 of Contemporary Design, and we're here to celebrate storytelling. We have a really fun event planned. There's going to be three micro lectures by fascinating personalities, including myself. And those will be interleaved with hyper-competitive cutthroat rounds of design trivia, led by the great Adam Kesner, this evening's Minister of Information. And we're going to have a book signing upstairs. We'll keep the shop open for you to do your holiday shopping. I sure hope you're a member because it's cheaper if you are. There'll be more opportunities for a glass of wine. We're going to be giving out prizes for the top scorers in the trivia game. There's also going to be a prize for the most creative Instagram story. So if you know what that is, you're one step ahead. Be sure to tag your story at Cooper Hewitt so that our amazing social media guru, Greg Gessner, can pick the winner tomorrow morning and send you, guess what, a free book. So tonight's talks, I'm going to talk about my book, Design and Storytelling. The amazing Peter Mendelssohn, who has designed, probably read in the last five years, will talk about his work. And Dan Venne, sound designer from Manmade Music. Dan Venne is going to talk about what he does, which is storytelling with sound. I wanted to say a very special thank you to my colleague, Susanna, tonight, who really organized this event and made it as creative as it is. She found Adam Kessner in Brooklyn. You know it's cool. She's our public programs coordinator. This is her last public event here, and I think it's going to be her funnest and most creative. So every time you laugh, thanks. Susanna Brown, thank you. So I'm going to just start for a few minutes and tell you about this book called Design is Storytelling, which was published by Cooper Hewitt and came out two weeks ago, hit the newsstands if those still exist. Writing a book is a really awful experience. It's like being pregnant for two years. And when you're done, you want to have an apesiotomy for your brain. Ladies, you know what I mean. And there are moments of incredible self-doubt and pain and times when you think maybe you shouldn't do this book at all. I was at a conference in New Orleans about halfway through this project sitting with some hip young people talking about what we were doing. And one of the young men asked me, well, what is your project? And I said, I'm doing a book about design and storytelling. And he looked very concerned. And he said, have you heard about the mantle of bullshit? And I had not. And it was explained to me that the great Stefan Sagmeister had a video that was, as they say, viral at the time about the mantle of bullshit and that he had met a roller coaster designer who claimed to be a storyteller. And Stefan did not like this. He felt that roller coaster designers design roller coasters and trying to call it a story is kind of phony. You know, it's like trying to add sauce to your pizza. And I felt very worried about this. But I watched the video and got some lessons from that. But the more I thought about it and the more I soldiered on with my project, I thought, well, stories and roller coasters do have something in common. So there's a very famous diagram of the structure of stories that many writers use and that we use to really think about how to create energy in a story. And so a story, it starts out low and you have an initial situation and the energy builds. Literally, you're collecting energy as you move to the top and you hit a climax. You go down the other side and it looks kind of like a roller coaster. And that's what Grant Snyder thought when he made this amazing illustration from the New York Times book review that he let us use in our book. I love this and it takes you through all the kind of cliches of what can go wrong in a story and turns it into a wonderful theme park. And somewhere there is the puddle of bullshit where you might get drowned and destroyed. And it turns out that human beings actually are attracted to a lot of things that have this shape. So if you think about lunch, you know, it starts out, you're hungry, you're full of anticipation, there's an initial inciting incident and then it gets more exciting, you're actually eating the lunch and then it's over, you're satisfied. Sexual activity when it works out can be like that. I'm kind of wondering about the Twin Peaks here. I want to call up the scientists and say, girlfriend, you got to share your research with me. I'm not sure about that part. And if we think about design and design being the representation of action but also an invitation for users to perform an action, many of the things that we do every day have been designed to have this kind of cycle of beginning, middle, end. That's your desktop on a Macintosh computer. And we could change the way it ends. You know, this is maybe for the age of Elon Musk, a new interface design. But we have that sense of an ending, right, of something coming to a completion. And so many things that we love and encounter every day come in threes, beginning, middle, end. I collect pictures of trash cans. Please send them to me. I really do want your pictures. And I'm fascinated by how many trash cans come in threes even though there's so many more kinds of trash than that, somehow it comforts us. And designers have created all these different openings to kind of invite your action to get you to put your trash in the right place. This version is Cooper Hewitt's and it's kind of a Bauhaus version. This one always looks kind of naughty to me. Like put your junk in one of these openings depending on what you're into. And lots of other things have that kind of arc. This is a diagram of the sound envelope. And every sound has a shape. It enters the world. It literally builds energy. It has a period of sustaining and time and disappearing. And when you edit sound, you're actually looking at that arc. So one of our presentations tonight is all about sound and telling stories with sound. And that's celebrating the opening of one of our exhibitions upstairs, Here See Play, which is about designing with sound. And Dan Van designed the sounds with his company Man Made Music to really invite the public to explore designing with sound. So we'll hear from Dan shortly. His theory of the sonic burrito. You can learn more about upstairs. And this is a book cover by Peter Mendelssohn, which takes this idea of threes and beginning, middle, and and basically shows you what a slave you are to language and numbers. I just love this thing. It's such a great story with an inverted plot. So I'm delighted to welcome Adam Kesner to challenge your brains in a deadly round of design trivia. Thank you. I'm going to turn that up. All right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask some trivia questions and you are not going to get all these questions right. Trust me on this. I'm going to ask a question. I'm going to give you about 10 seconds to take a guess, write down your answer, you know, confer with your teammates. And then at the end and then after each question, we're going to find out what the answer is. So we're going to do this quickly. Question number one. We're going to talk about Saul Bass to begin with. Saul Bass perhaps is most famous for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock for one point. Name any two of the Alfred Hitchcock movies seen here that Saul Bass was involved with the credits for. Any two of the three will get you the point. I know it says three. We're making it a little easier. Trust me. You'll be happy with that later. All right. So we'll take about 15 seconds. Sounds about good. This is where we'd have game show music if we were. All right. We good? All right. Everyone take your final guesses. Pencils. Yes. Pencils down. These three movies, Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest. And of course in that order, it's Psycho, North by Northwest and Vertigo just to make it more confusing. All right. Question number two. Question number two. Oh, it's a great picture. A few years ago, this high school student made news with his science project when he figured out that the government can save $370 million if they changed all of their fonts from Times New Roman to what font seen here. What slightly thinner Sara font would save the government $370 million? Well, you can see Times New Roman is still in Times New Roman. Everything else slightly thinner. Yep. It's a font you've all got on your computer. Take about 15 seconds. Take a guess. Right? Do-do-do-do-do-do. All right. We good? All right. What would it be? Garamond. Yes. I like seeing the fists up. I like seeing you got it. All right. Things are going to get a little bit trickier here. Here we go. Question number three. Question number three. Luchia de Respinis is an industrial designer who among many, many, many other things. She teaches at Pratt. She's designed clocks with George Nelson. But we're going to talk about a logo she designed for a company in 1980. A logo, 12 letters in pink and orange. Yeah. You see it every day. You might have purchased something from this company at some point today. 12 letters in pink and orange. Technically, I think it's 12 letters and an apostrophe. For one point, what famous company's logo are we talking about? Oh, it's a sweet question and a sweet answer. That might be a hint. All right. How do we feel? We feel we're good? Have we taken our guesses? That would be... Oh, I should have gone to that. Dunkin' donuts. Dunkin' donuts it is. Pretty sweet. All right. Question number four. Getting tougher still. This is our sports question of the night. Oh, yeah. We're talking about the iconic logo of the National Basketball Association. You see it right there. And not only do you see it, you see the man that the logo was based on. And L.A. Laker Hall of Famer, whose nicknames, among other, include the logo. Yeah. Also the clutch and some other ones I don't remember. For one point, I can give you a hint if you need on this. Yeah. Y'all need a hint? All right. I'll give you his initials. How about that? Yeah. That works. J.W. Right. If that was going to help, that was going to help. This is our only sports question of the night. But now you can go home and say you know this. All right. Take 10 seconds. Write down any names that you can think of that start with J and W. You might stumble onto it. All right. I see some final guesses being taken. Jerry West. Jerry West. Jerry West is not here tonight with us. But Jerry West, somebody did get that question right, which means it was worth it. All right. Last one. Last one. You're going to hate this, but I love it. Perhaps the most iconic logo you've seen today, the Google logo. You've seen it multiple times today. And you can see right here. This is all gray. I would like you to tell me the colors of the Google logo. Yeah. In order. You want a hint? I'll give you a hint. I'll give you a hint on this. Two of them are red. Two of them are blue. One is yellow. One is green. I know. Just put them in the right order for one very tough point. I know this one's a thinker. I'll give you a couple extra seconds on this one. Again, two red, two blue, one yellow, one green. And that, of course, is not the order of them. I would not give it away in the question. All right. I see some counting going on. I like it. All right. Take the next five seconds to get your answer locked in. We ready? All right. Get ready to be mad at yourselves. That would be blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red. And that, that was our first round of trivia. We have two more rounds. They're going to be happening after each presentation. So now, hello. I think that's you. And you're using, do you have the mic? You guys hear me? Hello. Can you hear me? Hey nerds. How's it going? Did anybody get all of those? Hey. So I'm Peter Mendelson. I'm a book designer and writer. And I'm a moron because I got the invitation to do this thing from Ellen, who I admire greatly. And I didn't see that this was design and storytelling. I didn't know there was a theme. And why I'm a moron is because I actually wrote a book about design and storytelling called What We See When We Read, which is a phenomenology of the reading experience, how the images that we concoct in our mind sort of are co-produced with the authors of books and how narrative is built through imagery, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm not going to talk about that. I mean, I'll try to tie in the things that I have up on screen with the idea of design and storytelling as best I can. Actually, as I was listening to Ellen talk about her amazing book, I was thinking, can design be storytelling? Because doesn't storytelling imply that something exists in time and I sort of got indignant in my own head? But then I saw the cover that Ellen put up of my own No, I'm going the right way. I'm going backwards, right? I saw... No, I skipped it. Yeah. No, I saw this cover and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that design does in fact exist in time. And, yeah, it does unfold. But it's really... It unfolds for the viewer in time, even though it's static. So I realized there is kind of an inherent drama to design in there. Anywho. So I have a bunch of stuff here. Most of it is... Oh, my God. I don't know how to use a clicker. Most of it's recent work. And then I have one thing where I can sort of drill down into one particular process of designing a jacket for a book. Maybe I'll just go through the recent design real quick so we have time to do the process stuff because people tend to like that, right? Okay, so I'm Peter Mendelssohn. I am a book designer. I've been a designer period for about 15, maybe 16 years now. I was a classical pianist most of my life. I started playing when I was four years old. I haven't stopped playing. I still play all the time. But I stopped playing professionally after conservatory when I was around 32 years old when my first daughter was born. So design still represents a pretty small fraction of the time that I've been on the earth. I haven't been doing this a very long time and I know very little about it which is why I did so poorly on that quiz. But, so anyway, I worked at Knopf, which is a publishing house for all of those 15 years that I've been designing this year. I've just left recently. And when I was there, there were certain things I was sort of known for this being one. And I did a lot of covers for books on what we call, in publishing the backlist, which is sort of the canonical classics in paperback. And I loved working on those because for a bunch of reasons, one of which is just a huge bang for your buck. You know, I have to do a huge amount of reading when I'm designing book covers. And not all of that reading is great. So, the other thing is that the authors are dead so they can't object. So, and these. And I also worked on a lot of literary fiction things like this. And occasionally, things, magazines, covers, stuff for newspapers and music and whatnot, but mostly books. And I'm still doing book cover design. Recently, David Sideris asked me to work with him on actually all of his books. We're redoing all of his books. This is his forthcoming collection, Calypso. And the titular story, Calypso, it's a sort of a throwaway line. But in the way of David Sideris' stories, sometimes the throwaway lines are the best. But he mentions a friend of his who belongs to something called the Wood Interpretation Society. So, as soon as I heard that, I was just, oh God. And that led to, that project led to doing the rest of his books in paperback. And the idea here was just that I was going to do the paperbacks as sort of a history of paperback design, which was really fun, especially because I got to do the worst typography. I mean, I broke literally every rule here on this one here. But they used to make books like that. So, and I work for all different publishers. There's a freelancer now for Norton, two other books from Norton. For Grove Press is one I was working Rachel Kushner's new novel. Actually, I said something to her on the phone about a month ago where I was asking her what she sort of wanted for the cover of this novel of hers. And she started to talk in these very big sort of thematic terms. And I said to her, actually, well, you know, a cover has a plot too. So, just, yeah. See, I'm agreeing with you just slowly over time. I'm just getting there. The Japanese publisher, I'm still the art director on vertical press. This is the guy that did the ring. It's gross. Another book for them. I still work for Knopf and Pantheon. This is a series of fairy and folk tales, which is sort of reimagined in kind of abstract and totemistic terms. New Directions, which is my absolute favorite client. They do a lot of literary fiction, a lot of books in translation. They let me get away with doing weird portraits like that and not putting any type on the cover. Things during the center of the night and putting a tongue on it, which is also gross and fun. I get to paint, which I very much enjoy and didn't really get to do that much and work on books that I've loved forever and ever. And here are more of them. And I get to have a goat on a cover, which is also fun. That's a one-off for me. And here, okay. So, about how much time do I have? Okay, I was saying to Ellen that I'm a little bit a little agorac and once I get on stage and I start talking, it's very hard to stop me, so somebody's gonna have to tell me when I have... Okay, do I have five minutes? Okay, great. Okay. I'm also a little manic. So, let's see. About three years ago, do you guys know who Italo Calvino is? Raise your hands if you... Okay, excellent. That's great. For those of you who do know, it's shocking that often I talk about this and people have no idea who he was. Who he was, for those of you who don't know, was one of the great 20th century novelists, literary critics, publishers and editors, and one of my all-time favorite authors. I read his first book when I was in college, when I was 19 years old and was just totally besotted with him. He was Italian, although he lived a fair amount of his life in Paris. And he wrote a lot of books. And about three years ago, I saw his name in my inbox. He's been dead for quite a while. It was his daughter, and she had seen some of those backlist titles that I was just showing you and had liked them and wanted to know if I wanted to work on her dad's stuff. There's 26 books, I believe. And when my feet touched the ground again, I said, absolutely. And I'm going to show you a whole bunch of directions that I worked on. I'll try to talk you through them a little bit. So I think the important thing to know about Calvino is that for his fiction, at least, he wrote in a wide variety of disparate styles, the first part of his life in sort of a stripped-down, kind of Hemingway-esque style, the middle of his life in what I think of sort of a phantasyster, fabulous style, he was very interested in the folk tales, and a lot of his books of that period are, in fact, folk tales. And the last period of his life, which is a very experimental and playful period, kind of metafictional period. So it was a bit of a challenge working on these books because you're representing the oeuvre of a guy who was a shapeshifter and a table hopper, but that's one of the things I loved about him. Anyway, so you're designing a cover for somebody who writes books that often draw the reader's attention to the artifice of reading. He'll always remind you that you're reading a book. That was one of the games that Calvino loved to play. One of his most famous novels, If on a Winner's Night a Traveler, begins you are about to read If on a Winner's Night a Traveler. Sit down. Are you comfortable? Do you need to pee? And so my first idea here was to represent the book with a book. And I had this idea of a catalog of 26 of these things sitting as if in an exhibition in vitrines. And then I thought it just wasn't clever enough. So then I thought, what if we took the old designs and just photograph them. Which was patently absurd, but would have been absolutely perfect for these books. But nobody was going for that. Here's another one of them. But so this is sort of what some of these could have looked like. But like I said it was a little too meta for them. And so then my next thought was, well what if I always like when there's very little throat clearing with a book. What I mean by that is wouldn't it be great if you could just start reading it in the bookstore if the first paragraph, the first lines were just there on the front of the book. So I started experimenting with that a little bit, but it looked kind of plain. So what if there was a little bit of imagery. So then I started experimenting with this idea of having the imagery just run directly over the text. But in the end I found that a little confusing. But then I had this really great idea. Let me see if I have this. Oh, I do. That's great. I had this great idea. I'm going to describe a cover to you guys and then I'm going to show it to you. Okay? So there's a photograph on this cover, the photos of a table in a well-lit white room. Try to imagine this. On the table are several artifacts labeled with small tags. These items are a bedroom slipper, a hand mirror, a green veined cheese, a starling, a small square patch of lawn, a brass telescope, a gecko, a human skull. Not obvious at first is the faint shadow of the photographer cast over the table. So that's what the cover looks like. So it's designed as storytelling, I guess you'd say. I thought of these as sort of ecfrastic, which is another thing that Calvino was great at, describing works of art. And honestly, I begged and pleaded for them to go with this. And I actually wrote covers for each one of these books. But they don't look good on Amazon quote, unquote. So this is one of the great tragedies of my book design life. Anyway, so back to this, I realized that actually the impact was really coming from the shape. So I pulled the shape out and then I just started experimenting with drawing things on the shape. And all of a sudden I realized that actually that line, I drew this other line and there was this sort of sword thing happening. And that actually opened up a whole interesting thing, this idea of an image that's sort of a duble entendre. So you have the trunk of the tree that's a ladder. This is a story about a boy who climbs up into a tree and refuses to come down because he doesn't want to eat his snails and lives in the trees for the rest of his life. So the rest of this process was spent just coming up with these sort of visual duble entendres. There's another book and I know I'm running out of time, so I'm going to be very fast. There's another book called Cosmo Comics and in that book there is a story in which a fantastical story in which an Italian village, they go out on certain nights of the full moon in boats with ladders and they climb up to the moon. So I started to experiment with oceans and moons and so they all work this way. This one's called Difficult Loves, so the heart you know a single line well it could have been worse and then the whole set kind of works that way. So you know you have a pepper with a crown and anyway. So that's that and the one that I was mentioning before where he addresses you directly as the reader are about to read, we made a mirror foil for the book so you actually see yourself in it and invisible cities this is very hard to see but the city is actually pressed into the paper otherwise there's no ink for it. So these are my two books they came out about a year and a half, two years ago this is the one on reading, this is the one on my work. I also am finishing up this other book which is about sort of the history of book jackets and book covers and how they mean what they mean and I just finished this this year. So this is a novel and Ellen's right I wanted a Pizziotti for my brain. It was a very trying year and a half but look for that in the fall and thanks for having me. I went really long didn't I, I'm sorry and I think we're doing more trivia now is that right? Alright so we good? Alright so round two round two we are back to trivia and since we just spent some time talking about book covers round two is our book cover round so I'm going to ask five questions about famous book covers, the history of book covers like you were talking. Alright question number one earlier this year Puffin teamed up with Pantone to release 10 classic children's novels each with a cover consisting of what they called the perfect Pantone color for one point what very famous children's novel was represented by PimaMass 12 a bright yellow oh yeah yeah so the other types they would do was the secret garden was just a pink and Anne of Green Gables was green what very famous children's novel had a solid yellow cover. I will say it does have something to do with the plot of the book alright so take about 15 seconds I got one more hint one more hint alright well I will say that even if you have not read this book you've definitely seen the film alright here we go take your final guess that would be the wizard of Oz the wizard of Oz yes it was the yellow brick road of course alright question number two question number two you don't need a big design to make a big impact every single one of Malcolm Gladwell's books are basically this cover with one small image on it for the tipping point it's subtitled how little things can make a big difference what little thing that can make a big difference did I remove from this cover yeah what little thing that can make a big difference did I remove from this book cover alright you want a hint yes it was a hot book it was a big hot seller that's a way to give a hint on it it was a hot selling book mmm that doesn't help yeah it really blew up I think that's another solid clue you ready a match it was a single match yeah it's hot it blew up I like those hints alright number three we've already talked about David Sedaris a little bit but we have not talked about this one and for the cover to his book when you are engulfed in flames the designer just used a 1890 painting called skull of a skeleton with a burning cigarette for one point what very famous dutch painter gave us this painting and this book it's cover I'll say if you can name a dutch painter you're already halfway there yes very very very famous in 1890 1890 so they're not here today alright you ready that would be Van Gogh Vincent van Gogh alright believe it or not this is where things get really tough question number four question number four we're talking about modern book cover design up until the late 1800s book covers were not illustrated that started basically with this quarterly literary periodical with illustrated covers by Aubrey Beardsley for a very tough point yeah something I remember a little bit from art history and then for one point what late 1800s literary periodical had Aubrey Beardsley covers you want a hint it was called the blank book fill in that blank get a point I mean fill it incorrectly just give me any word the book book it would be good for this round it's a colorful name so now this is basically multiple choice what color book did Aubrey Beardsley design the covers for it's not black or white either I left the color out of it for this image alright you taking your guesses the yellow book the yellow book alright see they start easier and they get a little bit tougher as we go on here we got the final question in this round the final question in this round we're going to end with some real cover designs for some fictional books in the 2014 movie listen up Phillip, Jason Schwartzman and Jonathan Price play authors and throughout the film we see their book covers for one point what famous designer signed all of the book covers from listen up Phillip I think he's a friend of Peter's right so you just took a picture to send to him don't give my wife any questions oh okay yeah I guess if you know Peter's friends then that'll help alright take another second or two good on time here we go Teddy Blanks that was Teddy Blanks and that I believe brings us to the end number two we got one more round coming up hmm oh did anybody get all of them do not worry about not getting all of them we went through these questions earlier and Ellen did not get all of them and if Ellen's not going to get all of them then nobody's going to get all of them alright so I'll be back for round three in just a moment but now so much like much like Peter I too kind of dropped the ball on this whole design as storytelling theme but I think that's okay though because with music the analogy to storytelling is a little easier leap than let's say book covers so I want to talk a bit about the role of sound in design and experience but I think first it's Ellen introduced me as the sound designer for Trashbot and I wish I could say it was as simple as that because in my company that I work for a man-made music I work with a team of sound designers composers musicians you name it and so it just makes that question all the more complicated when my mom asks me what do I do for a living and I tell her I'm a creative director and a producer and so she says well what do you make and I don't really make anything I actually just I talk a lot and I get people to do the things that I ask them to do and then I judge them poorly or or well and then I say that's great let's get it in front of somebody else and then I don't take any responsibility so then it's also really complicated when I try and explain to my mom who I love very dearly what man-made actually does because man-made does so much more than just sound design although when I get into the meat and potatoes part of my presentation I want to talk really though about sound design products and experiences but man-made is a strategic music and sound studio we score entertainment and brand performances and once again that's one of these things that's really difficult for I think you know one thing my mom's like so would you make music yes but we do anything from if you see the AT&T globe up there we designed the bang bang bang bang that you hear at the end of commercials um it put my kids through preschool okay guys we've done work for the Alzheimer's Association in terms of developing music that talk about their mission if you go to see an IMAX movie the countdown sequence that you see there that's us we've designed that experience so we're about introducing you to that experience Hulu if you're watching Hulu Originals the three second thing at the beginning of Hulu Originals and at the end of Hulu Originals we design that we do a lot of work for NBC if you've watched the Super Bowl or Monday Night Football in NBC we score those experiences HBO if you watch feature presentations da da da da da da da da arrangements of that. Allstate, urine. That one? No. I could keep going. There's a lot, but we do brand and we do entertainment like that. For instance, Cartoon Network is up here. There's a theme park in Dubai. It's the biggest indoor theme park in the world. And we did the soundtrack for it just when you're outside, but you're actually inside. But when you're walking around all the exhibits, there's a crazy little sound, we call it the cartoonist sphere is playing the whole time. And so in that case, we're designing an experience. I could go on, but I'm going to move on to just one small thing I want to talk about today is the role that sound plays in design and experience. So I could talk about a million things I could talk about branding, I could talk about scoring the experience, but I just want to focus in on sound as an element in design. And so if there's one thing that you guys walk away with from what I talk about, it's as you interact with devices, products, objects, experiences, I want you to think about what is the sound telling me what role is sound playing in this experience. So it's kind of more for you guys to think about. It's more of an open-ended question. So as I thought deeper about this, I've ended up putting this question, what role does sound play in design and experience onto a spectrum? I'm going to go through three things. Once I got done doing it, I thought, well, maybe it's not a spectrum, maybe it's like a triangle or, I don't know. But I'm going to go with the spectrum right now, because that's what I ended up with. And the first role of sound is feedback. So if I'm pressing a button, I'm interacting physically with an object, or I'm doing an action, that object, that experience, it gives me sound back. The next role that I think about when I'm creating experiences is sound giving me messaging. Is it giving me information? In other words, I didn't necessarily push something to get a sound, and I need that sound for feedback, but instead, I'm getting some sort of information given to me. And the last role in this just an adorable little icon that we found is sometimes the role of sound is to, this is like designers and it's super intimidating. The idea of that sound can have the role of giving a product or an experienced character. And so I want to drill down into like this continuum, if you will, of the role that sound can play in design. So when I think about sound and feedback, I can go back to an early analog of something mechanical. So before anything digital would have been part of the experience, feedback sounds were just inherent in that experience. It's about the physical experience, and we all know that kind of satisfying feeling that you can get out of certain physical interactions, especially when a product is made well. But as technology advances, we still have these button presses, we still have clicks, we call them clicks, even when our mouse doesn't make that satisfying click. But the role of sound in this experience is still really important. It gives us feedback that my input has been received. It's working, the device is working. And that's really, once the physical part of it moves away, it's then about establishing the connection in that experience. It's real easy to have a connection to something like a typewriter or an old school mouse, but once that physical layer is gone, how do I establish connection? And even a step further would be how do I establish connection if I'm doing something like with Alexa, right? No, I'm no longer touching something. Now I'm using my voice and the use of sound to give feedback saying your input's been received is something that we have to think about when we're designing products that no longer have that physical interaction. So in messaging, I go back to, I think, analog, and I think about the idea of bells being a very early way of sound in an experience messaging something. So I think about bells, church bells, they're telling me somebody's married, somebody died, it's 12 o'clock. Messaging in terms of sound is always on the present in alarms. In New York we know this quite well. Ringtones, alerts, thank you. So obviously your phone is a font of alerts and that's just, I'm not trying to say it's bad or good, but in considering sound and design, the role of it giving us an alert message is something we have a lot of, we probably get too much. But I think most importantly with messaging we're conveying some sort of information. So when I think about the role of sound in a messaging context, a lot of times it's going to be coded with information. But I think this image is interesting because I've been told that all airplane cockpits, no matter where you are, whatever country, they make the same set of sounds. So if you take a pilot in Mexico, you take a pilot somewhere in Russia, their cockpits in a commercial airline are going to make the same sounds. Because it's so important that that information maintains is the same across the experience. So I think it continues to get more complicated though as I go into the concept of character. So the role that sound plays in an experience can it convey the idea of character? And if it's just a person or if I go back to the idea of what's the analog voice, obviously voice conveys a huge amount of character, information around character. I don't always need voice though. I think sound can give character in a very expressive way. If you think about R2-D2, BB-8, Wally, Eva, all those kind of like classic robots that we think of that are super expressive, sound has the ability to give that sort of expressiveness. And the idea of intelligence starts to come out too. And I think this is really interesting as we interact with products and devices and experiences that are more than just I'm pushing something, I'm getting a sound, or it's sending me some sort of message. Now I've got the challenge of using the sound to convey intelligence and along with that the idea of personality. So this is like a still from the movie Her where the personality of this product is only through sound. It's only through sound but it conveys something deeper than just intelligence or being expressive. It conveys this idea of personality. So this is more just what I want you to take away from this first little thing here is as you interact with your devices, as you interact with products, experiences, be it your car, your computer, your laptop, think about what does the sound tell me here? Is it just giving me a feedback input? Is it successful in that? Is sound giving me a message that's clear? And this is sort of an open-ended question. I don't think every sound that comes out of a product at us, every sound that is programmed to just come at us is telling me a clear message on what I should do or is sound trying to convey some kind of deeper character in the experience. So I'm going to share just a little bit of work that Manmade did and just in this just through this framework. This is just a small sample of some of the stuff that we've worked on. The first thing is going to come at you really loud here but it's Disney Now. The interface for their streaming platform is you might know Disney pulled off all their content from Netflix and Hulu and launched their own platform and so we scored that entire experience. What you're going to see is just sort of a mock-up of what it looks like when you first launched the app on let's say an Apple TV. You're going to select it. It's going to have a musical score in terms of kind of greeting you to the experience but then you're going to hear these I guess what I'd call them feedback sounds that connect you if you think about you're sitting on the couch with your Apple remote and you're clicking through these choices. We're giving you sounds that are giving you that feedback but it also provides like an emotional context for that experience and it has to be right for Disney because it's Disney. So I'd select the app. You can turn up a bit. It's just a real quick example of feedback sounds but they don't have to be they don't have to be called down for the sterile. It heightens the emotion as well. Next one's going to be totally forgetting what it is. Once I find the designer who made this PowerPoint. Stuff for AT&T. These are product agnostic. In other words they're just generic light and sonic things for this. This welcomes you to an AT&T product when I turn it on. This is like a combination of feedback. Start a task and it tells me it's completed. This would be messaging tell me that this is going to sleep. Right. So you can kind of feel like my product's turned off is going to sleep. It's sending me a message that's very clear. This next one is sort of a combination of messaging and character. Under NDA I can't tell you the name of that brand although you can you may you may be able to guess what that is. What was interesting about that project and this would be really brief on it was when we started developing sound for this robot we were like this has to be just dripping with character. It has to be BB-8 and a combination of BB-8 meets Mary Poppins. It's going to be your expressive and sprightly helper. And we actually over-rotate it. We gave the machine too much personality and we had to kind of dial it back to a place where it was messaging me something much simpler. Interesting place to be. Last thing I want to show you is just something that people don't think about in terms of where sound goes into design. Working with a car manufacturer. I'm never sure when the NDA ends on this. I'm just going to say it's a Japanese car manufacturer and we got to do the sound for when the car is reversing which is obviously very much a message there saying get out of the way. But then we also had to design this sound for when the car goes between zero it's an electric vehicle. When the car goes between zero and 30 kilometers per hour it has to make a sound by regulation because we all know that experience when a Prius rolls by. You don't you're not aware of it because it doesn't make the internal combustion sound. And so there's an opportunity right regulation is an opportunity for us to put a sound in there that's going to obviously send a message saying this car is there's presence here. But we have an opportunity to define kind of the sound and the soul and the character of the car as opposed to just hitting regulations. So here's a little sample of it. Of course we developed like 50 versions of that to try and convince the client that that was the right soul of the car and hopefully you'll hear that sound someday on the on the road in the next couple of years and don't get hit by it. So that's it that's all I got. Thanks guys. All right and here it is the final round we're going to play at Trivia and it's a game that we just were playing. I'm going to play some sounds and I'm not going to tell you the company. This time it's going to be worth points. So here we go round three. We're to start off. Originally this was part of a Spanish classical guitar piece but this noise is now better known as a musical trademark of what company. Let's do that again. Yeah that is a it's a strident noise. It's uh all right have we taken our gases. Have we taken our gases. Are we good. That is the Nokia ring tone the Nokia ring tone. All right question number two question number two. Since 1982 this sound has been rattling teeth and letting you know that what you're watching was worked on by what company. That's right if you listen to that if you hear that that means that what you're watching has been worked on by what company. Ready. That would be THX. That is they call it the deep sound. The THX deep sound. All right question number three. We're going to go analog on this one. This trademark sound can be heard just around 500 times every calendar year. Where. One more time. And that's the only analog sound on our list tonight. All right take a moment. Huh. We'll be we'll be real generous with the place you would be if you were hearing that sound. It is in New York City. Yeah you personally could have heard it. Maybe. All right have we taken our guess. One more time. One more time. All right you're ready. That is the New York Stock Exchange Bell. So if you're at the Stock Exchange that counts. If you're at Wall Street I'll give it to you too. If you wrote Manhattan not not close enough. You needed to be closer on that. All right. Here we go. Question number four. A question number four. This is a sound you've probably heard at the end of any of the 626 episodes of what television program which has aired since 1989. And I know it says what production company. You don't need the production company. Just name the show. Name the show. It's been on since 1989 at 626 episodes as of this week. They've got their hints. All right. I know they're supposed to get tougher as we go on. You want one more time. We'll give you one more time. All right you ready. The name of that show. 626 episodes since 1989. The Simpsons. That is the Gracie Films logo that plays after The Simpsons. And we're going to finish things off. Here we go. Question number five. 300 million people a month hear this sound while doing what. That's right. What company uses this trademark noise. I'll give it to you one more time just because it's fun to listen to. It's better than the bell. All right. We ready. That is the Skype ringtone. That is the Skype ringtone. And that was the end of round number three which means. Yeah. Which means you guys are geniuses and you got everything right. Right. No. That's why we are going to give our prizes to the top scores of the night. So take the next five seconds. Grade yourself up. Honestly. Honestly. This is what we call the reckoning. So take five seconds. Grade things up. And then we're going to give away some copies of Ellen's book. All right. We had 15 points up for grabs tonight. Yeah. Did anybody get 15 points? Did not expect that. How about 14 points? I know we're going to we're going to move this quickly. 13 points. 12 points. 12 points. Whoa. Very impressive. 12 points. PhD. All right. Here we go. How about 11 points? Did any team get 11 points? Oh, this was you ran away with this. What a loser. 10 points. Oh. 10 points. Nine points. There's a team with nine points. All right. All right. Eight points. Seven points. And oh, I think I think that's a what are we going to do for that? How many teams? One person on per team raise their hand. Four more books and all right. What a great evening. Thank you, everyone. This is super, super fun. I would have totally failed the trivia. So we have a little time that the shop is open upstairs. Wine is being served for a modest cost. There are copies of my books and Peter's books. The process lab which features the sound designs of man made music is open so you can try your hand at actually designing sounds for a robotic garbage picking up machine called trash bot. So check that out. And it's just so fun to have you all here and thank you, Susanna. This is all her idea. So we're really happy. Anyway, thank you to the great speakers and congratulations for winning prizes and just one note. So we're going to be wrapping up in here very quickly. So if you want to stay longer, we'd love to have you just head on upstairs. So the guest speakers are going to be heading upstairs too. So thanks so much and drinks are in the cafe through the bridge gallery through the shop.