 and welcome to Design Within Reach, San Francisco. My name is John Edelman, I'm the CEO of Design Within Reach and we are beyond happy to be hoping, hosting the second annual Coupillure National Design Awards West Coast event. As I look around the room at the people who have come to this event, to the people that will speak tonight, I and my entire crew always sit here humbled at the enthusiasm, at the talent, and at the general mood of the crowd. You're a crowd of learners, a crowd that is able to be inspired by our message and for us there's no greater crowd to be in front of on the planet. We love being here, we're honored to have you and we hope we do this for many more years to come and with that I introduce Caroline to tell you about the night. Wow, look at this crowd. Hello, hello. Cooper Hewitt is America's Design Museum and the National Design Awards are our most visible education program. So we've had several events this week and I'm very proud to say that our amazing education team has partnered with the winners of this year's National Design Awards going into schools across San Francisco. So it's been an impactful couple of days for people from grade two to grade 12 and adults alike. And today I was in the Gateway Middle School with Stamen, with Eric and the kids were having a ball understanding that map making is fun. And for me, it's seeing the mission of Cooper Hewitt come alive, right? Our purpose is to inspire, educate and empower people through design. How do we do that? We do that through the National Design Awards. We do that through our exhibitions. We do that through our education programs. But most of all, we do it through discussions about design. Reiterating the power of design to improve people's lives. Speaking of which, I am very, very pleased, I almost said high as a kite but I hear all the people at the bar so that might not be an appropriate phrase to use. Yeah, Michael Kimmelman has just posted a major article on our first floor exhibition which is called Access Plus Ability Online. It will be in the Times on Friday. And Cooper Hewitt is embracing accessibility like never before. We embraced it during our recent renovation when we wanted to make our permanent collection of 210,000 objects accessible to all. We did that through interaction and technology using the pen. And now we're doing it looking at every single audience across every ability and every disability and thinking about how can we welcome everybody and deliver our message to all of those people. So, I want you all to see the show and I would like to invite you to be my guest and come see the show, just bring a printout of your email invitation to this panel discussion or say you're a friend of mine and I really, really want to encourage you. It's a plane ride but it's Cooper Hewitt. It's the design museum and we are who we are because of the amazing staff, the amazing board of trustees. I have Agnes Bourne, one of our long time trustees right in front of me and Todd Waterbury from Target is somewhere there, I see a hand. Another wonderful trustee who has made our team design competition possible through Target's support and it's also thanks to all of you. So, when you read this article tonight or tomorrow, please share it on social media, share it tonight on social media. We want to spread the message about the importance of design and on that, thank you so much for coming out on this dreadful rainy night but I have to say Metropolis named San Francisco one of the design cities, one of the global design cities in 2017 and it's the one time that I would take the word design out. San Francisco is one of the best cities, period. So, and now I have the wonderful honor to sit down with our four West Coast winners of the National Design Awards and I would like to add that, yes, they all went into the schools today along with one sort of bi-coaster winner, Mary Ping. Can you raise a hand, our fashion award winner? Okay, maybe she's one of the people, okay. So, it's nice to have this marriage of East and West. Thank you again for participating in New York City and now in San Francisco with our students. So, Hermit Esslinger, Lifetime Achievement. Jennifer Moorla, Moorla Design, Graphic Design Award Winner. James Lord, Surface Design. Landscape Architecture. And Eric Rodenback of Stamen Design, Interactive here. So please take a seat. So, one other administrative detail. We have a lot of friends in the audience of the National Design Awards, past jurors, past winners. I want you all to join us up on the stage after our talk because we do take a photograph of that wonderful alumni family. So, I like to get personal right at the beginning with this sort of panel and I wanna share a little something about me that will then lead into a question. I grew up with a physicist father north of Boston and we had this wonderful basement that had a dark room, a printing press, and a carpentry area and a wine cellar. That was a nice plus too. But my point in telling you this is there was a real enthusiasm around curiosity and experimentation that was really the catalyst for me and my love for design. So, Hermit, let's start with you. What were your earliest sort of interests in design and what sparked those? Well, it was a Volkswagen Beetle. 1948, I was four years old and I tried to redesign it on paper and in bark. Wasn't probably not very good, but the car has a good story. It was one of the first posts where Volkswagen's my dad bought and then after a year he got the luxury model and sold it to a farmer. The farmer forgot it, put it in his hay barn and four years ago they found it. It had, for the original of the first 100, everything original, and the Volkswagen Museum bought it back for 230,000 euro, about a quarter million dollars and my dad had sold it for 500. So, my first design venture was really already such with business, but I always wanted to be a designer, so can I think anything else? James, what about you? Maybe I'm on? I am on. I'm just not loud enough, sorry guys. I think it was how you talked about your family background. I'm the black sheep of the family. My entire family are structural, seismic, civil engineers. And so I decided that I was gonna be something different and I started off in architecture and then realized that landscape was really where my heart was and landscape is something that's around us all the time and when I started my first job illegally at 15 was for a Japanese nursery. So if you imagine the karate kid, it was like me and Mr. Miyagi was sitting there telling me to wax on or wax off so I learned every plant alive and it wasn't until after school that I merged the two. Well, I grew up in New York and when I was 11 years old, the World's Fair was happening and we went to the IBM exhibit and I saw Charles and Ray Eames, the power of 10 and their whole exhibit design. And even though I was too young to really understand what design was, I did learn two things from it. One, which was the interactivity and wayfinding and number two, that film is a captured audience and it's oftentimes best used when you have to tell a complex idea because it's linear, you're forced to be there. Whereas a book or a website or anything else you should have opened at any given page. But the powers of 10, what you learned about exponential numbers was a turning point for me. It was fantastic. I matter of fact, I had the opportunity to meet Ray Eames in the early 80s and she talked about that and she was just a lovely person to talk to, so why, so it was a big circle that came around. You know, I think about the drafting class that I took in high school and my friend Cassidy Curtis and I, he's right back there. We talk about it how he followed his zen to San Francisco and I followed Cassidy's zen to San Francisco. But drafting was really this kind of amazing thing where you could just describe an object and look at it from side to side and then that was kind of closely followed by Cassidy's incredible rapidograph drawings of tiny, tiny, tiny little letters and we would cover our binders and then we played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. And the mapping that went into the, I remember Ira's maps of Dungeons and Dragons and these just incredible drawings of mountains and imaginary landscapes and underwater seascapes and all this crazy stuff and it just made me sort of aware from the beginning that there was this kind of world of wonder to be had in these very mundane, tiny little marks. So again, thinking about inspiration and how you revive yourself. Couple of years ago I had the opportunity to go to Sea Ranch and for me it was a real cleansing, inspiring moment and then this past weekend I did something that you've all done which is crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on a bike. I know it's no big deal but it really gave me a boost. So on that note, what do you do when you're in need of that refresh? Yeah, that's a bit more complicated. You must understand normally we have different levels of our mind. Ideas only come when you're half asleep or daydreaming or rejecting everything or getting really mad. It's very well known that we sometimes think we're so honored by idiots. Actually now we know where the idiots are and I apologize to my clients. Another point really is you need to be prepared but when it happens you cannot control it. And then when you have it you have to get the logic. So you have to get to go to sleep, be awake and it's kind of this balance between really logical here and emotional back there and then the rest is process. So I think many designers fail because they don't have a process. We work for people, not for us. So that's one point. Second, we have to see our responsibility in terms of resources, people's jobs, families. I mean whatever we do, millions of pieces have a huge influence. And for example, we didn't foresee that everybody would live like this. But it happens so we have to invent the next thing that people get back to life. I think also what helps are detours. My parents didn't like the fashion and they thought all designers end in the gutter. And so I had to start engineering. I tried a music career. I was a military officer. You know discipline and leadership. I mean as a 19 year old in front of 120 people you think of what is making them tick and you cannot just scream here to think. And then in the end all the detours helped because leadership and responsibility and then I saw that we'll build a company because the expectation of designers was ridiculous. As an engineering student I got more than twice the money that a chief designer in Germany of a big company. And then I decided to pay people well and make it a business also. I have the power to define what is really right. We should not always wait for the cowards to push us under the table. And I think that we were pretty successful also here. Ben Moogrich and I were the first ones coming from Europe. Today there are hundreds. And I think it's really a design center now because people understand it's also successful. And so of all for your question it's you just must love it and be very happy with it. So as I told you I get up in the morning happy. I work like crazy and I go happy to bed and at night I wake up to a sketch sometimes it's stupid sometimes it's good but it's you must live it. And when you don't have an idea it's really bad feeling so you have to get through it. And never give up and always show up. I believe being curious is the best way to stimulate inspiration. And I look actually not as a graphic designer typically although we work as multidisciplinary firm in two and three and fourth dimensional forms I don't really reference graphic design as a form of inspiration. I actually look to other disciplines the most often is a conceptual art discipline. Solowit was a very large who happened to be a graphic designer prior to taking up conceptual design but I remember seeing a piece of his when I was in school. And it was really beautiful was this dense picture with a lot of black dots in the center and it was beautifully fanned out to the edges. And I thought like wow that's great. And I read the plaque and the plaque says my attempt of putting a million dots in the center of a piece of paper. And that made me realize how beauty I want to make me rethink what beauty was and how beauty really becomes a part of the process. So that was one thing. Another great influence was Zaha Hadid actually and I was lucky enough to be in New York in 84 when Philip Johnson did his deconstructivist show and Zaha showed her peak project. And that made me reconsider how to consider space. I mean really that it is multi-linear and it can be into this realm that I hadn't considered before. And both of those types of people and their work makes me realize when I'm designing that it doesn't have to be a two dimensional form or three dimensional form. In fact the end result can be an installation of sorts. It could be a sound. It could be a way of addressing the client. So it's, you know, I really look to those other disciplines. Thanks. I think for us it's probably travel. My partner Roderick Wiley and myself we love to investigate anywhere. We love gardens. We always laugh that you'll only find Roderick and James and a whole bunch of old ladies at these gardens and through that and it's amazing because I think through the care and the craft that goes into making a garden is very intimate. And for us to see those all over the world in different places really starts to let us unwind and really think about what we're doing. One of the biggest influences in my life was I had the rare opportunity to spend two weeks with Roberto Burley-Marx just before he passed away. And I was a young kid still in graduate school. And to be taken around his sitio to paint with him, to do floral arrangements with him, to hear him sing was really inspirational because it was about understanding the culture and the place making but he wasn't restricted by just being a landscape architect. He was everything. And I think we should all be thinking that way. We shouldn't all be one thing or another thing. We should really be open to what the possibilities are and what those cross connections are to listen to people. Sorry, thanks. Someone's waving that I've got it too low. So I really, I think it's those kinds of intercrossway disciplines and being passionate about something. I think when you talked about dreaming, they always tease me at the office because I wake up and what did I dream that night? Because I will come up with the craziest things and they'll like, what is going on? And it really is that moment, that quiet time, I think that you have to yourself where really pure design can come from. So I'm a dreamer. For me, I would say it comes from two things from the data that we work with. We're always engaged with a kind of direct relationship with data that we've never seen before and we'll discover some new pattern in it. But for me, it really comes from my clients, I have to say. I have the great pleasure of Dr. Paul Ekman, my friend and client, walk into my office and tell me I'd like you to help me design an Atlas of Emotions for the Dalai Lama. And we had never met before and I didn't know who he was and I had no idea what that meant and I had no idea how I could do that and it took me about seven seconds to say, well, of course I'll do that. I'll spend the next two years of my life doing that. So for me, it's about a kind of active engagement with the world, it's about kind of being really open. A lot of people will say it's important to say no a lot and I get that if you're Apple, but if you're me, you have to say yes a lot. You say yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, Roderick isn't with us tonight because you have just launched, I think last month, the Hudson Project. Can you talk a little bit about your work in Detroit? Probably signed an NDA and I can't say anything, but I'm sure we can. We've had the pleasure of working on several campuses here with shop architects, one Uber that's coming out of the ground right now and they asked us to take a look at Hudson's, which is this amazing site because it was, it's so hard sometimes when you visit places to actually think about what's actually going on. And Detroit in itself, the history, the majesty of this amazing city and then how it's come down to reality and hit hard and to see the way that nature engages with it has really been amazing. I mean, you go to Detroit and there's beautiful buildings everywhere, but you go out into the neighborhoods that were neighborhoods and you see how nature is reclaimed it. I mean, it's very bizarre, eerie, but it makes you really think and that's why it's important is there are streets and sidewalks and street trees and you see everything that is a makes up a city, but the houses are gone, the people are gone and you see these incredibly beautiful, almost majestic poetic meadows where people used to live and as a landscape architecture, it's thinking this is beautiful, those street trees are finally gone to maturity and they're like not being salted to death and everything else and it's an incredible, beautiful place, but there's a sadness in the fact that we're gone and for us to find that, they're still there, they're still alive, they're doing amazing things and people are really reimagining how to remake a city and for us it's about trying to find that heart. What's that tone that respects the history of the place but also celebrates the future for it and working with shop, it's been really fantastic in the way that how to, in essence in a core of a city in a spot where it was the largest department store in the world, it was the trademark, the, the place that a couple of years ago, someone decided to implode it and so this whole is in the city so in those ways we are very, very, very, very fortunate to be able to be part of a team, a large team, a local team and a national team to actually give it a new vision, a new hope. And when will that be realized? What's the hope for schedule? They broke around, poor Roderick froze his feet off last week so and that's where he is right now so he gives us apologies and I think it'll be about two years. So each of you have talked about color in some of your responses. It's obviously a game changing decision in the design process, black and white we talked about in your studio yesterday. Can you talk a little bit about how you each have experimented with color? What tools you may have used, Hartman? Apologize, I want to say something else first. I think we talked too much about beauty. In Europe we have an advantage of getting this education that killed us on classical Greece, philosophers, Plato and so on. But the real point about this culture of ancient Greece is at three levels. First, to be a citizen of Athens, you had first to be competent and know your stuff. If you were competent enough to know most of the sciences back then, sure quite complex already, you had to become ethical, like a monk, whatever, but you had to prove that you're an ethical person. Only then you were trained on beauty and without the foundation, beauty is senseless. By the way, only then you could be elected a politician. So, just to make that clear, I mean it's really, also to say that actually beauty is also an indicator. So vulgar taste displays a vulgar soul. And dirt is dirt, but not human. And I think that's another point, the ugliness of the verbal thing. But back to the beauty thing, I think you always, well actually I always build a foundation and then at the end of beauty or aesthetics, it's craftsmanship. Everything is different and then you will master it on that specific point. I like color, but Steve Jobs did not, black and white, white and black was fine. We also took the Apple logo color away and it made sense because a global brand cannot be that complex. So you want simplicity. Other people want a lot of color and I think it's also expression of the emotion you want to convey, optimism, skepticism, safety, cautious behavior and stuff like that. So I think color is also very functional. But really to your discussion, we also look at the old Greek temples and one thing about Greek aesthetics is the following. When you look at the Lincoln Memorial, the columns are vertical to the center of the earth. The Greek temples meet all the lines in five miles, seven kilometers up there because they saw the gods live up there. No jet planes fly up there. Anyway, so this light angle change makes us Greek temples totally cool and the Lincoln Memorial is so heavy and that's craftsmanship in the end. So I love color. My students know it. And I use it. Well, I think appropriateness is a good word to use in the context of color. I start off nearly every project I have in black and white to see whether in fact that alone could solve the problem and it does in a lot of instances. When I'm dealing with a conceptual art venue and we don't know what the piece is going to be, a typographic form is the right solution and because of that, the black and white was appropriate. But when I'm dealing with the, before let's say the Museo Mexicano and I'm dealing with their posters and often I want culturally those colors to be reflecting what the nature and the DNA is that institution. I like to say there's no color that's really a bad color. I mean, I don't particularly like an ochre, let's say, but you put an ochre next to a perfect, you know, periwinkle blue and all of a sudden it's beautiful together. So, but I don't really take it from that aesthetic. I really try and see what the piece calls for. Which one color? Does it work? Yeah. Okay, the color of China is red and the color of America is pink. It was teal, but now it's pink. Well, in our world, we always used to laugh. You could tell the difference between an architect and a landscape architect is color. But actually, Jeff, my business partner and Roderick are probably the best one to talk about color, but I found, sorry, Vasya, you're very good. I will keep it up. It's really the, it's, we have an amazing project right now and my team's out here, but it's called Faust of all things. It's a winery and Roderick and the team's really worked to think about color through living material. So there's an ombre of color, not dissimilar to the wall you see behind you, that takes planting and flowering and leaf texture and everything and literally paints it across the vineyards and then really starts to talk about what is that doing seasonally over time because we deal with living things and so that becomes the creative part where color really comes alive because it is living and for us, it's sort of our passion actually. We're not afraid of color that way. I'm gonna mention the Atlas of Emotion again that Paul and we did. It's an Atlas of Human Emotions and Paul and his group did a study where they surveyed scientists to find which emotions are core to being a human being which you can't have if you're not human. We came up with five of them, anger, sadness, enjoyment, disgust and fear. Yeah, I experienced that a lot actually doing the project. So anyway, these are the five core emotions and they needed to be distinguished from one another and we picked colors for them. Red was for anger, blue was for sadness, yellow, orange was for enjoyment, green for disgust and purple I think for fear. And this was sort of an arbitrary choice for a scientific project and we said to ourselves, well, how are we gonna come up with this? How are we gonna justify this? We were very clear that it was just for an American audience because the Chinese have a different association with color, with red, so we thought. And then the movie Inside Out came out and they had the same five emotions and they had the same colors and we were like, fuck, they're gonna sue us and so we had to make sure that we documented that. So anyway, so it all worked out and but in the end, so I had the opportunity to show the project to a Chinese group that came through my studio a couple of weeks ago and I asked them because I had been waiting to talk to someone Chinese, like what is your, do you associate the color red with anger because I know you associate it with good luck and all this stuff and all of them said, well, yeah, of course, red, anger, what other color would it be? And then I said, well, what about blue and sadness? And they said, well, yeah, blue is sadness, of course, that's what it is. But then they said, I don't think that we would have thought that blue was connected with sadness before Elvis Presley came on the scene in Western music. So there's this kind of, just the thing that we had assumed was a non-universal relationship of emotion to color turned out to be much more universal than we had thought. So my thought on that is I don't know. I don't know. Sounds a bit German. What? Sounds a bit German. German always find the hair in the soup, but even if it's her own. So seeing that there's so many students in the audience tonight, I wanted to think, talk about your careers because all of you launched your careers at a very young age. Eric, you quit Cooper Union? No, I didn't. Nice way to say it, right? I quit going there because they told me to stop coming back. So can each of you talk about, when you arrived in San Francisco, how you started your businesses and give some counsel to the many students that are in the audience tonight? Sure, yeah. I mean, when I came here, it was 1994 and we could rent an apartment in the mission for 800 bucks. And survival research labs had just broken the ground at SF MoMA and the town was just this crazy Bohemian. And I found work in the digital space because it was all just kind of starting off. And went bankrupt twice before starting Stamen for a variety of reasons. And I guess I would keep coming back to Paul, but his message was leave no stone unturned and never take no for an answer. And so this idea of kind of starting a business, I think the average that I read of the most people who are successful business people in America have are on their fourth business, which means that the average is that you've gone bankrupt three times. So I'm ahead of the curve, I've only gone bankrupt twice and that's good. So yeah, my advice would be like, don't let anybody tell you to not do it and just hold on tight because it's gonna be really, really difficult and it's gonna eat your brain and it's going to consume your life. And if you're willing to do that, the other side of it can lead to the complete meshing of your business interests and your personal interests and it can be a wonderful thing. Well, I moved to San Francisco in 78 and actually I saw Mark Pauline in Survival Research Lab also on Division of the Mission that was one of the inspirations really for being in San Francisco but my first job actually was in television and what was unique about that was that it was the beginning platform for additional language because all television was the integration of sound and movement and type and that's where it all began. So I was very lucky to be a PBS in KQED here. It's been a few years there. Then became Art Director at Levi Strauss which was, although it paid nothing, what it did do is that it allowed me to have a very large budget and work within the corporate sector in a very interesting way and understand the way it works and really become very close to many of the presidents and understand what their goals were. I knew that once I left Levi's, I was there for three years. I could open my office, I opened my office in 84 and I was 28 years old and I did have a client base. I mean, it was that and I have to say a really good thing is that I wanted originally to work for another great designer but what this allowed me to do is really discover my own voice because I wasn't really imitating somebody else. I was learning what worked with me stylistically, theoretically, conceptually and how to solve those problems. So the office is still around, now we're in 40 years just about. But I think that's important though that my first clients came from my, I had a job, I had the same kind of thing. I worked someplace for three years, Quaca Sports, long time ago and then my first clients were connections from that. So it was easier than just starting out on my own. I had somebody, at least I had somebody that I could ask for things or who wanted to work with me. I mean, I have to say like as hard as that is and San Francisco is much more affordable than, the salary can't really drive if you see the opportunity for creative there. I don't know how you can do it because you suffer but it is, you go for where you can learn the most. Yeah, I totally concur. I mean, I first landed here in San Francisco in 1994 as well. I came to work for this really small landscape architecture firm called Hargraves Associates and there was only six of them and three of them were partners just like I have my three partners. And when I arrived, they were given a competition and no one wanted to do it. So let's have the intern. Hi, do the competition. And so I was just a new student. I knew no one in San Francisco and I basically did. I did the World Expo site for Lisbon out of clay physically and designed it and worked with George intimately and I went back and I went back to school ready to go and the next thing I know, I got a fax. That's what you got back then. That we had won the competition and I said and George said, well, I don't have anyone to work on it. You designed it, come do this. So that opportunity was fantastic and for that led to me ending up working for in landscape terms, the triple crown. I worked for George Hargraves and I worked for Martha Schwartz and then I worked for Peter Walker for eight years and that kind of grounding experiment taught me a lot of how what to do and what not to do. And when it came to be 39, my last name's not Walker, it's time to start your own thing. And that's what it was. I left, I have the blessing of my partner, Roderick. He said, don't worry if you fall over, you're always gonna do this. And then we met Jeff and Jeff folded right in and the three of us sort of took it in. Like you said, we never took anyone from the firm that I was at, Peter Walker's, but everyone was waiting for you to leave. And the first thing that came out of the gates was a friend called me from Monterey, Mexico. I have this museum of steel I wanna go for. I need someone that knows what they're doing. Can you team up? So the two of us did it and it was amazing. And the second call on the second day was a friend from New Zealand who said, I have a town for 10,000 people I need to design and I don't trust the Australian that's doing it right now. Could you come down and take a look? And I did. Me and my colored pencils went down and then really engaged with the client and with the place and listening to the stories. And I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked. And when I came back, poor Roderick is sitting there saying, well, how are we gonna do this? A town for 10,000 people, it seemed like we need help. And so we hired Alan, who our first employee. I don't know, he's here tonight, but it really was this sort of really small and we kept it small. We were a very small firm just like when I, George started about seven people for a long time, now we're very excited because of more opportunities. So that's where you get, the answer is never say no. And all right now, everyone that works for me right now is cringing because they'd love to say no, but it's not, it's really, you don't, if you say no, you lose out on so many amazing opportunities and as a student, you always wanna grasp them because you never know where it's gonna take you. And that's the important thing to remember. So James, back to you, your mention of New Zealand reminds me of the Auckland Airport and the landscape architecture there is absolutely stunning, but also really exudes the culture of New Zealand. Can you talk a little bit about the process to find that right note? Yeah, so we were very fortunate in part of the work we were doing down there, someone said, someone at the airport said, oh, you gotta get James in and talk about what you can do with this logistics part. So we came there and we started working on it. And Kiwis are really amazing, quirky people, which I love, because I'm half Kiwi, so that helps. And at the moment in time, and it's really about a layer of culture. And the culture of New Zealand and Australia is really about being, or Canada. We're all Commonwealthers, which means we look like Americans, but we're not. And there's what they call the tall poppy syndrome. People will say thing, they won't say anything what they're thinking. And, but they really want to say, but there's no voice. Like they cut off the people that stand out every time. So here I am with this accent, like I grew up in Los Angeles. So I was able to give them a voice and understand the culture and what they wanted to do that they couldn't say themselves. And so you can always blame it on James or whatever, but in some ways it was a great way to engage with the people. And in that community were the Maori, so the Iwi groups. So we were talking about an amazing population that was the first residents of New Zealand. So the peace itself really started to talk about blurring the line between man's engagement with landscape or nature in New Zealand. Because when the Maori arrived, they're all in, I always laugh, they're in these giant canoes, not wearing too much and you arrive in New Zealand and you think you're, it's like Portland, it's freezing. And they came from Polynesia. So for them with their food stocks that they had in their canoe to survive landed in New Zealand and was confronted with this jungle basically that was freezing cold with these giant volcanoes everywhere. So what they did was they used their ingenuity. They shaped the landscape of New Zealand to create these large holes in the ground and plant their food stock, which is a warm thing. So during the day, the rock would heat up, this is designed through survival, would heat up and then you would actually keep the plants alive. So by shaping the earth form, that's why the landscape that you see in the Auckland airport is these series of very large earth forms that are rock lined. My people came to New Zealand, very long time in 1840. They had the same issues, but they used planting, they used giant hedgerows. So when you think about New Zealand, you think about these beautiful landscapes, but also these big farm agriculture landscapes. And that taking that language and blurring that into the entrance piece was the way of merging these two cultures together that they could both relate to as well as honoring and exciting air travel. Because in that piece, there's a series of smaller earth forms that line the road that we call the blades. And the blades, you're driving at 80K through the highway because you're late for your flight. You basically get this sort of almost cinematic, like you're talking about Jennifer, this sort of cinematic experience and excitement of an abstraction, we abstracted a jet engine. But the way it's been interpreted by the New Zealand people is so many different ways. It's been magical from calling it Mordor to it actually being a dunescape to them. And so I think the uniqueness is to be able to listen to a place, tell the stories, but not through hitting your head to tell the stories and for people to read in their own stories. And that's important, I think. So that's how the airport sort of evolved and continues to evolve. I can hear the din of the party, but I have two more questions. One is for Eric. Can you talk a little bit about the big glass microphone? It's microphone. What would you like to know? How you analyze the data and how you get through all of that and how it can help ultimately humanity. Sure, so I talked to a lot of people about a lot of weird data. Just kind of how I spend my time. And I heard anecdotally that there were companies that were analyzing the signals that cars left as they pass along fiber optic cables. You know, fiber optic cable that says, you know, Oakland four minutes, you know, that type of stuff. And that a lot of those companies were having to filter out the static that was caused by the cars driving along those roads in order to get those signals right. And then another company had come along and said, well, why don't we just, instead of using that as something we want to filter out, why don't we analyze that? And it turns out that you can tell not just that there's a car driving along the road, but that by analyzing the static as the car moves along, you can tell the difference between a Volvo and a Ford. Or if you get really good, and this is without putting any sensors in the road, you can tell the difference between a Volvo with two people and a Volvo with three people in it. And so I just became kind of captivated by this idea that there was this kind of ready-made infrastructure network that was highly invasive, highly problematic, but also very useful, right? I mean, it could be used in all kinds of different ways. And terrifying. So we talked about this, right? Everything that's happening now is amazing and terrifying at the same time. So when the Victorian Albert Museum came along and said, we'd like you to do a show, we'd like you to do a piece in our show about the future of design, we said, well, why don't we do something about these crazy signals? And so we were introduced to a group that's got a five kilometer long, five-brop-to-cable buried underneath the Stanford campus. And they're using it as an earthquake analysis tool and they're doing big and important science down there, but they also have the ability to track the bicycles and track the fountains and track the air conditioners and all that kind of stuff. And so for me, the piece that really captivated me about it was just this sort of accidental infrastructure that had been laid and that they were trying to do really big science and important science and they're doing it and they're continuing to publish about that work, but that sort of this kind of global sensing network just kind of falls off the side of the truck. Weird data, as you call it. Weird data, that's good. Yeah, so not, yeah, big data is whatever, but weird data. Weird data. Okay, that's cool. I do wanna open this up to questions, but I just wanna end, oh, go ahead. Sorry for that. I think this whole discussion about location misses an important point, at least in design. You have to be with the people and you have to be with the production and the resources. And I think in my life, I always looked for, I tried to inspire people to work with me and invite me who wanted to go someplace and never cared where it was. It could be a village in Germany, nice place, crazy company. Tokyo and Sony, a Cappuccino Apple. So I think the point is, where's the company? Second, where's the factory? And a big problem, this is maybe for the young kids here, if you don't go to the factory, you're really ignorant to the bone. And I think this, where I go to China has two reasons. First, it's interesting, cool culture, which is dynamic, but to see all these western designs coming into China, copying each other like complete slaves, designers, companies like Google, you can't name them, I name them, nothing to lose. It's shameful, it's stupid. And I think, I want to be in San Francisco and drink my coffee next door. Go to the factory, learn the trade, factories are cathedrals. I think this passion for this process and at least in national design, your gross trees take longer. I mean, that is something which I miss and I try to bring it to young people to live it. And personally, actually I'm happy that I have a wife which is sitting in the same way and supports it. We live global, which is not very ecological from a carbon balance. But if you don't have the whole knowledge and experience working with the people, you cannot be a designer, you're just a stylist, illustrator, copier, and that's too many in San Francisco. That's the reason I don't like San Francisco like now. That's too many losers. Sorry, it's time to wake up. And we started this in 1981. Please understand what is the essence of our profession. It's to create the best for people in all dimensions and not nice vocation you can do, but life is passion and commitment and doing. So that's also what you're going to have. You somewhat answered my final question. So at Cooper Hewitt, we just closed the first solo show in the U.S. on Joris Larmann, the young Dutch designer who is in the midst of 3D printing the first pedestrian bridge in Amsterdam. And we hope that it will open in April. And the reason I bring Joris up is usually at Cooper Hewitt, it is a rush to move design objects out of the galleries and then open the next show. In this case, we're taking two weeks in February to pause and create an experimental space on the third floor, which is the contemporary gallery space at Cooper Hewitt. And what this relates to is, I've been really enthused and thrilled to see the colleges and university design students so interested in accessibility because our focus will be experimentation and discussion around accessibility for those two weeks. So for example, we're partnering with Mark Morris and doing dance for people with Parkinson's on the third floor. We're partnering with Google on a hackathon. All sorts of partnerships throughout the week and things that you wouldn't necessarily think Cooper Hewitt right away. But it is the college audience that's really jumping aboard and they'll be doing a charrette with us around how to make New York City and cities in general more accessible. So my question is sort of two part in closing. One is how do you impart to your students the importance of good design and designing for all? 11 of my students are here. Can you stand up? Yeah. Okay, bro, cool, yeah. It's the next graduation class in May. Well, I think they live the future and what is today is already history. And so they, you can sit down, sorry. Ha ha ha, that's not nice guys. Too nice, sometimes too nice. No, they have to learn what is the future. Looking back, it's always kind of a curve. And when you look back, you see what will happen. Somehow, we go all slower. And I think the obligation ecology is huge. We have poverty with other nations. Development, sustained development is important. New tools artificial intelligence. We have to create algorithms which creates certain things. And, but you have to know what they should do. It's always more important what you, to decide what to do and then it does it. And I think a lot of the problems is computer tools are too smart looking. But in reality, they're really just tools. And I think that's one part we try really hard that they can project the future as they imagine. You know, in China, we have so many people. So when you say here in America, we had a TV show and CCTV. It was 120 million people watching on a school show because it's one point, some billion. And I think about impact ecology, global trade and so on. And I think it's also something I would like to work with kids who want to go someplace like my clients and they want to go places. And then we also say it cannot be a teacher without a student, not the other way. So I love to have students who I can be a teacher. Oh yeah, thank you again, sorry. I'm never gonna get it right. I mean, I think for students, I think you're quite right and we just finished teaching and it was a huge experience for us at the GSD. And it really made you think and make your life complete in a fulfilling way because you realize that there are so many different ways of doing everything. And there's so many different ways of thinking about things. And I think for us to, in some of these institutions, there's such a strong pedagogy of how to do things, how to draw things, all these kinds of things. So with the students this year, it was their first time that they actually were beyond the core. And for us, we said, this is your moment of freedom. And this is your time to explore what you want to explore, who you are, what you want to accomplish. And it was very fascinating for us to watch because it was so hard for them to break out. They had always done it this way. And it's always this way. And so a lot of it was this liberation of like, no, what do you really want? Question yourselves. And for students, you should always challenge your professors. You should be challenging everyone in your life about design and the possibilities of what design can do for it. And it's so important, especially in your workplace. It's not that you have to fight with bosses, that's always gonna happen. But it's important that you really challenge what the engineers are saying, what the officials are saying. Why do we have to do things the way we always do them? In some ways, I challenge our young people to think, is there a better way to do a curve? Is there a better way of doing a street? And you know what, we might not have streets pretty soon. So what, as landscape architects, what's gonna happen to all those spaces, the open spaces that we currently occupy, that's where we should be thinking in these in-between spaces and in these large spaces. I mean, if you can imagine the 405 freeway with one lane, what could you do with that? And so I think for the future, that's really where our profession has to look forward to. These transformations of these existing infrastructure pieces. But to do it in a way that respects and acknowledges and makes things about a place, authentic. I know that's a weird word, but you know when things are soulful, they're authentic. And I tell students all the time, get your voice. And your voice is gonna change over time, but use your voice. Well, designers are storytellers and what we do is we disseminate information and we try and find the best way to tell sometimes complex information in a way that can be absorbed and utilized. What I find, as I've taught for 23 years at CCA, is that you have to really examine all different forms and really decide which is the correct form to use for your project. Don't go in with a preconceived idea of like, oh, I'm going to be doing a website, for example, as a communication tool. Your duty really as a student is to come up with ideas, many, many ideas, then do research in service to those ideas. Then from that research you take, now what form could this be? If I took this in film, what would that be like? If I did it as a book, what would that be like? If I did it as a space, as an experiential space. What would it be like in virtual space? That's sort of your obligation to deep dive into each one of those vehicles, those communication vehicles, that will allow you to make the most meaningful communication tool to the world at large and it's hard. Design is hard and design takes time and it's not, you know, the course is thy teacher, a 16 week course, which in our world is not that atypical. 16 weeks is a very realistic timeframe to go from a beginning to end. Not so in architecture, certainly not so maybe in landscape design, but you get to certain key benchmarks in that time period and so it's fun, but it's hard. I remember my last critique at Cooper Union, which was founded by the grandfather of the daughters that, the Hewitt sisters that founded Cooper Hewitt. And I remember one of the professors saying that this was about the angel of death, moving backwards through the winds of history with the wreckage of the past strewn around them and he was gesturing at this block with a cut through it and I was like, I don't know, I don't see, I'm sorry, I don't see it. And so, and they were using nouns as adverbs and adjectives as pronouns and I was like, you're all crazy. And so that's my educational experience and then they said, why don't you go do something else? And so I did something else. But then one of the great experiences of my life was getting on stage, being introduced by Carolina, being able to say, and I just love to say this, screw you Raymond Abraham. I just like that, that there's a, I think there's a kind of a change that I'm seeing in students now. When I was in school, the professors were the holders of knowledge and they were the gate that you had to go through in order to get the knowledge that you wanted and that's not as much the case anymore as it has been. I mean, there's certainly knowledge and experience and wisdom and all those kinds of things, but I think of my son, I think of my six year old boy and what it's gonna be like for him to learn about all the stuff and all the kind of the way that I see young people showing up now that on YouTube they figured out how to make a new motor or turn the four by four into an electric vehicle or whatever and it's this kind of amazing bright future for education of the quality of the education of the kids that are gonna come into these institutions and whether they choose to actually go into those educational institutions is a huge question right now. So for me, I'm just excited about it. I just love the idea that the kids that are coming up are able to research just about anything under the sun just the same as we can. Super exciting. When you asked the kids today that were fourth graders, I think, about data, one of the fourth sixth graders said the seals and keeping track of the seals in San Francisco, right? Which is really impressive for that age group. Yeah, we talked to a bunch of 12 year old kids who were able to make maps of imaginary landscapes and draw their own special transportation networks. I mean, if they were, anyway, it was a lovely, lovely thing to see them. You didn't get the German treatment, my professor said once, multiple times, where did you take the courage to enter my room with that piece of whatever? But I said, please tell me and I learned it. But actually, I think politeness sometimes doesn't help. At one point in design, you must be honest. Yeah, frankly, for sure. Frankly, it's a different thing. Honestly, to say that, Caroline, I didn't expect to get this award here in America because I was always outspoken of strange kind. So thank you for overcoming that for me. And I really appreciate it. Well, we could continue this panel for a long time, but most of you are standing. I want to thank everybody and open it up to a few questions. Two questions and just a curation's over there. Okay, and you'll provide mics, right? So questions for the illustrious winners. Well, I would love if you guys could share your favorite failure story within design. Yeah, 20 years ago with the dot-com boom, Frog we invested in a project called Frogwork, where we thought we can invite people to design for themselves. We hoped, expected that people in the industry would work together. You know, the CEO has ideas. Marketing has features. Engineering has a playlist. Finance has no money. And we failed big time and lost $8 million. For that reason, I don't forget it. But we got it back. I mean, it's an illusion that people can design for themselves. Otherwise everybody would be a poet, a pianist, and everything. Talent is rare. Only one in eight people statistically is creative. All this design thinking, forget it. Talk to people with expectations that don't understand you. Come from the other side. Don't expect them to be suddenly design conscious. You have to argue with the other way. Is that mistake we made? And we learned it the hard way, but we stood up. I was gonna say attention to detail. I mean, really no detail is too small. And I remember early on, I backed when you sort of typeset all your work and I re-read it and I didn't have anybody else read it and I spelled the author's name wrong on the book. And... And that was, you know, but it's, you know, such a thank God it happened when I was young. But that sort of attention to detail all anybody will ever see. You could do the most beautiful, the most conceptual, the smartest design in the world. And I guarantee you, if there's a misspelling on that page, that is all they will see and your whole piece is sort of down the drain. So I'm sure that you have sort of similarities in each one of your professions, but in, you know, when we were dealing with typing, when you're, that is sort of the vehicle that you're using in order to express, you know, not everybody is going to be enamored with how beautiful something is or how appropriate something is or how successful something is. This is a good point, you know. I went to the Basel school with Frutiger. We had to paint. We didn't make mistakes. It took too long. To answer your question, I think mistakes happen all the time and the best thing is learning from them. And so that's what we do every day in our office is we learn. But the colossal mistake I always like to talk about is when we're in the, we're gonna do everything alive, right? Never say no. So there is a charity organization for University High School in San Francisco and they have this design home. So it's all the design community, all these very amazing talented designers take over rooms and they asked us to do the landscape. And we thought, oh, this is amazing. This client was page glass, so we should utilize what they sell and we could do all these crazy things. And we did this tripped up earth form and we abstracted a piece of the Victorian architecture in this radical cubist way that went everywhere and the mirrors went in different directions and you could see pieces of the neighbor's house and you couldn't really figure out where you were. And of course, all the docents were horrified. Like they're in this beautiful home and this racy modern pieces out front doing whatever. But the colossal failure was actually that, well, when you have mirrors outside, they reflect the sun. So the sun literally scorched all the landscape that we came in and we were sitting there and they're calling us furiously. James Roderick, they're just like, the grass is dead. It's dead. Like everyone's seeing this dead grass and we're like, you've gotta come fix it. And of course we had cajoled our landscape architecture consulted to put it in in the first place. So it cost money. I go, well, it's 250 a roll for a sod. We'll just do that again. Oh no, no, we need it now. And so we thought, oh, we'd fix this by going out and putting gold paint over the top of this dead grass. So we thought, oh, this would be fine. It'll look great. Like how cool that be? And like it looked horrible. Just like, we finally like said, we've just gotta go out to Home Depot and get the grass because there is no way and just out of our pockets because this looks so bad. So anyway, that was sort of cool. I just wanna add mistakes are something only you can recognize sometimes. I'm gonna give an optimistic view of mistakes. I believe that as a maker, as a designer, that there's really a lot of value in starting something and going all the way through to the end, to the finished product. And the reason being is that there will be mistakes along the way, but only you will recognize whether it's not something that you had originally visualized. I remember early on, it was back in Illustrator 1.0, it was like 1993. And I was doing a poster for Agnes for the Museum of Modern Art when we did the design lecture series. And I had this wonderful model who had a shaved head and she got scanned and the image got scanned in. I imagined a continuous tone photograph but it came out all pixelized. Completely pixelized. And I looked, I said, well, that's perfect for this purpose. So the name of the lecture was the radical response. So there we go. That was really reinforcing sort of this response. So mistakes are only mistakes in your eyes and realize how they can really inform the end product. No, some mistakes hurt. Well, that was one where you, you know. Yeah, yeah. Actually, our students, we have the rule because China is so compliant. We start the morning, many mistakes are better than few mistakes. I mean, you must make mistakes. You must explore the edge. Naturally, that's more theoretically because actually winning feels better than defeat. And we had a soccer coach and when we lost, he said, we have learned nothing. I mean, be honest. I think there's so much in America about explaining you can fail or wrong. You want to win and you have to. And that's what we are here for. There's so much depending on us. There's no excuse not to have a top performance. My mistake involves nudity. Is that all right? So this is less about design than it is about client management. So I, I've worked for Renokia for a while and helping them come up with new interfaces for their phones. And so I was asked to travel to Finland and got to go to Helsinki and had a great time in Helsinki and in Helsinki after the business meeting, the men typically go into the sauna. So I was invited to the best sauna in Helsinki and they do this crazy thing where they bury rocks in the ground and set fires five hours ahead of time and you jump and you get warm. And anyway, so we had a big naked experience with the clients. And so when they came to San Francisco a few months later, I thought, well, I'll do the same thing with them here or something similar to them here. And my wife and I had had gone out with her father, my father-in-law to Asia SF which is a transgender Asian venue here in San Francisco. And I thought, they like nudity. We'll just go to Asia SF. It'll be fine. And when I went there with Nikki and her father, we sat in the back and when I brought the fins along, we sat at the bar where the dances were going on and they were not psyched. Like they were not comfortable with this at all. And usually after a client dinner, you go and you walk out the door and you're like, okay, so should we go to go drink? Go get a drink somewhere? And they were like, no, we're not. So now I know what that's like to have a highly unsuccessful client dinner and no repeat business. And I'm not gonna do that again. I think that's... Sometimes you have to get caught in symbolism. One of my first projects for Sony was a very, I saw it's simple Japan, Bo-House, White and I presented it and Olga-Saham said, hmm, so what's wrong? It's a tombstone. Was not a hi-fi unit. It was a tombstone. Oh my God. We took it back. Good stories to conclude our evening. Just a reminder, anyone in the NDA family, please join me up here. I want to thank John Edelman and the whole team at DWR for organizing such a wonderful event tonight and for believing in Cooper Hewitt as we wanted to take the National Design Awards on the road. John has already given his word as you heard to future years, so we will all see you next year. We do change the cities every year, but we're coming back to San Francisco repeatedly, which is really wonderful news. So, and lastly, enormous thanks also to all of our friends at Target and Delta Fawcett for making all of this possible. So thank you all of you and I look forward to welcoming you at Cooper Hewitt.