Treat your employees like they're volunteers.
That's my leadership philosophy. Leadership is about leveraging
the trust of those who choose to follow.
This comes directly from my years in AIGA and other
volunteer driven communities. Hello everyone, Welcome back to
a new episode of the AIGA Design Podcast.
I'm Julia Donatello, Design Competitions and Events Manager
at AIG, the professional association for design, and my
Co host. I'm Li Shawn Huang, Co executive
director of learning and programs here at AIGA.
This season of the show, we're exploring the theme Eyes on
Design. It's inspired in the legacy of
the acclaimed AIJ Eye on Design publication that ran from 2015
to 2022. We aim to challenge our
community to look deeper, connect broadly, and think
further about design. This season is dedicated to
fostering a new era of discourse by critically analyzing the
present and boldly facing the future.
So the first eye that is our lenses for this programming year
is the connected eye. We recognize the
interconnectedness of design with other disciplines such
technology, science, art, culture, and business, and its
profound impact on human communities and broader
ecosystems. Then we have the critical eye,
which is about being reflective and thoughtful about what we do,
what we practice, what we make as designers, as well as looking
through our designerly points of view to critique the broader
context in which we live and work.
And the last one, the Future Eye.
We will keep tabs on the evolving landscape of design
practice, analysing emerging trends and transformative power
of new technologies. So we welcome deep, deep dives
into topics such as AIVR, sustainable design, and other
types of innovations. And for today's episode, we
welcome Seth Johnson. He leads the design practice for
the Chief Data Office at IBM where he overseas teams driving
AI first enterprise data transformation.
Welcome, Seth. Hey, Julia, and hey, Lee.
Sean, it's such a pleasure to be here with you.
Thank you for inviting me. Yeah.
Thanks for joining us. I'd like to jump right into
things, give our listeners some context about your background,
where you've been, how you got to where you are now, and then
also a little bit more about what you do at IBM.
But let's start with the past. So you've worked in higher Ed,
you've founded your own studio, and then today you're still,
you're teaching on one hand that nurturing the next generation of
design leaders. And then in your primary job at
IBM, we'll talk more about that. But let's jump back to the
beginning. Like how did you get into design
in the 1st place and maybe connect some of the major
milestones of your career? It's such a fun question and I,
I feel like I'm one of the only designers who didn't come to
design through music. For, for me, it, it started when
I was like 12 years old in a used bookshop opening a copy of
Dick Hess's monument to Lou Dorfsman and CBS, the Columbia
Broadcasting System. And something about seeing the
totality of design, of his design, the system at scale over
many years, touching everything from like an elevator button to
ATV commercial to Walter Cronkite's newsroom set, like
that stopped me in my tracks as a kid.
And eventually I found my way into starting my own studio
'cause I wanted to see if design could like, stand on its own 2
feet, not just creatively, but economically and ethically.
I also wanted to see if I could stand on my own 2 feet, I guess.
And running a small business really collapses the distance
between ideas and consequences. If the work wasn't creating real
value through the eyes of my clients, and if it didn't create
trust or if it didn't hold up under pressure, it failed.
And it failed pretty quickly and I didn't get paid.
Yeah. And so pretty fast feedback loop
there. Pretty fast feedback and like
lasting feedback, right? Hit senior wallet and so that
experience also like that really shaped me.
So I did that for I don't know, eight years, 10 years, something
like that. And I frankly, I got no insult
to my former clients, but I got I just got a little I got a
little bored and my my clients needed me to grow my business
with them. I just wasn't into that.
And so I sort of found myself staring down the lens of of like
a mid career pivot. And up until that point in time,
I had done sort of mostly what, you know, we would these days
call pretty traditional graphic design.
I was doing things mostly as a solo practitioner or in really
small firms, mostly with a regional or maybe a slightly
national reach. And I thought, OK, well, let's
like, let me just let's do the polar opposite of all of that
and see what that's like. So let's do tech, let's do
gigantic company, let's do global reach, which sounds like
IBM. And so I, I sold my business, I
sold my house in Minneapolis, I moved to Austin, TX and I joined
IBM about 8 months into its sort of now storied design
renaissance. And what I was really drawn to,
although I didn't realize it at the time, I was really drawn to
the complexity like billions of users, thousands of products,
legacy systems, some of which go back 50-60 years, regulation,
just like massive consequences. And I've been with the company
for about 12 years now. My role has continued to evolve.
It's mostly sort of evolved away from designing artifacts or
experiences directly and toward designing the conditions under
which design can happen at all. And so today, my work, it's less
about the end product, and it's much more about shaping systems
like teams and platforms and even things like incentives and
governance and culture. I really strive to create
environments where good decisions are easier and where
constant learning is the default so that design and designers can
operate with integrity at scale. And I guess I've got like
literally it's right here. Here's this book, blue dorks.
Then get yourself. I have it too.
Yeah, Oh my God. Thank.
You this book. Changed my life like in a way
it's basically the same impulse I had when I was 12.
Like it, it's just expressed, I guess like at a different
altitude. As far as IBM and what our chief
data office does, I kind of like to think of IBM as a company
that designs and builds the systems that people are using
inside other systems, which is one of the reasons why many
people don't really know what IBM does.
It's like the system's all the way down, but it's like hidden
under some layers of stuff, yeah.
Yeah. And like it's a very IBM thing
to sort of say, we're not like we don't want you to hear about
us. We want you to hear about our
clients because we serve our clients like IBM ERS work where
technology and business and human decision making kind of
all come together. And the chief data office, which
is the part of IBM that I work for, we exist to give our
company a single trusted view of the business and how it's
actually performing. And so that means that means
things like governing, integrating, securing accurate
data so that my colleagues, so that our IIDM Ers can act with
confidence and increasingly so that AI, which is also a
consumer of data can be used responsibly and at scale.
Sometimes, you know, if we're talking to clients or something
about their own, their own data efforts, I, I sometimes get
quizzical looks of, you know, like what, what, why are, wait,
so why does the IBM Chief Data Office have a design team?
That's kind of unusual. That's unusual.
It is. I wish it weren't.
So if you think of data as the lifeblood of a business, then
the experience of engaging with that data really starts to
matter. And design can help turn data
into something that instead of people dreading, Oh my gosh,
there's so much of this, it's messy.
I don't even know what to start. Like you can turn it from that
into something that people really start to rely on every
day. And when that happens at scale,
it becomes data becomes a source of real, sustainable competitive
advantage for an enterprise. Yeah, thanks for going deeper
into that. It's I wanted to jump in and say
that we recently had Georgia Loopy on the show and she's
known for her two. Yeah, yeah.
Like her visualizations of data and trying to humanize data.
And you know, a lot of what she talks about is like there's the
stuff that you see that she makes, whether it's on the New
York City subway or at the MO ma.
But she also talks about how data itself is something that's
designed, right. It's like, how do you collect
the data sets? How do you even define what that
data is? And so design is there all
along, not just in the the final pretty visualization you see on
the subway or in the museum. Absolutely.
Seth, I wanted to hear from you that has you have already had a
long lasting relationship with AIJ, served as a president of
AIJ Minnesota. I think 2012, is it correct the
the date? Sounds about right.
Yeah, directionally correct. Yeah, OK, good.
I wanted to hear a little bit from you, how how did it feel
for you to go on the stage representing IBM receiving these
awards so personally and professionally?
And how has your connection with AIJ changed and evolved
throughout the years? The first thing I want to say
is, is thank you to, to, to AIGA, to the selection jury.
We are, we are deeply grateful for the recognition.
And that moment wasn't about any one person.
It, it, it was about a, a collective body of, of work and
shared values and a long standing relationship and
commitment between IBM and the people we seek to serve that we
do not take lightly. And I think what the award
represented to us was continuity.
You, you mentioned Julia receiving the inaugural award
back in 1980. And so standing there 45 years
later, a lot has changed the the world, the technology, the
industry, the civil discourse and, and IBM too has has we have
changed almost everything about the company since then, except
for our core beliefs. Things like advancing the
science of information, applying technology to real problems,
designing systems that help institutions work better.
Design has always been part of that equation, not just as
decoration, but as infrastructure shaping how
humans and machines work together at at at global scale
over time. You asked about a personal level
that the moment was it was it was really humbling.
You know it. It brought into focus the
thousands of IBM designers and hundreds of thousands of non
designers at IBM who have who have done the the quiet, often,
often invisible work of embedding design into culture,
into platforms, into decision making.
And given my relationship with a IGA, receiving that recognition
from a community that helped shape my own understanding of
leadership felt really special. I love that.
That's that's great. Full circle it seems.
My relationship with with a IGA has has evolved alongside my
career. You know, early on it was about
community, finding peers, learning the language of the
design profession, you know, finding like which photographers
to hire or print vendors to avoid.
But but like, it was also understanding what it meant to
belong to something bigger than yourself.
At least that's what it felt like to, to me, bigger than, you
know, just your own specialty or your own practice or your own
city even. And in that way, like it was
formative in a really basic way, it helped me understand what
design could be, you know, And over, over time, I get that
relationship. It's shifted for me.
I get it's shifted from, you know, pretty deep participation
to maybe something more like responsibility.
I guess that might not be the right word.
But you know, serving in leadership roles in a IGA taught
me how organizations actually work.
Like the mechanics of signing an affiliation agreement with a
bigger entity, or how to be responsible to a board of
directors and to do's paying members who have questions.
How to stare a $50,000 budget gap in the face and through a
ton of hard work and a ton of dedicated volunteers, turn that
into $1,000,000 budget surplus. What it's taught me is how
leadership actually works when authority is not around.
But accountability is still very much real.
And I don't know about the the two of you, but like, that feels
pretty important today because the community that AIGA serves
and the environment in which it operates is very different than
it was a decade or two ago. And so are the, you know, the
the needs that the stakes, the heroes, the challenges that
they've all changed too. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. And to build on that, Seth, if
you can share a little bit of your thoughts on the IJ's role
in the design community today comparing to how you saw back
then like a decade ago. Yeah, this is something I've
been thinking about for, for a while.
I, I think I'm starting and I'm, I'm glad for the opportunity to
try to crystallize my, my thoughts about it.
I think I see AIG as role today as less about defining the
profession and more about helping a very broad, diverse
community stay connected and coherent in a much more complex
world. Design now lives inside
technology and business and policy and culture or or not,
there are certainly gaps. That raises the stakes for how
designers learn from one another and how they show up
responsibly. One thing that feels especially
important right now is AIG as chapter model, which member dues
should be directly funding, and not the opposite.
We're all hyper connected digitally.
But like, I'm still craving real human connection and man, like
AIGA chapters have a proven track record of bringing people
together in their own backyards, not online, not abstractly, but
in rooms in, in conversations across differences.
And like, that's why I think that AIG as role as the as, like
the connective tissue designers as conveners, which is a
superpower of designers. I think that really matters now,
not as an authority that people have to follow, not as an
exclusionary club, but as as a structure that people choose to
participate in. And that idea that leadership
and community only work when people opt in and feel a sense
of belonging and a sense of ownership when when doing so.
That's something I think about constantly, not just for design
organizations, but in how we lead teams and in how we grow
markets and opportunities. Gosh, and in how governments are
accountable to their citizens again or not.
Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense.
And speaking from a person who is an extrovert working full
time from home, sometimes I'm really feeling lonely and I have
to push myself to get out of the house, work somewhere else,
Public Library or Cafe or even really sign up for like I have
been to some of the AJ New York chapter events or Creative
Morning. Creative Mornings monthly events
is just very, very inspiring, just awesome.
Yeah. So I very much resonate with
what you're saying in terms of, yes, we're all connected, but
there is some clear distance. I think either, you know,
because the ways we work is is very different nowadays.
A lot of people are working remotely or hybrid and so on
some. So the idea of like a workspace
as we used to have before has changed a lot.
So, yeah, but I, I very much resolute you say and moving
forward. Seth, so a few months ago you
had a conversation with Rachel Ellner from our AIG board, the
national board, and you shared something that really stayed
with me and I wanted to hear a little bit more if you could
elaborate on that. You said that you have an
approach. In your team with to work with
your team members and look at them as if they're volunteers so
choosing every day to be part of your team team at IBM because
they clearly could be somewhere else, right.
So can you elaborate a little bit of on how did this idea come
to life in your practice and how do you feel this from what's the
feedback you feel from your, from your team in terms of like
their engagement or they the way they they perceive their own
careers? That's a fun question.
And 1st, huge props to Rachel Elnar and Eric Cargill for their
amazing gift to the design community, their Cheers and
Tears podcast. That's been food for my soul
since it since it launched. Treat your employees like
they're volunteers. That's my leadership philosophy.
Leadership is about leveraging the trust of those who choose to
follow. This comes directly from my
years in a IGA and other volunteer driven communities.
When people aren't paid to show up, leadership becomes very
clear very fast. It's not compliance, it's it's
choice. People participate because why?
They because they believe in the 'cause that they believe in the
work, they believe in the mission, and they disengage the
moment that belief breaks. And I've carried that lesson
with me into the corporate world, even even though the
context is obviously very different.
Talented people may be employees, but they still have
options. They're deciding every day how
much energy, creativity, judgement they are willing to
invest. We are willing to invest.
I'm an employee too. I have a manager and like that
keeps you really honest. It is is the work as a manager
myself? Is the work meaningful?
Is the direction clear? Do people feel respected and
included? Is the work we are asking them
to do worthy of their talents and their aspirations?
Because if the answer is no, you might get the work, but you're
not going to get the commitment. And you asked about how this
shows that like this. This can show up in really
concrete ways. I try to lead by example, assume
positive intent, stay genuinely involved in people's growth and
success, not just not just their output.
It shows up really clearly under pressure.
You know when you're in a really tough situation with your team?
Grace, humility, clarity, understanding, humor, those
things matter a lot more than authority.
I found that it's pretty powerful, right?
When when people choose to follow, they bring more
initiative, they bring more thoughtfulness, they bring more
ownership to the work. And you should expect to impress
your upline leadership like with real things like like faster
velocity and lower attrition and increased employee engagement
metrics. All true over time, and it takes
some time. That creates a culture where
people aren't just showing up to work and operating.
It creates a culture where people care.
You can't fake caring, and you certainly can't fake caring at
scale. Yeah, I love that.
I wanted to follow up on this thread of design and leadership.
It's been an ongoing conversation about designers
having a seat at the table. You have a seat at a table where
you're at in IBM. A metaphorical table, I guess.
Not in this office you're you're taking this interview in.
Sometimes the table. Sometimes it's a table, but you
know, you've developed your leadership skills from what
we've learned, like running an AIG, a chapter in Minnesota,
running your own studio before joining a big corporation like
IBM where you run a team, right? And so you have this experience,
but what does this look like in a corporate environment and how
is this perceived? I think we've been talking about
this for over a decade now about, you know, designers
having a seat at the table. But what does this look like,
especially at IBM that's really invested in design and elevating
design, even with, you know, the non designers in a global
corporation. So yeah, what does this look
like now from your perspective? And how and how fortunate am I
and, and my design colleagues at IBM to to, to be in, in, in such
a place? I tend to start from a pretty
brutally pragmatic place with this particular conversation.
The business does not care about design and it shouldn't.
A business cares about market outcomes.
So to the extent that any organization values a
discipline, whether that's design or whatever, data science
or legal or sales janitorial staff, it's through that
function's ability to deliver outcomes that matter to the
market. Design matters enormously, but
only in so far as it can change outcomes the way that they need
to be changed. And when I talk about outcomes,
I mean very concrete, measurable things.
Increased revenues, decreased expenses.
What what do businesses care about?
Less risk, more certainty, faster deployments, fewer
defects, more productivity, less pissed off customers.
Those are the currencies that leadership teams actually
balance and trade in, and design only earns influence when it can
clearly connect itself and its work to those outcomes.
The challenge is, especially in large, complex organizations,
that no single function delivers those outcomes on its own.
With all due respect to Amazon 2 pizza teams don't deliver
enterprise software like you don't get higher market share,
lower churn with design alone or engineering alone or product
alone. So you asked, you asked.
I think about about strategy, like strategy happens at the
intersections of those where design and product management
and engineering and data and sales and operations and and
where they are working together toward those shared outcomes.
I actually think that most solid business leaders understand
today that design is in fact a strategic force that can create
competitive advantage. It's pretty rare for me to meet
a non design leader or even just a non designer that doesn't
believe that design is important.
What I hear instead, and that wasn't, you know that wasn't the
case 10/15/20 years ago, right? So excellent.
But what I hear now is yes, yes, I want great design.
How do I actually get it? Or we tried it and it slowed us
down. Or even worse, I didn't even
realize we had designers like what?
What have they been doing? Like that's where the breakdown
is happening. And candidly, that's that's our
fault. That's not us as designers, as
design leaders. Those failures usually come from
the sin that we accuse other people of, which is a lack of
empathy. A lack of empathy for the non
designers that we work with and a failure to integrate into the
systems that we are trying to influence.
One of my favorite paradoxes is that IBM, on one hand, has more
than 3000 formally trained designers all over the world.
It's one of the largest design workforces ever assembled.
On the other hand, if you do some quick math, designers are
what, barely 1 or 2% of the total IBM are population.
Yeah, I mean, like it. That's a paradox.
And and it points out that part of what I'm talking about here
is like it's it's a numbers game.
Like designers will always be outnumbered, always.
Which means, I'm sorry to tell, that we are the ones that have
to assimilate into the dominant, what the desominant realities
and rhythms of the larger hole before we can earn the right to
ask anyone else to change the way they work.
So that that's the foundation that I operate from it.
It's not advocacy for design as like a thing or as a profession.
It's situational awareness about how organizations actually win
and how design, when it is embedded and accountable and
collaborative and aligned, can help organizations do that more
consistently. So I wanted to follow up on this
designing in a corporate environment conversation before
pivoting to ask you about like how design schools and design
education can can help the future designers adapt.
But the follow up question really is about dealing with
constraints. You know, you mentioned earlier
about like this additive dimension of these different
layers of like dealing with engineering and the business
side and technology. And obviously IBM has huge
global scale. But it also means it's a very
different, far greater number of constraints, whether it has to
do with like compliance or just kind of, you know, corporate
regulations, culture, all of those sort of dynamics are in
play. Very different than being a
small studio owner working with a small business where the owner
or the founder of the startup can just be the decider and then
you're done. You go to printer, you, you push
online, right. So like, do you have any
thoughts about that for designers who are entering these
large bureaucracies, these large corporations where there's all
these other things that may be new constraints that we hadn't
thought of before in school or in our smaller studio work?
Great designers love swimming in the sea of constraints.
And I I think of things that, you know, I used to do a lot of
work in the medical, the healthcare, the pharmaceutical
space. I'm now at a company that, you
know, is a publicly traded company and we often times work
with within regulated industries, you know, things
like regulation. You just define the boundaries
of the problem space that you're working in.
And design's job is to create ambition and possibilities
within those boundaries instead of like, trying to route around
them. Instead of asking how far we can
go, you might ask instead, like, how well can we solve this
problem for real people given these very real constraints that
we can't ignore? You asked about advice for for
emerging designers, respecting the fact that those constraints
are there and being willing and curious to learn why they exist
in the 1st place. That behavior, the very act of
doing that in genders, trust. And so in spaces like these,
highly regulated, lots of constraints, creative freedom is
something that you earn. It's not something that you walk
in and demand design that consistently delivers outcomes
that are clear and defensible and responsible.
Over time, the organization or your partners or your
stakeholders, they will become more willing to let us push
further because we have shown that respect to begin with.
I think your point here, Seth, reminded me of a conversation
Lisa and I had last year with the innovation specialist Yvonne
Boscardiol from IDB International Interamerican
Development Bank. And he was saying something
about everyone says the usually bureaucracy is seen as something
bad. And he was as an innovation
specialist in such a large organization, government
organization like that. He was saying how the actually
the good points about it right like and it reminded me about
you when you're talking about like emerging designers entering
such a large complex organization such as IBM, the
importance of actually learning why this system exists as it is.
So in his case, he was saying why, what's the role of
bureaucracy to keep some, some sense of tradition, legacy,
trust and respecting even like the consequences of, of big
changes, right. So if we move too fast, the
consequence, what are the consequences and all that.
So a little, a little bit understanding that the pace
might, might be slower in his case, but there is a, a reason
for that. And there is also, you know,
good things about looking at bureaucracy.
I think it reminded me a lot about your point on trusting,
like being, being open to understand and learn why the
systems work like it, like it is today.
And building trust starts from there.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of what we're all taught in design
school. I'm sure it's attributable to
some designer. Like you have to learn and
respect the rules before you can break the rules.
Yes, totally. Yeah, As you were sharing with
us a lot about what it means to design systems and platforms for
for your clients that are very much shaping the future in the
context of today, but also the future, how do you think the
next generation of designers will learn to practice design?
So basically my question is here.
Since a couple years ago, we've been introduced to all these AI
tools and the question now the conflict, the friction is how
are we still continuing to be creative?
So keeping our creative intuition and creative thinking
in in an era where AI tools are helping us speed up and somehow
hack the creative process that we've been working so far with.
Boy, that's the that's the question.
Of $1 million. That's the bajillion dollar
question, yeah. Yeah.
Well, let me first approach this from a lens of design thinking,
which I like looking through because it inherently makes the
conversation not just about designers, it makes the
conversation about designers and their collaborative partners.
And I think I think what still holds true about design thinking
today is its ability to help people align around the right
problem. So skills like framing and sense
making and bringing multiple perspectives together and
learning through making like those fundamentals are not only
incredibly durable, but they're also incredibly human.
And I still believe and I think will continue to believe that
certainly in complex organizations, design thinking
is still one of the best tools that we have for turning
ambiguity into shared understanding.
Now you asked about the next generation of designers, design
leaders. How might they learn design?
I hope it'll be not as much about learning design as as a
discipline isolated on its own, and more about a way of
operating inside really complex systems, but armed with a
particular set of skills and passions.
So I, I hope that learning design will increasingly be
about participating in real evolving environments where you
know, where the boundaries are fuzzy, where the constraints
aren't quite as clear, where the the work doesn't end when the
project shifts. For the pedagogy, I think this
means that things like the ability to frame the problem and
deal with objectionable circumstances in some ways, you
know, forced pitfalls, the ability to make sound judgments
as conditions change. I think those things in the
pedagogy will have to be prioritized over the mastery of
a particular tool or a particular method.
Today, higher education does a fairly solid job of preparing
designers to be pretty strong on their own.
But where it still falls short, and this is no different than it
was 10 years ago, like where it still falls short is preparing
designers to work and lead within teams.
Not nearly enough. Not nearly enough students are
given meaningful opportunities to work on team based
assignments. You know, even though no
designer actually works alone. Even freelancers have
collaborators. They've got a client and a
customer client and a user, right.
Design is by definition A-Team sport.
So there's that. I also fear that still too many
design programs are insular with their their own institutions.
You know, if I went to a State University or I used to teach at
a Community College, I mean, if you're in one of those places,
you are surrounded by a microcosm of the real world.
You've got, you've got biology and nursing and kinesiology and
business and public policy. Like why aren't design students
partnering with biology students to visualize their research or
professors putting their students in touch, their design
students in touch with kinesiology or nutrition
programs to create data visualizations from their
exercise programs or, you know, whatever.
It's that kind of cross disciplinary work.
That is exactly what designers will be asked to do the moment
they step into practice. Yet I'm afraid we still rarely
train for it enough. I mean, maybe the last thing
I'll say here is that the era of the lone genius designer is
over. It's been over for a while.
We're now in the era of the diverse, empowered team.
And the sooner that design students to get out of their own
heads and out of their own classrooms, the better they will
be prepared to operate and to lead in the complex systems that
need them. Yeah, it sounds like not just a
curricular change, but like a a mindset change, right?
Because it's not necessarily what you're learning in class,
but just the narrative that you're internalizing.
And there's still a lot of that sort of, you know, great man.
And I'm using the gender term on purpose, given the history of
like that designer that we that is canonized, you know?
You know. And so, yeah, I agree
completely. So Seth, I'm having so much fun
with this conversation, but our time is wrapping up.
So we like to ask some short questions at the end to get a
little bit more color about you and your point of view.
You've already mentioned that designer should be more curious
and empathetic about constraints and understanding why things
they are, why things are the way that they are in a corporation
in a given context. But is there another question
that you wish more designers would think about while they're
approaching their work? That designers think about when
they're approaching their work. I wish more designers would
question their own intuition. I wish more designers would.
More frequently, and I'm speaking to myself as much as I
am to anyone else, would frequently challenge their own
beliefs, challenge their own assumptions.
What if the way that I'm thinking about this is not
right? What if the way I'm thinking
about this is massively misinformed?
What if I haven't talked to the right people?
That's something that will never steer one wrong in design
practice, which is to question that which you think is true.
Yeah, amazing. And then so the next one is
actually similar on this vein of like questioning a lot of design
is just questioning the status quo and understanding that
things could be better. So if you could choose like 1
product, service, space or system to redesign, what would
you choose and what are some of the changes?
You would make my annoyed answer is that I'd redesign how our
services protect us or don't from spam, from unwanted
intrusion to too much of that burden is like pushed onto
users. My real heartfelt answer,
though, is that I would redesign the New York City subway system,
which I love with all of my heart.
And it's, it's so old and I say that in a respectful way and so
important. And it is trying so hard to do
all of the unreasonable things we demand of it.
And it it needs our love and our care and our patients.
And yes, it needs our tax dollars.
And that's something that I would love to redesign with
every fiber of my heart might be. 100% agree there too.
As a New Yorker who's left New York and moved to a city with
minimal public transit, it's like, you know, I miss it even
though when I'm back it's like, oh, it's so old, it's so slow,
but you know, it still gets you where you want to go.
And you still see some of that Vinelli legacy.
And then they brought it back in those maps too.
So final question is just a recommendation for our listeners
or our viewers. If you're watching this on
YouTube, what's something that's been inspiring you lately, Seth?
It could be a book, a film, a song, whatever you want to
recommend to our listeners and viewers.
It's kind of a cop out answer because it's less about who's
inspiring me lately and more about who always will inspire me
and who I can always return back to when I need help or a lift.
And that is the artist Karita Kent, not just for what she
made, but for how she lived. You know, she was, she was an
artist and a teacher and an activist.
She believed that creativity was a form of service.
And what I really admire was how she how she combined her
conviction with generosity. You know, you've seen her work.
You know, it's bold and it's political and it's joyful all at
the same time. And it's never cynical and it's
never closed off. And so Karida can help remind me
to to stay open because she did, because she always kept learning
and experimenting and changing and listening to younger voices
well into her later years. And so that mix of curiosity and
courage and humility, using creativity to widen people's
capacity for for hope that. Feels like a pretty good.
Blueprint for how to be at this point or how to be a human in
the world today. Yeah, that's a great place to
land it. I also share Karida Kent's
rules, the poster of her rules to my students, like every
class. And it's, you know, it's both,
like, rigorous and funny and deeply human at the same time,
which I think is just a great way to set the tone and also to
wrap up this episode. Find a place you trust and then
try trusting it for a while. Beautiful.
Well, thank you again, Seth, and thank you for listening and
watching. We'll see you on another episode
of the AIG Design Podcast. Until next time.
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this.
And you know, these these are the kinds of conversations that
make the work feel worth doing. Thank you, Seth.