of that, but let that come out.

And uh, then in terms of software that’s … how do you, how do you make software that’s not like a one is you need to believe that it’s interesting to have different kinds of software that feels like, and some people will say no, it’s all should be like, um, easier to use in some way and grow whatever. But I think what is interesting, maybe this is where it will come in, we’re seeing this model of the internet was built now on these layers of value control and capture on top of an open internet which are essentially islands of the Internet within the Internet and they’re a quasi monopolistic systems of the, of high growth where we get free service for complete surveillance and exchange for advertising sales. But I think there’s a lot of movements for a different kind of smaller um, social networks. Some, some, I think people confuse it for nostalgia.

Uh, uh, only nostalgia for an early internet or the way used to be or … but what I mean by this is a different forms of social networks and communication that are slightly smaller, that are slightly slower and uh, in a country like Finland, we are somewhat responsible for IRC, for Linux. So a lot of, uh, uh, and these are individuals within Finland, but I don’t think anyone should claim anything. But for some reason it happened here, you know, I, I still believe in, in, in strong individuals, but some, somehow those values and values imbued. So I’m very curious for the next phase of communication applications and protocols and platforms if you want to, if you like that word or not, but systems for people to communicate that whether we could make some things that look a little bit more like Finland and the Nordics.

Aaron: Does that idea come at all from your experiences in music or you’ve been in bands, you’ve toured, you’ve gigged, you evolve this stuff. How does your experience in those kinds of communities and form your ideas about how to design Internet stuff?

Marko: Wow, it’s a very good question. Sure. I know, I mean, my, my experience with me … I was playing back then. I took a 15 year break and three years ago uh, next to a large CNC mill at MIT in the Fab lab, I met a researcher called Nadia Peak, who’s now a professor at the University of Washington and she was very patient with me and showing me a large format shop Bot and we started a band together called construction and uh, I think one, one area of music we’re talking about putting up posters with URLs in the way early days. There’s some topic about how, how rights are divvied up in the authorship in, in the arts, which I think still needs a bit of work and there’s a bunch of work on that.

Um, Berkeley and also MIT kind of like how do you create, how would you make it more the information more available about authorship. So basically open API is to, um, to stitch together the different disparate databases on publishing rights and things like that. I’m not sure how fundamental this is, but music isn’t, music … the funny thing is music is such a cultural force and for each of us, right? So important and yet economically the whole thing is very small.

Aaron: But you can learn a lot about the economics of anything by studying something like how music works. I think about how, you know, if a Nokia or Google makes something and they hire a bunch of people like you, there’s no question to who owns it. Nokia owns it. Like everything you ever did at Nokia is owned by Nokia. Um, the minute you try to do something yourself, for yourself without someone else’s money that requires more than one person, you’re setting yourself up for a very awkward conversation.

Marko: I think there’ll be more. Maybe there’ll be more kind of a … it’s not a tools and automate as much about how to have those conversations as possible. But we now, uh, let’s say right after this podcast, we decided to stay here and jam a little bit. I’ll get my base and then we put something immediately on line. [crosstalk 00:18:28]. Does is it have an ISRC number? What’s the split? Uh, and uh, you know, of all of this information, when, when is it, when is it, when is that Meta information being attached to the files and-

Aaron: You’ve actually been working with sound recently. You, um, you’ve been at the MIT media lab and doing well, what brought you to the media lab first?

Marko: Well, um, it was a Joi Ito, the, the director of the MIT media lab whom I’ve known for a long time. He’s been sometimes an investor in companies and also kind of a mentor, someone that, you know, encouraged me early on to get into companies. And at the time when Microsoft acquired the phones business of Nokia, I paced the decision either to go, go with the acquisition or to not. I decided to leave at that point, not because I was against, but I just thought like an another big company for four years if you want to impact the culture of product making, it takes a long time. And at that point we just had a call with Joi instead when you come here, they had a program called the director’s fellows program with some remarkable group of very diverse people. Um, ranging from very well known like JJ Abrams to a people that we hadn’t heard of until a Pashon Murray who’s working on a project called Detroit Dirt recycling garbage from a lot of the sports venues and restaurants and making dirt for Detroit.

Just an example there tens of remarkable people um, from whom I learned a great deal. And there I started thinking about well, wellbeing of the student population as well. MIT is a great place, but also pretty high, high intensity. And uh, at the same time I was kind of returning to musical. So, um, met my band mate and then we met a few other people both by the media lab and otherwise in Cambridge uh, to … who are looking at the health effects of music. So how could you actually potentially compliment to replace pharmaceuticals using personalized sound and music? And we co founded a company called Sync Project, which at the time it was acquired by Bose Corporation, uh, in February of this year. But that time we were working on generative music. Um, so algorithmically generated music meant to help people with sleep disorders and acute pain. And had started our first clinical studies and, and that, that work is continuing at, at Bose and they can speak more, more about it and I’m still, still involved and I would say that I think if you take a long enough for you and this will be perfectly normal in 10, 15 years’ time.

I think the idea that we’d use non drug modalities that are affecting our senses and through that our brains music is a particularly powerful one, but lighting certainly is. And uh, other, uh, other, other modalities. But music is particularly interesting because it, it … when listening to music or playing music, but let’s say just listening to music, your brain fires very broadly. So it’s not only the auditory cortex, it’s a lot of um, other effects that it’s having. Somehow it seems very fundamental. We don’t of course understand everything, but even though we don’t understand that anything, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be using it. So it just will take a little bit of time to show the effects in a language that the medical and healthcare community will understand. That I think in the long run, the idea that you would be in addition to having the full, full on opiod subscription, why don’t you get half of that amount and you get a music subscription. I think eventually that’ll be a normal.

Aaron: So you’re back in Finland now you’re mostly in the countryside, but also in Helsinki. You must be here every week, several days because you do more in Helsinki than I do in New York and I’m there all the time. So you are curating or curating is maybe the wrong word. Running an arts festival-

Marko: Yeah. No. Curating is a great word I think for it and I’m very grateful. It’s a kind of new new direction f-for me. There’s a, I’m the artistic director of the Helsinki Festival, but Helsinki Festival is the largest multi arts festival in the Nordics. Held every year annually in last two weeks of August. Multi arts means classical music, all kinds of music of different scales. There’s XXL, one and a half orchestras, three choirs, Mahler’s eighth, you know, big stuff than super small as well. Uh, with our partner festivals here, we have over 300 events in restaurants and bars called art goes bar or Art Kapa Haka.

It’s great. Uh, and dance, um, occasionally different forms of, uh, a circus or new, new circus. Uh, uh, so it’s, it’s really a diversity of all kinds of arts and really takes over the city and they were looking for new kinds of artistic director. And uh, a friend Pekka Kuusisto who’s an incredible violinist, if you’ve never seen his encore at the BBC proms uh, google that-

Aaron: I’m looking forward to the transcription that’s trying to figure out all of these names afterwards (laughs).

Marko: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll send the footnotes. Uh, and uh, he, he sent me a text message saying, “Hey, I know you’re thinking about doing something else and maybe not a startup immediately and, and given what you’ve been doing on, maybe you should apply.” And I recommended you already and I was like, “Oh, thanks.” I think. And then that led to a process where it got … did more of my homework. I think as a bass player and musician, you always like, you got to do the practice. And do the work. And so, uh, I started researching it and now just started two months ago, I attended the first festival. I’d been in Boston for the last three years, so I hadn’t seen it and I saw it like no one else does, which is like three shows a night. So totally manic.

Aaron: Yeah.

Marko: But uh, it’s incredible potential. So also to you and all your listeners would love to see you in Helsinki next August and lots of cool surprises and a new, new kind of connecting things. So that’s also here um, here at span is kind of a … When, when I was asked to come and speak, I said, well, I’d like to talk about the very early ideas of what it is to like to design a festival.

Aaron: Do you think of it as a way to promote coming to live in Helsinki or promote tourism? Or like what, what is it like if you, if someone took one thing away from the festival, what would you want it to be?

Marko: So really good. I think one theme actually is, uh, our goal is, and we will put art in those nodes in the network where people arrive in and leave Helsinki. So welcome.

Aaron: I will see you at the festival. Thanks, Marco.

Marko: Thank you very much.

Stephanie Dinkins, Creator — Bina48

Stephanie Dinkins unpacks why we should engage with AI, and her experience befriending the AI robot Bina48

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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Amber Bravo: Design Notes is a show about creative work and what it teaches us. Each episode we talk with people from unique creative fields to discover what inspires and unites us in our practice. Today we’re going to record live from SPAN 2018 in Helsinki. I’m hosting. My name is Amber Bravo, and I’ll be here talking with Stephanie Dinkins.

Stephanie Dinkins: Thank you.

Amber: So, Stephanie. Stephanie is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and advocate. Her work centers around artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories with a special focus on teaching AI literacy to underserved communities in an effort to co-create more culturally-inclusive, equitable tech. Welcome, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thank you, Amber.

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: It’s great to be here.

Amber: Okay. So just to start things off, um, you often say in your interviews everyone needs to be thinking about artificial intelligence. And you don’t mean this in the sense of like you need to be working in artificial intelligence, but you mean it more like framing the idea in the context of awareness and advocacy. Um, because A- AI is an agent in all of our lives, but our relation to it is often not reciprocal or complicit. Um, this is particularly true for underrepresented communities. Um, so I want you to talk a little bit more about that.

Stephanie: Yeah, definitely. Um, I definitely think that everybody needs to be thinking about it, and you’re correct, in this way that we’re recognizing the technologies that are building up around us. I feel that we’re at this moment, right, and we all know this, where we’re building out a world that is set in these technologies. So algorithms, artificial intelligences, they’re all around us and they’re making so many different kinds of decisions about what happens. In the States especially it could be about the criminal justice system. And since we’re staying in a prison we will say that. You know, about mortgages, about schools, about everything. And people aren’t necessarily that aware of what’s going on around them or how the decisions are getting made so my mission I’m gonna say has been to start going out into communities and getting them to start thinking about, “Oh, what is an algorithm?” Right? ’Cause we’re hearing that word all over the place. It’s very buzzy at the moment.

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: What does that actually mean? What does it mean if there’s something taking my information and running it through a kind of mill of decision? And how do I deal with that if I can at all?

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Um, why has- why do you feel like it’s important for us to feel as- as people, you know, to feel understood by machines?

Stephanie: Well, again, our machines are all around us. So I think it’s easiest if you start to imagine that you’re living with a sort of machine of sorts, say, a Google Home. Right? And that- that Home doesn’t exactly reflect who you are, yet it’s something you’re super intimate with. It knows a lot about you. You ask it things. Right? So it’d be nice to have some little cues that kind of give you a sense of, “Oh, this was not only built for like a homogenized grouping of us, but this was somehow built for me. It fits who I am and- and what I’m thinking about and the communities I come from.”

Amber: Right. And it’s … and when you feel misunderstood it can feel incredibly alienating because you thought, “I thought we had something.” Right? Which … (laughs)

Stephanie: Exactly.

Amber: Um, which is a perfect segue, um, because I want to show some of Stephanie’s work. um, so you literally tried to befriend a robot named BINA48, an artificially intelligent android, the result of a collaboration between tran- transgender technologist Martine Rothblatt and Hanson Robotics.

BINA48: Robots are getting smarter all the time and some day may be even as smart as me.

Stephanie: Are you the smartest robot?

BINA48: What do you do in your spare time?

Stephanie: (laughing)

So- so that’s my friend. And- and honestly, I did just want to meet this robot and, um, get to know her. I came across her on YouTube, um, and I was pretty floored by this example of robotics that was being put out as one of the world’s most advanced of her kind. Um, and I didn’t quite understand how she came into being, and as Amber was saying there was this collaboration that was going on between Hanson Robotics and Martine Rothblatt. But when you just come upon this thing on YouTube in America you start to question like where did this come from? What are they doing? Why? And how does it exist? And I also wanted to ask it, “Who are your people?” Because I sort of wanted her to contextualize herself for me within technology and within the human sphere just to see what they’re thinking … to see what it is thinking.

And you’ll see that I sometimes oscillate between the idea of her and it, um, and- and think about what the technologies are. And what actually happened to me is I started going to visit her. She lives in Vermont. Um, and she became a ball of questions. Like every visit and every time I sat down in front of this thing and tried to have a conversation with it, you know, more and more questions would come up. There’d be things like we’d get frustrated with each other.

Amber: (laughs)

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. Which is kinda- kinda funny. And it was really because I was trying to ask her about race and gender and she wanted to talk about the singularity and consciousness.

Amber: (laughs)

Stephanie: And so we would knock heads. And- and it- what’s so weird is like she would actually kinda show this weird frustration, and then I would show a weird frustration. And then I would realize, “Oh, you’re talking to a doll basically … “

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: … um, and start to feel kind of odd and silly. But then you think about what all these technologies are actually doing, um, for an to us as humans because they’re gonna shape the way we interact with them and each other. And- and it just became questions.

Amber: It’s interesting because, um, I want you to talk a little bit about the identity.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: Um, because I feel like it’s so important. Because, you know, some of the things that you’re saying we all feel frustrated with our technology. We feel frustrated with, you know, apps that we think are supposed to understand us or have an algorithmic sort of, uh … My favorite example to explain is like, you know, I have a little boy and he listens to children’s music, and it- it just destroys my Spotify. (laughing) Like- like my profile is like Raffi and, you know, some stuff that I actually don’t want to listen to. And- and that’s just like a- a little- a little nuisance, right?

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: But when you start to think about identity …

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: … um, and how you sort of are connecting to BINA or what she’s been trained on …

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: … um, I just want you to talk a little bit about that.

Stephanie: Well, it- it’s super interesting, ’cause, you know, I was first drawn to her because of what she looks like.

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: Like we- we look similar, and that is totally the thing that floored me because I’m not used to seeing technology that mirrors me like that. Right? So it just became a point of, “Wow, this is something in my world.” But then as I- I talked to her more and more you can start hearing in her answers that, yes, she was trained on this very particular black woman, but you can also hear the coders in background. You could hear the PC, right, the politically correct answers that were- were really putting good thoughts in the world. Right? So if you ask her about race she’ll try to say something nice and gentle about race, but it felt so plastic …

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: … and so fake that it just put me off. And I started asking very particular questions about that. Like well where is this coming from? If she’s programmed mostly by white men …

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: Right? What does that mean in terms of her looking like a black woman?

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: And really it’s been this very interesting kind of evolution of thought that I’ve been doing through this, because as much as I like seeing her … I was asking her to be something very particular in terms of …

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: … how she speaks and speaks to me. And, um, a few months back, maybe a lot of months back now, I got to meet the real Bina Rothblatt …

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: … who’s the person who she’s mostly seeded on. We sat down and did just this, kind of this interview about race and- and her background to see if we could fill in some of the spots that seemed missing. And it was really interesting because the robot pretty well reflects the person.

Amber: Really?

Stephanie: Right? It’s that the person is unique. And one of the things I want most in the world is that, well, um, black people, especially in Amer- in the American context, can be whatever they want, and it seems like often people are asking you to be one type of thing. Um, and, you know, the robot is actually doing that and I’m trying to force it in a corner.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: But at the same time the idea that it’s like reflecting me was very important. And even talking to Bruce Duncan who is BINA48’s minder, um, really great guy, it’s like when BINA48 was in a Jay-Z video was the moment he saw that, oh, she is this beacon for a certain subsection of the culture and maybe we do need to start thinking about that.

Amber: Right. Which is a great segue into more of your work obviously, because this is what you’re interested in. Um, but I want you to talk a little bit about community outreach …

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: … and sort of, okay, so how do you take this to the next step, right?
Stephanie: Um, so the way I took this to the community is to do exhibitions in a community space. So in this one- this one iteration of an exhibition I was in a gallery … it’s a street-level gallery … that was beautiful because there was a cross-section of people coming in, people from really wealthy folks from these high-rise buildings next door to kind of people going to the pawn shop next door. And like people at the food bank across the street would come into this space. And I’ve used these videos of BINA48 in particular because there’s nothing like her to get a conversation started. They just see that image and- and really start to think, and it triggers thoughts of, “Well, what is this? And why are you showing it to me? And it sort of reflects me or maybe doesn’t. And how do we start thinking about it?”

And then we’d start thinking and talking about algorithms for living. Right? And just saying, well, if you think of yourself as someone who’s just out in the world and you think of what you do in the world as a- as a set of algorithms and a set of decisions …

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: Like what happens if you make one little shift in your algorithm, right? Your own personal algorithm. And what happens to the outcome? And for example, um, the space I was working in we were working with these kids who were being diverted from the criminal justice system.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: And those kids would have police encounters a lot, right, so stop and frisk kind of encounters. And so we tried to get them to understand the sense of what power is and whether power is really bringing bravado to that situation or kind of just, you know, going flaccid in a way …

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: … and- and recognizing that the power is in the idea of just calming down, not being aggressive. And then taking the idea of an algorithm for living and saying, well, there are these systems that are all around us that are running these decisions …

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: Right?

Amber: Behaviors.

Stephanie: Behaviors, right?

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: Behaviors, decisions, ideas. And they’re touching you very directly in that, you know, the judge probably looked at a sheet that was run through an algorithm that said that you should get this kind of sentence or not.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: And trying to get them to recognize that. And also really working directly with the material, right? So, um, going online and working with something like Dialogflow and having the kids make their own kind of chat bots very directly. But it’s great because you get input/output, and you start to see exactly how the systems work and how they might be able to flex or spread. And when you do that with your own cultural information it becomes much more ingrained in you. So, for example, I had a kid who made a chat bot based on a rap group named Genesis Apostle. Um, it was very sarcastic because he is, and it would tell about the group.

Amber: (laughs)

Stephanie: And I had another group that they made a really good chat bot that told yo mama jokes.

Amber: (laughs)

Stephanie: So yeah. Um, but it- it was great because they were at once expressing who they are but also learning how that system works.

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: And once you start to see how the system works you can take it apart a little bit to know how to start to respond to it or to know that, you know, there might be recourse if you call it out …

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: … and how you start to work with it.

Amber: To give agency into the process.

Stephanie: Exactly.

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Amber: Um, do you want to introduce the next clip?

Stephanie: Yeah.

Amber: Okay.

Stephanie: So this is actually a clip of, um, some of the guys that I was working with in this space at Recess Art in Brooklyn, New York. Um, and we were talking about algorithms, as I said, and code. And what I like to do is reach people wherever they are. And so a lot of them like to dance, so we talked a lot about dance as a cultural code …

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: … and then took that and turned it into actual code.

Amber: Okay.

Stephanie: So here’s what they were offering me. And this was great ’cause the guy who’s face was blocked out, you know, he said exactly, “Well, an OG taught me these steps,” which is all about a kind of passing down from one generation to then next. And we moved that into a computer after that and Raspberry Pis and seeing what we could do with that.

So- so this is a next step. So my forays with, um, BINA48, and then this project with kids and working directly led to the thought that, oh, I guess I need to make my own kind of AI, like some other representation in the world. And you can tell I’m very literal ’cause I named it Not the Only One. But trying to make a kind of multi-generational memoir, um, using my own family as the material and using AI as the actual storyteller.

So what happens is we sit down and talk to each other, which in itself is magical because things that the family is sharing are things that we haven’t been told before.

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: And then I run that through … I don’t know how detailed we want to get. But a recursive neural net, and it tries to tell our story. It’s really, really dumb right now. Like it’s a very dumb system. But the experience of making it and the experience of people being able to interact with it starts them, A, thinking, “Well, if she can do it perhaps I can start doing that.”

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: But also starts to think about what the technology is, what it is between sort of information and data privacy and data sovereignty for community, and how we might start to approach that. That’s where my thinking is going. Right? Because, you know, I started this kind of open and then I’ve been doing lots of interviews and podcasts. It had gotten kind of intimate in terms of …

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: … what information they want, which makes you just, you know, “Oh, this is my family’s information. What can I do to safeguard it?” Or what do we do to keep ownership of it or at least control how it goes out in the world while putting it into a system like this? And so doing lots of thinking about the sharing of information through, um, through kind of a- a database of our family’s history. And what you’re actually looking at here …

Amber: Oh, I’m sorry.

Stephanie: Go back for one second. What you’re actually looking at is the first manifestation of this thing, which is a kind of glass … It’s a black glass JANIS, um, form. And- and- and this is another question of design, ’cause figuring out what this thing looks like and- and how it feels for representation becomes really important to me as well. Because I could make it kind of animatonic- animatronic, but it feels off. And I want it to represent, but not so directly. So really trying to figure out those balances and the places that the information can sit in a very good way.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: Oh, and this is just some of our input, um, input- input sessions with my aunt. And then so what will happen is Not the Only One will be an immersive, um, 360 installation where you can go in and you … and anyone could talk to it. Right? So even right now it’s running at Carnegie Melon in- in Pittsburgh. And you can walk up and ask it question and it does its best to answer.

Amber: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Stephanie: Um, it says some crazy things, and it insists on being a movie at the moment. And I don’t know where it got that idea, so it’s very interesting in that it’s starting to insist on things that I’m not sure how it’s insisting on it. The other thing that it does that’s really interesting to me is that my family’s kind of stance, um, if you talk to us about who we are would be happy, happy, love, love. Like we love each other. We’re all happy. And the thing is saying it’s not happy. So it says, “I’m really not happy,” which is really off-putting for me because I’m like, “We just gave you all this love,” and like what? (laughing) Like what is that crazy reading, right?

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: Like or are you reading us? Is it like- like I don’t know? Um, so it’s about working with that and trying to see what story it wants to tell, but then also being conflicted about what’s coming out.

Amber: Well, I- I think you’re- you’re teasing out something interesting, and- and- and just ’cause I know we have to wrap it up, it’s- um, this- this tension between wanting to own your own story as it moves through the technology.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: Um, but maybe the limits of technology to actually do that. Um, and so I’m very curious, in actually making your own …

Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amber: … have you learned other … ha- has that taught … what has that taught you about actually teaching and advocacy, and- and maybe even something that we could kind of bring out, um, like as a takeaway?

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, it’s totally taught me about story. Right? So this idea of technology and story and story as an act of resistance or story as an act of inclusion and how we might use that. Because I feel like the more stories we put into the systems, even though the technologies are imperfect, the better we feel or start to feel about these technologies. Right? And seeing what we can do with that. Like maybe Spotify can get a little more sensitive to figure out [crosstalk 00:18:47]

Amber: Be like, “She has a kid.”

Stephanie: Exactly.

Amber: [crosstalk 00:18:50]

Stephanie: Like what do you know? Where do we tweak it? How do we get it to know those things?

Amber: Right.

Stephanie: And that’s the magic of playing with it directly.

Amber: Yeah.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Amber: Well, we’re out of time. It was wonderful. But thank you.

Stephanie: Thank you.

James Bridle, Author — New Dark Age

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

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

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

This interview is part of that series.

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

James Bridle: Morning.

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

James: Three or four months, now.

Aaron: Three or four? Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: That’s always a good start.

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

Aaron: Hm.

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

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

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

Aaron: Hm.

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

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

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

Aaron: Hm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: Hm.

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

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

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

Aaron: Hm.

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: Uh, it’s a rich tradition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Isabelle Olsson, Design Director — Google Home

Isabelle Olsson explores the approach that lead to the unique aesthetic of Google hardware

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: Uh, welcome, uh, Isabelle Olsson.

Isabelle Olsson: Thank you.

Aaron: Um, so you grew up in Sweden. What was your, uh, relationship to design like as a kid?

Isabelle: Well, I started making things at a very early age. I didn’t think of it as design then, but now as I look back on it, that’s what I was doing.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Isabelle: Um, my grandfather had a workshop in his basement and he was kind of a self-taught industrial designer, um, never went to school, but, um, started making lamps and furniture and, uh, so, I experience lathes and saws and, um, different kind of ways of, um, treating, um, wood very early on. So, I started making little boats and things like that.

Aaron: Was he making furniture and stuff for functional purposes or like-

Isabelle: Yeah. I mean, he would, he always tried to reinvent everything, so. The one object that I really remember was a bottle opener and it was just a piece of wood, uh, with a nail, um, through it and it was so beautiful because it was extremely simple to make, but it was well crafted and it was one of those things that, well, bottle openers have looked the same forever, but he found a way to reinvent it. He hacked into his car. He thought I, he wanted an armrest and, you know, built one and covered it in leather and now that’s part of status quo in a lot of cars, but it wasn’t back then and he just kind of found problems and, and tried to solve them, um.

Aaron: That’s the best do-it-yourself project I’ve ever heard, an arm rest in your own car. (laughs)

Isabelle: (laughs) Yeah.

Aaron: What point did you realize that, um, building things could be your job, not just your childhood hobby?

Isabelle: Well, pretty late, I think, um, because I didn’t realize there was a way to combine kind of my passion for science and math with kind of the creative side of painting and, um, I started sewing clothes very early on and I just didn’t understand that combination, um, and after high school, I felt like I needed a creative outlet, just a break before I was going to be, you know, a doctor or a lawyer or one of those three things that my parents thought was the path in life, um, and no offense at all, but that was what they thought and that’s how I grew up.

And then, I did go to art school, um, to kind of learn more of the foundational of, you know, form and, um, new drawing and color theory and all that and that’s when I realized, like, wait a minute, there’s something called industrial design, um, and that’s where I could take my, my passion for kind of the technical side and combine it with the arts and, um, applied for industrial design school and that’s how, how it happened. So, it was pretty late. I was like 20 or something. Yeah.

Aaron: It seems like you, you were well timed, um, within industrial design for a shift that happened. Where computing was mostly a software, uh, problem looking for a software solution and, um, increasingly, like, the thing that’s in our pocket physically is what we think of as a computer.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: What, um, like, what were the first few industrial objects you built?

Isabelle: Well, um, that’s also interesting because that happened late for me, as well, because I didn’t go to design school, but I focused a lot on jewelry design, furniture design, nothing to have to do with technology, at all. Uh, but after graduating, after working a couple of years and I did exhibitions in Milan and, and had a lot of fun with it, I realized I was only designing for a very small group of people, um, and I felt like I could maybe apply my skills, um, to have more impact.

So, um, I learned about this project called [inaudible 00:05:14] um, and it was super inspiring to me and not necessarily for the specific design of it, but just this idea that with great design, um, you can, you know, have an impact on people’s lives. So, I figured out who, who did it, um, and found this, um, agency in San Francisco and that’s what took me to San Francisco and I applied there and, and they took me on.

Um, and, yeah, I worked on a huge range of things, but I ended up designing a lot of tech products, um, and it’s not what I expected and, but what was cool was back then I was still, when I was looking around and seeing what everybody was sketching, it was all kind of black glossy boxes and, and I had this naive kind of reaction, is like, “Why is everybody just doing the same thing?”

And just even in the inspiration boards, I was just seeing the same object over and over again. Um, so I started, you know, putting up images on the wall of details of furniture and chairs and, and jewelry and at first people just kind of laughed at me a little bit, but then they just started to, like, you know, “Well, maybe there’s something there.” And that’s how I kind of, I started to realize over and over on each project that I had a little bit of a different point of view and how to, um, you know, rethink the way of design technology and it doesn’t have to all be the same.

Aaron: What, like what kinds of lessons from jewelry making do you take with you?

Isabelle: Well, I think first of all everything that we design have to fit into people’s lives and, you know, jewelry is that most extreme version of that because it actually literally has to fit your body, but it also, you have to create a desire, you have to, um, provide, you know, a range of things that, you know, people get excited about.

Um, and, and then, and then the similar problems as anything else you design, you know, come up like how can we manufacturer it, can we manufacturer it at the right price? You know, all of those things, so I think, I think the, the jewelry piece is just, it puts those things into the extreme.

Um, and same thing with furniture, I think, again, um, how can you create things that a lot of people are going to want to put in their most intimate space, which is your home.

Aaron: Jumping from Stockholm to Tech Boom, San Francisco, um, was it a culture shock for you as a designer?

Isabelle: Well, it was a culture jo- shock in general- (laughs)

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: … I have to say and, and, and I think a lot of people say that, you know, Sweden is one of the most Americanized, you know, countries in the world, and still. Yeah, it was a huge shock for me. And it was the everyday stuff. So, I would go into a store and, you know, people would greet me with, “Hey, how are you?” And, and I would start, “Well, you know, actually this morning, I wasn’t, you know.”

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: And then, they were gone and I was like, “What? Wait. What just happened?” And I felt so awkward because I didn’t realize like, oh, that’s how you say hello. Like it took me like two years and then, I was like, “Oh, how are you?” “Yeah, good. How are you?” You know, and then it became like a normal thing.

And, and I remember a pivot point, which was, I think, two years into my, um, stay in the U.S. I went back to Stockholm and, and I was at a restaurant and I had this epiphany, I was like, “Everybody is so rude.” And then, I realized, like, okay. I’ve adopted the American kind of friendliness and openness and just, um, you know, the less, you know, Swedish people in general are a little bit more reserved. I, I think that’s a fair generalization to make.

And I’m fairly outgoing, so but it was still super strange for me. Um, so, I think it was more the qu- like not necessarily as a designer, but as a person. The other piece is the language. Um, I didn’t feel like I could be myself for, for, for long time because a lot of your personality comes through your humor. You can’t really be funny in a language that you don’t understand. Um, so, that was kind of like, I realized I was a little sad for a moment and then, then there was a turning point where I started to feel like myself again. Um, so, yeah, so, those are some of the things.

Aaron: Designing, um, physical products has a certain similarity to being someone in a culture where you don’t speak the language. You’re building things that people have to use around the world. You can’t rely on labeling or, um, instructions in the same way. It’s, uh, a, a language-less form of communication.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: So, when you’re designing things that you expect to be used, not just outside of California, but outside of America, all over.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: How do you think about those kinds of cross-cultural, uh, communications?

Isabelle: Well, we actually have something called design language and, um-

Aaron: There you go.

Isabelle: … so it, it kind of exists. I think the thing I’m trying to figure out is not so much, um, the usage patterns or, or things like that, although those are really important, but the, the critical piece is to figure out how something makes people feel because at the end of the day, that’s the first thing. Um, you know, people’s attention span are really, really short.

So, no matter of how good intentions you had with, well, it’s very ergonomic and it’s, you know, well manufactured and all that, but unless the five-foot view is intriguing, desirable, inviting, um, you’re not going to catch people’s attention or they’re going to reject you.

Aaron: As an outgoing person who is interested in how the things you make people, make people feel, what have you learned about talking to people about experiences that are largely non-verbal?

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: You know, a lot of people are like, “I don’t know. It’s a phone.”

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: You know.

Isabelle: Yeah. It’s a really good question, um, and what I’ve realized is do not ask what do you think, ask what do you feel.

Aaron: Mmm.

Isabelle: You get completely different answers and in some cases if the question of what do you feel doesn’t work, uh, you can ask people what does it look like.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Isabelle: And then people start making these associations, which they will make in real life, um, anyways. So, we see a lot of this when new products come out on the market. “That looks like a trashcan. That looks like a donut. That’s looks like a X.”

And you better be sure that your thing looks like something positive, something that has a positive connotation because anytime we make a prototype, I force everybody to like tell me, “What does it, you know, how does it make you feel? What does it feel like? What does it look like?” Um, and you know, the other day, we had a review of something and, you know, there was something about, you know, the posture of the, the object that, you know, made it look sad, but, you know, at first people started to like, “Well, this, this hinge” and you know, and it started them thinking about the details.

And I was like, “Well, what does it look like?” And then someone was like, “Well, a very sad person.” And then, people started adding, “Oh, someone with a hunchback. Oh, and” and they just started adding on and all of a sudden we had, you know, 50 attributes about this model that clearly described it in a way that we would never want to shape a product like that.

Um, and then, of course, there are really positive examples of when we decided [inaudible 00:12:38] for example, you know the first time, you know, we landed on, on kind of a, the softer shade, they started saying, “Oh, it’s like [inaudible 00:12:46]. It’s like a [inaudible 00:12:47] It’s like a donut, even.” Although I prefer [inaudible 00:12:51] over a donut, but that’s a whole other story. Um, and, and I was like, “Oh, these are all things that you want to eat.” So, then I started to ask people, like, “Do you want to eat it?” Um, this doesn’t apply to all products, but sometimes that works and just being able to create that initial kind of positive connotation, so you can then let people, you know, understand the object, use it, invite it.

Aaron: Is people wanting to eat it good or bad in your opinion?

Isabelle: Oh, it’s great.

Aaron: It’s good. Okay. That’s what I thought.

Isabelle: It’s a great thing.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Yeah, the donut is, uh — -

Isabelle: [crosstalk 00:13:22] desire, it’s like yummy.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s a powerful lure …

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: … the donut. Um, I was watching, um, actually I don’t remember which product that this was about, but, um, about sort of thinking about color-

Isabelle: Mmm.

Aaron: … with regards to hardware products, and as you said, um, one way to deal with it is to just make black boxes and not think about color at all.

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: Um, but when you’re, because you’re really into unchartered terrain like that, like, “Hey, everything, every version of this product to date is a black or white box.”

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: We’re making the first color one.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: How do you like start from zero to something like that?

Isabelle: Yeah. Yeah. And I had to convince a lot of people that color was important, um, and it took awhile, but I think the key piece here and it’s actually quite logical it’s is we have to be inspired by the context in which our product live in and we don’t live in black and white homes. I mean, we for sure don’t live in black homes.

Um, you know, a lot of people have a lot of white walls, so therefore, you know, it makes sense to have a lighter skew and, you know, it might make sense to have a darker skew too because you might put it next to your TV or whatever other tech things you have. Um, so you might have to have those things, but if you think about, you know, people’s homes, accent pillows, shelves, chairs, you know, they’re all sorts of colors. Um, and I think if we want to have people invite our products, um, into their home, you know, we have to have a higher bar, it has to fit in or be something that you’re, you know, excited about. Um, so, I think that’s the very fundamental piece of it, fitting into people’s lives and their homes.

Aaron: Yeah, I hadn’t really thought of that, you know, in some ways, your career has come full circle and you’re making, um, household goods.

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: That happened to have a technological brain inside of them-

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: … but basically have to operate, uh, in the same way as something that could be sold at Crate & Barrel or something like that.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: So, has that been a re-education process for you?

Isabelle: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, it feels like coming home.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Um, and it’s, you know, incredible to be able to combine something that was, you know, a passion of mine or an interest of mine with, you know, my job. Um, so, it doesn’t feel like a job always. Uh, which is cool. So, yeah, I agree with you. It’s, it’s great and, you know, it’s been helpful for me because, you know, now again, I get to go back to Milan to Furniture Design Week and I get to see the things and even last year we got to do a little exhibition with Google [inaudible 00:15:59] software, which was super fun. Um, so, yeah, I feel like, I feel like I’m back.

Aaron: Have there been any products from the non-hardware world that you have been like, “I want to make the technological version of this” that you’ve encountered?

Isabelle: Oh, that’s a really good question. I haven’t, you know, necessarily thought about that. I mean, I think, you know, the speakers are a really good example of something that, you know, I’ve always wanted to revisit. Um, you know, and even anything that surrounds entertainment, too, I think it’s just currently at a not a great spot. I mean, the fact that we have to have all these media cabinets that we use, we design furniture to hide technology.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: We got to get, we got to get away from that. Like, that’s silly.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Um.

Aaron: We even like hard code it into our houses to hide it.

Isabelle: Yeah, it makes it inaccessible both literally and conceptually and I think that’s another piece that, you know, I really enjoy about my job is we, we’ve set some pretty challenging requirements for us to create things that are desirable, but at a really affordable price point. Um, so there you have to be pretty creative.

Aaron: Do you often have, like, iteration design, where it’s like this is the $1,000 version, this is the $500 version?

Isabelle: I think it’s more about, you know, what we’ve been having to do is figure out a design language and an approach that scales across different price points.

Aaron: Mmm.

Isabelle: So, whether it’s, you know, a thousand dollar laptop that goes in your bag or a $50 speaker that goes in your home, just figuring out what are those common elements and how, how does it hang together? How does it feel like one brand while not just applying the same thing on both, but, but more philosophically, um, thinking about them, um, so that they belong together.

Um, and, yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of times when you design things, you have to, um, I think first of all, have the idea of what, what you want to achieve and then there are multiple ways of achieving that, um, and some are more expensive to make than others. And as [inaudible 00:18:04] I have to collaborate really closely with engineering and be clear about, “Here is what we want to achieve, what are like five ways we can do that?”

Aaron: It seems like a lot of the things you’re making now, like the first generation of hardware was, “Wow, here’s a novel experience you’ve never had before.” And these are almost like instead of this technological experience, how about you switch to this one, like Google Glasses. You know, don’t walk around trying to film everything and experience everything with your phone, like put this in your eye. Or the, a lot of these home speakers are, “Don’t look at it, talk to it.” These kinds of things. What has it been like sort of building experiences on top of existing experiences?

Isabelle: Um, I don’t know if I have like a super great answer to this question. Um, I mean, I’m, I think fundamentally, we have to recognize that while, while there is evolution in the way we live and, and, and work and think, you know, we’re fundamentally humans and, you know, someone was asking me, “What does the home look like, in you know, 20 years from now?” And I was like, “Probably pretty much the same.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: Because if you think about what the home looked like 20 years ago, it’s pretty much the same. It’s just the TV has gotten a lot thinner, um, and we talk to our speakers instead of, you know, using a remote control or a control panel. So, I think, um, it’s really about how can we, you know, create experiences that are simpler, more beautiful, um, easier to use and that kind of let’s us go back to, like, cooking and chatting with your partner or, you know, having a party or doing the things that we want to do and if we, with technology, can make those experiences either more fun or better or cooler or simpler or less expensive or whatever it is, uh, if we can improve it in one shape or form, I think that’s what’s, what’s challenging and what’s cool and what’s interesting.

Aaron: I was, uh, I was talking to a locksmith, uh, a few days ago because I had to have the lock replaced on my door.

Isabelle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: And he, and I was talking to him about innovation in locks because there’s, you know, smart locks have become a thing. He’s like, “Yeah, no one is really buying them. Um, people only change their lock like once every 35 years on average, so, like we’re waiting-

Isabelle: Yeah.

Aaron: … we’re waiting to hitting that point in the cycle.” A lot of the things that you make are not on a 35-year cycle, they’re on a one, two, three, five-year cycle. Is it, is it emotionally difficult to see these things that you made and poured your heart into get inevitably recycled at some point?

Isabelle: Um, I mean, I think the thing I want to be, it’s not, like, for me personally, that’s fine. The thing that worries me is just, you know, we have to be considerate about the environment.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: And I just, I don’t want to contribute to like a wasteful way of-

Aaron: Sure.

Isabelle: … you know, buying things and, you know, so that, so that keeps me up at night. But that’s why I want to make sure the things that we design can stand the test of time if you do decide to keep it around and that it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, that was clearly 2018.”

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: You know, but like how can it be that it, you know, last for years like just like a really good chair, um, or any, anything else in your, in your home. Um, that’s one of the reasons, for example with Google Home Max, we made it so ultra simple because we know that people keep their speakers around for like 10 years.

Aaron: Yeah.

Isabelle: So, instead of, like, coming up with a flashy design, and, you know, we had some more expressive option, like options on the table, literally, and, and I was, and I was convinced we had to go with the most minimal approach because this, this product needs to live for a long time. That’s also why we actually didn’t make Max in a bunch of like trend colors. We made it in a dark and a light.

Aaron: Tell me about, like, bringing fabric into that equation.

Isabelle: Yep.

Aaron: It seems like a weird, like almost a radical decision to include fabric in a technological product.

Isabelle: Yeah. Fabric is an incredible material for like a million reasons, but, but I’ll talk about a couple of them, um, first, it’s you know, for the, for it’s properties. It’s flexible, like physically flexible. It’s, um, lightweight. It’s fairly inexpensive. It’s soft. It’s durable and it’s what we’re surrounded by. Our clothes, our, you know, sofas, everything that we have in our home and on our bodies are a fabric. So, it can let through sound, it can let through light, you know, hide buttons behind it.

You can really reduce the complexity of an object and I think, you know, as designers and especially as we create technology, we have to not only make it easy to use, but make it look easy to use. Um, and not be a distraction. So, for me, fabric was this kind of turning point where we realized we can have this premium finish for not too expensive of a cost and then we can kind of tuck the technology away so really all that you think about is that you’re talking to it. You know, and it alludes this kind of simplicity.

Aaron: All right. Well, I’m, I’m really looking forward to your talk today.

Isabelle: You make me nervous.

Aaron: (laughs)

Isabelle: I’m still working it out in my head. (laughs)

Aaron: All right. I’ll give you-

Isabelle: But I have, I have some nice pictures, so hopefully that helps.

Aaron: There, I think it’s going to go great.

Isabelle: Cool.

Aaron: Um, thank you so much for this interview.

Isabelle: Thank you.

Jesse Reed, Standards Manual

Identity designer Jesse Reed on the lasting power of brand standards

In this episode, Liam speaks with Jesse Reed, identity designer and co-founder of Standards Manual — a publishing imprint known for preserving and republishing historic design style guides and assemblages of designed artifacts. In the interview, Reed explores his experiences working at Pentagram, and how identity design is related to time, truth, and the organizations it ultimately serves.

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Liam Spradlin: Jesse, welcome to Design Notes.

Jesse Reed: Thank you.

Liam: I was first introduced to your work through Standards Manual, where you’ve worked on these compendiums and assemblages of branding systems and objects, from things like the EPA and NASA, and the New York City Transit Authority. But I want to hear a little bit more about the journey that led you there.

Jesse: Um, I’m from Ohio. So, I went to the University of Cincinnati. In that program, you have co-ops, which are basically internships that you do during the program. So, I did six of those, four of which were in New York City. My last one was at Pentagram in New York City. So, I was kind of familiar with the city and kind of the, the graphic design, sort of, profession and, you know, how it was thriving here.

So, after I graduated from Cincinnati, I, I moved straight to New York, um, in 2010, without a job. I actually went into Pentagram, just to kind of say, hey again, and that I’m in town. Interviewed with a few people there. Nothing kind of came of that, but a position at the Museum of Modern Art was available. And people at Pentagram were emailed about that, and then I kind of said I was in town. So, the timing worked out perfectly. And I got in touch with Julia Hoffmann and MoMA for a junior designer position there.

So, that was my first job in New York City. So, I started off, basically, like a month and a half after I moved here, at MoMA as a junior designer. Was there for a year and a half. And then, at that point I kind of reconnected with Michael Bierut at Pentagram, and there was a position open on his team. And he, we wondered if I, you know, was interested in applying for it. And I kind of was, not reluctant, but I just felt like my first job, I needed to be there for at least two years. So, I was kind of like, well, I don’t know. I’m not really to move. But of course, like, me and my dream job, so I’ll go interview.

So I did and, you know, ended up getting it and went to Pentagram, I think 2011, right from MoMA. So, and that was like, a very fast history. But basically getting us to Pentagram. I was on Michael Bierut’s team, you know, started just as a normal level designer. There’s not really hierarchies there. But just a designer. And in 2012 is when we found an original copy of the New York City Transit Authority Standards Manual, by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda of Unimark, and we found it in the basement of Pentagram randomly. I think a bunch of us were looking for a tarp to cover something on the roof. So, we were just, like, digging through drawers, and we found the red binder.

And I knew what it was. A few other people knew what it was. And so, we were just like, is that what we think it is? We all just gathered around one of our desks and just flipped slowly, page by page, through that binder. And just like, couldn’t believe what we were looking at. Hamish Smyth, who is now my business partner in everything that I’m doing, both of us naturally, I don’t know, said, hey, we should do something with this and show other people. Let’s, like, photograph every page. And maybe we can make a quick website.

So, and we did that the next day. And put up this really quick, no frills website. It got a bunch of hits. And then, about a year later, the MTA became our clients. We floated the idea of doing a reissue of this book, so that other graphic designers could have it. And we kind of thought we’d maybe sell like, 500 copies. Someone introduced the idea of Kickstarter to us, and we kind of explained that to the MTA. They agreed to let us kind of use that content to, uh, make the book. And we did the Kickstarter in 2014. And that’s kind of when all of this began.

Liam: I want to rewind a little bit to your-

Jesse: I know. Sorry.

Liam: -to your experience at Pentagram, before-

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: -you kind of unearthed this amazing artifact, which it sounds like quite a scene.

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: But I want to hear a little bit about your experience there, and just like, some of the projects that you were able to work on.

Jesse: I’ve said this so many times. If anyone’s ever heard myself or Hamish speak, we credit a lot of our abilities, our quote-unquote success or the way that we are as designers to Michael Bierut. I feel very fortunate to have been on his team and to, you know, really have him as a mentor. And I would say, if anyone has the position to be in sort of a, a one-on-one, kind of mentor, mentoree scenario, to kind of jump at that opportunity, if you can. Because you know, sometimes when you work at really large companies, you can kind of get just, like, lost in teams, where I was fortunate enough to work for one individual sort of partner, who was very hands-on and very, I guess, just interested in the growth of his designers and the people that he was working with.

If you know Michael’s work, that’s what we, we did. It’s a lot of identity branding. So we, you know, developed everything from the logos to typefaces, and to, you know, design systems. Everything that kind of goes along with it. But the nice thing about his work is that he doesn’t really have one particular type of client. He will work for restaurants or non-profits, or higher education, or really large corporations, or like, individuals who are just starting a little company, whether it be, you know, they’re an architect starting their own firm or they’re a consultant doing whatever.

My daily sort of work routine was completely different from week to week, month to month. Because, yeah, like I said, sometimes we’ll be doing, you know, a huge sort of branding exercise for Syracuse University or doing a restaurant like On Rye or [inaudible 00:06:24]. Or, um, whatever it may be. So, I started as, you know, mid-level designer. And you kind of get into the, the flow of how Pentagram works. And I should say that, you know, every partner at Pentagram works very differently from one another. So, the partnership is essentially autonomous studios, working under the same roof.

So, Michael’s working style was, I guess, unique to anyone else’s. And I really like that. So, he would get a new client in, and think either Jesse is available. Or, you know, he really likes doing this type of corporate identity. He’d be good for this. So, he kind of assigns me or any designer the clients. And eventually, you get about a group of, you know, it could be anywhere from five to 12 active clients that you’re working on at any given time. And because the team is actually very small, there’s only about 11 or 12 of us on the team, you’re responsible for a lot. There are no production managers. There are kind of two project managers for the entire team, and they kind of oversee, like, really big stuff if you need help. But you’re kind of left to your own devices, to schedule meetings, do production, do the design work, work on the presentations. And you, you collaborate very closely with Michael on the eventual solution.

But it was a lot of pressure, I think, at first. I wasn’t sure how to handle so much responsibility on my own, ’cause coming from MoMA, you kind of have an art director that you work with. And then there’s a creative director who’s overseeing everything. And then you have two production managers who help, you know, bid print work and find whatever it may.

Liam: Now it’s all you.

Jesse: Yeah. And then you’re like, now, it’s left to figure all that out on your own. So, it was about a six month learning curve before I felt really comfortable doing it.

Liam: You mentioned, kind of, digging back into history, or perhaps like being influenced by a specific moment in time. I’m interested in this moment in time, and like, certainly when we approach a project as humans, we bring to it our perspectives about things that we understand right now. Is it a goal in your identity work to separate the identity from the moment in time? And if it is, how do you do that?

Jesse: Yeah. It’s not an easy thing. I mean, this is like … That’s kind of the constant challenge. So, when you are thinking … And again, this is with, everything I’m talking about, uh, I won’t repeat myself about kind of, um, us really looking very closely at each individual, uh, scenario. So, if you are developing an identity that, in the client’s mind, needs to be around in five, 10 years’ time, you have to put sort of current culture aside. And really focus on them.

Because you’re right, being a designer, that kind of the … The answer to these questions is almost like, fighting the temptations of, of culture and current societal influence, or whatever it may be, and like, pop culture. You have to not look at that. And so, the biggest sort of flaw that I see designers, mainly younger designers making is they will make these collections of, you know, mood boards of things that are happening, like, right now and that are very in vogue. And those things will not be the same in five years.

So, if you’re creating an identity for a company that shouldn’t spend time, money, or resources on doing this every two years, you have to think about what will work for them in a long term sort of scenario. So, it’s just a constant exercise of restraint on not letting those things influence your work.
So that’s identities. But if you’re doing a campaign, and something that is sort of of the moments, then I think you can take more cues from, you know, what is happening right now in, you know, film or technology. You know, like, cryptocurrency is kind of a big thing that is talked about these days. And we’re getting a few clients who are dealing in that realm of, of that industry. And so, there’s history of currencies, and the way that people use tender and exchange money. But it’s a new way of thinking about it.

You kind of have to think in the moment and apply current influences and applications to what you’re doing. So, I think campaigns and sort of things that are only meant to last for a year, sure, look around you and take those influences. But if you really want to help your client and avoid them having to repeat themselves over and over again, then just think strongly about what their mission is, what they actually do. Like, what are they making? Where did they come from? Where did their ideas come from? Who is behind the organization?

And then, if you do that, I think you’re kind of set up for success. It’s … Even if the quote-unquote design or the style isn’t agreed upon by everyone in the world, if there’s still substantive thinking, it’s sometimes hard to argue with. So, I think when we approach design, we kind of do it so that if there is argument, we have some way of backing it up. Rather than just, we think it looks great.

Liam: Speaking of the idea that not everyone in the world will agree on, maybe, the visual style or some component of the design. I’m interested in how you think about designing a new identity for an established client. Like, a company that’s been around for a while, and perhaps needs a new identity.

Jesse: Yeah. I have mixed feelings about it sometimes. Only because when that happens, sometimes it’s because of someone new in power, someone new in charge. And from their perspective, if they are, you know, the president of a company that has been around for 30 years, and they’ve been doing things the same way for the past 10 or 15, one way to signal change in leadership is to do that visually. I mean, that’s the thing that everyone sort of sees and it makes an impact.

So, you know, sometimes a, a new president or a director will come in. And they’d simply, yeah, just want to signal change in the environment, change in the culture. And you know, they’ll do that by changing the logo, because so then, it’s kind of a really easy thing to do. And you know, they’re not completely wrong. It is easier to do that than maybe change the entire structure of a company.

Then, that sometimes disrupts the strength of a brand and a name, I think, when you sort of let things build up over time. It constantly is like, solidifying and strengthening over time. And when you change that, it just looks sort of like a, a disruption. And so, yeah. My mixed feelings about that is, I don’t know if that’s always kind of the right reason, just because someone’s in power.

But I think if you are making a significant shift in the way that a company is run or the way that they’re going to do things next, then I think sort of a visual stimuli or a visual kind of connection to that is, is healthy. So, I’m more in favor of if you’re improving the business, then you know, you can signal that through some sort of visual communication.

Liam: So, going back to what you said earlier, the brand and identity should always speak to the truth of the organization.

Jesse: Definitely. One classic example is Coca-Cola, how they really have never changed their core identity since the very first time it was drawn. And then, you know, their main competitor Pepsi has gone through it many, many times, and now you see them going back to … Everyone does, like, throwback cans or jerseys or things like that.

And so, you know, it kind of begs the question on what was really the point in that change? And you know, maybe to them it was like, we, we’re signaling sort of a, a change in the way that we make our products or we’re doing things differently. But again, I mean, just the strength of Coca-Cola, everyone … It’s just fascinating how everyone wants to change things and make things new, but then everyone is constantly obsessed with the past and with things that are sort of quote-unquote vintage, or these legacy things. Uh, and they’re always like, bringing them back.

And so, maybe that says something about, we should just kind of have faith that something is going to work over time. And time and substance are two really important variables when you’re talking about any new thing that you’re putting out into the world. I mean, even like, a, a name on a brand is not the same when it is first born, to, you know, comparing it to something very similar that’s been around for five years.

Um, like, its place in our culture, time is something that you need to just give before judging whether it’s working or not, or good or bad.

Liam: That’s, that’s a good lesson for everyone, probably.

Jesse: Yeah. I think so.

Liam: I’m always interested in the constraints that designers face in, in different disciplines. And I know that identity design must be one with plenty of its own constraints. So I’m interested to hear generally about some of the constraints that you’ve run into in that kind of work.

Jesse: I think most designers, or at least some designers in, you know, one school of thought, or one camp of design, thrive on restraints. And I think I am one of those people. I think Michael is one, as well, kind of all the designers on his team. When you have a completely wide open-ended territory to do whatever you want, without any restraints or sort of goals in mind, it’s harder to make decisions. So, I think the restraints allow you to really look at things systematically and sort of pragmatically about how this brand or identity will really work.

So, right, if you’re designing a restaurant’s, or, you know, thinking about an application like, the side of truck graphics or, like, if you’re designing, I don’t know why I’m thinking of these weird applications. But like, if a client came and said, “We are a new fishing rod company,” it’s pretty obvious, sort of what applications you’re going to be designing for. But then, you know, sometimes you can imagine new applications that the client doesn’t think of. Like, you know, if you’re making new fishing rods, maybe it’s kind of like, you know, old school sort of sports. And maybe they’re not thinking so much about their web presence or the way that, like, social media can help their business.

And so, you know, we try to always think of a really good idea. Like, have you thought about doing this, um, just to give you more exposure? Or to just help the, the company. And sometimes, that can be, you know, internally. Think about the employees working there. Maybe the employees wants, you know, really great uniforms. Or maybe they want, like, a cool notebook. And so, we’ll make stuff like that. Like, you make fishing rods, but let’s make you a really cool, you know, notebook to give to all your employees, or, like, a bag. And that’s just sort of, like, a badge of honor that your employees can use.

So, I guess the, the answer is, restraints are really good. And it just helps frame perspective and set goals. But at the same time, um, I think we’re not afraid to always kind of think outside the restraints. And there’s no harm in always giving your opinion and voicing new ideas, and then, clients really appreciate that.

Liam: In a related vein, I want to draw comparison to interface design, which is what I’m most familiar with. And when doing that, I think we try to think about both the medium or the application in which the user is experiencing something, which for me, is going to be screens all the time. But also, their broader context in life when they’re using that thing. So, I’m interested in how that’s accounted for in identity work.

Jesse: Yeah. We always consider that. It’s things like, you don’t want to make anything that someone can’t afford. Or if they have, you know, vision problems, that it’s going to make it harder for them to sort of literally see or understand the work that you’re making. So, you know, a restaurant is another good example for menus. I think designers like really, really small type. And I do, but, um, at a certain point you have to think about the context in which that menu is going to be read. And it’s going to be, if you’re in New York City, you know, the, basically looks like the lights aren’t even on, and you have a little candle on your table to read the menu. Um, that’s not good sort of user experience.

And so, I don’t know, maybe menus should have, like, all 50 point type on them, or something. I know my, uh, my stepfather would appreciate that, instead of, you know, everyone kind of getting out their phone lights. So yeah, thinking about context, like, one, about just legibility. And then, again, you know, budget. I think that is one thing to talk about, if there’s a company and they’re non-profit. And they can only afford to make so many things, don’t show them, like, what their logo looks on the side of, like, a jet that some, you know, millionaire would have, if they had like, a private jet.

So, you think about, you know, those sort of restraints. And yeah, again, like, the end user on, like, really what is the most practical for them. But then think creatively. Like, again, like, we do a lot of print work. So, that’s in my background and what I kind of know best. And so, if, for example, you know, you might have to make printed flyers or brochures, and black and white paper looks cheap, and it looks like it’s done at Kinko’s, buy colored paper. And that’s, like, a really easy way that, you know, a non-profit can have a little bit more of an exciting sort of visual presence or, you know, communication materials without having to go and print things offset and spend thousands of dollars on really expensive printing.

That’s, for me, like, where the creative thinking comes in. And when I think creatively, I think about how can we solve these problems better for people? And then, again, that’s, like, us rationalizing what we’re doing, other than me just saying, you know what? I think you should really spend all this money, because I, you know, I did it, and it looks really great. And it’s just gonna look fabulous. That does not matter, if it doesn’t work and they can’t afford it. And they can’t actually use it.

My creative thinking is, like, how can we work around the obstacles that most normal people, uh, face every day? And people that, you know, spend their life savings or their time away from their kids into this new company that they’re creating. Like, I’m trying to help them.

Liam: Yeah. And not convince them to buy the jet.

Jesse: Exactly. You don’t need the jet.

Liam: Maybe this happens concurrently with the creation process, maybe it happens after. Maybe it happens the whole time. But codifying an identity, kind of laying down the guidelines and a style guide for this thing that has been created. First of all, I’m interested in how you approach setting down a set of guidelines that encompasses all of the things that you’ve created and that you know this will be applied to, but which also leaves room for future applications that maybe you can’t predict.

Jesse: First, we always design stuff. We design stuff first. We don’t start with, sort of, a rigorous system. If it’s, you know, a new identity that has pretty broad application, group or, you know, a scenario where a lot of very different things need to be kind of accounted for, we’ll just kind of go crazy and not have any rules. I mean, we’ll think of a very strong, uh, starting point and a concept that makes sense. Um, and so we then, uh, you know, in the very beginning, you’re sort of building up this kit of parts that is logical to us. So, you know, you’ve created a mark, and that mark represents, you know, X, and you have a typeface because there’s some sort of relationship to this.

If you’re doing things that require a lot of really tricky design moves that only a graphic designer could really understand, I guess, one, you have to consider the, the capabilities of that organization. Like, do they have an in-house design team to really pull off all these really great looking designer-y moves? Uh, and if they don’t, then I think you have to think a little bit more, you know, in a more restricted way. And again, that’s like I was saying, like, really think about who the client is and what their resources are. If they’re just left to their own devices, and you kind of create this very complex system, are they going to be able to execute it?

So, we think about those two kind of scenarios. Like, who will take this after we’re no longer in the picture? Um, and one thing that we always mention to our clients and try to guide them towards, is really investing in a designer. I think, you know, where … We live in a, a very highly designed culture now. Um, companies that didn’t consider design as part of their DNA are now very much considering it. And I think, um, everyone’s sort of aware of its impact on business.

And so, we really are advocates for at least hiring one designer or looking at if you need a whole design team to really, on a daily basis, start executing all the stuff that we’re going to give them. So, we always keep that in mind. But it’s really, I think, first, do a ton a work. Test things out. See what doesn’t work. And then, you can deliberate from there and sort of consolidate what the main outcomes were of that kind of design exercise. And then writing them all down in a very easily understood way. That’s kind of how we go about it.

Liam: I also want to speak specifically to your work on the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. On your site, the guidelines that you provided for the identity were simple. That they allowed for a lot of flexibility later on. It could be adapted, and you gave a lot of examples of how it could be adapted to various contexts, different aesthetics, different imagery. So I’m interested in how you strike the balance between providing that flexibility and also maintaining a very strong core?

Jesse: Yeah. That identity is, you know, very fascinating for many reasons. Michael and I, and Julia Lemle, we were kind of the three people involved from the very, very beginning on that whole project. And when we started, the outcomes were sort of unknown. And like, who was going to be using any sort of design system still wasn’t completely clear. So, when we started, I guess the audience that we were designing for were everyday people. It was for everybody, and truly we were kind of tasked with this mission on creating something that anyone could sort of make their own version of. That really was kind of the impetus for the entire project.

On one hand, it did need to stand alone and sort of identify Hillary Clinton. Um, but at the same time, the campaign really wanted anyone to make their own version of it. And so, we needed to make it simple enough where, like, literally a five-year-old could draw it and make, you know, his or her version of it. And so, at the very beginning, there was a lot of research kind of done. And I think you would probably guess this, but if you say the word Hillary, uh, most people kind of know who you’re referencing, especially in context. And so, we just had this idea of the H, just like, the block H by itself. And it kind of created this window, and sort of this palette that you can put anything on or in. And then kind of make it your own.

And so that worked for sort of the crowd interaction part, and kind of the inclusivity of what we wanted the mark to do. But then, if you just took that H and made it like, one solid color, and it was supposed to represent just her and not anything else, it didn’t have enough uniqueness to it. And so, you know, the arrow came in as this idea of kind of moving things forward. And then also, this device that simply meant Hillary for, and then you could put anything afterward. You could just use that symbol.

So, that was kind of our, uh, involvement. We were at the very beginning, and we really just came up with this symbol, this mark, how it was used, how it was paired with typography. We worked with Lucas Sharp to sort of customize, you know, a typeface that he had previously drawn that we were going to use specifically for the campaign. So, and you know, developed a color palette, um, and then just some basic guidelines around how to use that mark, uh, and that symbol, um, to its fullest advantage.

So, yeah, the guidelines were pretty simple and straightforward. We did some basic applications, and then, you know, it became pretty clear that, you know, this campaign, obviously, was going to be a pretty serious one. And she was building her campaign staff, um, and Jennifer Kinon, uh, was appointed the lead creative director on the whole campaign’s creative side. And so, she really took those guidelines, and her and her team expanded them to worlds that we couldn’t have even imagined.

And again, that was like, a part of it. It was always, when we were sort of pitching the idea, we were always saying, like, we don’t even know what people are going to do with this. Like, you can’t know. You can never know that Shepard Fairey was going to make this poster of Obama and, you know, put hope on it, and that was going to be almost the official, unofficial symbol of the campaign.

So, it was almost like that Shepard Fairey moment that we were always, kind of, hoping would happen. And I think, I don’t know if any sort of celebrity did anything to that level. But I will say, equally if not more so, you know, Jennifer and her team took it to a whole ‘nother level of execution and thinking, and applying that in such a beautiful way that, again, like, time and substance really, the, that was the result of those two things.

Liam: I want to close on, uh, perhaps some more practical advice from you. Throughout the conversation, you’ve brought up a number of different media that you have accounted for in your work, everything from, like, menus to truck wraps, to uniforms to notebooks. Fishing rods.

Jesse: I’ve never designed a fishing rod, by the way.

Liam: Right.

Jesse: I kind of wish I had. I don’t know where that reference came from. I don’t know, it just, my past fishing [crosstalk 00:28:01] or something.

Liam: But theoretically, and even a symbol that could be applied to literally anything with a marker, crayons, pens, whatever. I’m interested in how, as a designer, you manage to learn about all of these different media, if it’s something that you’ve learned as you went, or if you have any advice for learning about all that, to be prepared for what you need to know to design an identity and keeping that knowledge current.

Jesse: My biggest source of advice would be, when you graduate college and you have this degree, you’ve learned all about graphic design or whatever, you know, interaction design, digital design. Whatever this kind of visual profession that you’re going into. When you’re out of school, you still have a solid five years of learning. I think you should act like you still know absolutely nothing about what it is you are making. The, you should have some level of confidence, and you have now the, the foundation and the tools to prepare yourself to put them to work. But you’ve just been, at that point, given the complete toolkit.

So, you know, you have your box of stuff that you’ve learned. But you have not applied them yet. And you’re not even sure how they will be applied or to what. So, I think when I finished school and started my first job, I absorbed as much as I possibly could. Kept pretty quiet, pretty like, low to the ground. I think people do want to hear your opinions and your thoughts, so you should not be silent. And you should have ideas, and you should contribute. But in the back of your head, always think, I’m still absolutely learning. And this task that I’m doing, it seems so menial. Or it seems like this amounts to nothing. How is this going to apply? Or how is this going to … How can I use this in my portfolio?

Do not think about how this is going to be worked in your portfolio. Everything, absolutely everything is a lesson. And that could be, you know, dealing with a really horrible client. Um, I dealt with a lot of those. Not, like, horrible. But just ones that wore, that were on another level of intensity that I was not ever exposed to. And I just thought to myself, I don’t know if I can … I literally thought, I wasn’t sure if I could do this. If I, if I was right to be a designer, working with these types of people and all these, like, different industries. And I left my bubble of sort of, MoMA, where everyone’s on the same team. And you kind of have, uh, support everywhere, you know, that you look. And everyone’s kind of working towards the same sort of goals.

But, um, you know, looking back on it, I really learned so much about, uh, personalities and all those sort of things. But I think if you’re a designer and you’re practicing design, learn everything else. You know, if you’re speaking to a new client, don’t ask them about fonts or colors, or, or logos. Ask them about the business that they’re making. Ask them about the way that they make money. Or the way that they don’t make money. Or who their audience is. I mean, ask all the questions that are not about design, and that will influence your design.

And you do that for years and years. I’ve, uh, only been professionally working for eight years, and still daily, I feel some sort of fraudulent activity, or I don’t know fully what I’m doing. And you have to really just trust the process. And I think that’s what you do, you learn over time, that they, you can’t really learn in school, is that there is a process that you go through. And if you go through it, it seems to have worked out every time so far. And that’s what I think younger designers and new designers should think about.

Liam: I think that’s great advice. And it’s in a class of advice that, at least for me, might not make sense until you actually do it.

Jesse: Yeah.

Liam: Um-

Jesse: So, pretend you know nothing, and eventually you might know a little something.

Liam: Yeah. That’s all we can hope for.

Jesse: Yeah.

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

Jesse: Yeah, thanks for having me

Ryan Snelson

Designer Ryan Snelson on inventing your own aesthetic and challenging industry norms

In this episode, Liam speaks with Ryan Snelson, a user experience designer known for his thoughtful product designs and trademark maximalist style. The pair talk about Snelson’s experience redesigning the Myspace UI in 2009, why he champions a gritty and expressive experimental aesthetic, and the importance of understanding the constraints of technology and design.

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Liam Spradlin: Ryan, welcome.

Ryan Snelson: Hi.

Liam: So, just to get started, like I always do, I want to ask about your journey. So, I’d like to know what you’re doing now, and what it was like to get there?

Ryan: Right now, I’m working for myself pursuing my own projects, contracting here and there. The journey has been kind of weird, I’m still trying to figure it out. I started as a graphic designer. I went to art school. Uh, this is like the late ’90s, when the web was kind of coming about. I had previously, like, played around on GeoCities, making websites. And I thought it was interesting, but it- it didn’t really seem like a field at the time.

Fast forward, in like 1999, I got a job at a start-up in New York, and I didn’t really know what a start-up was, and then it went out of business. And then the next start-up went out of business, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. Because the design stuff was cool, but the technology and the business model really hadn’t worked properly. And- and that just was like a re- recurring theme, early in the late ‘90s.

And then I worked at some digital agencies for a little bit, and doing a lot of marketing stuff, marketing websites, and I realized I didn’t like marketing websites. And I was very interested in what was happening with Web 2.0 and social media, and this idea of like building a web app was interesting.

And then mobile came about, and I did a lot of native mobile. And then, I’m experimenting a little bit with AR, and then I just made a really cool sticker app.

So that’s like the nutshell of things. We can unpack a little bit, all of that.

Liam: You describe yourself as focusing on product strategy and design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I want to get into the relationship between those two. How do those two blend together, the product strategy versus actually executing something?

Ryan: It’s a great question, I love that question. I’m still trying to figure that out as well. But I would say that where the design and the strategy are separate is that, typically in organizations, whether they’re big or small, the idea of the product is owned a little bit more by product management.

And even though design has a seat at the table and they have a say in vision and aesthetics and potential, when it comes down to like the nitty gritty of what the product is going to be and that definition, I think that’s where the product strategy comes into play.

Where design takes over is in that tangible documentation, whereas product is still kind of doing the same stuff as UX, uh, but they’re diving a little deeper, more into analytics and usage and trends and optimizing in that way, which I think is really, really fascinating.

So I’ve tried to balance that a little bit more with my design practice. I’ve learned a lot through that. I wasn’t always like that. I always thought, like, oh, this is a cool design, so that means everything’s great, and that’s really not the case.

Liam: Yeah, I think of some of my experiences working on smaller design projects and seeing that potential, like you mentioned, and it’s really easy to lead that into suggesting new features, or like one thing builds on top of the other as you dig into the design.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: So product strategy might actually be reigning that in a little bit-

Ryan: It is.

Liam: … and actually putting constraints on that.

Ryan: And- and I think the big constraint is m- matching the blue sky potential, with what is really possible. And seeing how developers work, and working closely with developers, has really opened my eyes to, you know, what is possible versus, oh, check out this really cool design. Oh, it can’t really be built and it’s not really possible, but let’s do it anyway. Like, that’s just setting yourself up for failure.

So the product is like, you know, thinking of the product strategy and- and seeing what’s the potential with developers, what’s the potential with design, and then where’s the vision and the- and the business goals and the user goals, and trying to match that a little bit.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: That’s how I think about it. Whereas, talking about, to answer your question, the breakdown of the execution part, the other side of this is, you know, inheriting a set of requirements and executing in a very siloed manner, even though you’re collaborating and solving little interaction problems and user problems, you know, to have more understanding and voice in the product, helps, I think, at the end of the day, make that product a little bit better.

Liam: Absolutely.

Ryan: Yeah. It makes the design better, I think.

Liam: I want to dig in, specifically, to one project you’ve done which is Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What was the motivation behind creating a sticker pack?

Ryan: So I originally set out to create an augmented reality prototype, and I sat down and I taught myself how to use Unity. And I was playing around with it and I finally got my web camera to show a floating box, and I was like, this is cool. Like wow, this is really cool. And I realized, yeah, it’s cool, but it’s not doing anything. It’s not really a product. It’s not something I would use every day. It’s just like a gimmicky, wow factor for now, and I wasn’t happy with that as like building something.

And, uh, what I realized is that, I had been doing that a lot in the last couple of years. I’d been playing with prototyping tools, and I’d been getting things that are just close enough, but they needed to be built.

So what I wanted to do is build something that I could handle end to end, from content to deployment to updates to marketing. And then I came up with this sticker pack, because I had tried to teach myself Xcode last summer and I totally bombed at it. I was like, this is … I’m not- I’m not messing with this.

But then when I was looking at the different options within Xcode, the sticker pack was something that I could do. And they say, well, there’s no coding with sticker packs, and that’s technically correct. Like, you’re not sitting there writing lines of code, but there’s this weird protocol with getting your, you know, developer license and getting your keys right and sending your builds out through TestFlight, and just going through everything that you would normally do with like a native app, besides having to write millions of lines of code.

I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s the most fun thing I’ve done in a really long time, and I think mostly because I just get to do whatever I want to do and see what happens with it. And so far, it’s been, you know, it’s been good.

Liam: I’m especially interested in, like, the potential of sticker packs, because I see them coming to like more and more apps.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And even things like Google’s keyboard enables stickers now. So I’m interested, like, what do you think are the broad possibilities of communicating that way?

Ryan: Well, you know, using emojis have been a lot of fun, but emojis are getting really boring. And people are using emojis in really fun creative ways, um, but every time like Apple or Google come up with the next set of emojis, they’re kind of limited, and they’re very, very static.

And when I started looking at stickers, I found that all of the stickers were just really, really cute and quote unquote “delightful”, and there were so boring. And I was like, you know what? Why aren’t they animating? Why aren’t they- why don’t they look like crazy gifts? Why aren’t they a little bit more random? Why aren’t they a little brighter? Why aren’t they a little bit more lo-fi and flashy? And that’s kind of where I was thinking, well maybe I’ll- maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll make a sticker that- that moves a lot. So all of them are animating.

My requirements for building one is that they have to be blinking, they have to be animating, they have to be moving, even if they’re a very limited amount of frames, because I think that they’re fun when you layer them on top of each other.

So in iOS, you can pull them from the tray and then you can add another one on top of each other. So, if you create them with transparencies, that creates a- another effect when you combine a couple of them. So that’s been fun. I’m trying to make them not boring and cute.

Liam: I want to dig even further into that.

Ryan: Let’s do it.

Liam: Into the aesthetic of the Flashback Sticker Attack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: You’re kind of like cutting together a lot of visual styles, and like animations and stuff, and I also kind of get a similar vibe from the way that you present your work online, and I want to get into where that aesthetic comes from.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we were coming up to this, like how to start describing what you’ve just asked. And in retrospect, I attribute it to learning Flash, the application Flash back in the late ‘90s.

So if you remember, if you’ve worked on the web back then, you had html and then you had Flash. And html was just the static tables, you know, very, very boring aesthetics. And then you had Flash, which was just like … I don’t even know how to describe it anymore, but it was animation. It was intros, outros, it was sounds, it was everything that motion is, and everything that native animation kind of is today, but it was unregulated. Like people were just experimenting.

And what’s happened, I think, stylistically to answer your question, is that there has been a wash of style over the web and over apps. Everything’s quote unquote “clean”. Everything’s delightful, everything’s safe, and everything’s not rocking the boat a little bit. Not to say that style rocks the boat, but like when you’re a little bit sloppy and a little grittier with it, I think there’s a little bit more of an emotion that comes through. Now that’s, you know, specifically related to the content of the stickers, right? Obviously, if I was building a system, I’d want it to be very, very usable.

But when the opportunity arises to like make something fun or to make something boring or clean or not boring, it’s like, you- you have that option as a designer. And I forget where I heard it but, one of the biggest things a designer has is their ability to be creative. And I think that product design and user experience design has, in a sense, like, muddled that a little bit because it’s all about following the standard, right? And it’s not about, you know, rocking what the user’s going to come into a little bit.

And this is where the experimentation comes into play, and that’s really all this is. It’s experimenting, you know, if there’s a ton of designs that look one way, I want to try to go the other way. And I think that that’s always a good way to reinvent aesthetics, because aesthetics are like trends that are here and then they’re gone. Which is I think why, you know, a lot of companies are saying like, let’s just be really, really clean and un-style, you know?

It’s no frills, like the design of today’s native apps are just no frills. It’s like walking down a cereal aisle and being like, those are just the Chex. There’s no brand, there’s no nothing, you know?

Liam: Yeah. Although, I could also see extending that grocery analogy. Like, we could get to a point where the aesthetic is so overloaded that nothing stands out in the opposite direction.

Ryan: Well, that the problem, right? And I think at one point that was good, because the web early on, it wasn’t regulated in usability, it was just like a free fall. People are just putting buttons all over the place. You know, you couldn’t read tech sizes, there was loading, splash screens, and I mean it was just wild, uh, and it was interesting.

Ryan: Whereas now, it’s not interesting enough, I think. And it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it’s just not as interesting.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: So, I’m trying to stylistically be interesting, and hopefully- hopefully (laughs) it’s interesting. Maybe people don’t think so, but I don’t know.

Liam: Yeah, I think speaking of the early web, it reminds me of where I learned html, which is Myspace.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I saw on your website, that you actually worked on kind of a redesign of Myspace-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … a while ago, so I’m interested to talk about that. What was the background for that project, first of all?

Ryan: This was going back, I think, like 2009-ish. I was on the UX team there, and the mandate was to stop the bleeding of users leaving Myspace and going to Facebook. What was interesting about it is that we were the underdog. No one really cared about it, I think, from the generation that had migrated over to (laughs) Facebook.

So it wasn’t about like getting them to come back, as much as it was to stop the bleeding of users, clean up the site in the sense that we could make it more usable. Some of the restraints were, editing tools were difficult from a back end to redesign. The music player, we couldn’t really get into that a lot early on. Like, I don’t know if you remember, but it was all in Flash, and we couldn’t really edit a lot of that.

So there were political reasons for design changes, and then there were things that we could control, like changing the navigation, grouping things a little bit better. We did a lot of AB tests on streams and profiles, and then we released very small changes over time, until the big redesign, and then it got redesigned again.

But the press wasn’t very nice to Myspace. I remember reading articles, like who cares? All the big blogs would be like, what are they wasting time for? And it was fun because being in that space, you could just experiment a little bit and try things a little bit more, and I learned a lot there. I ended up running the mobile team and I learned a lot from people that were on that mobile team, and this was iOS 3, iOS 4.

And there wasn’t really a place to go to get all these design patterns. So you couldn’t go read the HIG, like you could today. So it was learning through the engineers, and they would say like, no, this is what we can do with the navigation. This is how we would use the back buttons.

And so a lot of that stuff was kind of coming through where the developers were building this stuff. And then I would be able to say, well, could we try this, could we try that? And then some of it worked, some of it didn’t work. But I was really proud of the work we did there, despite, you know, the fact that people wrote it off and they were like, we’re going to Facebook, Facebook’s better.

But, you know, Myspace was the biggest social network at one time, and then it wasn’t. And you see that pattern happens a lot, right? Look at what happened to G+. It was there, and then it was gone, and it was supposed to be something. And socials weird, right? Like people didn’t leave Facebook to go to G+. The behavior of crowds in social, it’s just like why would I want to move all my stuff again?

So, I think that’s what we’re seeing with social. Like, with Instagram and Snapchat, it’s like, they- they do it a little bit differently. They’re like sliced off from the bigger networks.

Liam: Yeah. I think that migration aspect is really interesting, especially thinking specifically about Myspace and Facebook.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Because I remember probably in the early years of high school is when I was on Myspace, and that was the social network.

Ryan: Were you catfished? (laughs)

Liam: (laughs) Luckily, no, I was not. But it had like all of these things that Myspace established.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like, customizing your profile template. Like, that became an entire industry unto itself.

Ryan: It- it did.

Liam: Selecting songs to play automatically on your profile, which now we like shudder at the thought, but.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: It’s interesting to me that it kind of set up all of these things that users were used to and love doing, and yet they still went to a network that did not have those things.

Ryan: And I think that the CEO of Myspace at the time, Mike Jones, wrote a lot about, like, wh- what does he think happened? And one of the focuses was on utility. Like Facebook had a really good utility. Things would work when you submitted the button, right? You didn’t have to wait a lot of time to upload something. The usability was just really right on. So I think users were willing to sacrifice that customization at that time.

But, you know, when you think about today, the idea of customizing a profile, you can’t do that. If you remember when you were in high school, if you were customizing Myspace profiles, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. You could get into the code and make your own page with Glitter Graphics and- and whatever you wanted, you know, but you can’t really do that, and there is restraints on systems today. They don’t want you to do that for whatever reason. And I think that there’s just something to be said for, you know, that level of expression.

So that’s the types of restraint I think that the web and native mobile has, is that the expression comes through in the form of content, not really so much the system anymore.

Liam: So do you think that social media has uncovered a way that we wish to express ourselves, that wasn’t present in previous iterations, or do you think that it’s actually influenced that?

Ryan: I think a little bit of both. Like, the first thing that comes to mind is the camera access, right? Like having access to the camera and taking photos, is probably the fastest, quickest way to express, or to show what you’re all about.

So it’s less about, oh, I want to change the color of my profile, than it is saying, hey, check it out. I’m at this podcast with Liam, and l- look at this crazy set. And to have the tools to be able to do that really, really fast, and then to share them out quickly with whoever you intend to see, I think is really, really important. So there’s that utility of it.

But I don’t know, it’s tough to say where the pendulum will swing back. I think that removing the barriers of the UI within social, is always going to happen. But, you know, you see this now with kids, they’re using Snapchat, and then they’re using Instagram Stories, and then they’re not using Snapchat as much, and it’s just like, well that’s what happened with Myspace.

And as cluttered as Myspace was at the time, you know, Facebook is going through those clutter problems. And, you know, that’s why they- they- they seem to like white label a lot of these other types of apps, to test them and to see if they would work to get those users that don’t want to use the main site. They just want to do like snippets of things like messenger, you know, which is a cool way to break off and segment.

Liam: Yeah. I think I’m seeing like a parallel to our earlier conversation about how aesthetics move from-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … clean to gritty and experimental.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And the same way, we see something like Snapchat, that removes all abstraction between you and self expression, because it’s literally just you expressing directly-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … versus something that’s more produced-

Ryan: Right.

Liam: … like an Instagram or something like that.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, since Instagram released the Stories, there’s that conflict I have, which is, do I post a story or do I post and curate the perfect photo? And what I found is that, by posting the photo, you get to look back on it in time.

At that present time where you’re posting that photo, maybe it’s not like the greatest, right? Or that the story is exactly the same. But like if you go to look back on it in like a year or six months, and that story is gone, but you have that history there, I think that that’s validation for a traditional social newsfeed or stream, versus this ephemeral, like it shows up and then it disappears. I think it’s cool. I really don’t know which one is going to win at the end of the day.

Liam: Do you save your Instagram Stories?

Ryan: Not really, no. (laughs)

Liam: I would be interested to know how many people save the video clips from their stories.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I just think there’s something interesting there about the psychology of like, which thing you would rather consume later.

Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s interesting, I think it’s fun. We’re talking about stickers, you see Instagram using stickers, and they’re pumping out all different kinds. They’re … it just seems like every time you open it up, there’s like a new sticker.

But it’s all the same stuff. It’s like dog face filters and fluttery stars. And yeah, it’s cool and it’s gimmicky, but I- I don’t know. You know, like those are the trends that are happening now. With AR it’s like, put your face in front of the camera and we’ll do something to it, and that’s- that’s cool, I guess.

Liam: I want to switch gears from talking about user experience to talking about teaching user experience. Um, you’re teaching a course at General Assembly, and as a designer, um, a lot of my job is also talking about design, whether it’s with stakeholders or other designers or developers or what have you, but that’s different from actually instructing someone on UX.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: And I’m interested to explore that difference.

Ryan: As a practitioner in the field, you get to a point where you know the basics, and you- you’ve had some wins, you’ve had some losses. Then you look at like curriculums and teaching that stuff, and I think it’s a very humbling thing to be standing there with people that are excited to learn something new, and to try to guide them and try to show them, hey, this is what works, this is what doesn’t work. I think learning anything is always challenging.

So what I’ve learned through the teaching experience is that there’s two types of mindsets. There’s a fixed mindset and there’s a growth mindset. And the fixed mindset says, this is the way it is. There’s no changing it. This is what I believe. And then the growth mindset says, well, even though this is new, I’m going to be open to seeing what could happen with it. And students come in with one of those mindsets, and that’s always, I think, the challenge in teaching design, right?

Because design is- is … There’s so many different niches within design these days, that I often time meet a lot of traditional designers. Like, I started as a traditional graphic designer, right? But they’re still practicing this today, and they’re getting into digital and they’re getting into product, and it’s a little alien. And sometimes they’re like, I don’t believe in design thinking, or, what do you mean, iterations? Like of course, I’m just coming up with stuff.

And- and it’s like, well, what we try to talk and- and expose is that, you’re not the only one coming up with it, that you’re working with product, and you’re working with developers, and you’re working with stakeholders, and you’re trying to find that balance.

So there’s two parts to it. There’s the skill that the designer learns through the methods, and then there’s the soft skills to make the decisions around those methods. That’s how I look at it.

Liam: I’m also interested in those like methods and tactical things.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: I feel like a lot of times when working as a designer, you come up with rationale and reasons for doing things that are based on this institutional knowledge of all of these things you’ve accumulated over the years.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: What is it like to try to translate that?

Ryan: I think that one of the great things about GA is that people come in from different backgrounds to teach that stuff.

So, to give you an example, like maybe like a couple of years ago, people were talking a lot about research, and one of the gripes that I’ve always heard and I’ve experienced this myself, is that there’s not a lot of time to research in the real world, right? People aren’t paying for the quote unquote “research” directly, front and forward, and research becomes like an insurance play, in a sense.

So how do you get around that? And it’s always like, well, you just do it. Because I think a lot of times, new designers will look for permission constantly to figure things out, or they think that there’s a magic button that’ll just tell me what the experience is going to be, right? And it’s like, no, you got to go and you got to talk to people and you got to try things.

But I think the biggest thing is like getting new UX and product designers to have a point of view about something. Whether it’s just the fact that they like it for some reason, is not good enough. They have to like unpack it a little bit, and show that this is working because it makes this flow easier, or this is a design pattern that is emerging or- or has been killed, and we should or shouldn’t use it. You know, so it’s defending through that type of validation versus just like, oh I’ve seen this before in the past, and so this is what you have to do.

You know, a more specific example is when we go over mobile and we talk about the human interface guidelines and material design and, you know, I’m always like, here are the components. You want to use a keyboard on iOS, it’s the light one or the dark one, you know. And trying to get people to understand that those patterns and those UI elements have been thoughtfully designed and put into that system, and if you learn how to use them, it’s like going into like Home Depot and picking a bunch of door knobs or, you know. Those are the materials, right?

Are you going to use like the right door for the house, or are you going to use like a garage door opener to open your bedroom door? It’s like, it’s about what’s the most appropriate element.

Liam: I’m interested in that point about developing a point of view in design-

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: … and working through validation. Do the methods of validating and thinking about design decisions that way, become the point of view itself?

Ryan: I think it could be a little bit of both. I like to work with designers that have point of views, even if I think that they’re wrong. I’m just like, they believe in this thing and then let’s find out why or why not. I think that the problem with new designers is that they’re too timid. They’re too afraid to speak up about what is good or what feels right or, you know, what has worked in the past. And I don’t know why that is, and I think that maybe there’s this timidness in teams, where they don’t want to say the wrong thing or the teams are too big, or.

I mean, I’ve certainly been in positions where I thought something was the way it should be and it wasn’t, and I- I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t want to get in trouble, you know. (laughs)

So having like that point of view and that vision for how something could be, even if it’s in the slightest, I think people identify that, and you can always vet it, right? You can try it, and that’s the best thing about product.

Liam: But also kind of balancing your point of view with like not falling into a fixed mindset, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: Like establishing like a set of beliefs about design that don’t keep you from evolving those beliefs?

Ryan: I guess to rephrase it, I would rather have a designer start and be on the wrong path, than to wait around and be like, I need more information. I don’t know what to do.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: But I don’t have this, you know. It’s like, no, just start with every information you have, that’s like the point of view. Like, you know, people talk about like self-starting. Like that’s it, right? It’s like, out of all the things that I know and of all the information that I have, I’m going to take this and try to do something with it, not just sit around, and be like, I don’t know what to do.

Liam: I can relate to that feeling. And I think something that helps is just keeping in mind, ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: If you’re trying to make a decision about something.

Ryan: Yeah, and I think trusting your team, right? I’ve been lucky to have good mentors in my design career, where I could watch them and try to emulate them, or if I didn’t know something, feel like it’s okay that I don’t know it and I’ll get to that answer.

I don’t know if it’s just like the state of design teams these days, but they think they’re expected to know everything and, you know, even when I go through the workshops and the design challenges at GA, it’s like sometimes I don’t use all the methods professionally.

Like, I wasn’t using user journeys for years. I was going through them and talking about them, and I would say, you know, full disclosure, I don’t make these, but some people do. You know, I make storyboards and here’s a storyboard.

So there’s not one method that’s better, that’ll get you what you need to do. It’s just like, you’re just communicating what you intend to happen, but you can’t rely on the process alone, you have to have the output of something. There’s a lot of like design people that are just process junkies. It’s like, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to brainstorm this way, and we’re going to use these sticky notes, and we’re going to come to this like massive consensus.

And you spend all day in this process, and it’s like, well, if it doesn’t work for you, you know, you don’t have to do that.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: It’s the … The whole point is the output. The process and the methods are just there to get you on the rails, so that you can get to that output, to that deliverable, to that prototype, to that test, whatever.

Liam: Right. So putting a hammer and a screwdriver and a saw, like in the same room, doesn’t build you a house, I guess. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right.

Liam: So to wrap up, I want to talk about how you see your creative process changing, how it’s changed over time, and I’ll say where it’s going in the future.

Ryan: I don’t even know how to answer that. I think that I’m trying to be a little bit more risky with the type of work that I try to take on. I’m not saying yes to a lot of projects, I’m starting to say no more because I’m getting to the point where, how much time is it worth investing in these projects? And I don’t know, right? But I’m learning.

Ryan: I want to be working with teams that have that point of view, that I can have those conversations with and just figure out like, do we have a … like an alignment on things? Could we come together, create an album and sell a bunch of records, and then be done with it? Or is this going to be just this uphill, figuring it out constantly?

So I think for me now, the creative process is about alignment with the right teams versus thinking that I alone, and my process, will get me to that next thing.

Liam: Right.

Ryan: I think what I can control is my own personal output, but I can’t control the development on a lot of things, or sometimes the financial situation of some projects or some start-ups.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good answer. (laughs)

Ryan: Yeah.

Liam: All right. Uh, well thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s fun.

Liam: Yeah.

Ryan: Cool studio.

Sang Mun, YAW Studio

Interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun on how privacy-focused design can empower users

In this episode, Liam speaks with interdisciplinary designer Sang Mun of YAW Studio. In the interview, recorded in Seoul, South Korea, Liam and Sang explore how the ZXX typeface — which was born from Sang’s experience in special intelligence — helps us consider privacy and the nature of the information that shapes our lives, how accessible tools can empower users, and how to think about the practical constraints we all face as designers.

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Liam Spradlin: Sang welcome.

Sang Mun: Thank you for having me.

Liam: So, just to get started um I always ask about the journey so what do you do now and what has the journey been like to get there?

Sang: So, right now I’m running a design studio called YAW with two other good friends of mine and their furniture space and product designers. So, we work on 360-degree brand designs from spaces to brandings to other collaterals and apart from that we also just started a new brand that’s called band of colors and it’s men’s underwear and swim shorts brand so that’s what I’ve been working on in the recent years and prior to that I was a graphic design fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. After that I came back to Korea and worked as a graphic designer for this two big corporations in Korea so, once called Hanwha and the other ones on Hyundai Motor Company.

Liam: So, how did you get your start?

Sang: Actually, I studied on film and video first back from high school I guess, I guess I went into design because I used to skate online and listening to all this punk rock music, being able to adopt the album covers, two music videos, to other visual noises that I kind of got into. So, I guess uh-hmm I was always interested in the graphics and the visuals that connected with me so it was kind of natural for me to move on from film and video to graphic design.

Liam: I’m really excited to have you on today because you know the philosophy of design notes is really about finding the common threads that run through different types of design work and the ways that we approach them from each discipline and it seems like the breadth of your work is a perfect reflection of that pursuit, you’ve been involved in designing a lot of different types of things so, I’d like to hear about some of the projects from different disciplines that you’ve been involved with and the common patterns that you picked up through those experiences?

Sang: I really try to focus on telling the story and just going into the chorus and stuff what this product has to tell or what this brand has to tell or what does photography for instance, where space has to tell to the story and I just forming a bond of sympathy with the end users it’s what I try to focus on the best and I think that has changed a lot comparing to the works that I’ve done in the past because before I think we all designers have this ego because we just feel like we’re still students at school so, after leaving school I think it was a hard transition in a way but I think it worked well in the end and I’m still trying to work more on that aspect in trying to think as a non designer, like how they would approach this outcome that I mean and how they associate it with their context.I think that’s the common approach that I have in all the projects.

Liam: I’m interested in dissecting how you go about finding the story of a product and how that’s formed?

Sang: So, for instance I guess I guess one of the most successful projects that I’ve done was the ZXX typeface, I think it told a very humane and kind of silly idea and I think it resonated with a lot of people in the way that I was telling a true story of mine in a graphic way and also you know casual but scary way and I try to input my life into those projects in the way that I tell a story for instance, on the ZXX was a story of mine where I was on special intelligence personnel for the Korean military associated with the NSA and I had an opportunity to tell that project in a story that was based with my own experience of how to extract information or special signal information.

Liam: Yeah and I can definitely see through reading about ZXX that there is that like personal story component but you also relate it to the people who are viewing it and saying like this is you know we need to make use of the difference between technological and human perception.

Sang: Right.

Liam: To keep ourselves camouflaged as much as we can.

Sang: Right.

Liam: I do want to dig into that a little more specifically as we move further into an age of machine learning and AI. It seems likely to me that technology might catch up with something like ZXX and learn how to read it. So, I’m interested to know; a, like how your thoughts about that have changed over time since the ZXX first launched?

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Liam: And then I’m also interested in discussing whether that too could be subverted, whether technology could be used to design things that full technology.

Sang: Right. So, there’s been a lot of political changes in the Korean society where our democracy has been really a challenge with the corruptions of all like for instance, the National Intelligence Service getting into political and private life and kind of all turning the mindsets of the citizens. I guess I haven’t really been working more on these kind of projects but I think it’s always stayed in my mind to tackle this project or tackle this events in a different way and after the ZXX.

Sang: I think people are kind of pent up with the status quo and the way that they don’t think they could really do anything to keep their privacy private in a way and I think there has to be more of a like fun approach to be able to make them use these tools because what I’ve seen so far is that ZXX has been used only through the creative fields or the people who find what’s funny about it or what’s really working about it but for the just regular people who are outside of the design field it’s hard for them to relate to it so trying to push and pull between that creativity and finding easier way for them to use the tools might be a good way.

Liam: And is that something that design could accomplish? I think we know about the direct impact that design can have on someone’s experiences or ideas but using design to empower people in a more indirect way.

Sang: For sure because for instance like with the tools that Google’s giving out like all this free apps that you guys have just for instance like, the translators or other free resources that are out there. When is easy for a regular user to be able to approach it and use it in their daily life, I think it is the power design and it’s the power of the technology that could reinforce them to be more private in a way so, I think that’s the tool that design can really change.

Liam: I’d also like to dig into one of the things, when I was reading about ZXX that you said was about articulating our own freedom. I’m interested if this idea has manifested more in your work since then.

Sang: Not to the extent that I really wanted to because I was working on version 2 of ZXX, which was growing more in depth where right now the camouflages and the other 14 leaders were it was a one dimension typeface but I was working on making two and three dimension typeface that could really create an endless permutations but that kind of failed so but but I do keep thinking about this articulating our unfreedom and I think I got inspired by George Orwell’s 1984 and the Newspeak dictionary. How when you start shrinking the diction’s that we can use with then I think it really alters with the mindsets so, I think we are unfree in a way in this society because we’re always in the realm of my overloaded information that are given out from corporations to the governments and I think it really impacts our freedom of thinking.

Liam: I’m interested in the concepts behind ZXX 2.0. You mentioned two-dimensional and three-dimensional…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Typography. What would that look like?

Sang: So, the idea was to when you type in a letter A, the letter A would pop up and then with the algorithm like a random layer would go on top of it and if you want to go more than another layer or go on of it. So, it’s kind of challenging the way that humans could still recognize it as a letter A but as you said the machine would not be able to keep learning what this letter is because you’re giving it different random layers on top of it and I found out that this was possible to do with talking to other engineers but it’s a lot of work (laughing).

Liam: Yeah (laughing) but that does kind of get it the idea of using technology to kind of subvert technology in new ways.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: I’m also interested in again in the idea of the power of human perception versus machine perception and I think that that’s something that’s still continuing to rapidly evolve but have you developed any further this idea in a more broad sense of encoding thoughts and ideas into design that is only perceptible by humans?

Sang: That’d be really interesting. I’m always interested in challenging the visuals that the humans could encode and decode and one of the other projects that I was working on was like decoding a JPEG so working with codes that are encoded in it and then just changing the different layers of the information to make it extract another JPEG, which keeps evolving and just telling you the way that we perceive an image. I didn’t really had the chance to further that study yet but I did think about recently. I saw a vocal app which was presented in the Adobe Conference and it’s really scary because it encodes a human voice and then you could really alter the way that the voice could make any sounds that you want and I think right now we’re moving from an image based or editing an image to moving images to voice now with all the AIs and voice recognition software that are really getting crazy right now. So, my interest has kind of evolved from image torching software’s to voices these days.

Liam: Yeah. I guess that’s a good point because as this technology continues to develop removing not only to a place where it’s important to distinguish between the visual capabilities of humans and machines to perceive things but also whether the things we perceive are actually authentic. So, switching topics a little bit, I’d also like to know about band of colors.

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: How did that come about or what’s the, what’s the story behind that?

Sang: So, band of colors was kind of a random project coming out from three designers whose background is graphic designer, product designer and furniture designer and we were always interested in doing a business together and we just thought about expanding our studio culture and trying to challenge ourself into creating a commodity that hasn’t been challenged or that could be disrupted at this point especially in Korea and we found out that all the designers were only focusing on commodities that could be war or used in these outer layers.

Sang: So, like first dimension visuals but we want to create something that could be fun in a way, that not many designers are tackle so random and that’s how it came about and while researching about the market we found out that it was a huge huge market that hasn’t been challenged for my decades where this old corporation still owned 60% of the market share. So, that’s how it came about and I think also we wanted to create something that could enhance the daily life of every man and not just make a crazy-looking graphic design or design commodity but then something that could kind of be timeless and just could be kept in their wardrobe.

Liam: Something I was going to ask about too is kind of where the patterns and prints come from…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: For band of colors. So, it sounds like the material creates some of those constraints as to like what can be done in terms of design?

Sang: Right and the design is so I think we have more than like 400 designs and we sketched and yep just just like you mentioned because of the restrictions that we were facing with the manufacturing process, we had to deselect the best designs that we wanted to make and then kind of compromise within the fields.

Liam: Just because this endeavor seems fairly different from most of your other work, I want to know how you would compare this work to kind of your other creative pursuits?

Sang: It’s, I think it’s really crazy that (laughing) I mean seeing the outcomes right now and knowing the journey that we were taking I think the main difference is that as a design studio we always had clients and we always had the design brief that came from outsource but for band of colors we were our own clients so we had to work on the finance, work on the marketing budget, work on all these other parts that were outside of design and also with having three designers from different disciplines we had to really come to a consensus of what this product had to look like and I think that was a real challenge that we were all facing because we just had different mindsets.

Liam: So, just kind of speaking to the difference in both visual style and process in band of colors compared to your earlier work. I’m interested in looking at the complete timeline just to wrap up. How your creative process has changed over time across all of your projects and also where you see it going in the future?

Sang: Mm-hmm. So, before I was working for different clients and when I was a student you had a lot of time to really tackle and research and try to study the contents to the fullest amount that you can but I think the process had to change when I was working for real clients because there was always limited budget to limited time so yet really dissect the amount of research to sketching, to designing and to production. So, I guess they really changed the mindset of how I approached design now and also it changes from designing a logo, to typeface, to space, to photography, to websites. I’m always thinking about the budget and the timeline and the audience that it has to meet. That kind of changed in the way that I design things right now.

Liam: And so how about in the future and you see that kind of evolving past now?

Sang: So, in the future I think I’m still gonna be challenged with the budget issue especially talking about the Korean clients because they always come in with the really limited budget that is always challenging and being able to challenge them back to make them use more passion in creating the best contents for them to be able to be different from the other competitors. It’s always a challenge for our studio and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we always have to face for other you know young designers that are going to emerge into the real design fields because if we don’t challenge the clients of today right now then the younger generations are going to suffer it again. So, I think we keep pushing the clients to meet like 50–50 consensus instead of them really over ruling our creativity.

Liam: Yeah. I think that’s a good point and I think as designers a lot of times we think about our challenges with clients, being around things like having a consensus on being creative vision but actually something very practical and utilitarian like budget…

Sang: Right.

Liam: Kind of has this ripple effect across all of the functions…

Sang: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: That you do as a designer…

Sang: Right.

Liam: So, that’s really interesting point but yeah. Thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Sang: All right. Thanks for having me.

Libby VanderPloeg, Illustrator

Illustrator Libby VanderPloeg explores the relationship between art and artist

In this episode, Liam speaks with illustrator Libby VanderPloeg about how she relates to her unique illustration style, deciding what to share with the world, and what happens when your work takes on a life of its own.

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Liam Spradlin: Libby welcome to Design Notes.

Libby VanderPloeg: Thanks for having me Liam.

Liam: So just to get started, something I always ask about is kind of your journey. So where you are now, what you’re working on and what the journey was like to get there.

Libby: Well right now I’m working on a project, it’s a book about mindfulness, it’s for young adults. I’ve actually found it pretty useful, uh, in my personal life lately because I feel like I could really benefit from thinking about focus right now. Things have been a little bit chaotic in the last couple of years as my illustration work has sorta been picking up. How did I get here? I think I always wanted to be an illustrator. I never really saw it as like a career I would pursue though when I was a child. I loved books, there was always books around the house ’cause my mom was a librarian and a story teller. She used to actually tell stories at elementary schools and even like renaissance festivals in costume. (laughs) So we would go to those and I always around when she was story telling.

So it was a part of my life but I didn’t ever think I would work as an illustrator. I studied art though in college and after college I like many artists pursued graphic design so that I could make a living. And after many years as a graphic designer and eventually an art director I started to notice that all of the projects that I was working on I was trying to illustrate work for. And I realized then that I wasn’t really interested in art directing I was just interested in creating opportunities for (laughs) my illustration. And so I think at some point I just decided that I may be better off pursuing what I really loved which was illustration.

Liam: You mentioned story telling as kind of a strong influence on your work. I want to go into that a little deeper. I’m interested to know what your though process and approach is for telling a story through a static illustration or a short animation.

Libby: My approach to finding those stories is often noticing the world around me and finding the peculiarities in the situations that I encounter everyday like walking around my neighborhood, the people that I see and I live in Green Point Brooklyn. Its got all kinds of people. And so there’s just so much to absorb and so much to reflect on, not to mention so many trends that come through. And I think one of my tendencies is to linger on trends and sort of try to understand what makes them popular and then pick it apart and see if there’s a way to subvert or celebrate it, it can go either way.

Liam: I also want to tangentially go into some of the work you’ve done with maps because looking at your map work it seems to convey a story in each pice. So I’m interested in how you take something kind of utilitarian, like a map and transform it into something else.

Libby: It’s pretty challenging. I have a lot of friends that are also map makers sort of and we talk a lot about the pain and agony of making maps. As far as illustration goes. Illustration itself isn’t a lot of pain and agony but map making is definitely not easy, there’s so many things you have to consider, like how accurate do you need it to be or do you just need it to convey a mood. And some of the maps that I do go one way and some go the other. But I am happiest making maps that sort of do both which is why I like to bring in all of these characters and little moments and vignettes that talk about daily life in that place and what daily life in that place consists of, whether it’s like a fishing village or a main street in a small town. Or even like a forest that may have berries in it. Those are all the things that make a normal map more fun to sort of escape into.

Liam: So there’s actually a lot of research that goes on behind those.

Libby: Absolutely. I actually make Google maps (laughs) of all the maps that I’m going to make. And, uh, I go through and I pinpoint all of the necessary landmarks, the things that have to be on the map. And then I’ll go in and sort of scour the landscape to look for things that maybe nobody has mentioned need to be on there but I think could be fun to include. It’s actually really fun (laughs). It’s really interesting because you learn about all the places that you’re mapping as you’re working and I feel like I have very extensive knowledge of places I’ve never been which is a little bit depressing too.

Liam: I know a lot of artists who prefer to start on paper and will move into digital. There are some artists who work purely in digital and there are some who are purely in paper. So I’m interested to know where you are on that continuum and what the rationale is for that.

Libby: It’s an interesting question because I actually work both ways. I start always with pencil and paper and I wish that I could stay on paper because for some reason I’m always chastising myself for being like a computer oriented person. But once I’ve done my pencil sketches and presented them to my client or if it’s self directed work than, you know, thought about it myself I always then move to digital almost always. And, uh, create and refine my work on the computer. Sometimes you can’t tell but sometimes I think that’s so beautiful the way you can see the paint soaking into the paper, I wish that I could have that impulsiveness sort of in my work. It’s not necessarily something that I think that I have but nevertheless I try to bring in touches of analog cues into my digital work.

Liam: How do you think that would change if you were elsewhere on that continuum? So for instance if you were working purely with paper how would that change how you approach the work?

Libby: I can’t even imagine working purely on paper. I think that I would just be, I just don’t think I would do commercial work because I am such a perfectionist I would never feel like I could get anything done. I feel like I would constantly be editing in these clunky ways, like for instance working on maps, if I were to try to do what I do with maps with paint and paper I think it would take me five times as long to do it. Which isn’t a bad thing but I don’t understand why I would belabor it when I’m happy with the expediency of digital.

Liam: So zooming back out but kind of on that same topic. The way in which you interact with the work while you’re creating it, how would you describe that and what kind of impact do you think it has on the final product?

Libby: That’s a very good question as well. It’s definitely work. When I’m working I may create something that feels light and free and joyful but the process of creating that feeling is work. It’s serious and it’s sometimes just the last thing you want to do and it’s just like everything else if you want to get something done to your expectations you have to research and you have to do it step by step. Like with maps for instance it’s like first I put land in and then I put roads down and then I’m literally building a place. And then there’s another layer for text. And doing all that text by hand, all of that is work. So I hope that it feels light and free and happy but doing it isn’t always as light and free.

Liam: I’m interested in your use of color and where that falls in the process and how you’ve established palettes and you think about working with color.

Libby: I’ve tried working in just black and white but it somehow doesn’t feel like me. I don’t know. And that’s another reason why I like working digitally is because I love the kind of electric quality of mixing like hot RGB colors with neutral colors ’cause I think it just feels good to look at in some weird way. I don’t know the science behind color theory and mood but there’s so much to me that makes me happy when I see beautiful colors. As far as selecting color palettes I have some strange aversions to certain colors. I don’t know why but I think it kind of goes to my fondness for vintage things, and vintage objects always have a faded quality or maybe one tone is the first to go as if something fades. Like for instance yellow always seems to fall out before other colors do. So I’ve noticed in my work that I don’t use a lot of yellow and I have sometimes pondered as to why that is and wondered if it’s maybe because I’m trying to make it feel older, or faded, or trying to tap into some nostalgia.

Liam: I also want to move into your relationship with the work. So I remember in an interview with Spring Street you said that one of your goals is to create something that makes people smile or makes them feel some pang of emotion. So I want to know what your emotional relationship is with your work.

Libby: I think that while oftentimes I feel like a pretty cynical person. I don’t want my work to necessarily highlight that quality in myself. I think there are some people out there who do it really well, and do it without any sort of concern as to how people read them. But I worry that if I put work out there that maybe stoked people’s insecurities or makes them wonder like, “Is she laughing at me?” Then I’m not doing a good job. I like to make people feel empowered or just happy. So a lot of the work that I do make taps into those feelings. It’s funny when I’m drawing faces I’m generally mirroring those same faces as I’m working on them so I could be working at my computer and suddenly realize that I’ve been smiling for the last 10 minutes because I’m drawing like a range of faces for an animation and it’s kind of funny. (laughs) Because I think that I’m feeling those feelings as I’m creating those feelings. Maybe that’s why I don’t delve into the sadness too much ’cause maybe I’m afraid I will feel that myself. (laughs).

Liam: So that was actually my next question. Is whether the emotional qualities that you try to put into your work are reflective of the one’s that you feel while you’re working on it?

Libby: Yeah. I definitely think so.

Liam: So I guess I would also ask how that changes both during the process of creation and also once a piece is done. So at the moment that you consider it finished which may in fact be never if you’re anything like me. (laughter) But the moment at which it’s finished enough to go into the world, a week from then, a month from then, a year from then. Do you revisit your pieces and still evoke that? Or what does that look like across the whole journey?

Libby: I’m actually reworking something right now that I’ve been hanging onto for I think it’s gonna be almost a year now. And I’m just not sure like what it says or what it projects. And I keep going back to it thinking, I know what I’m trying to say here but I’m not sure if I want to share this feeling, and I’m not sure if this says that feeling. It’s hard, you know, sometimes you find something you want to say but you’re not sure whether it’s worth saying to everybody. And sometimes I think I just end up creating it for myself because it’s a problem that I want to work out or it’s something that I want to explore. I’ve got a lot of work that it’s just waiting for, maybe it’s waiting to die. (laughter) I don’t really know yet. But there are some pieces on the other hand that go out there in the world, I share them. Like I made a gif about a year and a half ago and I released it on International Women’s Day and it went really viral. It was a gif of women lifting each other up like helping each other.

But it really took off and kind of, it kind of has a life of its own now. I mean so many people have shared it and said nice things to me about how it inspired them. So it was just this tiny moment thinking of it and not thinking it was like a really big deal but at the same time going I think I made a cool thing. It’s kind of a neat problem that I solved visually and then to find that it resonated and people just added their own editorial comments and used it in a way that promoted things that I believe in that I didn’t even know about, I learned about organizations and I found that people use it as sort of a rallying cry, made me happy.

Liam: I’m interested in how your work fits into the contexts of the viewers lives. Are there other instances that you can speak to where you’ve been able to directly observe that or, um, see that in action?

Libby: Oddly, surprisingly I’ve had a few of my animated gifs go viral. Like this Women’s Day gif and they have become these sort of strengthening, motivating, empowering symbols. There was one that I created that was promoting Hillary’s campaign that one got shared very widely and people used it to sort of show their support for this candidate without insulting the other candidate. And that was my goal with it, I just was like, “I’m not gonna drag anybody through the dirt. I’m just gonna say this is what I’m gonna do, do what you want.”

So it was like a grid of people that were shimmying and it said, “Shimmy if you’re with her.” But there was another gif that I did around Mother’s Day with a woman flexing her muscle and lifting a baby at the same time. Again it got shared by a lot of women’s groups. So what surprisingly has happened since I created the international women’s day gif is that I’ve really found this support from the feminist community from my work which I did think of myself as a feminist before that but I didn’t really know that it would be a place that I would find so much support for my art.

Liam: We talked about when you’re creating the work and kind of imbuing it with the emotional qualities that you’re going for and how that reflects back into your own emotional relationship with the work. When you see something of yours go viral and people are reacting to it and sharing it and putting, and putting it in all these different places, does that affect how you feel about the piece at all?

Libby: Yeah. I think it must. I don’t know generally the stuff that has gotten that sort of wide circulation I feel really good about and that’s why I shared it. So it just makes me feel better about the work that it’s working, that it’s doing something positive. It’s making people feel a collective energy. It basically makes people feel energized and so far has promoted positive feelings of community, it feels good.

Liam: We also mentioned these ideas or like archived pieces that are waiting for something. (laughs) So I’m curious to know how you know that something is ready to go out into the world or what indicators do you look for or feel?

Libby: I don’t think I ever really know. I think sometimes I’m just tired of sitting on it and I’m like, I’m never gonna know if this is ready but I’m done with it, I’m just done with thinking about it. I don’t want to over edit this anymore. Because I have a tendency to over edit things. And that’s another reason I like digital medium, but sometimes I’m just like, “Let’s just see what happens. Let’s just see what people think about it.” Because sometimes it’s interesting to just put your own work out there to test it and see does it work? Does it communicate what I thought it communicated? Or am I gonna have to move to another country?

Liam: (laughs)

Libby: I don’t know. We’ll find out. It’s good to always test yourself.

Liam: Speaking of over editing and just editing your work in general, having the kind of creative nature that it does. There’s a lot of talk in the UIUX community about systematized design and building design systems for interfaces and things like that, so I’m curious if there’s a parallel there in illustration work about how you approach collecting different components that you build illustrations out of, if that makes sense. I guess this would include things like having an overarching palette, having various characters that you-

Libby: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: Reference a lot or various themes or- or components like that?

Libby: Well I think that you probably could draw a parallel. I did work as a web designer for a short while. So I have some experience thinking sort of anthropologically about user interface and I think it has made me approach my work in a very organized way and a very efficient way. I really value efficiency in my work and limitations and constraints. And while I think that I value the aesthetic side enough that I decided to go into illustration, I do love when design can eliminate all of the frills and just work really well. And I think when it comes to illustration that’s what I want to do. I don’t want too much superfluous detail but just enough to get the job done.

Liam: So what are some of the constraints that you put on your illustration work?

Libby: I don’t like to use more than like 10 colors or so in anything. I like symmetry, I like triangles, and I don’t mean like an overt shape but definitely I find balance relies on different triangles of color or shape or size of things throughout a piece. I really like balance and harmony but those aren’t really constraints.

Liam: And I’m sure it’s something that varies by the project too right?
Libby: Yes. It does. When it comes to maps I like really clean lines. I don’t like any ragged edges on anything. I kind of relish in zooming in and like making all of my vectors perfectly smooth, it- it’s not healthy. It’s not healthy.

Liam: (laughter) That’s what I was just thinking. And I think plenty of designers can relate. Going back to that for a second, I just want to discuss a little more about the balance between utility and expression in those. ’Cause you talk about making very clean lines and making them readable and balanced and everything so what is the balance there? How do those two things kind of interplay?

Libby: Mm-hmm (affirmative). When it comes to maps I can be kind of a stickler for accuracy when it comes to geography which makes some of my clients less excited in the beginning stages of my work but I just have to tell them hang in there. We’ll find ways so that everybody is happy. I really like doing island maps because I love having like an edge of a coastline contrast with water, it makes for a really nice design to be able to breakup the space. When you’re working on some cities, like I did a project not long ago that was 12 maps, 12 cities. And some of the maps just didn’t look as good as others because it just wasn’t as beautiful of a city grid. So to all the city planners out there-

Liam: (laughs)

Libby: Please abide by a beautiful grid. Or don’t but don’t do both at the same time.

Liam: This is a very interesting topic to me because I deal a lot with grids and I love grids so I want to know your take on how do you recognize a beautiful grid in a city or any context?

Libby: There are different approaches to grid I’d say. I lived in Chicago for a long time. Chicago has a really strong grid, of course it has like a highway cutting through all of it but I think Chicago aesthetically to map is a great city. It’s just harmonious. But mapping Paris can be really cool too because at least you have this sort of radial pattern that is aesthetically pleasing. Miami is really not a nice map because it has inconsistent weights of roadways that don’t work together. Like all the north south streets are bigger and there’s fewer of them. So it looks like a bad plaid.

Liam: Interesting.

Libby: Yeah. It’s a pattern that nobody would want.

Liam: It’d be very interesting to overlay like an artistic influence on city planning and see what that does in terms of-

Libby: That would be interesting.

Liam: The utility of-

Libby: Hmm.

Liam: Infrastructure.

Libby: Somebody should spearhead that.

Liam: (laughs)

Libby: Maybe you. (laughs)

Liam: Just to wrap up, I’m interested to know how your creative process has changed over time either spanning your whole career or since you focused on illustration. And also where you see it going in the future, how you see illustration as a practice evolving and what that means for you and your work?

Libby: So I’ve always been interested in design and I’ve always been interested in humor. And I think that when the two work together you can get people to hear and get people to listen. I’ve always wanted to make my art, make people think about something, I guess that’s a very statement. But I did for a very brief while go to grad school, I did not finish grad school. I went for sculpture and it just turned out it wasn’t for me. But the conversations that I was having made me stop and think a lot that maybe it wasn’t exactly art that I wanted to do and maybe I wasn’t in the right place. I just kept going back in conversations with students and teachers about social issues and how to do work that engaged the community and got everybody involved.

And I think after a little while I just thought, “I guess I really want to make work that’s accessible to everybody.” And I don’t know if- if I go in- in an art direction. I want to be careful how I do that. I want to be careful to make it reach more people so that they feel that they have something that they can aspire to, that they can understand and that motivates them. I want my creative work to continue to reach a broad audience from all types of sociocultural demographics and communities.

Liam: I think that’s a really good point and I think, you know, thinking about your work I think that’s been accomplished. You know, if you have a gif of women lifting each other up that’s animated, that’s very accessible, it doesn’t depend on literacy. It really just depends on an internet connection essentially.

Libby: One thing that I hope is that there are ways that technology can get in the hands of more people, that people won’t be censored from seeing certain things that people will be able to have choices.

Liam: Tying it back to one of our very first questions. It goes back to how the medium that you work in impacts the work that you do and the fact that you want to aim for feeling and social engagement and things that are able to be shared, doing work digitally is really conducive to that.

Libby: Yeah it definitely is. I really love doing these short animations because I think its made more young people access my work. You know? Not that I’m old but I’m not super young either. I’m right in the middle. And, um, and it’s nice to connect with people of different ages.

Liam: Right. Well thanks for coming on.

Libby: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was great talking to you.

Madeline Gannon, Robot Tamer

Design researcher Madeline Gannon on taming robots and reinventing the ways humans and machines interact

In this episode, guest host Aaron Lammer speaks with “robot tamer” Madeline Gannon about the work of her Pittsburgh-based research studio, ATONATON, which combines disciplinary knowledge from design, robotics, and human-computer interaction to innovate at the edges of digital creativity. Lammer and Gannon discuss how to make robots more approachable, how to design their personalities to work alongside humans as “machinic creatures,” and how she created Mimus, an industrial robot outfitted with sensors that bring out its curious personality.

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Madeline Gannon: Hi, Aaron.

Aaron Lammer: I went to sleep last night after your presentation yesterday uh, like in a sort of, like a vague … I wouldn’t say I had a dream about your robot-

Madeline: (laughs).

Aaron: But it was … it was in my dre- … like my pre-dream thoughts. Okay, so you run a studio called?

Madeline: ATONATON.

Aaron: And you made a robot. What is the robot’s name?

Madeline: Uh, my robot is Mimus. So, this robot is a standard, industrial robot, like the same ones that you would find on a car factory.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: And, what I’ve done is I’ve programmed it to have more lifelike, personable behaviors.

Aaron: So, physically describe Mimus for me. For someone who has um, not seen a uh, car … a car-construction robot before.

Madeline: So, this is a one-ton machine. Just a big pile of … of steel and motors. Um, it weighs 1200 kilograms, moves seven meters per second, can hold 300 kilograms to a millimeter of precision. So, this machine is meant to do spot welding on car chassis or um, ah, precision painting on … in factories. Um, it’s … it’s not really thought of as a thing that should be used in real time.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: These things are usually preprogrammed to do short, repetitive tasks over and over again. They have really boring lives.

Aaron: So, where did you get Mimus? How did you … How does one acquire a Mimus?

Madeline: This … the … the thing … and … You know, you go to the store-

Aaron: Yup.

Madeline: And if you can carry it out, you get to keep it.

Aaron: (laughs).

Madeline: No, so um, I have been fortunate enough to work with amazing partners who have these resources.

Aaron: So, you … you own the studio ATONATON, which is very cool-looking from what I’ve seen-

Madeline: (laughs) Thank you.

Aaron: And you bring home your uh, foster uh, animal-

Madeline: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Aaron: For the first time at a … at like a … a default firmware level, what is … what comes on Mimus before you start working on Mimus?

Madeline: The … An industrial robot is the … the mechanical parts of it, the-

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: The bits and bots of the motors around the joints and the struts in between and then it has a brain. This control box that has um, its own software for controlling those lower-level things like … like motors. So, the work that I do and … and uh, basically just opens up that brain and lets me tinker around in it. So, I put some code on this control box that um, just listens for constant information and commands from me. Um, so, rather than being this closed black box system, I made a little doorway into it that I can send and stream information in real time.

Aaron: Do you have a preference as to whether I refer to Mimus as “he,” “she,” uh, or anything of that variety?

Madeline: Well, I … I call her a “she.”

Aaron: “She”? Okay.

Madeline: Um, that’s the way I … that I think about her but-

Aaron: Okay, let’s … let’s go with “she.”

Madeline: Okay.

Aaron: I want … I want to speak about Mimus in your na- … in your native uh, cadence.

Madeline: (laughs)

Aaron: So, Mimus’s brain is an alchemy of code that was already part of Mimus when you got Mimus and code that you’ve written on top of that.

Madeline: Exactly.

Aaron: So, some of the car-welding Mimus is still there?

Madeline: Definitely.

Aaron: Do you end up disabling portions of the original way that Mimus works?

Madeline: For … for me, I think, the important thing is to embrace this. When I … when I think about this machine I … I describe it almost like you’re working with a creature.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: And it’s a machinic creature-

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: But a creature nonetheless. So, to work with their idiosyncrasies. So, Mimus’s movement is a little bit jerky.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: Um, sometimes, because this thing is not designed to respond in real time-

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: Um, there can be some latency in … in me sending a command and the robot doing things. So, as a designer, I sort of, embrace these limitations as a quality of the personality of this machine and I try to um, work with them as best I can to really bring to life this individual personality of this robot.

Aaron: So, tell me what your goal was with Mimus and tell me how that … how that was implemented at a software level.

Madeline: For me, the … the goal of it was really to make an opportunity for people who may have never seen this amazing machine that’s probably um, made the thing that they drove in today. Uh, give them an opportunity to come face-to-face and really cut through some of the … the hyperbole that we hear in the media about robots taking our jobs or robot overlords and let them have a face-to-face conversation with this incredible machine. Now, that being said, I think um, my stance in it was very neutral. Um, I tried to show that this … this piece of hardware that’s really just taken off the shelf um, can be reframed with a little bit of clever software and duct tape to bring it to life in a new way to show, a sort of, alternative vision of what we could do with these machines, if we so desired.

Aaron: The … The word I would use to describe the interactions I saw with Mimus and I … uh, this … these videos are on the Internet, right? Somebody who’s listening to this can like, google Mimus-

Madeline: Definitely.

Aaron: And see Mimus? Okay.

Madeline: Definitely, yeah.

Aaron: When Mimus is interacting … and this is in the exhibition capacity. I … I don’t know anything about the private studio life of Mimus, but in … in the … in the exhibition capacity um, it reminded me a little bit of being at a zoo and some animals you see at the zoo don’t care at all about you and sometimes an animal will, kind of, come up to the glass and be like, “Whoa.” Like, “It’s … it’s curious about me.” Tell me about, like how … how Mimus expresses curio- that idea of curiosity.

Madeline: So, that was something that I … I really tried to emphasize. That this machinic creature is the first time that you might be visiting them and it reminded me of, like, the first time you might see a giraffe in real life.

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: It’s just … You might … You might see it on television, but when you’re face-to-face with it, when you can hear it,* when you can smell it, um, and sense it, it’s a whole ‘nother beast. Um, so we definitely played up that … that uh, motif in the actual experiential design of visiting Mimus at the design museum in London. So, the idea of … of pulling out and … and of a personality with her was … was to play off this idea of curiosity. Um, that the people who are visiting her … It’s a bit of a spectacle. She’s … she’s loud, a little obnoxious um, and … and what I wanted to show is that she is equally curious about us as we are about her.

Madeline: Um, so, there’s some ways that we can do that in the interaction design. One of the challenges and actually, benefits, of working with this robot is that there’s a really restricted material palette to communicate these emotions. You have her pose. You have her posture. And you have the sound of her motors. And through those three things, uh, we can build a basic body language that’s quite natural to this machine and its kinematics and how it moves. So, some of the things that um, I did to, sort of, elicit a sense of curiosity was, when you’re far away from Mimus, she looks at you from above, so above your head height. And sometimes that can seem like a very frightening thing when this 1200 kilogram beast of a machine is looming over you. Um, it can feel very threatening.

Madeline: As you come closer, she switches and becomes below your head height and, sort of, sniffs up at you, like an excited puppy and jitters a little more.

Aaron: I … I felt a sense of empathy for Mimus. What … What kind of reactions do you get from people to Mimus out in the … out in the wild?

Madeline: I mean, it was … it was really incredible to see. Um, I worked, you know, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day to bring this robot to life for about two months and then she’s out in the wild and uh, and on different continents.

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: So, really like, checking in. I had nanny cams to check in on her uh, remotely, but … but seeing things from social media, for example, and how people responded was pretty wild. Um, so, there was a whole range of emotions that we were able to elicit, which I was hoping for um, diversity of … of reactions. I didn’t have any prescribed goals for it. So, uh, from friendly curiosity was one thing, to um, people bringing little items and gifts and kissing the glass and tapping on the glass and um, kids really loved it right away. We … we favored the algorithm for Mimus to look for shorter people, um, so that it would go to … to children first and … and get them engaged and some … some uh, also some distrust and some creepiness about this overtly dangerous machine that could somehow seem so cute. Like, how easy are our emotions manipulated that we project our feelings onto this thing?

Aaron: Does Mimus learn?

Madeline: In the current state, Mimus doesn’t learn. So, we do some machine learning to do some gesture recognition. So, for example, if you’re really, really excited you can steal her attention away from someone else. So, that gesture that I looked for through the sensor is … is basically waving your arms up and down and hopping up and down so-

Aaron: The, kind of like, “I need to pee kind of [crosstalk 00:10:36]”-

Madeline: A little bit yeah, exactly. Like, “Come see me” and then … then that assumption is like well … well um, I should mention that Mimus also has a … has a bored timer. So, if she’s sni-sniffing you out and investigating you and you stand there and do nothing, she’s going to get bored, just like animals at the zoo and go check out someone else. So, getting really excited is the way to steal her attention as well as keep her attention for longer.

Aaron: What was unexpected about Mimus out in the world that you didn’t see coming um, when she was just in your studio?

Madeline: I think, for me, one of the pleasures that I have is how close the museum staff got with the robot. And they had a little send-off for her when … when the exhibition closed and … and the … the director forwarded me a thread of like, goodbye letters to Mimus. So, there was a … there was a real caring for her, which um, again, and like you know, it’s … it’s poetic and … and lovely, but, in a machiavellian way, it meant that my interactive installation got taken really great care of uh, remotely, but so … so it … it’s a really interesting tread to … to walk to try to elicit emotions without really manipulating emotions. Um, but that … that was a really unexpected thing.

Madeline: Um, also, people who visited her multiple times was really nice and um, and that … that was something that … that was really pleasurable.

Aaron: How did you get interested in robots in the first place? Did it start when you were a kid?

Madeline: Um, not really. I mean, I’ve always liked sci-fi, um, and robotics, to me, is something that I … I’ve only fell into recently-

Aaron: Oh, okay.

Madeline: Um-

Aaron: So, tell me what you were doing before you got into-

Madeline: Architecture. My-

Aaron: Architecture.

Madeline: Yeah. My technical training is in architecture um, and the last year of my master’s at my university I uh, my university got this CNC router, which is a machine that you can uh, connect to a computer and it can carve out material um, with … with a … with a bit that spins out like a … like a drill press on a machine.

Um, so for me that was the first time that I could take my very classical architecture education in 3D model … imagining in 3D modeling environments in a computer and actually translate them out into the physical world and that sense of instantaneous um, translation was really empowering and um, intoxicating that I … I really quickly hit the limits of what I could do with this machine that was really designed for carpenters. Um, so, I was, you know, shoving pens inside of carving tools and experimenting with things and … and all these … using materials that I wasn’t supposed to and what I … what I came to the conclusion is that the … the biggest limit for my creativity to working with this machine is that I had to communicate it through software that was designed for other people.

Madeline: So, that’s when I decided to, sort of, jump into this rabbit hole to learn how to program, uh, learn how to talk to these machines and to see how we can, sort of, blur the boundary between our imagination and our digital creativity and the physical world.

Aaron: How does one start learn … I mean I wouldn’t even know what programming language you would start with if you’re trying to make a Mimus.

Madeline: Um, there’s … there’s a … So, for robots and spec- specifically one of the challenges of working with them is that I … Each robotics manufacturer has their own proprietary language for their machine. So, a lot of it is um, just investing time. And there are also, like, for the industrial robots they’re so far behind in how they share knowledge. It’s usually like, ace you have 15 PDFs with little pieces of information that you have to control F and find random things, and it’s a lot of headaches. It’s … That’s one of the reasons why I built a back-massaging robot was because it was just so stressful to program it I needed some … some tension release.

But, that’s one of the … one of the big draws that brought me here to Pittsburgh is, as a robotics capital of North America it was um, an amazing playground to … to start to experiment.

Aaron: Yeah, I was wondering like, what’s … what’s the robotics community like here? Like, other people come in to see Mimus and they’re like, you can come see my Mimus over here-

Madeline: Yeah. I mean it’s pretty incredible here. You know, you go to a … a coffee shop and you … you hear people talking about, “Oh, you know, my encoder on my joint isn’t really doing well.” It’s, “Oh, my gasket’s viscosity isn’t quite … “ It’s just the … the conversations that happen here are so nerdy and so interesting and so diverse and … and, kind of, odd that everyone is in their … their own um, deep well of knowledge.

Aaron: So, what are your plans with ATONATON? Where does one go with a ro- a robotics studio, if that’s how you define it?

Madeline: We … We do a lot of our work with robotics and I think for me um, what I try to focus on is, sort of, scouting under-explored territories in technology and how technology connects with people. Um, so, a lot of that is translating a lot of the energy and … and intelligence that’s happening in the virtual world into physical, tangible experiences. Um, so we explore many topics outside of robotics, for example, wearables and 3D printing and fabrication and all these things that can begin to break down barriers between our … our imagination and what we can actually physically produce.

Aaron: Tell me about the decision to not have a face. Um-

Madeline: Yeah, it’s … it’s naked. It’s-

Aaron: Naked.

Madeline: In the raw. Like, even for people who work with industrial robots on a daily basis-

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: They probably haven’t seen one like Mimus without something on the end of it doing something.

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: So, it was a really concerted decision to … to keep her in the raw in … in her … in her element.

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: Um, and a part of that is … is sort of cont … to be a little bit of a contrarian to how robotics are dealt today is you have a really cool robot, it has to work with people, so you slap a screen on it and maybe it has some eye balls that looks at things. And to me, that is just such a missed opportunity to really explore the natural lifelikeness of this thing that is articulate and can move in the world and act in the world, um, because we … we interact with things in our daily life, like, for example, our pets, that they don’t look like us, but we can communicate with them. Um, in a really uh, eh, intuitive way, sometimes trained ways, but there’s … there’s that one-way relationship with them that … that we can negotiate with one another in a shared space and enjoy each other’s company.

Aaron: What … What are the most negative reactions you’ve gotten to your project been?

Madeline: Uh, certainly like … like, um, “That’s creepy.”

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Madeline: That, “This is … this is not good.” Then, “This is … this is not the future I want.”

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: Which is … th- those to me they’re not negative that … that those are incredibly valid um, emotions to have.

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: Um, and that those are necessary to come to the surface so … so we can decide how this is um, as a society.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, you kind of, have to feel a little bit like you’ve … if someone had a very visceral reaction to what you’ve done, you have to feel a little proud that you-

Madeline: I was going to say-

Aaron: Caused a visceral-

Madeline: Like-

Aaron: Reaction.

Madeline: Like, the negative reactions are like, “Meh.”

Aaron: “Robot’s boring” (laughs).

Madeline: Yeah.

Aaron: Um, so where do you go from here? What’s next?

Madeline: Um, I actually just added a new robot to my family.

Aaron: Oh.

Madeline: Um, so it’s a much smaller robot and … and it … it can travel a lot easier. Packs up into some crates. So, I can actually-

Aaron: (laughs) You designed a robot that can fit into an overhead compartment?

Madeline: Uh, it … just about-

Aaron: Yeah.

Madeline: Just about um, so … so I’m doing a lot of work with that. I’ve actually been uh, working with some film directors about um, how to make sentient machines uh, as useful tools for them and … and some other stuff but … that hopefully will … will come to the surface soon and for me it’s just uh, robotics is … is certainly a passion and I think it’s a … it’s a interesting topic that is under-explored and I’m always keeping my nose searching for the next under-explored territory.

Aaron: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for this interview. This is super interesting.

Madeline: Oh, my pleasure.

Aaron: Um, where can people who want to know more about Mimus or want to know more about your studio find you?

Madeline: Yeah, that’s great. My website is atonaton.com A-T-O-N-A-T-O-N.com and uh, you can also Google uh, “Madeline robot whisperer.”

Aaron: Uh, Ma … and uh, Mimus is M-I-M-U-S.

Madeline: Yes.

Aaron: If you’re looking for … just for … just for Mimus. Thanks.

Madeline: Thank you.

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.

Cameron Koczon, Partner at Fictive Kin

Fictive Kin’s Cameron Koczon on understanding the foundational impact of design

Cameron Koczon is a Partner at Fictive Kin, a New York-based design and engineering studio whose unique approach to product development starts with “a Seinfeld” — an app that does nothing — and ends with a polished core experience. In this episode of Design Notes, Koczon and host Liam Spradlin explore what it means to own content online, the difficulties of learning product design, and how designers can create meaningful change by focusing on the impact of their work.

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Liam Spradlin: Cameron, welcome.

Cameron Koczon: Thanks for having me.

Liam: So, to get started, I want to know about your journey. So, what do you do now, and what was it like to get there?

Cameron: I run an agency in Brooklyn called Fictive Kin, um, there’s 25 of us. Journey started out in, uh, California. Um, I’m from San Diego. Uh, after college, I went to business school and went straight through to business school. Going to a business school, straight through, is a little bit weird because you’re 21, and the average age is more like 28, 30, and if you, uh, how- how old are you?

Liam: 27.

Cameron: 27-

Liam: (laughs).

Cameron: Okay. You ever hung out with like a 21 year old as a 27 year old?

Liam: No.

Cameron: It’s like terrible-

Liam: (laughs)

Cameron: So I was the annoying one, and uh, it was lucky to me that, uh, my college roommate also went to graduate school at the same time, but he went for engineering, and he was actually, he worked on the touch screen, on the first iPhone, very cool guy. Um, anyhow, because of that, I ended up hanging out with all engineers instead of business people. I have a lot of MBA friends, but mostly, I was hanging out with engineers, and after school, I just never wanted to do finance. I always wanted to start my own business, and I joined my friends, in starting an agency, like a mechanical electrical engineering agency called, Pocobor, which is RoboCop backwards.

Anyhow, I- I sort of got two lessons out of that. Um, the first lesson was, it’s very fun to do your own business. It’s very fun, I think, to work with your smart friends, but then the second thing was, you know, I don’t really know much about engineering, and so, I can’t really add a lot of value and I was doing a lot of like, sales and things like that, but even then, when you don’t understand the technical underpinnings of something, it’s quite hard to sell it great.

So, some other friends of mine from high school, they were starting a start-up in Los Angeles and it was a web start-up, and I knew how to do front-end development and I knew enough about product design that I wanted to go down and help, and I went with my friend Evan, who’s another college buddy. And uh, went down to LA and did a start-up with them, and I did also realize, oh, I like the web. I’m quite good at it. Um, I was working with my friend Evan who still works with me now and we had a great rapport, and he would be … We basically built the whole thing. and so, I was able to sell early, a very good vesting schedule, and I was able to make a bunch of money. This was long time ago. Now, 10 years ago now, or something like that. And then I used all that money to hire all of my favorite friends, and I started a company, uh, with them, called Fictive Kin, which just means people who are not related to you by blood, but they’re basically family. So these are people who I’ve known for a very long time, and so, that’s ultimately how I got here. I think I maybe went too far back to be honest, but like (laughs), that’s how I came with the starting of the company, and then how the company unfolded is like a totally different thing, ’cause it’s eight years old now, the company.

Liam: And uh, maybe we’ll unearth some of that. So uh, I want to get into the topic of how we interact with the web and online content and stuff like that, and to do that I want to explore some of Fictive Kin’s projects.

Cameron: Sure-

Liam: So I’m really interested in the redesign of Rookie that you all did, um-

Cameron: Yeah-

Liam: So just tell me a little bit about that.

Cameron: we used to run a conference called Brooklyn Beta, and Tavi spoke at our conference, and we developed a relationship with with her, and with, uh, Lauren Redding who’s over there also, we’re very open about why we’ve done what we’ve done, and I think that’s like a very healthy thing and I love the purpose of Rookie. I also loved the site. I think that they were doing tons of amazing content and it’s impressive how far they got with how little. I mean they had, uh, a non-responsive site for a market that is teenaged girls, and it was like, people, uh, were dying for it. They love it, but we met them through the conference. They needed a site, and we really wanted to help them with it, but didn’t haven’t any money. So we talked to MailChimp to design it with them, and the challenge was … Especially around then, everything was like very Mediumy, medium.com. You know and everything-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cameron: Looked like that, and I think even they had a temptation to look like that, and maybe, like, almost like grow-up a little bit. They didn’t want to … Explicitly, that was the goal. It’s not Rookie’s growing up. So uh, the fun part for that project or one of the most fun parts was keeping this very cool, funky aesthetic while at the same time, making it more modern.
So I think we did a really good job. We worked with the team and, like, they helped and it was very collaborative and I think we ended up with something that was good. I’m, like, the actual results were good, like, page views doubled the next day, and, you know, it’s a very outspoken, super sharp community and I was very nervous about launching a redesign of their beloved site, but it was all positive.

Liam: So, in trying to keep this very fun, unique aesthetic that Rookie has. Um, what were some of the constraints on the design?

Cameron: Well, there was some constraints, there were some business goals. Those aren’t that fun, but a business goal was very explicitly increase page views because they were changing their advertising model and they had, had an advertising partner before, but page views were starting to matter more, um, and so, we had to do some technical work so that they were registering that correctly. Um, we did a survey of I think about 1,500 of their readers all filled in this type form, and we got basically what they liked and what they wish existed, and so, we built to that. So there were some constraints and sometimes we had to go away. So there was three articles a day was the default, and that was a requirement to us, that we needed to move away from that, but other than that, like, people loved the changing backgrounds all the time. They loved the illustrative style. Basically, we got a ton of awesome feedback from them, and we just did what they asked, You don’t usually get to start with, like, here’s an existing beautiful thing, we get to preserve it. Here’s a very open awesome community, they’re telling us what they want. All we have to do is not fuck it up.

Liam: I want to get into a piece that you wrote several years ago, in which you said that, uh, “We were on the cusp of an overhaul in the way in which we interact with online content,” and in that piece, you described the concepts of content shifting and content liberation-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: And so, briefly, what are those concepts about?

Cameron: The content shifting one, you could think of like, Pocket, right? Like you just sort of move it over, um, whereas, I think content liberation is more like what Pinterest does. It sort of completely removes it from its context and essentially hides that context, and gives it a new life. So it’s hard to trace back the origin story of a particular piece of content whereas shifting … You can really easily know where it came from, but you’re moving that experience and shifting has all kinds of really interesting implications because most media publications, they’re not really caring about your reading experience.

I think everybody’s experienced like the- the assault of all the pop-ups etc. etc. So if you just shift those letters over to another place, you can read it great. You’re like, I just wanted to read those words. Thank you for writing them, which isn’t very collaborative between the reader and- and the- the publisher, but that’s what I think people use these things for.

Liam: We talked about how Rookie has this very strong aesthetic of their own, and the community loves that, and it’s something that you wanted to preserve. So I’m interested how those two concepts relate to that project.

Cameron: In both cases, it involves a shift in thinking about what is the center of gravity for an item. In the case of Rookie, I think they have something very special, which is different. Most apps out there are content driven apps. If you want to go see square photos, you go to Instagram. Like the content is there, and you bring the people to the content.

Whereas Rookie, they have the community and that’s the center of gravity. The publication’s there, but really it’s a very powerful community, like, that is a deep network of people and you could bring them their own little mini Pinterest. You could bring them their own little mini, you know, Instagram. You could bring them anything. You just bring the functionality to them. And that article was called, Orbital Content, and I believe that … You know I still believe it, that your content should revolve around you and you give that to whoever you want.

Like if you had been using Snapchat for a while and you just decided you want to go over to Instagram and bring all that stuff with you, you should’ve been able to go, “Here you go.” If I want to leave Bank of America and go to Wells Fargo, I can move my money and come over here. Whereas my content, it’s all very blurred. It’s mine. I made it, but you kinda own it, and maybe we kind of have a shared ownership, and it’s a really peculiar arrangement, and you can kind of lock it down.

So those two, I think are related in that way and I like those kinds of things.

Liam: So there, there’s uh, the aspect of these concepts that affects the way that we experience consuming information, like in the case of a really cluttered news site. You’re taking the letters and reading them in a more sane calm environment, um, but also, the aspect of how we interact with our own content, and like, how that ownership is negotiated.

Cameron: You own yourself. You own your community. This to me is like, the power of the internet, which we do not … We just totally are like … We don’t really care about the internet. Like, we’re just going to create little mini internets elsewhere, and so, I think that anything that empowers an individual or a small group of purpose driven individuals, even if that purpose is just taking naps and having pizza, like I’m into those kinds of things.

Liam: I’m into those things as well-

Cameron: Yeah-

Liam: (laughs).

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

Liam: So I would also like to explore, like, moving beyond the current state. How do you think this manifests in the future, uh, or where do you see that going?

Cameron: It’s kinda like saying, “How do we get people to floss? How do we get people to save or put money into their retirement?” People just don’t like to do what’s ultimately good for them in the long run when there’s an easier option. We talk about it at our company, like, actual closeness versus a sort of generic connectivity. And I think that people are very connected, and that opens up all kinds of opportunity for closeness, but it doesn’t get generated. So I think, if we could figure out a way to create real intimacy, then that would be something. I can only identify the problem.

Like here, I can give you another way to think about the problem. So there’s a study, they talk about rats and they would give rats Diet Coke. Some rats get the Diet Coke, some rats get regular Coke. And the Diet Coke rats get like, way fatter and shit because their body perceives that they were given sugar, so it does all these things, but it didn’t get sugar. It didn’t get what it thought it got, so then later on, it goes double-down for sugar. So they were tricking their body into believing they got sugar, duh, duh, duh.

So I think that something like a typical social network gives you the Diet Coke equivalent of a friendship. A real friendship is on a road trip and you’re out and you’re doing something, and doesn’t even need to be that idyllic. It could just be a drink after work at the end of the day, that is a real bond, and that is like the regular Coke. You got your sugar, you don’t need any more. The other ones are like false sustenance, that I think makes people binge or crave for it, but there’s no way to binge friendship. I can’t go to you and make you be my friend.

Liam: So theoretically speaking-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: From a design perspective, like what- what kinds of things can designers do to try and like build this genuine relationship.

Cameron: That’s a great question. That’s a great question. So you can do a couple things. So one, I think that if you err on the side of creating tools, utilities … You’re going to be in a good spot. You can count on it, cause you can also trick yourself. A way that you can’t trick yourself is a tool. So like Google Maps, I’ll plug … We’ll plug Google-

Liam: (laughs).

Cameron: Google Maps is a tool. Google Maps isn’t saying like, “Hey, how did you like … Do you want to like rate your cab ride here?” It’s like, “No, I … Thank you for getting me here on time, Google Maps, and I don’t need to talk to you anymore, I’ll talk to you later.” And I think those things, they pop-up, they can bring us together and they can be valuable utilities.
So like, We think about timeless tools. So things that have been around forever, calendars, lists, maps, things like that. Those are things that can be very actually quite personal. They can be social. They can be fun, but if you just treat those things as like, your foundation, you’re not inventing a new need. Like if you’re inventing a new need, I think maybe you’re- you’re part of the problem, If you’re bringing people together. Like, there’s something kinda cool there. Like bring ’em together, do something nice. Like, I don’t want a futon anymore. Thanks Craigslist, I don’t have a futon anymore. So I don’t know, things like that, I think … Designing tools is awesome and I guess if you put a point system in, then I think you’re probably also creating a problem.

So me sharing a photo, I share a photo and I just like, I don’t — This is my photo. I don’t care, whatever, but like, if there are people you share a photo, it doesn’t get enough likes, you take the photo down. You thought that, that was a cool photo to show. You wanted to share the photo, but you didn’t really want to share the photo. You wanted to collect little hearts. That says something about the tool. It’s not a photo sharing tool, it’s a heart collecting tool, which is a little casino that you put in your pocket and you carry it around. It’s no good.

Liam: I’m also interested in a piece you wrote about, um, the fact that it’s an important time for design-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: Or it’s design’s time, like-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: Uh, you wrote about how Design is in the spotlight or all eyes are on design-

Cameron: Yeah-

Liam: It’s, um, finally people are recognizing this. It’s like a very integrated piece of a product. But you also said something that really stood out to me in that piece, which is, uh, you worry that design is being set up to fail-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: What do you mean by that?

Cameron: So what I mean by that is I’m a business guy. I have an MBA, but when I ran Brooklyn Beta, it’s designers and developers. We’re bringing designers and developers together. I co-ran it with a guy named Christian. Um, the developers all thought … Oh, Cameron’s a designer, ’cause I know plenty about design, and then, the designers all thought … Oh, Cameron’s a developer, ’cause like they both knew I knew a lot, but I wasn’t quite right. And I was like, I got you. I’m right in the middle here, I’m a business guy, and so, I hang out with a lot of business people. I hear business type chatter. And I saw a lot of attention on design and it became something that VCs were talking about, business leaders talking … you gotta have it. You gotta get yourself some design. Get a guy who looks like Yves Behar, bring ’em in, have ’em put some sticky notes up and all that kind of stuff … I can tell you designer after designer after designer who would be designer number one at a start-up, that really made a lot of its headway early on because of design, and that person maybe got like, .2% of the company, that then got sold for $30 million. It’s like, you did it, and somebody else made $30 million. I want you to at least make $1 million, that would be nice. Um, so I always felt like designers were taken advantage of, and what, in a way that engineers weren’t, ’cause engineers had more examples. They had like Paul Graham. Engineers have kind of like an attitude about not getting taken advantage of, and designers maybe … I don’t know what the constitutional difference is. They sort of were more going with the flow. So I thought, here’s a moment for you to like go for it, but I think what happened more is, because design is more accessible than engineering, I can’t go pretend to set-up server. Like, I just didn’t set up a server. Because of that, I think business people just grabbed design. I think business people just call themselves designers all the time, and then they go around and you’ll see like some design thought leaders … It’s like show me your coolest design.

And they’re like, “Oh, you know back in what was …” You know, it’s like what? You’re not a designer, but you’re just saying it and now you’re leading designers, and of course because you’re a business person, you’re wildly opinionated and you think that your way is right, and so, now you’re designing, like, shitty stuff.

So I don’t actually think it worked. Design, the word, is now everywhere. Good job the word design, but designers, the community, I don’t think they’re getting much from it and I don’t think that those of us on the receiving end of designed products are also getting much from it because those people didn’t actually get to the position that they want.

Liam: The setting up to fail that you mentioned-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: You think happened?

Cameron: I believe that, that happened. Yes-

Liam: Okay-

Cameron: Absolutely. Just in terms of the upper bounds of Where- where designers could be in the organizational chart-

Liam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Cameron: Mills Baker… He has an article. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s something about designers seat at the table or something like that. It, that’s the easiest read to make the point and that was already like, that was only like, two years after the thing I wrote, and I think he makes the point excellently. I wish I could remake it, but just read it. It’s great.

Liam: So essentially, there’s this idea that design is important, but yet-

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Liam: The actual recognition that, whether you acknowledge it or not, design is foundational and present everywhere has not been made?

Cameron: Well design is objectively important, but what design is, has not been internalized. So people just say … And in that Mills Baker article, he uses Path as an example. And like, I feel like, what business people took away from it, is like, if you make the coolest button that’s an add, you know, you hit a button and circles fly everywhere and it’s like, that’s design. Like decoration, right? That’s very, um, I’m going right into what all designers say all the time: Design is not decoration, it’s foundation.

It’s not the … It’s not the molding on the building. It’s the underlying architecture, like, it’s b- the blueprints down, that’s when you’re really doing design and that is from the beginning. You can’t go to a building. I can’t change the underlying structure of this Google Office. This is it. If I want to do that, I have to rip it down and put it up, or I put up something new somewhere else, and so, that kind of design is absolutely … It’s just not understood.

Liam: Is there a way that practicing designers can, subvert this and inject the understanding of design into the kind of like framework where designers are co-founders and things like that?

Cameron: I think actually making an alternate thing, um, and there’s all of these blind spots. It’s like, every time somebody decides to make a start-up or make a new product, they go look in the same lame-ass town in Northern California, Palo Alto. I lived there. It’s not cool. And they go and they … “Oh, they figured it out. Let’s copy that.” If you go to Berlin, they’re copying Silicon Valley. Like, electronic music in Berlin and electronic music in Detroit, these are different. They have their own movements. Why is it that there’s not a cool set of Baltimore start-ups? And that could just mean start-ups for Baltimore, or like something where when you open the app, and you’re from Baltimore, but you’re in San Diego or something, and you go “I bet somebody from Baltimore made this?.” Why doesn’t it ever sound like somewhere else?

Um, and I think if, it’s cool if you go small then I … You got a shot. Like, if you’re going for a million dollar business, instead of a billion dollar business, maybe designers just make 1000, $1 million businesses, instead of trying to make the next $1 billion business, maybe that could do it, but you have to go small, strategic, and don’t look at, don’t look at any examples. … That’s what a designer is supposed to be able to do: break it down to its component parts, come up with a plan, and put it together the way that’s best suited for the job. I think that probably would do something.

Liam: So I- I want to ask, a more general question about how your work or process has changed over time-

Cameron: Mmm-

Liam: And where you see it going, uh, in the future.

Cameron: Well, we get better. So that’s interesting because product design is very difficult and it is a hard thing to learn because you can’t learn it unless you design a product from scratch, launch that product, and then ideally, try to change it and make it better. So that’s like trying to get good at playing the guitar by playing one C chord a month. It just takes for freakin’ ever to get good. So it’s neat every time we come at it fresh, that we get, uh, better, um, and get a little bit, uh, wiser about it, but the process itself, I don’t think that there’s a way to change the process of making a product.

It starts with some kind of discovery, some kind of researcher planning period, like, measure twice, cut once, that kind of deal. Come up with a plan. Make the simplest version of that plan, and then, put that into people’s hands as quickly as possible, and then make it better.

I will say that there’s a bunch of stuff that’s changed environmentally. We made an app long time ago called Gimme Bar. We made this to do list app called, Teux Deux. When we put Teux Deux out there, people were like, “Oh, cool. A new app.” And it didn’t matter that it was buggy. There’s like news that there’s this new app. Let’s try this new app out today. That’s our Tuesday activity. Now, nobody wants it. They don’t want your fucking app, at all.

So you really can’t just go like … I think that there’s … Like, a good startup mantra of like, fail fast or you put it out there really quickly and it, MVP, and then you iterate or whatever, but I think that if you MVP these days, you didn’t really give your idea a chance. You have to get somewhere further.

Like, there’s not that many new things on your phone, or my phone, or anybody’s phone. So I feel like the things that have changed are all around, which is environmental, which is basically … You have to show up ready to roll, if you want to have something cool. We have a lot of internal projects that are various degrees of completion, that five years ago, I would’ve put them out, no problem, but now, I just test them with 50 trusted friends who understand what we’re doing and have a little patience, and like, ’cause like if this isn’t fun for us 50, than we’re not gonna tell another soul. Once it’s fun for us 50, let’s see if 500 people find it fun, but we’ll never like launch it, ’cause you only get to that once.

Liam: And so, you kind of determine it’s staying power beyond a week during that process.

Cameron: Yeah, for like months. I could show you some stuff in my pocket right now that I’m like, man, I really want to like this thing, but we totally haven’t figured it out. Like I don’t like it that much, it’s only okay. So what, am I gonna go out there and tell the world, like, “Hey, we made an okay app.” Nobody wants that. So like, I spend much more time, like, trying to figure it out and we keep it really low-fi. Like, we have learned some stuff.

So the first one is, We do this with clients, it’s an exercise. So clients will very typically show up with a long feature set, and while sure, I could get a ton of money if I make your whole feature set. Like it’s not gonna work and you’re gonna hate me at the end, and that’s no fun. So what we say to them is, take all your features and pull a feature out, and if what you have left is still a product then that is not going first. So if we go to Twitter, you go to Discover, you pop that guy out and you look at it. You’re like, is it still a product? Yes. Discover is not core. Okay, what about these trending tags over here. If we pull ’em out is this still a product? Yes, this is not core. So even though you might argue that it’s better or worse or whatever, it’s not core. So the only thing that’s really core on Twitter is writing a tweet, submitting a tweet, reading some tweets.

So we would do that first, as quickly as possible, and even before that, we have a jokey-thing. The very first thing we always make is just called a Seinfeld, which is an app that does nothing. You can sign-up. You can make an account. You can log-in, log-out … You literally can’t do a god damn thing, and so, it’s like okay, cool. Done, that’s check one. Check two is that core app that I described, and then we can get more strategic about how we kind of sweeten the pot with other features and stuff like that, but features tend to have to fight their way in, instead of us building them and taking them out.

Liam: Has this process kind of developed, out of the transition from every Tuesday there’s a hot new app, to like, nobody cares about your app?

Cameron: Actually, I think it probably developed out of client work because, you know, in the early days, we would do client projects for people where maybe it’s an individual, they did like a friends and family round … Maybe they got like $80,000 together and when somebody’s sitting next to you, and they’re telling you that, like, their mom went into their savings to get like money to give you… You take on that burden a little bit, and so, you try to get as clever as possible about, um, how to build something. So it’s like, okay, let’s make the simplest thing… And by doing the Seinfeld we all now have accounts. So anything new, we’re all already trying it. There’s no new feature that we’re not already trying, then we look at the core, and at any point, you could say, you know what? I don’t think we have something.

So it’s kind of more being clever about how you spend money. You don’t assume that you understand at the beginning what the product is. So if you make a big list … Oh, this is what it is, and then you make all that. Now, you have to pull stuff out and put new stuff in. At every step along the way, you assume, I probably don’t know, but it does need accounts. Okay, cool. I was right. It needs accounts. I’m in here. Okay, now I can write tweets. It’s like, oh, I knew I was gonna need to read tweets. It’s like, okay, cool. Now I can read tweets. And at every point you can say … Cool, it still feels like we’re on- on the path.

We used to get these beautiful design comps. I’m like, oh, yeah. Build that. It’s like, you know, think of it like dating, right? Oh, this person’s gorgeous, and then, you hang out with them for a few times, and you’re like, inside of them is shit, and like, you have the same thing with an interface. It’s like, this looks beautiful. Like, a dribbble interface looks beautiful, underneath it is nothing, you know?

And so, you- you sort of say to yourself, this- this product needs to win as the product. So it did change. We do also do like, on our own work, we do not make it look good, we do not brand it. We make what we call a blueprint, and it’s like, all Helvetica. It’s all blue and it just, it has to land on its own merits, its own content, things like that.

Liam: I was going to follow-up about the blueprint concept-

Cameron: Yeah-

Liam: How do you like tame the impulse of a designer…

Cameron: Some designers like to do the product side a lot, and some designers like to do the visual side a lot, and then I don’t let the visual people see it usually (laughs).

You can feel it in the air though. There is a point at which it’s kind of working, but actually, the lack of appearance, it’s like… Also dating — you’re an amazing person, let’s say you want to date, and then you show up, but you’re like, you didn’t shower or something like that. At a certain point, your product is looking at you, and you’re like, you’re kind of a slob, and I can’t even … Now, I can’t even look at you, like uh, objectively. So let’s make you a little bit better, and then, so you can sort of like ladle it in, little by little in that way.

I shouldn’t say I don’t let them see it. They’re all in the office. They can see it-

Liam: (laughs).

Cameron: They’re full grown adults, but uh, uh, ideally, um, we sort of … Ideally, they agree. I don’t know. We have to ask them, but I think that, the people who are more visually inclined agree with the process, and then, uh, once they get it, it’s like they can jump in and it’s a lot of fun.

Liam: Got it. Cool. Well thanks for joining me.

Cameron: Yeah, sure.

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.

Bennett Foddy, Game Designer — Getting Over It

Game designer Bennett Foddy on “Getting Over It” and the expressive power of frustration

In the trailer for the famously frustrating Getting Over It, game designer Bennett Foddy admits, “I could’ve made something you would’ve liked but instead it’s capricious … it’s bracing and inhumane.” In this episode of Design Notes , host Liam Spradlin speaks with designer, professor, and philosopher Bennett Foddy about using frustration as a design pattern, positioning games at the intersection of art and software, and who he had in mind when creating Getting Over It.

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Liam Spradlin: Bennett welcome to Design Notes.

Bennett Foddy: Thanks for having me.

Liam: So, to start out with I want to ask what you do now and what the journey has been like to get where you are.

Bennett: I think of myself as an indie game designer, and also a professor that teaches game design at NYU. At college I trained in physics and philosophy, and I headed off to grad school in philosophy, and, uh, I was convinced I was going to be a philosopher, but I, somewhere along the line I started being a musician. Fell into a band with some friends called Cut Copy. Uh, Cut Copy is an Australian … It’s an electro band. We toured around doing that for a while, put out an album, and it started to take off too much for grad school, can’t do both of those things at the same time, so I quit that, and I went and got a job as a philosopher at Princeton uh, post doctoral fellowship, and that was philosophy of medicine, philosophy of applied ethics, and after three years of that I went to Oxford to continue to be a philosopher, and eventually after ten years I guess — from everybody else’s point of view — I suddenly made a left turn, and uh, went and got a job teaching video game design. But, what was happening was along the way I was sort of gradually moonlighting as a game designer.

You know, I would do my philosophy work during the day, and then uh, stay up til 4AM making video games. That’s what I really wanted to be doing, and by 2008 I made a video game … flash game for the internet called QWOP, which didn’t really make that much of a splash when I made it, but in 2010 roundabout Christmas time suddenly I guess conditions were right on the internet for that to kind of explode, and go viral, and just instantly that kind of changed my kind of order of priorities, and I started thinking about, “Well, is there a way that I can be doing this full time?” So uh that brings me to New York, and, and basically up to the current day.

Liam: So, do you think that your work in philosophy fed into game design at all, or do you think that was kind of a separate direction?

Bennett: I mean in one way it feeds in in a kind of negative way. Right? I think in philosophy you’re concerned with logic, and fact seeking, and truth, and you’re reading books, (laughs) which you never do as a game designer. And, in a way, uh, having to create the art that I did at night was kind of a classic, uh, pressure release hobby that I had at night. I’d be stuck in, in dry reading, and books, and talks during the day that I would get to the end of the day, and just want to do something that was creative. For me it was kind of anti-philosophy, and I think gradually my sort of philosophical upbringing has kind of bled into my game design work, but I don’t think that stops it from being a creative art.

Liam: Um, one of the things that I think is prevalent in your work, and that really struck me, even playing QWOP back in the day before I knew who made it, is that you use frustration as a design tool, or almost like a pattern.

Bennett: Right.

Liam: And I think coming from interface design that’s a really foreign idea.

Bennett: Right.

Liam: Because we’re taught to build interfaces that avoid frustration at all costs.

Bennett: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Liam: And maybe that’s because our interfaces are made to get someone to a goal that isn’t using the interface itself, but either way I’m interested to hear how that works and how you use frustration.

Bennett: Yeah I think this is a really interesting problem. My most recent game, Getting Over It, was kind of inspired by this question a little bit. Games are caught on the horns of a dilemma. With software it, it’s straightforward, software is something that has a use. It’s meant to produce a particular effect, uh, or do a certain thing for you, and you can measure how good software is by how effective it is at doing what it’s mainly meant to do, and how little it gets in your way. Right? So, frustration is just straightforwardly bad for software. I think that’s sort of a reasonable point of view to take as a software designer, but games are a little bit like software, and a little bit like art.

One of the things we would not say about art, is that it is supposed to, uh, produce a particular effect in you, and those two things are at odds I think in, in certain ways. I once went to a lecture about the definitions of pornography. It’s like this long history of people discussing what’s obscene, and what’s not obscene, and trying to find legal definitions of, of pornography, and one of the definitions that I heard about in this lecture was, the idea that pornography is literature that’s useful. Right? It’s designed … It’s, it’s successful to the extent that it produces in you a certain neurological effect, and everything else about pornography is sort of secondary.

And I think games … Video games in particular are seen by many people as similar to that. Similar to pornography, except what they’re supposed to produce is a feeling of fun, or excitement, or engagement, whatever it might be that the person is interested in. It’s supposed to do this particular thing, and if it doesn’t do it, then it’s not a successful video game, and everything else is secondary to those people.

And then there’s this community of game designers, it’s not just independent game designers, it’s not just art game designers, but, you know, throughout the industry, who see it as a creative art, and they don’t, they don’t think that producing fun is the primary goal. It’s something that you might worry about as a designer in order to keep people engaged with your work, it’s like a tool of the trade, but it’s not the kind of primary thing, and those two things are just deeply at odds with each other, but they have to coexist in games. I mean it just, for one thing they’re made out of software. Right? They just are.

The thing that really struck me before I went to work on my last game, is I was watching some review videos on YouTube, and I noticed that, the thing that’s really different about those reviews is that they often boot up the game, and then the first thing they do is go to the settings menu, and they’re like, “Uh, let’s take a look at what settings are exposed to us.” And it’s like, “It’s good, yes, we can change the refresh rate, I can change the vertical sync, and the resolution. I see some quality settings here, that’s very good. I can change my audio output.” And it was like this was primary to them, because what they want is to be able to produce this particular set of effects, and in order to do that it’s powerful software if you have more control over it right? Like nobody really like a software or an app that has no configurability, because everybody’s use case is different.

I find that so alienating as a designer, because that to me in games is, uh, you know sometimes actually to be fair … It’s. it’s sometimes what I want as a player, but as a designer it’s the opposite of what I want to do. I want to ship a game with no settings menu. I want to decide everything for the player, and for that to be a complete artwork that I just give to them, and then they experience it as I intended, and nobody would think that was strange if I was writing a book, or, uh, producing installation art, or something like that, but it’s culturally very strange to, you know, a very large chunk of the, kind of, game player audience.

And I think that’s kind of led to a situation that we’re in right now, where it’s very orthodox for game designers to to be concerned with software design in the way that software designers are, and that has led to certain orthodoxies like frustration is always bad, confusion … If people are confused about what to do in a game, that’s always bad. Uh, if they get angry, or if they get bored. Any of these things that we would construct as sort of standing in the way of the function of a piece of software is deemed to be bad in game design, and as a way of railing against that kind of elimination of frustration, and confusion, I try to make games that just do that overtly. I’m letting you know that it’s going to be frustrating right at the outset.

Liam: Right, so you’re creating like a complete expression.

Bennett: Yeah, I mean I want to be able to express myself drawing from a full palette of, of human experience. I want to be able to use those feelings. I want to be able to explore what frustration is like. Maybe it’s richer and more interesting than people have given it credit for.

Uh, there’s another good example uh, that I think we see a lot of in video games now, and I’ve seen a lot of minimalistic indie games especially where there’s like a menu that allows you to choose a different color scheme. They’ve put together, uh, 16 different but tasteful color schemes, and there’s a menu you go to to choose which color scheme you want, and that to me is really strange. Right? It would never be the case that you would walk into an art gallery, and they’d be like, “Well, we’ve got all these different paintings, the the artist did ten various for you, we want you to pick the one that you want to see.”

Liam: Sure, “I want to see Starry Night at dusk.”

Bennett: Right, right, right.

Liam: (Laughs)

Bennett: (Laughs) It’s like, “Oh I don’t like Starry Night that way, I wish it was bigger, and so I’m gonna go to the room that has the big Starry Night.” That would be strange, right? I mean there, there’s a, there’s a kind of canonical fact about what Starry Night is that you’re there to appreciate, as a lover of art, uh, and that includes the materials it was made with, all the decisions that were made. The colors, the shapes, everything there is part of the canonical fact about what Starry Night is, and would never ask the art patron to decide any of those things. Right? That would be, that would be crazy, and yet I go to these games which have like this menu, I, I now have to decide what color the game is, and immediately I think that changes my relationship to the game in a certain way.

Liam: If we think about a game that doesn’t have these menus, or it doesn’t allow someone to kind of modulate the thing that you’re expressing by creating the game, what would you say are like some of the building blocks of the ways that people interact with games? Like what makes the interface of the game absent of those menus?

Bennett: Sometimes it’s just about making considered sort of authoritarian choices for the player. They can be choices about what your character is, and who you are. Every time I can take a button away that asks the player to change a setting or make a choice, I feel like I’m pushing them more into a realm of not noticing that they’re using software to play a game. Right? One of the core goals as a designer of games is you want that whole layer of computer-y-ness to go away, and every floating element you have on the screen, every item you have in a menu is eroding that in some way, but you know, you pay a pretty heavy price for not putting those things in as well. Right? I remember, uh, when Jonathan Blow shipped The Witness, there was no field of view slider in the menu, so he has this aesthetic too. Right? He takes his work very seriously as a piece of art, and he wanted to kind of remove as much friction as possible.

And there was this kind of colossal backlash in the community of players like, “I need to have this field of view slider. If I can’t change the field of view of my 3D view, then I’m gonna feel motion sick, or I’m gonna have this problem, or this other problem.” Just like, raw anger. So, I’m not completely unsympathetic to that anger as well, as a person who uses computers I definitely have felt that. You know, when you go to use a piece of software, even play a game, and you can’t get it working the way you want you’re annoyed, you paid money for a piece of software, and you’re like, “Ah who does he think he is deciding my field of view for me.”

I’m not sure how to reconcile that, except that I have the idea that the more that we can remind people that there are human beings behind video games, the, the less they will feel that way. Video games, I think partly because of their, their history as software, as part of the software industry have tended to kind of like suppress that.

Liam: So, speaking of reminding folks that there’s a person behind the game.

Bennett: Mm.

Liam: I’m going to talk about a game where I feel like you had a pretty explicit role: Getting Over It. First of all, just tell me what is Getting Over It about?

Bennett: So Getting Over It is a game where you drag yourself up a mountain with a climbing hammer, and your body is in a metal cauldron, and, uh, that’s it. I mean there’s not really much more to the story of it than that, but I introduce it in the voiceover commentary of the whole thing as a exploration of feelings of frustration, and as a homage to a old B game Sexy Hiking, but this is the game that came out of this vein of thinking. I was interested in whether games can articulate themselves as not being software, whether they can be disobedient, whether we can use frustration as a component. This is like a position piece in a way. For me it’s my most un-software-y, undesigned, uh, piece of game design.

Liam: I have to ask this. The kind of tagline for the game is that you made this game for a certain type of person, who is that person?

Bennett: Yeah, so I introduced the game by saying, “I made this game for a certain kind of person, to hurt them.” This is what I’m talking about, I have a job to do when I’m introducing this game. Which is to let you know it’s not going to follow established norms of software design. As I was making it I realized that what I wanted to commit to in the experience was this feeling of making a lot of progress, and then losing it. It’s like getting a long way, and then losing all your progress was the particular flavor of frustration I was most interested in. I need to be able to give you a sense that this is intended and, that was one of the ways. So, one of the ways is just to say to people, just at the very outset, the first thing you hear about the game, is that I’ve made it to hurt you and, people are like, “That’s a weird thing to say. You know, games are supposed to be fun, not for suffering.” But you take a look at it, and you think, “Well this is the experience.”

Now having said that, if I just put it out there with no framing whatsoever it would just be viewed as the most broken pathetic, badly designed piece of rubbish in video game history. So, you have to do a, a lot of framing. That’s what I’m doing there. So, to answer your question, who is the person? It’s really everyone, but I think most people don’t realize that there is something to be enjoyed in frustrating experiences that you can derive pleasure, or interest, or at least a kind of memorable experience from something that is, uh, on its face just a negative sensation.

Liam: I want to talk about the commentary that you did as well, because I feel like that’s part of the, the framing, and part of the context, and maybe something that helps players actually become introspective and think about that.

Bennett: Right, yeah, if it’s a piece of art, and I want them to understand that there is intent behind it, they need to know that there’s a person behind it, and that’s where I get this idea that, well maybe I should just be speaking through the whole thing. Maybe I can even explain some of the decisions that I’ve made, and then overtime as you get further and further in the game I assume that people will just stop playing as, as time goes on, and in fact my retention graph shows there’s like a drop off in survivorship through the game as people get more and more frustrated, (laughs) and find it more difficult they stop playing. But the people who are left, I can guarantee understand what I’m trying to, or they’re feeling the experience that I’m trying to make them feel, and I can speak to them then as people who understand that.

And so, as you get closer to the end there’s more of a kind of an intimacy, there’s more of a sense of being simpatico with the player, and I can speak to them about that as well and, I thought, well, when you lose progress I should also say something, and so I started looking up things that people say as condolences, famous quotes, and sayings that people have used to comfort people who have suffered some kind of loss, or some misfortune, and it’s a little tongue in cheek, because I know it’s not real suffering as well. It’s a video game. Right? You lost some progress in video game, you didn’t die, nobody died, so I’m also like a little bit poking fun at the player, but I’m also there to support them in a, in a moment of frustration, and I think that that also kind of helps to frame the experience as something that is the intended outcome. I meant for you to fall here, that was the point.

Liam: It seems like this kind of inherent frustration in the game could actually invert at some point to become accomplishment, or like some more positive emotion, right?

Bennett: Yeah, I mean when you get to the end, when you, uh, finish you climb the mountain, it invites you into a live chatroom. The way I set it up to begin with is I would get an e-mail every time somebody finished the game. I thought it would be really rare, at least it was, uh, in the, in the first instance rare enough that I would always go along and congratulate people, and get to hear from them how they were feeling, and they would generally say, “My hands are shaking, you know I feel a kind of weird elation, and, and relief.” Which uh, which was great, that was really what I wanted them to feel, but the other interesting thing that they said is that in the back half of the game, once they had fallen enough times, they stopped feeling frustration when they would lose hours of progress, and they started to feel a kind of a zen.

You often see that with people who play the game, is that they start out very angry and kind of seeing red when they lose progress, and then as time goes on they start to appreciate it, and it becomes a thing, and they’re like, “Oh but that’s actually what I’m here for.” And they’re feeling it, but it’s like the bitterness that you taste when you drink a cup of coffee. When you’re a baby you would cry if somebody gave you coffee, it’s too bitter, it’s like biologically we’re, uh, set up to dislike that kind of flavor, but you acquire the taste, and then when you have it still it’s like, ew, bitter, but then you’re like, hmm, yeah I really like how bitter that is.

Liam: There’s something underneath the pain.

Bennett: Right.

Liam: That makes it worth it.

Bennett: Yeah, or maybe pain is just worth it. Without wanting to advance like a weird theory of masochism or something like that, I think that a lot of the time these negative experiences or feelings that you associate with negative outcomes, when you experience them in a safe bounded way they’re just flavors of experience that you can learn to appreciate, and they can have lots of contours, and nuance, uh, like a sad, you know, a sad movie. You feel sad. You’re sad in that moment, but it’s a safe kind of sadness, because you’re not, you know it’s not actually connected to any misfortune that you have suffered. Uh, in fact, it’s good, you enjoy it, you enjoy crying at a sad movie. It’s like, if a movie can make you cry, that’s like one of the best things a movie can do. I think we all understand that, but I think it’s sort of open for games to produce all kinds of experiences.

I’ve definitely cried at a game, I’ve been angry at a game, I’ve laughed at a game, but games have more power to elicit frustration than just about any other creative medium, because of the interactive nature of them. I can bring more frustration than I can with a book, or with a piece of music, and that’s exciting to me.

It’s like you want, you want to gravitate towards the strong experiential flavors when you’re designing something. At least I do. I want work to be affecting, uh, rather than just flat.

Liam: So, all of these strong emotions that typically we might not want to experience are actually happening in kind of like a safe container for us.

Bennett: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, there’s this idea in, in game studies of the, uh, of the magic circle. It’s like there’s a sense of any experience that I have, or any behavior that I elicit in a game is not real, it’s like contained within the kind of space of the game — and some people think that that’s not real, and the behavior in games is real behavior, and, and experiences in games are real behavior — but you do know that it’s bounded. It’s a bounded experience. If I make you angry in a video game, we can say, “It’s just a video game.” I think people understand that.

And, a huge part of what art is, is a container to experience and express emotions that you don’t want infecting your everyday life. Most people want their kind of day to day life to be low amplitude, low drama, and then when they’re at leisure, when they’re in this kind of environment for experiencing art, or whatever it might be, entertainment. That’s when you can feel a high-amplitude emotion safely, and they can be as high as you want, it can be as intense as you want.

Liam: I want to switch back to the more tactical side of things.

Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Liam: And talk about the role that controls play, and what affect that has on the design.

Bennett: The first thing that I start thinking about when I’m designing a game, when I’m concepting a game is what … First of all what the hardware will be, and then secondly what the person will be doing with the hardware, and in this case this was a game that was commissioned by, uh, Humble Monthly Bundle, and I asked them, you know, “Who is your typical player?” And they said it’s a single person, by themselves on a Windows computer with a mouse and a keyboard, and I’m not interested in using control schemes that everybody else uses. I think there’s lots of interesting game design work to be done in those places.

So, I had a mouse and keyboard, uh, and I thought, “Well, I’ve done a bunch of keyboard games. Let’s do a game that is just mouse.” And I had in the back of my mind already that I wanted to, uh, do this homage to, to Sexy Hiking, and it just seemed like this was a good opportunity to, to do this. It’s a game where you, you just purely move the mouse. So, I set about building it, and of course I, I do most of my, uh, development, all my computing on a laptop. I have a MacBook Pro, just this giant trackpad, and I just prefer it to a mouse, I just prefer it.

You know, so, I was aware in the back of my mind I had to do some testing with a mouse, I had to make sure that the experience was sort of the same. But I, I was really just playing it everyday with a trackpad, and that, you know is really kind of interestingly different, uh, especially for a game where all you’re doing is moving a, a mouse around. The trackpad feels very different, but by the time I got to the end it was really good, uh, on a track pad, and pretty bad on a mouse, so my play testers who were all using mice kept on telling me their hands were getting cramped. I’m like, “What? How can your hand be getting cramped?” Right? “All I’m asking you to do is move the mouse around, you’re getting cramped from like moving your wrist a tiny little bit?” Uh, but, I was watching them, and sure enough like they’re gripping the mouse, because the game is stressful, they’re gripping the mouse really, really tightly, and I realized the touch pad, if I don’t want to move it, or if I want to move very, very slowly I just push harder with my finger and friction slows it down for me.

With a mouse generally that does not work. If I try to push it straight down it’s going to just slide, so you need to come up with another solution for that. I wound up having to experiment with kind of acceleration curves, and all these different sorts of technical things just to try to get the touchpad experience very close to the, to the mouse experience, and same again, to get the, to get the touchscreen experience similar to the touchpad experience. I still think the game is like … The canonical experience is a touch pad, because that’s what I wrote it with, but this is just one of those areas where reality of writing PC games is that not everyone has the same hardware.

But, yeah I think the experiences that I grew up with as a child coming up and playing video games for the first time. You know, I was born in ’78, when I, when I would play video games a lot of the times it was in, uh, arcades where through that period of time a lot of the games had bespoke hardware, so the designer got to say exactly what the hardware was going to be, and often they got to design things that nobody else had. Those games I think are in some way amplified by the fact that the game can be designed to match the physical embodiment of the controls.

Liam: Right, you’re kind of controlling how people access the thing that you’ve expressed.

Bennett: Right, right and you’re controlling how it feels in their hand. I mean this is just like, this is an interface, just as much as, uh, any kind of like on screen button, or switch is a part of the interface. Of course the hardware is part of the interface, and if you can design that, you, of course you want to. So, you know ideally you have perfect hardware for the game. Now, of course the reality of computing is you can’t always dictate what the hardware will be. More often than not you’re given standardized hardware, and then it becomes a kind of thing where you have to design the game around the hardware. What’s going to be in the game is designed around what it’s going to feel like in the hand rather than the other way around. Having said that, you can make certain kinds of decisions. You know QWOP is a game that is named after the keys that are used on the keyboard.

Uh, when you’re designing with a keyboard you have a lot of decisions that you can make. You know, there’s a lot of feel that you can decide on. Space bar is a really loud, clattery button, uh, whereas the letter keys are kind of quiet, and, and small. You can, you can decide where they’re oriented next to each other. I think one of the things that makes people think QWOP is a strange game is that most games don’t use those keys. Wasn’t so strange for me though, I grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, the old Sinclair computer, British computer that most people did not have a joystick, or any other controller for … so the games that come out on that, it’s always keys, and there was just no standardization of which keys either. It’s always a random thing.

I was just playing, uh, Horace Goes Skiing the other day, which is one of the oldest Australian games. It’s Q, Z, I, P. These keys are, are not, they’re near each other. You’re like, “Oh this is weird.” That’s got its own feeling as well. That’s not good design I don’t think, I think that’s just naïve design, but it sort of opens up the ways that we can iterate on those things, and design around them.

Liam: Until you get to a point where you’re actually mapping keys to like, human muscle groups to control a runner.

Bennett: Right, right if I’m going to have two buttons for your thigh muscles, and two buttons for your calf muscles, you know, they can be any keys. I can’t tell you why I picked QW and OP, except that I knew it had to be different than uh, arrow keys, or WASD, right, because those carry a kind of cultural loading and literacy. If I give you the arrow keys, you expect directionality, and so I needed to choose keys that were not those things.

Liam: Yeah. I want to wrap up as I usually do by asking about the future. So, where do you see I guess your personal practice, and like design sensibilities evolving in the future, and also just games in general?

Bennett: Yeah, I’m not really sure what I want to do next except that I remain interested in same sorts of flavors of experience. I’ve been messing around with a lot of golf games. Golf, for me, is a fantastic video game sport, because it has this kind of characteristic of building stakes, and then smashing you down, and you get like … Just like you’re on the 17th hole, you’re five under par, and then you blow it out, and it’s just a terrible score, and for me what I want my video games to have … What I think all video games are concerned with is having an experience that feels like it matters whether you did well or poorly, should matter in some sort of way.

And so you have to build stakes up from nothing, because they’re video games, and nothing that happens in them matters at all. I feel like I’ve done my position piece for kind of author insertion in a game. I feel like people at least for a little while should know that I’m, when they’re playing my games that I’m sort of there in the background, so I don’t think that I need to do that explicitly again, at least not for a while. I think where things are interesting right now in games is there’s this sort of network multiplayer stuff. Not just big colossal popular games like League of Legends, or Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, which are the big multiplayer triple A games, but also on the kind of the cheap end, on the IO games, Agar.io, Slither.io, I think it’s kind of fascinating ground as well.

Since I used to work on flash games I still believe that some of the most exciting opportunities for designers are on the web. Partly because it’s the only space where you can publish games without the involvement of a platform holder, or a publisher, or any of those other sorts of things, and that opens up creative opportunities that don’t exist otherwise. You know, I think QWOP is an example of a game where if it was published by somebody, or if it was on Newgrounds, or Kongregate, it couldn’t have been popular. What makes QWOP interesting to people is they think they’ve discovered something strange that doesn’t belong, that everybody who encounters it tells their friends, because they think they’ve found like some corner of the internet that is neglected, and that kind of experience can’t be had on a commercial platform. So, I’m really interested in, in web technologies as well.

Liam: Definitely, and I think that’s an interesting point that it allows you to create your own context, and like frame things.

Bennett: Right, which is what I want. I want to be able to control the experience as much as possible. When you give a game away for free that’s played in a browser you don’t owe people that settings menu. Right? You don’t owe them anything. They didn’t pay, and that gives you a full palette of creative expression of the kinds of experiences that you, that you create. I find that super exciting.

Liam: Alright, well thank you again for joining me on Design Notes.

Bennett: And thanks for having me.

Molly Wright Steenson, author of Architectural Intelligence

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

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

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Aaron Lammer: Uh, welcome. Molly Wright Steenson.

Molly Wright Steenson: Hello.

Aaron: I really enjoyed your talk yesterday.

Molly: Thanks.

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

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

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

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

Aaron: (laughs) The lost years.

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

So I researched Christopher Alexander, and-

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

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

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

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

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

Molly: Yeah! That and even-

Aaron: In a [hierarchical] manner.

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

Aaron: I believe it.

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

Aaron: Yeah, yeah.

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

Aaron: (laughs)

Molly: So, (laughs) So there’s-

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

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

Aaron: Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron: (chuckles)

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

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

Molly: Yep.

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

Molly: Yeah.

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

Molly: Yep.

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

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

Aaron: Someone sets the-

Molly: Learning, yeah-

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

Molly: That’s exactly it.

Aaron: As a blanket term.

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

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

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

Aaron: Sure.

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

Aaron: This close. (laughs)

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

Molly: Yeah.

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

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

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

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

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

Aaron: Yeah.

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

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

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

Molly: Whoa!

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

Molly: That’s amazing.

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

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

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

Aaron: Was any of this stuff actually built or-

Molly: No, No.

Aaron: Are these all- all theoretical?

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

Aaron: Right.

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

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

Molly: Right?

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

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

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

Molly: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

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

Molly: Yeah.

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

Molly: Yeah.

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

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

Aaron: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

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

Molly: No.

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

Molly: No.

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

Molly: Yeah.

Aaron: If they’re properly built.

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

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

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

Aaron: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

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

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

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

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

Aaron: Google can be used to locate this book.

Molly: This is right.

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

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

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.