Physical Design Meets Digital

I hosted an event on Design, Technology, and Leadership in San Francisco at the end of last year that brought together Carl Bass, Erin McKean, Margaret Stewart, and Robert Brunner. Robert Brunner's team at Ammunition Group was kind enough to let us use their beautiful offices right on the Embarcadero. You can watch a short "trailer" of the event below:

The general topic of the evening was one that I like to foster -- which is the power of conversations manifest as ... well ... conversations. Specifically, conversations between two people who might not know each other too well -- and while they learn about each other, you too might learn more about the conversants that you may not have had the chance to otherwise.

Carl surprised us all with his backpack filled with various 3d-printed parts. I've known Carl for a long time -- and once had the opportunity to ride with him in a train from Davos for at least four hours. At the time I was deeply struck by how he was -- the CEO of a major corporation -- traveling with no entourage and showing me all kinds of images on his laptop of different sculptures he'd been creating using some of the tools created by Autodesk and at his personal sculpture studio.

Fast-forwarding to the kinds of things Carl shared that evening, it's important to note that he and his teams have been curious about the bleeding edge of human creativity as assisted by computation. He asked,

What if we could describe the problem we wanted to solve to the computer, instead of make the problem all about how to explain the problem to the computer?"

You can watch a 5-minute edited clip of my interview with Carl from this link. And if this is a topic of greater interest to you, I suggest you read this piece on TR that explains the approach in greater depth. This approach is not a new one -- and it goes deep into a splinter group within the Architecture (non-computer) community that was led by the late William J. Mitchell back in the 70s -- this reference opens that door a bit.

Now, moving on to Erin McKean, what's great about what she brought to the evening is the notion of language as a material. She made a great point about the creativity within the limitations of computer languages as not being dissimilar to the feats achieved by the author of the Dr. Seuss books in creating entire sets of beloved books with a limited number of words.

It's not really about how many words you have ... it's about what you do with them."

If you haven't seen one of Erin's TED talks, I recommend you do. Just go to the TED site and she's super easy to find. Her big project right now is building a non-profit within her famed dictionary site Wordnik.com where anyone can "adopt" a word. (In full disclosure, I'm the proud foster parent of the word "design.") Carl's interview with Erin is 2-minute edited clip right here.

Erin proceeded to interview Robert Brunner -- designer of the ubiquitous Beats headphones, among many other design achievements.

We define ourselves by what we surround ourselves with ... our things have meaning. Especially when we start wearing them."

Robert made an important argument that folks in the technology industry all understand what technology is and what it does, but don't have a great grasp of how it makes people feel. Or more importantly, how it can make people feel. That 3-minute edited interview is here.

Margaret Stewart's interview by Robert closed the evening -- he steered her to talk about her experiences designing at scale for Facebook or, as Robert described it, "designing for the whole world." Margaret's emphasis on the importance of empathy for the customer and critical thinking by the designer wrapped up the entire evening with a nice bow. She acknowledged how important it was for designers to own the solution to the problem, but how sometimes ownership got in the way of being open to the designer's willingness to make change:

Don't get too in love with your own solution.

You can watch all the clips on one page at the official KPCB page for the event. If you think it's a bit odd that I've made my own summary when there was already another existing event summary page, you're probably right. But by doing so, it forced me to re-learn some of what I learned that evening -- I hope it was of use to you. -JM