Design Better Experts in Residence: Roundtable at Sequoia Capital

19:36Kevin Bethune:And the most common answer is, I don't know, maybe something good they got from Bootstrap or somewhere else. And like that, well, you know, something common, right? But what you want is the answer that matches the system you built. And that is hidden in your library of React components. So reference that. And it's not that hard as designers for us to bring that into our process when we're prompting for new components. There's another way to look at efficiency, too, which is on the team level. And there have been some amazing strides in design teams, namely around design operations, design ops, that has its origins with Hot Studio being purchased by Facebook, now Meta, bringing that in.

20:11Kevin Bethune:And then many of those people went out into the world and formalized design operations. You know, design teams became way more efficient, integrated with companies more effectively. I wonder if there's also another side, because when I think about efficiency and design, there's a good thing. Like we can be part of the story. We can be part of the strategy. And there's a downside to that too, which is design also needs space for ambiguity, uncertainty, exploration, discovery, which is very unique with our discipline. And I wonder if the obsession with operations, not just design ops, but also OKRs, I've never really resonated with the idea of an OKR feels very manufactured, sort of like let's write our own script and then perform to that.

20:57Kevin Bethune:Lots of people have different perspectives on that. Kevin, let's go to you because I think you've got some feelings about efficiency in design.

21:03James Buckhouse:It definitely evokes strong feelings. It makes me reflect not only for myself, but also the teams that I've been a part of. Where are we spending our calories? And I'll just simplify it in the sense that there's like been typically three buckets. One, it's like usually there's a lot of stakeholder management and the work that we have to do. Second, there's a lot of production time to build assets to convince said stakeholder. We need to go forward on a certain initiative. And the last bucket is what I would deem the most precious. It's that creative problem-solving time. My hope is that with efficiency, with automation and these kind of things, we can allow the first two buckets to reduce, to expand our bandwidth and appetite and energy around the creative problem-solving and really tapping into the deeper why.

21:45James Buckhouse:Because I do have concerns about the role that hyper-consumption and the flywheel of marketers, marketing, consumers consuming, and everything being described through market funnel speak and OKRs and KPIs that are very much rooted in conclusive data fed by clicks versus what's typically missing in a lot of opportunities is just really interrogating the why around how are we actually showing up for people and planet. And if we do that well, hopefully the business concern and the data will be satiated. But I don't think there's enough time being spent to really interrogate that why. So the optimist in me says with efficiency, we'll open that third bucket a little bit more.

22:21Kevin Bethune:I had this conversation with a major corporation recently where OKRs almost never mention what the user wants and needs. 99.9 % of the time is what the company needs. And really, we're trying to build relationships and we're creating products and putting them into the world. We probably all had relationships where it feels very transactional that someone is always asking of us instead of, you know, we take care of one another. It feels a little ironic. But Irene, I mean, how do you think about efficiency in the companies that you've supported?

22:51Irene Au:I think it's really important for us to remember that the design ops and the style guides and the design libraries and things like that, it's a means to an end. It's not the point itself. The whole point of having all of that design infrastructure is so that designers can have more time and space to be creative, to generate a lot of ideas for any given solution, to make tangible the unseen, to go deeper into understanding, is this really meeting people's needs? And is it really driving the transformation that we seek to drive? I think about all the design activities that so many startups say, oh, we would love to do this, but we don't have the time.

23:32Irene Au:Well, now you have the time. Create multiple ideas for any kind of problem to help visualize what are all the trade-offs. If we go with direction A, B, or C to solve this problem, design A is focusing on this as the point of view. Design B is emphasizing this other thing. But you can't have both because if you have both, then it's too confusing. And a lot of times decision makers like stakeholders can't really see the trade-offs until they actually see that come to life. And I have met so many designers who have pushed back on designing solutions that they know will never get implemented. They say, well, I don't want to create a design until the product manager, the CEO, or whoever knows exactly what they want to build.

24:16Irene Au:And it's like, well, a lot of times they don't know what they want to build until they see it. And this is the whole promise that we make when we say that design can help you get to the right answer faster, is that the good designers are going to be mocking up multiple different alternative paths so that stakeholders can see the consequences of their decisions and make informed choices. There's a lot of talk in the last several years about design has a seat at the table, now what, and that sort of thing. And your job is to make vision tangible as a designer. That's what you're supposed to do. And a lot of times designers don't feel like they have the space to do that because they're stuck in this production grind.

24:54Irene Au:But if things become more efficient and we can produce more quickly, then theoretically that means we should be able to create alternate possible realities for stakeholders.

25:04Kevin Bethune:I want a T-shirt that says make vision tangible. Yeah.

25:09James Buckhouse:So as we kind of hinted at roles collapsing, a lot of companies are reducing the size of their teams. That's not just design teams, but engineering teams as well. Let's hear how deep you think these cuts might go. And also, if I'm a designer, design leader, how do I best position myself to be valuable to a company so I don't find myself cut from my role?

25:30Irene Au:One thing I find troubling in the hiring market these days, and I don't know if you guys are seeing this right now, but a lot of startups are kind of adopting this 996 work ethic. They want people to work six, sometimes seven days a week. I see more and more startups creating hacker houses where everybody in the startup lives together. It's troubling for many reasons that we don't need to get into. But on one side of the market, I see startups having trouble filling these positions. And then on the flip side, I see very talented designers who are on the job market and there isn't a fit. So there's this mismatch that needs to be reconciled.

26:09Irene Au:I don't know how that's going to go.

26:11Kevin Bethune:I would have a different hope that it would be how large will the blend become. So as you blend what you can do between, at first, maybe it was blending between visual and product, or maybe visual and UX, or visual UX and research, or visual UX research in some front end, to becoming a builder, kind of a creator of dreams who has an idea and works it out, where the three different options aren't just for some other approver out there, But you literally do those for yourself because you yourself are exploring the different options. And that to me is the most wonderful feeling when you're creating a solution is trying out the different answers.

26:48Kevin Bethune:Not because I secretly know this is the only one that I want to do and these other ones I'm just doing because I've got some other person that is somehow in charge of me. No, I am doing the different options because I am trying to deeply understand the problem from all angles and accept the humility that there might be something in the option that at first I don't like, but I trust that I'm an interesting enough solver of problems that I can find something in there that's going to be instructive to me. So I would hope the era we're entering is one of curiosity and growth, where instead of, great, this means we can keep the headcount low, the answer is going to be awesome.

27:26Kevin Bethune:This means that we can create more. That's my hope. That's my hope. It may not be reality. And these words don't feel good to someone who's just lost their job because some other manager took a different point of view than what I have and said, ah, awesome. Now I can cut you. That feels awful to hear. But for that same person, I'm hoping that there is some encouragement that there will be another place for that person to grow. What you're describing, James, is in my experience, it's the most rewarding, the most exciting type of work where the gap between an idea and execution and trying something out is as small as possible.

28:04Kevin Bethune:And in my experience, the larger the team, the more the overhead and coordination. There's a tax that comes with all of that. And the gap between those different things gets so wide and the work becomes so much more tedious because there's a lot of just we need to have meetings and coordinate. And that's why Agile has developed is to counteract that. I'm curious if Agile might even like sort of slide into the background a little bit with the blending of these roles because we're already just closely coordinated. Either a person is doing these many things or such a small team is doing all of those things.

28:42Kevin Bethune:We don't need all of these formalized rituals and so forth. Do you have feelings about that, Kevin?

28:47James Buckhouse:Yeah, I mean, maybe it's a two-sided coin. And on one side, I think about some of the loud party lines that pervade the business world around efficiency. Where it's like, because that business did it and they cut 10%, we're seeing headlines of XYZ companies are doing the same. You hope that it's not just based on reckless decision-making because you're just following the leader over here. I would hope, just based on experience, being part of teams that scaled, is that we're hyper-conscious of what the actual work is. Even if it's fluid in the systems, the underpinnings, the foundations are changing, the design ingredients are transforming, the hybridization of roles, role clarity is getting revisited, that we're honest about what we're learning from the work iterations to inform what that next hire should be.

29:31James Buckhouse:And unfortunately, a lot of job descriptions that we find now, the language is based on rote, trodden paths to product creation versus like what's actually happening in the moment. And who has the breadth and depth of skill to navigate an increasingly multidisciplinary situation that we're all finding ourselves in, but still bring their depth of expertise to be able to leverage AI or leverage design systems and the ongoing evolution of these ingredients that we get to design with.

30:00Kevin Bethune:we'll return to the conversation after this quick break

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33:10Kevin Bethune:And now, back to the show.

33:18James Buckhouse:I mean, I'm curious as the person who helped design the first commercial internet browser, what's your thought on this new trend we're seeing of AI companies building browsers? And I've only done a little bit of experimentation, but on the one hand, it seems like, well, amazing. You have this kind of agentic experience where they can go out and do things for you. And then also scary. Do I want to give this thing my bank information where they can kind of act independently? So what role does that design have to play there?

33:43Irene Au:I think a lot of this is still playing out, but one should never adopt these browsers without fully acknowledging and being okay with the fact that they're going to be sucking up all the information you're giving it. Any kind of query, any kind of information, you're surrendering. So that's a remarkable difference from the browser of 30 years ago. It's getting hyper-personalized, and it also comes with a balance sheet. You will get results that are hyper-personalized to you, but you're also surrendering a lot of information about yourself. It also potentially leads you further down into this very narrow echo chamber where you're not seeing all this other stuff that actually could be very eye-opening and present alternative points of view.

34:23Irene Au:And I remember the first Coastal Ventures Summit that I went to, Condoleezza Rice spoke, and this was 2014, where she was talking about the advent of personalized news was a national security threat. And we've seen that play out over the decade that has ensued. And so you can just imagine how extreme that could become when we're in our own little filter bubble with the blinders on. The other thing that I'm concerned about is our own ability to trust ourselves. We are becoming so reliant on just ask ChatGPT, like any kind of question you have. You don't even have to click into 10 different websites to do your own research anymore.

35:03Irene Au:Like the answer just comes. And some friends of mine and co-workers, we've talked about how the younger generations, they almost don't have an internal compass around what to do next or how to navigate their lives. And so we risk losing that, our own sense of agency, our own connection with who we are, what we want, what is right, because we're just being told all of that now. So those are some stark differences I see.

35:30Kevin Bethune:I want to push back on this, the idea of surrendering, because the same argument could be made of Google, that it gobbles up all of our data, all of our queries. It is the zeitgeist of human consciousness. It has our email, our documents, etc. How does it feel different if, let's say, perplexity or OpenAI with its new browser Atlas has this information instead of Google?

35:55Irene Au:I think because Google, when it's presenting search results, it's still showing you this is what's out there. And then you're on your own to kind of investigate and explore the range of what is out there in the world for you to understand on this topic. AI companies, they're spitting out a definitive answer. And yes, there are links, but we're kind of lazy. We don't really need to. We won't click on them if we don't need to. You don't even get ads. I mean, it's just wonderful. It's like you're having a conversation with someone. So it's very seductive and alluring and creates this illusion that it's this oracle, that this is the source of truth and this is all you need.

36:31Irene Au:And so I think that's the key difference. It's an interaction design paradigm.

36:35James Buckhouse:There's also just the idea of a browser having agency. And this hasn't happened so far, but let's imagine that we did get access to our banking and all this stuff. And it knows that you're sort of frustrated how expensive it is to live here in California. So it says, oh, I have a great idea. I sold your house. I bought you a house in Nashville, Tennessee. You're going to move. They'd be like, wait a minute, I didn't ask for this. It's just Nashville's cool. Yeah, Nashville's cool. So we would take some other place. But yeah, that idea of these browsers being able to act without you necessarily being able to guide it as much.

37:02Irene Au:Well, and then, you know, the most important decisions in our lives really come down to how we feel about something, who to marry, what job to take, things like that. But even in terms of what flight should I take to New York, if you leave that in the hands of an agent, who knows how they're going to prioritize this constellation of things like price and departure time and, you know, number of connections and things like that, but also other fuzzy kinds of things like what Airbnb to stay in, for example. Those decisions are always based on gut feeling and impression. Oh, I like the way this looks.

37:32Irene Au:This feels like a nice place to stay, that sort of thing. And that's something that you can't really delegate to an agent or even define to an agent yet.

37:41Kevin Bethune:Let's just pretend for a second you could, though, and it was always right. Let's just pretend. Like, maybe it does. Maybe it's awesome. Let's just look at another aspect of this, which is super interesting. So about four months ago now, interesting paper out at MIT that said you spend just a couple of months where you allow ChatGPT or some other LLM to do all of your writing. Your writing will be perfectly fine, and you will have measurable cognitive decline. And it didn't take long. It took a couple of months to do it. I think it was three months in the thing, like measurable cognitive decline.

38:10Kevin Bethune:And it makes me think of the Kurt Vonnegut book called Galapagos, where humans started to play around the water and eventually become kind of like dolphin-like creatures. Their brains smooth out. They have a grand time, but they're not thinking in the same way, right? And I think of like the neuroplasticity of the brain, the things that you bring into your life, how you can like have reinforcing pathways, how you can learn new things, how you can forget things like memories that you don't revisit often, how those can disappear, how you can like have inborn prejudices, or you can have expansive creativity depending on what you practice, right, with your brain.

38:43Kevin Bethune:You can practice making connections between different things, or you can always tell yourself the same thing over and over. Sometimes maybe a negative self-message over and over, pretty soon you're going to believe it. Or positive self-message over and over, pretty soon you're going to believe it. So if you look at all of that research around the neuroplasticity of the brain, and you think about, okay, if every piece of stimuli that comes in ever so subtly changes the configuration of my brain, well, then that's a design problem. How are we designing what we bring into our lives so that we might have the kind of brain we want to have?

39:14Kevin Bethune:Whatever that is, how might you create that? And so what I find super interesting, both about filter bubbles, which you talked about before, which if the audience listening here hasn't seen the classic TED Talk on filter bubbles, it's worth revisiting because it's quite eye-opening to imagine what happens when you only see stuff that you like. At first it seems good because it's the stuff you like, but then it's like, oh, wait a minute. that I'm only always getting a single message and I'm never getting input from the outside that's gonna help me see new things or different things or reaffirm my own beliefs because I'm seeing something else that I don't agree with or something.

39:45Kevin Bethune:Okay, now what's happening though, if you decide, ah, it is such a pleasure to not have to really think through how to structure that argument. I don't have to really think through how to piece together what is really going on in my mind about my point of view on this because some other LLM does this for me so well. Well, then pretty soon, imagine what's going on in the neuroplasticity of your brain. You're losing that ability to do that well versus if you practice that. So will we get to a place where we no longer are moving around all day? We sit at desk jobs. So now we exercise. Will we start to exercise our minds in a certain way so that we can stay cognitively sharp?

40:20Kevin Bethune:What will that be like? What activities will we choose with our free time so that we might increase our problem solving, increase our creativity, increase our ability to make new connections? How will we approach designing our own beneficial stimuli, our own cognitive diet to have the brain we want? How will we design our own brains?

40:39Irene Au:I mean, that's an interesting provocation because you're asking how do we design our own brains? The word design implies that there's intentionality. And I think the problem is that we are by nature pretty lazy and non-intentional. I mean, just look at the amount of time people spend on social media. I like the way you're framing it. I fear that we end up like the people on Wall-E.

41:01Kevin Bethune:I love to use it as a sidekick. Like if I'm reading a book, tell me a little bit about what was going on in this time period so I can understand that narrative differently. I often use it to fill a gap versus do my homework for me, which keeps me dumb and ineffective. I have a super weird one I do all along. So I have a Delphi trending on my Substack posts and stuff. And I call it just to spar with myself all the time. So it's me talking back at me in AI form, right? Which is a little weird and sort of self-loving in an embarrassing way. But it's nice to have a research buddy that you spar with on like trying to figure out how you think about something.

41:38Kevin Bethune:But that's totally different than like a lean back experience where you're just kicking back and having to do it for you. So I want to zoom out a little bit because to me, this is the classic problem that we've been wrestling with for some time, which is man versus the machine. And we can really see that if you're a student of history and you know about the industrial age, 1830s to late 1800s, there's this battle back and forth. We want to industrialize everything. And there's so much prosperity that's created from that and so many unintended side effects. But one of the pushbacks there was the arts and crafts movement that we want to reconnect with things that are handmade.

42:14Kevin Bethune:There's the Green and Green Brothers house. I think it's the Johnson house. That's not too far from here. Lots of different examples of arts and crafts movement where we want to physically make things. I have a hunch that the way that the conversations around AI are going will bring us back to that type of dynamic where there are some things we want the tedium taken out of our lives and some places where we want to feel a human connection. And I know that each one of you has thought about this idea of beauty and craft. And I've heard it, both of us, Eli and I have heard this come up in design teams at big companies that we all know and love.

42:53Kevin Bethune:What's your feeling about that relationship between a human touch and technology and where that fits into the commercial space?

43:00James Buckhouse:I mean, my immediate reaction to that is we're creatures of habit, but at the same time we're idiosyncratic human beings. We're sensorial. We can't literally interpret the world just through flat interfaces. And so how do we remember that marvelous feeling when you have an epiphany? Maybe for some people it comes through their hands when they're making something, someone sketching, storyboarding. These different acts of creation are beautiful, but also less intuitive. They're not obvious. They're sometimes counterintuitive. And when people still appreciate that or encounter that, it's still a wonderful feeling, even if we're wrestling with an imperfection.

43:36James Buckhouse:I think it screams authenticity at the end of the day. And if automation can help eliminate some of the mundane, fine. But I think people are going to value more, hopefully, the less than obvious human touch. And how do we scale that? Kevin, to go a little deeper into that, I know you do a lot of sketching. You post on LinkedIn, which I enjoy your sketches. And how do you make the argument to say that somebody is a student coming into the field or even somewhere midway or along their career? What's valuable about that to you when AI can churn out a million sketches in like five minutes? What's valuable about putting a pen to paper and doing that whole process?

44:10James Buckhouse:You know, I definitely feel my brain working just as much as my hand is working. I feel like I'm problem solving even before I know what the next line is I'm going to throw down. There's something happening in my brain that I feel like some sense of autonomy and nonlinear control as I navigate towards the answer that I want. You know, I'm experimenting with AI tools. I'm no expert at it. I'm experimenting just like everyone. But I find myself having to do this a lot when I could just easily whip out my number two pencil and sketch what I want, what I'm thinking of, even if it's a divergent idea.

44:38James Buckhouse:I'm not convinced yet that the speed to convergence is going to be solved by these tools over here, at least right now. Irene, I know you've got deep feelings about me.

44:47Irene Au:Well, first, I think this tension between machine versus nature, it is kind of like a pendulum that swings back and forth. If you look at just how art and technology have co-evolved together over the years, new technology gets invented and then all this innovation happens. And it also enables new and different forms of creative expression. And then the next cycle continues. What's exciting and interesting now is that as technology becomes more ubiquitous, and AI allows us to engage with the technology in ways that are beyond the screen, like it's allowing us to interact in more ambient ways. My hope is that it will free us, it will liberate us from the screens, and to be able to engage with the world in ways that maybe we traditionally have engaged with the world is like through more senses than just eyes on the screen.

45:39Irene Au:But there's a lot of research that points to how healing nature is. And ultimately, whatever nature makes, it's very difficult for people to replicate that. There's something very beautiful about the organic that is very healing. It's nurturing to us. So I posit, and I haven't researched this thoroughly, but when we look at the pendulum swings back and forth over centuries, My guess is that it's our own natural way of recalibrating, reharmonizing, rebalancing when we go from the machine to things that are more organic and more natural until a new technology arises again to throw us out of balance.

46:23Irene Au:It is part of nature, too, when we go out of balance and swing back into balance.

46:28Kevin Bethune:I'm almost certain when you were describing sketching, you did a little air sketching with your hand-dose. Now, did you? Did anyone else catch that, Diddy? So I do a lot of work with the ballet. I'm not a dancer in the ballet. I design sets and costumes. And the ballet dancers have wisdom in their bodies. Yes. Right? Yeah. Sometimes they only pretend to even be counting. They'll kind of pretend to be counting, but they're not really counting. I mean, occasionally there's a little bit, you know, counting eights, but a little bit. But mostly what they're doing is they do this thing where they kind of mark the steps of their body, right?

46:59Kevin Bethune:And they're kind of encoding into their body the music. and they're encoding into their body the decisions they make, the emphasis they have with that music in that moment. And like a pianist, they talk about it being in their hands when they play it. So there's something about the wisdom in the body. I watched the, I don't know, Hobbes versus Shaw, the rock movie. It's a spinoff from The Fast and the Furious and the rock character quotes Nietzsche where he talks about having wisdom in the body. I mean, it was kind of a tough guy moment, but there is something quite there. And so part of the reason to draw isn't because the job to be done of drawing is to produce an image.

47:32Kevin Bethune:The job to be done of drawing is to access the wisdom in your body and your understanding of a shape or form or problem-solving technique to get to an answer. The job to be done of drawing is to solve a problem, to think through an idea, to work through how you understand, to express your understanding of the world, not can I generate a perfectly shaped box. There's a fair bit of research that I cannot cite right now, but maybe we could add that to show notes for folks to dive into, that these sorts of activities, it's thinking. And it's not unlike what you described with your Delphi oracle that you call and debate yourself, that when we draw, when we write, when we're even like out in nature, that it's a way of thinking, that we take action and then we consume that action as if we are not the one who just created that action.

48:21Kevin Bethune:our brains are sort of multi-threaded, that we can observe that. And anyone who has a meditation or mindfulness practice, you can do this. You can just watch your brain do all kinds of things that you did not ask it to do, but it's activating.

48:36Irene Au:Yeah, I wouldn't describe it necessarily as a different way of thinking, but it's a movement of energy. Any shape that we assume with our bodies, because I taught yoga for 10 years, and any shape that we make with our bodies, but also any kind of color or sound or angle or proportion or whatever, number, those all have energetic qualities. And when we engage the senses, like taste is another one, when we engage the senses, we are effectively moving energy within ourselves and often with whatever we're engaging with, wherever we're placing our attention. That's the essence of creativity because when energy moves, that's when new inspiration comes.

49:15Irene Au:That's when healing happens.

49:16Kevin Bethune:It has come up in prior conversations with Chris, from A16Z. He listens to frequency music for creative thinking, for calming. I use it to take like the shortest nap that I can during the day.

49:30Irene Au:So I didn't wear it today, but I've been experimenting with frequency medicine. And I have this watch that has like 1100 different sound frequencies on it. And they all correspond to different ways that it can move energy in the body. And it emits the sound through a speaker in the watch that I can turn the volume down, But just the vibration of those frequencies starts to emit and change the frequencies that are resonating in my cells in the whole body. And so there are some for sleep. There's some for mood. There's some for organ repair, you know, bladder health, whatever, anything, Lyme support, things like that.

50:08Irene Au:And it is pretty amazing.

50:10Kevin Bethune:So Ivy Ross at Google, she also does this stuff. She carries tuning forks. And I think they're two different frequencies. and she's at a very high level. And if you're at a very high level in Google, that's a high burn rate. It's a very challenging job. You have to think about recovery as much as being good at what you're doing. And she's had people who just sort of melt down in meetings and struggle, hit the tuning forks and put one over each ear to chill them out and bring them back down to earth. And I think that's fascinating.

50:41Irene Au:I have tuning forks also.

50:43Kevin Bethune:Very cool. Yes, that stuff is real. I spent too much time on tuning forks, So I did spend some time with, you know, the art of tidying Marie Kondo. And to meet with her, the first thing that she would do would be to tune the room. She had tuning forks with her. She would tune the room. She made a series of salt pyramids in front of us. You know, whatever energy she didn't want in the room would go up and channeled out through the salt pyramids. And we did that as a moment of ritual together before we began. And I did some amazing things. It kind of chilled out everyone in the room to like, also made everyone pay attention.

51:14Kevin Bethune:because no one in the room had seen a ritual like that before. And so it was, okay, this is different. I don't know everything that happens in the world. Like I'm experiencing something I haven't seen before. And so there was intense focus and interest. Everyone was quiet. There was a lot less just sort of chatter, but more intentional conversation. It was wild. It was wild. Makes me want to get a tuning fork if we now have three examples of tuning forks.

51:38Irene Au:Beyond tuning forks and sound though, I mean, really anything that is qualitative emits an energy and can have an impact on our environment and then in turn have an impact on us. So it's not just sound, it's color. I mean, just like the color of this room. Like what if we painted the walls red? How is our color?

51:54Kevin Bethune:Is this one going to be okay?

51:55Irene Au:It's really calming.

51:56Kevin Bethune:Is it? Is it all right? Yeah.

51:58Irene Au:It feels very secure and calming.

52:01Kevin Bethune:Yeah.

52:01James Buckhouse:So this may be adjacent to the energy or maybe they're kind of overlapping. But before we had this discussion, we were talking a little bit about beauty and how beauty, there's maybe a resurgence of beauty as being important to well-designed products. And my assumption or thought is that maybe part of that is there's a connection between beauty and truth. Like something that's really beautiful, there's an element of truth to it too. And we're so inundated with stuff that's fake right now that maybe that beauty element, and maybe part of that beauty is an imperfection. Let's say an imperfection of a hand-drawn sketch that we're drawn to as humans.

52:35James Buckhouse:A mole on the face. A mole on the face, yeah. Yeah, so maybe we can talk a little bit about that and how the beauty in human touch, we can bring that.

52:43Irene Au:Well, there have been studies that have found that like gazing at naturally occurring fractals can have a very healing effect on the body. But the same effect does not hold if you're looking at computer-generated fractals because they're too complex. So it's like this balance between complexity and simplicity. And nature is a really interesting source of inspiration. When you look at what are the things that we naturally find beautiful, whether it's a beautiful flower or some succulent or whatever, the shapes that those assume. And this also exists in faces of humans or like the shape of a beetle or a butterfly or another mammal.

53:24Irene Au:I mean, it's like in all living things, there's this golden ratio. I think there's some really interesting lessons to be drawn from studying the golden ratio because ultimately it's about, again, finding balance. It's about harmonizing two extremes. Like if you look at the way a golden spiral gets created, the way sunflower seeds grow, it's always 135 degree angle from the originating one because that is the angle at which all of the seeds and the petals can get maximum sunlight. Ultimately, any context in which you see this golden ratio at play, it's about sharing. It's about finding harmony between two opposites.

54:05Irene Au:It's about the masculine and the feminine coexisting. It's about a minimum and a maximum. I mean, it gets really deep into Buddhist principles and things like that. I think that if we study what we naturally find beautiful, that can point us to a lot of interesting solutions for us in the material world and what we create as artificial. One of my favorite books on design is The Geometry of Design. They cite this study. They kind of survey people looking at different rectangles created with different proportions. The majority will usually point to the rectangle that has the golden ratio in it. So it's like we as human beings are naturally drawn to that.

54:46Irene Au:It's built into our bodies, too.

54:47Kevin Bethune:It is. The ratio of our belly buttons to the top of our head and belly button to the bottom. Like the Vitruvian man illustrates. Yeah. So that's a designer's favorite topic, right? And we think of it as the Vitruvian man. We think of Leonardo da Vinci for that. But where does the name Vitruvian man come from? Vitruvius, right? vitruvius the architect and designer who then created this i don't know if it's nine or eleven i can't remember how many volumes maybe it's 11 but we only have nine of them whatever this multi-volume set called de art architectura and in it is describing all these ratios ratios of the body ratios of the body reflected in optimal building design ratios of the body reflected an optimal type design so if you thought you were a type nerd go all the way go all the way body that's right yeah you have a place and so what da vinci was doing that was so interesting was he looked at that work from vitrullius and said let's find out and so then did all his own secondary measurements to like basically fact check and say let's find out and see and he proposed slight variations because his body was different than the ones that vitrullius had and stuff.

55:55Kevin Bethune:But it was this kind of long history back all the way to Vitruvius. And what was Vitruvius accessing, talking about where did Vitruvius get his ideas for ratios? Well, that goes back to Archimedes. Because Archimedes' main brilliant math was to examine not calculation, but ratios. And his ratio math was built on physical levers, weighted physical levers. And he would do his problem solving is by drawing circles in the sand and playing these what-if games on things that were just outside or just inside. He invented a proto-calculus, you know, what is that, 1 ,300 years before Newton did, right?

56:33Kevin Bethune:But it will take another hour if I tell you how much I love Archimedes, so I will stop other than to say.

56:38Irene Au:Well, you're pointing to something that I think is really exciting, which is there's no separation between the qualitative and the quantitative or art and math and science. It's all the same. And I think over the past several decades, we've created this artificial divide, all the way down to how we educate our children, and then they have to choose a path, and it's this path or that path. And you're either a humanities person or a STEM person, just in the same way that we talk about roles and design collapsing. My hope is that all these disciplines will start to collapse too, so that we don't have this artificial divide anymore.

57:11James Buckhouse:I love this thread of historical relevance, as you describe. and this notion of the patterns, the visual form that nature already sort of gives us. It's given us a curriculum. I think of the Eames Power of 10 movie is sort of playing in my head as you both were talking.

57:24Kevin Bethune:You can find flip books on eBay for about 10, 12 bucks. Oh, is there? That's wonderful, yeah. Well, you know, it's like that movie is working in exponential numbers, right? And then there are other traditions, though, that we tend to not focus on that are also looking at brilliant ratios. And the one that I would like to call to everyone's attention because it's so phenomenal, and like right in front of our faces is if you go to Spain and in your mind you think, Spain, Spain, that's Europe. Like Spain, that's Catholic. That's like Western Christian stuff, right? Well, Spain for the longest time existed at the intersection of different religions.

58:00Kevin Bethune:Peacefully, coexisting, we had Islamic scholars, we had Jewish scholars, and we had Christian scholars all working together on the same math. And they had a very cool system of ratios for architecture design. I'm going to tell you because it's super cool. You're going to like it now once you hear it, which is how we have our golden ratio, which is like 1, 6, 6 to 1 or whatever. We have something like that. They would have first 1 to 1 over 1. So 1 to 1, square. Then 1 to square root of 2. Then 1 to square root of 3. 1 to square root of 4. So they're going as ascending square roots of integers compared to 1.

58:38Kevin Bethune:And that's their ratio system that they were using to design in that era. I love that. You get shapes that are not only harmonious, you're like, oh, this is quite interesting, but feel different than what we sometimes are used to because we're used to a different set of ratios. But they're all based on that same moments in nature, things that exist through the nature of numbers and math, just seen from a different point of view. Are you referencing like the Alhambra and some of the geometric design there? You can trace it in the Alhambra, absolutely. It's not just the Alhambra, though. It's actually spread out through all of that era of structured Islamic architecture.

59:16Kevin Bethune:I think we've beautifully threaded the needle here of this idea of collapsing roles in the modern role of design in the software space in particular, and what nature already has, you know, message for us, to use your word, a curriculum for us of how these two things really intersect in a beautiful way. Okay. Well, Irene, Kevin, James, thank you so much for being on Design Better. Thank you for being experts in residence. It's a great conversation. Thank you.

59:42Irene Au:Thanks for having us.

59:47Kevin Bethune:This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.