Humanize with designer Thomas Heatherwick

0:05Things that come off assembly lines are, well, boring. Things made by hand have a more magical quality to them, because they were made by someone's hands. Sadly, this assembly line feel has infected the broader world, including our cities. Thank goodness for Thomas Heatherwick. He is on a quest to make the world less boring and, well, more human. You may not know Thomas' name, but you definitely know his work. He has designed iconic buildings and iconic stuff, including the vessel in New York City, the cauldron for the 2012 Summer Olympics, and the new modern-looking famous London double-decker bus.

0:53He says our cities have become dreadfully unhuman, and it's negatively impacting our physical and mental health. He even wrote a book about it called Humanize. I'm a huge fan of Thomas, his philosophies and his work. He inspires me every time we sit down to talk. And this is no exception. This is a bit of optimism.

1:19I'm a huge fan of your work, which you know. But the thing that I love is that where so many designers or architects are driven to show off or show their masterpiece, and having worked with some of them, it really is often about them. You are so driven to contribute to the community and the places in which your work shows up. And what I particularly love is you're leading this movement to make the world a little more unboring. Sounds funny, doesn't it? Yeah. Well, first of all, if you want to make the world unboring, first of all what makes it boring yeah well I suppose I come from a slightly unconventional background into the world of architecture in that I was initially trained before I started building buildings as a designer so I was interested in how things you design are useful for people and how they feel about what you design for them and I was growing in a time very formative time where there were some amazing product designers who really captured people's imaginations by cultural connections in what they did it was that insight to say could it tell a story that would connect with people's imaginations rather than what's my design idea what's me what does me think it's more what might connect with people and I came to the world of architecture and was a bit astonished actually I looked at buildings as I was growing up as we all do and was just amazed that it seemed something had gone wrong something strange had happened so I felt like a detective trying to unpick what what is this thing where we all know like everyone When you speak to most people, they say cities are becoming more characterless, less soulful.

3:24That's something we all know. And somehow because buildings happen slowly and stealthily and because very few people are in the fortunate position of commissioning buildings or being a mayor who gives approvals for things or a planner or an architect or designer designing them, people feel powerless. so if you think of any building there's the amount of people who will ever go inside that building but at least a thousand times more people will go past that building and it will be the landscape backdrop of their lives and so I suppose I've tried to stay an outsider stay seen with those eyes that I saw as a as a teenager and stay with the confidence of those thoughts I had as a teenager but now as an adult who does know the history of architecture who knows all the different movements who's had a team for 29 years and has built many buildings I'm still trying to keep that outsider feel because I think putting yourself in the shoes of others instead of just saying this is my idea and this is what I think the world should do to me it's more exciting trying to imagine how will other people feel what were their thoughts rather than what are my thoughts.

4:41I'm more interested in their thoughts. As you said, way more people walk past the buildings than go into them. And yet we don't look up. And we don't enjoy our own cities. We sort of walk past them on the way to our office or on the way to our appointment or the way to meeting our friends at the restaurant or something. And we don't look up past the buildings that we love. And I know from living in New York City, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, which are old buildings built from the 30s, are still beautiful. And having walked past them thousands of times and seen every angle and every weather and every light, I still take pictures of those buildings when I walk past them.

5:21And yet modern buildings, I don't. It's so interesting because the modern movement that's created all those buildings that you don't look at and don't stick in your heart and that you wouldn't fight to keep them up if someone proposed demolishing them, they were built with a socialist intention. You know, that this was good for everybody. This was good for the public and the intention was good, but actually it was done with such an authoritarian force that had been inspired by people like Mussolini. Functionalism came in. These mantras, form follows function, less is more, ornament is a crime.

6:05And they felt very powerful. After the Second World War, it felt society wanted to be told the answer. And so in a way, the modern movement in architecture came in where it's saying, here's the answer. And it must have felt very exciting saying, right, we've just had war, clear it out of the way. But I think that where I've come to is that those form follows function is a very powerful thing. There's an economy to that. And we know no one's got endless money. And so we have to be resourceful. But I feel that I believe in form follows function, but I believe that emotion is a function and that we forgot that emotion is a function.

6:51and it became cerebral and it lost actually empathy and the sense of feelings. Feelings are a thing. They are a real, real, real thing. You said something which was really interesting, which is people were comfortable being told what to do. They were comfortable being told what was good. And I know just if I take it down to an individual in my own career, there were times where I knew little to nothing about something I had to decide on. And there were people around me who were very experienced, call it in finance, you know, who knew a lot about the subject that I knew little about. And my insecurity about the topic, I was okay with being told what to do.

7:36And sometimes my gut said, this is wrong. But I deferred because they were the experts, and I was the idiot. And I was, quote unquote, comfortable being told what to do. What I appreciate is what you're saying, it sounds like to the general public, is you're smarter about what you want your city to look like than you think you are, that you have confidence that you may not realize, and trust your gut. Though we can argue what beautiful or what good is, there's very little argument to your point about what shit is. And if we can all agree that we We want our cities to look not like shit. And we get a vote.

8:18We get a voice because we're the ones that have to live in the damn things. Like we're not in the meetings looking at pretty models. We actually have to walk past these buildings and sometimes go into them every single day. We get a vote. And I so appreciate the of the people point of view that you have when you design. not what do I think about this building, but how will others feel about this building? I think sometimes it's possible to mistake some of the things that I'm trying to talk about as if I'm saying you need to ask everyone's opinion and make everyone happy. And you can't ask everyone everyone's opinion and make everyone happy.

9:00But it's a very different thing to just believe the public are ignorant and they don't understand or the reality is the public are not ignorant the public all our lives where did you live in a building so your entire life you're almost 50 or whatever is 50 years of your life have been lived in and around buildings so you are an expert on buildings you may not be articulate at talking about it I suppose my hope is about national conversation. There's a national conversation about sugar. Should we or shouldn't we have sugar in our diets and how much, how bad is it for us? There's a national conversation about flying, whether you should fly somewhere on your holiday or take the train instead or shouldn't go abroad because of the environmental side.

9:49But there's no national conversation about the world that surrounds we're talking about places that have necessary human interestingness and that isn't a luxury it's when this isn't really a conversation about niceness like simon why don't we make the world nicer wouldn't it be nice if everything was nice and it's not a conversation about wouldn't it be nice to make the world old-fashioned or futuristic or curved there's a researcher in Canada called Colin Ellard who's done this research and it was really a rare bit of research. There were no institutes really pushing this and he put sensors on the wrists of groups of people and took them to different places in the city and in New York he took them to an area with some main new building blocks and was measuring their heart rate and their stress and he also took them to one of the older areas and they went into stress when they were in the newer area their heart rates were actually in stress it wasn't just less nice that stress is what contributes to even he puts forward towards heart attack and condition which no one would associate that an absence of interesting is a thing so i think we think that oh well that's a luxury to have interestingness rather than an absence is positively bad for you and it was just very powerful as we started me and my team just researching and we've written this book called humanize and it just sort of like a snowball got more and more powerful there's a researcher in homes in syria and she comes from an architectural background and she was researching the impact of the new buildings that were built there in Homs in recent decades that replaced, they cleaned away.

11:49The faiths were all living in sort of some interlaced harmony with each other. But the modernist mindset that wanted to clarify and separate divided those faiths and also stripped the culture from the building. We know about the cultural revolution in China of burning books and taking down temples but we actually voluntarily with a zeal that's extraordinary we've had a cultural revolution where we voluntarily following the logic that form followed function the ornament was a crime and that less was more we culturally stripped the world around us to the point that this researcher called mawa al-sabuni in homs she attributes it as a contributory factor to war that's another twist of gravity that things being boring isn't just boring it's actually like a cultural revolution that's stripping us actually of our humanity so it's who we are and i think we all know there are huge challenges ahead and without joy you actually can't solve problems unless you have hope and optimism and that's why i was looking forward to talking to as well, because I know actually underneath it all, your big drive is to find that hope.

13:12And the culture to me is actually it is hope. That's what it is. Let's bring down about a few thousand feet. And I'm interested in when you start a project, what is your process to ensure humanness in your work? Many buildings and cities are takers. They don't give to the surroundings. I suppose a few years ago I sort of realized that if I'm lucky my studio will do four or five projects every year you know I'm very lucky to be trusted but actually we say I'm lucky enough to go for 20 more years before I hopefully don't get hit by my own bus um but if we if we can that's 100 projects that's not that's that's loads that's loads of work but actually in the big history of cities That's nothing.

14:02And unless actually the public get involved and other designers and planners and politicians and builders and architects all rally around saying we need to humanize our cities. I used to think that projects could be highly influential. They're actually not that influential. Is it because of money? I think money is a bit, but actually I think it's human nature. We always give excuses as to why we don't have to be inspired. I mean, how can you build next to the Chrysler building? How do people not feel that's the biggest gauntlet thrown down? But we make excuses. We say, oh, well, back in the past, labor was cheaper.

14:45I mean, in our book, Humanize, there was an American researcher, an architect, and he really went into what did buildings cost? Because it's the first thing I hear always is, oh, but Thomas, it was cheaper to build in the past. And his research came back saying it wasn't. It was really expensive to build buildings in the past, but we thought it mattered. And it's a bit like fast fashion. We all know that there's a problem with fast fashion, this idea you create things and chuck them away. We discovered cheap. We invented that you could build even cheaper. And then we now say it's expensive to build human when actually it's like fast fashion.

15:29We've got this fast architecture that we throw away after 40 years. And in the US, I think it's a billion square foot of buildings is demolished just to be rebuilt. that's half of washington dc every year it's the stories we tell ourselves is the problem and that's that's what i love about the way your movement that you've been doing is looking at the stories we tell ourselves how we give ourselves permission you look look back at what the engineers i mean i think of what a victorian engineer would think if they arrived now they would look up at the satellites and go wow what did you do amazing they would look at the mobile phone technology and say, that's incredible.

16:11They'd see an aeroplane. They would see it and say, that's so impressive. And then they would look at the buildings and just say, what happened? What were you thinking? And we mustn't forget, society's richer than ever, ever before in 2 ,000 years ago, we could make human buildings. 1 ,500 years ago, 1 ,000 years, 500, 200 years, something weird happened. And we're stuck, we're like stuck in a bunker. This is worth underscoring because I think this is so interesting. We industrialized food to the point where we've taken all the nutrients out and all the goodness, where we've made fast food become a staple and now believe that spending the money on good food makes you live longer, right?

16:53As opposed to eating processed food every day. If you have a good, well-made piece of clothing, it'll last your entire life and you will hand it on to someone else. You'll create hand-me-downs of clothing and high-end fashion, but we made it - And be inspired to repair it and you'll fix it. And be inspired. If you get a little hole, you repair it because it's worth it, because it's good quality. Where we've industrialized fashion to the point where fast fashion, we don't bother repairing it because the item was so cheap in the first place, it's not worth it. Or it falls apart completely and we chuck it.

17:23To your point, which is we've created a fast fashion industry, which has done tremendous damage to our environments as well. And that insight that we've done the same thing to our buildings where we've created fast buildings. where we build them up, whatever, we'll smash it down, we'll make another one. And the damage that's caused to not only our environment with the emissions and the carbon footprints, as you said, 40 % of all carbon emissions come from construction, yet people are focused on airplanes, they should be focused on construction. This is the great forgotten landscape, pardon the pun, the next frontier where we need to focus attention, not only for the good of the environment, but also the good of our health because you said there are actually health implications being in uninteresting, boring places.

18:08It actually increases our stress and creates more health problems for us. So if we care about food and nutrition, then we should care about buildings. I love your analogy of nutrition, of looking at the food parallel with it. And there's now proper evidence showing that these buildings cause stress in our brains that it takes longer to heal inside them you're more likely to suffer crime and antisocial behavior around them and terrible for the environment at that scale I had somebody challenge me the other day and it's on a nutrition base they said oh Thomas you will um you Thomas will disagree with this I'm sure but uh I see cities as a bit like a fruit loaf oh you know Thomas he won't like this because he thinks everything should be raisins my response was no not at all I think the world just like a piece of music you know when you have music you don't want it all to be loud or all to be quiet the power is having something quiet that then builds up and then comes back down so the going back to the fruit loaf my point was I totally agree with the fruit loaf analogy it's just the bread dough part between has had zero nutritional value for more than half a century what we actually want is something nutritious wholemeal organic whatever you believe to be nutritious as in every day yeah we're not saying everything should be monuments should be eiffel towers and empire state buildings everywhere They're rammed up next to each other.

19:46The boring stuff should be good too. Like when I don't always have salmon and spinach. Sometimes I just have cereal and eggs, you know, but my eggs should not be sort of industrialized eggs that have no nutrition left. It's every day. How do we reinvent every day buildings to have necessary humanness? When I think of the worst buildings you ever come in contact with, they're medical ones. It's probably educational and medical or care homes. actually for us in later life. It embarrasses me because surprise, surprise, all the love gets put into art buildings. So someone thinks I'm making an art building.

20:25Why don't we make it artistic? Like, oh, surprise, surprise. But actually to me, real culture is where you don't expect it. And where would the most value be? The health environments. And if I take the most extreme ones, which is people at the very ends of their lives in care homes. It's the least glamorous, arguably part of the medical profession. Both my grandmothers at the end of their lives were in care homes and it really was some of the worst place I've ever been. But the staff there, I wasn't worried for my grannies, actually. For me, it was about the staff. I wanted that place to say to those staff, thank you.

21:08But without saying thank you, I wanted that place for society to be appreciating and cherishing that someone will come in and will work with people where you're not going to have miracle cures. Thomas, this is such a great insight. And I want to share a story with you that you'll appreciate that's a great analogy here, which is we had an airline called Continental Airlines in America, which has now been folded into United. For years, it was rated the worst airline in the country, like on every metric. And this new CEO came in, a man by the name of Gordon Bethune. And one of the problems they had was the planes were dirty and the crew had no incentive to clean the planes.

21:45They stopped caring because the management didn't care about them. They didn't care about the planes. And Bethune, when he came in, he didn't say, we're customer focused. Clean the plane because it's all about the customer and we have to have a great customer experience. That's not what he did. He came on and said, the passengers will be on the plane for about two or three hours and then they're going to get off. That'll be their whole experience for the day. you have to stay on that plane for the next eight hours working you're going to have many flights that day it's your office don't you want to keep it clean because it's just a nice place to come and work in a clean office every day you have to come here every single day and so it's the same thing the patients hopefully will come through the hospital for as brief a period as possible we will cure them and look after them and send them on their way hopefully but the doctors the staff, the nurses have to come to work every single day.

22:36And don't we want them to work in an environment that inspires and invigorates them so that they're better problem solvers, that they have more energy, that they have more love to give to our family that goes through their offices. And yet we don't think that way. We think about how do we build a hospital room to get as many beds in as possible as we can treat as many patients, but we never think about the energy of the people and how simply designing a good hospital for the people who work there will have profound impact on the health care that they're able to provide and their own mental health.

23:12This is the thing is that actually your challenge in designing is finding what the real thing is to solve. Often you'll get asked, can you design this? And you can imagine asking the AI, You know, you design this. But actually, the real thing is figuring out you're asking me that. But the real issue is let's reel back further is another thing. And that once you find the true problem to solve. So in a way, in our design process here, and I work with 250 amazing people, is trying to find the real problems to solve. It sounds very unglamorous, really, to say I'm a problem solver and my team, that's what we do.

23:53But we problematize because actually that empowers us to put our biggest passion and inspiration and artistic thing because it's with a purpose. It's not about self-expression. That isn't our urge. Thomas, you're onto something here. You're onto something here, which I think challenges the fears that people have about AI, which is if you ask AI to build a hospital, it'll think about patients and healthcare in beds. But this idea of being an inventor, of being able to understand purpose and what the underlying cause and the underlying challenge really is, is a very human experience. And I think your challenge, which is how do we teach our children to invent?

24:34How do we teach creativity, not as you talk about it, which is in the self-expression manner of creativity, which is usually what we think of when we think of creativity, we think of self-expression, but rather how do we teach creativity, which is to re-understand the problem presented to me so I can actually understand the real problem underneath the problem you've given me or the real challenge underneath the challenge you've offered me. You do it. It's probably in your DNA. However, I can't imagine that the 250 people who are on your team all are naturally gifted with that DNA. Some have talents for other things.

25:07And having worked with you and gone through your studio, they have developed that talent, which means it's teachable. It took us a long time really to develop some techniques for being able to step back and look. The beginning is always just researching, just research and trying to step the furthest back we could. And for example, when we did the Olympic cauldron for London 2012, and there we were briefed and we were told to make an Olympic cauldron to go on the roof of the London stadium. and that it had to have no moving parts. And the roof had been strengthened to take 200 tons of extra loads.

25:48And so we were all briefed very firmly. That was the brief from the British government. And we thought and we stepped back and we reflected and we did our research and we looked and thought, what's the real problem that's to solve? And we looked in Sydney at the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony. the Olympic cauldron got stuck for two minutes it was supposed to lift up and so it's it didn't move for two minutes so it was a kind of embarrassing awkward moment and then it moved again and so we diagnosed that the reason they were saying no moving parts wasn't because they were saying don't have any moving parts it was because the Sydney one had stuck it was expressing their fear what they really meant is make sure it doesn't go wrong which is a different thing yeah and then And the roof had been strengthened.

26:38And we were there and we knew that Danny Boyle, the filmmaker who made Trainspotting, an incredible person, he wanted the ceremony to connect with all the volunteers, the nurses and doctors who were going to be doing the opening ceremony. They weren't soldiers. And so we just thought, if we put it on the roof, it's going to be enormous. Put it this way. what's the most important place in a circular stadium with a circular track with circular seating with a circular road around the outside it seemed to us one object the most powerful place you can put it is the center not on the roof somewhere and we could then be smaller and it would seem big because it would be relative to the people around it so we didn't put it on the roof and we did a cauldron with a thousand moving parts it had the most moving parts in the history of all Olympic cauldrons.

27:27There were 204 pieces for 204 countries that got laid down and they lifted up and made one giant flame. So we broke the brief completely. AI wouldn't probably have thought that because it needed our years of confidence to be able to lead and say, I know you think you want that, but actually what you really maybe want might be this. What do you think? Thomas, there's an insight here that I think is important for anybody who's in any kind of industry and anybody who's raising children. So in other words, everyone. And I never realized this, which is my process is very similar to yours. When I want to explore something, when there's a problem presented to me, and I have to start with a problem, right?

28:11I don't try and solve the problem. That's not what I do. Because to your point, my solution will be the same as everybody else's solution, because I'm going to go for the stuff that I know, I'm going to go for the stuff that's around me. I'm going to go for the obvious. And those ideas are already on the page anyway. So you don't need me. What I start to do is research. And I ask the question, well, why did that happen? And why did, so to your point, which is, well, why don't you want moving parts? I don't just accept it, which is why my work necessarily always ends up in anthropology and biology.

28:42Because when you want to know, why do we trust each other? Well, trust is really important. You can't build culture without trust. True, accept all that. But why do we trust each other? What does that even mean? What does trust come from? Necessarily, you end up in biology. And as soon as you get to the biology, now you realize how we've accidentally short-circuited the biology. And so now I can offer a solution that's more in line with our biology, that's more in line with how to build trust. So like you, I start researching. So I think number one is whenever you have a problem, just start researching everything.

29:11Read everything. More than half of it's useless. But even the useless stuff is helping you get to a path. You have to sort of bump into a tree to find out where the path is. The tree was just as valuable as getting to the path. That's number one, which is I'm not afraid of going down wrong directions because it gets me into the right direction. In other words, people are so worried about wasting time. No, no, you have to waste time. But wasted time is actually not wasted. So number two is I think this idea of being an expert in something is very limiting. And I think we've downsized the importance of being a generalist.

29:46When you go to college, you have to major in something. You have to declare an expertise. You have to get a degree in something very particular. Everybody says, a jack of all trades and master of none. And they mock you. Oh, you're a jack of all trades and master of none. But the full quote that nobody ever repeats is, a jack of all trade is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. Oh, that's brilliant. Yes. My two favorite people in the planet are artists and military. And people never understand that. because they're on opposite sides of the spectrum. But I learn so much from the diversity because they're all human beings.

30:22So there's intersections and things to learn. And I think we should encourage our children, we should encourage the people on our team to explore wild varieties of experiences that seemingly have nothing to do each other. And usually when we give education budgets to our teams, we'll be like, well, you're in IT, so we'll pay for IT classes. Nope. If you're in IT, I want to pay for you to have a ceramics class, you know? Yes. Two things. I think you're talking yourself into designing a building with me now. I should be so lucky. Because I'd love to design a building with you. I can tell you, Thomas, nothing would give me greater joy than to have that opportunity.

30:59I feel humbled, but I don't think I could, but I love the idea of it. But the idea that we can teach, I think we can teach people how to invent. I think we can do it. It's about analysis. I mean, a lot of the time in the studio, we're also spotting cliche. You know, to start is just step out of your body and say, what do I expect me to do now? What am I likely to do now? What's a typical thing that I would do? And do I actually want to do that? You know, you were saying about the way that you step back and analyze. I wanted to say something that I think is quite important. I don't know if I'm going to say it well.

31:37but I was aware that I'm probably not the greatest designer in the world not the best visual creator all of those things so all the more need to move the goal posts like why compete don't compete find something that there aren't many other people who are an expert at and become an expert at that and I think too many people spend too much time inadvertently just competing with loads of people and what's the point find something where you can contribute and i suppose i try to see that not as a here's my big career doing that as much as in a sense with every project so we were talking about olympic cauldrons we started by looking at every other olympic cauldron that had been designed watched so many old dvds of every single olympics that there had been it's pattern recognition we're watching what did people do and what did we actually care about when we reflect back and we realized that people were expressing themselves like i think it should be twisted and someone else saying well i should think it should be really square and someone's go i should be think it'd be round and we realized that a billion people see the olympic cauldron when it's lit and a billion people forget it straight away afterwards and when you ask someone which olympic cauldron do you remember they'll be like i don't really remember any like looking back and i don't know what age bracket your listeners are but for example the one that people did remember when we were researching was the barcelona 1992 olympics because what they remembered was there was an archer shooting an arrow with fire on the end of it i remember that you remember it but if you if i ask you to tell me the design of the cauldron you won't be able to tell me couldn't tell you so this is the real i think it's a in a sense it's a common sense thing we're talking about is don't just be obsessed with your area i'm a designer so it's all about the design actually think about what mattered to people and so our reflection was that people remembered a moment they didn't remember a thing so we were designing a moment don't design a thing because no one really cares about a thing they care about moments and and the key thing was jeopardy the reason people remembered the one in barcelona because it was jeopardy yeah every inside your emotion yeah what if he misses yeah emotion is a function and this applies to architecture but everything and so there was a moment where everyone's looking thinking what if he misses and then you stop and think and you in a fraction of a second you know as i thought i know everyone else thought that you think oh no no no it'll be fine because there'll be a little man at the other end whose job it is to light it if he misses and then in the same nanosecond, your brain's going, well, if he shoots the little man whose job is to light it.