Rewind: Paola Antonelli: How design shapes culture

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A Hey folks, DesignBetter has been on the road recently, recording a live episode in Manhattan for design search firm Wharton Company's 30th anniversary. Guests for the episode included Paolo Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and design at MoMA, Mike Davidson, VP of design and user research at Microsoft AI Kate Aronowitz, design Partner at Google Ventures, Megan Choi, Product Designer at Anthropic, and Mark Wilson, Global Design Editor at Fast Company. While Aaron and I are catching up from travel and as a lead in to the live episode airing next week, we're rewinding to our interview with Paol Antonelli. We hope you enjoyed the episode and if you haven't checked it out yet, did you know you could save over $1,600 on popular productivity tools and design and AI courses with the Design Better toolkit? Just head over to DBTR co Toolkit to learn more.

Speaker B The term design is very slippery. It's a little bit like art, right? You know, you can't really give a definition. I always think that it's a coming together and means, right? You have a goal and the goal can be functional. The means are the materials, so there's not much difference. I know that it's kind of crazy to say that between wood and code.

Speaker C The Museum of Modern Art brings to mind images of Van Gogh's famous Starry Night, Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory, and Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans. But thanks to Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of architecture and design, MoMA exhibitions also encompass the role design has played in shaping culture and the human experience.

Speaker A We talk with Paola about how we can look at digital design through a historic lens, some of the most important design movements in the past 100 years, and how the creative process has evolved through these different movements.

Speaker C We also talk about the history of the AdSense symbol, which is in MoMA's permanent collection, why craftsmanship is necessary to experimentation, and some of the current challenges that she sees in design education.

Speaker A We hope you enjoy this episode, which is a part of our series on design history with upcoming episodes on Typography with Jonathan Heffler and the History and Philosophy of Design with Professor Barry Cates. Thanks for listening.

Speaker C We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show.

Speaker A Paola Antonelli, welcome to the Design Better podcast.

Speaker B Thank you, Eli. I'm glad to be here.

Speaker A We're honored to have you here. You are a storied figure in the world of design. And for our audience, which often skews a little bit more towards product design and digital software, they may not be familiar with your name. So I thought we could start off with just talking about your role at MoMA and maybe a little bit about how you got there.

Speaker B Sure. I've been here 29 years, which is a really long time. And I started out with my same. Well, just a lower title, but in my same function to be the curator for contemporary design. I have a background as an architect. I'm Italian, and I studied architecture in Milan. And when I went to school, it was really crowded. We were 15,000 students, only in architecture, only in Milan. That meant there was nothing practical that we could do. But we got really, really good theory. It was kind of understood that architecture or design, in a way, was the mother of all design disciplines. So you could go to architecture school and then become product, graphic designer, interface designer, fashion designer, you name it. And after that, I worked as a freelance curator of architecture and design. I was teaching at ucla. I was gallivanting back and forth, and I was a freelance curator until I saw a post in a magazine announcing the job opening at moma. So I answered a post in a magazine. That's how it went.

Speaker A That's fantastic. And through your work at moma, I'm sure you're exposed to the canon of design, essentially all the history and the foundational parts of design. I'm curious how right now can we think about how that applies to maybe our work if we're working in digital design, and how do we think of going forward? How would we think about collecting and curating those types of works of design?

Speaker B The term design is very slippery. It's a little bit like art, right? You know, you can't really give a definition, but the truth, I mean, I use one for myself. I always think that it's a coming together of goals and means, right? You have a goal, and the goal can be functional. But function is also very subjective, Right? You could think that the Tamagotchi is a functional object, but what's the function of the Tamagotchi besides just like, inserting anguish in your life? But if you start thinking of design that way, you can go back to the first wheel. You know, you can go back in time and really think of design also as creating the tools for agriculture or even just, you know, spears to hunt and gather animals. And if you always Think of this idea of goals and means. The means are the materials, so there's not much difference. I know that it's kind of crazy to say that between wood and code, right? In a way, it's the means to an end. So I feel very comfortable going from brick walls to wooden furniture to code, both in my mind and in my function and career here at moma. So how do we collect design? Well, it's about having a strong viewpoint and then pursuing that viewpoint in your collection. So if your collection, you have to kind of declare your cards, right? So if your collection is a collection of digital design, then you stick to it. If it's a collection of furniture, you stick to it. In the case of MoMA, it's a collection of contemporary design, therefore all its different aspects. And because we have that attribute in the title modern, we can get away with being more selective and opinionated than, say, the Smithsonian, which gathers and collects culture and cultural artifacts. I'm not even talking about Cooper Hewitt, but the Smithsonian in general. So it's very important to understand the personality and the goals of a collection, and it's important for the curators to state them clearly, and then the public should hold them to it.

Speaker C Are there particular values that you and colleagues at MoMA have articulated about how you want to present design and architectural history? And then are there constraints? You know, there's some physical constraints to what can be presented and how things should be presented.

Speaker B One thing is the intellectual statements. There's been so many. MOMA was founded in 1929, and architecture and design were part of the museum since the beginning, because the whole museum was founded on the model of the Bauhaus, which was about all the different creative disciplines coming together to make a better society. So it went from architecture to painting and sculpture to design to stage design, set design and costume design. So it was really part since the beginning. And since then, different curators have articulated it in different ways. We have a little picture by the elevator on our floor with the statement on what good design is by Elliot Noyce. And it's very funny because I wouldn't necessarily say that the statement is the same today. Today we think of context much more. At that time, it was about the object itself. Before then, it was even more about the object as almost sculptural. And this idea of modern also change in the decades. So, in other words, it's always important to have this kind of clarity of statement. Now, if I were to tell you what we stand for today, it's design that has an impact in trying to make the world a better place, not only for humans, but also for other species and as a system in general. I know that it's vague, but it's impossible to be less vague because truly, it's not a matter of how an object looks. Even though looks are important. It's still an art museum and it's not a matter anymore of its price or preciousness, as far as I'm concerned. I prefer objects that go to as many people as possible so that they're accessible and affordable, but rather it's a matter really of what the object wants to achieve.

Speaker C What are some stories that you are either working on or have recently worked on that are the foundation of some shows that have happened at MOMO that are exemplars of those philosophies?

Speaker B Well, there is an exhibition that unfortunately is in its last week, so I'm saying goodbye to it as I speak with you. And it's called Never Alone. It shows the collection of video games at the Museum of Modern Art, video games and other interactive design. So it has our 35, 36 video games. Some are playable, some are not. And then it has also, you probably know, the iWriter, which is this open source project from a few years ago that enabled a graffiti writer from Los Angeles that had Lou Gehrig disease to kind of tag buildings using laser from his bed. So it's part of that. And there's the first reactive books by John Maida that are basically the first apps from the early 90s. But then there's also the at sign that I'm really proud of as an acquisition. So that's a story that will never grow old for me and that I'm continuously proud of. I don't even remember, remember how it happened. But I was thinking of the at sign and I was thinking of how important and crucial it is to our life these days. And I was thinking of how beautiful it is. So I started digging and I found out that it was first found, maybe it was used even before, but it was first found in manuscripts from the Middle Ages. And the monks that were copying manuscripts would use that symbol to fuse the letters A and D from the Latin preposition ad, which means in relationship with or towards. So they were just like, to save energy, that would go with a swirl. And then that little symbol, I mean, already I was stunned because I said, oh my God, it's the same meaning and it's been so many centuries. Then I found out that it had stayed during the centuries it had been used by Merchants and in the 19th century, by accountants to say, at the rate off. So it was also in the typewriters. And then in 1971, when Ray Tomlinson was working on the email program within VPN and just creating the Internet, he saw it on the keyboard of the teletype, and he was looking for a way to fuse into a symbol the lines of code that would connect the name of the person to the location in the computer or in the room. Right. So he saw this symbol and he decided to adopt it as a fusion, all that code. So centuries afterwards, different setting, same meaning, same use, different. Same way to save energy and time and letters. And I just was flabbergasted. I said, this is wonderful. And then I thought, okay, it's in the public domain. What does it mean to acquire it? Which was another layer of beauty to the whole operation, because it is everybody's. It's in the public domain. So it's not an acquisition, it's an anointment. But says who that acquiring things for a collection. And it goes back to your question about the collection means possessing them and taking them out of availability for the rest of the world. That's not necessary. Our job is not to own and close and lock under lock and key, but rather it is to show the audience the marvels of design or the marvels of painting a sculpture, you know, depending on what we have. So that's an object or an acquisition or an anointment or an entry in the collection. That makes me very proud.

Speaker A I love that.

Speaker C And for type nerds, that's ligature.

Speaker B It's a ligature, indeed. I mean, I didn't want to go into specific terms, but definitely it's a ligature, and it was a ligature also in the Middle Ages. That's the beauty.

Speaker A We're going to have Jonathan Heffler on the show, so we'll talk to him a little bit about that, too, I'm sure.

Speaker B Oh, my God. You know, type designers are crazy, but Jonathan is wonderful.

Speaker A Paola, I'm curious. Are there any other stories along those lines of maybe objects or symbols that we sort of take for granted in the digital age, but that maybe have. Have a history that we might not know about?

Speaker B That is the purest. Then there are other symbols that we have acquired. We have acquired the Creative Commons symbols, and in that case, it means having an agreement with Creative Commons. Right. So having it in the collection means having an agreement. We have also collected the on off sign, and we discussed with the IEEE about that, and we usually show the sign. Even that is on display right now. We show the sign stenciled on the wall and then have a video next to it that shows when the circuits needed to be open and closed, the zero and the one coming together into the one symbol we have. I Love New York. So in that case, you know, it's very fascinating when you go into symbols or digital objects, ownership versus license. It's really fascinating and complex. The I Love New York symbol belongs to the state of New York, so you cannot use it unless they give you permission. You have to pay them something, et cetera. But Milton Glaser gave us the original sketches. So Milton Glaser is the graphic designer for those of you who have not yet encountered the magnitude of Milton Glaser in your life. He was the man that in the 1970s, sketched the I heart NY on a piece of paper, actually a napkin. A napkin, the proverbial napkin, to help the state of New York and in particular, this great advertising company run by a fabulous woman, Mary Lawrence Wells, to help them help the governor of New York kind of redesign the image of New York. Because New York was in really dire straits at that time and tourists didn't want to come anymore because of crime and dirt and sanitation department strikes, you name it. So I Heart New York is in the collection as the original artifact.

Speaker C Is that napkin in the MoMA collection? Who has that napkin?

Speaker B Yeah, it's the napkin and then some of his first cut and paste tables, you know, like papers. So it's the process of the I Heart New York that is in the collection. The object itself, sometimes we put it, like when we reopened in 2019, I think it was on the wall. After the expansion, it was on the wall. But every time we have to ask permission of the state of New York for the sketches, we don't have to ask anybody's permission.

Speaker A I'm curious. Is the I Love New York? You'd be the perfect person to ask this question. There's other examples I'm sure of, like a rebus where there's pictorial elements that are arranged in a way to make something like Paul Rand's IBM logo design. Is the I Love New York sort of the first kind of emoji? Or where would you place it in the history of that?

Speaker B You know, the first emojis are hieroglyphics in ancient history. Right. So in a way, there's no first emoji, but definitely it's one of the most contemporary and evergreen uses of emojis. The first emojis were designed in the late 90s. So we also have those in the collection. By the way, we have the original docomo emojis from 1999, but of course, symbols existed even before that. So, no, we can't say that I Heart New York is the first emojis, but definitely it's one of the most famous.

Speaker C I love that you educated us that MOMA has its origins with the Bauhaus. That was something I had no idea about. And I'm a big fan of the Bauhaus and all that it did for design. I wonder if you could just give us a little tour of 20th century design. If we could walk through a few moments that in your mind are like key moments in design that every listener, regardless of whether they're a student or a VP of design, somewhere that they should know about and be aware of this moment. So in 20th century, we'll start maybe there.

Speaker B It's not an easy feat at all. You know, I see guitars and other music artifacts on your walls. It's as if I were asking you to give me a tour of music in the 20th century. So everything that I will say will not be enough. And also everything that I will say is sadly very Eurocentric and very white male dominated. Because that's how I was educated. And many curators like me are right now trying to rebalance our education and also our collections. But the Bauhaus is already way into the 20th century. Before that, I would like to go probably in the 1860s. You know, that was a very important decade. Not only was it the decade of the Expo in London, the Crystal palace, it was also the anointment of industrial design. Before that, the champions of the Arts and Crafts movement in the UK had already started thundering against industrial production and trying to also save the crafts. But I'm going to just give you points because otherwise we go on forever. But in the 18th century, the industrial Revolution, the Crystal palace and the Expo in London, at the same time, Arts and Crafts and the Shakers in the United States. I think the shakers are very, very important. Then you move to the 20th century, the beginning. There's a lot of organic design design. There's the episodes of the Secession in Austria, of the Art Nouveau in France, and Liberty style in the UK and also over in the United States. So this kind of organic aesthetics, the ones that are important to me, the Bauhaus certainly was. Then a lot happened after World War II. The percolating of so many of the advancements that were made for the war that came to fruition of people in general. And that's what is called the mid century modern United States. The case study houses in Los Angeles, the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, those were all like boosts that came from the war effort and so on and so forth. The moment of radical architecture and design in the 1960s and the early 1970s. But it's a whole universe and it's impossible to sum it up in just a few minutes. I just want to send this message to your audience. Design is one of the, if not the most important, creative endeavor that humans have. You know, art is very important, but design shapes our world. So it's necessary for people to have knowledge of it. So I really do hope that you will be more curious and that you will find enough materials to soothe your thirst for it.

Speaker C One theme that seems to be recurring, that I'm always fascinated about in design history is this tension between man and the machine. The humanistic approach to work and mechanistic control of things that seems to be reigniting and playing out right now as artificial intelligence and, you know, sort of human craft are at tensions again. But you talked a bit about the 1860s and industrialization and there was a pushback with the arts and crafts movement where, you know, like, let's return to something that's handmade, Something that is special and has a spirit to it. That there is something special that we perceive as humans. That in designing and crafting things by hand, we feel a connection to it, to that object, but also to one another. How do you think about what's happening? What's playing out today? This person versus the machine balance with technology and modern day design.

Speaker B What's happening in AI is really fascinating and it is coming to head of this tension. But the funny thing is it's not really happening in the world of physical design. Quite the opposite. When I came to MOMA, I was 94. And in 95 I did an exhibition that was called Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, which was all about these materials, new materials like carbon fibers. I mean, at that time was new or aerogels, all of these different new experimental materials. The funny thing is, I discovered at that time that the more advanced the materials, the more you need crafts, the more you need handicrafts, because the machines to work them do not exist yet. So craftsmanship is necessary to experimentation even with advanced technologies and materials. And the same is true today. You know, there's a real deep attention to crafts because it gives us ideas of how to work materials and technologies. And just a Few days ago, I saw this beautiful example of 3D printing. You know, there is a lot of 3D printing of buildings. There's a nozzle that lets the slurry of cement or whatever other materials be positioned in the right shape. And I saw this beautiful adaptive reuse of old homes in a rural community in China that were recuperated by integrating them with parts that were instead 3D printed. So it was just such a beautiful way to show how the two came together. Or the work of Yiba van Schibbe, who is this young designer in the Netherlands that we're going to have in the next exhibition that I am preparing that is going to be about materials. He found a way to adapt a 3D printer so that it can knit a toothpaste of ceramics or toothpaste of different kinds. So at the end, you have this knitted 3D printing with enough imperfection as to bring back a humanistic quality, even though it's a 3D printing machine. So designers that actually make objects are very fascinated by the coming together of imperfection, the imperfection that comes from the human hand that makes it so that you can feel that an object really belongs to you. And instead the economy and the exactitude in some ways of 3D printing, printing. But you know, what's happening in AI is very, very serious. And definitely that's a discussion that needs to be had. In the world of three dimensional design, there's much more harmony, I would say.

Speaker C We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Design Better is supported by Miro. Eli and I have talked to hundreds of team leaders and visited countless companies, and all of them struggle with the same thing. Collaboration. Getting people within and across teams to work together is a challenge, but there's a way to make it easier. Miro is the smart canvas that brings everyone together to explore product ideas, lay out your marketing plans and sort through the details of all your product releases. Miro AI can turn unstructured data, like sticky notes or screenshots, into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes in minutes. Whether your role is ux, design ops, product management, marketing or anything adjacent, Miro will help you be better at your job because it makes it easier to work together. Help your teams get great done with miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's miro.commiro.com and now back to the show.

Speaker A Paolo, how do you think that the creative process has evolved over the course of modern design? I mean, 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 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?

Speaker B It all depends on how you think of the process, you know, the creative process itself. Because of how abstract and philosophical the way I was taught was. To 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. Because 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, they needed to pay down the debt. So 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 Coben. Truly it is not. It's exactly the same thing because the investment needs to be then repaid.

Speaker C 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. In 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? Well, code shapes our lives on a regular basis.

Speaker B Well, 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. 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. So 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, 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. And I think it's very important to be reminded of that because just like chairs or teapots, CODIS 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 when not.

Speaker A Paula, I'm curious about the relationship between art and design. And to give some context, in 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. Occasionally they'll go out and get these things themselves, but sometimes they're sort of a lack of knowledge around the aesthetics of particular types of design. But what else is missing if you don't have a relationship between art and design? Or what's important about the connection?

Speaker B 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 Politecnica 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. Well, it's really interesting because the problem is when you set design within an art context, there are some problems. 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, that'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. I 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.

Speaker C 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. It's a very constrained scenario where there's no opportunity for discovery. We had Lisa Demetrios, granddaughter of Charles and Ren. 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, work together. It's a wonderfully inclusive creative process. But in the middle of that is play. I'm curious, like, how you see that play out in some of the curation work that you've done. What's the role of play in design?

Speaker B 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. I really like what I do, so I. 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.

Speaker C 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. Do you see that line of thinking in a different way of, like, really great designers versus those who don't succeed all the time?

Speaker B 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 Eamess 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 you 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.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker C Fair enough.

Speaker A Paula, in your background, I see a book called the New French Wine, and it just got me thinking about wine label design.

Speaker B Somebody said this to me. I'm like, what? Don't even know who sent it. Okay.

Speaker A But I'm curious. I don't know if you're a wine fan, but I'm curious about totally.

Speaker B Yes. Packaging French wines.

Speaker A Yeah. Nor do I. Yeah. 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.

Speaker B There was a gorgeous exhibition here at MoMA in the 1960s. Of course, I haven't seen the exhibition, but the catalog is fabulous. It 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. And 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.

Speaker C 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. Like, telling that story of responsibility can be very inspiring to young designers who can take this concept further.

Speaker B Oh, 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 that 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. So 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 Rawthorn is called Designing 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. So as far as I'm concerned, design is one of the most important tools to be better, 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.

Speaker C That's great. Just for listeners, can you share URLs where people can find out more about about Design Emergency?

Speaker B 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. And 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.

Speaker A 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 making meant to be interacted with as part of their experience?

Speaker B We think about it all the time. It's really a catch 22 because when you have a museum like MOMA. It's 3 million visitors a year, you know, so you cannot let people sit on the chairs, even 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 change. Keep 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 least to hear the description of how comfortable they are.

Speaker C Paula, what are you excited about Indesign right now? What's sort of caught your attention?

Speaker B 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. To teach people to do objects with everything that they have nearby. So to give you 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. The 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. And everything is super elegant also aesthetically. Right. So I'm excited about the projects. There's this young designer, Gabriel 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 are 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, okay, change. And 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 10. So it's a continuously fluid and dynamic game where you cannot be acrimonious in your competition because your enemy might become. 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.

Speaker C That's fantastic. What a fun job you have.

Speaker B I certainly do. I'm never going to say that it isn't. It's great. That's why it's play all the time.

Speaker C Yeah, that's great. Paola Antonelli, where can people learn more about you?

Speaker B You just Google me, you find me. Yeah, I'm there. It's quite easy. I. 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.

Speaker A Fantastic. Paul Antonelli, thanks so much for being on the Design Better podcast. Thank you.

Speaker B Thank you, Eli. Thank you, Aaron. And good continuation to you both.

Speaker C The breadth of territory that Paola 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.

Speaker A 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.

Speaker C 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 and 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.

Speaker A 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 side of design and the art side of design. And for me, the art got me through the engineering because I was terrible at. Relatively terrible at math and kind of hardcore engineering stuff. But I love the art side. And 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 are these other assignments like drop three strings on a piece of paper and build up a composition out of that. That 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.

Speaker C Yeah, it was interesting to hear her push back 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, 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. You know, if I were working at Google or Meta or Amazon and I've got a very specific goal to design this checkout button that is very easy and that increases our revenue. Like there's a very specific goal there. But then there's, you know, 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, that it's not so commercially driven or specific things you have to account for in your quarterly business review or something.

Speaker A Yeah, 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 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 a more convergent and in his words, closed mode of thinking. But it feels like there has to be a balance between those two.

Speaker C I 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. 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 is in 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 have heard a lot of people talk about this. But I'm curious how you think about that.

Speaker A Yeah, I. 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, you know, structure and you're wrapping around the fibers, and then you have to put a coating on that. And there's. At the time, there was no real machine that do that. It was very, 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 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, you're injection molding, you know, know, thousands or millions of parts that are exactly the same, you lose that often in the process.

Speaker C Yeah, I like that you called out Heath there, because we have this tile on our fireplace in our bedroom, and it's all like handmade, and so it's a little wonky. Like the grout lines are imperfect. And some people would find that frustrating. Like it should be straight lines and all perfect. My wife and I find that. 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 in 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. It's like in swaddling clothes is the latter 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. 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.

Speaker A Yeah, I was. 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. It was this wonderful, like, image, almost like a little miniature painting and embellished with a 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.

Speaker C I had a really unique experience many moons ago. I used to teach design and design history and I took my students to Berlin to see a Gutenberg Bible at 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.

Speaker A I did not know about the history of the AT symbol. Did you know about that ligature in its history?

Speaker C 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, that it's just like a really beautiful character. And I just, I'm fascinated by trans. Generational 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. Eli, what are some of your favorite design history books?

Speaker A 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. For folks that are, you know, 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. And I know you, Aaron, and probably encountered that a lot in your Covid response work.

Speaker C Yeah, I worked on US 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?

Speaker A 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 about 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. Again, not directly related 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, my 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.

Speaker C 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. These are high level concepts about design. Things like constancy, closure, affordance, alignment, archetypes, et cetera. Really practical, useful stuff with lots of great examples in it. And then the Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. 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 leading and margins and so forth, where it all comes from.

Speaker A It's funny you mentioned that because I was looking for that book on my shelf and my mom had just, 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, came up in conversation today.

Speaker C It's a great book. It's also a great object. I like the feel of that book.

Speaker A 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 where we're excited to share the those.

Speaker C Yeah, and as PA called us to do, you know, we need to all dive deep into history. It'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. Eli and I love producing this podcast, but sometimes we find ourselves wondering, what sort of feedback does our audience have? How could 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 Survey. That's DBTR Co 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 slack channel designbetterpodcast.com it'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

Rewind: Paola Antonelli: How design shapes culture

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