People say, well, what would you have done differently?
We went to school and I say, well, I would have taken an
acting class in a public speaking class, in a comedy
class, and, you know, all these things where I had to get up in
front of people and put myself out there.
So I became comfortable with it. And like I said, it took me a
long time to do that. But now it's a big part of what
I do, whether it's going out and speaking, doing something like
this, standing in front of a bunch of executives, whatever
it's, it's just feeling comfortable and confident with
you are and being able to communicate ideas and values
that way. And then I think that's really
important for people. Hello and welcome to the AIG
Design Podcast. We are the official podcast for
the oldest professional association for design.
And my name is Lee Sean Huang. I'm the Senior Director of
Learning and Programs here at AIGA and the host and producer
of the show, where we talk about professional development and
creative growth for designers. First, I want to take the chance
to give a special thanks to our AIGA members.
Your support, your membership makes programming like this
podcast available to the entire design community.
So if you're not yet an AIGA member, you can learn more and
join us at aiga.org. Or you can follow us and share
your thoughts with us on social media at AIGA Design.
Our guest for this episode is Robert Brunner, Chief Designer
at Beats by Dre and founder and partner at Ammunition.
With more than 40 years of industrial design experience,
including as a partner at Pentagram, Robert has been named
one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in business and
has built iconic products including Beats by Dre, Lyfts in
car Icons, and the countertop Point of Sale square stand.
We're going to take a look at Robert's incredible career
journey, discuss how he builds products that stand out and have
purpose, and explore how we can build a culture of faith in
design no matter what company we're working at.
Robert, welcome to the AIGA Design podcast.
Well, thank you, Lisa. I'm really happy to be here.
Awesome. Let's jump right into things.
Great. You've been working in product
design for so long. Yes, on iconic products that we
see all the time. And these are with huge
companies like Apple and with Pentagram, your former agency.
Can you tell us a little bit about your journey?
How did you get here? How did you get into the
industry? And yeah, how did you find so
much success along the way? That's probably a long answer.
So I'll try and I'll try and give this short of it, but it's,
it's an interesting one. You know, I'll, I'll go back to
actually growing up because one of the advantages you have when
you do get further along is you can look through the, the lens
of your past and you realize, oh, that's how I got here right
in my family, I was the youngest, my father was a very
accomplished engineer. He actually developed a lot of
the mechanical technology in the first disk drives at IBM.
He was a consummate tinkerer builder.
He built boats in our driveway, just always building something.
My mother, who originally was started out as a as a fashion
model, but then became a homemaker, but was always a
craftsperson and an artist, was constantly painting, constantly
making things, constantly redecorating the house.
It was, you know it. Yeah.
My, I used to joke that we never had the same Christmas tree,
right. Every, the Christmas tree was a
piece of performance art as far as my mother was concerned.
And so that was the environment I grew up in, right?
Everything was a project. You know, I didn't really
realize it at the time. I just thought that's the way
all households were. But that was, that was my
household. And so, you know, went through
high school and you get to the end of high school and you meet
with the career counselor. And the career counselor looked
at my transcripts and said, well, you're good in math and
science, and your father's an engineer, so you should be an
engineer. So I said, OK, that's fine.
What he did, he didn't really look at, which is kind of an
indictment at how I did in art or how I did in shop or anything
like that that required my hands or my creative thinking, which I
excelled in. But, you know, I thought, well,
OK, engineering, I originally I thought, well, I'll be a civil
engineer 'cause that's, you know, I had this romantic notion
of building bridges, right? That would be really, really
cool. And then I, as I started school,
somebody told me, no man, all, all the money's in electrical
engineering, which was true. And so I switched to become an E
major, but hated, just just hated it.
I went through the first year of core engineering.
My father loved it, right? He's like helping me with my, my
calculus problems and stuff. So but I decided this isn't
right for me. I'm going to pay more attention
to who I am. So I went over to the art
department and I'd heard of this thing called graphic design.
Actually, I, I was some form of commercial art, you know, that I
didn't really know a lot about, but knew that that's what people
did. Wandered into the art building
and opened the door. And immediately, this was at San
Jose State University and was immediately presented with this
display cabinet full of industrial design work, sketches
and models and renderings. And, you know, I just, I don't
know how long it stood there. It was probably a long time
looking at all this and thought, OK, this makes perfect sense,
right? Because I, I love art.
I love building things. I spend more time in the garage
working on my bike than anything else, you know, So this is what
I want to do. Went over and changed my major.
Pissed my father off, right? He thought he didn't think much
of designers, classic engineering sort of viewpoint
that, you know, basically in his world, industrial designers made
his job more difficult. And, you know, he made this
comment to me. I'll never forget it was, well,
they're the guys that specify the paint and it usually peels
off. That's what he said, you know, I
said that, you know, but undaunted and feeling a bit
rebellious, I continued forward and just just loved it, loved
everything about design, just, you know, was immersed in it.
You know, I often have told my kids today, when you find that
thing that you are working on in the middle of the night, you
don't care how late it is. You don't care, you know, about
what's going on in the world. You're just doing it.
That's when you found something, right?
That's the thing that will give you purpose and allow you to
grow. And so that was what I did.
And so started working in a design firm when I was in
school. I was really fortunate in that
this is a, a company called GVO in Palo Alto, CA.
They're not around anymore. It was one of the larger offices
in the Bay Area. It's sort of early Silicon
Valley. And shockingly, I pretty quickly
was working on real projects and as a student.
And by the time I actually got out of school, I was leading
projects, which to me thinking, running a design for bidet,
thinking about giving a graduate, you know, just got out
of school, you know, responsibility on as a lead on
the projects. Insane.
But their model was kind of economic.
They said, we're, we're paying this guy next to nothing and
he's capable. This makes a lot of sense.
But it, you know, it was really great for me because I learned a
lot. And by the time I was a year or
two out of school, I felt really strong and, and, and confident
in what I could do. And so from that point, I'd
worked with a couple guys at GBO named Gerard Furbichon, Jeff
Smith. We decided to start our own
company, which initially was a company called Interform.
That didn't really work out. And it kind of morphed into
Lunar. And that was really how things
got going. And Lunar, Apple became a client
of ours in at Lunar. And then Apple offered me the
job to become their director of design and it built that
department and the pentagram and ammunition, it was just kind of
everything just seemed to flow. There's a lot that I've learned
along the way. You know, we can dive into that,
but it's that's kind of the the path of how I got to where I am
today. That's awesome.
Yeah. I we can totally weave in some
of the lessons that you've learned along the way.
Maybe to just finish up this portion of some of your
background. Can you tell us a little bit
more about ammunition founding that studio and what sets you
all apart and what you do there? I went to Apple, you know, then
really didn't have a design team at that point.
They had a few guys internally and originally I turned down the
job and then I said, OK, well they came back and said what do
you want? That was young and naive.
I didn't save tons of money and I said I want to basically if
any company could support a world class design organization,
it's Apple. So if you want to build that
onion, they said yes. Since we did that, went through,
it's about 7 years, you know, became, was successful at that.
Learned an amazing amount. The longer I went on, the
farther I got from being a designer, right?
Just spent more and more time in eight hour meetings with other
executives, you know, where I only really needed to be there
1/2 an hour, but I didn't know when that half an hour would be,
right? So felt like I was atrophying.
So I decided I wanted to go back into consulting.
I was going to start my own company.
And that's when I was approached by Pentagram.
So if this makes sense, Pentagram, you know, was always
something I aspired to because of Kenneth Grange and his work
and did that for 10 years. That was amazing.
But so I'm working the ammunitions.
But what I discovered was that Eva Pentagram was fantastic and
the people I worked with were by far the best at what they did in
the world. What I did in product design,
real hardcore product development.
I was the only partner in the company that was doing that work
and as part of an organization was largely driven by graphic
design professionals, few architects.
Again, amazing people, but it's kind of a boutique within a
boutique, right? And it's.
Hard to be the only one to. Yeah.
And I was seeing this shift in how industrial design was being
viewed, especially in the technology business, where it'd
gone from this sort of necessary evil or, you know, styling to
really many companies, largely because of Apple viewing
industrial design as a, as a core competency they needed to
have. And, you know, felt like I
really wasn't quite positioned in the right way to take
advantage of that energy that was flowing.
So I'll forget, I was trying to decide what to do.
And I was on my honeymoon with, in Nicaragua with, with my wife
and we're sitting on the beach and I was still Hemming and
hawing and complaining. And she's just said to me, you
know, more or less I'm paraphrasing, why don't you just
shut up and go start your company and do that.
And so I, I was, so I became a a rare partner who actually quit
from pentagram. Most most partners either were
fired or died. Right, it seems like a forever
kind of job when you were sent to partner a pentagram.
And so, yeah, yeah, you know what shocked everybody?
But everybody was really supportive.
And and so I was able to, since I was only one that did what I
did, I was able to take my book of business and really just move
it to this new thing. And really why I sort of wove in
Apple and Pentagram because I, I learned some important lessons
in there about product design and really that at it's best,
it's a multidisciplinary process really is about the thing that
someone acquires and brings into their life and everything that
they experience with it really adds up to its value.
And that's not just how it looks right or how it feels in your
hand. There's a lot that goes into it
in terms of how they learn about it, you know, how it arrives,
how they learn to use it, how they use it, what happens when
it breaks, you know, all these things, right?
So I really wanted to build a multidisciplinary studio, but
with products at the center. And that's, that's what
ammunition became. The other key thing was, you
know, I had this epiphany one day.
Like most designers, when I get a project, I'm I'm just happy to
get the project, especially if it's a cool one.
And as long as I make enough money to pay myself and my
people, I'm fine, right? I'm cool with that, right?
Let's get this thing, get it done, have a great portfolio
piece, have a great time doing it.
And then you see this thing that you've created, go out into the
world and create hundreds of millions of dollars of value,
right? And many times based on the lot
of the intellectual property you've created.
And I began to wonder is well, is there another economic model
or are there other economic models to work with?
And that was part of the the other idea of ammunition where I
had a few things beats being one of them where where I was really
participating in the economics of the product.
And we were doing a lot of work with early stage companies and
began to look at this idea that using our studio as a tool for
investment, right. So we would begin to sort of
become investors in these start-ups we were working with.
And that really it really changed the way we worked.
It was really interesting. It's not, of course, there's
great economic potential there. But what we found was when we
were integrated into the business, right, literally we
had more ability to affect that business.
Basically, people would take you more seriously and you you
weren't just this hired gun or a vendor, right, that comes and
leaves you or someone that's there.
And that and that actually caused us to be better
designers. So that that really sort of what
is what fueled ammunition and sort of this the way we created
the studio and really is, you know, we're actually on our
gosh, we just started our 19th year, which is which is pretty
amazing. Wow, congratulations.
We've been exploring the theme of margins here on the podcast
this season. And one thing that we've been
thinking about is how in society today, in our world today, we
have a ton of products to choose from, right?
There's just so much stuff. We're recording this during
Amazon Day, which they're not a sponsor, but it just thinking
about like all of the stuff that we have and all the shopping
that people do and the comparisons that people do.
So how do you find that creative power to build products that
stand out in the margins that stand out from other products,
given just how crowded the marketplace is these days?
Yeah, it is challenging. And there's, there's at times I
feel very bad because my profession is many way in many
ways at the forefront of populating the world with lots
of useless or unnecessary stuff, right?
And so from the very beginning had this notion of building
things that matter, right? Trying to really build products
that affect people in a very positive way can create change
in the world, can create change in a market, can deliver things
and enable people to do things they haven't done before.
But we have this approach, right?
So I, so I have this very sort of mixed viewpoint on research,
right? I often have joked that if great
design was born in research, there would be more, a lot more
great design, right? Because gathering information is
an important thing, but not exactly the thing that's going
to make a great product. It can build, be a foundation or
lead to direction. So we, we have a strategy team
here and we have a user experience team here.
And of course our industrial design and, and visual design
and so forth. But we started looking at that
function as answering this question whenever we, we're,
we're approaching a project. And that question is what's
worth designing in the 1st place.
Because largely many times driven by the pure economics of
product development. If you're going to develop a
product into, into the world in, in volume, you're looking at
spending at minimum $5,000,000, typically 10/20/50 a $100
million to really build something and deliver it at
scale. And it's an incredible use of
human capital, manpower, incredible use of time, as I
mentioned, dollars, natural resources, all these things that
go into building something and delivering it.
So the basic thought is, if you're going to do all that, you
better know where you're going, right?
So we, we do, we should do a fair amount of work up front to
building a framework around answering this question of
what's worth designing, right? And, and it really helps us.
It really it's, it's again, I don't, I don't view it as all
the answers are there sometimes, but really many times it's about
just framing and providing direction and building a way to
talk about the creative work that we're doing with people.
And so that that's really important part of what we do.
And we do it on almost everything big and small to sort
of figure out if we're going to do this, what's worth doing.
And, and that helps guide us quite a bit and, and it helps us
end up with something that that is in fact valuable.
That's not just another thing that looks better than the last
one, right? And so that's easy.
We can do that, but we really strive to do more.
Yeah, I think it'd be helpful to talk through a couple concrete
examples. And since you're wearing some
Beats by Doctor Dre right now, this is going to be an audio
only podcast, but I can see Robert right now in the video
stream. Can you tell us maybe the back
story behind that and then we can look at a couple other
examples? Well, it's a great story.
It's really fun and, and in many ways has really shaped
ammunition and, and my career, at least the the the latter half
of it in that, yeah, I did a look at it and I've been
literally working with beats for 19 years, which is in kind of
crazy from a relationship point of view, yeah.
Yeah, they've grown up and gone to college at this point, right?
Yes, yeah, You know, and, and I the other thing that's really
crazy is that from the original people that started, which I was
one and put it all together and built the thing, I'm the only
one left and it's still there, which is which is kind of weird,
but yeah. So how it started was like how
things, a lot of things start just happenstance.
I knew somebody who had gotten some Intel that Jimmy Ivine and
Doctor Dre were interested in building audio products.
And he set up a meeting and I went to the meeting and that was
just crazy, right. So here I am, some Silicon
Valley design nerd sitting there with Jimmy Ivine and Doctor Dre
and talking about, you know, building products.
But you know, it was, it was really interesting that very
strangely, I, I connected well with those two and, and I never
really understood it right, why there seemed to be some bond
there. Later I realized it's because
they, they viewed me as talent in the same way they viewed
their musical talent right then. Just so you know, it was someone
who could do something that they thought was exciting and they
were going to get the try and get the best out of me to
produce something. And so that that relationship
began to develop the first product, which was the Beat
Studio. And that first product was an
insane ride because honestly, Jimmy and Dre and the the small
team that they had did not know what they were doing and they
kind of knew what they wanted, but they had no idea how to get
there, no understanding of the development process.
So it took actually a while to get the first product done and
was incredibly painful. But at the same time, I was
doing design reviews with Will I am and Pharrell and Oliver
Stone, and he was just like crazy.
Whoever happened to be in the building at Universal Music any
day we were talking about the products got invited, right?
So which you might think sounds cool.
It was actually really difficult because if a superstar takes a
viewpoint on something that's completely wrong, sometimes
takes you months done and you know, and so, but, but it was
great. And then and so we did the
studio. It took a good six to nine
months and then it just exploded right just on the market.
And once Jimmy, I remember I asked him early on, what's our
marketing strategy? And he's great.
He says, Robert, our marketing strategy is a lot of people owe
me a lot of favors. And you know, literally every
music video that went out of Universal had the product in it.
Everyone that he knew who was anybody was wearing the product,
right. It was really became this
classic brand association with creativity and and greatness.
And it just it once that caught in the thing took off and then
we just began developing product after product and delivering it
and building on building the brand and building the idea.
And it was just incredible. We have an ammunition, one of
our larger forms of our practice is packaging, structural
packaging. And the whole reason we're
really good at it is because we pretty much had to take that
entire piece and develop it, source it in Asia deliberate,
you know, it just became something it was kind of one of
these all hands on deck thing. If there's something that needed
to be done, you did it. And that of course is a great
was a great learning experience. So that of course went on.
Then the Apple acquisition occurred and I thought that was
the end, right. I thought that OK, and we're
going to wind down here. ID Studio will take it over.
You know, financially it was a good thing for us.
So, so we went on a project by project basis.
We're just finishing some things and then I got this call to come
down to Cupertino and, and basically that's like we need
you back. What do you want?
You know, so, so we, we moved into a different type of
relationship and it continued that since then we're working
with Apple and developing the products.
Yeah, it seems like a real testament to the strength of
that brand since Apple has such a obviously they make their own
headphones and audio equipment and they're very specific design
aesthetic. But to keep that as a brand and
continue it going forward, I think it's a testament to that.
Yeah. And it it it's, you know, been a
fantastic foundation to build products on.
But then we we strive to really keep a very sort of beads
viewpoint on, on the things that we do.
And I think that helps bring the the value in that in that
portfolio between apple and Beads.
Is there another product that you're particularly proud of
that you want to share the back story of?
I always hate this question 'cause there's so many.
I know it's like choosing your favorite.
Children, I know there's so, so many things that well, well,
that, you know, I think the work for Square is really
interesting. We don't work with Square
anymore, but we spent a very pivotal period working with the
company and working with Jack Dorsey.
They came to us with their first credit card reader, right.
So I don't know if you remember it's, you plug it into the audio
Jack on your phone and, and you could scan credit cards.
But you the, the really incredible thing about that was
that it really democratized credit card transactions.
It used to be to be able to take Visa and MasterCard was, you
know, you had to create the this account, which was a lot of
work. You had to buy specific things
to support it. It really, you know, it would
take you a month and it's a fair amount of money and effort to
get up on being able to accept credit cards.
Now you, you've got online filled in simple information, a
few radio buttons and the next day this thing showed up in your
mail and you plugged in your phone and you could be selling
used sneakers on the sidewalk taking Visa cards.
And it's just like changed everything.
And that we thought was amazing. So, you know, the, the first
thing we did was they were having a lot of issues with the
with the reader in terms of reliability and manufacturing.
So we helped redesign that. And then Jack Kim goes with this
project, which was really reimagining the castrated Sir,
you know, the and, and where they really felt their sweet
spot was. And he is, continues to be, is
in, in small business and small business retail.
And it was a space where people take a lot of pride in their
their environment, their storefront.
They of course, need things to be as simple, as efficient as
possible. They need to be able to, you
know, process as quickly as possible, right?
All these things just made it a, a really interesting project.
And then, you know, our thing was to, well, this thing has to
be an icon, really it, it has to be universally recognizable as
this piece of technology that that is reshaping small
business. And so that all that went into
creating the the square stand, which basically took an iPad.
You put the iPad in it, downloaded the software and you
had this full functioning point of sale system.
And we ended up building this, this visual architecture for it,
which was actually very hard to build.
And it was a testament to the support of Jack and his team
that we have able to do it. And it's, you know, and the one
thing I, the reason I love it is the most important view of that
product is the back, right? And it's it's one of those rare
ones when most people approach it, they're coming up to the
back. Right, this is the customer
view. Yeah, the customer view and
honestly, it's the most beautiful backside you've ever
created it though. And they still, even though
they've gone to other generations, you know, still
when you walk into a shop and see one of those white square
stands, you immediately sort of have very positive feelings
about about the retailer. So that's another favorite.
In terms of like the connecting thread of this, I mean we've
talked about like these needs and something like that and like
connecting it to research for something like that, like the
the square stand, there's kind of two users, right?
There's like the cashier, the person working there, but then
there's also the customer in the retail store.
So how do you think about that in the research phase in terms
of like understanding people? Again, the amount of research
that we do is not huge, but it's always important research.
And, and we're really very big on just getting out to where
people are, right, whether that's in their home, whether
that's in their business, you know, and really understanding
the pain points and the challenges that they have.
And, and really, you know, and I always view it as a way of
building empathy, right? I think, you know, as a
designer, one of the most powerful things you can have is
true empathy, right? Where you can put yourself in
other people's shoes and sort of really allowing yourself to do
that. And and so, you know, seeing
things from a small business person's point of view and a
retailer's point of view and what they need to run that
business and how what the solutions that existed before
just didn't work. And then, yeah, the customer and
that that simplicity and seamlessness of a transaction.
And back to the square stand. One of the interesting things
about that, you know, when we, after working on the Reader and
doing that, we realized one of the most interesting things
about the Square experience was this was the transaction, right?
If you went up to that guy in the street to buy some sneakers,
given the sneaker, he would do something on his phone and then
he'd hand his phone to you, right?
For you to scribble a signature with your finger and then take
it back. And so that was that.
It was, that wasn't, you know, the handing of cash and giving
change or handing over the credit card.
It was that became the transaction and so we wanted to
continue that into and we saw that need, you know, in at the
retail experience from both the customer and the retailer sort
of how you'd make that work really well.
So we came up with this really amazing technology called the
Lazy Susan, right. So it was basically all we did
was put a disk, a rotating disk on the bottom of the product
that allowed you to flip it around 180° to perform that
transaction. And no, it became sort of a core
to the personality of it, right? So those are the things that
seems obvious and it seems trivial, but those are the
things you discover by sitting with people and observing the
process and understanding what's going on and, and what you need
to do to, you know, build a really good experience that
people are not only functionally satisfied, but emotionally
satisfied with. Yeah, it feels like you've
created like a, a new gesture of meaning, right?
Just as like when smartphones first came about or the iPhone
first came about more specifically and we were started
to like touch screen and swipe and do all of those sort of
things like that. Turning that point of sale
device around that iPad around for the signature and for the
choosing the tip has become like you obviously didn't do that
before with traditional cash based cash registers or even
like the the swiping of credit cards, you know back when we did
that instead of tapping. Yeah, Yeah.
Let's see. Another more recent project,
which we're very proud of is a product from a relatively new
company called Terra Cafe. And it it is a coffee machine.
We did their second generation, which is called the TKO 2, but
we're working with the founder, Sahan Damani, who is, he's based
in Brooklyn. Two things about Sahan.
One, he's, as you might guess, is a coffee maniac, right?
I've never seen anyone consume as much caffeine in, in that 12
hour day as this. This man, it fuels his energy
and intensity. But you know, more important to
us, we, you know, became enamoured with his sense of and
belief in quality, right? And, and that's sort of when we
start taking it down to what we're doing to have this
conversation about craftsmanship, right?
And well, that I wish that was a more general neutral term.
I don't have, but it's, you know, about the idea of being
really focused on the quality and craft of what you're making
and what you're building and what you're delivering to
people. And it's something that people
can feel, right? It's something when people ask
me are are we going to be put out of jobs by artificial
generative AII say no because that is always something that
people look for is the touch of other humans and their
commitment to building something great right.
And so the TKO two is a fantastic machine makes amazing
coffee rivalry machines. It's about a $400.00 I think
machine. I'll probably got that wrong and
he'll get mad at me, but but it's makes quality coffee.
It machines that you know, hence machines that cost three times
as much, but it's fully automated.
And he gave us an incredible amount of leeway on the design
on the interface to just build this really incredibly built
quality, simple, highly detailed machine.
It's got almost this very brutalist, minimalist sort of
feel about it, but it when you walk up to it, it feels
technologically advanced and be like a very quality thing on
this machine from a solid block material.
And that's, you know, something I really, I really love about it
is that when you get the opportunity as a designer to
work with someone that just really cares about what they're
making, but trust you at the same time, you almost always end
up with something great. If you get a chance to check
that out, it's it's really an amazing machine.
Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing 3
examples of your work. What I'm seeing as a connecting
thread is you've worked with clients, you've worked with
partners. It seems you know more than a
typical like client relationship because you do have that stake
in things. They believe in you and and in
the power of design. But do you have any advice for
designers who are working in context where maybe the value of
design isn't quite as appreciated by the folks that
they're working with? Yes, I do and that and that is
always a challenge and honestly, we, we still experience that
today, right? We've been working among name
names with a, a new company and you know, they're both very
opinionated and and focused on what they're doing, but don't
really understand design. So it's a constant battle,
right, to get things, you know, moving and down right.
So it, it always exists, right? But you know, I think one thing
I always go back to about designers, and I think this
crosses all design professions, which needs to change, which is
a little bit of, there's a little bit of an inferiority
thing that happens when people, it's sort of, I went to art
school. What do I know?
I'm just just a creative person, right?
And, and I remember learning this lesson when I was at Apple.
It's like, you know, I mentioned I'd go to these like 8 hour
meetings at C level type stuff and I'd listen to these
executives talk. And first of all, I thought, to
be brutally honest, half of them were idiots.
And second of all, I had thoughts and beliefs on what we
should be doing. But you know, I, I felt like,
no, I'm not, it's not my place to say.
And then I realized later I was right, right.
Actually, what I thought was the thing to do was the thing to do.
And it just taught me a lesson about speaking up and being
confident, right? And being confident in who you
are and what you know and the experience that you have and the
viewpoint that you have, it is valuable.
It brings incredible value to almost any conversation,
especially when you know you're talking about things that you're
delivering into people's lives, whether that's business or, or
as a, as a consumer product. I think that's one another thing
which I found to be incredibly important is I've been asked a
number of times in, in a slightly different context, what
the secret is to business development for a design firm,
right? And, and I, I over years of
trying a lot of things and not working, I finally realized it
came down to two things. Visibility in relationships.
You needed to make yourself and your work visible and constantly
putting out there. And the relationships that you
form that are good and and positive and solid, you leverage
those, you build on those, you expand those, right?
In any situation, even whether you're working in a corporation,
whether you're working in your own studio, I think those two
things are very important, right?
Maintaining visibility and building those relationships,
right? And you know, again, the idea of
expanding on it, right? You've worked with someone, it
was a really positive outcome. You work with that person to
introduce you into other areas and expand upon that and so
forth. And just sort of, you know, use
those relationships and the word of mouth and that visibility
continue to grow. And I, I think that's, that's a
very important thing. The last one I, I preach often
to our younger designers is to learn to communicate, right?
Learn one to speak the language of business and really
understand it, not just use buzzwords or really understand
concepts or just. Throw in like a leverage to
sound so. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And then just, it took me a long time to get comfortable with, I
mean, probably a decade of practice, which is really
getting up in, in front of people and telling the story and
building that story in a way that builds context for what
you're doing and builds emotional energy around it.
And so I, you know, I often say, if people say, what would you
have done differently when we went to school?
And I say, well, I would have taken an acting class in a
public speaking class, in a comedy class, and you know, all
these things where I had to get up in front of people and put
myself out there. So I became comfortable with it.
And like I said, it took me a long time to do that.
But now it's a big part of what I do, whether it's going out and
speaking, doing something like this, standing in front of a
bunch of executives, whatever, it's, it's just feeling
comfortable and confident with who you are and being able to
communicate ideas and values that way.
And then I think that's really important for people.
Yeah, those are great points and especially the last one, I'll
just reveal it now. This is totally not a plant at
all. But Robert, our next season of
programming, the theme is going to be design and performance.
So we're looking at whether it's performance on a stage, giving a
design talk as you were saying, but other forms of performance,
right, like negotiating the terms of a contract is a kind of
performance as well in terms of your preparing what your talking
points are, what you might be able to move on what is non
negotiable for you. So yeah, I think that's a great
point for a lot of designers to think about in terms of how they
perform, being designers, how they perform, being leaders in
addition to their core craft of whatever they're doing, whether
it's products or pixels or or whatever that might be.
Yeah, no, it is and, and it's become a thing for me now it's
it's just interesting, become a bit of a passion in that the I
do a lot of public speaking, which I used to be terrified of.
I still am. I still, you know, the half an
hour before I have to go on stage, I still say, why the fuck
am I doing this? Why did I, why did I fly across
the world to stand in front of 2000 people and potentially
embarrass myself? I don't know.
But once I'm up there, I've kind of, I had this sort of epiphany,
a couple things. One, I used to worry a lot about
my content until I realized it's very unlikely that any person
comes to see me twice, right? So having some content you put
together and, and delivering it over and over and getting better
and better at it, right? In terms of your pauses, in
terms of your punch lines, in terms of your flow.
And, you know, all these things is actually a big part of the
delivery. And then I, so, and then I've
actually got to this point now where I strangely, I enjoy being
in front of an audience and seeing the faces, but I kind of
become disconnected from that. And I'm just completely like an
actor following through this narrative and focusing on
telling the story and doing in a way that's compelling and
emotional. Totally.
That in a way has become, you know, an interesting thing for
me is, like I said, realizing that there's this whole new
thing to be learned about delivery.
Totally. And I think it's again, at
different levels. It takes a lot of time, it takes
a lot of experiencing and gaining of confidence, but it's
it's an important part of inspiring people totally to
follow you and get excited about the things that you're doing.
You mentioned earlier that you wish you had taken an acting
class. Did you end up taking one or
work with a coach which on any of this stuff or this is just
through Hard Knocks of giving a lot of talks and figuring it out
along the way? It's Hard Knocks.
I mean, I do, I have this group
that, that I think they organized this working with you
here and that help you. And they've done a couple like
sort of audits, which is always humbling, which unfortunately,
you know, it's probably 70% positive, but you know, it's the
25 or 30% that needs to be improved.
That always, you know, sticks you with you totally.
You'd like it to be 99% good. But no, no, I haven't.
It was really just at first it was a necessity realizing, OK,
if I'm going to have a business and I'm going to leave things, I
need to get good at this. And then as I said, it's sort of
morphed into, oh, it's just something I want to be good at.
I'm going to figure out how to be good at it.
And that's scary, at times exhilarating and and at times
fun. And it's important.
Wonderful. Like a lot of things, it just
takes practice. Yeah.
So to wrap up our time together, I think we're already on this
theme of learning, but there's a question that we like to ask all
of our guests this season here at the AIG Design Podcast, which
is about learning in general. So what is something?
And it can be a fact, a scale and insight, whatever you want
it to be that you've learned recently.
What's something you've learned recently?
It could be related to your work at Ammunition or just in your
broader creative life, whatever you want to answer with that.
Well, I talked about the speaking thing.
That's been a big thing that I've been doing and a lot of
learning in one that's interesting and much closer to
work, which, you know, I, I mentioned this sort of notion of
what effect does generative AI have on what we're doing right?
And so really I've been diving in to figure out where we're
going to go with this as much as possible.
And it's become fascinating to me.
There's a saying which I love, which is 2 opposing things can
be true at the same time. It's, it's said more eloquently,
but it's, it's a really interesting concept.
And for me, it's this idea of change is constant, yet things
stay the same, right? Because it's, you know, it can
really sum up our experience in this world, right?
While we're constantly surrounded by change, things are
always moving, always in flux, have something new all the time.
Yet at the quorum, anything stay the same.
And so, you know, as you know, we were looking at where we are
as an organization and where I am as a as a design professional
and what's going on. I took back the the one of the
first products I ever did. That was successful was this
product called Mindset. I think I did it in 1992 and it
ended up winning a lot of awards going in the Museum of Modern
Art was pretty successful in the computer marketplace.
But my tools, the only piece of automation I had was an HP
calculator, right? That was it.
Everything else, drafting machine pens and pencils.
What I've seen is these wave after wave of technology that
ends up freaking people out, but in the end does one thing.
It frees us up to think more, right?
And that's kind of where I've started to view as generative
AI. And what what's happening to me
and, and our profession is that we're seeing increased
automation research and more speed and accuracy and creative
and technical efforts. We're using it for concept
creation as an augmentation. We're seeing automation and
development, refinement, all these things, but it, it, it's
sort of moving what we do towards this role of producer,
director and editor, right? Which is kind of what I do all
the time anyway. But now it's becoming more and
more broad. But the thing that that I find
that's important about this is I believe the connection that
design creates with people cannot be outsourced, right?
It cannot be handed over and automated because as I was
saying about Terra Cafe, I think when people bring something into
their lives, they feel the hand of the other people that were
involved, right? You know, when you know
something about how something was made and the fact that
someone went to this extraordinary effort to make it
and improve your life, that's the thing you connect with many
times. And so this area I'm still
playing with, still understanding, it's still
evolving, but it's kind of become a little bit of focus for
me of, of figuring out where this is all going to go and, and
what are we going to do with it. You have people that are scared
that essentially generative AI is going to take over what we do
and will no longer be necessary. I don't believe that to be true.
I think it's going to change a lot of what we do.
And it's, it's one of those things you're, you're better off
diving into it than just resisting it.
But at the same time, I, I don't, I don't feel worried or
scared about it. It's something, it's just
something new to be learned and understood.
So that's not really a hobby, but it's, it's professionally
become something that I'm intrigued and excited about.
And I just want to continue to learn what we're going to do
with it. Thank you for your reflections
on generative AI and how you're thinking about it, how you're
using it in your work. So as we wrap up, Robert, can
you tell our listeners where they can follow you and your
work online? There's LinkedIn, myself on
LinkedIn are ammunition, but I think, you know, you see a lot
of stuff on on Instagram. So my Instagram is at Robert D
Bruner and then at Ammunition Group for our company and that's
probably the best place to see what what's going on in our
studio. Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
And AIG is virtual studio on the AIG Design Podcast.
Robert Brunner, thanks again. This is a great conversation.
And for our listeners, we will see you next season on the AIG
Design Podcast and you've heard of here.
We will be exploring design and performance as our theme.
I'm Li Shawn Huang. Talk to you next time.
Thank you. Bye.