Hasta La Ideas

Photos by Talia Herman

If you’re an industrial designer looking to work in the tech sector, Google is probably pretty low on your list of prospective employers—if it’s on there at all. The company employs plenty of UX designers, interaction designers, motion designers, and others who shape how Google users interface with its many digital tools. But Google doesn’t really make stuff, and ambitious designer-makers are much more likely to set their sights on Apple, IDEO, frog, or any number of other high-profile companies that do.

That may be about to change. Recently, Google invited Core77 to visit its Mountain View, California, campus and meet some of the design talent behind Google X, the semi-secret “moonshot factory” that has in recent years been designing quite a bit of actual stuff, some of which you’ve no doubt heard about by now. X was founded in January 2010 to continue work on Google’s self-driving car initiative, and to start developing other similarly futuristic projects. The next to be unveiled was Google Glass, the much-publicized wearable computer that is expected to reach consumers sometime this year. After that, X launched (quite literally) Project Loon, an attempt to provide Internet service to rural and remote areas via balloons floating in the stratosphere; it conducted a pilot test in New Zealand last June. X also recently acquired Makani Power, which develops airborne wind turbines that could be used to harvest high-altitude wind energy, bringing its total number of public projects to four.

But what’s interesting for the design community is not just that Google X is doing some traditional industrial design in the service of realizing outrageously big ideas, but that it’s integrating I.D. with a variety of other disciplines in a particularly rigorous fashion, creating an ideal-sounding nexus of design thinking, user research and fabrication. And it is actively seeking new talent who can help flesh out its multidisciplinary approach.

“We’re looking for unicorns,” says Mitchell Heinrich, one of the four X-ers I met in Mountain View about a month ago. Heinrich founded and runs his own group within X called the Design Kitchen, which acts as X’s in-house fabrication department but is also deeply involved in generating (and killing) new ideas. And what he means by “unicorns” is designers who have the rare ability to excel in both of those roles—as he puts it, “people who have the ability to have the inspiration, the thought, the design, and then are able to carry that out to something that actually works and looks like what they want it to look like.”

That may not sound like such a fantastically rare combination of skills, but Heinrich insists that finding people who can do this kind of soup-to-nuts design—come up with brilliant ideas and then actually make them, while also working extremely fast—has been difficult. In other words, the Kitchen has high standards. “I like to think of it as more like a Chez Panisse than an Applebee’s,” he says.

The Googleplex in early December

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