 Hydi oedd yn gwneud. Fel gyda ni, fel yw, ddweud o'r ffordd. Rwy'n credu nhw'n dweud yma'r bwyntau o'r gwaith yma. Mae'n ddechrau'n rhaglen am y cyfnodau gydechol, ac mae'n dŵr i'r Ysgolffach Robert Wong i'r bwysig arno gyda'r ysgolffach. Mae'n dŵr i'r 15 ymlaen nhw, ydw i'w ddysgu'n ddim yn ymddangos. Is it good? Does it get in the way of design practice? What's it like? So talking to Helen Walters, maybe a couple of other people about that, trying to clear it up in our minds. On the 12th of April, Annabelle Seldorf is coming. She's an architect. Done some lovely work, particularly famous recently for the Brooklyn Recycling Centre. 24th of May, we have Scott Wilson. He's an industrial designer, a product designer from Chicago, but he's also an entrepreneur. He did this amazing thing with Kickstarter, where he had this idea for taking an iPod and turning it into a watch. This became like an amazingly successful Kickstarter story. He's going to tell us about that and some more of his work at Minimal, but also we'll probably have some Kickstarter folks to help explain it. And then on the 14th of June, we have Walter Hood coming in from San Francisco, a wonderful landscape architect. So, back to tonight. Now, Robert Wong is really a man of the world. He was born Chinese. He was brought up in the Netherlands. He became an accountant in Toronto, Canada. And he decided he wanted to be a graphic designer, so he came to New York. And he was first working as VP of Creative at Starbucks. Then he went on to be head of Arnold Worldwide for their creative. And then he became the creative genius who started Google Labs. So I'm sure we're very excited to have him here tonight. Robert. Thank you, Bill. It's an honour. So, I'm going to correct a tiny little bit. It's actually Google Creative Lab. It's a small little group of people here just not too far away in Meatpacking District. And at one point, there was a Creative Google Labs, where they were tinkering and building a lot of the new products, or I think Gmail was invented in labs. But really, all of Google is lab. I noticed that this talk was sold out, and I know, and I'm humble enough to know, it has nothing to do with me. It's usually the word Google that gets everyone packed in here. And I'm just going to set the expectations right now that I have done nothing of any of the good stuff that you enjoy, all the products from Google. I'm a graphic designer in training, and not an engineer that builds all the magical stuff. And I went to Google to try to figure out what could designers and storytellers how can they do for the brand and contribute as much as engineers do through building the products. Okay, so I guess we move right into the thing. And I'm not used to sitting down. This is kind of a mic is not set up. But okay, the perfect day. I want to talk to you about, when I talk to Bill about what should we talk about, I'll be doing a lot of rambling about my life and approach and my work, so I hope you guys are going to be okay with that. I don't know if you guys read John Hathes' book, Happiness Hypothesis. If you haven't, it's a great one. I was quoting that nonstop, but he was talking about this one thing, that people's relationship with work comes in three categories. Work, a job, a career, and a calling. You do a job to make money so you can survive and feed your kids. You progress in your career so they can feel good about yourself, the self-esteem thing. I'm doing better than the next guy. And then the calling part is where you actually get satisfaction from the work itself. The most interesting thing about what he was talking about, it doesn't matter what profession you're in, so you could be a used car salesman, a plumber, a high school teacher, a physicist. It turns out the percentage of people who feel that it's a job or who feel that it's a calling is about the same across all industries. So the conclusion there is it's not the thing that we do, it's what we think about the thing that we do. So most of it's delusional in our minds. And I'll tell you about my delusion that started in college. I was, I think, junior year watching Highlanders. I don't know if you guys have seen that movie with Christopher Lambert. But it's about medieval warriors that all of a sudden popped into modern day New York. And they were disoriented. This is the first scene there in New York. And they were on a quest and they had to find something. I don't even remember the plot at all. I don't even remember it was a good movie, but I remember this scene. And the one warrior said, how are we looking over all of Manhattan? He's like, how are we going to find the church? And the other warrior says, oh, that's easy. It's the tallest building and they cut to next scene. And I remember that they had a little bit of a stop for a second. Of course, the tallest building is commerce. And it had a deep impact on me. I was like, well, wait a minute, what is commerce doing? What is it saying? What are its doctrines? What tablets and things is it doing to society? At that point, my delusional purpose in life came to, okay, I'm going to become a graphic designer, go into advertising or design or whatnot. And I knew that there was like $7 trillion of marketing budgets out in the world to market stuff. And my delusional purpose was to hijack as much as that money as I could to try to do good, add joy, add beauty, and all that stuff. And that's kind of given meaning into my work. Now, I don't have a clicker, so next slide, I guess. And so this is kind of the best thing you can get to. And I feel very fortunate that I got to Google because the founders pretty much want to solve all the world's problems. And all the products are free. And most of them are really useful. And some of them are absolutely magical. And so I just get to try to get free stuff to people. So that's pretty good. And the interesting thing that I found is, so you guys assume our designers are in the design creative industry. Even with big companies, you realize that we absolutely have in our hands the most powerful tools on the planet to shape society and what is said. And these tools are Photoshop and Final Cut Pro Illustrator. Because if you go to the next slide, we've designed a creative lab that all of us are only making four things. A poster, a video, a mock of what an experience could be, or a prototype where you actually interact with something. And it's interesting. I've been in this industry for like 20 years and you realize you spend a lot of time making decks to sell ideas and rationalize all sorts of stuff. I'm sure you guys all understand that. And the more I work, the more I realize the most powerful thing is none of the decks is just like create the thing that, you know, if the product was launched tomorrow, what's the poster that's sitting in Best Buy? And what's that picture of that poster? What is that thing called? What's the logo underneath that makes me wonder or not? And same thing with the video. Imagine that product is launched out in the world. And this is the launch video. And what do people see? What is the product? And it's actually been amazing because we've actually been making videos of vision products and now engineers are actually building those products. But it's made by people who are designers and writers that have no idea about engineering or what's capable at all. But we all are human beings that want things better for ourselves. In a weird way, I feel like we're at a stage in technology where the best thing that technology can do is to get rid of the technology itself and just serve us in the best way possible. So anyway, this is what we do, these four things. We spend as much of our time doing this as possible and nothing else. And obviously all the strategically and brand thinking and design thinking is all baked into these four things. But that's how we've operated our group. Next line. One of the... Showing up Google is a very intimidating place. Some of the smartest people on the planet have made amazing, insanely great things. And the good news is that they had very little expectations of what a designer could do. That's a good thing. And same here. We didn't really know what to do. We were making short-cut Gmail stickers that you put on laptops and things like that. Because we didn't really do marketing in the traditional sense of the word. But there was a problem that was in Google and that was engineers and search... Google search I'm sure you all use is our core product. Thousands of engineers are constantly innovating and iterating that product every day. You would never know it and the change of design since 19... Whenever Google was started it literally has not barely changed until recently. And there's also no instruction manual on the homepage. Even though there's all these new features like if you typed in a foreign language and you're coming from Google US it would translate whatever you typed in. Or if you typed in literally a FedEx package number it would give you a status without you having to go to FedEx. Or if you typed in a flight status or your flight number it would tell you whether it's on time or not without having to go through all this stuff. But no one knew about this stuff. So it'd be nice if people knew. And the second thing that was going on is that we all use Google and it's become like the airy breathe like utility. The water that gets pumped into our faucet. And I think frankly most of us take it for granted. And one of our missions was to try to remind the world what is they love about Google. So we thought okay what could we do that we could remind the world what they love about Google and also give some utility to the world to let people know that you can do all these things. So we started making these, prototyping these little videos. And this is this one video we made like two years ago now. And I don't know if you guys saw this but people liked this video so much internally that we put it online and people loved it online and we said well let's put it on the Super Bowl. So Google's first foray into marketing was a Super Bowl ad and you can press next slide and she'll play. So I think one of the things that we realize when we're working on this thing is that even though we obsess about making the search better and better the truth is that the best search results don't show up on a web page. They show up in people's lives. So we made this thing. It was passed around internally and you knew you hit gold when the engineers actually liked something that was made by people in marketing. To the point where there was an email chain that started that Sergey jumped in on because we all use Gmail. We use Docs, what you guys use at work. Like Vinsurf, inventor internet. He's like this is awesome, I love this video. And then Sergey weighed in and he's like yeah my wife cried. I scored points, total points on this one. It was this funny thing where a little video could actually capture the hearts of Googlers who are literally changing, improving our lives in such an amazing way. Anyway, so that was one of the first things that gave us some credibility to people who are non-engineers. And what's the next thing? The next slide is... Ah, okay. I don't know if any of you guys saw this. That's Paul Doodle. The things that people love most about Google is the Doodles. That's for the longest time the only marketing if you can call it marketing. And I don't know if you guys know the history of this but in the early, early days of Google the founders and at that time I don't even know the staff of like 12 want to go to Burning Man. And so they're like well who's going to stay back like well nobody. So they drew a little Burning Man stick figure as kind of like the out of office be back in 15 minutes kind of a thing as just a little goof joke. And the people was like what you crazy you can't change the logos ah it's okay it's no big deal it's not like we're going to be a big serious company or anything. But that's the tradition it just came from this like thing they wanted to go to Burning Man and so people loved the Doodles and one of the things that I remember getting there was the Doodles are great but boy it would be great if they surprised people even more. So in the last you know two years or so we had the first animated Doodle I think the apple fell off the tree and then a video Doodle John Lennon's birthday you actually play a little video and then the famous Pac-Man Doodle which wasted so many people's productive hours around the world it's standing and this is the world's first shareable Doodle made by a designer in a group who was just a mad musician guitarist and this is for Les Paul's birthday and he actually recorded the sound in this from his Les Paul if you can just play this little video. The coolest thing was we launched this thing and then within six hours someone had built a website you know it was like a song sheet for people to like okay if you want to play this song it's like EGFFF and it was like instantly people just took it and this is one of the coolest things like we're lucky to have one of those bands and people don't think about it as a separate thing people see like homepages as their thing and that's one of the things we try to do is like we try to you know we make the plumbing and other people are the stars and they actually you know you're always amazed you can never write or create something better than like what you know six billion people on the planet when they take your stuff you know what they do with it. Okay speaking of that so you know after the search on series we made like 12 of those videos we're like okay there's enough talking about features let's talk about like we make awesome stuff but it is what other people do with it that's even more awesome so we literally use Google to find interesting stories of how people use Google so here's one It's pretty amazing I don't often watch these things so I'm watching along with you guys here and you realize this like information is oxygen and we probably live in a time like no other time ever in the history of humanity where we have so much access to so much information that we could pull off and do so many amazing things Anyway I'm just in the moment with you right now The next thing is What is the next thing? Ah okay You know having gotten having Google and YouTube getting to its world society you realize that we can create pretty big stages for people and how do you use technology to do things that a single person could not do themselves and most people can't go off and make a feature film but with YouTube we thought okay what if you told the world to this was actually launched in every country to upload whatever video they want on that single day and then we'll have Ridley Scott who produced this thing trying to make a movie out of this thing so this was back to the make a poster, make a comp make a video thing this was the video that was made to pitch the idea internally to get marketing support and resources to do so someone just like used Final Cut Pro and made this little thing Now I'm going to get the stats wrong but I think there were submissions from 140 countries and I think 80,000 hours of video and I think the final film that was cut had credits of I think 1,800 people and actually the project oh that's a cool idea these things we've never done before you never know what you're going to get to and you realize when all the film came in there was no human possible way for the traditional editing process to work you can't hire enough editors to look at all the film to pick out so they actually tagged everything with a computer program like oh Tiger, Sunset and so that they could only review a portion of the film and then when it is like Tiger Shop will be nice right now and it would pull up the right so it was we were just making this up on the fly and the film is done and it was premiered in Sundance to some critical claim, Discovery picked it up and it was running in theaters for a while and now you can all watch it on YouTube for free so you have to check it out I was always horrified thinking this thing could be really boring I was actually surprised. The second act is always tough but the beginning and the end is actually it's well worth checking out What's the next thing? Ah, Wilderness Downtown How many of you guys know what a browser is? That's not bad When we started working on Chrome, which is Google's browser you realize no one knew or cared what a browser was but the interesting thing is I think in US more people spend more time in a browser than they do in their cars. Everyone knows what car they drive, what car they want but no one knows what browser they have Some people say my browser is Google or my browser is AT&T and of course for Google all our products are experienced through a browser and we have an interest for a browser to be really good so our products get better and that's why we built a browser and we also believe that the better browsers get the better anyone out in the world making a website the websites get, the world gets better we just had a fundamental belief of why this is good In the early days when we first launched Chrome and no one cared what a browser was why don't we just try to push the limits of building something that pushes the limits of what a browser can do so that pretty much if you really want to experience this thing you have to have it on the most insanely awesome modern browser otherwise it would just break so we created this film with Chris Milk in Arcade Fire it was there the first interactive music video experience through a browser you type in your address where you grew up and you experience where the street view images and the Google Earth images of your home address gets played into the video that you watch this is just a little snippet try this at home, type in your address and hear the whole song because this little thing doesn't really do it justice it's interesting we're pretty proud of this piece and it won all sorts of crazy awards and stuff but back to my job career John Hayde's job career and calling thing yes it got a lot of people to download Chrome to experience this thing and yes it won a lot of awards but the most satisfying thing is that we know that we did this so that more people could benefit from a modern browser that's the thing that feels the best progress and actually after Chrome launched and after it started to rise up and now it's number two times better they had a monopoly in browsers so they just stagnated the innovation on it Firefox tried to make a dent and it did a certain degree but now we're heating up the competition and now all browsers are getting better which we all benefit from which is totally awesome the next thing is something less edgy in more every day to get the average person to really not understand what a browser is but just realize that with the web there's awesome stuff that you can do I don't know if you guys have seen this but when I first started at Google I heard the story of two girls a six and seven year old engineer heard about an engineer that was using email to write letters to set up an account for his daughter before she was born and all up while she's growing up and he hopes to share it with her someday and so I was blown away by that just that little simple hack of Gmail has been around forever and he thought of this cool use of it so we made a video about this alright I love that little story anyway the next thing is one of the within this Chrome thing is one of the things I'm most proud of recently play next so I don't know if you guys heard of Dan Savage but it gets better movement so a group of gaglers that's what inside Google they called themselves gaglers you know they were inspired by Dan Savage's video so they made their own video and it was all these Google employees saying like it gets better it was this long video and I was so moved we should run this stuff as ads in YouTube where if anyone searches for anything related to suicide let's have that ad there and then after this thing ran a little bit we got this email I don't know if you guys can read this out but I'll try to read it from here there Google a few days ago I was trying to find a way to kill myself on YouTube in the sidebar was your company's it gets better video I don't know why but I watched it I watched it many times actually I had been so depressed after going to many job interviews and being blatantly told no because I'm gay I just felt like I couldn't do it anymore I had the rope tied to a beam in my house and was trying to figure out how to tie a noose I can't believe that I was so intent on doing this watching your video made me realize that there are companies out there who will accept me for who I am I just want to say from the bottom of my heart that you did save a life mine I am so thankful and this thing passed around and we were so moved communication can be artful useful information and we said well let's make a story about Dan Savage so we talked to Dan it was actually really interesting so we made this next video when you play it real quick it's just true it's documentary the interesting thing was when we talked to Dan and this thing launched on Glee I think the premier of Glee on the first episode of the season of Glee but he was like well that's pigeon to the converted you need to run it on like Monday night football and we were like you know what you're totally right so it's interesting because like I don't know if you guys have ever done media plans or something like that it's like how do you optimize for reach and frequency and blah blah blah but we were just like okay where should this thing run to have the impact that we want to have to the most amount of people the right people people who have never you know you've been hiding it and of course what's great about the web is that you put stuff out there and you always see the comments and there was a great one of my favorite comments in YouTube was the son who was writing it it was really cool I was watching TV with my dad and this commercial came on and he put his arm around me and said son you know whatever you are whatever you do it's okay with me because I love you I'm not gay but I thought that was pretty cool you know this stuff matters you know you can either add beauty add joy and sorry I played a lot of videos I just you know we also designed we've redesigned products and stuff but like strong webpages is kind of boring just thought I'd just show stuff that moved with sound and music what's the next thing is there anything else this concludes today's conversation I do want to just you know summarize a little bit that I don't know if you guys read the right what is it the whole new mind that's another great one the right brain rising this is the era where the creative class synthesizes all sorts of stuff and we can really really lead my version of leading is making those four things everyone can find their own version of leading and we really can change the world and invent the future because engineers are great at solving problems sometimes they need a little help figure out what the problem is that needs to be solved or come at it from exactly the user's perspective anyway so there's a reminds me of a story of the first grader who was drawing this crazy portrait I heard this from Paul Hawkins and her teacher was like wait what are you drawing there and she's like oh that's a picture of God and she says well no one knows what God looks like and she says well they will when I'm done duh and anyway all I can say to anyone here who knows Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or can code a little bit you know we don't know what the world's going to look like but I feel like we have a lot of awesome resources at our disposal that we're sitting on now that's different than any other time in the history and you know better world maybe you know they might know when we're done anyway that's the end I think one last slide yeah so that's my delusional half an hour lovely thank you so much you know I want to talk a bit about design of course what you showed us was design but it was very narrative it was closer perhaps to advertising than the way we think of design normally perhaps I could ask you to talk about that but let me frame it by a little story of my own I think it's just about 10 years since I interviewed the Google founders before my book called Designing Interactions and I've only been at the Coupier National Design Museum for a couple of years so before that I was at IDO in San Francisco and it was easy to meet these people and so you know I invited them to to come to the studio we had at IDO in Palo Alto for a video interview and Larry Page actually turned up on time wearing a jacket so it looked pretty normal but Sergey turned up 20 minutes late wearing a very crumpled Google t-shirt on his roller blades so I had this lovely video of them sitting next to each other being videoed with the crumpled t-shirt and the jacket man which was good but anyway talking about design you know Google is such an engineering driven community and they think of themselves I think as engineers I asked about the design of the website and remember when it started ten years ago I mean all the other websites were these horrible banner ads and flashing things and you couldn't see the screen for everything going on and going on and going on and there was this beautiful simple white Google with one search box and that was it what a breakthrough but I asked Sergey what happened how did you come up with that and he said I didn't really design it I just all I wanted to do was have something simple and this was such a kind of non it was almost an anti-design statement in a way because although it was a brilliant design that really was innovative to the degree that it put everything else on the world at the time behind it at the same time he kind of didn't admit that it was design so what do you think about the design of the original website and that kind of attitude I think the words sometimes have different meanings different people so like you know to them design might have been a dirty word in their minds that although in anyone who's trained as a design thinker you realize that they were designing the whole time as engineers they're designers obviously I think it's brilliant I remember at one point counting how many clickable links they were on excite years before I started working at Google obviously when the site existed and it was like over 300 and then there was Alta Vista over 280 and then Google had like seven clickable links and the awesome thing about that why I think it's actually to me the touchstone of all our brand stuff I always like if anyone asks what's Googley like how do I know if I'm doing something right or not I go well look at the homepage does it have the same principles as the homepage which when you think about it to your point it's just square with a blinking cursor asking the user what do you want what are you looking for there's nothing about Google except for the the logo and there's nothing as like trying to sound anything it doesn't you know so I think design is a set of principles and beliefs that you hold and they actually have held fast now we've recently redesigned or tweaked on surface most of the products whether it's YouTube or Gmail or even Google homepage but it's really just surface the underlying principles is the most important thing we have this saying internally just assume people are smart and respect their time if you're not giving them anything you're wasting their time so you just try to get out of the way the first search on Parisian love thing it's just like we got out of the way of just a product and a user so how can you say respect their time when you just told us that you wasted 5.4 million hours of people's productive time they chose that they helped it in but I think that sense of fun of the Les Paul Doodle is also part of the Google brand DNA just like the Burning Man actually our favorite holiday is April Fools I don't know if you guys participate in the April Fools thing that's where like oh let's do something because they're PhD students they're men living dorms they like pranking and there's always a little bit of that cheeky wink and everything yes we might be solving all the world's problems but let's have fun doing it one of the things I always say is like when people ask a new designer what is the most googly thing next to the logo is the name and I don't know the history of the name Google but it was invented here right across the Hudson a mathematician in the 30s from Columbia he was walking taking a stroll with his nephews one day a 9 year old and 13 year old and they were talking about math stuff as you do with your uncle who's a mathematician and they were like what's the biggest number in the universe and he was like oh I don't know 10 to the power of 100 that's one with 100 zeros behind it and just so you know how big that is there's not a there's not that many stars planets, grains of sand particles in the known universe that's how big a Google is hard to wrap your head around that and the kids are like well what does it have a name they're like no why don't you invent it and so the 9 year old was like it could have been Yala Dabadu he was like Google and then the mathematician just started putting it in white papers and he was like Google so it's literally like nine tenths awesome infinite science and one tenth baby talk pretty much and I think it's actually a good you know little balance to play with and when Sergey comes to town do you talk to each other about design issues or yeah but the design issues are more problems issues it depends how you define design does you talk about white space and the hairline rules but Larry in particular in the last two years has been really into the word beauty he wants one beautiful seamless experience across all Google products so design is definitely on his mind but Sergey I think the first conversation he had with us when he first met me and Andy he was talking about you know I think Andy asked him what's on your mind lately boxes and this is the first time Andy met him so he was kind of like okay okay I'm going to fire it now I don't know what he's talking about boxes it's some molecular scientific thing I should like boxes cardboard boxes cardboard boxes oh yeah of course cardboard boxes and what he meant by that I've been thinking about how stupid cardboard boxes are you know fresh direct I'm sure you guys all use it I mean they're made they have one use they're thrown out and this goes on like a billion times a second around the world Andy was like yeah I don't know I just that was the last thing I've been thinking about we could fix them it's a problem so when do we think about design yes like designing the world you know what sucks and what needs to be desuckified yeah and I think good designers think that I mean signage systems what is that like you know Renee knows like I get so pissed off if a sign is in the wrong place because you know you created doubt my my anxiety for a split second as I'm driving and and you know that's deciding the world anyway tell us about the little robot the android ah yes we created that logo that's it yeah what do you want to know about it how did you did it was I think literally the first week that Andy got there and it was like we're launching the android and it's like okay we need a logo and I actually really love the speed at Google it's like there's one gear and it's like hyper fast um and okay normally it would take months to develop maybe we have to like interview you know stakeholders or shareholders or global research before we do the logo but we realize that this little operating system was potentially going to be well is open so that any carrier anyone can use so we realize that we want to create an an open logo so there's no fixed logo I mean except for the dimensions and the color of this little guy anyone can do anything they want with it so sprint ads made them 3D and flying around the only thing we said make sure it's tiny because you know we are not afraid of tiny little things and we just do it to have a little bit of a friendly you know because android you can imagine how scary it could also be technology and most of the time we try to counter that with okay let's just make sure it's like cute and friendly talking of deep thinking there cute and friendly research and design another person that I interviewed is Terry Wennigrad his professor at Stanford who taught the Google boys before they as they were starting the company really and he told me a story because after they had left and started Google he did a sabbatical where he was at Google for a year and he said that you know it's the Gates building in which he runs and he'd been given a lot of foundation money to complicated new technology for communication in the basement and then he was inviting people to come in and use it and it was a tedious and complicated process you know so you had to invite them in they had to come in then you did this user test you watched or when you interviewed them and you tried to find out what it was like for them and you tried to learn from that and do your next iteration of the design and he said the amazing difference was that when he went to Google they put up a prototype and they had millions of responses so that whole loop of speed in terms of getting response about whether people like things or are annoyed by them but there is this thing about Google always putting things up with a couple of breaks in it or problems or the beta things never quite work isn't there is that a philosophy of let's put it up when it doesn't quite work no it's a launch and iterate factor fastest, better than slow there's certain things that like let's get it out there it's almost a I think there's a little philosophy of like coming from a humble place that we can't figure this out I recently Ted Global in Edinburgh had this I forget his name the man talked about the need for trial and error as the fundamental operating system that we have to adopt in this new age when problems are so complex you can't think your way through them and he told this great story about a little nozzle that's made that's engineered for producing detergent transforming liquid into powder so if all the liquid turns into perfectly usable detergent powder then more profit for detergent company but it's very fickle how the liquid turns into a thing so these nozzles are like little chest pieces and any given new location new factory, the air, the water everything makes a huge difference and so they have these experts the experts in nozzle design you didn't think there was a thing but there was a thing and the designer thing realized that didn't do so well then they did 10 variations of that and did a test and the best of those 10 they did 10 variations until 47 generations later they got the nozzle that turned almost all the liquid into the perfect detergent and at the end of the day that same engineer and the expert could look at that thing and have no idea why that one and not the one in the 46th generation so while trial and error seems to be like of course that seems like of course that's what you should do but the problem is if you look at education today and even how we elect officials there's no trial and error that's not the fundamental operating system the system is there's an authoritative figure with the right answers or the wrong answers and you get six out of the ten right answers you're mediocre if you get ten out of ten you're smart if you're three you're dumb if you get all those ideas that they expressed before to think they have no idea if it's going to work or not but their success is driven by whether they are able to carry through their idea and so until the day a politician can stand up and say hey these are the three problems they're going to focus on nothing else, I have no idea how I'm going to do it and people vote for them and then that person goes out and test a thousand ways to like solve the financial crisis not knowing which one is going to work a dyna ni'n gallu cael ei wneud, a mynd i'r amser o'r cyd-feydd honna, ond mae'r cyd-feydd yn cael ei ddweud. Mae'r cyf-feydd, ond, ond, rheifft ac yn gweld o'r teimlo ond yn y bryd, mae'r cyd-feydd yn cael ei ddweud, oherwydd mae'n gyrdd maen nhw. Mae'n gyrdd o'r lle, mae'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n meddwl dweud, mae'n gyrdd o'r lle, ond mae'n grannu'n gweld o'r lle, dwi'n gyrdd o'r lle, can only do so much around iterating original things. Sometimes, you know, a designer or an engineer has to just imagine something that no one could even imagine and create that as whole as it can, you know, and then do the launch iterating. So I think you need both. Well, in terms of prototyping, I mean, I'd like to ask you about your own methods of prototyping, because what you showed us was very much narrative, it was stories, and I imagine you use lots of sub-prototyping methods, but the main prototyping idea for the ad seemed to be storytelling. And, you know, if you think about your nozzle example, you'd think of those prototypes as being made in a shop, which is really the tradition of three-dimensional design. Then you think of, like, interactive design, you think of people making prototypes either with little hardware kits or perhaps on screen with a program. And then you think of, you know, architectural prototyping, where you make a model of something that's small, and then you try and make a bit of the environmental experience. And then when it gets complicated with things like services, you put all those together, and then maybe that narrative thing comes in. But tell us more about how you actually think of you and your team putting prototypes together. So I definitely showed you all mostly the video prototypes, because they play well. But we do, if you walked down, you did walk down a little hall, you saw that, like, all we have up are printouts of, you know, interface prototypes. And even the Android thing, I don't know if you guys ever played with Androidify. It's a little app you can download and you can make a little, your own personal Android. So, like, you know, if you like to wear plaid, red plaid shirts and white running shoes, you can make a little Android that's, you know, short and have medium skin. And that was a prototype. Like, we just hacked it and coded it, like, oh, is this cool? Is this magical? But at the end of the day, what prototypes, at least for us creators, is like, it's fun to make and it's also, it's easier to react to, you know, like, does, you feel it, like, does that have heart, does that have magic? And then you go, ooh, that warrants more investment, more time, more team energy. So we, you know, I know you saw a lot of film prototypes, but we prototype, you know, you know, we code stuff. We do lots of posters, you know, I have to time if you like, if an idea can't be, you know, put down to a poster, it's probably not a clear enough idea. And actually most of the time when people have an idea, okay, make a poster of that. So the life of the day, the first thing that was made, was a poster. And then the film pretending to like, okay, if it was a call to action to participate, what it would be. It's, it's always, for us, we're always prototyping the end result, you know, pretend, if, yeah, and it's interesting because what you realize is, you know, if you guys read the Steve Jobs book, but you realize that like, in all the time, as a CEO, all the time that he could be spending on, on the company, you know, the infrastructure of technology, you know, the strategic planning, the, you know, business operation processes, you know, human capital and how to optimize it, you know, to like, at the top, like, you know, the, the, the packaging and communication of the products to the actual products themselves on the left, the tip of the pyramid is like industrial design, what people touch on the right is, you know, interaction design, what people, you know, see and you realize reading this book and I've known people, you know, working at, within Apple that he spends 90% of his time on the tiny tip of the triangle. And why? Because that's what the world sees. That's what the world touches. That's what the world hears. It's design. It's design. It's design. With everything baked in, you know, and I think often, you know, wether it's advertising or design, it easily can be taken to mean the layer you put on top of something, you know. It's not the icing on the cake. It is the butter or the flour, you know. It has to be baked into the whole thing. One more question, then I want to open it up for the audience. I'm sure they have lots of things they'd like to ask you about. But let's go back to where I started, which is you being a man of the world and tell us a little bit about what you think those different experiences in different cultures have meant for you. Yeah, I've done the psychoanalysis myself a little bit. It's interesting. I feel really fortunate because, and I can't imagine, I have two kids and I wish I could create that variety of experiences. Like when I grew up, when I was born in Hong Kong, I wasn't born in Hong Kong that the Hong Kong you visit. I was born in new territories on the border of China in a village that has no running water. So I was born in a place of dirt floors and like, you know, we didn't have shoes. It was very third world. And from there, you know, my grandfather went to Holland to open up a Chinese restaurant because that's what people who look for new opportunities who are Chinese, that's what they do, they open Chinese restaurants. And I'm allowed to say that because I'm Chinese. But literally it was, you know, and my parents followed his footsteps and it was literally you get on a bus or train, you get off at a stop and you look out and you go, is there any Chinese restaurant in this town? No, okay, I'm going to get off. And so I grew up in a small fishing village in Holland where we were the only Chinese restaurant. And it was my first sort of Western experience. And then at one point, my parents, you know, their restaurant was successful. And they, you know, they were very impulsive when my dad is anyway, and they flew to Canada in 1976. This is when Canada was voted the world number one city CNTOW was being built. The Canadian dollar was 20% above the US dollar. The future was resting. The immigration policies are really lax. They're like, let's move here. The kids should learn English. And so, you know, I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Wayne's World, where Mike Myers, I went to his high school. I mean, and then, you know, when I decided to go to college, when I realized accounting wasn't my thing, you know, decided to go to New York City, the most dense, most urban international place on the planet. So I've had this amazingly rich life experience that I'm sure did something. I don't know if it's good or bad, but one thing for sure that it does is it, I read an article in New York Times about people have kids are propping bilingual have more empathy, because they constantly have to figure out their context. And empathy is all about context, you know, like in this situation, I do this, in this situation, I do that with this person, I do this with that. And so, so I thought that was very interesting. And then the second thing is, I also realized that there was no right answer, meaning, you know, you grew up and I don't think like things that I thought were visceral and like not changeable, like the people's reaction to pain. You know, like if you get hit in Hong Kong, you say, ah, yeah. And you get hit, you know, you get pinched in Spanish, you say something else. And I realized I was growing up, I was like, wait a minute, how come everyone's like reacting to pain with a different thing? And you realize there's no correct answer. And so I think that, you know, we realize there's no correct answer, you're more open to things. And when you start with a little bit of like constantly thinking about your context, you might have a little bit more empathy. And honestly, I do think empathy is probably the number one ingredient for any designer, you know, which is opposite of an artist, you know, which is expressing something. And I think, you know, I love art. I just feel like, you know, I've chosen design as my career. And I think that just constantly think about what other people are thinking and doing and how to, you know, best make things better for them is cool. Great. So there's a microphone here on a stand. And if you'd like to come up and stand, you know, to make, there's another one over here. So particularly for our online streaming audience, please say who you are when, as before you say, anything else you'd like to say. So come on up. In the meantime, we can talk about, I don't know, what do you think? Yes, somebody. Hi there. My name is Amanda Gelb. I'm an educator and a curator. And based on what you said and just design in general, I think design can apply to anyone. But people don't necessarily know what it is or how to use it in their lives. So how would you answer those questions? What is design and how can it apply to anyone? Yeah, it's interesting because maybe I've given up on trying to define it because I think you're designing every day, every second of it. When you figure, when you try to decide what shoes to wear, you're designing some part of your self image. And so it's, to me, it's, it's, you know, reading and writing and and stuff versus a separate thing. So I know, I'm obviously a huge fan of design thinking. So the more design thinking is baked into everything is where I feel like it's kind of all about. And even less so, I'm actually not less interested in design as its own, you know, ivory tower to earn its table, you know, amongst commerce or whatever. I'm much more interested in the horizontalness of design across everything. And I think that would be a useful thing to, to get into the minds of young people and educators. I'm here with actually a design team. We work at an e-commerce site across the street. I think our biggest challenge is communicating to the rest of our e-commerce site. That design is, it's a little different than Google, but it seems like Google puts usability first and then maybe like design second or I'm curious how it works with the company and how your position kind of comes into play when it was added a little later perhaps in the development of Google. Really, I'm asking in terms of kind of to get something out of it with like how we could communicate to our company. That's important. Yeah, it's a great question because I think everyone struggles with that. We're lucky that we got the seat at the table with like, you know, we have Larry, Larry and Sergey's ear. I don't know how we got it. We stumbled into it. So I don't envy anyone who has to fight their way to that. My only thing is you can never argue your way. You can never PowerPoint your way or prove because I just found that this doesn't work. And the only thing you can do is show them something shiny that they want to make which gets back to my four things, the poster or the mock of like, like, hey, isn't this cool? Do you want it? You know, that's how we've done it. It's either like, well, you can have this or you can have this. It looks like this now. It could look like this. And, and, you know, and that you're like one step ahead. Well, it's not even the one said because I'm sure you're proactive trying to change in people's minds. It's just the vehicle, which is this, you know, show what the user will see and that them and they bring it home, they show it to the wives, ultimately the wives decide. You're like, hey, which one do you think I always, and their wives go, oh, that's much better. Okay, cool. So yeah, I think, I think you should use the shiny thing. You shoot the poster, use the mock, you use the, you know. So by the way, what's the difference between a mock and a prototype? Prototype actually works. So I can interact with it. So it's coded. Does that make sense? So like, it's an actual interaction thing. You can play on a computer or play on an interface. And a mock is just a still picture? No, it's a flat picture. It's probably closer to a poster. Well, poster has more leeway. A mock usually is for our products. And a poster is an idea for anything. So that's not necessarily like an interface design or anything. It's just like, you know, hey, how about YouTube Symphony Orchestra or, you know, Google Play, we put the Google Heim logo next to the YouTube logo. And, and you just imagine like, oh, that'd be cool to do something with the Google Heim. That's that's how we, it's totally cheating, but it's great. Hi, my name is Joseph Lara. I'm a design student at City College. Is this referencing back to what you mentioned about art and design? Someone once told me that fine arts tends to ask questions and designs answer them. And I wanted to get your personal feedback. I see how do you feel about design and contrast with fine arts? That's a good question. I think there's definitely a lot of merit to that, you know. I think that's probably pretty good. I, you know, the, the one thing, the only thing I would say is designers actually I found, and this is the thing that I work, try to work on the most is like, we love problems, you know, and the juicier the problem, the more we attack it with ferocity and then the clearer and the crisper the problem is presented to you, the more focused you are, your creative energy in solving that thing, which, which I think is great. However, you know, there's a ceiling to that, because then you're always relying on someone presenting you with the problem. And I think in the last, you know, five years of my career, I think I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the problems are themselves and, and invent the future without anyone even asking for it, which is still not the same as asking, you know, provocation, I would say, you know, asking a question, because the net, the goal is still to answer it at the end of the day. That's what designers do. Well, you can actually, a little pitch again for the Helen Walters conversation on the 15th of March. Design thinking you can think of as being trying to decide what to do, whereas design practice is more about how you do it. And I think a lot of people have both. I mean, they have some elements of deciding what to do, and then they go on and do the design of it. But we'll come back to that then. We have another question here. Hi, my name is Chloe Gingrich. I'm a student at FIT and I kind of wanted to thank you. I found my biological mother through Google. I was adopted from Paraguay. So I kind of relate to your story a little bit about Third World Country. And I was wondering, do you ever feel like you're changing lives like on a day to day basis? Just like I was connected, you know, to a Third World Country to, you know, a completely different world just last year. And all thanks to you. Well, it's moments like this that make it all not suck. No, it's, listen, I mean, most of the time, like everyone else, you know, in the day to day grind of things, you're caught up on, oh no, I'm late for my meeting again, or, oh no, this deadline, like everyone else. But I think the moments that you can stop and reflect and, you know, hear a story, yeah, you know, very moved. And you do realize, you know, well, I realize how fortunate I am, how lucky I am, how lucky the team is that gets the work, you know, on something that, you know, oftentimes I do feel like even though it's a company, you know, no one actually sets out to make companies actually, you know, it's individuals, the founder, and the good thing is the founder still run the company. There's founder ideals and it's human beings, there's engineers that have their dreams and wishes and intent and desires, like when they die, what do they, what's, what, what do they feel like they've done? And I think, you know, on our best days, that's in the back of our minds is, you know, we've given this opportunity this time with these resources, Google our back, the internet, you know, what did we accomplish? And I try to keep it as much in the foreground as possible and present that to the team because it's very easy for most people to like, to everyone to just go dive into the day-to-day minutia. But your story is like yours helped a lot. Thank you so much for sharing. Hi, my name is Max Kaplan. I'm a graphic designer. I just wanted to ask a lot of the videos you showed are very cinematic and I was just wondering what the structure of the creative lab was. Do you, is it all designers, filmmakers? Good question. We actually, we launched and iterated. At first we had a model of what I thought it was. It was like, okay, there's a couple of principles we had. First was, if I had a credit card and had to pay for everything myself, who would I hire to start my company? You know, and just a forcing mechanism of scarcity of resources. And actually Google offers it that way. It is like a bipolar thing of scarcity and abundance, like, you know, little time, no money, no engineers, what can you make when they hit big? Like, okay, now let's put infinite resources behind it. But back to your thing. So that's how we started. We thought, okay, I'll have, I'll do four pods of creatives. So there are only many startups, you know, of like three people or four people in a team. Once we do one thing, we make a couple of cool things and people want more of those. We'll get another team and we kind of grew horizontally. And then one of the things that we realized that we needed the prototype more. We needed a filmmaker and an animator. And I started this program a year in called The Five and we recruited five of the top students around the world from the disciplines of graphic design, advertising, so writing in our direction, creative coding, filmmaking. And we had a wildcard, like whoever thinks that they want to geek out at Google. And it was awesome because we had these kids right out of school and, you know, and they could make everything. Like, you know, we were old farts. I don't know when you had ideas. And they actually could make, they could prototype stuff. They're like, look what I made. You know, it's like, whoa, that's really cool. The Parisian Love thing, that was made. They made that video. They had that, you know, we were talking about that, you know, that night, that morning they cobbled together this rough thing that was pretty much Parisian Love. And we played it in the meeting and everyone, you know, this promising to that. So it's really built around prototypers. So we have writers. Now we've scaled since. So we have people who've come from, you know, UX. Probably the best way to put it is like what companies have come from. So people come from like Apple, from IDO, from, you know, RGA, from advertising agencies like White and Kennedy. So they're storytellers, filmmakers, people from production companies, people from animation school, you know, SVA have had animation, you know, graduate with us. So it's a hodgepodge, but they all make things either write something or they make something. And so they're all makers. And even the leaders, the creative directors, they're all what I call player coaches. They don't just sit there and, you know, think about stuff. They, you know, get their hands dirty making this stuff. Is that clear enough of a, okay, in addition to that, so that's what the purely creative side, then we have producers that help. You know, they've had a lot of experience either producing films or making big complex websites or small apps. And then we have people that heard the cats, project managers, and they also think strategically of like, okay, that's a really cool thing. How can I bridge the gap to the business problem sometimes, you know, and sometimes we, a lot of times we retrofit what we, the shiny thing we make to making sense of it. And it's interesting, back to your original question, how do you change people's hearts and minds? Like when people feel something or touched or they just lust after something, like there's no rationalization. So we try to constantly try to, you know, make the things that just like skips all rationally. I want that. I need that tomorrow. Very good. Thank you very much. Thank you.