Hello and welcome to a new season of the AAGA Design
Podcast. My name is Li Shan Huang, Senior
Director of Learning and Programs here at AIGA, the
professional association for Design.
And I am Julia Donatello, I am the competitions and event
manager at AIGA. This season we are exploring the
theme of design and performance with all of the different
possible nuances of that term of performance.
And our very first guest for the season are Scott Dorley and
Carissa Carter from the Stanford D School.
They are also the co-authors of this new book assembling
tomorrow. So we're going to talk about who
they are, what they do as educators and as we'll dive into
some highlights from the book as well.
But over to you Julia, to kick things off.
So as we kick start this, I was wondering what was the
inspiration to write this book and how did the the first ideas
come up to you both? Well, I mean, I think the
backdrop for writing this book is how unsettling the world is
right now to all of us, Scott, and I feel it.
I'm sure you too can resonate with that in some way.
But in many ways, our climate is on the Fritz.
And in particular, technologies in the technologies that we
build with as designers are changing really quickly and in a
way that they are what we call mischievous and on their own,
right? So the tech that we are now
including our design materials like AI, like synthetic biology
or artificial evolution, we call it, right?
Like when you're building with algorithms and genetic code,
those things change and make decisions after you launch them
and change their logic after they're released into the wild.
And that's part of of the backdrop with which we, you
know, had the motivation to to craft this book because it was
super, it was super throwing us off kilter in our design work.
And we saw it in our students. And so even though we felt this
way, we also know how much agency each one of us has to
craft a really wonderful tomorrow.
And we knew from our experience in classrooms about building
activities to help students see this world in new ways and to to
create with responsibility and in humility like we wanted to.
We wanted to turn that into a book.
And that was a bit of the backdrop that led to us writing
Assembling Tomorrow. Before we dive deeper into the
book, I'd love to hear, I think our audience members who are
maybe not as familiar with the Stanford D School would love to
hear a little bit about your institution and maybe a bit
about what you teach as well. Yeah, the D school is in the
School of Engineering. We're actually in the Institute
at Stanford, which means that we sit in one of the schools rather
than the inside a department and that allows us to work with
students from around the university.
So every year we work with more than 1000 Stanford students and
then we do a lot of work outside Stanford as well.
And we look at design in, in a, in a few different ways.
Our program started with product design, which in other programs
was called the industrial design.
And there's like a fundamental difference at that time.
This is like in the 60s at that time in that approach and the
approach what what they came up with was called comprehensive
design. So this is around the late 60s
or early 70s. That's a way of looking at
design where you're looking at all the layers of, of
interaction. Carissa uses an incredible
framework that, you know, design is not just about the products
we create, but it's the experiences that that creates
and the systems that that lives in and the implications and the
data that drives it. So we push students to really
look at, you know, the holistic space of design.
And now we also have two degree programs, one for undergrad and
one for grad students. Very cool.
So jumping now into topics of the book.
So I'm curious if you can elaborate on your perception of
the term runaway design and what do you think is our role as
designers to engage with this more responsibly?
Yeah, the term runaway design is the the backdrop for the for the
moment that we're in, right. And it's a bit of what I was
saying before about how our materials seem to be getting
away from us in a way. And, and one other, one other
layer to add to that is like the things that we make with, right?
Like if they are tangible things, like I've got a piece of
paper here and when you fold it like I, I get it.
I know that it's folded right? And we all have a sense that
like I could fold this into a paper airplane and it would fly
like I like, I understand what the paper affords me to do.
And like in other physical materials like wood, like metal,
etcetera. Like I might not be a master
crafts person, but I kind of can understand how, you know, you
might joint the wood together to make a structure that could
support a certain amount of weight.
And I can also see if that structure has failed or if it's
wobbling, etcetera, right? But in this runaway design world
where those algorithms, genetic code is set to like the stuff
that we're building with is now invisible and we don't have a
sense as makers as to what those materials really afford.
Like, that's what makes it a bit of a runaway design moment,
right? They're changing fast, they're
scaling fast. And we don't actually know when
they go wrong until we see how they've crashed or they've
tumbled or that structure has crumbled.
And that's an interesting point, like using the piece of paper,
right? Because it's like, OK, that's
like a finite thing we can hold in our hand.
But even the piece of paper, it's like, OK, well, where did
it come from in terms of like the trees and the supply chain?
But then if we apply it to something like AI, right?
It's like the there's it's running on some server
somewhere, we don't know. And then, you know, what kind of
energy is being used to power that plus like, you know,
whatever the social effects are of whatever AI application as
well. So it's like all of the stuff
that's like beneath the surface of the water if we're using like
an iceberg as a metaphor. Yeah, I mean, it's that you're,
you're exactly right, Lee, Sean, it's that interconnectedness of
design work, right. And then the minute that you
start to peel back those layers, you know, Scott was talking
about products, experiences, systems, and then the tech and
the data, the power that and the implications of all of it.
Like when you were talking about that, you know, if you if you
take this piece of paper, right, like this is a product, it like
allows me the experience of writing and folding and paper
airplane making, right, and even mailing letters, etcetera.
Like there's many systems that control its distribution and
production, like you were just saying, and there's the
technologies that go into creating it and making it this
bleached white color, right? And then there's the, the, the
data that even powers like what size it should be, right?
And like how it comes like in reams to us, right?
And like there's all these different implications for that.
And, you know, the sizing that we use in this country versus
other countries and who, you know, who can use this medium,
who might be excluded from it. And that's what's really part of
what makes it a runaway design moment is because like that
interconnection, once you start to like realize it's everywhere
and you realize that how are some of our technologies really,
really allow that to take off really quickly today in ways we
can't really control. Sorry, Scott, Go.
Ahead. No, I was just going to say to
build on that last point. The, the job sometimes of
technology is to sort of transcend our limits, right?
And you see every time a new technology comes out, it's like
it's going beyond what we were used to.
It's creating this new paradigm and we have to move into, I
think the job of design is then to choose new limits.
It's, you know, like designs all about constraints.
How are we making decisions about what we feel like this
should be used for and what's going to be desirable to put in
front of people and what, you know, what do we care about and
how should that be built into the way it gets disposed of, let
alone the way it gets created? And so design, I think it has a
really important role in adding constraints, meaningful
constraints back into these sort of breaking of past limits.
I wanted to circle back on some of the themes of the book in a
little bit, but I wanted to share about like the the
structure as well. So for folks who have not read
the book yet, it's a combination of nonfiction and fiction,
right? So there's like the the main
narrative of you will where you're looking at different
phenomena, different trends, making sense of it, you know,
citing other folks who are studying this stuff, looking at
it. But then you have these like
vignettes that are sprinkled throughout the book.
I felt like they were like postcards from different
features. My favorite one, which one of
the earliest ones in the book is the, the AI mother who had
passed away. And it's really about like, we
already see beginnings of stuff like this with chat bots and
people who have like tried to memorialize their their dead
relatives and friends through large language models and stuff
like that. But it really explored like
this, like relationship between two sisters.
Why did you choose to do this? Like fiction, non fiction
structure. At a baseline, right, all design
begins as fiction, so everything is imagined before it is
created. And so if we're writing a book
about assembling tomorrow, part of our job then is to imagine
some possible futures and try them on before we commit to
anyone. And that that's what each of
those those speculative fiction stories is about, is is testing
and see if we like how we look in those futures.
They're also like really fun ways to explore specific moments
in the future that you can't just get from talking about what
technology might do, you know, like from that posture, that
story that you're referring to, Lee Sean was one that Scott
wrote. I love it too.
It's called sibling rivalry. And yes, so these these siblings
are arguing over which version of their dead mother to bring
back. And I'll also say like, like we
wrote this book before that those services that currently
exist, that do that existed, like it felt far more futuristic
at the time. And like, that's the that's
runaway design, right? Like the fact that now you have
at least four or five choices for how to bring back a deceased
relative is, is pretty remarkable, right?
And you do need to ask yourself, like, what do we want?
Like, what would we want out of bringing some somebody like that
back? You know, that feels like really
big questions that we should be asking now Taps at our emotions.
It taps at relationships, it taps at a lot more beyond just
what the tech can do. Maybe one each another story
that you would want to give us a preview of.
Just building on what Chris was saying, and I know you, you
teach future looking classes to you, Lee Sean.
And it feels like if we don't think a few steps ahead, we're
actually sort of a little bit behind, particularly because,
you know, these things are coming to fruition so quickly.
We had three or four stories that, you know, we thought were
plausible, but when we started writing them in 2021, they
weren't happening. And by the time the book was
published, they literally were, you know, services you can pay
for. One of the stories in there is
about guy who's trying to reconnect with people in his
life, and so he has this sort of embedded AI that's helping him
have conversations with people. It's like encouraging him to
call people he calls like sort of an ex-girlfriend and it's
guiding him through the conversation.
It doesn't go well. But I had a student who
literally created a prototype of that product two years after I
had him as a student about at the same time as I wrote the
story with neither of us knowing that that was happening, you
know? And so it's just kind of amazing
how fast things are moving. Another one I'll just throw in
there that Carissa Rhodes is called Compassion School.
And there are a couple in the book that are really sort of
forward-looking to say, like, what do we value in the world?
And Compassion School looks like that looks at the idea that what
if we created leaders based on their capacity for compassion?
You know, what if compassion say was, you know, the criteria you
were really looking for in an elected leader and, or in
someone who, you know, might even be able to go through an
educational process, how would we dictate that?
Where would we find them? And there's something about
being able to not just come up with that idea would explore
like, what would be the mechanics of that and how would
that feel? And what things would that
create that are maybe like a little less desirable?
You know, what kind of problems would it cause?
And the storytelling actually just like allows you to play
with those details. What comes after, what comes
after, you know, and it's really, really rich activity,
let alone hopefully it also, you know, is something to ponder as
you read the book. Yeah, I assigned your book to my
class for the first time this semester.
We were talking about it before we started rolling, but I teach
a class on designing the future. It's an executive master's
program at Parsons, and the students are working
professionals. They're mostly in their mid 30s,
as is the average age. And so a lot of them are already
leaders. They're working on different
products, services, different kind of things.
And you know, often in these corporate environments where
they're working that it's all about like, OK, what is the next
product launch, right? The next version that they're
launching of whatever. And so I think grad school and
this class is a good way for them to reflect on both like a
longer time horizon, which your book does as well, right?
Thinking about through the lens of all design is future making,
but also like just a larger systems perspective of like, OK,
you're you are responsible for whatever it is you're putting in
the world. Like what are the ripple
effects? Can you maybe tell a story to
try to understand the potential systemic impacts of what you're
doing? And then, Yeah, well, so I got
my students to write their own future stories as well, you
know, because it's, it's also a way to like to deal with like
the again, that short term is a writer, like just the next
version and then the next design Sprint.
That stuff that they have plenty of time for us of grad school is
like the perfect space to like think about that.
So they either do like a a personal future, like where do
they see themselves like a decade in the future?
Or they, they have their own independent study projects
essentially like their master's theses.
And so sometimes they also have the option to to do that, right.
It's like, OK, you've already launched your thesis as a thing
in the world. Like what does it look like when
you've reached scale? And so it's a way to integrate
that into the other things they're doing.
That's incredible. Did any interesting facets come
out and in any of those stories this year that are shareable?
I just eager to know what types of things students latch onto.
I think there's a lot of interest, like inspired by your
book with like and the Orca story, which I once spoiled.
So good, but folks were really exploring like the relationship
with nature. So I have a graduate student
who's working on, she uses like sake, like the Japanese rice
wine as a way to help groups with like self discovery.
So bringing in like the history and the production of sake for
these kind of facilitated things.
And so she was doing some stuff on like the future of this sort
of facilitation and and like that connection with nature as
part of this process had another student who was looking at
essentially like trying to find like a creative type.
And so like, how do we find like a happy balance between like,
OK, being sorted in this way that is optimized for, you know,
flourishing and good for organizations and teams without
going full on like, what is that sci-fi, young adult sci-fi
series like Divergent, you know, that series, you know, or like
Gattaca or these kind of like almost like, yeah, eugenics type
things, right? Where it becomes too rigid and
people get 2 pigeon holes. And I think another prompt that
I give my students is to like, think about that in between
space, between like a utopian and dystopian future, because
that's where like, a lot of the interesting explorations are.
Yeah, no, I love that, right? Because.
And I think you're right that in between utopia, dystopia, like
that's where we're going to be. There's no absolute right.
And like wrestling with even when you put your best ideas for
the best of intentions, it's going to affect something.
It's going to displace somebody. It's going to take over a job,
right? Like things will go wrong for
someone somewhere in the ecosystem, in the fiction.
Such a great way to experiment with that.
And fiction writing sometimes seems very whimsical.
But as you're pointing outly, Sean, it's when you get into it,
it actually becomes a kind of Safeway to explore some things
that if you were just thinking about it in terms of like
product repercussions after your release, wouldn't feel, you
know, you wouldn't really be able to explore.
You would kind of just get caught in like, well, what's the
cascading impact there? But when you get into the
fiction world, you can kind of play with it a little bit and
allows you to open your mind to things that you know might be on
the horizon for whatever you're doing, but you don't want to
think about. Totally.
Yeah. There's another point that I
think helped a lot. It's something that I've learned
in the last couple of years. I've been studying comedy,
writing and improv. I hadn't really done much
fiction at all before this. And one tip that I think was
helpful for my students was like, getting them to make like,
one leap, right? That could be like a sci-fi
choice, like with your story, Scott, with the mother who's
like preserved as this AI, but then everything else should be
like grounded around that, right?
So even though like, well, we do have some services that are
doing something like that now, but in this far farther off
future, like the relationship between the two siblings is very
grounded in human feelings. And so by having like yet making
that one jump and then trying to like see like how do you make it
as realistic as possible after that is another way to kind of
keep it grounded in that way. Yeah.
Even as things change, so many things persist.
And so we have a tendency of, I think you're what you're saying
is we have a tendency of writing these stories where, like,
everything's changed. It's all new.
And you sometimes get into then that trap of like utopia
dystopia, right? Yeah.
And it's never, it's a mixtopia, it's a messytopia or whatever.
It's just a mess. And and that's because the
things that we've been doing don't go away immediately.
You know, we're still driving cars.
Those were invented over 100 years ago.
Yeah. Even in a mass scale.
Yeah, Or there's like science fiction, like the Jetsons,
right, This cartoon I grew up with where like, they have
flying cars, but then like, they still have to be driven.
Or like, you know, the wife is still taking like, cash money to
go to the mall, right? So there's like all of these
1960s, like sexist stereotypes. So it's like there, it's like
things have changed, but then nothing has changed socially,
which you know, is also something to avoid on that
extreme. I mean, I think that brings up
like the real a really key point, which is like we're
changing things, but what do we actually want to change?
You know, And that that kind of gets into the that story with
the two sisters. Like they're trying to solve
basically like a family issue around how they how they live
with each other, how they interact as a family.
And they think, you know, resurrecting mom's going to
solve this problem, but it's the problem's still there, right?
So like, I feel like a lot of times we're, we're basically
creating solutions that are in need of a problem or we're just
ignoring problems that are in need of a solution.
And so like really just thinking about like, what is the change
that we want? What would the and what would
this technology give us that might be useful or not?
I'm curious also to hear a little bit from yours, your
personal take on how you are approaching your creative
process and usage of technology and AI support.
So I've seen myself now at times either, you know, tired or
wanting some refresh and going to some type of AI support tool.
And then I'm always questioning myself, shouldn't I be doing
this? You know, like how, how, what is
the relationship that you personally are building and
creating with these tools? It's a great question.
I think it's a, at least for me personally, as an ever evolving
one too. It's one that have a couple
graduate students wrestling with in their year long projects
right now. We have a a group that is
meeting weekly right now that talks only about creativity in
the age of AI and like pushing the limits of that in multiple
different dimensions. So I know that this is one
that's like actively being explored by people from all
angles. And I find myself like
constantly like, oh, wait, you do that with it.
Oh, wait, you do. You know, for myself, I
sometimes use AI and when I do it is often because I want to
kind of like experiment with what it might be able to do.
I don't think I've worked it into my workflow yet and I think
I probably will at some point soon.
That feels like it's coming. But you know, there's a hurdle
to embracing something into your process, etcetera.
And I just, you know, I haven't crossed that limit myself.
I probably have spent most of my AI time trying to deconstruct it
and make it analog so that other people can learn and understand
it out of AI platforms. So, you know, like making making
like tools you can hold in your hand to say if I use this type
of machine learning algorithm and this type of data set, I
might do or create what right. So I that a big part of my work
is, is trying to give some visibility to the invisibility
of what it's doing so that people can feel empowered in
using it and talking about it and talking about all the things
we don't know about it. And that even the most
sophisticated technologist doesn't know about it.
Because that's, you know, it's critical that we talk about the
uncertainty and the, you know, lack of transparency and AI's
decision making. Yeah, I have the sort of mixed
feeling about it too. Like on the, on the one hand, I,
you know, I think there's a lot of issues with it to just around
like creative job replacement, you know, that just make me
really uncomfortable. Not to mention the fact that it
is built off the creativity of people to get there, right.
So that like really, really bothers me.
The like utility of it. I think I've been kind of coming
around to via seeing other people use it a little bit.
So I've seen a lot of examples where people are doing something
that they actually just like couldn't have been done without
it. So one example is the end papers
of our book were created by a guy named Aaron Huey with the
help of AI, who's a National Geographic photographer.
He took pictures of climate change in action over a decade.
So wildfires, glacial melt, oil spills, and then he put those
into an AI and had them create wallpaper patterns.
And there's something magical about what came out there.
Then he has a site where you can download those wallpaper
patterns and you can wallpaper your your walls with it.
They're beautiful patterns, but they're based on these
disasters, floods, you know. And so it's a way to kind of
call attention to climate change using AI to do something that
really kind of couldn't have been done without it.
I mean, I suppose it could have been, but it felt like very kind
of original to the tool and that kind of stuff like really
interests me and it's really kind of exciting and you know,
you know, so it's very, very mixed feelings, you know?
Yeah, in my own stuff, I've kind of used it on the edges either
like at the beginning and or the end of a writing process or the
beginning is like, OK, well help me ideate or I'll use it of
like, OK, I've already written this thing.
And do you have like feedback or punch UPS on ways to like rework
the sentence or this headline or or whatever?
I did have something really funny happened to me because of
AI recently where somebody else like this woman in the UK, she
used ChatGPT or whatever it was, but the AI hallucinated that I
had written a book that I did not repeat.
And so she actually emailed me and the publisher of the
supposed book, like asked about it.
And I was like, actually, that's a cool topic, but I did not read
this book. Yeah.
So it's like, OK, whatever large language model this was, it was
like, OK, it knows that I'm a real person.
And like, it was like expertise, definitely kind of like adjacent
to my wheelhouse, but then somehow connected it with like a
book that doesn't exist with a real publisher, you know?
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, One another fun example,
this is one of our graduate students, Veronica Chen, is
working on, like, really exploring this crossover between
AI and creativity, and she's not sure where she lands on it yet.
And that's part of the really interesting exploration.
And she and two other students, Kotorai and Kalina Yang, have
over the weekend acquired a pumpkin that is large enough
that it needs a forklift. So you can just get a sense of
the. Code today, yeah.
And they've used AI with the actual geometry of that pumpkin
to to give them a design for how it should be carved.
And like, there's some really interesting aspects that it has
like, and I'm like, and now they're going to carve that for
for real as humans, right? And like, so there is something
interesting with that back and forth collaboration with
something that is so like an AI cannot carve a pumpkin, right?
But it can suggest and like how well that's going to do.
Like I just can't wait to see it.
It's also just like a glorious, just like object of this season
and this moment. And I feel like these these
places where AI like reminds us that we are really human.
I love too and like this one example of it.
Right. It's like finding that kind of
hybrid Cyborg space, you know, just as like with these future
scenarios, we're trying to find like that space in between the
utopia and the dystopia, but it's like not fully human, not
fully machine, but like, what is that in between is like such a
rich area for exploration. Yeah, we already.
Made B mixes, right? Yeah.
Where are you going to go there, Scott?
I actually wasn't, but do you want to keep going on that well?
I'll just say like, like this human slash machine, like I'm
already a little machine with these glasses on, right?
Like I'm already a little machine if I've had a knee
surgery and there's a plastic part inside of me, you know, And
so how like getting comfortable that with that different kind of
crossover is, is fascinating. Yeah, and I was going to add
that it feels like these weird scenarios that are hurt.
I don't know if we're to the right word, but that idea that
like, you know, you're getting it to kind of you're almost
becoming subservient to it on the pumpkin carving.
But you have to do the work and it can't do the thing if you
don't put it in. You know, this sort of like odd
role that it plays is actually like way more interesting and
exciting than like, you know, it's like a really good
autocorrect editor, you know, that can help me, you know, like
it's a very, it's a much more interesting use case.
I think it's fascinating talk about.
Being awkward, you have an entire chapter on that in your
book. We recently had our AIG design
conference this year and there was a a workshop on like
neurodiversity and it was like one of the most highly attended
things at our conference. I think designers are probably
over represented. People who are neurodiverse as
well as people in the kind of LGBTQ spaces are also over
represented in design kind of cultures and teams, maybe
compared to the general population.
And often, you know, these are folks who were awkward in that
sense of like not fitting into established dominant ways of
being and and living in the world.
So yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on like why you chose
awkwardness as something to put in the book and and to really
like promote or get designers to embrace like at its.
Core awkwardness is something that you literally feel inside
of you when there's a a gap between your expectation of a
moment or a situation or a culture and what you're you're
met with. So it's like a way that you
actually see a distance between you and whatever the quote UN
quote norm or expected behavior. You know, regular flow of a
situation is right and design and is really about noticing
those gaps, right where our way that we title a lot of the talks
that we have about this book is is how to see the unseen.
And that's really, you know, awkwardness is in feeling.
It is one way to notice that something's amiss.
And then you can go into like, well, why is that?
And is this an opportunity? Like you're seeing the
neurodivergence? Like I, I feel like that you're,
you're spot on there. Like how are we tapping into
people that already see and experience the world
differently? There's like wild potential for
noticing patterns differently, right?
Opportunities, not only like, hey, this, these people don't
fit a norm, but I feel like there's a whole other way.
Like those are the people that are going to to really see
solutions that nobody else could have come up with.
So like awkwardness is that first signal.
I'll say that. Let's got build on that.
Yeah, there's an. Opportunity in that awkwardness
too. So in that chapter we talk a lot
about gaps and gaps being sort of like the distance between,
like what could be to create a different type of situation.
I'm a little wary about using the word better, but like what
could be to improve a situation and what exists at the moment?
And those gaps come of being feeling that awkwardness, right?
Like if you're not feeling that awkwardness, you're not noticing
those gaps. And I think you bring UA really
important point there, which is like, if you're outside the
norm, you know, I mean, there are a lot of disadvantages to
that, but an advantage is that you're just seeing things from a
perspective that other people aren't looking and there's just
huge windows of opportunity in being able to see that.
So like, I, I can think as soon as you brought that up about
neurodiversity and design, you know, like three people came to
mind like right away, like, Yep. And they are all so good at
noticing. And I think it's no mistake
that, you know, you have maybe a higher percentage of people
identifying as queer in design. And then also differently abled
people or people who have differently abled family members
are often also inspired to do things because you're recognized
that awkwardness. You live in that awkwardness.
And you're not afraid to say like, hey, maybe there's
something beyond this. Whereas a lot of people who
might not sort of have to grapple with it in the same way
just kind of pass through it. They avoid it because it's sort
of like, well, that's awkward, but maybe I don't have to deal
with that. And then you're you're kind of
missing out on a chance to make things better the other
category. Which I see a lot, you know, the
design schools where I teach at Parsons, I also teach at SBA
School of Visual Arts is that the master students are a very
high percentage of them are international students, right.
And so some of them like come and Julia was an international
student from Brazil. And so they're coming into a new
culture and like, so that gives them both like what they're
bringing from their home culture.
But so like noticing things that, you know, I grew up in the
US, so I probably just don't notice because it's just like
the water that I swim in. We talk a lot about in the.
Book about untaking things for granted and I think when you're
in a new situation, it's like you don't take things for
granted, right? So you're all of a sudden
questioning everything like why is that like that or that's a
weird way of doing that whereas a lot of us are just kind of
accepting it because we have to move through that culture.
Sorry, Carissa. No, I was going to say.
Something similar and you know, when you travel to a different
country, it's totally heightened, right, because
you're noticing that into an extreme, but you can also force
yourself into that noticing in your own environment, right.
If you if you take a totally different path from your home to
you know, where you walk to the bus stop, like you start like
taking things away from your peripheral vision and you tune
in a little bit more. And so there's a lot of that we
can do to practice that noticing and you know, like to shake us
into, we call it like us like deliberate disorientation,
right? Like how do you make yourself be
a little bit off kilter in the situation you're in as a way to
see facets of it that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise?
Totally. Julia, do you have any examples
or stories you want to share or and or the next question?
Yeah, I think for me. I'm always it's, it's funny
because I feel like I haven't lost my Brazilian way of seeing
things, but I have to remind my remind myself to adjust right.
So I think a very, very simple and basic everyday reaction for
me is the like when I meet someone new, I, I never know if
I can hug that person or if I should just say hi.
So there's always this awkwardness inside of me because
I'm like, OK, let me read this context.
And then once I build some relationship with that person,
then I already know, right? Because then the, the
expectation somehow is set. But when is the very first
moment, I always feel like, oh, can I hug?
Can I not? How, how does it work?
You know, so it's always, I'm, I'm always reminding myself to
wait a little bit and then react.
Otherwise it would be more automatic for me in, in another
context. Yeah, I had the opposite.
Experience I had the chance to work in Brazil like over a
decade ago or like in my career. So I was like and I was like the
only American in the office because it was like an American
agency that opened an office in Rio.
Everyone else was Brazilian and there's one colleague who's from
Portugal. It was interesting.
Like for me, the first thing was like just the relationship,
people's relationship to time and the way that meetings were
run and there was like some workshop or like people were
just like the introductions took like an hour and a half.
And that somebody who was one of the workshop participants we
were facilitating was like bicultural, like she was British
and Brazilian but had grown up partly in the US And she like
turned to me. She's like, yeah, people have to
feel comfortable first before they can do get down to
business, right? And it's like, OK, well, I'm
going to relax that because. So I felt like, oh, was I losing
control as a facilitator or whatever?
But yeah, it's like that adaptation.
But I also noted, you know, I was doing branding work back
then, but I was able to like, notice things in just the, the
physical environment there in the visual culture that like my
Brazilian colleagues like just weren't noticing because they
were surrounded by that all the time.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it's. It's really amazing.
And Chris had brought up that like, you don't have to travel
that far to get there. You just have to be able to get
into a state that's sort of what we call deliberate
disorientation. There's our publicist actually
worked with a guy who walked every street in either all 5
boroughs of New York or just Manhattan, I can't remember.
And he was saying when he talks to people, oftentimes they're so
into their routine, they don't know what like the back of their
building looks like or the block behind.
So like, you know, if I live on 10th, I might not know what 9th
looks like because I leave 10th and I go to work up in Midtown
or something. And that's just my normal path
or the restaurants or off on the river that way.
And so like, there's so much. We actually, a friend of ours
talked about how whenever he commutes, he takes the same
commute, but he tries to notice one different thing on the
commute, Right. And that it just like awakens
you a little bit in the way that like traveling, just showing up
somewhere where you can't help but be awakened.
But you can, you can do it in your day-to-day too.
And I think designers are particularly good at that,
actually. Yeah.
One of my my. Favorite activities in class and
it's in the book is the theory of the derive.
It's a French word which means to drift and it comes from the
psycho geography movement and the from the 60s right And so
essentially it is a the way that you can practice this is go
outside and set your timer for half hour, one hour, pick a
block of time, no technology otherwise and follow a color
right. So if there's red over there, I
walk over to it and then like wait to see where's that next
red in your peripheral vision and walk to that and where's the
next one in your peripheral And like so you just like allow
yourself to follow something, whether it's a color or a shadow
pattern or acceleration or a texture, etcetera.
And with that simple setup. Send people out.
And then they come back and everybody comes back and they're
like, Oh, my God. Like, I had no idea.
Like the conversations that happened after that, you can't.
I mean, I can't do with them justice, right?
And it's something that any one of us can, can do.
And yet it's like it takes a little bit of inertia.
It takes somebody assigning you to do it, to do it right.
But you see what's right there all along in an entirely
different way. Yeah, that's great.
And I. Think it ties in so much with
our theme of performance this season 2, right?
Just this idea of like, how do we cultivate?
Being a designer. Right.
So when we go and practice it and doing so, it's like
exercises like these that you can do yourself.
You don't necessarily have to uproot and move to another
country, right as we were talking about.
But just these little things like this daily exercise you're
talking about or design fictions, future stories in the
book and writing your own, like things like that.
Kind of cultivate ourselves as designers in terms of how we,
how like athletes train, you know?
Yeah. And, and I think the idea of
sort of doing it continuously, there's a lot of research around
sort of career spikes. And often a career spike comes
after some fairly long period of exploration, right?
So it might be like taking a new job, taking some time off doing
a project that's like very different or just exploring
something that you haven't explored before.
And then you start to consolidate what you've been
learning through the exploration and it becomes like kind of path
to higher performance, if you think about it that way.
And the other thing is we often have a tendency to only validate
the things that we learned during a project, right?
Like, OK, I'm on the project now.
I'm going to do a period of research and then I'm going to
go, you know, do my design when the body of work that you've
been doing your whole life. And of course, you have to be
careful about bias and where you're coming from, your
positionality and point of view. But like that body of work can
be valuable at any given moment. So I think like if you think of
performance, it's sort of like thinking of it as like an
ongoing thing rather than a, oh, if I do this now, it will lead
to higher performance versus like, well, if I have these
habits over time, they're going to add up in ways that are
bigger than I can even imagine. Totally.
And I think it's. Like on that point of like your
body of work, it's like your portfolio is more than just the
thing that gets you your next design job, but it's like just
your toolkit of things to go back to, right?
Even if it's like seemingly a totally different project, but
maybe there's something that you can reuse or adapt there.
Yeah, there's like some. Picasso thing and a Picasso I
think was probably not the best very sounds like a pretty
horrible guy, but he like did a sketch and somebody.
Wanted to take it you just sketch on a napkin and somebody
wanted it and there and he was like, no, you can't have that or
I'll I'll pay give me $20,000 I'll give you my sketch And they
were like, well, you just did it in 30 seconds.
He's like, no, it took me 60 years to get to the point where
I can make that sketch, you know, in 20 seconds or whatever.
There is an. Another, another thing that made
me think of 10 years ago, Scott and I did this project at the D
School that was like looking at the future of higher education,
residential higher education in a world where everything was
going Mookie, the big online classes moves and the, the, the
thought of like portfolios and jobs and hiring came up and I'm
forgetting who said this, but it became the sentiment.
That's advice that I still give to students when they're
preparing those portfolios, which is around like an employer
is not. They may be looking to see the
work that you have done, but what they really want to know is
like what you have the ability to do in the future, right?
And so how you position what you have done right in ways that
they see that like, oh, this person has been able to mock up
illustrations that have flowed beautifully across, you know,
these apps, etcetera. But like that might tie like
really interestingly to this new type of technology I'm building
where we want to bring in illustration in a new way.
Like it's like you don't need a one to one correlation, but you
have to be able to talk about what you might be able to do,
what you could be able to do that's non trivial.
You know, that's a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing to do.
Tristan Scott, It's been. Great chatting with you about
your book, your teaching, your points of view on design.
You'd like to ask all of our guests a closing question, which
is do you have something to recommend that's not your book
to our listeners? It could be like another book.
It could be a TV show, some piece of media, piece of art,
something to recommend to take us out today.
The book that I. Cannot stop Talking about right
now is called The Light Eaters. It's by Zoe Schlanger.
And it's all about the the world of plant intelligence and how
plants sense the world. And it has fundamentally shifted
how I go about my day and how I look at everything from a blade
of grass to a bud of a flower. And I think like it is as a
designer, I'm really now in tune, you know, to sensing and
sense making like always have been.
But now from the lens of the the plant world, like, wow, I cannot
wait to see what happens next. So highly recommend.
Amazing. And I was.
I will give some books and media to support this in case people
are interested in. But I have to say like a
fruitful thing for me lately has just been like getting into
architecture and trying to understand like what is somebody
trying to say with the thing that they make?
So I think I what I was going to say is like, don't, don't even
read about that. Just go out and like look at
stuff and and like what what is this telling us about the what
the person cared about when they made this?
I think it's just like a really fruitful activity, especially
from a design standpoint. Architecture is everywhere and
it's so rich. I will say like a great book
that gets into that is David Byrne has this sort of not
really memoir. It's kind of like a travel log
called Bicycle Diaries where he's traveling and he's biking
in different cities and talks about like how he experiences
those cities. And that's a really great, great
thing. And then there's another book
written by Berkeley architecture professor called A Timeless Way
of Being. So this is Christopher
Alexander, who's famous for this book called The Pattern Language
and the Timeless Way of Being. I think is is a better a better
version of his philosophy. So it's worth checking out.
Wonderful. Thank you for.
These great resources and for the conversation today, you've
been listening or watching the AIGA Design podcast.
I'm Li Shawn Huang with Julia Donatello.
We'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for having us.
Julia and Li Shawn.