Greg Cohen: What are you working on currently that you are excited about?

Stefan Sagmeister: There really are two different ways to look at the world. Most media looks at it from a very short-term point of view. The insight is that if you look at the world from the long point of view from 100 years, 1000 years, most things important for humans developed very well. If you look at Twitter, you only get half the information if you wanna have an overall view of the world.

How do you start?

If it's a very large project that has many facets to it, I might start with a gigantic map of that project that would include every single idea or direction that could possibly be part of that. If it's a more singular item like a particular painting or something for a more contained project, I might try out different methods, starting to think about the idea from the starting point that has nothing to do with the idea. I try not to have the brain start where the synapses are already connected because that often yields something that I've done before or that I have seen before. I try to break that.

Most of the time I have five or six projects running at the same time. I switch between those projects and one might influence the other. A strand that doesn't seem to lead to anything else might lead somewhere in an unrelated project.

How much of your creative process is routine and how much is spontaneous?

If I just let myself go, it would all be routine. That's why I'm breaking it with different techniques to have my brain break out of the routine, meaning starting to think about the project that has nothing to do with the project at hand. 

Let's say I'm designing a book about cars. If I just sit down, considering I've already seen hundreds of books about cars, chances are that this will also be another. I might look around the room and see a cactus and think, “Let me try to start working on this book about cars from the term cactus.” Can it be hurtful? Maybe it has a very rough surface. Maybe they have a tar dust cover around the book.

Can you explain your quote “Uselessness is necessary in the creation of joy?”

Let's say you're doing a commute every day. That commute has a lot of functionality. Say you're spending 20 minutes to walk aimlessly in a park. That way of transporting yourself has almost no functionality, but you will enjoy the walk in the park more than the commute. You will enjoy an album cover that has little functionality more than a tax form that has high functionality. You will enjoy driving a Ferrari that has little functionality much more than driving a dump truck that has high functionality. You will enjoy being in a cathedral that has little functionality more than in a factory that has high functionality.

Greg Cohen: What are you working on currently that you are excited about?

Stefan Sagmeister: The last five years have been pretty much consumed by one big subject that there really are two different ways to look at the world. One being like most media looks at it from a very short-term point of view. The insight is that if you look at the world from the long point of view from 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, most things that are important for humans developed very well. If you look at Twitter, you only get really half of the information that you might need if you wanna have an overall view of the world.

When do you do your most creative work?

The morning, because I find that working on ideas or concepts is the most difficult part of my day. I wanna start with it, because everything else feels easy in comparison. If I start with easy things, I will not move on to difficult things.

How much of your day are you actively engaged in your creative work?

As far as literally designing or sitting there and trying to come up with ideas, it's probably not longer than an hour or three. All of these other things of course are necessary to actually make these ideas happen. I couldn't sit eight or 10 hours on a table actively trying to come up with ideas. It's too frustrating or too difficult.

When you are creating something from scratch, how do you start?

If it's a very large project that has many facets to it, I might start with a gigantic map of that project that would include every single idea or direction that could possibly be part of that. If it's a more singular item like a poster or an idea for a particular painting or something for a more contained project, I might try out different methods, like starting to think about the idea from the starting point that has nothing to do with the idea. I try not to have the brain start about the idea where the synapses are already connected because that's often yields to something that I've done before or that I have seen before. I try to break that.

I most of the time have four or five or six projects running at the same time. I switch between those projects and one might influence the other. A strand that doesn't seem to lead to anything else might lead somewhere in an unrelated project.

What are your building blocks or algorithms for your creative process?

It's very traditional. I make sketches, often by hand. I do this only very rough now and often make the sketches also digitally. But sometimes we break it on purpose. We then work until the final piece looks like a very high-res version of the sketch. "Let's do this project without a sketch at all and see if that influences the outcome." We've actually had a very good outcomes like this. I don't quite like it. I'm feeling much more comfortable and confident if we’re working from sketches.

How much of your creative process is routine and how much of it is spontaneous?

If I just let myself go, it would all be routine and habit. That's why I'm breaking it with different techniques to have my brain break out of the routine, meaning starting to think about the project that has nothing to do with the project at hand. 

Let's say I'm designing a book about cars. If I just sit down, considering I've already seen hundreds of books about cars, chances are that this will also be another. I might look around the room and see a cactus and think, "Let me try to start working on this book about cars from the term 'cactus.'" Can it be hurtful? Maybe it has a very rough surface. Maybe they have a tar envelope or maybe a tar dust cover around the book.

What makes one idea more promising than another?

It's going into a different direction so that there is a surprise in it, that can be going into either being surprising for the audience or for myself. I find that I am a mainstream enough person that if I'm excited about it, my experience has shown that other people are excited about it too.

How do you know when you're done?

I might have them up in front of my thinking every day for many weeks, and I might tweak this and tweak there until I resee it and I think, “I don't think I can push that any more for it to become better.”

Where do you find inspiration?

I do a lot of presentations around the world which I always find inspirational. Physical influences that I see on the road or that I see in a different country or I see in an institution, all those tend to leave a stronger residue in my brain than if I look at stuff on the web. At the same time you can also see a lot of different things on platforms like Instagram. I tend to go to a lot of museums and galleries, not really to look for inspiration, more because I find it very enjoyable.

What are your most frequently revisited sources of inspiration?

That would be the Edward De Bono Thinking Method.

What media do you recommend on creativity?

The Tokyo Type Directors Club book.

When and where do your lightning bolt ideas occur?

Mostly on the table if they occur. Idea generating is a very deliberate process. It's very rarely that an idea comes by itself. Most of the time it's hard work.

What role if any does feedback play in your creativity?

I have a particular message that I wanna bring out that I would wanna put out into the world. If that message does not arrive or is not communicated, then clearly I have to make changes. When we did the first exhibition of the work and all the painting sold, this was good feedback but also very important feedback because it was clear that the project worked.

What do you think different creative fields have in common?

All of them prize surprise or uniqueness. All of them try to be emotional. We are living in an extremely sophisticated society where these different strands have a good chance to become very sophisticated themselves. I've seen many architects trying to do graphic design and doing it quite badly. I've definitely seen graphic designers trying to build houses with very mixed results. These different strands necessitate an incredible amount of knowledge and mastering of crafts.

In preparing for this interview as well as a potential interview with Thomas Heatherwick, I was simultaneously reading your book Now Is Better as well as his book, Humanize. Both books make the point that beauty leads to longevity. How can we break out of the zeitgeist of efficiency and the capitalist tendency for cheaper, cheaper, cheaper?

Thomas’ theory and mine are proven every day by companies who incorporate beauty into their product line and how successful they are. Arguably the most successful company in the world is Apple and the only company were the founder and longtime CEO openly, clearly, and repeatedly talked about beauty was Steve Jobs. This idiocy that came out of misunderstood modernism will go away. This period from the 1950s until the year 2000 where we thought that it's all about functionality and nothing else matters.

Can you explain your quote that “Uselessness is necessary in the creation of joy?”

Let's say you're doing a commute every day. That commute has a lot of functionality. Let's say you're spending 20 minutes to go through a park to walk aimlessly in a park. That way of transporting yourself has almost no functionality, but you will enjoy the walk in the park much more than the commute. You will enjoy an album cover that has very little functionality more than a tax form that has very high functionality. You will enjoy driving a Ferrari that has very little functionality much more than driving a dump truck that has very high functionality. You will enjoy being in a cathedral that has very little functionality more than in a factory that has high functionality.

What are some ways that you create an emotional connection with you audience?

Through modernism, the idea was to bring the designer outside of the design and make it in quotation marks objective so that formally the goal was that it would look like it's been made by a machine. So we tried always to make designs that were very clearly created by a person, by a human being. Be it formally like by incorporating clearly handmade things like hand typography or illustration. But also conceptually where the opinion of the designer is clearly part of the whole communication process.

Greg Cohen: How's your day going so far?

Stefan Sagmeister: It's going good. It's busy working, but all fine. I have no plans for the evening, which I always like because then I could just work as long as I want. It's perfect.

So these questions are going to center around creativity, and we're going to begin with questions about you personally and then we'll move into some other. So what do you create?

Ultimately, I'm a designer and I create designs, meaning things that hopefully in the best cases could help somebody and in the very best cases could delight somebody. That's the goal, very rarely achieved.

And what are you working on currently that you are excited about?

Well, I think the last five years have been pretty much consumed by one big subject, which comes out of the insight that there really are two different ways to look at the world. One being like most media looks at it, meaning from a very short-term point of view. And the insight is that if you look at the world from the long point, from long term point of view, meaning from 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years, most things that are important for humans actually developed very, very well. So, it's the 180 degree opposite view that you get from short-termism. 

And I found that to be interesting and created a very large number of different pieces around that subject. Ultimately, to make the point that if you look at Twitter, you only get really half of the information that you might need if you wanna have an overall view of the world.

Yeah, I read that in your book Now Is Better. It was a very good book. 

Oh, thank you. So then I don't have to tell you that's ultimately what I've been looking on the last five years, the content of that book.

And what would you say is your signature? What distinguishes your work from everybody else's?

I would say that I'm a trained communication designer, and most communication designers tend to work for commercial entities and connected to promotion or advertising. But more and more, and I would say since five years exclusively, I'm trying to use the language of design for non-commercial messages.

When do you do your most creative work?

The morning. Because I find that working on ideas or concepts is the most difficult part of my day. So I wanna start with it, because everything else feels easy in comparison. And I cannot go the other way. If I start with easy things, I will not move on to difficult things. So, I'd much rather start with the difficult ones.

And how much of your day are you actively engaged in your creative work?

Small. That depends on how you would define it. I mean, I would say that if as far as literally designing or sitting there and trying to come up with ideas, it's probably not longer than an hour or three. 

We can take today: I think that today I did work on creative work probably just for an hour. Then I did a long Zoom call with some guys who wanna do a documentary about me. Then I packed the book up for a museum director who wanted one. And now I'm doing this interview with you. And then in the afternoon I probably switch over to answer some emails, things like that. So all of all of these other things of course are necessary to actually make these ideas happen. 

But I normally don't work more than, yeah, one or two or maybe three hours actually on ideas or really actively designing. I also… I couldn't. I find it too difficult. Like, I couldn't sit eight or 10 hours on a table actively trying to come up with ideas. It's too frustrating or too difficult.

Ok, now we're gonna move into questions surrounding process, and the first questions are about getting started. lWhen you are creating something from scratch, how do you start?

It would depend on what kind of project it is. Meaning, if it's a very large project that has many facets to it, let's say, like a book called Beauty, I might start that with doing a very large project. I might start with a gigantic map of that project to try to get a handle on it. So let's see on our project on Beauty or even when we did the book that you mentioned, the Now Is Better book, I definitely did a gigantic map that would include every single idea or directions that could possibly be part of that. 

But if it's a more singular item, I don't know, like a poster or an idea for a particular painting, something for like a more contained project... if something comes to mind by itself, I might try out different methods, like starting to think about the idea from the starting point that has nothing to do with the idea. Meaning that I try not to have the brain start about the idea where the synapses are already connected, because that's very often yields to something that I've done before, or that I have seen before or that I'm familiar with. So I try to break that. 

But in general, I most of the time have four or five or six projects running at the same time. So I switch between those projects and one might influence the other, you know, like sometimes something like a strand that doesn't seem to lead to anything else might lead somewhere in an unrelated project.

Do you begin with the end in mind or do you let it evolve organically?

Normally I begin with the end in mind, but we've done projects that we let evolve organically. Let's say we did a for-us large project, the documentary film about happiness where we did not have an end in mind. And I think it served the film well, but I did not enjoy that process, because by nature I'm a big planner. So for me, it's much more comfortable if I have the end in mind.

OK. And some people call it mise en place, fertile soil, or getting in the mood. But how do you set up your environment or conditions to create?

Well, I have a very beautiful studio that in that studio, pretty much everything is just so. It's also quite orderly, as in I know where things are. So if I am in the flow of working on something, I'm not stopped by looking for this kind of foil or that kind of pencil or that kind of thing. 

And it has a fantastic view over the New York skyline and a lot of sky. So if I'm actually thinking about something there is a chance to have a wide vista and I also think it's interesting enough to look, at but not so interesting that you couldn't follow a particular kind of thought, so it's very helpful. And I've had studios in the meantime where that wide view was not the case. And specifically now that I have it again, I became incredibly aware of how much I missed it.

Moving on to questions of evolving the work. What is your process for building or improving or evolving your creative work once something is started?

Now, they're so different from project to project because the processes are so different. Meaning if we talk about recent work, let's say the process behind the paintings with those contemporary inserts is of course similar, meaning they change as far as sometimes we had in the beginning with the inserts that were canvas themselves. And now we're making inserts that are wood that's lacquered and that's covered in resin. But in general, that process is very similar, but that process is completely different. 

Let's say when we do, I don't know tunnels that connect hospitals in Toronto, meaning it's a different process, not only technology-wise, but also the way that it would evolve because the process, the job is the hospitals. The process is also different because let's say the Toronto Hospital project has a client. So that needs presentations, it needs a back and forth. There's five hospitals connected to have their own opinions as well as their own bureaucracies. So it's significant, it's incomparable to, let's say, doing the historical paintings with inserts which is basically done without any interference from the outside, because the museums and the galleries where these things are exhibited typically don't interfere with the pieces.

What are your Legos or building blocks or algorithms for your creative process?

I'm not quite sure how you mean that.

Actually I think probably you invent or design your process differently on each project, but I didn't know if you had any commonalities from project to project, like any consistent pieces that you use from one project to the next to guide your work.

I mean, ultimately, it's very traditional. You know, I make sketches. They used to be sketches, often by hand, as in meaning with pencils and color pencils. I do this only very rough now and often make the sketches also digitally. But sometimes we break it on purpose. By and large, we then work until the final piece looks like a very high-res version of the sketch. 

But as I said, sometimes the strategy is broken on purpose. And we say, “OK, let's do this project without a sketch at all and just see if you know how that influences the outcome.” And we've actually had very, very good outcomes like this. It's just that meaning like, I don't quite like it. I'm feeling much more comfortable and confident if we’re working from sketches.

What percentage of your creative time is spent prototyping or experimenting?

Those two are very different things. Experimenting and prototyping have nothing to do with each other. Experimenting is I'm really trying something out where I have no idea where it leads. And prototyping is, I already have an idea and I'm building a prototype.

Sketching is prototyping. So, I'm not quite sure how I would separate working on an idea and sketching that idea out, because it's sort of like one influences the other, like just thinking influences how the sketch comes out. So, yeah, I don't have a good answer for that because I'm not quite sure how I would separate it.

Fair enough. How much of your creative process is routine or habit, and how much of it is spontaneous or improvised?

I would say if I just let myself go, it would all be routine and habit. So that's why I'm breaking it with different techniques to have my brain break out of the routine. As in, starting to think about the project that has nothing to do with the project at hand. 

I can give you an example. Let's say I'm designing a book about cars. And if I just sit down, considering I've already seen hundreds of books about cars, chances are that this will also be another, they will look very similar than the other books about the cars. So, basically I might look around the room and, I don't know, see a cactus and think, “Ok, let me try to start working on this book about cars from the point of, from the term 'cactus.'” Ok. Is it, does it, can it be hurtful? Maybe it has a very rough surface. Or maybe we'll mimic that. Maybe they have a tar envelope or maybe a tar dust cover around the book. Not even that bad of an idea about the book about cars. 

But if I'm not actively fighting the routine, considering I've been a working designer for many decades now, I will fall into the routine for sure.

What makes one idea more promising than another?

Well, it's going into a different direction so that there is a surprise in it, either being surprising for the audience or for myself. And if it has a chance to help somebody more than another idea, or if I have a chance to be more delightful than another idea. And this can also be for myself, meaning specifically now, I find that I am a mainstream enough person that if I'm excited about it, my experience has shown that other people are excited about it too. So if I'm excited about an idea that I think could really work, and I'm getting giddy, that normally means that other people think so as well.

And at what point do you test your assumptions or challenge your creative choices?

When we still did commercial work, those assumptions were often tested the first time when we did the client presentation, because the client of course basically would know more about their company and their audience than we would. Now that we don't do commercial work anymore, we don't test. I make a painting, sometimes I show it to my partner because we have very, very similar ideas about quality. So quite often I do show some to my partner, but outside of that, I don't test. I don't do groups or any of that.

How do you distinguish when it's time to test or try new things, or when it's time to dig deeper on something?

That's mostly a gut feeling. It's that time definitely became much longer with age. When I was a very young designer, I tried to jump from one thing to the other very, very frequently, and I had a much shorter attention span for a particular project. But as already discussed about this long-term thinking project that I'm working on right now, I've been doing already for five years and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do it for another five.

In regard to finishing, how do you know when you're done?

That's also different from project to project. Like right now, since I'm setting my own deadlines, it's very much when it feels right. So let's say on the pieces that hang on a wall, I might have 15 going on at the same time at various stages. Some just in the beginning, and some almost there, and I might have them up in front of me thinking every day for many weeks, and I might tweak this and tweak there, and until when I resee it and resee it and resee it and I think, well, actually I'm not quite sure, but I don't think I can push that any more for it to become better. Or maybe it's still pushable in the future, but right now, this is about as good as I can make this composition, this shape, this data, this color combination and then I know it's done.

And what makes a creative project successful?

When it helps somebody, and when it delights somebody.

Questions about outside sources of inspiration or collaboration. I've heard you talk about train trips or newly occupied hotel rooms and Edward De Bono's use of random objects. Where else do you find inspiration?

Well, those are definitely a couple of good ones, and then they are the usual ones. I travel a lot. I do a lot of presentations around the world which I always find inspirational, meaning that physical influences that I see on the road or that I see in a different country or I see in an institution, all those tend to leave a stronger residue in my brain than if I look at stuff on the web. 

I think at the same time you can also see a lot of different things on platforms like Instagram, so I'm sure that there's an influence there. I tend to go to a lot of museums and galleries, not really to look for inspiration, more because I find it very enjoyable. So Karolina and I spend many weekends in galleries and museums and of course, New York is the ideal place for it.

What are your most frequently revisited sources of inspiration?

Hm. Probably that would be the Edward De Bono Thinking Method. I try that out all the time. 

And what media like books or blogs or magazines or podcasts do you recommend on creativity?

I very rarely look at design-related magazines, online or offline. It's here and there but barely. I look that it's nice that or I might look at the Tokyo Type Directors Club book. But that's really the exception. I was an avid follower of many of these things when I was a young designer, but not so much anymore.

When and where do your lightning bolt ideas occur?

Mostly on the table, if they occur. I find that that idea generating is a very deliberate process. It very rarely it happens that an idea comes by itself, but most of the time it's hard work. So that because most of the hard work that I do is done in the studio, that also probably is the biggest location where ideas actually come.

Is your creative process solitary, or do you collaborate with others? 

Right now, it's solitary. But when the studio, when we did commercial work, it was also very much beside us.

When you collaborate with others, how does that function? What is that like?

Jessica and I used to work on things, even sometimes coming back from a client presentation where we got the brief, and we would talk in the taxi about “this goes in this direction or that direction.” Very rarely, there might have been an idea that already came in the meeting during the brief, but that's more the exception than the rule. And we would then divvy it up like who does what, who works on which part of that thing. I don't think that we would do it any different way than most people would. 

I have never had good results from trying to come up with an idea in a room, like brainstorming with six or eight people. I certainly tried, but I have never really been impressed with the quality of the results.

What role if any does feedback play in your creativity?

I think ultimately a big role. Obviously it played a role when we did commercial work, because the things that we do need to function, and the feedback would also determine what that functionality achieved. Meaning, did the thing do what it was supposed to do? And right now I would say feedback also plays a role, because I have a particular message that I would wanna put out into the world, mainly that if you look at the world from a long-term perspective, many things developed well. And if that message does not arrive or is not communicated, then clearly I have to make changes. 

Even from a practical point of view, when we did the first exhibition of the work and all the painting was sold, this of course was very, very good feedback, but also very important feedback because it was clear that the project worked. If nothing would have [sold], I probably would not have been able or wanting to continue because clearly it didn't work. And because this is design, functionality has to be a part of it. It's not everything. There has to be a very important part that goes beyond functionality, but functionality has to be part of it.

Moving to questions about challenges, what is the hardest part of creation?

Thinking about an idea.

I've heard you talk about boredom or uninteresting content and the fear of not being able to come up with anything. But when you're in creative flow, what stops your flow faster than anything? 

Any sort of interruption. But I created an environment where those interruptions are pretty at a minimum.

Do you have any notable mistakes or failures?

Oh, yes. But I'm not a huge fan of incorporating failure into the workflow, meaning like I rarely have a mistake that then leads to something else. And I know that there are a lot of designers out there who think that failure is an important starting point. And I would say that in my case, I would rather create something successful than a failure. But I do believe that it is important to expect failure here and there and see what is learnable from it. Because of course, I very, very much agree with the widespread notion that we can learn a lot from failure, but we don't learn a lot from success.

And how do you make progress when you're blocked or feel like you're at a dead end?

I just switch projects. I go from one to the other. I find sitting there, when there's nothing coming to mind, so incredibly frustrating that I find it much easier to just switch to the next project.

And how do you avoid ruts or preconceptions?

I think that there is a natural wave of energy that my body seems to work in. And so there's just sometimes weeks where I'm incredibly productive and things seem to flow, and then there are weeks where it's less so, and I found it far more productive to basically just go with those weeks, rather than feeling incredibly bad when the productivity isn't as high as it was a month before.

Can you think of a time that a constraint was beneficial to your creativity?

All the time. I think that all creativity needs restraints. If you can do whatever you want without any restraints and restrictions whatsoever, it's probably stupefying. It doesn't really allow you to do anything. And I think that's true for most people.

What is a tell tale sign that it's time to abandon an idea?

If I've been working on it for a good while and even after trying really hard, I still have a bad feeling about it in my tummy.

Ok, this is questions about creative crossovers. Do you have more than one creative skill or hobby or interest? What comes to mind is you designed furniture on one of your sabbaticals, and sometimes you're designing CD booklets and you have a bunch of different avenues for your creativity.

Yeah, I think that I get bored easily. So the range of media that we've been designing in the studio is very wide. As you said, it can reach from websites to furniture to a documentary film, to some branding items. Or even now when we don't do commercial work anymore, it leads from gigantic murals all the way down to tiny little pins, from water glasses to a watch, to the design of tunnels. So, yes, I think that the medium that we try to work in are very diverse, and I like it very much that way.

In that regard, what do you think different creative fields have in common? Like, is there anything universal to most or all of them?

Well, I think all of them need ideas, all of them prize surprise or uniqueness. All of them try to be emotional. And of course they are still very different from each other, because by now we are all living in an extremely sophisticated society where these different strands have had a good chance to become very sophisticated themselves. 

I've seen many architects trying to do graphic design and doing it quite badly, and I've definitely seen graphic designers trying to build houses with very mixed results. Or I found that as a designer, creating a documentary film that is actually watchable was incredibly difficult, simply because these different strands have necessitated an incredible amount of knowledge and mastering of crafts. So the switching between one to the other is often not simple. It's maybe easier to switch from communication design to furniture. But even there, I tried to make, I would say graphic-y furniture as opposed to straightforward… Like, I don't think I would be the right person to design a classic modernist couch, because for one thing, there are already a thousand classic modernist couches out there. And I probably wouldn't be the person to make that incrementally by half a percent better, because I know too little about the exact material of foam that should be sandwiched with this kind of material to optimize the sitting experience by a little bit.

What skill or techniques from a different field would you like to bring into your work?

I'm very aware that this is super important, and I'd be open for absolutely anything. Meaning like I think what I've done or brought into in the past was at one time I was in engineering school. So I think there was some sort of influence there where the design at one time probably was a bit more engineering-related than usual. But in general, I think it's super important to bring in influences, interests from outside, into your design work.

And who do you think of when I say the most creative person?

Mmm. Probably Danny Hillis, who's an engineer.

Iis there anyone else you can think of that we should talk to for this project? Anybody specific that you think of is super creative and would be useful?

Not necessarily, but I have one comment to the methodology that I've seen you do. I can tell you when we did the Happy film, I interviewed a good dozen of scientists all in the world of psychology, positive psychology. And I did it exactly like you do, meaning like I had a very long list of questions, and I found after having done 12 of those on camera that this is not a great way to yield truly interesting answers. 

I was ultimately interviewed by a fantastic person in Germany for a newspaper. And this was just an interview that I found was truly interesting for both of us. And she made me say very interesting things. And when I asked her about her message, she said she always just thinks of one question. She goes only with a single question into an interview, and then she builds the next question from the answer that that first question yields. And I've tried that out and found that I got much more interesting answers out of people with that second method. So obviously you do whatever you want. But that was what worked for me.

That's some great feedback. Thank you for that. In preparing for this interview as well as a potential interview with Thomas Heatherwick, I was simultaneously reading your book Now Is Better as well as his book, Humanize. And both books make the point that beauty leads to longevity, and how can we break out of the zeitgeist of efficiency and the capitalist tendency for cheaper, cheaper, cheaper?

Well, I think that we are ready. There's a good number of people out there who proved that it works. I know Thomas well. Thomas’ theory and mine are proven every day by companies who incorporate beauty into their product line and how successful they are. Right now, arguably the most successful company in the world is Apple, and arguably the only company in the world were the founder and longtime CEO openly, clearly, and repeatedly talked about beauty was Steve Jobs. So there is a correlation there. It's something that we all want and need, and this idiocy that came out of misunderstood modernism will go away. I'm completely convinced about it.

I sure hope so.

Yeah, I'm sure that I think that this was a period roughly from the 1950s until the year 2000 where we thought that it's all about functionality and nothing else matters. And I think we're getting away from there. And you see it. I mean, there was plenty of evidence. The worst places in New York, that the symbols of that were basically Penn Station and LaGuardia Airport, and LaGuardia has already been completely redesigned, and Penn Station is in the process of being redesigned because people just hated those places so much.

Yeah, I think it's crazy that we have a greater capacity than ever in human history to mass produce or produce ornate things through 3D scanning and 3D printing and all types of CNC work, and everything is just so same-y. And I just don't understand. I wish we could break out of it.

I'm pretty sure we will.

Can you explain your quote that “Uselessness is necessary in the creation of joy?”

Let's say you're doing a commute every day. That commute has a lot of functionality. You're going from your home to your work and then back. Let's say you're spending 20 minutes to go through a park to walk aimlessly in a park. That way of transportation, of transporting yourself has almost no functionality. There's basically no function coming out of that, but you will enjoy the walk in the park much more than the commute. 

And I think this is true for many things. You will enjoy an album cover that has very little functionality more than a tax form that has very high functionality. You will enjoy driving a Ferrari that has very little functionality much more than driving a dump truck that has very high functionality. You will enjoy being in a cathedral that has very little functionality more than in a factory that has high functionality. I think because our lives are so very functional, we enjoy things that have little or no functionality.

I can see that. And the last question I have for you: what are some ways that you create an emotional connection with you audience?

That was all part of our desire with design, because particularly through modernism,  often the idea was to bring the designer outside of the design and make it "objective," so it would look like it's been made by a machine. And so we tried always to make designs that were very clearly created by a person, by a human being. Be it formally like by incorporating clearly handmade things like hand typography or illustration, but also conceptually where the opinion of the designer is clearly part of the whole communication process. And I think we've done well with that.

When you said that I was reminded of the Flash videos from the late great Hillman Curtis when  you'd be looking at a web page and then all of you think something's a picture and then all of a sudden it blinks at you…t's jarring and surprising and heartwarming all at the same time.

Yes.

That's all the questions I had, and I wanna genuinely thank you for the critique of the interview process as a whole. I'll definitely take that to heart.

Alright, excellent. Well, I wish you all the best of luck with the book and with the project. Thank you so much for sharing the results.