Live Recording with Dalit Shalom

0:00From the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, this is the DesignThinkers Podcast. DesignThinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Originally launched to mark the conference's 25th anniversary, the podcast now reaches a global audience of designers and creatives. Join our host and RGG president, Nicola Hamilton, as she connects with DesignThinkers speakers to explore the work and ideas shaping today's design industry. Welcome to today's very special Design Thinkers podcast recording. We are coming to you live from the British Columbia Institute of Technology in beautiful Vancouver.

0:37My name is Nicola Hamilton. I am the host of the Design Thinkers podcast, and I am officially RGD's past president as of a month ago. For those of you who are new to RGD, we are a non-profit professional association supporting the nation's creative community. Through the RGD, Canadian designers exchange ideas, educate and inspire, set professional standards and work together to advocate for the value of design. About three years ago, in celebration of 25 years of RGD's Design Thinkers Conference, we launched a podcast. The idea was to dig into the archives, to revisit talks, ideas and the people that have shaped our conference since the year 2000.

1:21We now have over 40 ,000 downloads across three seasons, and we are thrilled to be wrapping up this season, our fourth season, right here. If you're new to the podcast or you want to dig into the archive, you can find past episodes at rgd.ca slash dtpodcast. This live show is just the beginning of an incredible week ahead. How many of you are here for Design Thinkers? Any of you? A few. A few. Amazing. So our Design Thinkers Vancouver conference is happening on Tuesday and Wednesday. That's May 26th and 27th, 2026 at the Vancouver Playhouse. If you're here in the audience, it's worth noting that registration is still open.

2:01So you can visit designthinkers.com for more details or get a ticket if you're interested. I know there are some students in the audience today. We also have studio tours that are happening tomorrow where you can get an all-access guided tour to top creative studios right here in Vancouver. There's a full list of participating studios and all the details on timing at rgd.ca slash tours. And if you are here as an academic or part of our academic community, our Design Educators Conference, which is organized in partnership with the Wilson School of Design, takes place on Thursday, May 28th. There's still space to register for that as well.

2:41So you can visit the registration desk outside of this room and get a little bit more info about joining us at the Design Educators Conference. Okay, that's all of my backstory extra stuff that's going on. Now we are on to the main event. Joining me today is our featured guest, Dalit Shalom. Dalit is the Director of Product Design at the New York Times, where she oversees the creation of new formats, spaces, and tools that advance the future of storytelling. She also leads design and strategy for various work streams for the company's AI initiatives, having previously focused on trust and credibility by developing features that clarify Times journalism for its readers.

3:20An educator as well as a practitioner, Dalit also teaches design thinking classes at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering and ITP. Please join me with a big round of applause for the wonderful Dalit Shalom. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for that introduction. Welcome, welcome. And congratulations on completing another season of this podcast. How many of you have actually listened to the podcast before? A few, a few. It is such a treat for me to get to sit down with folks like you and talk about design. I'm excited. I'm so excited to have you here on the show. I've been doing a lot of reading and listening and watching past talks ahead of this conversation.

4:01And the thing that really stood out to me is how intersectional your career is, sort of how many branches, branches of design you've dug into, or maybe branches of humanity. Yeah. Yeah. I think you could say so. Yeah. We were talking on the way over here just about how much of our practice is also about being a human in the world or a creative human in the world. So we're going to talk about that a whole bunch. But before we get into it, you're also in a little bit of a transitional moment right now. I am. Yeah? I am. So most of you probably know Delete from her work at the New York Times, but you've got a little bit of news to share with us.

4:36Yeah. So I'm recently also out of office, as the conference suggests. I left the Times a few weeks ago. My last day was May 1st, and I'm on the precipice of something new. And this time right now in between is actually quite nice. It's very liberating. Yeah, the time off. So we are going to talk about your time at the New York Times for sure, but know that Delete's doing something new soon. Yeah, and I think it's exciting to be out of office at a conference that is dedicated to being out of office. it feels it feels original well you actually worked that into your talk description right I did yes your talk description on stage at design thinkers is called out of office and into yourself which sort of immediately suggests that many of us don't really know who we are outside of work in some way or sometimes we forget about who we are outside of work why why do you think that happens I think it's something that is really easy for creatives especially um and I think what's easy about it for creatives is we're so um we're so dedicated to our work and our work uh also often stems out of passion and out of this like connection to something that we really care about I think we also as designers can really see a vision in in our work and when we can see like an outcome or you know the ideal scenario of how something could end or could be I think we have a real dedication to seeing that through and it kind of becomes a space that is easy to have with no boundaries yeah and to me that's something that like just is easier for creatives than than others perhaps yeah there's like a weird obsessive nature to the kind of work we do, right?

6:36Where we get like the problem weasels its way into our brain and we really want to solve it. I think so. And also the dedication to details and to completing it in a way that's like almost to perfection, if that resonates with anyone here. It certainly does with me. Are there perfectionists in the audience? Of course. Yeah. Some like hesitant hands went up for everybody listening at home. you talk a little bit about the sort of difference between life purpose and job description when in your career did you actually realize that those were different things yeah I think when I think of life purpose I think about the why like our own why and when I think about a job description I think it can really it can really run the gamut between being something you're interested in it could be something that you have a vocational skill for so something that you're really good at and in some fortunate situations it's it's also something that you're very passionate about doing yeah and I think that to me is a little bit more of like the what what are you doing and not so much the the why the why is really kind of like your life's purpose and they don't always have to be the same I got some incredible advice when I was like really early in my career about how like for a lot of creative people you're always gonna have like two streams in your professional life and how one of them should like maybe feed your bank account and the other one should like feed your creativity and it's been really true for me like it's really unlikely to find a job that is going to fulfill you in both ways yeah um what how do you how do you differentiate your purpose from your job description then?

8:21I think it's a lot of self-work and it's a lot of just being really honest with yourself. I think it's easy to get sort of like lost in the sauce. It's easy to have the worlds kind of become enmeshed with one another. I'm going to talk about this in my talk too on Tuesday but you know there was a time where I noticed how excited I was to tell people when I first met them, like, that I work at the New York Times, and I became even more excited over time because I saw the reaction that people had, and it was kind of, like, fueling me to keep doing that, and once that became, like, the first line of my introduction, I noticed that other people were doing it to me, too.

9:16Yeah. Like, people would introduce me as like, this is Dalit. Meet my friend Dalit, she works at the New York Times and it just became like the first thing that people knew about me. And that was totally like a thing of my own doing. Like I did that to myself. Yeah. And there are so many other things I can say about myself. So many other things. I'm a curious human being. I'm a community builder. I'm a dog lover. an adorable dog I saw photos before this I'm a great dog um I'm a I'm a professional baker um I I do a lot of other things and and there are a lot of other things I can say about myself and I can introduce myself um with or by but um somehow somehow our job becomes this thing that people ask us even like at dinner parties like you go somewhere you go to some kind of event and you know people ask you like the first question they ask you is kind of like so what do you do and it's clear that when they say do they're talking about for work yes professionally what do you get paid what do you get paid to do and I don't know how many of you can resonate with this too but for many years in my career like I always fumbled with like what to say because you want to come off as like sounding impressive and doing something like really meaningful and and it's always kind of like it's it's it's a moment of anxiety yeah as somebody who has a lot of jobs like I wear a lot of hats I sometimes get anxious when people ask me what I do because I can't quite figure out which one to put on in that moment which is also funny okay but it makes me think about this this sort of idea of like folks sort of pursuing prestige in order to find meaning and I think it's something we spend the beginning part of our career doing right like we've we've worked so hard to sort of establish ourselves, and we're looking for that New York Times job title.

11:15Yeah. And then we realize partway through that we actually aren't finding meaning necessarily. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. But I think with prestige, I think it's really easy to go there. It's really easy also to want that because with prestige, I think, comes recognition. and recognition is like very is a very tangible way to feel like you made it or you did something that other people also deem worthy and especially for designers when like most people don't actually understand what we're doing you know what i mean like your parents your parents don't understand what they can understand like people know what that thing is and and i think there's definitely like an allure to it and sometimes that prestige is it can be a vehicle for fulfillment but if it's just prestige for prestige itself it I think it falls flat very very fast and there's a little bit of like an emptiness to it too and I think this is something that we also see in our culture it to me is sort of like a cousin of like you know celebrity culture influencer culture it's kind of like the be seen and be noticed or the facade of it in a way right yeah but there's some there are so many moments of fulfillment in our lives that have nothing to do with work and they have nothing to do with recognition yeah and we still can feel very fulfilled yes and we should we should be i really i i i'm kind of hoping that our creative leaders everywhere right now will take this moment where I know people are very anxious about about their jobs and about the workspace and I think it's really important for creative leaders to see that and to remember that people everywhere no matter what it is that you do like people need to be fulfilled outside of the office as well and outside of their their work yeah what do you do then to sort of keep yourself yeah keep yourself fulfilled outside of work well this is also this is interesting too so maybe maybe i'll pose a question or not a question but i i want to see like maybe a show of hands like how many of you think that fulfillment is something that comes after the fact like you do something and you feel fulfilled how many of you think that or perceive that to be the case I think a few right yeah own it that's pretty we have some very tentative hands I'm only seeing like halfway hands it's pretty normal to think that like you do something and you go through some kind of process and then you feel a sense of fulfillment right Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:06I can see where you're going with this. So one thing that I did as a manager, over the years of being a manager, I was kind of feeling that I needed a little bit more, I just needed a little bit more kind of like support in the knowledge that I had as a manager. I you know managers are responsible for so many things in in the careers of the people that they manage and they handle a lot of you know a lot of one-on-ones and promotion cycles and the well-being of their direct reports I really was seeking just a way to kind of like connect that I didn't feel that I was necessarily getting from either the training or just from what the expectations of management was and I pursued a certification in coaching because of that and in in this certification there are the the certification I did is through this organization called co-active coaching and one of the principles in coaching is to seek fulfillment and when you think about fulfillment it's so often sort of like kind of like a cause and effect you'll do something and you'll feel fulfilled but if you actually flip it and you think about fulfillment as something that comes before the thing that you seek and you build these sort of like you build the fulfillment out of these principles like values and daily habits and boundaries then you are really setting yourself up for a kind of stability and a kind of sense of self that is not necessarily connected to an outcome.

16:07You are driving the outcome from what it is that you want. Do you see where you see what I mean? I do. I even I'm sort of thinking about my own experiences and I'm thinking about the way that often the fulfillment actually comes during the process of making work or of doing something or working on something or finding the answer and that the external validation often comes like later like like a month later when something ships or when something's out in market or when you win an award and you're then disconnected from the actual process and the thing that fulfilled you right like that was that was a month ago I'm working on a new problem now yeah totally Yeah, which is so interesting to think about.

16:49Okay, so I read a few things that you've written in the past. I want to sort of move us towards a bit of burnout and anxiety talk. Into something that's a little bit more personal, I guess. And I read this article you wrote for Adjacent, which was your alma mater's sort of publishing platform. And you wrote about this idea of like micro tasks that stay pulsing in the background of our minds until they're actually resolved. So I'm going to quote you. Are you ready? If I've been emailing with a friend or a colleague, and for whatever reason I haven't yet replied to their last email, that seemingly micro-task often stays pulsing in my mind, a dissonance, something that is not yet completed until it's been resolved.

17:29Many of these micro-tasks collectively create an avalanche of anxiety that can seem to have no end and leave us in an illusion of failure, debt, and critique. I've never felt more seen in my entire life like that to-do list that is constantly there the need to respond to things I just added two more while you were out to my to-do list I have never felt more seen and I've never thought about them as micro tasks that sort of add up and weigh on you in that way do you think that modern creative work has sort of made it impossible for us to ever feel caught up or truly done in some way? I think at times it does and I think when the creative work is is only driven by outcomes yeah it is easier for it to become exactly that I think that what so just to go back to the the piece that you quoted in this publication called Adjacent I wrote this article.

18:29It was about rituals. The whole edition was about rituals, and I wrote an essay about Shabbat. So Shabbat is a practice that I have once a week, the Sabbath, and it's a practice where my family traditionally has just had a family meal on Friday nights with our friends, with our relatives, and it's a time where we put our phones away, and it's just being in community together and and being offline and being with one another and there's something so special for me about that boundary and about that practice where I can just like I I work on the same table on my my dining table that's my work table too and there's something about like Friday afternoon towards the evening the ritual switching it over I just get to clean the table off yeah of all of my devices and put everything away and clean all the post-it notes from from the week put them aside and make that boundary to be able to have kind of like this peace of mind and the separation between the week and being with the people that I that I care most about yeah and for me like that sort of like that space is what's necessary for creativity to thrive like creativity needs space and I think maybe as designers something that we can all relate to is like when you think about composition right composition as a principle only happens when there's negative space right there is no composition if there's no negative space it's just gravity it's just like things falling right so we I mean if we're the creatives making these compositions we need to embody that like we need to have that negative space we need to have space for our ideas to evolve and to become something maybe new I really am a big believer in the phrase like sleep on it it's really served me over time sleeping on it is is great because the ideas like need time to cook yeah and I guess that idea of that like never-ending to-do list right that really has an impact on our nervous system over the long term very much so and you're right that as especially as we've like moved into this remote work work from home situation like the work bleeding into life life bleeding into work or the um popularization of like you know bring your whole self to work which also in reverse is bring your whole work self home I guess yeah it makes me think a little bit about like the sort of over romanticizing of the output you sort of alluded to it a little bit um already like that idea that we're so used to defining our success based on how much we're actually putting out into the world do you have strategies for combating that like working with your team at the times yeah I think it's really important to look outputs are critical like that is how most of the companies that we work at that's how they measure success and that's how they measure progress but But I think it's really important when you lead teams to know how to tap into everyone's strengths.

21:53So outcomes and outputs are not necessarily equal across the board, right? Some people are really good at facilitating. Some people are really good at sketching and being generative with sketching. other people can be really good as designers maybe with work pairing with engineers and so I think that is one that is one aspect that I think is important to just notice especially as a as a leader when guiding a team but I think the other thing that I really hope every leader are listening to this, and not just leaders, I think designers are empowered to do this too, I think we need to give more space to transferable skills, because I just, I hear this from designers across the board, like in working in different companies, that it's really easy to put people in a box.

22:57It's really easy to say, you know, you're really good at making wireframes. How about you make wireframes for the rest of your life and and you know people can be really good at making wireframes and they can be really good at doing other things they can be really good at things that are outside of design too I mean I think we all are and I think that's part of what I hope when people think about like fulfillment and the values that sort of like are the pillars of what creates that sense of fulfillment for them. I really hope that people can also look outside of like, you know, just design and creativity.

23:38There's so many other values that I'm sure everybody here has that make them the person that they are. And those values might also translate to skills that they have. Well, or skills that we might need in the future. I sort of think about this in this like big, big moment of transition for an industry, I think, which may or may not come to fruition, right? Like who knows how much graphic design will actually change or design will actually change as an industry in the next 10 years. But I know I'm biased, but I've always thought designers have so many transferable skills. So many. I couldn't agree more.

24:14I couldn't agree more. I know. I think about our ability to see things from many perspectives. I think about our ability to work with emerging technologies with a sense of curiosity. Absolutely. I think about our ability to like solve weird and complicated problems and get strangely obsessed with solving those weird and complicated problems. And I think those are things that are only going to become more valuable in the future. I also think designers have a superpower, which is agility and the ability to pivot. I think designers are really good at that. And there is no better time than now for that to be like a superpower to have.

24:52Pivoting is a superpower. Do you have a moment? Do you have a big pivot that stands out in your brain? I can't think of anything specific, but I can think of so many, like, I can think of pivoting as almost like a daily practice. Because, you know, especially working in a newsroom, like, sometimes, like, the brief changes or the specificity of it changes or the outcome we want to see is a little bit different. and there's nothing like the pace of a newsroom no there's nothing like it it's a roller coaster it's moving so fast yeah it moves very fast and there's something really nice about um designing for for storytelling and for narratives and for um clarity for understanding yeah right being able to kind of like connect dots for people yeah but i think that that's and and being able to to have that mindset of like okay well that that could have been a good idea but now we need the idea to serve something else and being able to move quickly to to that is i think it's i think it's i think it's an awesome uh muscle to evolve well i think even as especially when you're working on product in a place like a newsroom right like sometimes the the pieces of the features that we're working on have effects that are different than we intended and you have to pivot those too right yeah like things that sort of head out into the world and people start using them in ways we didn't expect yeah definitely and you sort of have to figure that out I think this is a good time for us to sort of pivot and and have you tell us a little bit about the newsroom and about your time at the time was working on products I think for me at least and again I'm so biased coming from a place of editorial design and storytelling.

26:42But I think product design in these spaces always feels fundamentally different than like a Silicon Valley sort of idea of product, like that sort of capitalist optimization culture doesn't exist in newsrooms in the same way, or at least I don't think it does. I mean, I would say product and product design at the Times is run like very, very effectively, and it's masterful. It's incredible how the teams run. but it is different because it does, again, it serves needs of storytelling and needs of narrative and needs of the news. Like people need to be able to understand and kind of like, you know, there are very few people who follow a news event from beginning to end.

27:27So being able to make it clear and being able to really help with that kind of like navigation of like, where are we in the story and like who are the people who's who there's so many things that contribute to making to having that that clarity and you know I think for me one of the biggest projects that I am like you know the happiest in the world that I got to work on um is um is designing for trust yeah like that was a really um that was a really special project tell us about it like what did that teach you about sort of like human behavior I guess right like you would have had to do a lot of thinking about like the emotional capacity of humans I imagine yeah definitely so with so when we started to think about trust there were a lot of different ways that we could have we could have approached this work and one one study really stuck with me it's called the Johari window and this the study basically it's a it's a framework and it says that um in any two entities let's say you and me yes there is going to be like a two by two quadrants and designers love two by twos so we do we do give us a matrix we're in exactly so um there's going to be this area of knowns so there's things that you and i both know yeah and then there's going to be things that i know that you don't know okay it's going to be things that you know that I don't know and those are going to be things that none of us know neither of us know okay exactly so when you want to build trust what you want to do is increase the shared space of the things that you both know yes right that makes sense so you and I will become closer over time because we will exchange stories and experiences and you'll learn more about me I'll learn about you yeah and over time we'll also trust each other more because of that I've never thought about it in that way like time spent does mean you'll start to trust something more spent but also the exchange of information from two sides so in order for that to happen there is a great deal of vulnerability of transparency that needs to happen.

29:48And that was really kind of the principle, the kind of like the pillar that served the products that we built. So when we designed initially for Trust, and this was a few years ago, we created enhanced bylines. We call them enhanced bylines. And what they are, are instead of just having a headshot and a byline, you now can see on the app of the times, there's a little blurb before the story begins. That blurb is created usually by the editor of the story. And it basically shares who this reporter is and what they did for the story. What did they do to gather this story and bring it to you, the reader?

30:35It's almost kind of like a right-of-way for you to say, okay, I understand. I understand what went into the work that went into the story. and now I'm ready to read it. Well, and that enhanced, like, I think the time sort of rolled out. Originally, like, the bylines that you could click and see everybody's history of what they had written, but I remember when those extra little bio lines came out, and you didn't have to click on it anymore. And the editor would, like, editorialize that a little bit to help you understand that person. And the other thing that kind of followed that immediately, also from the trust team, was the new bio pages.

31:13So those were redesigned. And what I think is like particularly special about those pages, and I think this as a designer, is we had every reporter rewrite their bio in the first person. And that's just incredible. Like, yeah, and that that was a design choice. And I like all of this is sort of happening at the Times I think the same time that we started to sort of see what I like to call the identity revolution like this idea where we did really want to fundamentally understand the people we were engaging with online more closely and it gave those journalists those reporters And another opportunity to introduce themselves in a really interesting way and every reporter if you go to those those bio pages every reporter has an ethics statement that they wrote on their own so it's not like a canned statement everyone wrote their own ethics statement and that just takes it brings so much intention to the work yeah and um i just like i i'm really moved by by intentionality did it foster internal trust like i know you were working on building trust like external reader trust to the times but did it foster internal trust too because you explaining those things makes me believe that all of a sudden those reporters and journalists and editors felt more connected to the publication they were writing for so i i would say certainly and the the thing about trust too is that it really it doesn't really it doesn't really hold very much when it's just external like it needs to kind of be coming from within isn't it wild like we can feel that from a team yeah you really can um i've been thinking about this thing sort of revisiting you you did a design thinkers talk all about working on the trust team at the New York Times a few years ago so you can go find that in the video archive but re-watching it and sort of thinking about this moment we are in now I started thinking about whether or not we as like a society are like kind of having trouble trusting ourselves and I was thinking about the rise of AI I was thinking about the fact that we're like relying on these computer-generated little buddies these agents to like validate some of our thinking sometimes yeah have you thought about that at all yeah I think about it a lot actually I I really in this moment I'm just thinking so much about what I wish for creatives and I I really my wish is like for people not to lose their their fingerprint in their work um AI is like to me is like it's just it's so exciting I think it's miraculous I'm really energized by this time that we're in and I know that that might not be that might not resonate with everyone but um I think mostly creatives are sick of having these conversations because I think we're so excited to think about it more deeply than the sort of surface level fear we've been hearing about for the last five years probably but the thing that I am energized by maybe the most is that it's it's such uncharted territories that to me they present so much opportunity to to shape it and to determine like how things are going to be yeah and and also to evolve practices like new practices like this idea of like beginner's mind or like everybody kind of starting from the same the same starting line is like it's really exciting to me.

34:47Hello, my name is Yuhan. My name is Renata. My name is Marla Reyes and I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. I grew up in Northeastern China. I grew up in North Ossetia, which is in the south of Russia. We were always reading, drawing, or listening to music. When I started doing anything creative, I found safety. I was very into understanding the logic behind things. I came to BCIT's Digital Arts to study design and development. I went to BCIT's Digital Arts to study digital product design. I am now working as a graphic designer for a marketing agency. I became their lead UX UI designer. We are BCIT's digital arts.

35:25Sign up for one of our programs today. So then my question for you is maybe you've been working on AI initiatives at the times. You are deeply familiar with a lot of what's going on right now. You've worked on a whole whack of experiments yourself. How do you think about the ethical sort of implications of AI? Like what is your own mandate because I often think about technology and I think about this sort of idea that we maybe sometimes forget that just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it you know why I love that quote because it's from Ratatouille is it I think so yeah it's from Ratatouille yeah Remy says it to Gusteau the chef I can't wait to go find that clip to add it to every lecture yeah just because everyone can cook it doesn't mean they should right I'm gonna go find that one.

36:14Okay, but how do you, how do you like personally start sort of thinking about those things? How do you sort of work through that idea? Like it is so exciting and interesting to figure out that we can in fact do something or that we can ask technology to do something or we can innovate towards something. But how do you decide that something should actually get sort of pushed out into the world? And being at the Times gave you like a massive audience, right? Like a little change was going out to how many million people? Yeah, millions. and when it comes to ethics and AI, I think that in itself can be something that we could talk here for hours.

36:51Yes. But I think when it comes to journalism and AI, there's so many ways that AI can be used in the context of journalism. Of course, I hope this is kind of very clear, but just in case it's not like the times is not using AI to do any kind of reporting nor will it ever when you think about the use of AI it's more kind of like how can how can this content be served to people in a way that might be more relevant or faster or in ways that they that that they intended to that they intend to get it. That makes me think about like the audio recordings that the time sort of rolled out. Yeah, yeah. Things that sort of deliver the journalism in a slightly different method.

37:46Exactly, or thinking about, you know, conversion in in cooking from material to metrics. So uses like that just make it make things easier. But when it comes to ethics, I think, again, there's so many ways to answer your question. And the thing that comes to mind to me as a team leader is the apprehension that so many contributors have when they think their role is going to be taken by somebody else. So product managers are afraid that designers are going to do their job and designers are afraid that engineers are now going to do their job and you know what the the answer is they might all of our jobs are going to change they might and with or without the that's the that's the that's the thing that i think is is interesting to kind of like just lessen the stress about a little bit because we're all that's that's the thing that we're all in the same in that same like beginner's mind yeah so it kind of raises a very important question like for yourself like okay so if if somebody is going to do this thing that I used to do like what can I do now like yeah not in a and and not to ask it in kind of like this like detrimental way like it's not kind of like in a helpless like what can I do now it's it's actually in a very empowering way it's like what can I do now?

39:25Like possibility. What can I do now? It almost brings it back to what we were talking about earlier, right? Like AI is almost exposing how much people have actually tied their self-worth to like usefulness or output. Yeah. Right. Like that idea of like be more efficient, do more, we can do more. Um, and back to your earlier point about sort of like looking for fulfillment and some of the others and designers, incredible amount of transferable skills. Absolutely. So fascinating. And I guess when I'm thinking about AI, I am also thinking about like the removing of friction, right? And I think we're hearing this conversation a lot right now.

39:59That's so much of the best parts of the creative process. So much of the best parts of the creative decision making process come from moments of complication or friction or this need to pivot. And that's so much of the agentic internet is like starting to remove that friction in some way um so finding ways to like keep that yeah it's sort of interesting it's critical like it's kind of it's kind of back to my point earlier about um composition yeah like we we need to live in tension like our our world exists in tension um and when i think about like this idea of like frictionless I I get very bored like yeah it would be boring there'd be no problem to solve there'll be or there'll be no interest like everything that's interesting to me has some level of like friction or tension to it um or there'd be no sort of beginner mindset again because everything's so easily accessible so I think when we when we think about like a you know this idea of like frictionless experiences it's nice to have things that work organically or feel like they understand you right but there has to be a moment where there's like a decision to be made right or input to have like somebody yeah making some kind of decision this way or that way and that's where I think we all come in we all we we are the tastemakers yeah we are you know we understand people whether it's like through research or through world experiences we read the world in a way where we can see you know we're really good at pattern recognition yes um and and translating it to something something functional something meaningful something of utility um sometimes when we go into like our artist mode something that you know makes people feel something yeah abstract and beautiful yeah and that's important to preserve are there skills sort of maybe moving into your sort of teaching and mentoring mind space but are there skills that you are sort of seeing as like priority skills as we go forward like the soft skills that sort of feel like they're the thing that are going to help folks keep accelerating I think it is that agility and I also really think that it's connecting with people like I really think that um I think that connecting with people like there it couldn't be more important than now well because ultimately everything we're doing is meant to support people's lives in some capacity right yeah I mean of course and I hope that we're going to continue designing for for people for people but um i just think that in in especially in a time where there's so much ambiguity and so much uncertainty and people have you know there are a lot of feelings right now that people have that are that are coming to the surface um it's important to have people to process it with and people to help you um and help to and for you to help others like it yeah there couldn't be a more important time to be connecting with people well and I guess that's why as an industry we're sort of advocating for this idea of transparency in the way that we're using technology in our work of the way we're using and in our work like starting to sort of share and have some curiosity about how people are doing it and you not feel weird about the ways we're integrating it or our workplaces are asking us to integrate it I think maybe that might be exactly kind of like the the point to to my point that i'm trying to make which is like when we when we fall into the um i guess the stream of or the river of ai yeah it's very easy to become a solopreneur or kind of like a lone wolf yeah you know a collaborator with the ai yeah but that's why i'm saying you want to kind of over index on the humanities side I think right now so that you can find a balance or maintain some kind of you know sensibility of like oh and I collaborate sure it's gonna be very interesting to start collaborating with agents and to start building things in ways that will really empower us as individuals but there's so much value from our collaboration with one another even our collaboration with our notebooks with our hand like with with being analog like we we have to keep we have to find ways to preserve these like analog practices too well i think that's the friction right like if you could just go and ask the agent to give you an answer to push you in a direction and you're not doing the critical thinking to think through it right that's what a notebook's good for well that's what but that's also what your mind is good for yeah yeah well i guess the notebook is i'm better on paper than i am in my own brain i talk about this with my students a lot because in one of the classes that I teach ideation and prototyping we talk a lot about idea generation in that class as which is scary would idea generation is scary but what I it is scary but what I what I tell one of the exercises that we do is we make this like association son and I always give them like kind of like a you know kind of like pretty generic term to sort of like write their associations off of.

45:36Can you give us an example? Like home, for example. And in my class, we usually, it's a very international bunch. And when you say home to a group that comes from all around the world, people have different associations with home. And that's something really special that then comes out in the projects. And that is the sense, that is the meaning that comes into the work and i when if you were to ask an agent like to tell you like what is what is home you'll get a response it could be an interesting one but you know how how much of that response is going to be your own association yeah well i'm thinking of and i'm i'm not going to remember where this came from but i home somebody did an experiment somewhere along the line where they asked a group of people to draw home like to draw their example of home and everybody drew a different version right um and i would expect that an ai would draw a square with a triangle on top right but there were like depending on where people were coming from a house looked so different yeah right like your own experience yeah even the idea that home is a house is not something that everyone is true for everybody yeah okay because you're doing so much teaching because you have experience working with sort of design and technology students right now what are what are you seeing in the next generation coming up are they more ambitious are they more anxious are they both temperature check yeah I think I think I'm seeing both definitely anxiety and I can understand the anxiety for sure and I I'm gonna I'm gonna mention this in the talk on Tuesday so everyone here has a little bit of a spoiler but I always recommend books at the end of my talk and one of the books that I'm going to recommend is a book by my really good friend Jody Cantor she wrote this new book it's called how to start and it's all about starting your life's work, but it doesn't have to be only for beginners.

47:47It's really kind of like how to start anything, like at any point. And it's such a hopeful, beautiful, like kind of like a love letter to this generation kind of book, because it really calls out like the the focus that people should have in this moment and those the two things that come up in the book a lot are around having a craft and building a craft and finding a need for that craft and I really I really resonate with the with the craft part because I think that's something that culturally in this moment when we are exposed to so many things that come immediate to us it's really easy to brush off the need to evolve craft and basically what craft is it can be a lot of things but I think for me that translates into this kind of like muscle of like some kind of expertise yeah that you know how to do and you know how to do really really well and and you are always evolving you're always evolving like I don't think I would I don't I can never see myself saying at any point in my life, I know everything I need to know about design.

49:10I can't see that happening. I'm constantly learning and I'm eager to learn more. Like I'm excited to learn more. I think it's so wonderful. I think we are so privileged to get to work in an industry that is as vast and varied as design. Yeah. There's so much to learn. I agree. And I think that's like a message that I shared with my students and I also share here with with with you all that evolving a craft is something that is going to be in demand and and the the the task is going to be kind of like finding the need where where is your craft needed and and to think about the transferable skills too.

49:56Like the craft that you have, again, it doesn't have to be a vocational skill. It could be, but your craft can be something that is beyond just execution. So really think about like what it is that you are, that speaks to you in terms of that craft. I talked to my students about something super similar, but I've never called it craft. So I talked to them about like finding a specialization of some sort. And I talk about the idea that specialization doesn't have to be about output. It doesn't have to be the genre of design you do. It could be a value-based specialization. It could be a community-based specialization, but finding the space in which you want to practice.

50:38So calling it craft is really fascinating. And I think it's exactly that, right? It's like working that muscle and being able to focus your energy into a specific part of this very vast and varied industry. Okay. I want to sort of wrap up before we, before we open it up for some audience questions. So start thinking about your questions, live studio audience. I want to sort of move us into some like very sort of practical things. So your talk description mentions this idea of boundary design, and I know you're going to go into it more, but it's a phrase I love, and I am so excited to learn more about how you think about that.

51:12Could you give us some examples of boundary design that like genuinely changed your relationship to work in some way? definitely um i once had i once had was a studio owner um before i moved to new york to become uh to to study in my master's program and as a studio owner you have clients of course um and i had a real difficult time with boundaries as a studio owner because it was like my thing Like it was my practice and it was my, you know, it was the work that I was on the hook for. And I basically like I could not draw the line of like when I would answer emails and when I, you know, when I would engage with my clients and how often I would engage with my clients.