Rewind: Paola Antonelli: How design shapes culture

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25:43And now, back to the show.

25:50Aarron Walter:Paula, how do you think that the creative process has evolved over the course of modern design? You just touched on this idea that despite these advances maybe in materials and engineering, there's still very much a craftsman aspect to this, a hands-on aspect, a sense that objects are made by humans or maybe a wabi-sabi quality to them. But do you think along with that, the creative process has evolved, especially maybe as it relates to digital products? It all depends on how you think of the process, the creative process itself. because of how abstract and philosophical the way I was taught was.

26:29To me, it's always the same. It's goals and means. You declare your goals. You see what means you have at your disposal and what you achieve with those means, how close you are to the goal and with elegance then shows if you're a good designer or not, right? So from that viewpoint, there's no difference in time or in material or in setting. But the truth is that it's wishful thinking. There's a lot of differences that happen. for instance, in design education. And design education does a lot to define then what the creative process will be. And I go to design education because I feel that it's a real big problem today how much design schools cost.

27:08Because when you go to design school, you should be able to experiment. You should be able to expand the possibilities of what being a designer is you should make some crap, you know, and some completely useless crap. The problem is students accrue so much debt that all they want once they get out of school is to be hired by a studio design office as big as possible that can pay insurance and help them pay the debt off. That's a big problem. I've seen schools in which enlightened professors were trying to start these projects, these courses that were more experimental and the students rebelled because they wouldn't have the skills that they needed to pay down the debt.

27:54So that's to me the big problem. I think that when a discipline is creative, it should be protected a little bit from the despair of finding immediately a job instead of trying to build a career. So that's the biggest difference, I think. When it comes to code, because it's more portable, sometimes I have the illusion that it's easier for people that work with code, but truly it is not. It's exactly the same thing because the investment needs to be then repaid. I love that you just brought up code because this is part of the creative process. These are the modern day materials for a lot of design.

28:33In fact, we had Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress on recently, and one of their taglines that's been at the bottom of all WordPress sites is code is poetry. and he thinks about code in a very kind of like the way that an artist thinks. He studied jazz as a high schooler, so he thinks like an artist. But there are folks like Casey Reese and others who have kind of pioneered this blurring of lines of art and engineering. How do you think about the technical side of people who are writing code and designing things that are influencing our lives? Like, philosophically, they match those criteria of, you know, how does good design shape our lives?

29:13Well, code shapes our lives on a regular basis. It's funny you should bring up Casey because we've been friends for more than 30 years and I respect him tremendously. Yeah, he's also our partner here at MoMA when the first ever NFTs that we did was with Feral File, with his company. So definitely you touched on the right person. Well, I just think like design, code can be good or bad, right? So I agree, it can be poetry or it can be good poetry or really bad poetry, right? So it's always important to remember that not everything is perfect. You know, you need to learn. And also as a person, as a citizen, you need to be able to push back and to say when something is not good enough.

29:54So Casey is at the pinnacle of these artists and designers that use code, that think of interactivity, that think of how it expresses. For those of you who might not know, Casey was also one of the co-founders of Processing, which was this attempt to disseminate code to as wide an audience as possible so that everybody could actually have at least a spark to begin a digital project. So it was also generosity, it was not only talent and creativity, but also generosity on his side. So Casey is an idealist and a great artist and the kind of person that we need to push the field forward. Then there's not so high pinnacles and then there's valleys, right?

30:38And I think it's very important to be reminded of that because just like chairs or teapots, code is for us. I don't ever use the word consumer because I really detest it. And I think that words determine who you are. So we're citizens. But code is for us, just like chairs are for us. And I wish we all could understand better and feel better when code is well used and well deployed and elegant and generous and whatnot.

31:08Aarron Walter:Well, I'm curious about the relationship between art and design. And to give some context to the program where I teach, we used to have a very strong connection to the art program and the design program at Stanford when I was going through it in the 90s, especially through my professor, Matt Kahn, who kind of came out of Cranbrook and the Bauhaus sort of philosophy. But over the years, that relationship kind of weakened. And I definitely see in our students' work, you know, occasionally they'll go out and get these things themselves, but sometimes there's sort of a lack of knowledge around the aesthetics of particular types of design.

31:42Aarron Walter:But what else is missing if you don't have a relationship between art and design or what's important about the connection? It's such a good question because, you know, design can never stand by itself, right? It always has to have other crutches. Like I went to the Polytechnic of Milan. So the crutch there was engineering. Not a bad crutch, but it always is with something. So it's either within engineering or it's within an art school. And in either case, you have some big shortcomings, which is interesting. So I think it would be so important for the people that set up programs to know that whatever is not available on campus should be fed because designers need a diet of engineering and art at the same time.

32:22Well, it's really interesting because the problem is when you set design within an art context, there are some problems. You know, there's this formalism that sometimes can become really apparent. There is a whole different market also, which is fascinating because you asked me what the difference between art and design is. Well, I used to tell my students at UCLA once upon a time, they would ask me, I used to tell them the only difference between an artist and a designer is that an artist can choose whether to be responsible towards other human beings or not. And instead, a designer has to be by definition.

32:56That's it. No other form apparent, not the materials, not the setting. But today, I would also tell you that it's the market. I mean, I have long relationships with designers that decided to become artists because they could get more money, right, by being in the gallery circuit. So that's really a little fucked up, if I can say that. You know what I'm saying? It's really sad that you have to make that choice. But it's what we were saying before. Either you enter a certain sphere in which you produce products or you produce art and the in-between is not very easy to attain. I see things changing, though.

33:40I see things changing with Gen Zers being less committed to jobs and more committed to their own careers and seeking a different kind of freedom. Also because they came into the world in such a complicated job situation. They don't have much occupation, so they just make the best out of it sometimes. Yeah, I love this conversation around the connection of art and design. And I have a background in painting and drawing. I went to Tyler in Philadelphia. And for me, it was really play was such an important part of the discovery process and the creative process in general. And what you described earlier of people going to college, taking on so much debt, there is inherently no room for play in that scenario.

34:28It's a very constrained scenario where there's no opportunity for discovery. We had Lisa Demetrios, granddaughter of Charles and Raines. Yeah. So we had her on recently and she was talking about their creative process. And in many ways, it's almost like for me, like it's an ideal creative process. It crosses mediums, so many partners, there's opportunity for lots of people to work together. It's a wonderfully inclusive creative process. But in the middle of that is play. I'm curious how you see that play out in some of the curation work that you've done. What's the role of play in design? You know, I don't think about play that much just because in a way I feel like I'm playing pretty much all the time, right?

35:13Because I really like what I do. So I don't even know what the difference between play and my normal process is. Sometimes I feel that this idea of play is a little mythologized, as if one should change or become lighter or not have a precise goal in order to achieve things. So I'm not really good at answering you because I don't know it. Let me push on it a little bit more. You look at a lot of different artists, a lot of different designers and their history and the way that they work. In software, people say like room for failure, which is essentially play. You can try things and it doesn't always have to work.

35:57Do you see that line of thinking in a different way of like really great designers versus those who don't succeed? All the time. I think it's a normal way to proceed in the creative process. That's why I don't know if it's play. And I think that the Eameses pretended that they were playing, but they were serious as hell. You know what I'm saying? They were really. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, sometimes I don't really buy that argument of the play. I think that the creative process is all about trying and being ready to accept the fact that something doesn't work and then trying again. So it's the idea of prototyping.

36:34You know, you model first and then you prototype and then you go back, reiterating. So I feel that it's intrinsic to the creative process, even to the artistic creative process.

36:46Aarron Walter:Yeah, fair enough. Paula, in your background, I see a book called The New French Wine, and it just got me thinking about wine label design. I thought somebody sent this to me. I'm like, what? I don't even know who sent it. But I'm curious, I don't know if you're a wine fan, but I'm curious about packaging design. But I don't know much about French wines. Yes, nor do I. Are there any kind of, you know, it could be wine or it could be other packaging design that comes to mind, either historically or current that's of interest? There was a gorgeous exhibition here at MoMA in the 1960s. Of course, I haven't seen the exhibition, but the catalog is fabulous.

37:26It was called The Package. It had like, you know, blister packaging for medications and all the different things that you can imagine. And they had the egg. And it's so perfect, right? So I like packaging. I like more the object packaging rather than the label in itself. Of course, there's been fabulous labels and graphics, but the concept of the package itself is even more fascinating to me. And I remember something we don't do in Italy, and instead every design and architecture student does in the United States is to make something that isolates the egg and drop it from the second floor. I just thought it was like the most hilarious thing, but that's what makes me think about it.

38:09And of course, you know, I love the evolution of packaging today, something that was not there in the 60s. But right now we have packaging that's made of mushroom mycelium and corn stalk. So there's also that evolution that I find incredibly interesting. Let's dive into this a little bit more and connect it to something you talked about earlier, which is responsibility in design, because this is becoming more and more of a consideration. How are you thinking about responsibility in design and telling that story? Because in your position, you know, like telling that story of responsibility can be very inspiring to young designers who can take this concept further.

38:48Oh my God, I've been doing it for decades. So it's nothing new, but I'm just thinking of some more recent exhibition. Like there was one called Broken Nature. There was the 22nd Triennale di Milano, and it was about the idea that we will become extinct. That's a fact. We have a little bit of control on the when, and we have a lot of control on the how. So the whole idea was to design a better extinction for ourselves and a better legacy so that the next species will not remember us as complete morons. So it was all about responsibility, responsibility, responsibility. Now the exhibition that I am working on that will open in September is called Life Cycles.

39:26So there you go, cradle to cradle. And it's the idea of thinking of materials, not anymore just about how they fit in the object, but rather where they come from and where they're going. So the whole life cycle of a material. Then another project that I'm involved in with my friend Alice Rossnorn is called Design Emergency. It's an Instagram platform, a book and a podcast, and it's all about what designers are doing to be better citizens and to make the world a better place. In the past, I did a whole project about design and violence and how design can help prevent violence or unveil it when it's hidden.

40:05So as far as I'm concerned, design is one of the most important tools to be better and more responsible citizens and one of the most amazing weapons against injustice and against inequities of all kinds if well deployed. But I believe in it so strongly that I made it my life mission to try and tell how fabulous design is and how powerful to as many people as possible. That's great. Just for listeners, can you share URLs where people can find out more about Design Emergency? Sure. Design Emergency is on Instagram. It's design.emergency. And instead, as far as design and violence is concerned. If you Google MoMA design and violence, you'll find it quite easily.

40:51And, you know, just in general, Broken Nature, I don't even know if there's really a website. There might still be. I mean, we also brought the exhibition to MoMA, but there's also, with MoMA, we did a really lovely four-episode podcast on Broken Nature. So if you Google MoMA Broken Nature, you'll be able to find it.

41:10Aarron Walter:I'm guessing one of the challenges you might have as a curator is how do you display these objects that are meant to be interacted with? And sometimes you can let people touch them. Like I'm guessing the video games, you can actually let them play. But in a lot of cases, there's a chair that's maybe of historical importance. It has to be a little bit set off from your audience. How do you think about that, presenting these objects that are meant to be interacted with as part of their experience? We think about it all the time. It's really a catch-22 because when you have a museum like MoMA, it's three million visitors a year, you know, so you cannot let people sit on the chairs.

41:46Even if they are chairs that you can buy, still we would need to change them too often. My first exhibition, the one about materials, had objects that you could touch, but that was the first and the last because it was like really hell to changing the objects. So there's not much that we can do. I remember when the Design Museum opened in London eons ago, must have been like 35 years ago, they had a selection of chairs that you could sit on, but also they stopped doing it. Unfortunately, it's tough, but it's the only way that we can keep showing, keep preserving. And we're hoping that people will have a chance to try some of them, or at least to hear the description of how comfortable they are.

42:30Paula, what are you excited about in design right now? What's sort of caught your attention? Well, I'm excited by all of these interventions that are very local and that are very smart. You know, I told you before about this Chinese countryside home that was replenished with 3D printing. Then I'm really excited about what the Luma Foundation in Arles is doing. They are trying to teach people to do objects with everything that they have nearby. So to give an example, Arles is in the south of France and it's near Camargue where there's a lot of salt. You know, there are the Salines there. They have done a new building in which the handles are made of compressed salts.

43:13The door handles, they're made of compressed salt. Not only because it's there, but also because it's antimicrobial. I love things like this. And everything is super elegant also aesthetically, right? So I'm excited about the projects. There's this young designer, Gabrielle Fontana, and they have decided to use sports as a way to help society. So they're using a three-parted field for football that was originally designed by a situationist artist. But they're also creating this game by which people keep changing teams. So they're wearing this uniform that has different layers. And the referee every now and then says, OK, change.

44:01And the kids have to peel off a layer. And all of a sudden they are in the other team. And one team has three people, the other ten. So it's a continuously fluid and dynamic game where you cannot be acrimonious in your competition because your enemy might become your friend in a second. And it's such a beautiful way of thinking of reality. I'm excited about people like them, you know, that do not necessarily design chairs, although they might, but rather design new ways of thinking about the world and of building the world. That's fantastic. What a fun job you have. I certainly do. I'm not going to say that it isn't.

44:39It's great. That's why it's play all the time. Yeah, that's great. Paola Antonelli, where can people learn more about you? You just Google me. You'll find me. Yeah, I'm there. It's quite easy. I'm on some social media, not all, but I would say that more than me, it's what I do. So probably consider the name just a way to get into the projects.

45:06Aarron Walter:Fantastic. Paula Antonelli, thanks so much for being on the Design Better podcast. Thank you, Eli. Thank you, Aaron. And good continuation to you both.

45:24The breadth of territory that Paula has to cover in her role at MoMA is kind of amazing. And it must be a very difficult job to narrow down what's inbounds and out of bounds. And she sort of articulated that for us. I like what she had to say about goals and means.

45:44Aarron Walter:Yeah, I thought that was an interesting definition. And I had not heard it put exactly that way before. I think that is an important distinguishing feature between design and art. And she also, I thought, had a really nice explainer later on about her considerations around what is design and what is art and that design considers people other than the creator in its creation, which is pretty powerful. She talked about just the impact on human life, you know, how design can influence so many other people. I've always thought of art when I was making art in my studio as a undergrad and graduate student.

46:26And later after, you know, art was like a thing for me that I was making that I would share with people and then they would have their experience, whatever that is. But I'm not really designing it for them first. I was designing for myself first, creating for myself, I should say. And design is the inverse. It's creating for others first and foremost.

46:49Aarron Walter:sort of looping that into the education part of the conversation, I thought, you know, as an undergrad, some of the most formative classes I had were in the art side of the program. We were a somewhat unique program having this relationship between the engineering side of design and the art side of design. And for me, the art got me through engineering because I was terrible, relatively terrible at math and kind of hardcore engineering stuff. But I love the art side. And, you know, for the art classes, it was very much about experimentation. I mean, you were designing things, you would design a chair, you design a lamp, but then there were these other assignments like drop three strings on a piece of paper and build up a composition out of that.

47:28Aarron Walter:And some of these other exercises I think actually came out of the Bauhaus originally, where you're just sort of exploring materials and composition and some of the fundamental things that you need to know about design, but aren't necessarily going to have any kind of practical implementation at the end of it. Yeah. It was interesting to hear her pushback on the idea of play as this thing that's a magical or important ingredient in the creative process. I still think there's something to that, but maybe it's more discovery. That's one thing about overly goals-driven creative process. There are times where you've got a very specific goal.

48:07If I were working at Google or Meta or Amazon, I've got a very specific goal to design this checkout button that is very easy and that increases our revenue. There's a very specific goal there. But then there's discovery of trying a thing out, exploring that. When I was at MailChimp and leading that design team, we definitely had a lot of creative freedom to try things out that had really wonderful outcomes for people that were mildly intended, basically, is the way I would describe them. It wasn't like a primary goal. It was sort of like, let's try this out and see what happens. And that's, I guess, maybe more of what I was getting at with play, that it's not so commercially driven or specific things you have to account for in your quarterly business review or something.

48:58Yeah.

49:00Aarron Walter:No, that makes sense. And I think, you know, it's sort of how you frame it. I mean, play is sort of, it's part of a, I think, any good divergent thinking process. You go back to our talk with John Cleese, and he talked about this open mode versus closed mode. So having some time for divergent thinking, which could be play, or it could be maybe, you know, getting into state of flow, or there's these different sort of modes you could get into. And then you, when you actually have to implement, you come down to more convergent. and in his words, closed mode of thinking. But it feels like there has to be a balance between those two.

49:32I also like the conversation around craft and how important that is. That's something I hear a lot of software designers talking about or returning to as our craft of how do we do this really well. Sometimes that means doing it efficiently. Sometimes it means doing it consistently. And sometimes it means doing it elegantly. And sometimes it's all of those things at once. I mean, ideally. But the thing about craft and software is we arrive at perfection very quickly, and that sometimes takes us further away from that human touch, that human feel. I've certainly written a whole lot about this in my book, Designing for Emotion, and I've heard a lot of people talk about this, but I'm curious how you think about that.

50:15Aarron Walter:Yeah, I did think it was interesting how she talked about maybe these new materials that are appearing that there is no sort of mechanized industrialized process yet that it's still very much. You think about the early days of carbon fiber where, you know, it's sort of like building a surfboard. You got a structure and you're wrapping around the fibers and then you have to put a coating on that. And at the time, there was no real machine to do that. It was very kind of hands on. and as part of that too and I think about Heath Ceramics who's going to be a sponsor for this series and the products that they create which have that human touch sort of embedded in them their their tiles and their tableware there is this book brief about that Japanese concept wabi-sabi which is this idea that the imperfections are what make the object beautiful in a lot of ways or relatable and if you have a heavily industrialized process your injection molding thousands or millions of parts that are exactly the same, you lose that often in the process.

51:12Yeah. I like that you called out Heath there because we have this tile on our fireplace in our bedroom and it's all handmade. And so it's a little wonky. The grout lines are imperfect. And some people would find that frustrating. It should be straight lines and all perfect. My wife and I find that wonderful and magical that it feels like it's evidence of the human touch. And I don't know if you know this, but this was actually a conversation more than 500 years ago and the dawn of printing and the printing press that early books, before they were called books and had the characteristics of books as we think of them today, they were called incunabula.

51:55It's like in swaddling clothes is the Latin phrase. That's what that means. And these were handwritten manuscripts, as Paola talked about earlier, you know, with the at symbol and the origins of that ligature for at. But part of the magic of these incunabula was that they were handwritten by these monks as a prayer, you know, like in these cloisters, this prayerful activity. And then the printing of the Bible, this machine process of exactly the same letter forms over and over being printed was seen as like taking some of the spirit out of the object.

52:33Aarron Walter:Yeah, I'm not familiar with that term, but I do know, even as a kid, I loved looking at the illustrated manuscripts of that period where, or sorry, the illuminated manuscripts, they would call them, where you have these, you know, essentially what became a drop cap that was this wonderful like image, almost like a little miniature painting and embellished with like gold leaf and things that I'm sure there's people working on it spent days on just creating that particular part of the object. So you definitely lost that when it moved over to the printing press. I had a really unique experience many moons ago.

53:07I used to teach design and design history. And I took my students to Berlin to see a Gutenberg Bible firsthand. And we got to see Incunabula, these handmade books, if you will, and then a real Gutenberg Bible. And it was a parchment Gutenberg Bible. I think there's only like five or six in existence. and parchment is like goat skin. So we were able to touch it with our hands. And I got to tell you, that object felt as magical as the handwritten, you know, hand illuminated manuscripts as well. They were all pretty amazing.

53:43Aarron Walter:I did not know about the history of the at symbol. Did you know about that ligature? No, that is so amazing, you know, to think of something that to me, the at symbol is just, it's a modern object. It's so embedded in modern life. Your Venmo handle starts with an at, your email address, like these things that are how we do commerce and how we communicate. This character is built into it. And she's right. Paola's right. It's just like a really beautiful character. And I just, I'm fascinated by transgenerational objects, things that can go from generation to generation and still have meaning. And I learned today that the at symbol is one of those things.

54:26Eli, what are some of your favorite design history books?

54:29Aarron Walter:Yeah, so I was looking at my shelf, and at least down here, I don't have any great sort of broad design history books. But I thought there's some kind of adjacent ones that I think are interesting and helpful for folks that want to understand disciplines around design and some historical implications. One of them is Edward Tufte's books, Visualizing Information. And the chapter that came to mind was the one where he goes through the Challenger disaster and sort of the graphics that he felt kind of led up to that. So I think it's a really neat book for understanding that how you design information has an impact.

55:06Aarron Walter:And I know you, Aaron, probably encountered that a lot in your COVID response work. Yeah, I worked on U.S. COVID response work and dashboard design of data. And I was reading the Edward Tufte books yet again while I was doing that work. but yeah what else you got and again this isn't so much history but maybe this is more in the category of inspiration but stefan sogmeister's book things i've learned it's almost not a book but a kind of series of little pamphlets about what he's learned over the course of his career and i just find it really inspiring every so often if i'm feeling stuck on something i would look through pull one of these out and look at one of those and then this is just kind of bringing together the art side of things.

55:48Aarron Walter:Again, not directly related to design, but Andy Goldsworthy, his book Time. I just find his work very sort of meditative and peaceful and beautiful. And if I'm kind of looking for inspiration for something, I might page through this. And just, I think he's one that we'd love to have in our creative process series because he's got a really intense, beautiful process. So some of my favorite design history books that take you into history, but also give you the practices and the principles that you can put into play right now. One of them is universal principles of design. This is just like one of the best design books out there.

56:26These are high-level concepts about design, things like constancy, closure, affordance, alignment, archetypes, etc. Really practical, useful stuff with lots of great examples in it. And then The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Brighurst. This is a book that when I was teaching that this was required reading in some of my classes, it kind of was the canon of typography, a typographic layout for some time. And it's just still a wonderful book for reference that does also have some historical context for where these proportions and where these terms like letting and margins and so forth, where it all comes from.

57:13Aarron Walter:It's funny you mention that because I was looking for that book on my shelf and my mom had just pinged me today because she thought that I had their copy of it. She was looking for it for some reason. And I thought I had my own copy and now I can't find either one. But anyway, it came up in conversation today. It's a great book. It's also a great object. I like the feel of that book. Well, that's a nice little short list of inspiration and history for folks. And we'll carry on. We've got some more episodes in this history series. We're excited to share those. Yeah, and as Paola called us to do, we need to all dive deep into history.

57:49It's rich and complicated, and there's a lot to look at. And if you want to be a great designer, not just a good or competent designer, history is an important, essential part of your education.

58:06Eli and I love producing this podcast, but sometimes we find ourselves wondering what sort of feedback does our audience have? How can we improve the show? Maybe you could help us by taking just a couple minutes to complete a survey, answering a few questions about your thoughts about the show, sharing your feedback and telling us a little bit about you to take the survey. Just go to dbtr.co slash survey. That's dbtr.co slash survey Our thanks in advance for completing the survey It'll really help us improve the show 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.

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