 I'm delighted to welcome you. I'm Ella Lupton. I'm a curator here at Cooper Hewitt and I'm one of the organizers of our new exhibition, Beauty, Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. Tonight's event is a partnership between Cooper Hewitt and Elle Museo, our good friend and neighbor here on Museum Mile. It's part of the series called Divanio. These are free public programs celebrating the achievements of contemporary Latino designers. The series is made possible by a grant from the Latino Initiatives School administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. Since 1969, Elle Museo has been committed to sharing the full range of Latino cultures through its collections, exhibitions, and special events and I'm just delighted that Cooper Hewitt has this collaboration. Super exciting. I think this is the second one this month, right? So we're really pleased to have you all here and to have our friends from Elle Museo here as well. About a year ago, Cooper Hewitt reopened after a huge renovation project. We completely rethought our galleries, our visitor experience, our use of technology. We reinvigorated our commitment to creating more programs for more people with the bigger and ever more global outlook. And this is all part of that. So just last month, we opened Beauty, the fifth in our Triennial series, which features the work of 63 designers from 26 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. We're taking this big, big look at design all over the world. Tonight, you're going to hear from two outstanding designers who are changing their fields in remarkable ways. First, Rodrigo Corral will speak to you about his work. He's based here in New York City. He creates design for print, for branding, for interior spaces, and for films. He runs his own studio, Rodrigo Corral Studio, but he's also a creative director for Farrar Strauss and Giroux, and he's creative director at large for a new direction, the legendary book publisher. He has designed covers for many of my favorite authors and probably yours too, including Juno Diaz, Jonathan Franson, Chuck Polania, Gary Sheingart, and John Green. So you probably have some of his work at home. That's kind of fun. Cooper Hewitt was very proud to feature his work a few years ago in our exhibition Graphic Design Now in Production. So it's great to have him back to share his work tonight and what he's been doing since then. Our second speaker is Emiliano Guidoi, who is based in Mexico City. He's a product designer. He works for a range of international companies as well as local manufacturers, including Neuvel Studio and Purley, a company that he helped found. You'll be hearing about his incredible approach to creating objects. He is innovating new sustainable design practices by creating and developing new materials and processes for working materials using skill labor and local resources. Several of his pieces are featured in our exhibition upstairs, including the Pablo and Pedro bowls, which are made from volcanic stone from Mexico City, and his Pizel vases. And some of these pieces are also in our permanent collection. We're very proud of that. And also available in our shop. That's really what you're going to touch them and pick them up and feel them, which you cannot do in the exhibition. So it's my great pleasure to get to know Emiliano and to see Rodrigo again. You're each going to sleep for 20 minutes and then we're going to have a conversation and invite you to ask questions. I know I have a lot of questions for them too. So I welcome. I would start with my name. So let's pivot from the right way of saying it to the wrong way to say it. So over the years, one very creative outlet I've had is to think of the many names people have given me when they hear my name and what they think of their heads. So right off the bat, one of my favorites is Rodriguez Corral, which is Rodriguez is the last name. Corral's my last name. So I had two last names and no first name. Redolfo. Really, it's a pivot again for me, but not my name, but thank you. Nice to meet you. Roberto. I like it again, but that's not me. Enrique. I could have been a musician. Absolutely. And then today, this was this was finally the decision I had to do this presentation. If you look at the date, it's from this morning, I swear to you, it says, Hey, Ricardo, just wanted to check in and see if the encrypted drive arrived yesterday. Okay, so it continues. It will always continue to see you know, my name gets butchered. Anyhow, so transitioning, it's kind of important to to talk a little bit about family as a here representing as a Latino, proud Latino. My, my, my mother would be delighted to be here, but I think it's important a little bit of background of where it came from. Passion is a word that comes to mind. My parents and family were full of passion when it came to loving each other and fighting with each other. One example, this is a very, very true story. My mother would ask my father to do some kind of thing around the house, whether it involved switching a light bulb or cutting the lawn. And it usually took about four or five attempts to finally get him to do it, but without he did it, he was kind of annoyed and she picked up on that. And she was always finding it just as another question that would end the whole thing off with an explosion. They would end up in a fight, a suitcase would go flying down the stairs, but eventually it would make up in that suitcase would get filled and they'd go on a trip, but leave us kids at home. I kid you not, there's a lot of emotion in my home and passion for the arts, but it was in a way that, in actually preparing for the talk that I realized it was very subtle and even more so than actually really realized. One way was literature or books. We didn't have them very much in my house, but one day I came home from school and found a full set of encyclopedia for down again in my bedroom. They didn't tell me anything, they just said there's a bunch of books for you to look at whenever you're ready. And then I'm becoming more of an installation piece because I never really touched it. For anybody that's over 30, if you can relate to when you've got your first computer and you open it up and you set it up and you kind of looked at it and you feel like it was looking at you and you didn't touch it for a few days, that's kind of like the relationship I had with this except it was like five years. I did not open up, but I finally got around to it. So that was their sign of encouraging education. As I said before, my parents were big travelers and my mother went to Spain quite a bit and got obsessed with Yadavarro, these porcelain dolls and would bring them home all the time. I found it kind of odd and funny when I look back, they're very sweet and she always managed to bring the ones home that were symbolic of the art. So we had a Shakespeare one and now we had a clown, I'm assuming it's the comedy or the theater and of course the dancer. Another permanent part of our, this is in our basement, which was also double as a dance club. I kid you not as well. They would have a bunch of these in the basement, kind of horrifying to look at now, but at the time, beautiful typography and the printing was really special. So these are just a few sort of indirect things references to art in my home. One that I think both my mother and father would be mortified that I should start with you, but I'm going to an area because it's one that I think really dearly about. One summer after we had our garage redone, but opted not to insulate the garage, my father decided to, over the course of the summer, fill the entire walls and ceilings of the garage with beer cans, beer cans that he drank. Now unfortunately I don't have a good proof of this, but he did that. This is really beautiful, but he was really like Schlitz and Miller, the cheapest thing you can get, but we went through all that and he lined the walls of it and I just really looked back that my father had a lot of creativity in him, but he just didn't really have that's not even the outlet, but he was dedicated and determined. If you moved one the wrong way, the whole thing would collapse and it was so noisy, so I didn't mean short of never ever to touch anything in my garage. I know we don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to try to be very quick and concise as I've already been here already. Collaboration. This is something that took me a little while to figure out that how important it is and how much I value it. Coming from a publishing background, it's quite easy to find yourself working in isolation. Reason being you're delivered a manuscript as a designer, you're sent off, you're given a few weeks to come up with a few solutions, you present and it's hardly presented, you're really just showing your publisher, your editor, the agent, author, etc. And it's either yes, no or try again. And you can find yourself kind of being comfortable with that process. A lot of designers are, but I over time outgrew that and felt like, okay, social skills are kind of critical. That might help you. So I started to really start to befriend the editors and get into more dialogue with them. And for the last 15 years I've had kind of a, I would call it a very special collaboration with one editor in particular, Sean McDonald, who's a very dear friend. I should expand on what I mean by collaboration. From my standpoint is one where it's not about that everything is approved and that it's always this beautiful experience, but it's this, it's almost like this space where you're feeling incredibly comfortable, where you can shoot each other down, you can criticize the book, you can shoot down the design, and it's totally fine. Because we're both agreeing that where we're dedicated to go up with the best solution for the project at hand. And that really just encourages more and more investment for myself as a designer and as a creative. One of the first examples of working with Sean is a million little pieces. This was a very little book. Someone's actually calling me my back pocket right now. So this is one of the first books we did together. And at the time this was a small book. There wasn't many expectations around it, but it was an incredible read, minus all the controversy around the book. It was a fantastic read, a page, really a page turn or something that I read in two nights. And in the process of trying to come up with a solution, every idea I came up with I could not create or mock up or find a way to just get where I can sell it. This solution was not something I could just mock up. So we decided to just hire a photographer. Generally in publishing, even before the climate of the industry started to change, you still needed to have approval. So it became this catch 22 that you want to show an idea in order to be able to get the budget for the photography. But since I couldn't do it, as I forget it, I'll just use the budget allotted as the designer and roll the dice. Unfortunately, the end result was fantastic. We worked with Frederick Broden as a photographer in Texas, sent him a pack of candy dots with a question mark on it and said, what do you think we can do? And this is what he came back with. I think the second part of what makes this experience really special is the reaction. And it sort of created a new path for me as a designer. The reaction was in so much like we love it. It's beautiful or it's brilliant. It was, it makes me really uncomfortable. I don't know what to make of it, but I can't stop staring at it. And that sort of, it's what sort of got me started in not only wanting to come up with solutions that were conceptually driven, but that could be multi-tiered, multi-layered, and hopefully at the very least just sort of have like a guttural reaction to it or just some sort of emotional feeling towards it. Again, this is another Sean McDonald collaboration. While he was at Riverhead and I was a freelance right at the time. Now, this is an example where this didn't happen overnight. This took about six to seven months. I was the first designer hire. They probably hired two or three other designers. I threw everything in the kitchen sink. I could possibly come up with the book is beautifully written. I'd never read a book that was at the violence and it was so powerful that it kind of hurt my stomach and I wanted to capture that in a visual. But they finally came down to this and I can't say that it was that they came to their sense is it just I think they might have ran out of time. I think everyone's very happy. The book is obviously going to be a tremendous success for the publisher and for Juno. A most recent collaboration with Sean is for Our Stress and Drew where we both currently work together and this book was originally a trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer and the original books were all published in favor of that and because of its success we decided to combine them all and give it a whole new approach and yeah this was the process for this was I believe the years of that we've invested together where you just ask a question which is one that I appreciate the most is you think and it really has this kind of incredible change of perspective when you're asked that about your own work. You really kind of can take a step back and think like well what do I really think? I know I made it so I should like it but it does sort of help and again it encourages this sort of doubling down and wanting to invest even more. The UK publisher decided to pick up the three covers for their paperback edition so it's great to see something that's not necessarily comedy but publishing where you can let the art be the driving force and the author name become the secondary element. Another form of collaboration is outside of the publishing house is working with an artist working with the design team and finding a way to bring those things together. Speetling Grouch is a brilliant division of Random House led this project and it was it was quite a roller coaster ride but the I think the driving force behind the success of this is is ultimately between the editor and Jay-Z himself. He was incredibly generous I was a big fan and the idea of having access to information is someone being open and willing to share for me means a lot for any project I take on. If there isn't an opportunity to learn to engage it makes it very difficult for me to commit and in this case it was it was pretty brilliant we had many meetings he kind of did the same thing that Sean did which is ask questions what do you think what do you think of what you're presenting and really just fed us with tons tons of amazing material the book comprising of annotations of his lyrics so it became this extension of what as a book jacket designer we do we take text and then we try to come up with a few images that can somehow either directly or indirectly speak to the to the to the language and in this case it was it was the challenge is to try to find a way to make 250 plus pages where each one could feel like a book jacket in itself so we've really tried to own every single page possible and not uh and not just lean on any kind of stock imagery or everything was photographed in the studio kind of bouncing a little bit here so work ethic so before getting into this place of what mattered most for me collaboration being one of them work ethic has been a thing that's kind of got me through more of the difficult times because for all young designers when I hear this word what's what's going to be your style or what's going to be your your lane I don't have a lane this obviously goes back 15 plus years ago I didn't want a lane I just wanted to explore and discover and learn as much as I possibly could so the thing that I could rest on through all that failure or that not failure the the unknown is work ethic and that's something that goes back to uh when I think of my folks being incredibly hardworking people and that's something that I learned from them and it's really like I said it really got me through uh through a I think a solid five or six years of wondering like should I really be a graphic designer or should I go into the hospitality industry uh in that process I've had an opportunity to collaborate with uh many different companies the Criterion Collection being one of them Sarah Beebe is a brilliant art director over there the material is speaks for itself working with the New York Times something that I really enjoy because it's such a different speed than books or film where you have 24 hours 40 hours there's really no time to hem and haw and start to to to worry about whether it works or not working with the design community which is fantastic working with high profile photographers in this case this was very funny Barney Frank uh I had I was hell bent on shooting having him being shot with uh 8 by 10 film for all those who don't know 8 by 10 film you kind of have to stay still you cannot move the photographer gets under this blanket and the photographer's like well I'm going to do 10 frames and that's it this photographer was so in love with Barney at the end of shooting I think somewhere like 40 and by 35 Barney's like I'm not supposed to first I gotta get the hell out of here it's like getting me out of here it's like no more pictures it's like my feet are killing me I'm exhausted I don't want to go home um but in the end the shot is fantastic and and I think Barney was really pleased again while uh I don't know how I actually do this uh but so I'm a creative director for our Strauss and Drew I also have my studio in uh what's Ellen was saying before I work with uh New Directions as well and in that time I'm also doing a ton of freelance uh through my studio uh some stuff for Random House for Penguin for some international entrance this has a glimpse into a the beginning of a project for the AGA for the upcoming Gala which is really exciting uh we're doing the full branding for which is a really fun uh fun experience but this is just one small element and unfortunately I don't have all the elements ready to show uh so when I'm not doing all these things and trying to get art into my design work because so I went through a period of loving the idea of conceptualization and this sort of punchline humorous element of making design then it became evolving to multi having uh multilayers and tier ideas uh I can reach many people and then it just became I want to start making my own work with no client and that became really awkward and so painful it still kind of is weird because I feel like I had like this sort of mechanism of competitiveness that it's really not with anyone else it's kind of in my own head but it doesn't translate with art for some reason but anyhow we started doing these graphite drawings it's uh I think it's sort of the nod to early I think early college of when you don't know what kind of work you want to be doing but you stick with a technical craft but what I'm picking is imagery that I think has the potential to be fraught with emotion energy hoping that when you look at it you can attach ideas to it as well this thing is uh I wish I had it in context this is about six feet wide it's pretty massive um I thought I was going to finish at the design so there's a there's a theme here sports competitiveness I swear I thought I was six four I'd probably be standing here probably my professional sports but I do love sports I love the psychology of sports I love what drives people and I feel like it's not just in sports but it's it's in it's in all the arts that I'm I'm really um I'm still fascinated people tell their stories of what motivates them what gets them through highs and lows and it's probably one of the some of the best advice I ever got from my college roommate and I'll finish on that but if you're going to commit to being a creative or a designer be prepared that it will be a rollercoaster ride it will be days you feel amazing will be days you will feel horrible at what you're doing today I feel pretty good so this is a sculpture of a porcelain basketball that we also painted airbrush painting as well it's already chipping along the part unfortunately thank you okay um that was fun I feel like I'm going to depress everyone so um thank you for the invitation for having me here I wanted to sort of explain a little bit of my design process and where it comes from and um I was just talking to Proviocan we were talking about the speed of things and I was saying like I'm so slow designing right it takes me ages to design a project and the project I'm going to talk about it it took me like about a year to make it and finish it and I think that comes from uh like a sort of a internal internal conflict which is uh that I started my design career in 1992 which was the year of the year summit in Rio de Janeiro and that year it was all about the environment and from that moment when I started studying and I started studying when that was happening the environmental side of it and the environmental side of design was always like present and like questioning my work or that that's the way I felt and uh it took me a long time to to actually understand what was going on and and to understand what the conflict was when I was starting the career it wasn't that clear the day it sort of became something that I understood there was a like a very clear contradiction between being a product designer and trying to be environmentally responsible and uh and at the time uh I think it's still lacking on design education but at the time it was like basically no existing the discussion about sustainability and design and for me that was a bit of uh well big thing and yeah and uh I graduated and I started working and I started improvising a lot and trying to understand how to do it and after a few years what I understood is that what what I understood it would what I was lacking was perspective and to understand when we talk about sustainability and we talk about the environment the environment and the sort of the uh the built universe and products and uh we're talking about a story that it's pretty brief in terms of the environment and the planet and that's when that sort of that was a click in my head then I understood the sort of the immensity of the challenge and the the the very special in every way moment that we're living in so the graphics that I want to show now and and I'll try to be very brief about this it's about the time frame that I try to consider when I'm designing right which goes like a few thousand years before our time a few thousand years after and there's a when I when I started looking at things from this perspective I understood that there was like 150 or 200 years that were very special and uh I'm going to show you just a few uh graphics about the things that we usually take into consideration when we talk about well-being or progress or how how well we're doing and the first thing is help right if you're dead you're not that healthy so uh that's the first thing we look at and what has happened is that in the last 150 years life expectancy has doubled right when you hear about Marco Polo conquering the world at 30 it's not because he was young it was because I was like expecting he was an old guy right he was like an old guy like conquering the world at 30 and we've only become like like we've only managed to live 70 or 80 years old only in the last generations four or five generations so the second thing that we used to to talk about well-being is culture and the most basic way to talk about culture is literacy you can read and um of course there was a time where that didn't exist but then it became sort of a very something that just the elite or just a few people could actually do read and write and only after I don't know the last 250 years we understood that it should be like a human right and everyone should be able to do it and now over 90 percent of people in the world can read and write and most of them can read and write in two or more languages so that's a big change and the other thing that we use of course is the economy and that's a place where the change has been the greatest when we talk about the economy of course there was a time when the sort of money wasn't invented but if we use the same tools that we used today to measure the economy the world has a history of poverty of extreme poverty before the industrial revolution 95 percent of people were living in extreme poverty so that's quite a big change now it depends on who you ask but if you ask probably Jeffrey Saks he would say less than 15 percent of the world lives in extreme poverty so that's a big change from 95 to 15 percent so that's sort of the inside of the things right we came from a world that was poor that was sick or unhealthy and that was not very bright to a place where everyone can read and write we're basically a reach in comparison and we're very healthy and we need to live a lot longer so that's the good side of them that of course has had a bit of an impact the first is that since we have access to health services and we have more money and we live longer then the amount of people in the world has exploded we from I think it was 1350 the year 1350 or something population has steadily grown and then the last 200 years it exploded from going from less than one billion to over seven billion I think the last count is 7.4 billion people in the world so it basically exploded and all of us we tend to eat at least three times a day and that means that we consume a lot more stuff so the there's a really nice thing called the living planet report I don't know if you know it but it measures sort of the health of the world in two ways one is the ecological footprint which is how many people not how much resources human kind uses and what has happened is that of course we use a lot more and it's the same time frame as the other graphics what you see the little dotted line in the center that's called bio capacity which is the capacity of the world to be in itself and when we crossed I think the date is 1976 and from that moment on we're consuming more resources than what the earth can produce this is kind of a bad thing and of course that means that other species population has declined a lot and that's the other part of the human the living planet report which is called the living planet index this index follows the health and density of population of I think 1300 vertebrate species and what has happened is that just in the last 35 years that index has gone down by 30 percent which is a lot it's insane and that of course drives what in my opinion is the worst environmental crisis that we have which is extinction and what has happened with extinction is that we're living there's a great book by Elizabeth Colder that talks about it and we're basically living what it's called a mass extension which means that everything goes as a scientist believe we're going to lose more than half percent more than half of all the species in the world by the end of this century so that's considered a mass extension right and that's well there has been five mass extensions in the planet already the fifth the last one was the dinosaurs when they disappeared so we're basically creating a new one because of our human industrial activities so this is sort of the bad side of it and the question of course is how we did this and why we were able to do this so briefly when I mean it's not that people on the Renaissance were like we don't want to be a ranger we don't want to like live longer right it's those things that people have wanted all along but how did we manage to actually change the world the way we have and that's basically because we used to we learned how to use fossil fuels to produce work basically to change the embodied energy in fossil fuels and like transform that into work when you talk about horsepower basically what you're doing is making an equivalent of a horse actually working and instead of a horse doing it with some other machine and we did that with of course the famous steam machine of the 19th century and the first just as a comparison the first steam machine that was operated like a coal on coal it was used to get water out of mines is that correct yes and that one single machine with one person putting coal into it replaced 200 horses right 200 horses with all the people working to maintain those horses so that's where all the horsepower comes from right that's a lot and that's a good thing it's like we we get fossil fuels and we use them to produce something that otherwise we would have to do by hand or with some other means and that was that that has allowed us to come out of poverty and get all these like good things that we have of course global warming greenhouse gas concentrations etc but my point with all this is that when i'm thinking about design i i really try not to be thinking about the design world or the project or the client but actually be thinking about this right and this is sort of like um what really bugs me right which is if if you were Marco Baldwin you were like whatever year he was living in and he was thinking about how how's the world going to look like for my son or my grandsons this is going to be the same thing right it's like there was going to be no real change in the planet there might be a big social change of revolution or something big in terms of mountain but not so much in terms of the planet but what has happened in the past 150 years is that our activity has actually changed the planet and that stability for good or worse i mean it's not that i want to go back to a world that is poor and sick and all the other things but it was a stable condition and now i don't know if any of you can actually answer that question it's like where are these graphs going to go in the future and that's kind of uh what i'm trying to think about when i'm designing and it's like which of those things that have changed i want to keep and i want to reinforce for example i'd love to end extreme poverty or our generation to actually manage to do it but at the same time i wouldn't like the extinction trends that we have now to continue right so how do we use this tremendous amount of power that we have in terms of changing the world to actually shift these graphs in a way that we actually want and uh it's kind of depressing when you start thinking about this because you you kind of feel helpless about the whole situation because it's like a huge problem there are huge forces at work and it's kind of hard to see like oh i'm designing this leaflet or this product and how this is going to impact that and it's kind of hard to grasp but there are a few examples where i think that this has actually worked and i think you'll have heard about the euro protocol which is one of the greatest fiasco world diplomacy but there's the other one called the montreal protocol you've heard of it yeah no it's the one that everyone signed for the aerosols and the ozone hole in the stratosphere and that was a good example like everyone signed it everyone changed their technology and all the world sort of worked in one direction and the last measurements is that that ozone hole is actually shrinking and it's getting better so it's when you think about it it's the world actually getting together and solving the problem that it's in the stratosphere which is kind of mind blowing right so my big question is like of course i need to think about the client and think about the product i think how to make it that it's feasible and etc but my big question that i always try to think about and i don't think that i'm successful most of the time over maybe just a couple of times but uh is how a design project can actually have at least some sort of direction that is helping in this big question right it's a sort of big package or a big thing you want to do but but i think it's a uh worthier discussion to think about these things when you're designing a new product or a new project and not so much about all the other stuff that designers were sort of asked to be thinking about like fashion trends and a lot about things so the the project that is in the exhibition that i want to use as an example of this is a place where i had the opportunity to work with a manufacturer that already knew me and knew all my like these things that i'm talking about and it was not as scary because he already had a couple of products in the market and knew i was i wasn't going to come up with something stupid or crazy so um it's a class manufacturer and my project began with another one of these things which was energy using manufacturing by the way any measurement you want to put into this graph is going to follow a similar trend right it's like if you want to look at book book number of books published or more time to rate for neon metal babies or whatever you want to do is going to follow the same trend so it's basically the same graph right but anyway this is energy using manufacturing and when i'm talking about glass blowing and glass manufacturing the problem with glass is that it uses a lot of energy right to to melt glass you have to take it to over a thousand degrees Celsius and it's it's quite a bit so um i started looking at places where i could lower that energy and of course i kind of make glass melt at a lower temperature but i started looking at other things and i found that there's another area where there's a lot of energy that it's it's being used and it's in the mold manufacturing how to make the tooling for the pieces and of course in machining the the steel for the pieces there's a lot of energy used but it's not so much that but actually the energy that was used to create the steel piece that you're going to start with right that's called embodied energy and that's a coefficient that is measured even either by weight or by volume and that it can change a lot at this is part of a bigger chart with all the materials that we normally use and you can see for example mega joules by kilogram and you go from 0.02 in river rock to 227 mega joules per kilogram for right to extruded anodized aluminum aluminum so what you see is that it depends on which material you choose before you do anything to it you already have a very big energy footprint right and when i started measuring that for mold manufacturing for glass manufacturing what happened is that even before i did anything with the mold there was already a huge environmental footprint right energy use so what i did is look for other materials such as rock that could be used and that could withstand that heat and be used for mold manufacturing so i started working with this which is volcanic rock of course coming from a volcano serves withstands heat and that that's local is from Mexico City and actually modifying the shape of the rock is pretty easy it's it also consumes less energy so i started experimenting with this is where the sort of the the good harder manufacture comes in because when you come up with an idea like this if you don't have like a good relationship to manufacture it's gonna probably say like yeah whatever hire someone else but he was already open to crazy ideas and i started experimenting with this and it worked really well and uh i also well we came up with this this is sort of the piece being made and i'm not gonna go too much into it but basically you blow into this stone mold this was the first pieces that we did that's the piece before they caught it and made the actual hole which is on the exhibition but when i was doing this i uh the first thing that i that i did is was like when i started testing it i started to see really nice textures on the glass piece and that's what i think is like the the the beautiful part of this type of experimentation which is that i started thinking about the environment on all the other things but the moment i did my first tests i understood that there was a new door in terms of the aesthetics and the design language that you come up with in this process and that that design language it was something unique to these material and these molds that was not feasible with the traditional steel mold right coming up with a texture like this on a steel mold will be just insane to think about it it would be very really hard and difficult to make with crazy expensive and it wouldn't just it doesn't make sense right so when you change the framework around it because you're thinking about the problem in a different way then you open up a new sort of direction in terms of aesthetics in terms of looks and that's sort of something that is really uh like empowering and and something that when it comes out right i'm like okay there i can be an optimistic and so anyway just to to finish up what i was saying the the comparison between a steel mold for a piece like this to a volcanic rock mold is that i lowered the energy used for the mold in 99.1 so the energy used for the mold basically disappeared and that is sort of the why i think it's is great about these type of projects is that you go on with something where the change in scale in terms of resource consumption is so great that it's i i think that's his name this guy that talks about we need changes where the scale of change is so greater that than the uncertainty of delta that it's it's not it's it doesn't really matter what comes from this place or the other or the data is not precise and correct the change the scale is so great that there is no way that you can sort of negate it by so that's it those are the federal and paulo balls in the thank you so much well that was amazing i like how miliana you took us from the sort of terrifying place to a place of some often as something told you it was going to be depressing no i don't feel good i feel like there's a a kind of magic and alchemy scribe and taking this piece of rock and it's just so elemental in relation to the materials and i kind of want to come to this idea of alchemy and invention in both of your work and i'd like to maybe hear a little bit from roberto about the kind of about in a sense what you're forging is ideas and there's a material component but it is largely in the kind of realm of the image and so i'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that the process of invention and graphic design maybe with an example like the axe cover that you showed and i understand that i'm sorry okay you guys can hear me uh yes so much of the so much of it is the idea the attachment that that i that i hope for the the viewer can bring to the to the visual because i am dealing in a very specific format it's a rectangle it's on paper i hope not too much heat was used to create those cars because now i feel really crappy about it you'll find out it seems to get back to the office tomorrow but it is this space and it's restricted so so the so the outcome that i'm looking for is is trying to attach as many things as possible so find as many things we can attach to it conceptually okay but i guess what i wanted is more of a story a specific philosophy but like tell me a story about an idea coming into being okay um all right so let's use let's use june a brief and wondrous life of oscar well so jude uh the main character uh in the book is this this guy oscar and he's uh he's uh he's not very attractive uh but he's a big personality and in book covers especially in literary publishing the whole idea is for you as a reader to create your own visual it's not for me to spell it out right as a designer so the end result is trying to think of someone who i know that could be that person in some way and so i remember an actor i can't remember his name right now uh coincidentally dominica america as well uh who fit that that mold of that personality and then the other element of trying to address and i kind of touched under a little bit in the presentations there's so much violence in the book and aggression in the book so how do you deal with that in a way where i'm not running from it but at the same time i'm able to create that feeling in some way so having a tightly somewhat bastardized or covered up or messed with kind of addresses the the lack of respect in some way or the the the tension or the aggression so those are the things that two things i was trying to address how do i capture this person and how do i express aggression and violence in some way right and kind of through print itself that's right right yeah that's a good story is that a good answer and so your story is really about material and this kind of birthing of material out of the earth right so tell us about how this kind of process of discovering material well well many projects are about materials in the sense that it's sort of the i don't know is it is the most obvious place where you should start right in terms of product design but there are many product projects where materials are just the least concern right when you're talking about for example a building and like the environmental footprint of the building through its use is much much higher than actually building the thing and uh i remember this is kind of the answer for your question and i remember i was doing this story the interior design of a store in Mexico City and uh when you i mean we we were trying to do something that was not very invasive and that we would we wouldn't be like redoing the whole building basically so the first thing that we do is we go and we make little holes to see what's behind the previous restoration of the place we found a beautiful brick wall and then we found that beneath the laminate a horrible laminate floor there was a nice pine blank uh blank floor and was like okay let's just take everything off and then recycle it the place where you can and use the floor that's meaning so we took the first floor and yes there was a nice pine planter floor which was all filled with holes made out of like several different box and stuff so we had to take it out because it was not safe so we took it off and there was another floor which is also covered in stuff and then we took that and there was everything was supported supported by these really big beams that were also in the like the point of breaking and killing someone so they we had to take those off and beneath it was like a meter and a half like this high of a hole and there was there was like water beneath it right it was so the building was being flooded and i was like you know this place where you go like this it was terrible and we ended up having a mountain of ways that we didn't plan for and we didn't know what to do with them and what i'm trying to say here is that when you think about materials it's almost always a metaphor of how people thought about the project in the first place right it sort of reflects your thinking about the project and when i when i was taking all these layers of basically all the guys behind me were just covering up problems right there was something with that was not wrong and they were like i had to take everything off and it was it was terrible but at the same time it sort of tells you how most people think about these things which is like it's just a facade it's just something that you put on top of it and what's behind it it's not how do i talk about the book and what it represents but it's like how do i just put something on top of it and it doesn't reflect what it's actually it's like i don't know that's that's a good story i like that you keep taking away taking away and there's water that was my good news so any questions from the audience yeah i see a question in the back there um i think we're going to use a microphone so that we can capture it through the internet but i went to a talk last week at FID about um which was run by the ethical fashion initiative about in a response to everything that's happened in Rana Prada and the guy that was running the talk the guy called Orret van Heerden and he was talking about design um and sustainability and Rana Plaza and how to kind of how to prevent something like that happen again and this is the factory that collapsed in 2013 and he said that um he felt instead he felt a new form of governance and social responsibility was really um imperative to prevent something like that happening again um and i come from the UK where i'm called my 11 invented free healthcare and social housing um and i'm just wondering how much you felt sustainability would be that environmental or healthcare um improving that how much a designer should work with governance and social responsibility and how that relationship might work do you mean like instead of working with private companies yeah okay well i've done both and i don't see that big difference in terms of how the project is usually organized or structured um i think both the private sector and the government and the NGOs even have a set of criteria to evaluate a project that i don't usually feel are the right criteria and uh they're usually usually related to how they have to uh report their work and how they're going to be evaluated and i don't feel that those uh that that way of looking at a project actually necessarily ends up uh producing a great project or a good project and uh that that's been sort of one of my my main concerns throughout my career is how do i evaluate a project and decide if i did a good job and what when i tried to do that i i mean what i now see in retrospect is that there is no sort of type of entity that necessarily produces great work but it's more like how do you uh structure the project so that criteria to evaluate it are clear from the start and those criteria are have like a mythical uh background behind them right i don't know if i'm making myself clear but sometimes when you work with a company they have two or three check boxes that they have to sort of cover and the government might have 20 but those check boxes not doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be happy with the project but they're going to be able to uh sort of show it to their superiors and not be liable for anything right and uh and that's just not a right way to approach work but i don't think that you get passionate about work when you're you have a checklist that doesn't reflect the way that you feel about work so for me it's not so much about the entity or the structure behind the project in terms of how it's funded or how it's managed or who are those stakeholders but more about if is there a clear vision and a clear uh criteria to evaluate the project and if everything involved everyone involved in the project share that vision and and understand that these criteria to evaluate it are more important than how we use structure the project to accomplish the end result i don't know i was that's a good question anybody else there there was some people i was oh yeah go ahead and then i'll come to the front yeah um my question is for Rodrigo uh basically i just wanted to know like you commission work you get commissions and then you do your own thing uh how do you juggle those three things you know i mean and how does that work i'll give you a i'll give you a i'll give you a two two part answer one is i think part of it stems from a degree of fear of failure and the other part is uh kind of enjoying living with that for so for such a long time that it's now this thing that i embrace and enjoy and there's just also an element like i think i was describing before that i have probably an inner voice of of competition that i create with each and every project uh and i just feel like um like at the risk of sounding kind of corny about this but there's i feel like i don't uh i don't let go of the appreciation i have of the opportunity because i never imagined i'd be doing i really wasn't going to host a restaurant i wasn't just to be funny but don't get comfortable right now it would be a good good advice really exactly on rike yeah we're talking about failure and i was just wondering with all the great work that you showed today are there projects that just didn't make it to the final execution and i'm sure that if there are a few like do you hang on to those or you just kind of forget about them keep going um it's a combination of it's a combination of both i think part of what brought me back to for our straws from drew is being fresh out of school and giving opportunities to produce work that should have never seen the light of day like i i wish i'd added to this deck but there's this one project i did about dh lauren's and it was the the author jeff dyre was was written a book basically going through the same travels as dh lauren's i had this great idea of using a photo of the author and then an acetate jacket with an etching of dh lauren's now when these two things were combined it just turned to mud you couldn't make out either face but somehow the publisher said gray let's go with it and so i think it's that level of support that just you know sometimes you're going to get them sometimes you're not i think the most important thing that i enjoy is feeling i gained i learned something uh whether it's having inspired uh a read or meeting someone that that uh just brought a different perspective into my life but even the failed moments those things can be the the winning thing that makes sense yeah and until ameliana you spent a whole year on a project how did that work out i was just telling you i'm never repeating it straight ever again it's not funny uh but i have a friend that uh studied with me uh proud of the master's and i talked with him and he told me he was designing 280 projects a year and i was like what is that like a good use of energy if i'm trying to do the graph on that they're bad like there's a whole slow design but there's value to work slow use human energy and i i'm a firm believer in slow everything but slow design is great it's it's when you think about it if you really want to think about the book or the project and like understand and have a clear vision of what you want to do in the online you have like i don't know eight hours to do it so it doesn't make sense of it if you really want to be uh so if you want to be held accountable for your work then you should at least have a few days to think about it right yeah and i i'm really or a few years or a few years some projects are are just way too fast and i know that i mean in terms of uh if it's feasible with the budget that you have for a project or not to make it round that long that's another question but i think that it would be very old design should take a bit longer we're going to try to have two different world clocks going on i'm gonna say there is a yeah it's back here thanks guys for a great event uh i'm just so curious about the backstory of the fight drawing like what is that all about there was a it's i think it's actually pretty good sorry uh let me think about it here so there was an exhibition match in china between one of the chinese national uh the professional chinese basketball team against a collegiate team from united states of georgetown and there were several of these uh matches that were set up as a good will uh as a good will uh tour that joe biden had also had traveled to china to participate in and the games got very aggressive and it just ended up resulting in a in a really brutal physical fight and embarrassment for promote countries that sounds familiar it's a very good will of them yeah uh i i think also uh i was just drawn to the image because i think i just spent an extended period of time at staring at uh pocosas warneca you just felt that this is a potential symbol of what might be coming down the road so again it's one of these things like i could love the sheer athleticism of the of the actual event the idea of it but also just what it could symbolize so i want oh yeah we have a question here i think i'll take two more questions and then i have a question three more questions you talked a bit about the idea of asking someone what they think is a way to ask them to reinvest in what they're working to bring the most of themselves to it so i can ask you to put your creative director hat on and kind of expand on that and talk about we are a general approach to getting designers that you're working with to bring their best to the project that they're working for you well i think if we're starting off with valuing what your team is giving the brain to the project as opposed to you do here's here's this image here's this type base put it together and show it to me tomorrow like that doesn't sound rewarding it doesn't sound uh this challenging or an opportunity to learn so uh i think it's giving the design opportunity to go and figure out and stumble whatever maybe your discover on their own so i think that question of asking what do you what do you think is a is just an extension of what starts with just interviewing the people that i bring in it's knowing that the box has already checked out that these that the person loves design is committed whether they're great yet or not if they're committed to it i'm willing to work with them because i know i'll be incredibly supportive i know i'm really enthusiastic about it so hopefully those things combined and with a little time you know you'll get there or the people that work in here and i've seemed to have i've had some luck that i currently have this an intern uh he doesn't speak great english and i feel like he's potentially uh like product of going through college system and not having a professor pull him aside and say hey these are the things you want to invest in so i make you a point that i'm bringing as an intern i'm gonna touch on three quarter things like one you need to articulate your ideas secondly be able to feel like they're your ideas and third make sure what you're saying you're visually doing and these are things i'm constantly reiterating within like two or three months it's amazing to watch um this happened i'm sure part of it's just like i i at least promise to give 20 minutes each day that 30 minutes are in the studio just like let's talk let's talk about design wow i want to be an intern there's another question so um it's a question for both of you you talked about material and how you use that you talked about the publishers and the authors and their objectives are um both of you how much are you thinking about the users that are gonna be you know using the books using the bowls etc well it depends on the project to be honest for example the project of the bowls that i did i didn't think about the user at all the only user that i thought about was actually the guy blowing the thing and that was a big thing like talking with him and being very involved in how they blow the thing and if it was going to work i mean this is going to be a nightmare for them but the actual guy with a bowl in his house i was thinking about the makers but but it's a special kind of project in this is that it's really hard to make a bad bowl right it's like i know it's not priming i wasn't going to kill anyone but there are other projects where the user is sort of like paramount in terms of the discussion there are a few projects where i have sort of put everything on a second level and the user is sort of the king in terms of who drives the discussion but i think it depends on the project to be honest do you have any users ready to go uh in in in an ideal world i'd like it to be a bound of a level of something that's visually enticing but also if you're jumping into the tax you'll discover something that you would have not discovered if you had it written in the book so hopefully you'll find something on the cover that you'd only discover if you read the book so that's as far as i'll go i really do you thought we'd take one more question okay thank you thank you um you both guys kind of talked about collaborations you're legal and emilliano you about um so my question would be how do you um pursue or and and um essentially engage the the chance to collaborate to with other designers for um in with big publishers or big um the other big production brands or um how do you pursue is that just like um sending a bunch of emails and just keep it keep them calm man and you know knocking the doors you know the old school kind of kind of way or um i think all the approaches i sometimes it's sending an email and you don't get anything back sometimes it's uh it's being introduced through your network friends and staying in the city long enough um but i but i would say most of it's uh just reinvesting and doing the work that i'm doing becomes just an extension of hopefully someone's easy and that triggers something for someone i that that's what i'd say is the bulk of the outreach is just everybody wants to collaborate but yeah so that answers the question sure i think for me it's the same as i i'm not very good at promoting my work for myself but it's usually i i sort of trust the word to be the main that's right sort of billboard for it and uh most of the times where i've been very eager to get something and i actually get it it's a terrible project and no it's not it's not a joke it's like when you we try really hard to get a project on the other side is not that like enthusiastic about it you should get that as a sign a very clear sign of like maybe you know that uh chick flick what's the meaning of it like maybe he's not dying to you that's the same thing i was like maybe you should let it cool for a few years and see it like later it works okay we got dating advice saying the world advice we got the alchemy of ideas with what an incredible night just so thank you for sharing so much with yourself and thank you all for being here thank you