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Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross: Your Brain on Art
00:49:31
We speak with Susan and Ivy about how they found their way into collaborating on the book, why we are “wired for art,” how practicing art can actually extend your lifespan significantly, and how they bring the ideas in their book into their work to reduce stress and help teams perform at their peak.
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- [00:02]
Ivy Ross
We've been optimizing for productivity and efficiency and you know, work, work, work, work, work, do do, do, do, do, and never take those pauses to understand that that is critical to then inform and come up with better ideas, better thinking. And I don't think that's built in to us because we've been operating like machines.
- [00:27]
Aaron Walter
In school, art is often positioned in curricula as an en skill like math or language arts, but those of us who pursue the arts instinctually recognize that there is something in creative expression that is foundational to the human experience. Susan Magsammon, Executive Director of the International Arts and Mind Lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has spent years studying the effect art has on our mind and our body. Her research is surfacing profound health and longevity benefits that are created through poetry, music, painting, and all the other arts. Susan recently collaborated with Ivy Ross, Chief Design Officer for Consumer Devices at Google, to co author a fascinating book called you'd Brain on how the arts transform us.
- [01:17]
Eli Woolery
We speak with Susan and Ivy about how they found their way into collaborating on the book why We're Wired for Art and how practicing art can actually extend your lifespan significantly. We also chat with them about how they bring their ideas in their book into their work to reduce stress and help teams perform at their peak. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [01:40]
Aaron Walter
And I'm Aaron Walter at DesignBetter. Our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [02:19]
Unknown
Eli and I are excited to be joining our pals at User Testing as they hit the road for one day events in San Francisco and New York. It's called this Connect City Tours and we'll be recording Design Better live on stage in San Francisco May 1 and New York City May 29. This connect city Tours brings together industry leaders to explore topics like AI innovation and the future of the customer experience. It's going to be a ton of fun. These are one day events so don't have to take a ton of time off of work and they're built for visionaries like you. Don't miss the opportunity to connect with really smart people, learn new things that will help you in your work and shape what's next Request your spot @ DBTR Co Utconnect. That's DBTR Co Utconnect. Come see us live on stage.
- [03:19]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. Susan Magsammon and Ivy Ross. Welcome to Design Better.
- [03:30]
Susan Magsammon
Thanks for having me.
- [03:31]
Ivy Ross
Great to be here.
- [03:31]
Aaron Walter
Your book is really wonderful, and I think it's an essential read for the Design Better audience. Your Brain on Art, which explores how our physiology and how our bodies are sort of wired to connect with aesthetics, sound and visuals and vibrations and so forth. I think it's something that a lot of human beings sort of recognize, but they don't have the language or the science to communicate that. You have this phrase that you've mentioned in talks and also in the book that we're wired for art. Can you break that down for us? What does that mean?
- [04:07]
Susan Magsammon
You know, I'm at Johns Hopkins and in the School of Medicine and in the department of both neurology and neuroscience. And you'd think, why? Why would a skull be interested in the arts? To study the arts. But it turns out that neurophysiologically, we are wired for the arts, and it's sort of the mother lode. The way I like to describe it is we all have these sensory systems that allow us to bring the world in. That's what they're there for. And just stop and think about that for a minute. Whether you have touch or smell, taste, sound, these are these amazing conduits for bringing all of this kind of knowledge in its many particle forms into our bodies. And when you're born, you're born with about 100 billion neurons. And they're not necessarily all connected. In fact, most of them aren't. You're born with this ability to be able to use those neurons at the synaptic level. So think about fingertips, to be able to connect those neurons together. And in doing that, you create very strong neural pathways. And so child development, early learning, is so important because it's that time, the first five to seven years of life, where we are really making these connections. And, you know, if you have grandchildren or young children, you can see it literally happening in front of your eyes. It's so immediate. But those neural pathways create the roadmaps for how you think, how you feel, how you create, how you move through the world, how you relate to others and how you relate to yourself. So it's incredibly important. And it turns out that we have so much content that our brains do this amazing thing, which is they process the information that is important to us, whether it's practically important or emotionally important. And that's called saliency. That's called salient information. Now we know a part of the brain that actually is kind of this filter of salient information. And so what I love about the work that Ivy and I do is that the arts and aesthetic experiences are the most salient kinds of inputs. And so when you think about how you put yourself in the path of arts as either a maker or a beholder or an environment or being in nature, those are highly, highly sounding experiences that change our neurophysiology and our biology and oftentimes instantly and oftentimes forever. Right. And so there's an amazing opportunity to think about the fact that these art forms that we've kind of made a luxury, kind of made them high forms, we now think they're so expensive, which in fact they aren't, are the ways that we really grow and learn at the most profound levels.
- [06:54]
Eli Woolery
I wonder if we could walk through a few of the creative disciplines and how they might influence our minds. And I wanted to start with poetry because I have an innate curiosity about that. My father, professionally, he was a physician, but he also did poetry on the side, actually, quite well, to the point where one of his poetry books was praised by John Ashbery. He was a poet laureate at one point. And as he's gotten older, and unfortunately he's in ill health right now, but he's keeping out the poetry. It does seem to keep his mind vigorous. So, yeah, maybe we could start there and talk about how poetry might influence your mind.
- [07:29]
Ivy Ross
Well, the one interesting fact about that, which I love, is that poetry and music light up the same parts of the brain and know how important music is, bringing people out of comas, et cetera. But, Susan, maybe you want to talk about poetry specifically.
- [07:45]
Susan Magsammon
Well, you know, poetry is believed to be, if not the oldest art form. One of the oldest art forms dates back 4,500 years. And as Ivy said, our brains are wired for rhythm and for rhyme. And so poetry actually does light up the same parts of the brain as listening to music. It actually also stimulates the reward circuitry, so serotonin, dopamine, even oxytocin. And it also turns out that your default mode network is activated in terms of reflection and introspection. And so, you know, we're starting to understand more of the kind of neural basis of poetry using FMRI and other kinds of biomarkers. But we know that metaphor and symbol are something that humans really understand uniquely and are helpful in us creating narrative. And so poetry helps to Sort of stimulate that in a very sort of unique way. What I have seen, and it's so interesting that your dad still comes back to poetry, is it's such a calming kind of medium, and it ignites memory and I think in partlets, because of this combination of rhythm that gets kind of hardwired and also because it evokes memory. And so I would imagine that does a couple things right. Simultaneously helps to calm him, so lowers cortisol. It also helps him to remember and to reflect. And we see poetry being used at end of life care. We see it used in healthcare for just helping people find themselves when they've been so disassociated and so disrupted in really serious health conditions, whether they're their own or their family members.
- [09:31]
Ivy Ross
And, you know, just writing down your thoughts, not even creating poetry, lowers your cognitive load. So it's so important that even if you never share those words with someone, but just writing them down and even burning it afterwards literally lowers your cognitive load. Yeah.
- [09:49]
Susan Magsammon
This is the work of James Pennebaker that ib's talking about, who looked at the ways that expressive writing, actually creating those stories, writing your stories down, lower stress and also impacts trauma. And that's pretty amazing. You know, when you think about the act of putting words down to our emotions and feelings actually helps us to contextualize, and that changes the sort of neurological processes that are being created. And, you know, this idea of limited cognitive resources, you start your day with kind of a full load, right? And through the day, your cognitive load continues to kind of diminish. So to be able to amplify that by just unloading, literally unloading, is a huge transformational benefit. I think the other thing about writing, to Ivy's point, is that we have the opportunity to rewrite our stories, to reframe and to create an intentional future. And so language writing actually helps us do that in an unconscious way. You know, a lot of writers talk about this. They're writing, they don't know what they're going to say. It's only in reflecting on what comes back that they really start to know where they are and where they're going.
- [11:00]
Ivy Ross
I actually brought a poet into Google to give a poetry writing class for my designers and some of the engineers. And they loved it. They absolutely loved it. And it was incredibly beautiful to watch Inkyu as the poet, and then he taught people how to, within an hour, write some lines of poetry. And then people volunteered to stand up in front of everyone else and share. And the amazing connective tissue that formed you know, these are things we never get to do at work was fantastic. Relationships formed and bonds changed, and it was beautiful.
- [11:40]
Susan Magsammon
I was doing a workshop last week, to Ivy's point, and, you know, this speaks to the need to do this anywhere, anytime in your life with groups, by yourself. But there's an activity that I did with a group of business leaders, leaders this week that actually said, think of a song. Think of a line in the song. And we started at the end of a roundtable. We went around, and people just wrote a line down, and then we read it back to each other as poetry. And it was so amazing. It was totally improv. Nobody had a chance to think about it. They just did it. And every single line in the poem was like something started when I find myself in times of trouble, and somebody else wrote, everything's going to be all right. You know, they think they riffed off the line ahead, but they created a shared poem based on the lines before. And so it kept moving and moving and moving. Think about that. The idea of being able to create a new body of work by literally writing a sentence down.
- [12:40]
Aaron Walter
You know, this is interesting. You talked, Susan, about poetry and writing. Activating the default mode network, which is often where we think about sort of like self and ego can live. And at the same time, what you're describing is something that's more transcendent. I have a background master's degree in painting and drawing. I remember in my studio when I was trying to make a great painting, it's really hard to make a great painting. It's so much easier if you're not trying to make a great painting. If you sort of, like, let go and open yourself to discovery. And what you're describing is a discovery practice. It's almost the inverse. You're quieting that default mode network. What does the science tell us about that of, like, if we want to be more creative or explore, regardless of medium more broadly and maybe with more success, what is that relationship with that default mode network?
- [13:34]
Susan Magsammon
Well, you just described the work of Charles Lim, where Charles is at University of California, ucsf, and he has done five, six, seven studies now looking at creativity. And so I'm gonna first start with the sort of prefrontal work. So when you're trying to do it right and you're trying to create the perfect thing, and you're trying to really amplify your talent, there's a part of the prefrontal cortex that turns on. It's that judgmental part of your brain. You know, you're Getting better. You're mastering it. But when you're moving into flow, that turns off. And it's actually a part of the same region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, where you're really able to sort of open up that part of the mind that allows you to move into flow. And when you're in a flow state, it's timeless. Right. It's endless, it's boundless. You're totally in the zone. Right. You're radically present. And I think there's something about the unconscious coming forward and maybe more of the essence of who you are coming forward, but you're not reflecting, not analyzing, you're not deciding which is what the default mode network really does. You're actually just being. I should talk about this, too. We did an experience called a space for being at one point and being you and being. That truth of you that only you can be is divine. I think there's a sacredness about that that we've forgotten about. The default mode network is that place in the brain where it goes to work when you're pausing, when you're not bringing the world in, when you're really talking to your. You're mind wandering, you're daydreaming, you're creating that story. And it's really been in the last seven, eight years that we started to begin to really understand this amazing requirement for the space between the notes and for pausing. And a lot of times when Ivy and I are giving talks and we talk about that, you can literally feel the room breathe, like the permission to be able to just take a break and to be able to metabolize what you've got coming in all the time. And Ivy, maybe you could talk more about that.
- [15:43]
Ivy Ross
Yeah, no, it's so important now because we've been optimizing for productivity and efficiency and, you know, work, work, work, work, work, do, do, do, do. And never take those pauses to understand that that is critical, to then inform and come up with better ide. It's almost like taking your foot off the gas for a while. And I don't think that's built into us because we've been operating like machines.
- [16:12]
Aaron Walter
Yeah, it's very industrial process mentality that we sort of maybe aren't aware of in the modern era. Is that industrialization always being productive? It's kind of like the social contract.
- [16:26]
Ivy Ross
Yeah. Since the Industrial Revolution, we fell into this and we've pushed some of these other things aside, especially within companies, I think, and thinking that that would make us happy, producing more and more and more, I think it's clear that that is not necessarily the only path to happiness.
- [16:46]
Susan Magsammon
And we know it's counterintuitive, right, because if you actually do stop and you do pause, you are more productive and more creative. And so your companies will do exceedingly better if they take this in. So it's counterintuitive was the point I was going to make.
- [17:03]
Ivy Ross
It's really creating a different rhythm right to the working style. It's a little bit like music.
- [17:09]
Aaron Walter
You got to build the rest. And yeah, how do you reconcile that? Because, I mean, you're operating within an environment at like a very high level. As chief design officer of consumer products at Google, it's a very intense environment where, you know, it's go, go, go. And knowing what you know, knowing the science of that and also being in an environment where you have to and your teams have to keep going, how do you reconcile that in your mind?
- [17:36]
Ivy Ross
Yeah, so we clearly have product development schedules to meet and gates to pass, but we've built things into the schedule up front, like we call it in the sandbox. But time to just explore without a preconceived outcome, which is the concept of play, doing something different than you do every day, but without a preconceived outcome. I also try and bring in different activities. I'll take the group and we'll go sketch out in nature for one afternoon and really do build in some of those. Not all the time, but whenever we can. Because I think it starts from the top, giving people permission to stop and do something different than you do every day and just play with things at different scale. I always look to hire people who do something or have a hobby that is different than what they're doing for their job because I think all those experiences teach you and make new neuro connections that you don't realize you bring back to your job. And so this idea of variety in how you play or express yourself is actually super helpful for your core job that you're doing. So you're right, it's not easy. But where I can offer those moments and model for the team that these things are important. I also in the beginning installed, it's called Tune bed. But a bed that people can lie on a table that has music frequencies, transducers built into it. Where you had an app where the designers could book for 15 minutes to go into a flow state or different attunements to actually say you can take 15 minutes and walk away from your desk and listen, you know, to music through headphones on this vibratory bed. And it's good for you to get into a different state of mind and then go back and look at the problem you're trying to solve.
- [19:47]
Eli Woolery
Ivy, you actually carry around tuning forks, right, to help you reduce stress. So tell us about that and maybe also, you know, any other stress reduction tips you have.
- [19:57]
Ivy Ross
I used to, all the time now, once in a while, because I've been studying sound and vibration for, I don't know, 40 years because I believe everything, you know, as quantum physics does, we're all frequency and atoms moving. And so this idea of getting in resonance with something is super powerful. But anyway, I was trained by Dr. John Villier in working with these tuning forks. And one day at Mattel Toys, the researchers and the designers, you know, we're watching kids play and everyone's on edge to see do the kids like the toys that we've designed. And there was one particular researcher that was getting so upset because the children were not picking our toy. And I had never exposed. I carry tuning forks with me before, but I just wanted to calm her down because she was making everyone nervous. So I have a rubber hockey puck and a set of tuning forks, and you hit them on the hockey puck and circulate them around the ears. And it's unbelievable. I just watched her literally like a balloon deflate, settle in. And it was the note of C and G at the time, said to be the sound of the earth's core. So it just has this ability to just ground you. And so, yeah, once in a while I whip them out if need be.
- [21:14]
Aaron Walter
Incidentally, C and G is also a doorbell sound.
- [21:18]
Ivy Ross
Oh, really?
- [21:19]
Susan Magsammon
Yeah, I love that. I'm going to use that.
- [21:22]
Ivy Ross
And you know, sound is more powerful than even visuals. You know, one of the things I think that our sensory systems make us feel so alive is, as Jill Bolte Taylor has said, we think we're thinking beings that have learned to feel, but we're actually feeling beings that have learned to think. And when you really embody that and think about it or feel into changes your whole lens. I mean, if we are designed to be feeling beings first, no wonder those things that make us feel, which are the sensory systems that make us feel alive, is our original blueprint, you know, is the way we're supposed to operate. Which is why nature is the most neuro aesthetic place there is, because it has shape, color, temperature, smell. Like immediately you step out and you take a walk in the woods. And the truth is we come from nature, so we are alive and by it. And, you know, when Susan contacted me on LinkedIn and said, we now, I've been following your career for 25 years. And I said, that's called stalking. And she said, no, hear me out. And she said, you know, we now have the science to prove what you've always believed. And when she told me what science is proving, my initial instinct was, I know that because intuitively some of us feel that. But when I heard all the research, it was like, oh my God. But the world doesn't know this. And science will now help people open up to take in the message and go back to, you know, we get so many notes of people that say, thank you for giving me permission to make art again. When we say the arts, by the way, we talk about anything that allows you to creatively express. So, you know, painting, singing, dancing, creating, space, architecture. The gratitude we get for just giving people permission because they've been shut down or felt like, I'm never going to make money at this, and they've abandoned it and now realize, you know, our message is bring it back. Bring it back into your life.
- [23:38]
Aaron Walter
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [23:41]
Ivy Ross
Foreign.
- [23:46]
Unknown
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- [27:56]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [28:03]
Eli Woolery
I was just gonna ask you, Susan, if you could talk a little bit more about how the collaboration came about. What was the impetus to get in touch with Ivy? And how did the idea for the book come around?
- [28:13]
Susan Magsammon
Sure. So in our lab at Hopkins, we have a luminary scholars group. And these are people that are doing amazing things in the world. Architects, researchers, designers, writers who exemplify what it means to live a neuro aesthetics life personally and professionally. And so I had started a company called Curiosity Kits and then Curiosityville, late 80s 90s to 2000. And one of my companies was bought by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. So I had been tracking the work of leaders in the toy space or the educational space for a long time. And Ivy always stood out to me as just an innovator, not only in the ways that she created product, but the ways that she worked with teams to build products. Highly creative, highly engaging. I mean, Ivy is like the most egoless person I think I've ever met. She's really about the collective. If there's an object that comes out of that, she gets that. But it's about the process to create things. And so I'd watched her work for a long time, and Ivy calls it stalking, I call it curiosity. So when it came time to bring on a few more luminary scholars, I said, I want to invite Ivy. And I didn't know her and nobody I knew knew her. And so I wrote her on LinkedIn. And that is kind of my M.O. is like, you know, I'm curious. I'm curious about this person. So I write them, and oftentimes you never know, they write you back. And so I've kind of lived my life like that and, you know, you never know. You never know what's around the next door. But I felt so aligned with Ivy, and so I wrote her on LinkedIn and she swiped right and said, I'm interested in this. So we scheduled a 30 minute call. So I'm explaining this to her, and she was like, do you have another 30 minutes? And I said, I do. And then 30 minutes later, I said, do you have another 30 minutes? And if you knew our lives, we never have 30 minutes, right. So three hours later, we're still yapping. And she invited my husband and I out to Mill Valley. We had dinner with Ivy, and we decided together that we would have a salon at her home. I was starting to work on the NeuroArts blueprint at that point and was trying to really figure out how do you bring people like me, researchers, practitioners in the field, together with artists and philanthropists to really launch a field. So Ivy offered to have the salon and maybe I'll turn it over to you, Ivy, to finish the story.
- [30:44]
Ivy Ross
Yeah. So we curated. It was like Noah's Ark. Two of everything. Two dancers, two painters, two photographers to represent the arts. And Susan flew down with some of her neuroscientists. And it was a salon in my living room. A dialogue around the role the arts play in our lives, the importance of them, what's the neuroanatomy of that? And at the end of that incredible, I don't know, it was like a six hour day conversation. Susan looked at me and said, I've always wanted to write a book about this. Do you want to do this with me? And I didn't even have to think about it. I said, this is the book I've been waiting for. Because throughout my career, whenever I've won design awards, etcetera, Publishers would come out of the woodwork saying, do you want to write a book on innovation and creativity? I said, nah, I'm a lifelong learner. And I said, that's boring because I do that all the time. I said, but I'll know when there's a book in me. And when she said this, I jumped on it because I understood the gift it could be to the world. And it really closed the loop because I started more as an artist, had been in the corporate world. And this knowledge and this, as we now understand it, permission that we're giving to people and it's touching so many different sectors, you know, education, health. I mean, it's really across the board. And then to learn that. Susan's lab was actually started by a family that gave her the money to study the effect the arts have on our brain and body. Because they had commissioned an architect to custom design a home for them. That kind of broke the bank in terms of building it, but it was exactly what they needed in terms of all the elements, you know, the right ceiling height, light, et cetera. And once they moved in, the husband attributes his brilliant idea that he got that made him extremely successful to being in the space, in this particular space. Cause space changes the way we think. And so I love the fact that her lab was started because of one family understanding what just happened here, this new space that we were in, and space is all a choice of design elements. Literally changed the way my brain Operated. And I was able to make this breakthrough. And, you know, it's so interesting because early on, Susan and I were brought in by Stanford women who code, I think it was. And we said, why do you want us to give a talk? And they said, because a lot of kids who are going into some of these technology realms like coding, etcetera, they watch the parents drop them off and say, now, don't you do anything other than computer science? You know, stop playing your guitar. Don't paint. You need to focus on this to get into one of those good tech companies. And luckily, this woman knew. She said, I am panicked that we're not creating whole people. You know, that not only are they leaving part of their soul aside because it's who they are, but it's like the people that are at the switchboard do not have a full perspective.
- [34:01]
Aaron Walter
Yeah. Can't make decisions for themselves, too. That's a big part of the creative process, is learning to make decisions for yourself, to get things wrong and be okay with that, deal with some adversity.
- [34:12]
Ivy Ross
Yeah. And it's all about possibilities. Right. Creativity is about understanding that there are many possibilities. And, you know, that's so important now because I think the pressure is on for us to imagine possibilities.
- [34:25]
Susan Magsammon
I just spent the last three or four days with a lot of different sectors. And one of the things just to double down on what Ivy's saying about why now, why this is so important now, is that the world is really suffering, and there is a lot of trauma, large and small. There's a lot of stress, anxiety, a lot of disconnection in communities. And there's this whole work around transformation, and what do we need at an individual level and a collective level. So communities really need to come together. And arts are kind of that weave that glue, that connector, that bridge. And it's a way to really find common ground and to respect differences. So we talk about, in the book, arts being the language of humanity. And in the book, we also talk about arts creates culture, culture creates community, and community creates humanity. And I think we're at a very hyper local level. We're seeing communities find each other. Arts communities with cultural arts institutions, with schools, with researchers, with libraries, with municipalities to come together with business. And I think that's gonna happen more and more as we realize that we don't do well when we're not in community, when we're not connected. And, you know, loneliness and isolation is an epidemic in our country, and I would arguably say growing and around the world. And so there's something about this that's really not like esoteric, it's existential. And this work is in multiple sectors, but the meaning of it is so profound.
- [36:04]
Eli Woolery
Just building on that a little bit. You mentioned loneliness epidemic and that certainly affects our health, but it turns out arts lower mortality rates. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that because that's pretty fascinating.
- [36:16]
Susan Magsammon
So Daisy Fancourt, who is a researcher at University College London, she does epidemiology research primarily. She has done work in London and in Europe. We're doing it now in the United States as well. But what she has found. So it's not like we think it might do this or we could do this, but the data sets that are collected in the UK are over 50 years of data and they were able to embed variables around arts, hobbies, aesthetic experiences in their data sets. So they were able to go through and screen the data sets to see that an art activity once a month. Considering all the variables like gender, race, class, income, we see that there is a gain to life expectancy up to 10 years. So we know that the arts keep us healthier is really what this is saying. And they keep us alive longer. And that's amazing. Just recently, this weekend, I was looking at LinkedIn and somebody was recommending the book and somebody said, well, I don't know this line about living 10 years longer. That's a outrageous claim. And I don't always go in and, like, respond to comments, but I went in and I said, you know what I love about this claim is that it's true. And so now I'm in dialogue with this new friend who was like, it is true. And I said, well, the person hadn't read the book. They were just sort of like going, what? That's crazy. But it is crazy. And we are also doing economic analyses right now in this work to show true value. And the return on investment for this work is also enormous. So just singing once a week with someone with Alzheimer's lowers medication, increases the quality of life for that person, which means that families worry less, that healthcare providers have to do less in facilities. And so we know at a bare minimum, the three to one return on investment in someone with Alzheimer's if they sing once a week. That's amazing, right? That's amazing. So there's huge value.
- [38:19]
Ivy Ross
And, you know, the great news is you don't have to be good at it, you have to be good at singing to reap the benefits of it. I also wanted to say that we've uncovered through this, that there are so many people who the arts are not how they're making their living. And they can attribute this, the fact that they stayed a painter throughout their life, even a closet painter, they believe informed their breakthrough ideas. I mean, we had a gentleman who's the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that brought us in. I said, why would you want us to come talk about art? He goes, because actually, I've painted my whole life. And I believe that exercise of me continuing to paint enabled me to create this breakthrough drug. So I think there's a lot of people that the arts practices as a foundation. It's such a good training ground for your brain and body, that there are other ways it shows up that the arts don't get credit for.
- [39:19]
Aaron Walter
There's transference, I think is part of what you're describing, is that as we learn a new skill, there are lessons that could be transferred into our professions or into other aspects of our life we can't really anticipate.
- [39:33]
Ivy Ross
Right. But also the. I think Susan has research about executive function. There's certain things, kids who have and stay with music or arts through school, what happens to them throughout their life.
- [39:45]
Susan Magsammon
If you think about it like building a muscle, these attributes already exist in you. In terms of. We started with talking about you're being wired for art, but when you build that capacity, when you build stronger neural pathways around executive function or problem solving or collaboration or feeling your emotions, literally knowing how you feel, interoception is this idea of how you know what you feel. And a lot of us are feeling above our necks, right? We're in our heads, as Ivy said. And so if you're building the muscle of creative expression, of ambiguity. Ivy mentioned also this idea of playful exploration, being able to create in a space without any expectation, without an end in mind, using your sensory systems, you know, really knowing what the temperature is, what the light is, what the smells are, we really have disassociated and disconnected ourselves to these very primal things that make us human. And then, of course, being a maker or a beholder, it isn't only that they transfer, because they do. It's that you move into these different spaces in your life in a stronger way that amplifies your human potential. And so it's a win, win, win. Right? Somebody here was here this morning at my house, and they said, you know, do you work 24 7? And I said, no, I live 24 7. I walk the talk, you know, and it's because I was raised in a family where ritual and tradition and Making and coming together, you know, in a very simple way, is how we lived our lives. And I mean, I talked to indigenous cultures. That's how they live their lives. Right. It's in the water. You're in the water. You're not. Arts are over here. Then I do this, and then I go to work. It's all integrated. So your physical and mental health is much stronger when you're building this capacity that isn't bifurcated by roles and responsibilities, but that you're coming forward for impact.
- [41:48]
Ivy Ross
Yeah. There was no word for art during indigenous tribe because they were living art. Singing, dancing, cave paintings. I mean, that's how they communicated was all through the arts.
- [42:00]
Eli Woolery
Ivy, you mentioned the bringing in the poet and the sort of sound bed. What other practices do you have for your teams to help them do their best work and reduce stress and anxiety?
- [42:11]
Ivy Ross
Well, really allowing them. I mean, I don't dictate. You know, I bring in things and encourage my team, my direct report, to do different things with their teams. So they've been super creative, whether it's bringing in a sculptor and working with clay, especially designing electronics. Right. There's a very specific process that one goes through. And so bringing in a sculptor who had us work with clay, and by the way, working with two hands at once is really good because it gets the right and left half of your brain together. And the beautiful thing was this one designer then showed me the next day, instead of going right to computer to draw the shape of the product he was making, he actually did it out of clay, then carved it out of wood. I mean, really took a different path to come to the end result. And I was so happy that just him understanding that looking at a different pathway of how to create evokes nuance in, you know, differences in shape. I bring in certain people, but then I'm watching my direct reports be creative, and they do exercises. One of my directors had, literally, with her color and material department, had a whole weaving class of weaving strips of paper to create different patterns and colors. And it was spread out in the atrium of the design center, which is this big public space that the Design center is on lockdown, you know, because of we're working two years ahead of time. But what I loved is everyone that day that walked by was seeing people making things out of paper. And some people could have gone, what does this have to do with, you know, making hardware? But it's absolutely important to the brain. So, again, I don't mandate. And everything I do, it's. I offer it up. We once did. I brought in a cardboard artist who's amazing, only works in cardboard. He did a huge globe out of cardboard. You could come down and pick a three hour block to take a break. And incredible materials. And the idea was to design the world we wanted to live in. And so everyone took a piece of the globe and almost like kindergarten class made amazing worlds. I mean some made farms, some made skyscrapers, some made new ways of being. But at the end we had this huge globe that was like eight feet with everyone's creativity and energy in different sections of the globe. And then at 5 o'clock we did an opening where it was great. You didn't have to look around and say who's the artist? Because we were. All the artists, you know, had contributed to it. But it was a great exercise because not only did they get to work with different materials and ignite different processes, but sitting next to someone, maybe you know, someone who usually designs phones, sitting next to someone who designs earbuds that never would have had the time to be in that flow state together and connect. I mean beautiful relationships were made. I also gave them a knot making class, you know, on a woman who has like studied all the sailors knots and everything. And everyone loved it. And then they started thinking about how can I even apply the way my hands moved here to what I do? You know, maybe we do that a few times a year. This is not a daily or weekly activity. I just want to be clear because there's no way we could get done what we need to get. But even doing it every so often and again, just giving people permission to model that and say this is really good for us. Our products and ideas will benefit from having walked away from what we do every day.
- [46:14]
Aaron Walter
What are you watching, reading, listening to that has you looking at your work and the world in a different way.
- [46:20]
Susan Magsammon
So I just came back from Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. So I spent time in the museum. I spent time on 130 acres where there are surprise and wonder in all of these nature trails. And you walk into an art piece and then you look up and there's a Frank Lloyd Wright building. This town is structured around community. So it's an old style town hall in the middle of a square where people come together and they celebrate together. And it was really wonderful to be in the Midwest in a rural community that's really looking at health and well being and to be immersed in that idea of physical health and mental health and community engagement. I really felt inspired by that. And then I went to another space in upstate California called 1440 multiversity, which is also a place to come and learn. And I think I'm starting to see more immersive spaces emerging big and small, where we have this idea to be able to grow and learn and transform together. And so I've been really excited to be in the world in places the last couple weeks.
- [47:35]
Ivy Ross
Yeah. And I would say I have had because we're building, getting ready to go to the Milan Salone and we're doing a new show called Making the Invisible Visible. I have been deeply in my free time, I am also working on that exhibition. So I've been deeply immersed in a little bit more of quantum physics and what does it mean to make the invisible visible? And I'm reading a book on symbols and myths. I love changing my headset, tuning into different things that interest me probably in different chapters in my life. And I'm someone that just deep dives like Alice in Wonderland going through the rabbit hole and loves to learn more and then it always affects me creatively in some way.
- [48:23]
Aaron Walter
It's fantastic. Ivy Ross Susan Magsammon thank you so much for being on Design Better.
- [48:29]
Ivy Ross
Thank you. Thank you for having this podcast.
- [48:32]
Susan Magsammon
Thank you.
- [48:38]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to finer shows or simply drop a link to the show show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.