Ep.20 Designing for everyone - Jonah Goldsaito

0:00hello everyone and welcome for one more episode of the world class designer today with me i have gold saito i hope i'm pronunciating your name correctly so uh jonah is a an amazing person like i feel like i've known him for years now like but we've just talked a few minutes we just connected uh like as professional is originally from the u.s uh an american guy as we like to say

0:33in africa so have experience passing from like those big companies that you most of you guys want to be part of like google youtube and others but i will leave jonah to describe himself his profession and what he is up to on the last few years as professional so welcome to the show jonah hey thank you very much um this is uh this is really cool i think the work that you're doing with world class designer seems really really wonderful and i'm i'm super excited to be a tiny

1:07a tiny part of it um so so who i am i'm in what i guess what i'm doing right now well what i'm doing the short answer is that i'm creating a way for you to get a transmission from the future and okay i'm assuming i'm assuming that sounds weird um uh a little out of the ordinary but basically um what that looks like is that i'm trying to create uh an experience for people i'm doing this

1:43with my my partner my wife um where people can get a different perspective in their moment um it's it's a mobile experience it's an augmented reality experience and um it it involves experience design for that which is a really nascent space augmented reality is not something that is is uh super commonplace the patterns are a little awkward things are new and that's exciting um i'm also

2:13doing all the coding for it so the front end which is really interesting and something i hadn't done before and the back end um and there are a lot of really interesting interesting parts of it there are a lot of really interesting design challenges i'd be happy to talk about that but it also is very different from although it's very much informed by my experiences coming up through startups and at google and youtube um so i i guess i could kind of talk about any of those things um but the design

2:47challenges that i'm looking at right now i'm finding really fascinating and um yeah i'd be happy i'd be happy to get into any of it what do you think nice nice i think we're gonna have the opportunity to go to go to it uh but like there we have a like a few set of questions to ask before we dive deep into that sounds good so like but uh how do you want to do this jana you want to go through your experience

3:18on the like from what you worked uh or you want to go to the traditional path where you answer like what it takes to become a world-class designer um you know i don't know what it takes to be uh a world-class designer for everyone i i just know how i've gotten to where i am i mean i i feel even strange saying that i'm a world-class designer so so saying that i can tell people what the what the

3:50what the steps are to get there um but i i think we we we kind of have a formula to get that out from you so let's try this okay sounds good sounds good how do you explain to your younger self right like this is the format we use so imagine if you're talking to yourself in 1999 when or before that when you started uh with with technology how would you explain design to your younger self

4:21with like that much experience what is design so in a way that you would understand right right 20 years ago right well can i say first that um i really like the parallel between the fact that what i'm working on now is the transmission from the future you know someone talking to you from the future and giving allowing you to see your life from a new perspective and the fact that the the philosophy the method that you you take in these interviews is to have people talk

4:52to themselves in the past i just think that's a like it's a really nice parallel um so so the first year that i made money designing and writing html i was telling you before was i was a teen in the mid-90s so i i had this ridiculous website with ridiculous typography and i was just a kid and i was just excited that i had access to these tools that allowed me this no one in in in particular to put something in the world where anyone could see it who who had you know access to a computer so i was i was

5:29just excited to be making any kind of money to be uh people didn't realize that was a child um and flash flash forward a while like my first real full-time year working i would say was in a startup that i co-founded with some people from my my secondary school uh one of whom was he was five years older than me and the other one was actually a teacher at the school um and at that point i'd left college so this was not a traditional path um and my father had just passed away and i didn't see

6:03a career that was offered uh that like a path to any career that i would find interesting in the university that i was in so what i did see was that there was there was this world where i could make something that would help people the problems that i would be solving to get to that point were um unendingly interesting to me the the variety of problems the way that they could be solved the the things that i could use or the things i'd have to reinvent or reimagine um and all happening within

6:37a web browser this was the days of flash and flash was was something kind of pre-powerful cross-browser javascript that allowed all of a sudden the browser to be an environment in which people could interact where they could create things where they weren't just reading the tagline of the largest company um suddenly you could make an environment where people could interact and that was what that's what that's what really excited me um so so my path um my path maybe is not like well it's not

7:09like everyone's and maybe maybe it people can see themselves in it who are listening to this um but at that point when i heard the word design i would say i only thought of graphic design and it took a long time for me to not think of the word in that way maybe if you use it in the context of designing solutions i would think in a different way but just in when people said design are you a designer um i thought about pixels i thought about photoshop and even for many years even through the mid you know through the early 2000s people were still when they were posting jobs or talking

7:44about themselves and promoting themselves they still talked about being pixel perfect we want someone who's pixel perfect i am pixel perfect people were still very much focusing on just the visuals um they were thinking that that that was the indicator of success and um but the reality was although that's how i probably would have defined it as a kid the reality was i was trying to figure out just any way to get to get a tool that the people i was trying to make it for could use

8:15that would make them happy that could help them realize their vision it was it was a creation tool that happened in the browser this is way before google docs or sheets or um any kind of website builder like squarespace but it was a drag and drop tool and a way for people to share and the way we focused it was for the classroom so we were trying to make online collaborative creation tools in a in an educational setting um it seemed so cool at the time uh now you're like oh yeah obviously um but

8:48the what i was doing on a day-to-day basis was really a lot of it was the process of ux it just wasn't really called that yet ux wasn't a thing um but but sketching out ideas talking with teammates figuring out what might work showing it to people making prototypes making it real like that whole and then iterating and iterating and all of that i mean i think i was actually doing a version of the design process um i can i can definitely name things that i was lacking at that time uh i didn't really

9:24have a good business perspective and i i often it was often my creative outlet as well so i was often putting in things just because i thought like it would be very cool for this to exist and not will this really help the person who is looking this at this on their screen get to their end goal um and i didn't do enough user testing we didn't really do enough defining of who are who these people would be who were using it and we just iterated for a long time and and didn't it ended up not i mean i learned

9:57so much it was a great experience but i guess i would tell that kid to to keep going but i would tell them to to listen more and to um to validate more to validate with real people and to not just keep building something new to to fill the void of of why it wasn't being successful that's kind of similar for the design process too you know just okay it's kind of an answer to the first two questions

10:27okay okay so like continuing uh how would you explain uh but yeah but i think you did answer this question about the design the design process so tell me about mistakes how uh which mistakes would you suggest your younger self to make because you believe you learned a lot from it from them um it's a funny question i was wrestling with this one um i mean if if i wanted if i'm if looking back

11:00i'm glad that i made it as a mistake then it wasn't really a mistake right it's just part of the path um i think there are a lot of things in my life that could be defined as a mistake but they they were all really good learning experiences and and there's no i guess i could have read a book about them but i would not have internalized it in a way that made me who i am like i would have i would have eventually made those mistakes somehow so i don't think i don't think that that i really have a

11:34good answer to it okay it's it's okay so so what would you recommend your younger self to focus on huh um so i guess i was always i always focused on my current project i mean i'm interested in in so many things and i i have been throughout the course of of my work um and ultimately just about every project had something that intrigued me in some way and and i i would say that the project focused

12:08me so um for me this this was a good thing i'd tell myself to do that i would i would tell myself to do that because when i focused on the project and i really got to dream big about that particular project i would i would learn something new from it whether it was like domain knowledge on an app for diagnosing concussions or it was new tech like some project needed me to learn a new javascript framework because in doing so it worked more seamlessly with the back end of this client

12:38um or or some project had me interfacing with the team and not just doing handoffs this is back when i was consulting and in doing so i would say like let's try and have this new kind of um session where we bounce these ideas back and forth and we all we all think through like you know essentially before design sprints were called design sprints um and each project would would push me to grow in that way and that happened a lot in in my consult in my consulting years um and the pros of that were that

13:12number one i would have a happy client you know they were they were getting something they didn't expect at all and didn't look like competitors work and um you know just generally delighted um i would from that get a glowing recommendation it would lead to to being handed off to another their friend who was a client who you know paid better and had something else that was interesting to me hopefully um and i think more important than anything i was just very personally satisfied like i'd grown from the experience so um there were cons to it of course uh that i was putting in way more hours

13:49which meant i was essentially dropping my rates i was like in a way valuing myself less like valuing my hours less because i was putting in more hours but i was putting them in as a way to learn something new you know building my tool set to me was ultimately the most valuable thing in building this network of connections um and and i got a lot of i would say that i got a lot of bad advice from people who said in you know blogs and lots of things they would say and i would say it was bad advice for me

14:22they would say take a job of the same type like once you do a job you make something you have a repeatable solution go find another job where you don't have to do anything different like you just have to change a few little things and then you can use the same whether it's if it's engineering the same code base uh whatever it is you can use those same solutions and then each time you're you're having to think and do less and then by the the 10th project you're doing a 10th of the work and that means that you're getting paid much more for that initial investment of learning

14:53um and in many ways that's great like being an expert is awesome and i think a lot of i love when people are experts i love working with experts i loved at google i got to work with experts for me that seems so incredibly uninteresting to do the same thing again and again um i love the work and i loved having a new challenge that pushed me in a new way and like being able to have something else in the in the tool set and i think i think in terms of the long run and how that played out um because

15:28yeah i've been told you know be an expert in something i would say having this full skill set has given me a lot of flexibility because the world has changed a lot if i had focused on something that existed when i was let's say in my you know 20 if i had focused on the job that existed then i would not be focusing on the job that exists now we are in a world of like exponentially changing technologies needs of communities of individuals and you can't prepare for the future

16:02you kind of have to prepare resilience and like prepare flexibility so i would say i made myself very flexible um i gained a lot of empathy for people who do these other roles these things that i was absorbing that weren't necessarily part of what other people thought i should be in my role um i i gained a lot of shared language i know how to talk to engineers because part of me is an engineer and i would say i gained a lot of credibility and an example there is when i was at google um if i were creating a design when we were a small team and i was working on the diet designs

16:39all by myself because we hadn't i was i wasn't a manager yet i wasn't hiring on people yet i was able to create a design um and look at two designs two proposals that i had and say well this one i know what i know a lot about what it'll take to build this and i can say that this one will take 10 times as long and this other one will take 10 times shorter and will actually i the value difference between them is not so great and instead of just falling in love with something that that was

17:12maybe who know for whatever uh subjective reason instead of pushing and fighting and dying on a hill of like i need the engineers to build this thing because i'm the designer and i say it's the best i could say i it's a compromise it's a dialogue with them and i could say you know what like let's build this other one it'll save you a lot of time and that gave me a lot of credibility um i could also when i built something and i knew that it wouldn't take a lot of time and an engineer said that they didn't want to build it because blah blah blah it wasn't possible i would say well this library

17:43has already been built to make this possible and i could call their bullshit um in a in a kind way um yeah and and also then once i was managing just being able to talk across the domain of i'd done some motion design in my life i'd done some ux research i'd done visual design like i was able to communicate across the team and um yeah it just ended up being really helpful and it wasn't because i had some end goal of being at google someday in any way whatsoever i literally never would have

18:16applied for a job um i could talk about it later i guess but it was it all came through working in startups and something being thought valuable by google and eventually being acquired um but i think i think focusing on my current project and like how to make it amazing was ultimately after doing it over and over again what brought me there you're fantastic that's amazing so jumping to the next question so what would you advise your younger self to learn to get extra skills

18:50so let's see i was always bouncing around between skills and i think one hole that i had was that i did not do a good enough job doing initial foundational research like i would look at the problem and i would say how can i solve this and then i would i would put forward solutions and i would think this one is cool this one is new i've never seen this or uh this is exciting in some way this will teach me something

19:24new and and i i didn't do a good enough job sitting down with the people and just talking to them about what were the problems in their lives what what they were trying to do that was difficult what was annoying about the solutions that people other people had already made or that they'd made for themselves hacking together spreadsheets or whatever they did to um how could how how could how could their world just be a little bit better and how could i make that happen and then and then down the line validating that and making sure metrics were being tracked in there you know and

19:58analytics tools like to some way to pull out if if the thing was actually working um i think um hopefully you know in doing so you you build more empathy for the the people you're trying to create impact for and hopefully um hopefully you know it would it would cause people myself everyone to to make more humane products too if you really understand the person um you know if you know that the person is is is getting caught up and isn't able to focus

20:34um they're getting caught up in being pulled to different texts and their main their main problem is that for example they don't have enough time to get things done so that they need something simple okay great make something simple but also don't add tons of extra notifications and other layers of social engagement that aren't helping them get what they need to get done and instead further dividing their intention right so like um yeah the the research i think is super important on the other hand what i what i what the advice that i gave to people um other people when i was at google uh people

21:09i was managing people that i you know kind of i don't know if they were like official mentorship roles but when we would have conversations um i tried to make sure people would elevate like in their in their set of priorities not just the tools but their communication and presentation skills you had mentioned earlier when we were talking um soft skills right i'd never i don't know that i'd ever heard of soft skills before google but i did understand the importance of being able to communicate with a

21:39person to be there with a person to listen to a person um the number of meetings that i walked into at google where the person used the same exact slide deck that that someone on their team had made possibly years before it had the same slide of everyone on the team just stuff that didn't tell a story and bring the person they were presenting to to the through through this path to understand what they needed that was just filled with extraneous information because someone had put it in

22:11something else and like this person had i knew i could see right away this person had not sat down and said i want to tell this story and the best way to do that is and instead of they could have used the same deck and culled it but they didn't even get rid of those things and i would say start start from the beginning start start with the basic story and and remember remember how boring it is when you're in meetings where the person didn't think at all about who you were why you're there what you're trying to do and just like thought okay i have this i just know i'm supposed to be in this meeting

22:44and talk so they just fill it with words and um so i so i tried to give some workshops when i was there i did a little bit before i left and that was really fun and um about about storytelling and making sure that people really could reflect on the fact that every time they're sitting in front of a person that's an opportunity to connect and to get them to be on the same team about something so they're in there and they're not just like waiting for a moment to go and check their phone and or to look when they open their computer they're not taking notes on what you're saying

23:16they're going and like just getting wrapped up in some notification that came because what you're saying is not actually geared towards them because you forgot to so um one trick uh i'll just add that i that i i included when i would talk to people about this is that when i'm talking to someone and it doesn't matter even if it's like a couple people in a room or a bunch of people or is there a way you know you could be on a podium in front of a lot of people is there a way that i can that i can structure this story and tell this story such such that the person i'm talking to sees themselves

23:53as the hero in my story you know they're the main character and that that main that that main character you you can win you can succeed you can be the hero just by helping support me so like whether that's at the end of this meeting you you sign off on the thing that i was trying to to to let you know about you say yes i i approve of this project i wanted to go forward or maybe it's that you say hey i know of someone on this other group this other team this other company

24:23who could you might want to talk to and connect because maybe they're building something that goes well with this maybe they have ideas for you maybe they have research for you but if you leave this meeting just being like wow that's done what do i have next i better grab a coffee before my next meeting or you're leaving saying that was a really interesting story i'm glad i heard this and i want to help them get to their next step um it totally changes everything and i just saw so many people wandering through this like monotonous story of a life of meeting after meeting without any intention

24:58so um the so i guess the the big answer was i would i would tell myself to make sure in my life to do more ux research and i would tell other people because i've seen it just lacking um in so many instances make sure to really remember that that that these that presentations and conversations are are a way to to communicate with people and tell a story that that gets you moving in the same direction wow that that's fantastic that's a really really good good good good good answer

25:32uh yeah yeah dude i've learned a lot i i found myself getting lost on your words uh like trying to visualize how i will deal with the same situation uh so yeah thanks okay thanks for this well i don't know if that's a good thing okay yeah great well you have a recording yes you have a recording yes yeah uh so tell me which books would you encourage your younger self to read

26:06okay um

26:10so so i didn't read a lot of design books um when i was when i was starting out through this process um i really i i i read to escape and i read to see new perspectives on the world so oftentimes the the books are are just that um to make a like a little shift so i i can think about things and approach my actual work a little bit differently it doesn't mean like every once in a while i would pick up it i i

26:43got some secondhand uh tufty books about you know visual uh how to visualize information um and i'll pick those up every once in a while and read a little bit but i don't have anything that's like um a bible um i don't have anything that i would definitely tell everyone to read but i will say i mean so i'm right now i'm i'm picking up and putting down every once in a while this book called a pattern language and i find it fascinating it's it's about looking at the way people build things

27:14and this is very traditional it's an old book so how do you build a home how do you build a space a room within a home a home within a community a community within a town or a city um and how do how do the same principles kind of play out across those levels as the scales of magnitude grow and i think there are a lot of parallels i also just find it interesting i mean i would be so proud of myself if by the time i die i have built the house that my family lives in i mean that would

27:46be incredible i love building things i love working with wood i love um but but building a house just all those levels and designing for all those different types of experiences i find amazing so so in one example from a pattern language i would just say is when he when he um when they kind of codify that there is no there is no right there is no right height of a ceiling it's about there's generally a proportion of how big how tall your ceiling is to how how large the room footprint is so like how

28:18wide and long it is should determine how tall it is generally but that also depending on how you're using a space the height should differ with even within a room so if there's one part of even a large room where you want people to have an intimate conversation like on a couch for example you want that couch to be raised up to the ceiling or the ceiling to come down uh to the floor such that you have a tinier space and it changes the acoustics and it's a place where you know we're animals like we want to be in a cozy little spot um kids always want to dig into the tiniest little space in a

28:53room or create a little fort something it makes you feel like you can be vulnerable in a different way and i think something like that first of all it just kind of blew my mind because i'd never heard that stuff turned into like theory in the same way but also i thought about so many of the interactions we have in digital where we we use the same type of ux pattern for a chat between two people on sms it'll look the exact same as a room that has 300 people with with with messages quickly streaming by

29:27on a live video with that as a comment section or um like think of all the all the places where you have a little text box you have the bubbles going up above it and there are just letters filling those boxes and the fact that an intimate conversation doesn't look different than a giant group conversation is kind of fascinating um they probably should right so so i think there's a lot we can learn from from old ways of building that you know haven't filtered in yet um and in and for example

29:59that that was probably just like an engineering uh optimization to make the chat with one person look like a chat with 10 people they were like why should we rebuild this it's still people typing words into a box right um i would also say just in terms of like picking up a book i've also never read the whole thing covered it back but cosmos by carl sagan just any any page you open up to it's just kind of inspirational like it's about the evolution of the the universe and us in it and

30:35everything um then there are books of just different experience than mine i i listened to a book on tape between the world and me uh by by ta-nehisi coates and i mean it especially listening to it in his own words there are certain books that i think are great to listen to and especially when the author has a unique unique voice perspective experience like hearing them them give it in their own words um incredible um yeah i i mean i love the autobiography of malcolm x i like new perspectives

31:15um i just saw that you have a book uh design sutra which which i do not know portuguese and i was like but i love this cover and then i and then i saw this one phrase i i saw this one phrase uh yeah on it um now uh was is it julius o libro pelo capa yeah is that right am i close so um and i was like i wonder what that means and i looked it up and it's don't judge a book by its cover which is hilarious because i was just saying well i can't read this but i love the cover um i'm hoping i'm hoping

31:50there's an english translation someday or that your next book at least isn't yeah yeah the next book is in english but i'm not planning to translate this one uh but yeah uh it's a fun actually the book has nothing to do the sutra part of the of the title it's a book about design principles so but i wanted to play cool the thing is i wanted to be like a bit commercial to make design fun again so that's why i have made the sutra right so it's my my catch right yeah yeah yeah yeah well i would i would own it

32:27just for for the cover i enjoyed it made me smile uh so so tell me jana which which people would you advise your younger self to follow okay um i would i would say i would say to my younger self be careful about following i would say that because i spent a lot of time on twitter in the past

32:54and there were a lot of things that were inspirational i learned a lot um it was a way that i i i was introduced to a lot of work i wouldn't have seen otherwise but for every inspirational thing the number of things the number of times i i closed twitter wondering how much time had passed and feeling bad about the world and bad about myself um so it just so outweighs the good experiences

33:28i know some that's not the same for everyone i know some people have good relationships they have healthy relationships but i i found myself opening my phone constantly just to see what i might have missed and because you know because those apps are designed by smart people to get you to pick it up even when you're sitting with someone who you could have a very interesting conversation with picking up your phone like without even without any kind of intentionality whatsoever

34:01um in those moments are all kind of stolen you know and especially when so many of them are filled with negativity um i would say be careful of that actually um and and i and i and i lost a lot of time you know and i don't know that i gained a lot of good you know i'm so glad i connected with you you're a great guy we had an awesome conversation before you even started recording that that it would have been i wish were recorded um and i'm so glad to have listened to to so many of your life experiences

34:35and and i guess that did come from from some type of digital social connection so so i think using it intentionally as a tool like this i think is wonderful um but i would be cautious about just like having people you follow and just opening it whenever and i would say that having a conversation i don't know if the person who's listening right now lives in um lives in a place where they get on a bus a bus stop but for example just talking to the person next to you sometimes randomly can afford you

35:07so much more meaning and beauty and an understanding and an empathy and a every you know everything that uh and who knows maybe the chance connection you know not not to turn everything into a transaction but like that could be your connection to a possible future job right um and so much of that um so much of that is missed if you're just like default picking up your phone and scrolling for forever there are people around you you know there's so much potential around you

35:39okay yeah that's that's uh part of it is the sad the the sad truth that we're living in our day today but yeah the the good part of of the internet of this digital life is being able to connect definitely with people like you uh so what would you suggest your younger self

36:05to learn to be expert i i know you said you don't like the word expert you don't like because you don't enjoy doing the same thing over and over again but what do you suggest your younger self to become expert because you learned now this that is extremely uh valuable skill that's interesting so so skills and tools i kind of i guess that you could kind of put them in the same boat um i mean when i was a manager i was delighted when i saw people using tools that i hadn't

36:43had experience with and that that afforded a different type of experience um that that pushed people in making things in a different way just because tools guide the maker um um so i i was always happy that to just when i was when i was brought new tools um and they seem to be coming out constantly so it's hard to say like which tool the tool if we talked if just a year ago it it would be a different tool than the tool that's popular now right so it's kind of hard to say

37:16in terms of tools i love so my grandfather was a coppersmith and just on the other this is i'm diverging but on the other end of the spectrum my coppersmith grandfather had tools that he was using that had been given to his father um by a craftsman in they were from lithuania and that craftsman in lithuania who knows where they inherited them from right these are tools that are still as valuable and useful today as they were as they were when they were first crafted and they're gorgeous they're gorgeous objects um just just that in comparison with the tools today where you learn you

37:51invest in a tool and then the tools like no longer in vogue or or even even use even possibly even possible to use right a cloud-based tool that the startup just closed down and like they don't exist anymore or they were bought by microsoft and they they uh they closed the project so so tools is a is a hard one um learn the tools you need right um like uh in the abstract idea of a tool and as a skill i would go back to communication um i would make sure i would make sure

38:28to keep communication within urex research within within you know communicating with a team within just being able to to to listen well to not just think about what you're saying next like there's so often that i find especially in group scenarios you're going around a circle and everyone's going to say something and you're worried about or i'm worried i should use the first person i'm worried about what i'm going to say and if i'm going to look cool if i'm going to sound smart or if i can delight people like wanting to make the room happy and i'm not listening to the three people in front of me

39:00because instead i'm really focusing on on what's gonna what i'm gonna project into the world and like listening huge skill um i'm doing a lot of talking now but i'm assuming this is the format and that's okay uh yeah yeah it's totally okay don't worry like that's the purpose of of this podcast so tell me jenna what you wouldn't tell your younger self wow i really what wouldn't i tell my younger self i feel like i'm in uh back to the future

39:33have you ever seen that movie yeah yeah i did i feel like i'm i mean it must be such a classic from your perspective i i'm assuming i was a kid or something but um any any time travel movie is uh the principles are kind of the same right and like what do you tell yourself and do you change the past and like i keep getting into that when when you ask when you ask the questions in this format and i think it's just really funny that i'm having this meta discussion in my head what wouldn't i tell my

40:03younger self um i i don't know that i would want would i want to talk to my younger self to begin with i don't know i mean there are things i kind of regret but i'm kind of glad like i wouldn't be here right like this is a fun conversation this is a fun conversation and i would not be here talking to you if i hadn't done everything i had done to get to this point so like i'm thankful for now which means i'm thankful for those past experiences right and some of them sucked some of them were hard

40:39but uh but i'm glad to be here with you that's a valid point

40:43so depending of how you define success in talking to your younger self how much of your correct success will you attribute to luck and how much of it will be hard work

41:01hmm i think this is such an interesting question um i'm glad you told me this question beforehand because i really had to think about it

41:11so so i used to travel um like a lot well it wasn't really traveling it was i guess you could it depends how you define traveling i had a backpack on i had my long curly hair i was moving between countries on slow moving buses slowly stopping in towns i didn't know setting up shop there for a while but i had i had my laptop and i was able to work i would you know i i didn't always make it super public that i had my laptop but i but it was it was allowing me to to to absorb the world in a

41:44different way um that i was grateful for in every place i went in in all these different cultures and in in many different languages one thing that was important to me was having conversations to be with people in the best way that i could and sometimes that was in english and sometimes i was able to learn some words when it was in spanish i could do a lot better um but there were always phrases even if even in vietnamese i i would i would make sure to learn um and i say that because it's a very challenging language and basically nothing i said anyone could understand there are many tones

42:17like it's it's it's it's amazing um but there were always words and phrases i wanted to learn in each country and i would make sure you know you always want to know things around yes no um but but also like i wanted to be able to communicate beauty to people so i wanted them to know that i thought something was beautiful that i wanted them to know that i thought that if if i were lucky enough to be invited to their grandma's house to have soup that that i could say this is delicious to that grandma and because i think that sharing food is on on in every culture i've ever been to not being you know

42:53being open to the things like it's just such an important part of culture and the rejection of food is is so deep for so many people if you reject the thing they give you and being able to say that it's delicious is on the other end of the experience just like it lights people's faces up and oftentimes that was my real like internal usually was really how happy i was just to be there and be invited to someone's table so so but one of the words that i that i often wanted to learn in in concluding an experience with someone because i might be saying goodbye i was usually saying goodbye to them for

43:26forever you know the chances of me seeing them again was so small and i wanted to be able to say good luck and this is a long way to get back to your question but um i would learn how to say good luck and and then and that was fine everywhere and it seemed to make people happy so i kept doing it and then i got to japan and in japan i said well how do you say good luck and be and and it was it was confusing like there there didn't seem to be a way to communicate that it wasn't like a cultural value or or something that that that that people were in like it wasn't it wasn't built into the

44:05language um instead someone said like i think instead you want to say uh gamba day gamba day gamba day it was like work hard is is what it means and the the response to that you're supposed to say ganbarimasu i will work hard and and i just that was mind-blowing to me like oh wow this is not even a universal concept or at least it's not it's not valued necessarily everywhere um and i thought okay well what is a world like what is the world without luck you know you can see the world as deterministic

44:38you can see it as like all probabilistic scientists or you know like what is maybe it's all just probability and quantum particles jumping around and who you know when i that conversation around like what is luck when you ask me if if what i did or where i am now is luck or hard work i would say sure i worked of course really hard i loved what i did i told you i i invested so deeply in every project um and i love doing it and eventually you build up lots of skills doing that right over

45:11for me decades um but what i also have to recognize is like the luck part of it but is it luck and and is that is that actually a word because because in english like it's an important thing in spanish you say sweat they like like luck but and then in other cultures instead you would say um uh inshallah right like like god be willing like instead in other cultures it's not if it's luck it's if god wills it um and what i would say in my current way of looking at the world that has been you know been made clear

45:45to me is that a lot of what i would call luck is actually privilege right and i i exist in in a pool of so much privilege uh just having been worn been born in a body that's white in a body that's male in in a in a country that is driving a lot of economics in the world in a country where the main language is is a language that has you know not by my doing not because i'm special i just happen to be here but

46:18like i have my my mother tongue is one that is now a business language all over the world you know um you intentionally put in energy into learning english at some point because it would be a valuable skill to you and i never had to put in that energy like that was just what my baby brain did because it was programmed because that was the the water i was born into um so so yeah i mean so many so many privileges um

46:49and and i think a lot of us don't you know when you're a fish in water you don't see the water right like it's so easy as a white male especially in america especially in um silicon valley you can take risks you can do a lot of stuff that if you were like starving to put in in in working so hard to put food on the table for for kids like is it is it fair to say go follow your dreams take a risk drop what you're doing like it doesn't matter you can you can you'll figure it out like yeah that's

47:23that's often coming from someone who is sitting in a position of power whether or not they realize it and whether or not they think they worked for it themselves and had no help um i think there's it's impossible to to really to say that and um i think i think using using you know some people don't use those connections as effectively um but but um they're there and it's how it's how things that's a lot of that's that's uh yeah uh as i told you in

47:57the beginning this life prototyping thing uh it's gonna be a life changing for me uh thanks thanks for this uh when you explain you're talking about our conversation yeah but uh it's connect with the the thing about like a good luck meaning they have a completely different meaning depending on the culture it shows how limited is our vision of the world we tend to assume that what we know is a reality and there is no other way to live but actually there is uh that yeah that like our vision of

48:34the world is so narrowed yeah this is like worth worth like a big reflection thanks thanks for this donna

48:45well i think i think this is why to me when i saw what you're trying to do in a multifaceted way through the podcast through uh the conference why why world-class designer and like the approach you're taking just the tone of it um all the intention behind it the fact that the classes you know you can do it without needing a lot of money to start without having a lot of resources or having happen to be living close to a university or a university that you can afford or all of these other things

49:18that you're stripping a lot of that away and you're doing that so intentionally i think it's it's i mean uh it's it's why i'm thankful to be able to help in a in a small way i mean it just to and just to talk to you i mean it was so cool to hear your vision too uh i really wish that first part were recorded okay so okay so like to finalize to close this do you have any questions for me um i mean i had that question earlier about in world-class designer like is your hope

49:57is your hope that people just gain these skills and does it matter to you if they go they go off and they find some really great well-paying jobs so that they can um um they can you know have more power in the world and more choice and um more agency in the world and maybe that means that they take a big job and they move to silicon valley and um they totally forget where they came from uh potentially you know that's one far into the spectrum or do you want

50:29people to be where they are and to solve problems locally and like do you have an intention there um and do you communicate that intention when you're teaching people through the course i think uh to answer your question is i'm trying to give people freedom to have a choice you know coming from have a choice yes coming from where i come from we don't have the possibility to even have this type of conversation

51:06right i don't want to judge people you like i know what means okay i'll be lying if i know what means what what means growing out in poverty because i i see you i know that i'm still a privileged person but you don't know what different people face and like what moving to a big company in the u.s when the in europe will mean for them so i don't want to have to make that

51:36decision for them but i want to be able to open that door for them that is the decision to make not mine yeah that makes a lot of sense and yeah i don't i don't mean to ask the question in in a judging i understand i don't mean to be judging either but i was yeah wondering if like do you do you have a big opinion on it and that yeah i really like that i really like that idea of just opening the door like just want to give people options because like i do have that option now uh i choose to not to take

52:11it yet but i want more people to be able to do that

52:18yeah it was it was cool hearing you say that that what you're doing the the value that you're getting from giving this value to other people um i forget how you phrase it i think you said it would be crazy to to leave this right now but um yeah i have i have another question go ahead um if that's is that

52:45cool i i was wondering um you know i've only during during that phase of my life where i was doing the um i was telling you about the life prototyping where we we i quit my job at google and my family we had a six month old and uh at that point was he five about to be five we picked up with my mother my my wife's mother and father her parents and we um we decided to every three months move to a new country and like get an apartment somewhere a house or a something and then try to embed ourselves somewhere

53:19and feel what the life felt like there and just get just get a feeling of of that we you know feel the agency of of of directing at least even you know there there's a certain amount of gravity in life where you're you're you're kind of falling or you're moving down a path like a riverbed right but at least that we could choose which way we were falling and and not just be like tumbling down the same what appeared to me to be an experience in silicon valley that i wouldn't be excited to tell

53:52the story of decades to come and uh so we we started we started moving about um

54:02and and we one of those countries we ended up in um that we ended up living in for a while was morocco um which is in africa but i know it's like it is so different than any other part of africa and every other part of africa is so different than i mean it's just such a big there are so many cultures and so many languages and so much history and um borders changing and just uh i can't pretend to know anything about the rest or even even morocco i can't pretend to know much about so um

54:34one of my questions is just around from a cultural level the things that are made in a place are you know reflective of that place and and technology comes from like a very western

54:48centric um viewpoint and it would be different if it had first been birthed somewhere else right and i was telling you about this potential opportunity that i that i wasn't able to take up or create um i found some people in bhutan a group that was uh they were starting kind of a startup lab that was government driven and in bhutan rather than basing things their main success metric being the gdp it's based on the the happiness index and like what if what you were basing things on was not if they made

55:19money but if they made people happy and you were the one driving technology and you are the one creating the apps and the world that the way that the world that that world that that little intentionally isolated world that was still very traditional

55:38you were creating how they were going to use technology and not base it on if things were making enough money

55:47what what would grow from that like what would you create if you didn't have to put notifications in to get people to come back because you had to make them look at your ads um and so i really wanted to be there for the beginning of that um and who knows maybe that'll still happen someday post pandemic but i was curious and i'm sorry this is such a long question but um i'm curious if if people coming from countries in africa like do you think that designers coming and

56:19problem solving from that starting point are going to be bringing something

56:26like really unique or is it all like already so muddied by the standards that have been set by you know silicon valley and do you think there's like a yeah yeah i think this is a really really nice question i think uh not necessarily because you can't cheat reality because technology is a tool it's a tool to solve a problem and if you ask africans to solve a problems using technology you might end up with a

57:06complete different set of tools because we have different problems so we still have basic problems but basic it's relative because like america 100 years ago probably didn't have the same problems that we did that we do have now because different people create different problems it's easy to assume that if you go like back 500 years you might find like all these developed countries with the same issues

57:39i don't think that is necessarily true because like the variants are always different so what i would say is like the resolutions that have emerged in africa that only work here because example mpesa like the the the fine tech uh company that use uh like that in the beginning uh was based on how people were using early time to make payments it it burned in kenya and it's why widely spread in few countries in africa now

58:14it's is one example of a solution that was only possible to be born in africa so i think if more people had opportunity to like use technology because remember technology still have this big barrier like for you to be able to build a very robust product you need to be like very very good at coding and it takes time to be able to get to that level isn't you you just don't decide to

58:47be able to be able to be that good so i think when we start having like more experienced developers more experienced designers like from africa focus in african problems we will have a completely different set of tools this those tools might not solve like uh western problems but they definitely gonna have like huge impact in the way we live now awesome the um yeah you were you were talking about some of the things that you were where where when like big companies like a google with its next billion users

59:24initiative they take a product that exists and try to strip away things so that it'll load fast enough on a device yeah you know and that it might be making some really foundational assumptions about why someone's doing something or how and hopefully you know they they've they'll be some i have some friends who are on that team or amazing researchers and they're going and they're talking to real people and there's you know they're smart and um uh but yeah it's different when you make your own thing

59:54right like when you build something for your own house yeah totally fits exactly into your house for to to do exactly what you need you know it's so different than the thing that you buy in the store totally agree with that so yeah but the only time will will tell so besides of that is only speculation

1:00:20so you're trying to accelerate that uh hopefully with the world class designer yes

1:00:26and are you trying to team people up with um you know like are there do you do you have colleagues who are who are on the more in the engineering side and you're saying okay well you guys are doing a coding school i'm doing this design school we should we should work together or have some type of collaborational collab collaborative project or you know uh like for my team like uh my team do have like a completely different set of skills so pradumnia from india is a developer but also a designer

1:01:00uh maria from russia she's a like really good like service designer uh uh uh and camila from brazil uh she's she's a product designer and i am everything design so yeah but i'm more i'm more like a product manager if i can say than a designer person yeah um cool well part of what i was asking i guess is is if there's like an analogous

1:01:38engineering school uh developer yeah that that that that the designers who come out of with because because i mean as you know and we talked about earlier a huge part of you can make the greatest design and it can just sit on one of these services like dribble oh it's pretty and that would that might be cool but unless it's built you know did it exist and um did you did you really get to contribute so you know connecting someone like it'd be interesting to connect people and also not just

1:02:13not just for the purpose of connecting them so that they have connections but also starting to build the skills around okay you have the skill of designing a thing now let's work on the skill of communicating that to someone having a dialogue understanding where like what compromises are when you should when when you when you can't um those are all such valuable like you learn them on the job but you could have a really crappy first few years of working if you get on a team

1:02:44and you you don't have those skills and you you make relationships hard by just thinking you know not being able to communicate yourself definitely definitely like that like uh answering your question no we don't have but that is a really really good idea uh we'll definitely take this in consideration i mean and you don't have to build it yourself like a new school god forbid you don't you don't need another project but there might be another school that has similar philosophy that you could team up with right definitely totally agree with you for like a collaborative just like a

1:03:19one-time try you don't have to invest fully yeah that's that's a good idea this was almost two hours conversation oh my god i'm sorry i'm glad we had like this was fantastic no it's for for the podcast was one hour only uh almost one hour but yeah yeah talking before this so jenna thanks thanks for making the time and to be with us to sharing like for you to make time to share your experience with our fellow listeners and i totally believe that they're gonna like benefit a lot

1:03:56uh from this life changing conversation

1:04:00awesome awesome can i um before i go can i just uh uh just put my project that i'm working on currently out there for a second and tell people where can where can they find about this cool so um it's called reach you it's a transmission from the future uh it's very experimental and that's why um and we're not really promoting it heavily yet but that's why it's great to have people especially from all over the world um get in there and try to use it because a lot of we're trying to figure things

1:04:36out in augmented reality we're trying to do things that are there aren't lots of clear patterns for and that's like an interesting and exciting and also scary space to be in um but it's called reach you right now it's up in the ios uh store and the the android version um is is up for testing but people will have to um uh get in for that uh test but basically it's a way um to disrupt people a little bit from their normal cycles uh it doesn't we try so hard to not interact with people in the way that

1:05:11an app normally does and break those expectations so that people have a shift in perspective and wonder you know what's going on and then um in doing that the hope is that they're they get to tell their stories because it's an interactive thing um experience where uh they they hopefully they'll tell their stories in a way that isn't just the normal way that they tell it when they're at a party and they're trying to you know look cool to somebody or at a professional engagement and um hopefully they

1:05:42can tell something in a in an authentic and vulnerable way that uh especially because it's anonymous and it doesn't show people's faces um but what but the the overall premises of the thing is that um we're we're in a world now with with unstable and unstable structure and that everything is fragile and like people should recognize that fragility and of the things that they want to to save of their their culture and their life and their their tangible human experiences to kind of store them in a way

1:06:14that that would be um almost like a time capsule um for for these people who are contacting them from the future um and that's it so yeah it's called reach you um uh and if and if you want to if if any part of this was interesting to anyone and um or if you want to be a part of uh reach you in any way just like trying it out trying it out on android giving any kinds of feedback um uh i am at jg makes on all of the social platforms um and it's uh

1:06:47uh reach you dot space is the url reach you dot space so please feel free to reach out and um and gijon i just i mean i'm i'm hoping the conversation with you continues i would like to support your work i think what you're doing is awesome and it was uh it was a total honor to be on uh on here with you today thanks thanks jenna this was fantastic and thanks for making the time and uh all right yes uh for all listeners you know this is the world class designer podcast uh if you find this interesting

1:07:22share with your friends and tell tell us what you feel about it and what can we improve so talk to everyone next time