A Way of Life - Kinference 2025 Talk
"Issue": 138
I’ve been getting into writing my entire talks instead of riffing on slides. The following is the exact script of my closing talk yesterday for Kinference, a design conference here in Brooklyn.
The potential title for this talk was “for the love of design”. And there was going to be a whole bit where I make you say that over and over, but I’ll spare you from that kind of participation. I believe fundamentally, design is about life style. I don’t mean that in a shallow sense that tech people tend to dismiss because they associate that word with fashion and lord knows they can’t dress to save their lives... but in the sense that we all have a lifestyle. A super routine that governs our sensorium each day.
We interact with 100s of objects and interfaces that trigger and relieve us.
In Jasper Morrison’s design book recommended to me by my mentor Freddy Anzures - he has these other reference books that really struck a chord i’ve felt my whole life. Super Normal, The Good Life, The Hard Life, and A Way of Life... the namesake of this talk today.
So the question today is what kind of life are we designing for others?
I love design. I truly truly love design. I love designers. They are my favorite people on earth... bar none. And I remember when design was my real first love. I wanted to woo her. I wanted to show her off to my friends. I wanted to bring her home to mom and dad, just for them to ask why I didn’t love that BROADDDD they introduced me to called finance.
And then everyone started to love design. She became absolutely ran through. Paraded around the Airbnb office... getting tossed around from house to house. Design leadership won its seat at the table. We even created venture funds to focus on “designer founded companies”.
And so we are headed towards new problems now. Software production is easier than ever... and roles are collapsing. It’s unclear what designers are for. Are designers just vibe coders now? And to top it off, capital is sorting out if design led companies have worked out to their liking. We need to address all of these questions.
We need to address the way of life of designers - and if we are happy with the way of life we’ve been building for others.
3 POINT SERMON
1 - THERE ARE SNAKES IN THE GARDEN, BEWARE OF THEIR LIES.
2 - WHAT REALLY IS DESIGN? WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
3 - WHAT IS DESIGN IS BECOMING VS WHAT IT CAN BECOME
THERE ARE SNAKES IN THE GARDEN
A STORY OF A DESIGN FOUNDED COMPANY
Adam & Eve in are in the garden. They are tending to it, cataloguing the animals. It’s perfect work of care and science. The snake approaches promising that if they do the thing that he instructs, they’ll be like God. Sound pretty good? They listen, thinking the Snake wiser than them. And get kicked out of the garden. In the garden they walked with God, they worked, they made love without shame. All that is gone because they took the wrong advice, from the one that originally did the same thing.
In 2021 Eternal built our 3rd formal product, Place. A generative tile world of rearranging neighborhoods, voicechat, endless customization, and spatial messaging. The coolest thing we ever did. Unfortunately, right after raising our Series A one of our close investors told us we should completely pivot with the new capital we had.
Now beyond even the ethical concerns of something like this - what it represented was someone outside of the position creativity / vision / true responsibility → instructing a complete overhaul. They were probably well meaning, but their advice + my listening to it, destroyed the company. For the rest of following 3 years of the company... we would be pushing to find that same spark. We found it again with Exit Sign → our show that scaled from 0 to 200k fans in under a year. But we were told again that media couldn’t be the center of our business... You can guess what happened. As George Bush said... fool me twice... never mind.
What happens when the folks concerned about creating value can’t see value? This is what the design and creative founder has to put up with when it isn’t packaged so neatly and cleanly.
Two Lessons From This:
Orthogonal Slide Risk - because Eternal was so close to gaming, but not gaming, we were always at risk of becoming something we didn’t really care about. That’s what happened by the end because it’s the only thing that capital could pattern match to - we were always supposed to be spatial social vs gaming... but we got pushed off our value’s core - which brings us to our second lesson.
Hold the center of your mission - you have nothing else... believe that
This brings us to our next section.
WHAT REALLY IS DESIGN?
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
A REMINDER OF IDENTITY.
If i’ve said it before I’ve said it 1000x. From Naoto Fukasawa → design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values.
And this is how we go about the world. We make sense of the world through interaction. Which ultimately means - we make sense of the world through objects, interfaces, landscapes of other people’s values. We’ve all interacted with an object or art that felt sturdy and clear in its values. It gives an immediate sensibility of care and direction. It’s a very powerful feeling, that seems to understand a deeper law and truth of what’s going on around us... or what could be going on around us if we commit to it.
If this was a more Christian talk I’d discuss the designer’s role in “creatio tertia” - we create from the materials and mandate God has given us... but I’ll save that for another day. What is the call of the designer then? If design is an embodiment of values... what are we pointing those values towards?
It is the same call of Nicholas Negroponte - the founding director of the MIT media lab → fundamentally we are here to improve digital quality of life / quality of life at large.
I love this naoto fukasawa project of treating communal utilities like luxury products... I look at his work on redesigning the elevator and escalator despite it’s many legal constraints quite fondly. Even looking at the escalator we see he opens the angle of the entrance to it’s legal limit allowing it to feel more inviting and less claustrophobic.
I would simplify improving quality of life down to a mission of renewal & discovery.
Naoto Fukasawa’s public utilities elevation is fundamentally about applying values towards public renewal.
Let’s give another, more direct example of renewal. In case this feels a bit abstract.
I’ll use the company Ramp. New York homegrown legend. And, my wife works there, so it’s easy for me. What does Ramp offer. Automated financials, that not only saves you time but saves you 5% - a massive impact on your business. The values that Ramp points to are clear, and it has had a direct impact on their success. Valuing and returning time to their customers. And in doing so, they open the affordance of what every business knows makes a difference - cost consciousness... which is really to say waste consciousness. Where does renewal come in? It is felt through better cost management that produces better profitability. It means employees have more secure jobs, incomes, health care, retirement plans. Anyone that has ever felt the pain of laying someone off knows that what hurts the most is thinking about the broader impact on their family, future sense of self, etc. Ramp can’t help someone’s performance, but it can help a company remain sustainable, and that’s special.
A company like Ramp can seem boring at first look. But in actually sitting with the values that they materialize, and the impact of those values - we see renewal across each customer they touch.
Now for the political kicker
A small interlude before the final section
In 17th and 18th century London - folks primarily drank beer as the water was too mukked up. As a function of trade however, tea and coffee started to become a staple and popped up coffee houses. This switch in society from a beer drinking drunk society to a caffeinated communing one sparked the enlightenment and bursting economic growth. We have the same issue today. Except it’s not our water that’s polluted. We are creating digital heroin at every corner, and we are in desperate need of caffeine.
We need some forms of design resistance. Leave that which is working against quality of life to suffer the consequence of weak design. If we believe design is what it says it is... than where we spend our time should have a very direct outcome. What if all design talent left sports betting and Kalshi and the Polymarket’s of this world to continue without design talent... a sort of “who is John Galt” for design. It’s an interesting probe if nothing else.
WHAT DESIGN IS BECOMING VS WHAT IT CAN BECOME
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
What we believe about our past and what we believe about our future... determines a lot about how we behave in the present.
I don’t want to go through the whole history of design here... because we will be here for much longer than i’ve already over spoke and you all know it better than I do and lived through more of it! But i want to point to my mentor Freddy Anzures again.
He was on the HCI team at Apple through it’s golden years, working on key moments of the iPhone and other products. (slide to unlock, springboard, etc). The goat. Anyway!!!
I asked him how he felt design had changed from then, his mix of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and just sitting with an engineer -> to today.
“...the tools we used to design shifted from invention to convention - sketchbooks to software like photoshop and illustrator which are rooted in analog metaphors and more open to exploration were replaced by tools specifically to design apps on a phone with built-in template to extend conventions. The tools became more specialized to repeat success than to encourage discovery or define something different.”
Now this is critical because if we believe we should be pointing our values towards renewal and discovery - and we believe our tools are pointing us at convention... ie the things that we are trying to progress past. Then we are in a bit of trouble right?
The two questions I want to pull from this:
Is AI / vibe coding keeping us, like Figma when used alone, further from invention and strapped to convention
Where are our homes for design discovery instead of hope for mimetic success?
I love this slide. These are typewriter gloves for bookkeeping from 1935. Sometimes invention looks strange and doesn’t work out...
For both answers I believe we can look to the environment of our practice to see why we are locked into convention and hope for mimetic success.
I refuse to bring up examples of Bell Labs and how the office forced collaboration. We know that story. So I’m going to bring out a different reference here.
On my first trip to Tokyo I got connected to one of the founders of TeamLabs. They invited me to their offices and immediately I understood the translation between the delight and joy of their work space and the delight and joy of the experiences they craft. It was 1-to-1. Real life willy wonka office, with desk counters made of sand and soft plush. A sensory overload as even the floors were uneven. They were living their product in a way that was uniquely singular. The problem is that Slack can never do that for you. And more seriously the problem is that we have a people that absolutely love sitting in front of a computer, designing social experiences and customer workflows that force you to sit down and stare at a screen.
As a simple conceptual example of what a computer would be like, that isn’t strapping you down. And please don’t take this idea. I’ve been thinking about a bar as a computer. I’m stealing this bar designed by Marc Newson, who I’m obsessed with. Cameras would be across the ceilings & as well as a light array... some sort of server rack in the closet. Cameras look for lost interaction cues from the patrons. Guy looks at girl at the bar. Girl looks at guy. They don’t see each other look at each other. Lights shift over them in a different tone - to encourage them to mingle. Providing the excuse for connection, after processing potential intent. Sounds computer-y enough right.
A couple more examples of environment shifting values and direction.
I know design isn’t art. But I was moved to think about the Jack Whitten exhibit at the MoMA. How his work feels insanely contemporary to the current moment despite it’s timing. How the studio of production gives so much life and nuance to what is produced. As a more shared reference, we can all admit that Charles & Ray Eames demonstrated this at scale as well!! Crossing multiple disciplines to make break through work, form, material, and media.
As design leaders your responsibility is to not just submit yourself to the tool dejour. But to build a critical view of tool curation, philosophy, and environment to point us towards renewal and discovery.
We started this talk with a few questions. And I’m working on directness. So now that we’ve worked through them in story and probing form - let’s answer them in a 4th grade way.
What is a designer for?
To express values that will point towards the renewal of a situation or discovery of something new.
Are designers just vibe coders now?
No. Vibecoding is just one of many tools that can be used to express the designer’s value. And we should beware of how it can overfit to prior conventions / pattern matching for previous success.
Additionally, we should have very ready pushback when management is pushing adoption for adoption sake. Point them back to what design is for, expressing values. Vibecoding is a translation tool, not the origin point of said value input.
Are design led companies working? Is there any unique benefit?
Yes, but they are constantly at risk of a competitive value assessment that might be misaligned with the company itself.
The unique benefit SHOULD BE a stronger ability to hold the line of one’s values. VS the mercenary MBA founder or efficiency prone engineer.
In a Christilogical hermeneutics approach to a sermon, you’re always supposed to end by pointing to Christ. In a design talk, you always have to end by talking about Steve Jobs
Despite all his flaws, one thing that is seemingly true from the outside is that Steve had decent values that he elevated within the design thinking of Apple. His quote recently resurfaced about Apple having a moral responsibility to not have porn in the app store. And that you can go somewhere else if that’s what you want.
Just yesterday in a tweet Roon from OpenAI said it’s perfectly ok to work in technology or anywhere and not really give a damn.
If this talk showed one thing I hope that it’s clear I fundamentally disagree with this. Now I want to be doubly clear - technology does not have a divine plan for your life. There were some talks yesterday that mentioned, basically, the slight disappointment they have as a result of realizing technology won’t save them. Technology exists as a transaction with you to keep itself alive. Kevin Kelly’s what technology wants really shaped a lot of my views about what technology wants, literally wants, but I don’t want to get away from this Roon tweet too much.
The problem, which I tweeted about last week is that creatives who tend to have brighter visions of the future. Don’t have the warring personality to fight these types.
One of my favorite scenes in Conclave is when Aldo is talking to Lawrence about the sides forming in electing a new Pope. Lawrence naively says “this isn’t a war Aldo”. To which Aldo replies “it IS a war, and you have to pick a side.”
The reality is that if we believe that design is about an embodiment of values. If we believe that design is what it claims to be. The shaping and defining layer of technology and research. And the majority of people here are in the arena of venture backed technology looking to scale. You are fighting a war of values. I want to encourage you that this is a good thing. As long as you’re pointing to renewal and discovery, do not be afraid. The thing to be afraid of, is if you find out you don’t even have values worth fighting for.
Thank you all very much, I think we have time for some questions.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light