Hasta La Ideas

In 1996, Chris Manak—aka Peanut Butter Wolf—self-released “My Wold Premier,” a collaborative effort between him and his partner and close friend Charizma, who died three years previous in a carjacking. The release was deeply personal and…

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John Baldessari, the prolific visual artist and living legend hailing from southern California, has left nary a medium untouched—painting, photography, printmaking, video, sculpture, installation and more—in his quest to find beauty, drama and art in the…

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Interview: when designer Isabelle Olsson joined the secret Google X lab in 2011, Google Glass looked like a cross between a scuba mask and a cellphone. In this exclusive interview, Olsson tells Dezeen how she turned the clunky prototype into something “beautiful and comfortable”.

“When I first joined I had no idea what I was going to work on,” she said, speaking via a Google Hangout video link from New York. “Then I walked into a room full of engineers wearing a prototype of the glasses. These were very crude 3D-printed frames with a cellphone battery strapped to the legs. They weighed about 200 grams.”

She was given her first brief, which was “to make this beautiful and comfortable”.

“My initial goal was: how do we make this incredibly light? I set up three design principles; if you have something that is very complex you need to stick to some principles. The first was lightness, the second was simplicity and the third scalability”.

Despite the technology available to her at Google, Olsson took a fairly traditional approach to refining the design of Glass, which is a computer that is worn like a pair of glasses and features a tiny optical display mounted in front of one eye.

“We would first start by sketching by hand,” she said. “Then we would draw in Illustrator or a 2D programme. Then we would laser-cut these shapes in paper.”

“After many iterations the team would start to make models in a harder material, like plastic. And then we got into laser-cutting metals. So it was an intricate, long, back-and-forth process.”

This painstaking, craft-led approach was essential when designing something that will be worn on the face, Olsson believes.

“A 0.2mm height difference makes a complete difference to the way they look on your face,” she said. “What looks good on the computer doesn’t necessarily translate, especially with something that goes on your face. So as soon as you have an idea you need to prototype it. The next stage is about trying it on a couple of people too because something like this needs to fit a wide range of people.”

Olssen grew up in Sweden and studied fine arts and industrial design at Lund University. She later worked for industrial design studio Fuseproject in San Francisco, where she worked on products including Samsung televisions, the Nook Color ebook reader and VerBien, a range of free spectacles developed for children in Mexico.

She now leads a team of less than ten designers at Google X, including “graphic designers, space and interior designers, design strategists and industrial designers but also people who work in the fashion industry”.

She says: “The funny thing is almost nobody on the design team has a technology background, which is very unusual for a tech company. But the great thing about that is that it keeps us grounded and keeps us thinking about it from a lifestyle product standpoint.”

With Glass, she was keen to ensure the product was as adaptable and accessible as possible, to ensure it could reach a wide range of potential users. “From the very beginning we designed Glass to be modular and to evolve over time,” she said.

This week saw the launch of a range of spectacles and sunglasses that can be used with the existing high-tech Glass product, which clips on the side of the frames. The expanded range of products helps shift what started as a tech product into a lifestyle accessory.

“We’re finally at the beginning point of letting people wear what they want to wear,” Olsson said. “The frames are accessories so you detach the really expensive and complex technology from the style part: you can have a couple of different frames and you don’t need to get another Glass device.”

Images are courtesy of Google.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

James Pallister: Can you start by telling me a little bit about how you started designing Google Glass?

Isabelle Olsson: Two and a half years ago I had a very simple, concise brief, and it was to make this [prototype of Google Glass] beautiful and comfortable. When I first joined I had no idea what I was going to work on. I just knew I was joining Google X and working on something new and exciting.

Then I walked into a room full of engineers wearing a prototype of the glasses. These were [very crude] 3D-printed frames with a cell-phone battery strapped to the legs. They weighed about 200 grams.

James Pallister: What were your initial design intentions?

Isabelle Olsson: My initial goal was: “how do we make this incredibly light?”. I set up three design principles; if you have something that is very complex you need to stick to some principles. The first was lightness, the second was simplicity and the third scalability.

The first thing that made me nervous was not how are we going to make this technology work but how are we going to be able to make this work for people; how are we going to make people want to wear the glasses? The first thing that came to mind is that when you walk into a glasses store you see hundreds of styles.

From the very beginning we designed this to be modular and be able to evolve over time. So in this version that you have probably seen already, there is this tiny little screw here and that is actually meant to be screwed off and then you can remove this frame and attach different kinds of frames.

James Pallister: You’re launching new prescription frames and sunglasses which fit the Google Glass you launched in 2013?

Isabelle Olsson: Yes. What is really exciting is that this is our first collection of new frames. The frames are accessories so you detach the really expensive and complex technology from the style part: you can have a couple of different frames and you don’t need to get another glass device. So we’re finally at the beginning point of letting people wear what they want to wear.

James Pallister: How many people were on the team who refined the clunky prototype into what we see today?

Isabelle Olsson: The team started off very, very small: it was like a little science project. As we started to transition it into something that you could actually wear we have grown the team. Our design team is still really small. So in the design team I can count them on my 10 fingers.

James Pallister: What kind of people do you have on your team?

Isabelle Olsson: I really believe in having a mixed team: graphic designers, space and interior designers, design strategists and industrial designers but also people who work in the fashion industry. The funny thing is almost nobody on the design team has a technology background, which is very unusual for a tech company. But the great thing about that is that it keeps us grounded and keeps us thinking about it from a lifestyle product standpoint.

James Pallister: Is that one of the strengths of the team, that you are not too obsessed the technology?

Isabelle Olsson: There’s often the view that designers and engineers have to fight; that there should always be a constant battle. I don’t believe that. I think that view belongs in the 1990s.

James Pallister: Are the glasses manufactured by Google?

Isabelle Olsson: They are made in Japan. They are made out beautiful titanium that is extremely lightweight and durable.

James Pallister: With the spectacles and sunglasses, how did you choose which styles to develop?

There actually aren’t that many styles out there, so we looked at the most popular styles and condensed then into these really iconic simplified versions of them. Bold for example is great for people that would normally prefer kind of a chunky, square style. Curve, which I’m wearing, is perhaps a little more fashion-forward. And Split is for those who like almost rimless glasses or ones which are lighter on your face. Then Thin is this very classic traditional simple style that doesn’t really stand out.

James Pallister: Had you ever designed glasses before?

Isabelle Olsson: I have designed glasses and jewellery. So it wasn’t completely new but we did spend a long time refining these. We wanted the shape to be absolutely perfect. A 0.2mm height difference makes a complete difference to the way it looks on your face. Prototyping was absolutely crucial. We also cut paper and used laser cutting and used 3D printing.

James Pallister: Could you explain the design process?

Isabelle Olsson: We would first start with sketching by hand. And then Illustrator or a 2D programme, then we would laser-cut these shapes in paper and do many alterations [iterations?]. Then we would go into a harder material, like a plastic.

Once we have the icons, then we got it into 3D. And then 3D print that. Then we got into laser-cutting metals. So it is a long, intricate, back-and-forth process.

James Pallister: So it was quite a manual process? It wasn’t so much using models and computers?

Isabelle Olsson: Yes. What looks good on the computer doesn’t necessarily translate, especially with something that goes on your face. So as soon as you have an idea, you need to prototype it to see what is broken about it. You can then see what looks weird. It can be completely off – too big or too nerdy and you look crazy! It can be a case of a couple of millimetres.

The next stage is about trying it on a couple of people too because something like this needs to fit a wide range of people. That is what I think is most exciting is that everyone on our team uses Glass. We gave them prototypes early on. It was interesting to get feedback from them and it was also valuable for me to see people walking around with them everyday.

James Pallister: What do people pay to get the device?

Isabelle Olsson: So the Explorer edition [the version of Glass released last year] is now $1500 then this new prescription glasses accessory is going to be $225.

James Pallister: Did you have to build different software to cope with the curvature of the lens?

Isabelle Olsson: No, it just works for the regular device. What’s great about it is that our existing Explorers can buy the accessory, which is just the frame part, and then attach it to their device.

James Pallister: How long do you think it will be before wearing Google Glass becomes a normal, everyday thing? Five years? Ten years?

Isabelle Olsson: Much sooner than 10 years I would say. The technology keeps on evolving. That’s the critical part about the Explorer programme [the early adopters who have been given access to Glass], to get people out in the world using Glass in their daily lives. Once more people have it, people are going to get used to it faster.

Even with the original edition or the base frame, after half an hour people say that they forget they are wearing it. When you put it on, it is so lightweight; you can personally forget that you are wearing it. Then it is about other people around you getting used to it. It takes maybe three times that amount for that to happen.

James Pallister: Have you heard of any unexpected uses of Glass?

Isabelle Olsson: I mean personally I was hoping for these cases so when anything comes up I am more excited than surprised. The artistic use of it appeals to me as a designer, when people use it to make cool stop-motion videos or in other arts projects. But also there is this firefighter who developed this special app so he can see the floorplan of a building, so it could help save lives. The more people I see using it, the more exciting it gets and the more diverse it becomes.

James Pallister: Some people are predicting that wearable technology is just a stepping stone towards cyborg technology, where the information is fed directly into the brain. What do you think of that notion?

Isabelle Olsson: I think the team and myself are more interested in what we can do today and in the next couple of years, because that is going to have an impact and be really amazing. You can speculate about the future but somehow it never ends up being what you thought it would be anyway. When you see old futuristic movies, it is kind of laughable.

James Pallister: It seems that we are getting closer and closer to a situation where we can record every situation. Does that ever worry you from a privacy viewpoint?

Isabelle Olsson: I think with any new technology you need to develop an etiquette to using it. When phones started having cameras on them people freaked out about it.

Part of the Explorer programme is that we want to hear how Glass is working and when it is useful and in what instances do you use it. We are also interested in the social side, how people react when you are wearing it. What are peoples concerns, fears, issues and hopes for it.

We hope that Glass will help people to interact with the world around them, really quickly process information and move on to the conversation they were having.

James Pallister: What do you think is the next stage for Glass?

Isabelle Olsson: Tight now we are definitely focused on slowly growing the Explorer programme, making sure that people get these frames in their hands – or on their faces should we say. We are really excited about that and obviously we are working on prioritising feedback and also creating next generation products that I can’t talk about!

James Pallister: Are there any types of technology that you think Glass will feed into in the future?

Isabelle Olsson: I think a lot of things. It is hard for us to speculate without revealing things but the focus is to make technology a more natural part of you and I think any type of services that does that. Glass is going to feed that.

The post Google Glass was designed through “sketching
by hand” says lead designer appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: over dinner in an apartment inside a historic clock tower, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told Dezeen how two young design graduates built the home-stay booking website that is now bigger than most hotel chains.

The venue, The Clock Tower apartment (main image) in Sir George Gilbert Scott’s 1868 gothic revival hotel at St Pancras, is one of Airbnb’s elite rental properties. Guests share the property with its owner, Peter Tompkins, who rents rooms through Airbnb for just £150 per night (although it gets booked up months ahead).

“I think this really sums up the wonderful authentic feeling you get when you’re travelling,” said Chesky, who founded the company with fellow Rhode Island School of Design graduate Joe Gebbia in 2008. “We’ve kept the feeling of being at home anywhere.”

The duo had the idea for a site that would allow travellers to stay in ordinary homes instead of hotels when, short of money to pay the rent on their San Francisco apartment, they bought a couple of inflatable air beds and rented them out to attendees of a design conference in the city.

“We called it the Air Bed and Breakfast,” he says. “From that weekend it’s grown to where we are today, which is 252,000 people every night staying at Airbnb at peak.”

Silicon Valley didn’t take the company seriously at first, partly since it was headed by designers rather than engineers – and partly because nobody thought anyone would pay to stay in someone else’s home.

“When we came to the Valley, no one even wanted to invest in Airbnb,” he says. “One of the reasons was they thought the idea was crazy. People thought: ‘I’d never stay in a stranger’s home. That’s creepy’. But the other reason is that they didn’t think a designer could build and run a company.”

Chesky explained to Dezeen how the company won over the doubters and built a global business where “everything we do is design driven”.

Images are courtesy of Airbnb.

Marcus Fairs: What is Airbnb?

Brian Chesky: Airbnb is a new way to travel and experience the world. We had this vision: what if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere in the world? And that’s what we have today. We’ve kept the feeling of being at home anywhere. We’re in 190 countries, that’s every country but four countries in the world. Thirty-four thousand cities. You can get a home, a castle, a teepee, a treehouse, a boat. Really interesting homes. We’re here in the clock tower at St Pancras station; I think this really sums up the wonderful authentic feeling you get when you’re travelling.

Marcus Fairs: You’re a designer. Tell us about your design background.

Brian Chesky: I grew up in New York, my parents were social workers. I know they had a lot of anxiety about me becoming a designer. My Dad wanted me to get job in health insurance one day. I ended up going to the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] and I was very inspired when I got there because a teacher told me: “You can live in a world of your own design, you can change the world, you can redesign it.” No one ever told me that growing up.

The day of our graduation, my cofounder Joe Gebbia said “Let’s start a company together.” I ended up moving in with him [in San Francisco] but we didn’t have enough money to pay rent. I had $1,000 and I remember that rent was actually $1,150, so I couldn’t pay rent.

It turns out the weekend I went there, this international design conference was coming to San Francisco. All of the hotels were sold out, so we had this idea. Why don’t we turn out house into a bed and breakfast for the conference? Unfortunately we didn’t have any beds, but we had air beds. We called it the Air Bed and Breakfast.

From that weekend it’s grown to where we are today, which is 252,000 people every night staying at Airbnb at peak. I think part of the reason we’re so successful – and it’s partly luck, we’ve been very fortunate – is that we’re from a design background. When I was at RISD, everyone talked about how design could get in the boardroom, how you could get the boardroom to listen to design, how you could influence the CEO.

But I thought: “Why should design be in the boardroom? Why can’t design run the boardroom? What would happen if two designers ran a technology company? What would that be?” That could never happen before. We are that experiment played out and I hope that we’re successful because of it. When we came to the Valley, no one even wanted to invest in Airbnb. One of the reasons was they thought the idea was crazy. People thought “I’d never stay in a stranger’s home. That’s creepy”.

But the other reason is that they didn’t think a designer could build and run a company. They were straight up about it. We weren’t MBAs, we weren’t two PHD students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people that worked for people that ran companies. That’s what they told us. We never believed that; we thought designers were the perfect people to run a company like this. A human-centred company, built around empathy, using creativity. I thought we were the perfect people and we certainly have something to prove.

Marcus Fairs: So is Airbnb more of a design-led company than most other Silicon Valley startups?

Brian Chesky: Absolutely.

Marcus Fairs: In what ways?

Brian Chesky: We’re very much a design-driven company. Everything we do is design driven, not just the products we make or how we design them. Every decision, from the board meetings we run, through how we hire people, to our office design.

We have this methodology that’s called Snow White. It’s inspired by the film Snow White, the feature-length animated movie. It was the first time Walt Disney created storyboards, and we did that for the trip. We storyboarded what was the perfect trip, from the time you book your trip, you leave your home. We did every frame, which in our business is the story board trip. We design it and make sure it’s great every time.

We created this whole end-to-end service design system, design every part of the trip. Hotels, Expedia, booking websites, they don’t do that. They typically use financial data to make their own decisions. We make decisions based on people. We do the same things with employees, how we recruit them, how they join, how we train them. We storyboard and try to design the end-to-end system. We try to see things very differently. For our office design, we redesigned meeting rooms to look like apartments because we thought meeting rooms were ugly and meetings suck.

We have really simple core values that are really like designing the culture. I think there’s a lot of intent around things that before us, there weren’t a lot of intent around. And they weren’t considered from a human basis. Typically they were done from a financial basis.

Marcus Fairs: How is the hotel world reacting? I heard a rumour tonight that they’re getting a bit defensive.

Brian Chesky: Well we’re as big as they are now so there’s a little bit of angst to them. But I think I can’t yet generalise the whole hotel industry and I think it’s because a lot of people have a lot of different views. Some are trying to figure out what we are. I was just in Davos [for the World Economic Forum] and met with a couple of CEOs of large hotel chains. They were actually really friendly and one of them said: “We don’t know what to think about you yet, how should we think about you?” and another said “We don’t actually think of ourselves as competitors with you.” But I heard off the record that another one does think we’re a competitor and has some concerns. So I can’t really generalise, they all have different views.

But I don’t think we’re as much competitors as people make us out to be. Most hotels make all their money in business travel. There’s not a lot of profit for them in ordinary people. We’re the other way around; we have some business travel but most people on Airbnb are using it for vacation.

Marcus Fairs: We’ve seen over the last few years the rise of design hotels, boutique hotels, design filtering into the hospitality industry but do you think that’s just a bit superficial? You’re talking about designing the whole trip experience rather than just the lobby or the room.

Brian Chesky: I think there’s two things there. The first is that I ask myself: “If the internet was around 100 years ago, what would it look like today?” My conclusion is that it would look a lot like Airbnb or be more of a home. I think home design has been an amazing thing that’s lived on for generations, and we kind of celebrate existing home design. I think home design is more authentic than hotel design and I think the idea of home is just more authentic. It’s not manufactured to simulate something, it’s got to be authentic because it has to be there year round. So it’s got to be honest.

I also think that we think about designing the entire trip experience, like Snow White. That entire end-to-end storyboard. We’ve come out with some things, some things haven’t come out yet. We’re really thinking about every frame.

Marcus Fairs: Give us some examples of how you’ve improved the sequence in the storyboard of a trip for travellers.

Brian Chesky: Most of my examples are things we’re coming out with this year. I can give you 100 examples but unfortunately we haven’t announced any yet. I guess our app… with a lot of hotels and a lot of booking sites, their app and how you book is a bit of an afterthought. We design every part of the experience. We even thought about when you get off a plane at the airport, how you pull up your itinerary, how you would check in. The whole app was designed for someone who is a traveller and using it while travelling. A lot of sites, the don’t really think about the use case.

Marcus Fairs: There’s that scenario with conventional travel where you have to print off all these different bits of paper the night before you leave…

Brian Chesky: We have an app that’s super consumable, it’s super easy to use and these are just some of the basic things. Let me give you another example: the host site [where people offering their apartments for rent on Airbnb upload and manage their details]. We were looking at the storyboard of a host and we realised that parts of it were really hard. One part that was really hard was taking photographs of your home. So we created this network of 4,000 to 5,000 professional photographers. You click a button and a photographer will come and photograph your home for free.

This is something that we never would have considered had we not been designers. But we put ourselves in the shoes of the user and realised how hard this was. Then we thought “What would magical feel like?” and that’s how we approach design problems.

So here’s a great design lesson that we learned. We had a mentor who said: “Brian, it’s better to have 100 people love you than a million people sort of like you.” To create the perfect experience for one person and then scale that; work backwards. A lot of companies don’t do that; a lot of companies make a small tweak for everyone, measure it, make another small tweak and get that out and measure again. You keep turning dials, kind of arbitrarily, hoping you get a good signal. We said “Let’s just design something from the ground up for one person, make it as great as possible and then scale it.” That’s how we came up with a lot of our concepts. We designed the end-to-end system for a small number of people and scaled it.

Marcus Fairs: You were saying earlier that Silicon Valley doesn’t take designers seriously.

Brian Chesky: When I got to Silicon Valley they were not taken seriously.

Marcus Fairs: Is that changing then? There’s Apple, there’s fuseproject… Is there a culture change going on?

Brian Chesky: Well Apple was successful in 2007 when I got to the Valley. Their value wasn’t higher than Google or Microsoft then. Engineering was considered what made the most valuable companies. Apple’s a funny case. Now people in the design community see Apple as a design-driven company. In technology, a lot of people didn’t think it was design, they just thought of Steve Jobs as a God. They’d go: “Oh it’s because Steve Jobs is a visionary, that’s why Apple’s successful.” And I said: “No, he’s just a great designer.”

But we had totally different views on it and now you have a lot of young startups – us, Pinterest, Square, SoundCloud – all these companies are really well designed, so I think it’s changing. I think more and more the experience and the design of the system and product are becoming the epicentre for the user experience. I think they’re really important right now. I would like to think we played a very small part in shifting that narrative and sentiment, and giving a bit more visibility to designers.

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a company” says Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky appeared first on Dezeen.

While his images—made from bubblegum, honeybees and toothpaste—quickly grabbed the attention of collectors and curators worldwide, LA-based artist Matthew Brandt continued to explore the potential of other curious media in order…

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