 Hello. My name is Caroline Payson. I'm the Director of Education at Cooper Hewitt. I'm delighted to welcome you to what is now the fourth event of National Design Week. We've in this very room have just had hundreds of high school students who have had minute mentoring with all sorts of designers. You might have noticed the lingering soda cans and smell of popcorn as you came in. We've also had a series of programs in our design education center in Harlem for children, and hundreds of kids made all sorts of things with Todd Oldham on Saturday. We had drop-in and toddler sessions on Monday and Tuesday. As I mentioned, the Teen Design Fair this afternoon, the Winners panel tonight, and of course all of this leads up to our National Design Awards gala on Thursday. So we're thrilled that you're participating in tonight's festivity. I'd like to thank, just to start by sort of thanking the Cooper Hewitt crew, who in the midst of a federal shutdown have been working really hard on all these programs. And in light of our shutdown, I'd also like to thank Ricky Saul Warman, who because our intended moderator is a federal employee, was not allowed to participate. So with very short notice, Ricky has come to help us out. So thank you. We'd also like to thank Target for making numerous elements of national design possible. We'd like to thank PNG and Soda Stream for making the National Design Awards possible with additional support from Design Within Reach. We also thank the Corning Museum of Glass for the beautiful award trophies that will be given out on Thursday night. And to Bihans for getting the awards online through the National Design Awards gallery, I invite all of you to go on CooperHewitt.org and see that site. And our thanks also go to Smithsonian Magazine for getting people across the nation to voice their opinion on good design through the People's Design Award, and that will be announced on Thursday night as well. We also invite all of you to help us share your ideas on great design with those who couldn't be here tonight with our social media slide, which has not yet popped up. We'll get you that address. But I'd like to start the evening off by introducing Richard Saul Warman, who has been, was last year's winner of the Design Mind Award. Lifetime achievement. And for over 50 years, he's changed the way we see information and exchange ideas. He's written, designed, and published more than 83 books, including the Access Series, which redefined the way we travel. Since 1984, when he founded TED, he has continually redefined the conference experience with TED-MED, EG Conferences, the WW Conference, all of which celebrate and improvise conversations. With that, I'll turn it over to him. Are these live? Is that live? Okay. Could we put the house lights up? Can somebody hear me? So we're going to talk to you, and we can't see you. Okay. Can people a little bit, up a little bit more? Up a little bit more. It's okay. I know you don't like that for filming, but I don't care about that. Okay. And turn these lights down a little bit. No, I'm serious. I can't, I can't see. And the whole purpose of this is to make contact with people, honestly. The whole purpose of life is to talk to each other. I mean, it's from talking to each other. It's, I mean, it was a wonderful, nice seeing Paul again. I hadn't seen Paul in a long time. She didn't recognize me because I used to be a fat pig, and I took off a lot of weight, and we talked about that, and that's interesting. And I don't know the other three. I know that he works with the TED conference, so I know about the TED conference, but I've never met him before. And these two I've never met, but I asked for their cards, and they asked for him for his card, and they told me what they were doing. It was fascinating, and it's really, and that's what this is going to be about. We're going to talk among each other, and we will, if some people have something you want to ask somebody here, and it's a good question and not a speech. I don't know if there's some odd people in the audience who want to get up and give a speech, but we're not here to hear your speeches, but to ask good questions of us. That where you look at the word question, and you see that part of the word question which says quest. You really quest something. There really is something you want to learn. You want to ask that's bounded that they can under, you know, that makes something understandable. Not a broad thing of why are you a designer? Or, you know, what is the story of your life? It's not that kind of question. These are obviously remarkable people or they wouldn't have been here. And to tell you how remarkable these people are, the one that I know, she got a prize for one thing and she does something else completely, not completely different, somewhat different, which is of genius, even more remarkable. And I love people's hobbies, elaborate hobbies. In fact, when I did TED, I always thought of as an elaborate hobby, not as a life, and that we collect the lots of things we do. And I see in your work, your interest in the journey. Explain to the audience who you are, quickly, not your life, your name, and what you showed me and why you did it and try to describe it. Hi. We're supposed to hold these up because they don't hear them otherwise. Hello. I'm Tia Gordon. I'm the studio director for local projects. And we are here to represent interaction design. The piece that I showed earlier was our work for Gallery One for the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is basically a new way of trying to engage audiences with art. So instead of there being a database, instead of there being texts that people enter to call up information, we're trying to find a way for people to connect emotionally with what it is that they're looking for. So there's not clip that's going to play, but you could imagine if you were in front of a screen, and you made an expression of despair, and a Renaissance painting was pulled up in response, or you made an expression of anger, and a sculpture of a warrior was brought up in response. And so finding new ways for people to engage with the world around them, and eliminating the barrier of technology by using even better technology than we used before. How will we interpret that? Thanks. That you go into a museum that has an infinite amount of information. It's like we're all everybody's talking about big data. I mean, that's the common thing you see in the paper a lot about big data. What they're not talking about is big understanding. How to find yourself in that data, how to take a journey through that data, how to take a journey through the amazing collection at that Cleveland Museum in any museum and any place. And she has done that, or at least the beginning of it, of how to take slices through all the paintings in the museum, slices through one aspect of the painting, all the people in the painting, and their expressions and how you could organize that, how you could see patterns. And that's what creative people do. They find patterns, and they make patterns understandable. And I think it's quite remarkable. And I hope you take you have some program that tells you who these people are. You should Google them later if you haven't before. Because that really looked interesting. Paul, tell us about your hobby. And then tell us about your work. Well, I don't know if you can call it a hobby, because I make money at it. So I I made money from Ted, but it was my hobby. Okay, okay. I don't know how you do it. Richard's talking about these very large scale paintings of maps I've been making for about 20 years that are essentially useless information. I it's my own take on the information age. They're really abstract expressionist paintings in the sense that I use information to create a spirit of a place. And that's what the paintings look like. They're amazingly complex. I look like a crazy person for doing them. But they were actually an antidote to my design life, which is very much centered around identity and has lots of very long boring meetings and corporations. And then going up to the country and painting mindless information on walls was very a very good antidote to that life. I love maps. How many people here? This is not a test. Let's just curious. How many people love maps in this room? It's a surprising number of people who love maps. And these are amazing paintings meaning up of words that are the places or the numbers of the population. They're exquisite. And they're large. And I have a little acronym for map, which is MAP, mankind's ability to perceive. And I look at everything as a map. The organization of all information is a map. The things that you're doing are maps of all faces, maps of all the connections and pattern making between the pictures. What I don't think you know is my father invented a device called stereo templates, which corrected the distortion in the lenses in aerial photography. So that everything that was Google Maps is probably based on the fact that he made that invention because it corrected a distortion so you could do a blow up and read the image. And he taught me as a child that maps are essentially distorted because the camera can never function properly. So it's always open to interpretation. And that was sort of the basis of beginning to do the paintings because it was my own narrative as opposed to the cameras. But they're still narratives. That leads us to the next two people here. One, a little bit of trivia that he doesn't know, I'm sure, is that Google Earth was when Sergey and Larry came to TED and they introduced Google many years ago. I introduced them to the people who invented keyhole. They bought keyhole and that's what Google Earth is. But you told me about a camera. And it's not a camera you invented but you've housed. And you know more about the camera than anybody else here in the room. And it would be interesting to know about the camera. I didn't understand what you said. But if you could make it understandable, and then what was your approach to as an architect shelters all of man's activities, how did you shelter the activities of this new adventure? So is that a reasonable question? It's very easy and simple. Yeah, so start by a history of photon and start from there. So my name is Gadi and a few years back I was asked by an inventor named Ren Ang to help him. Ren Ang? How do you spell it? N-G. Oh, just that? Well, how would that everybody know that? And Ren done a phenomenal postdoc in Stanford and actually created a new imaging theory. It's basically a theory that uses many, many lenses to capture an image and effectively creating rather than a pixel map of the universe, it's more akin to a variety of vectors. Let's say if you look around and pick the quite many lights we have here, each one of them creates rays and these rays of lights are actually bouncing off our clothes and that's the reason why my jacket is green. So imagine an imaging device that takes all these points and actually gets another dimension to them, which is the direction they're coming from. And if we can create and capture all these imaging data together, we can in theory recreate an image, a single image. For instance, we can play with parallax. I think everyone could play a little bit with parallax by switching their eyes through a peephole or refocus an image. So he started a company that was then called Refocus. And the big task was actually to basically squeeze that lab in Stanford into a consumer device. And we helped them create a very teeny camera. It's about say five inches long by inch and a half square. And the interesting thing for me in this whole project that the very first meeting, the very first cup of coffee we had together, the image that came to light was this gesture, this human gesture. And I just had it about an hour and a half ago, one of the high school kids saw it and said, hey, that's like a kaleidoscope. Yes, it is like a kaleidoscope. And this is a camera that actually uses a completely different gesture than typical cameras. These cameras that, for instance, you using now, it's a history of 150 years. And we wanted something completely new. And if you look at how we take images today, through an iPhone, we basically do that. We take a distance from the iPhone. And we wanted to take that gesture plus the kaleidoscope. And that's how the lightrope camera came through. I need to know more, but not right now. Because I still don't quite understand it. Most things we don't understand. In the beginning of this program, they thanked Target. And Target is a very charitable company. I have nothing to do with Target. But a few years ago, I looked at the list of which companies in America gave the most to charity. This is not last year's list. Which companies gave the most to charity? And there's this long list. And then which were the most charitable companies? That sounds like almost the same question. It's a completely different question. Which one is the most charitable based on their sales, their profits, which gives the biggest percentage to to charity? Which is the most charitable company? And at that time, a few years ago, it was Target. But they're way down the list, because they're not as big a company as some other companies, as giving the most to charity. That's just an example of how to really in there is a question. This is really a good question. And seeing the difference when you ask a question, when people come into these museums and ask a question of what they want to see and how they want it organized, it really affects things. Ted is about questions. Ted X is about questions. It's about people opening up themselves to talk to somebody. It's not about the speakers, by the way, I know you focus on the speakers, it's not about the speakers. It's really about the audience meeting each other. And what really came out, I ran Ted for 18 years. And Chris for less, right? Because it's the 30th anniversary next February 23rd, 30 years. And what it changed in people's lives was they met people that didn't do what they did. They did something else. And they stretched into that. They morphed into that and found out a different pattern and journey in their life. And he's responsible for continuing that Ted. He's been there since 2008, which means he's an old timer. Tell us about what you do. Sure. My name is Mike Femia. I'm the design director at Ted. And basically, I think about all of the different things that Ted is doing. We run a conference, we release free talks from this conference online. We run a program of local community organized events called TEDx. We do many other things beyond that. And I think about that whole visual identity and how to keep those things each feeling special in terms of the unique aspect of them, because they are quite different, but make sure that they feel like Ted, for lack of a better way of saying it. We want them all to feel like Ted. And that's a quick way of saying what I do. Does anybody have a question for each other here? Nothing, nothing. Actually, I had a I had a question for Paula earlier is how to manage a company like Microsoft to do the right thing eventually. And I think it's an amazing achievement. Is that a question or a statement? It's a statement half my time trying to convince people to do the right thing and you managed to take a company that has been known to be nearly anti design and doing something really radical in terms of their appearance. For those of you in the audience who don't know me, I'm a partner in a design firm called Pentagram. And we're a group of independent minded designers and we don't operate very much like other design firms and that we don't employ strategists and we make direct relationships with our, our clients and try to persuade them through making analogies or teaching them or entertaining them or actually getting them to that if there is a willing partner, you can do it. It's rare. But I mean, I think that that's what we all want to have happen is to is to look at things that that could be better or could be first or or could make a difference and try to get that to happen. And that's that's really, really hard work because it's a lot of meeting and a lot of persuasion, which is why I paint big, giant, complicated maps. Are there some questions out there that you'd like to ask any of us? Come on, come on, you all came here. You have some preconception about what we've said already. Yes, ma'am. But stand up and yell it out because there's no mic in your hand. Oh, okay. Can I answer that? Please. I created it. Yeah, absolutely. Then you can take it someplace. Okay. Well, my name is not Ted. And people used to think my name was Ted. And the whole basis of Ted was it occurred to me that the only interesting people were people who were involved in technology, entertainment and design. And that I saw a pattern in 1984, before most of you were born, of the convergence of those three disciplines. Now it's old news. I mean, of course, we know they're one discipline in many ways, and many that they depend on each other. But it was news then. And the first one I did, nobody knew what it was about, and I lost money. And then it was a very good conference and people came. And they came because, well, see if this affects you. The other day, I was thinking about innovation, and we're all doing innovation of one sort or another. And I thought, when you go into San Francisco, there's a billboard that says this is the innovative city. And car companies call themselves innovative. And they think they're innovative because they put a camera facing backwards so you can see who you're running over or something. And I was thinking, how do people innovate? And one of the ways that I think innovation occurs, let's say the Bauhaus and Ted is they subtracted things. Sometimes like the iPhone, they add things. Lots of different technologies added together. So addition and subtraction are ways of I think partly what I think there's a pattern in the camera you're talking about of subtraction, of trying to get down to the essential aspects of something rather than add things on. And Ted, I got rid of everything that I hated in conferences, which were white men in suits on panels, lecterns, long introductions, so forth and so on. I got rid of the stuff that bore me in conferences. And it was innovation by stripping it down to the essence of what it is. I'm not sure it's stripping down. For me, it's more about trying to find a point of clarity. It's more assembling and more coherent and simple or clear thing, if you wish. So it's not necessarily extracting as curating and putting together in some kind of a coherent way. What do you think? What does Ted mean to you? Sure, I mean, yeah, to me, I gave away teddy bears. We still have them in the office. They're dusty. Yeah, Ted is technology, entertainment and design. And I think those core, you know, and now if you go on the website and you look at the talks, there's there's all kinds of stuff on there. And so it's definitely expanded beyond those core areas. But I do feel like those are still sort of strong bases that you can actually group a lot of other talks around. And so people, I think, do sort of think of that as general areas to speak to or to try to relate their work to in some ways. So if there's someone that's speaking about biology, they might think of it in terms of how their work in biology tries to think about technology, maybe tries to mimic the way biology does something to create a finish on a product that has certain properties. So I do think that the fundamental idea of technology, entertainment, design, though Ted has grown in terms of topics, it does still resonate and still a core feeling in all the talks. More questions. Yes, sir. Speak it out loud, though, so we can hear it. National Design Awards. Do the National Design Awards feel like a barometer of a particular moment when you, you know, I think people think about who are the nominees and who gets chosen. Does there is there any unifying thread or is there any particular moment that it seems to reflect? The choice of the people sitting here and in the past, does it represent some barometer of taste or or politics or power or something in our society? I'll take that one. So we went for interaction design and I like to joke that with Jake Barton, who's the founder of the firm that he's the Merrill Streep of the National Design Awards that he's been nominated for several times and we've never actually won. And I'm wondering if the year that we won is the year that the idea of touch technology has become ubiquitous, that it's in all of our hands. And now we have to start thinking about that as a new way of designing a simplicity around it, where it used to be a novelty, interaction design five years ago. My parents still don't know what I do for a living. So but interaction design as a concept is now something that people are starting to really grasp. And it has to do with technology. And I think that's relevant. And that's the barometer for us that everyone now has a smartphone. iPads are being used in hospitals are being used in gas stations. It's not a mystery anymore. And I think now that we have that in front of us, we have to now accept it, and then build above it, as you were saying, sort of to elevate and a dish add or subtract from the basis. Like Jake Barton, I've been a bridesmaid about a million times here. So so you know, I think that there's there's no science to it. I think that there are full that do interesting and terrific things and that they come to the fore and the nominations and that when the stars are aligned, the you know, the balls line up and the cash comes out or whatever you want to put it's like a slot machine really, with the right, the right mix. But I don't think I don't I wouldn't read it to into it too much. Since I got the lifetime achievement award last year, and Jim Wines who got it this year is back there. I think I applied several times. And I mean, you get s to apply, you get nominated, then you apply and then you lose. And that's the procedure. So I only warm up upon rejection. And I think after a certain point, my my abrasiveness made them numb, and they gave me the word. I wouldn't like to think about it as a bunch of rejects that just got it this year. I, you know, there was some discussion in By the way, it's really an honor when you get it. It feels really good. Really, I'm not making light of it at all. I mean, it was terrific. Really loved it. I was leading to that that it's actually was an amazing moment at the White House with the First Lady talking about it. And the discussion I think I had with few of the winners was that there was some thread of I wouldn't call it social interaction with design as much as the level or that there's some, I think, some democratization, if you wish, in the way design interact with the greater society that comes across a lot of the work of the winners this year. And my studio is called New Deal Design for a reason. And, you know, we could go each one of us will probably have some small part in getting design somewhat out of we call it maybe somewhat of an ivory tower and getting more connected to, you know, social and kind of the broader audience in society. I loved what you were saying about the fact that technology is a given now. And so it's no longer interesting, and that we need to utilize it in a much more interesting way. And so we want it to recede. We don't want to think about it. And I mean, I see that in the light show, which I've used many times in the, you know, the interface recedes the there is a simplicity to it. And so it does seem like there's such mind boggling technology happening within the camera. But in terms of the user interaction, it's so simple. And so I do I mean, saying that simplicity is a thing is sort of simple. But I do feel like there is a moment where everybody has the iPhone or a fancy, amazing, essentially super computer in their hand. And it's like, okay, well, now what? And so that's why it's a challenge for people who create hardware or software products or designers to, to move beyond the fact that, yeah, it's shiny, and it has a big screen, like who cares? Let's think about what's important here. So any other questions back there? Somebody's going to run up to you with a mic. So wait a second. Welcome. I just wondered, since I interviewed for a lot of things and I got this question all the time of, do you live in breath design? And I always kind of saw it. That was really boring of an idea to stick to all the time. How often you guys try and get out of, as someone up there said, the ivory tower, and just kind of go and see what everything else is. Well, I think we live life, you know, that that it's not, it's not like you live and breathe design. It's that that design is essentially planning, and that you can, you can be planning a city, you could be planning three lines of typography on a book jacket, you could be planning to Rob Tiffany's, you could be planning all kinds of things. I think it's really the act of integrating ideas into society in some way, you know, that that's what that is. And I think that that that is a 24 hour occupation, because it has to do with who you are. It has to do with how you sort of operate and move and think about things. It doesn't mean that you're actively doing something all the time, but that your mind's functioning that way. I think what's really radical was in 1984, the idea of tying together technology, entertainment and design, because they seemed very diverse. It seemed like stuff you wouldn't put in a put in a bag together. And and when Ricky did that, it was the beginning of understanding that all things, whether they're entertainment or they're things that are, are scientific or technological are planned, and that they they they relate to each other in a very specific way. It really may design become important. The big design problem is designing your life. And I think all the people here have, as I think we're design enters us is by designing your life. If you can, when people ask me, what do you want out of life? And I want to have interesting days. I'm 78 years old, gonna be 79 pretty soon. And I just still want to have interesting days. And I try to design them, not so they're like the day before, but just to have interesting days. Lucan, some of you know who Lucan is, he's my mentor, long dead, but still my mentor. And I think of him every day. In fact, I'm writing an introduction to a book on one of his buildings right now. And when I was just before shortly before he died, we flew out to the West Coast together. And I, I was worried because I am an architect. And I was doing lots of other things. I was doing had already done seven or eight books. And they were on different subjects. And I was interested in so many different things, particularly maps. I was really interested in cartography. And I was worried that Lou would think that I had lost the cause I had left architecture. And I asked him, was it okay to do all these different things? And I think his answer answers your question. It's an odd answer. But he will pause for a minute. And he will not a minute, but 30 seconds, which is a long time to pause, actually. And he said, Ricky, he said, even when I get a haircut, I'm an architect. And he was saying that he's always that he's always an architect. And no matter what you do, you are a designer. And in his case, architect. When I participated in the teen design fair in Washington, DC recently, several of the kids asked me about design thinking. You know, and this was a term that they had heard of and they wanted to basically know what it meant or what it meant to me. And I think I had the same reaction to what you're saying, which is, for people that think in this way, it's just called thinking. It's just doing the things thinking planning. It's so interesting that it's it can be a very simple process of just laying out things in a clear way, and having no biases in in terms of how you want to approach them. Going into different things, each one of these people here have an interesting life. I mean, and I'm fascinated with what they do. And many of us have not come from parents that have as interesting a life. One side of my family were kosher butchers, very poor. And the other side made cigars. And I think my life is more interesting and has been more interesting. And and I'm fascinated with these four people. I mean, there's a you can you talk to people in design and they can think of the thing that's next that's outside of what they're doing of the connective tissue between something. You know, I'm convinced when I finally find out what you've just housed about this camera, I will think of something else. And I still understand a goddamn thing of what you said. But I think it's there or you wouldn't be so seriously passionate about it. Holler on the kosher butcher background, we can talk about that. In terms of a lineage, maybe there's something about butchers and design that we can put together. But something just in order, exactly, deconstruction, in honor of where we are in the fact that we're in a design school and design program. And I'm a graduate of Parsons. So hollered Parsons as well. But something that I think is interesting about design, mind design thinking. And what I'm hearing here is that through design, you learn how to sequence. And I think that's something that's really critical. And that's what I find when I'm in conversations with people that are not in this field that they don't think in that method, they have an idea. But the idea of how to execute that idea sort of vague to them. And I think that's something that you can cultivate as a designer. And as someone who's studying design, and it's really important to be able to do to succeed in life and in this industry. How many people in this room are designers or in allied fields or have an identity with? Oh, well, that's amazing. So we're talking to the converted here. This is like a meeting. Yes, sir, back there. Well, we're going to get the mic, the mic, the mic, we're trying to be good about this. It also delays things. There we go. Hi. I have a question for all of you. Obviously, congratulations on winning. It's an amazing award. Do you think it's going to change the way that you approach your work? This next year, this coming year? And does it give you the authority to perhaps push projects or push clients into a direction that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to do? I mean, what does it mean to you other than just winning the award? I guess is the question might be too early to know, but what do you think? What's your fantasy? Well, I think my question or rather my answer is a little maybe different from the others, because a big part of what Ted does is it it reacts to what users want. So if they're users of Ted.com, many of our largest programs have been created as a result of our users asking for them. And so I think it's a little bit different for us in terms of, you know, a big part of what we do is listening to the community. So I don't think that it necessarily applies for us, but it certainly makes us feel like we're heading in the right direction and we're going to strive to keep moving there. I want to jump in here. A lot of what I'm doing, and I guess a lot of what designers in general doing is trying to piece together one solution that has a lot of facets of problems that each one of these problems have an expert and we are kind of the non experts. Maybe there is some ounce of authority that will be added to something that we say against these experts. In many cases, we have conflicts with, you know, just each one of these vertical expertise. And maybe that body of work, if you wish that we represent and was honored by Smithsonian will actually add to our ability to push forward ideas that are maybe a little bit more radical, maybe a little bit more progressive and so on. It's it's a big deal that the United States government honors design. I mean, that really this word matters for that reason. And it is a tremendous honor. And it's it's great to to win it. On the other hand, work and practice or work and practice and that one pursues what they do separate from the accolade. If the accolade is a seal of approval that helps the practice, that's fantastic. But it still means the next day is the next day and the problems and one confronts in trying to make things happen are still going to be there. And and it's it's terrific that the United States government now says designs important to our society because there was a time when they didn't. And that's fantastic. It is a tremendous honor. And we're so pleased to have received this award. And I agree that it is to take what Paula said, it's about it. We still have work to do after this conference is over. And after this panel is over tonight, even probably. But I'm pleased that hopefully this will present design to a wider audience in the United States, and allow people who had previously not allowed that as an avenue for their exploration to become something that's known to them. And the different avenues that you can take even within that how design manifests across disciplines. I'm going to tell you a little bit of history because it goes on what you've said in 1973. Now that gets a long time ago. There was a single thing happened and it never was repeated was called the first federal design assembly. I did it. I was chairman of it with with Ivan Chimayev with Ivan, a great designer Ivan Chimayev and a great maker of collages too. He has a hobby, right? And his or hers are better. Ivan, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. So we've haltedly in this country tried to through the National Endowment for the Arts that had a design awards program that was very beneficial, it's really quite beneficial for a while. It gave C grants of 15,000, $10,000 to people, which was quite a bit more money than I mean, you could actually do a little project with that. And they gave you entered your ideas and they had juries and they seated the country with lots of little ideas, lots of them. And then they decided and Nixon was president then they decided to have a first federal design assembly and they asked Ivan and myself to to chair it. And we did a book called Design Matters. You just that came up one of the two of you. And Ralph Kaplan was involved in writing that book. And then it died. And now it has a rebirth and it's a more solid rebirth with the Cooper Hewitt Museum. And this has been going on for a while. And I think, as Paula said, it's very important that the federal government, a luncheon with the first lady, the whole misogast, the whole craziness of it of doing all this stuff is very important. And it getting teenagers both here and in Washington to get out of school for a day and have some soda and talk to some designers, it probably will change a few lives. And that's the beginning. And all things you do are about beginnings. So it is important. Speaking of beginnings, I'm a student here at Parsons now. I'm just curious to learn about your beginnings and how you got to the positions you're now. So I graduated Parsons 13 years ago. And I, at the time, it's embarrassing to say so I was the first year that they ever had a media program. And it wasn't even matriculated because they didn't know what it was. This was before iPhones. This was before cell phones. So I was designing for the idea of communicating a concept. And so I studied graphic design, I studied illustration, I studied communication design. And it was a combination of those ideas that enabled me to focus my desire to move towards that of educational media. So I had a one way street to Sesame Street, which is where I thought I was going to go. Of course, all your paths lead to other roads. And so I found myself actually at the American Museum of Natural History, where I was there for seven years in their exhibition department. And that was an amazing opportunity of a lifetime because it allowed me to understand new ways of communicating science to a general public through design. And so I think that was a huge neural connection for me of when I was using design to explain science, something that was clearly not the strength, otherwise I would be a scientist. But I was instead a designer who was using the keys and the tools in front of me to explain much more complicated topics. And that was the opening window for me. I see that in your work today. That's interesting. Paula. I graduated Tyler School of Art as a design major in the 70s and went to work in the music business. And I used to art direct record covers. I made lots of them. I made about 150 a year. I was the senior art director at CBS Records for about 10 years. And it was an amazing experience. They were 12 by 12 then, not little things on your iPod yet. If you download a lot of jazz albums or Charles Mingus, the images I made in 1973, 1974 still come up. It's amazing. They tell you the graphic design is ephemeral. And work I did 40 years ago is still around. So that was sort of great. I learned about a relationship with the public because I was designing for popular culture. And I think that where you start has a lot to do with where you go. For example, at Pentagram, we do lots of work for cultural organizations. And my work is largely connected to the entertainment industry still. You know, whether it's theater or it's theatrical in spirit, it's it's something that I feel natural about because I was doing it back in the day. I was a record cover designer. And so much of my identity work has been really based on trying to make the public enjoy and understand things that are sometimes complicated, things that sometimes seem strange, and making things accept accessible to people. And that's what I've done always really. She was the queen of record color covers. And there was no king. She really she controlled that space. They were fantastic. So I actually grew up in an architectural studio, basically my parents, both of them are architects. And I since I was a kid, basically ran around and played with them, all sorts of phones and phones and so on and decided absolutely not to be an architect. So I was just asked by the kids earlier, when I knew about industrial design. So through my high school years, I was pretty much a geek. And only after high school, I grew up in Israel. So I went to the army as well. And around 22, I had a girlfriend who had a roommate who was an industrial designer. And that clicked immediately. So I wanted to do that. So I went to school in Jerusalem. And after that, I worked in a company that did imaging. Really love dealing with graphics image and so on. And from there, I got to frog design in the early 90s. And I worked with Hartmut Esslinger, something like eight years, seven, eight years. And then I decided to start my own studio because I didn't want to be part of a large design company. And I was still very much enamored with objects. It was the end of the 90s. And everything was supposed to be software and I did industrial design was supposed to be dead, which I never thought it died. And that's how I started New Deal design and really focused on creating objects in somewhat kind of an old traditional craftsmanship type of methodology. I studied film production, film theory. And then so when I graduated, I went to work for a film studio, except I worked in photography. And so I was thinking about how to convey the emotion of a film in a single, you know, still frame. And then when I moved on from that, I worked for in freelance in terms of book, book photo editing and book editing. So again, it was about storytelling. And then when I landed at Ted, you know, one of our main resources is a pretty amazing photography library going back of speakers through the years. And it really just occurred to me that we have a Ted talk, which is a video. And we have a still frame of that person giving that talk. And so it just seemed to me that that was such there was such potential in that single frame to try to transmit some small bit of what a speaker is trying to say. And so I started thinking of photography, not just as photography, which tends to be just its own thing, but in terms of a design element, in terms of a narrative, and how it can help what we're doing on Ted. And so I started bringing photography more into our overall visual language. And then started thinking about, you know, the whole the whole thing in terms of every way we were trying to communicate visually. So that's my background. I'm an architect. And there's connections between everything, because you work for CBS. And you know, my partner was Frank Stanton, who was the CEO of CBS when I did a whole series of guidebooks. And I just was interested in I failed a lot. I was fired from most of my jobs in my life. And I was fired when I was Dean of a school. I sort of failed sideways my whole life. And when I realized I was totally unemployable. And and I was I didn't have any money. I mean, really was destitute at 45. I had always done like gatherings. And I wasn't shy. And I started doing lots of other things. So I had a number of my books. There's a whole series of books on medical things. I think there's an element in design where you sell I think the good designers, they don't sell their expertise. Most of our society is based on and I gave a the graduate the graduation at Harvard this year at the Graduate School of Design. That's not the big speech to the whole university Oprah gave that. But I just gave it to the to the Graduate School of Design. And my speech then was saying that because there was parents and kids in the room that we've all been taught as I think we were taught somehow that you start as a private and you end up as a general. You start in the mailroom and you end up as head of the studio that there's a vertical silo in in many of our lives. I mean which we were taught that should be. And I think for more interesting people the silo has fallen over. And certainly for me it fell over. And and I think there's an element behind some of what is said not everybody here is that you sell your ignorance rather than your expertise. That you sell what you don't know about something and you want to learn about it. And what you produce for that museum I think is your journey from not knowing to knowing. And I think what you do is your journey from not knowing to knowing. I think you come at this these inventions which you really don't fucking understand in the beginning and you try to you try to put something around them and that makes sense to you. You start what you're doing from zero. That's the excitement. And that's the opposite of much of society of trying to sell your instead of your expertise so your ignorance and your desire to learn. And I think that's what all these people have in common. And that's what makes it interesting. I think I see that in what they in their work. You can argue with me. I totally agree. That's the thing is I'm going back to some comments about design thinking earlier. I think that's something about design thinking that's a misnomer because of what you just said. I'm not sure we are thinking coherently all the time we stumble we have a lot of serendipity in what we do and but we do have intuition. And I think the intuition is the key missing part. So I think it's discussion should be more about the role of intuition rather than the role of thinking. Actually I had done a Ted talk that is about this which is the difference between what's serious and what's solemn and what you know is solemn because you already know how to do it. And what's serious is when you're messing around when you're either being arrogant or obstinate or stupid. That can be very serious because you have accidents and accidents are interesting. That's failing up. It's such a good talk. You should watch it if you haven't seen it. I wish I was asked to give a Ted talk but I've never been asked to give a Ted talk. So there's no Ted talks from me. Hi. What is something that you're particularly proud of in your career. It can be an idea or a concept that wasn't realized. I'm a product something that you really care about. You're proud that you did. Thank you. Wow. Yeah. That's a great question. I have a hard time picking favorites in anything. Movies, music, things like that. But I would say that one thing that I'm proud of is the fact that if you go like this people might say hey that's a Ted talk. And it's kind of a funny thing but there's certainly sort of a form. I think there was even a blog once that put giant hamburgers in people's hands. But I guess that's a funny way of saying I'm proud of bringing visuals to a medium that's primarily about a person standing, speaking either in a room or on video. I'm proud to think about the visual way to communicate what's usually a very complex idea in a simple bite. I'm proud of actually being able to touch people's life through these objects that I make. And I had this really touching moment when I left the White House lunch and one of the officers that is, you know, they work around there. It's kind of their social thing. And she walked to me and said that her mom lost 64 pounds due to Fitbit, which is another thing that we worked on. And she was really worried about her mom's health and how she couldn't lose weight in any other way. And this thing worked for her. And she was really emotional and really got me choked up too. And that's for me very, very important. So it's not a single thing that I've done. But it's these moments of connecting with people and what we've done and seeing that it actually makes some difference in their life. And that's for me the most important. When I was in high school, I had my art teacher, Mr. Tucker, had something called picture of the week. And if you got to have picture of the week, it meant that your picture hung outside the art room for everybody to see. And it's like the happiest moment of my life is when I first had a picture of the week. And all I want to have are pictures of the week every week. That's all I can say. I won't focus on product. I'll focus on process. I'm proudest of the fact that, I mean, all the work that you see on Local Projects' website, all of our work that's in museums is not my work. It's the work of an incredible studio of the most talented people I've ever met in my entire life. And they are so dedicated and collaborative. And I think that that's a skill that maybe is suppressed when you're being trained. It's all about your vision and pushing that through. But work that's truly great is a benefit of other people reviewing and then amending your thought process to make it that one step better. And I think what I'm proud of is that every day I get to work with people who are, and this is so cliche, but they are dedicated to a better solution and a better design. And no one is looking for an easy solution. We're looking for the better one. Is this okay? So my question is about the museum and interactivity. Do you see it very much as a bidirectional process? Are you acquiring information and learning from your visitors? To answer that question, I would maybe veer away from the Cleveland Museum of Art and look at a different museum that we've been working on, which will open next year, which is the National September 11th Memorial Museum. And that's a completely different approach in that 9-11 was the most mediated event, tragic event in our nation's recent history. And so the entire museum is based on the premise that we are able to learn from the event through the collection of stories that are told by people who live through it. So anyone that was in New York, anyone that was anywhere in the world that heard of this event and that spoke about this event and then that learned about it as it unfolded is how we tell the story. So there's not a larger narrative or curatorial or God voice happening in this institution. Instead, you learn from listening to oral histories that are compiled and directed to help you understand a formation of the day's events, the year's events, and then the decade events that have followed. So in that instance, we are using the visitor to reverse the flow of information back to other visitors. And I think that that's an exceptional new place to go. It's very different than the comments on blogs. It's very different than the other way that digital detritus can kind of become a bad thing. It's using voices to respond and to help you learn about your own story as opposed to having it be just filter. Our hour is up. I think it's an hour. One more question. Somebody's waving frantically. Lucky, lucky last question. Wow. This better be a good one. I'm gonna stand up and ask this one. Actually, I'll come a bit closer maybe. This is not going to be a good one. It could. It could. You'd never know, actually. I know. Ladies and gentlemen, I thought I'd just come up here and ask you personally. How do you decide what to do with your time? How do you decide what problems to solve as designers? And in an ideal world, what problems would you be solving if money wasn't, in fact, an issue? Well, that's it. Okay. Does anybody want to try to answer that? You can differ. Do you want to answer that? No. Well, let me just say that we're all so different. Many of us work. Let's take Paula. She works when, for some reason, a company asks her to solve a problem. And so she has clients. A lot of people have clients. They may be proactively trying to get the clients they want you by publicizing themselves or publicizing other work they've done, but they basically have a client they work for. Now, when she does her painting, she doesn't have a client. You have a client when somebody asks you to design things and you work for a non-profit corporation, but you have a job. The opposite of that is being, not having, having to wake up every morning and decide what I want to do. I don't have any clients. I either invent something, think of something, or I don't. And so there's such a wide range of, in answering that question. And I don't think, this seems specious, but I don't think money is part of it. I don't think money is part of the issue. It is, to some degree. What I was going to say is I was wrong in saying that. Let me qualify. There are two aspects to that. I actually want to hit. First, the one thing I want to say, and it's actually related to the kids earlier being here, talented people deserve good money. So the whole phenomenon of talent with people doing things for free, I think is actually immoral. So this is number one. Number two, in my profession, which is more about dealing with industrial processes and all that, you really need money in order to make a change. So whether it's a medical device or whether it's a new computer or any other invention, at the end of the day it ends up being millions of dollars of a lot of people that make it better and eventually deliver it. By the way, the guys who make the iPhones are also supposed to be paid well. So we should tone down a little bit about the discussions about the immateriality of money. So that's... I actually disagree and I love making money. So I was form-making money. But I think that the question was really about, you know, how do you decide what you're going to pursue? And that pursuit is, I think, inherently personal. It's driven by your own prejudices and interests and opportunities as they come. For example, I spend the past four years of my life going down to City Hall once a week to be on the Design Commission because I got to learn how cities function and I could get involved in the infrastructure of New York to a degree and be able to learn and change my other work largely because of that experience of being involved in government. It wasn't a financial decision. It was something I was really genuinely interested in. That you do these things because you want to and because they help you grow and that when you do that, you do good things, you put good things back out into society, which is the whole point. I mean, that's what the fun is. And that money is kind of a byproduct. I mean, Ricky's right in saying, okay, you have clients and the client has a specific relationship and I don't get paid to work for the city and I get paid by Microsoft and they balance each other out and that's very nice. But that's just getting your life in order so you can survive and buy really good shoes and those sorts of things that really matter. But I think that that the choices are something that come from within you and that's why everybody's inherently different because we all make different choices. I think it's really different. I've never I've made money, but I've never tried to make money. I really feel I'm Tom Sawyer and people pay me to paint the fence. I think sort of it's sort of a scam. I don't try to make money, but I've made money. It's not it's nothing. It's not something I don't think about. I thought about not having it at all, but it didn't make me change my life to make it. So but everybody here is telling their truth. I'll give we'll end with one luke on story. When I was flying the same flight when I was flying with him out to the West Coast. I was doing I had done the first book on him when I was 26. And then I was working on another book before he died, which I continued after he died, which was originally going to be just stories about him from people who knew him. It later turned into a different book, which that was a very small part of. And most of the book was all his writings and all his speeches. But as I was collecting stories about him, some of the people didn't have nice things to say or some of them didn't like him for one reason or another or building or had some criticism or whatever. It wasn't all. It wasn't puffy. And I said to Lou, because he was my life, I said, some of the things are going to be in there and I don't know. I'm having a hard time because I love you so much. And I mean, he was my life. And he had one of his pauses again. And he said, well, everything that any person says is the truth. It's their truth might not be factual, but it's their truth. And I'll be really interested to hear what they have to say. And I think tonight, everybody's told their truth. And in that one last question of the gentleman who sort of got up and came to the stage and asked us that we're that one, we're going to have many divisive ways of answering that of how you choose what you're going to do the next day, how you what what money is in your life, what it isn't what power gives you buying shoes, you know, the silly thing of buying shoes or their nice shoes. Are they red inside that heel? Oh, my God. Thank you very much, everybody.