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Maggie Gram, "The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History" (Basic Books, 2025)
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Hi, I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter. BurnedByBooks. Let's start the show. When I think about design, it is so often in terms of a personal aesthetic that finds its way into my everyday life. I find something beautifully made that may exist for unbeautiful reasons. A washing machine with a matte black finish and easy to toggle chrome selection wheel, an office chair of sky blue with an invisible lumbar support, and so on. But it is the case that what I really am imagining is how form and function work together to create an that is at once utilitarian and aesthetic, beautiful and useful. Maggie Graham, in her gorgeously written and intimately researched book the Invention of Design, would argue that in the history of 20th and 21st century design, I haven't even scratched the surface. In chapters on beauty, function, problem solving, human centeredness, experience, and thinking, Graham both democratizes design to include sometimes competing definitions and pathways for the term, while looking to the curious lives and discoveries of major figures in each of these turns in the history of design. While she will tell you that this is not a history of design in the classical sense, there is no doubt that one of the great pleasures of the invention of design is the care with which Graham looks to the biographies and passions of these figures to understand the enormous influence of people like Eva Zeissel on whose experiences in a Stalinous prison taught her to seek out the beauty of everyday things as a light that illuminates even the darkest moments in a person's life, or Herbert Simon, who was driven by Cold War politics and anxieties to transform himself again and again into the kind of intellectual required to solve the greatest problems facing the nation and the world. Along the way, Graham puts us at the center of design's ideological failures and its sometimes all too narrow vision of a consumer and their needs and wants, while also taking time to revel at designers like the Eames Brothers and their Solar Do Nothing machine, explaining that sometimes design is not supposed to do, it is supposed to be. Its whole function is its being. By borrowing the best stylistic qualities from creative nonfiction and cultural criticism, Graham gives us a rich picture of design's influence on modern life, but with a delight that carries a reader rushing through to the conclusion. Maggie Graham is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experienced design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Cafeskari, University of Venice, and Harvard University, and she has written for N1 and the new York Times. She lives in New York. Welcome to Burned by Books.
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C
Maggie Graham Chris, thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be here.
- [05:01]
A
I'm so pleased I get to talk to you about this amazing book. I think I fall into the larger category of people in the world who sort of think they understand design. But I learned very quickly in reading your book that my sense of design was so narrow and so misunderstanding, especially of. Of modern design, and that I just, I just didn't know enough to to have that term encompass so much of. Of what it does in this book. So I wanted to start with getting some of the different definitions that you work with of design in the invention of design, because, as you say, it's such a capacious term once you start to dig into its history.
- [05:51]
C
That sounds great. I mean, part of the, the idea of the book and part of the kind of motivating insight that led me to try to write the book was is that really design is our senses of it. So when you say I, you know, I had such a limited sense of sense of design, I, I think I, I wanted to get away from the idea that there is one thing that's design, that design, there's one good definition of it and say, like other kind of discursively constructed things, to use a little bit of jargon, it is what we have thought and said it was over time. So, you know, 125 years ago, the word design in English and other Latin languages or Latin influenced languages meant any art that was derived from drawing. So the word came in from the old French and the word meant drawing originally came into Latin as disenio or Italian as disegno, and, and, and eventually became to be used for sculpture, drawing, painting, these various arts that began with diseno drawing. And so as of the end of the 19th century, designers were artistically trained people who could do these arts or do one of these arts based on drawing. Over the course of the 20th century, people gained different senses of what this word or this kind of, this kind of word cloud of, of associated things meant. And design came to mean all kinds of things, no one of which is kind of more organically right than any other ones. But so early on in the 20th century, because, you know, when after the industrial revolution, industry began hiring these people who are artistically trained in some way to try to differentiate their products and increasingly competitive consumer markets, that the point of hiring them was to beautify these consumer products. And so what design meant at that point was making something more beautiful. Over the course of the 20th century, it came to symbolize making things work better kind of function. Functionalist idea of design. It came to symbolize problem solving with the cold war. And that meaning of design is very much still with us today. I, in my, my daily kind of work as a designer and as a design manager, kind of constantly focused on how to define the problem and what the best kind of solution to the problem is. And the kind of discourse of problem solving has become very central to the discourse of design. Design came to mean human centeredness over the kind of second half of the 20th century. It came to mean the creation of Experiences. And over the last kind of 25 years, it has come to mean a way of thinking. You know, hear all the time about design thinking and about the applications of design thinking in education or in, you know, food service or whatever it might be. So design is now not just beauty and function and problem solving, human centeredness and experience, but also a way of thinking and beyond. So the point is just there are a lot of different definitions of it and whatever your sense of it is, it comes from somewhere and it feels right to me.
- [09:12]
A
Well, I mean, I like that democratization of the, of the word and our sense of it, but it, it is interesting how authoritatively the individuals that you, that you detail their histories treat it. They are not democratizing design. They are, they feel very dogmatic about design. But I wanted to know because you have these, you were outlining the umbrella categories. There's, there's six of them. Beauty, function, problem solving, human centeredness, experience and thinking. But you pin them to 1, 2, maybe 3 figures that you take us deep into their lives and talk about how they become pretty dogmatically attached to one definition of. So I wonder how it ended up that the book gets centered around these individuals and what it meant to kind of see design as coming out of an individual's passion, commitment, sense of ethics.
- [10:13]
C
Yeah, that's such an interesting question. I mean, I, I think early on in trying to figure out how I wanted to put the book together, I thought, am I really going to. I love, I love people, I love characters, but am I really gonna organize this book around individual characters and make it kind of.
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A
And they are such characters. Oh my gosh.
- [10:34]
C
And I think that's ultimately why I, I went that way, but. Or one of the reasons I went that way. But I did have some reservations about the kind of character driven cultural history because inevitably it comes to seem like this first chapter is organized around someone named Eva Zeissl. Oh, well then Eva Zeissel must have kind of invented the idea of design as beauty. And that's not quite my intention. I, I think when you, you're writing a kind of history of a, of a discourse, the idea is lots and lots of different people contributed to each kind of piece of the discourse that came in. It's, it's contributed by all of the kind of writing and speaking and kind of other forms of like kind of linguistic contribution that, that, that come in to, to a culture. So lots of different people kind of worked together to make design mean beauty or thinking or all the other things in between. But I did get so excited about these individual people and just really want to tell their stories, you know, in. In the kind of limited way that a. That a person looking back in an archive can do. So. Eva Zeissel, for instance, is born early in the 20th century in Hungary and was trained as a painter, became quickly a. A potter because she wanted to kind of figure out how to make a living in this very rapidly changing Hungary of the 1910s. And ultimately, after a series of really interesting life events, became a ceramicist and one of the most influential kind of industrial designers of the American 20th century. She ended up in the United States and really of the global 20th century. I think part of the reason I found her so compelling was that she wrote in a deeply intentional and articulate way about what she felt that beauty in an object, you know, intentionally designed object, could do with regard to the connection between the person who made it and the audience. She felt that beauty could kind of create a soul contact between a person who made something and a person who was using the something that the person made. So that was very compelling to me. But also, Eva Zeissel was imprisoned in Stalinist Soviet Union.
- [12:56]
A
And this is where the story just, like, for me, because I was like, how did Maggie find this person who I've never heard of, who's, like, responsible for so much of the, like, beauty in utilitarian design movement, whose life, like, should have been just a horror show. But talk about how, like, beauty comes out of horror for Eva Zeiss.
- [13:21]
C
Yeah, she, you know, she was imprisoned in a couple of different Soviet prisons as part of the kind of Great Purge or Great Terror, Stalin's campaign in the late 30s to consolidate power over that Soviet state by purging the Soviet people of kind of alleged enemies within, she got caught up in that and ended up in these prisons and. And really stayed alive by observing kind of tiny moments of beauty, you know, a spider or a ray of light. She would, you know, think of her past self, a skipping girl looking at the sun or whatever it might be. And these moments of beauty, she felt, kept her alive and ultimately kept her connected to. To the rest of humanity. And so later on, as she, you know, moved through her career as a designer, she. She remained committed to those kinds of forms of. Of beauty. But I guess I. I bring this up to say that the. That we keep reading, or I keep reading at least when I'm. When I'm reading because of stories. And although I was very interested in the kind of conceptual framework and the. The kind of polemical points of this book. I think I ultimately finished writing it and, and kind of stayed interested in it on, on the whole because these stories were so compelling to me.
- [14:44]
A
And in that way, no matter what the umbrella category is, you really are quite committed to the, to the human centeredness of, of design. By centering these humans in your book, you're doing a form in that you care about their stories and how they came to be Principal parts of what you say is, you know, a discourse that involves many people, but certainly principle to one kind of element of the, the to and fro of discourse.
- [15:15]
C
That's a lovely way of, of thinking about it. I mean I, I, yeah. So later in the book I write about the rise of this kind of discourse of design as, as something human centric or as about making the making process focus on people. And I'm a little bit skeptical of that overall kind of piece of the cultural history of design. I think human centeredness feels politically attractive in the 70s and that kind of like a good way to sell a service in the 80s and 90s and in the present. But I also really admire the anthropologists and design researchers and others who, who do bring actual human needs into the design process. And, and yeah, I guess I, I do kind of try to emulate them in some way, maybe subconsciously. In this book I did, I did get into design myself as a user researcher. So I, I, I can't get very far away from the idea of human centeredness.
- [16:17]
A
Well, I want to come back to the like anthropological term, term turn in design, but I wanted to talk for a second. I mean you're very clear that one of the interesting things about the history of modern design is that it, it sort of plays at being apolitical and is, you know, for a time thought of as like a, a pure rational mode of, of approaching the world and its problems. But you, you so easily point out how much it's connected to politics. And I'm very interested in how two kind of central figures in the problem solving category of design, Teague and Simon, end up on very like divergent ends of the spectrum of New Deal era American politics. And I wonder if you'd talk us through the strange political, you know, differentiation that happens with these two figures who are so invested in empirical design.
- [17:19]
C
That's such a, it's a good pairing. Yeah. So Walter Teague is the, the kind of organizing character of this second chapter of the book, which is about function, about the, the kind of rise of the idea of design as function, which is you can also think about or talk about as the story of the rise of industrial design. Industrial design is really about bringing in this expert figure to make something work better. Teague was an American industrial designer, one of the kind of, quote, fathers of industrial design. And he began doing that work in the 1920s and then continued to do it with a few others over the course of the 30s. And one of the kind of way. One of his ways of thinking that came out over the course of the 30s was his aversion to government planning, government action of whatever kind. Basically, the New Deal, it felt threatening to American business. It felt threatening to his business. He felt it was dismantling the kind of freedom from oversight that corporations had previously joined. And ultimately he thought that it was too much government meddling in corporate affairs. His kind of his own writing about design and what design can do and the kind of power of design and technology and innovation really took a lot of energy from this political frustration and aversion that he felt along with some of his colleagues over the course of the 30s. And ultimately, I felt like the kind of way that we talk about design and technology and innovation as being able to make things work better is really con. You know, continues to be informed by this really kind of libertarian or techno utopian libertarian impulse.
- [19:09]
A
Oh, God, that's such a horrifying term.
- [19:13]
C
Yeah, but it's so descriptive of what's kind of what's going on today.
- [19:16]
A
Yeah, no, so totally. It's a great term. It just gives me the shivers.
- [19:20]
C
I mean, same, same, same. But yeah, when you. When you see, you know, Elon Musk come into the. Into the government to try to, you know, cut. Cut most of it in the name of efficiency. At the same time, you know, Trump and Musk fired all of their really extraordinarily talented interaction designers and builders of Technology 18F and the US Digital Service as part of DOGE and that recently brought in a new leader to create the US Design Agency or something like that. And I think the. The idea is like, let's get rid of all of this kind of ways of making things that are actually kind of part of government and, and organically connected to government and replace them with a kind of shinier version of design that is really about pushing against all of. All of that and bringing in something kind of new and promising that isn't. That is the opposite of that. Anyway, my point is just. It's a. It's a long. It's a long and powerful discourse that that kind of weaves together design as function and this kind of, sorry to say it again, libertarian, techno, utopian impulse on the other. So, yeah, tell me what, tell me what was interesting to you about, about Herbert. Herbert Simon, and I'll explain.
- [20:43]
A
Well, I mean, first of all, the career trajectory of Herbert Simon broke my brain. I mean, I don't, like, I tend to think that genius is just vastly overused and is like some kind of an illusion really. But I'm going to say that Herbert Simon's a genius or was a genius and had a kind of like, ability to transform himself to suit what he thought was the next kind of mode of design most appropriate to problem solving that he, he saw before him. And yet politically, he always, as you write it, kind of maintained a sense that some government intervention into, you know, the bettering of lives was, was really necessary. And can you, can you tell us a little bit about his career trajectory? Because it's so bananas. But then also, do you see something that is kind of of a piece with his sense of problem solving and a vision of design that ended up dominating Cold War America with his continual sort of like liberal, old school liberal sense of the world?
- [21:58]
C
Yeah, it's, that's a, it's so, so well framed as a, as a question. I want to think about it far beyond this, this five minutes. But so Simon. Yeah, Simon's career trajectory also breaks my brain. He began as kind of political scientist and economist thinking through how organizations make decisions early, you know, in the, in the 20th century, and then became a psychologist and a computer scientist and really one of the inventors of early artificial intelligence. Oh. You know, along the way, like a whole bunch of kind of applied math. I don't know, I'd say it's really hard to keep your, Keep, keep Herbert Simon. Keep track of Herbert Simon.
- [22:44]
A
It sure is. I feel like it's maybe one of those things where it's a really big trench coat and there are like four Herbert Simons, like, standing on each other's shoulders. That's one possibility. Don't, don't discount it.
- [22:57]
C
No, it's really true. Another way to kind of make sense of him, though, is that he's a University of Chicago guy in the. And then an operations research at Berkeley guy. And these are both kind of these capacious empiricists, 20th century institutions that often kind of pushed people across disciplinary boundaries to really interesting effects. They were also, you know, Cold War institutions or they, they spawned Cold War sub institutions in a major way. And that was the milieu that Herbert Simon really came out of a lot of his research was sponsored by these kind of big cold war think tanks that were trying to understand how people made decisions and figure out how to reproduce some of that process with computers. And that was how he became an early kind of theorist and practitioner of, of AI. It was also how he got into thinking about design as an idea and how his ideas came to kind of influence the discourse of design. He thought of kind of human intention, setting and planning as, as a design process, as the design process, and thought of all of the different kind of professions that involved that those processes in the human mind as design professions and ended up writing quite a bit about how those processes worked and describing them again as design. Design as problem solving, problem solving as design. So I think, I do think that the thing that Herbert Simon and Teague have in common as kind of liberals in the, in the deepest sense is a kind of faith in humanity and the human individual, human capability to move things forward, to create progress. They are kind of rationalists who believe in human beings and, and human improvability, but they do take in really, really different directions. I mean, one of the things that ultimately really kind of like about Simon is that I think he, he doesn't, he doesn't become a techno utopian. He believes in the kind of the almost social democratic state as the beings to advance their own position. And you know, I do too. So I like him.
- [25:37]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, I, I'm definitely, I'm team Simon both because I feel like if he were still around then, then he could probably solve a bunch of problems that we're having now, but also because of the way that his life experience produced a certain, for me, recognizable political instinct. While, but while, you know, Simon and Teague are, you know, designing kind of pure function, rational function design as a means of problem solving. You, you look to, in a similar moment, Charles and Ray Eames and their experiments with design as play as, as, as design that can simply be rather than do. And I wonder how play fits into the story of rational design.
- [26:28]
C
Yeah, I, I love the Eamess for this reason. I mean they, they wrote about. Charles Eames wrote particularly a lot about design as problem solving. And they made, you know, I made these kind of films about problem solving and, and the kind of commonalities between computer problems and philosophical problems and real world, but design problems they talked about, Charles talked about the kind of steps involved in, in solving problems and the kind of ways that the problem solving could be design, problem solving could be reproduced as a set of rules and yet if you look at the kind of toys and masks and games and furniture that the Eames is created and collected, they're really organized not just around function, but also around luck and spontaneity and whimsy and play. So whether that's about the object itself or the kind of juxtaposition of very different objects or about color and texture and kind of decoration, so much of what they did was really not about solving a problem or making something work better, but about having it exist for its own sake and having it kind of move in a way that. That was unexpected or whimsical or whatever it might be. I became kind of obsessed with this 1957 object or instrument that. That Charles and Ray Eames created in 1957. Oh, I said 1957. Anyway, for the Aluminum Company of America, it was called the Solar Do Nothing Machine.
- [27:58]
A
Yes, you have a picture of it in the book, and I'm now obsessed with it, too. But tell us. Tell us about that machine.
- [28:04]
C
It's the only. The only regrettable thing about the picture is that it's. It's very colorful in real life, and the picture is black and white, but you. You get the idea of it. It's just like a bunch of kind of gears and shapes and kind of stuff, thinning, shining, swinging, oscillating pieces that look like they might relate to one another in some way, but that really are there to kind of poke fun at the functional.
- [28:32]
A
It looked a little bit like a Juan Miro work. A little bit.
- [28:39]
C
It's like a. It's like a cross between Miro and a machine or something.
- [28:43]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've got the. Like, you got the solar apparatus there, which is looking both in its design and actuality as, like, very useful look at it. Capturing things. It's capturing them and transforming them, and then it's, like, hooked up to a thing where you're like, well, that's not gonna do anything. That's just gonna be whimsical and. And fun and lovely, and I. You know, that combination of the, like, you know, the problem solving and the useless, but full of delight and joy and play, I really loved.
- [29:20]
C
Yeah, thank you. Me too. I. Charles. Right. It is not supposed to do. It is supposed to be. Its whole function is in its being, which is so beautifully paradoxical. Its function is in its. In its being something that is inherently not about function, just. Just being. I think the. The reason the Eames has ended up in the chapter was that although I do, as I said before, really rely Myself on the idea as problem solving and the idea of design as function or making something function better. That's my whole job. I, I also think that we, we kind of undersell design and its attraction for people if we forget that a lot of it is play, is art, is aesthetics and, and kind of aesthetic experience for the sole purpose of aesthetic experience. And there's something kind of mysterious there. And, and I, and I love the Eames's for, for calling it out in such a kind of beautiful and funny way.
- [30:26]
A
And that's, you know, that helps to explain why suddenly, like Gwendolyn Brooks is in the middle of a, like, conference of designers who, and on the one hand she's like, you know, this isn't, you know, I'm not really invested in like, making design, but here's my poetry and my poetry is going to do something to you and, and whether that's aesthetic or, or otherwise. And even though she's arguing for herself nodded as a designer, she's clearly like proving your thesis there on the, the need for, for thinking through aesthetics when we understand useful design.
- [31:07]
C
Thank you for, thank you for seeing her there and feeling that she proves the point. I had such a kind of lovely experience myself of being at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and doing early archival research for this book when I really wasn't sure yet what the book was about. But I was in the archives of the International Design Conference in Aspen looking through the kind of slides from the conferences in the early 60s and came across this panel of people. I think it's like five or six white men in suits and Gwendolyn Brooks, and she is sitting there looking, you know, a little bit bemused or like both, both unimpressed and a little bit lost among these designers of industry of the US mid 20th century. And it turns out, yeah, she was there to, to be on a panel about problem solving. And it was proposed that she talk about the artist as problem solver. And she responded by saying, you know, the artist, you know, I, I, I don't believe it's the province of the artist to be a problem solver, to solve problems. I think it's the province of an artist to be in an eye and an ear and to identify problems that maybe others will go on to solve. But yeah, I mean, I think the thing that made me unsure whether Brooks belonged in this book was that she was talking about art and not design. But I think what she was saying design has in common with art. It's not only science, it's not only something rationalizable or empirically fully knowable. It is also art. It is also play. It is also seeing and perceiving and intuition. And I wanted to bring that into the book alongside all of the smart Herbert Simon thoughts about the rationalization and kind of computer reproducibility, et cetera, et cetera, of divine.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah, you don't collapse. What I like about your take on design is you refuse to collapse one thing into another. You, you, you refuse to say one form becomes all dominant because even when you're, you're like, moving into the kind of like, experience, user experience, and the kind of like, absolute usefulness of how, how one might experience a new computer, for example, you're still thinking about the aesthetic quality of design and the beautification and how we encounter in our experiences both beauty and direct, intuitive use. And I wanted to turn for a second, when you turn to human centeredness, we get this sort of like, idealism of Victor Papanek, who, who views design or comes to view design as an anthropological project and wherein designers must look outside of the Western tradition. And you know, he, he proves to be a, a little bit fraudulent in his, you know, in his anthropological claims, but he's sort of at the tip of the spear to a particular anthropological moment that ends up having actual anthropologists seated directly in corporate America. And so I wonder if you could talk about that, that moment in design and its meaningfulness as a, as a turning outside of the west and where it ends up leading us.
- [34:52]
C
Sure. Yeah. So Papanek was an Austrian American designer active at mid century and especially in the, you know, starting in the 60s and 70s. And as you say, Chris, it can be kind of hard to trace what exactly he did in the first couple of decades of his career because he made a lot of big claims about the people that he referred to. But ultimately he became a design writer, kind of practitioning practitioner writer who advocated for designers to kind of adopt anthropological methods so as to understand the kind of range of human need that design might be applied to. And he, I found myself, you know, quite, quite skeptical of his own anthropological methods.
- [35:45]
A
But he, yeah, he seemed to be good at collecting things.
- [35:50]
C
He's good at a kind of an Orientalist collection. But he wrote a very influential and I think very good book in the early 70s called Design for the Real World about kind of the, the imperative that that design both answer to real human needs and have real kind of utility in the world. And that that book remains quite influential to, you know, design students and others who are interested in using the, the tools of design for, for good. I think describing Kapanek as the tip of the spear is such a, is so right in that as the kind of late 70s and early 80s, as the 80s passed, designers came into industry. Oh sorry, anthropologic anthropologists came into industry as kind of informants to the design process and write about one of them at some point length in the, in the book. One of the first ones, a woman named Lucy Suchman, who was also a Berkeley person, a Berkeley trained anthropologist out of the doctoral program who had a real, I think a much more deeply grounded, nuanced, deep kind of idea about what anthropologists can and do and what they might be able to do for the design process and in industry. There was a, there was a kind of popular idea as of the late 70s coming out of writing by the anthropologist Lauren Nader of studying up, which is, you know, not just studying the idea that anthropologists should not just study people in kind of cultures far away who they kind of looked up in some way, but in fact should study the cultural forums and institutions of the most powerful to get a kind of vertical slice of society and understand the, the structural forces that were affecting everybody in society. So Lucy Suchman decided when she was in graduate school that she should study up by studying the kind of mundane everyday existence of corporate power. And she did that by getting an internship with Xerox, which was one of the most powerful technology companies at the time, and going in as a research assistant ultimately to a research group called Xerox Parc Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox's west coast division, which was supposed to be it's pure research arm doing basic kind of production of scientific knowledge. So she arrived there in 1979 and she started studying kind of how to technology was made and how decisions were made among corporate decision makers, et cetera, et cetera. And she was one of the people who kind of theorized knowledge work early on in its, in its history, during its kind of discursive history. I take so much instruction from Lucy Suchman's work and from her ways of, of bringing observation of kind of human workflows and behaviors and habits into the design process. So, so maybe I, you know, I, I read Papanek as a young, as a young designer. I'm really glad that I, I read Suchman later on and I will continue to do so.
- [39:22]
A
And the, the question of like what really, I mean you, you talked before about some of the kind of irony or the failure of Human centeredness to live up to its ideals. And you know, in Suchman is perhaps offering something that's not idealized but that cares about the human that ends up being at the, at the center of questions of design more than perhaps Papanek, despite his idealistic claims. And so do you feel like that by being, you know, a more mature designer who thinks about suchmen, that you can hold a little bit of that kind of idealism of human centeredness still?
- [40:08]
C
Yes, I, you know, I, I think one of the. Just to get a little bit more lofty than you have invited. I feel like it's my, my own obligation and all of our obligation to, to try to live in negative capability in some way and hold these different ideas at the, at the same time and accepts that both of them can be true. I mean, I think that I, one of the things that drew me to design to begin with was listening to people about what they were experiencing and what they needed and then being able to try to work with them to make something that would help fill that gap. And that's an incredibly idealistic conceit. And I also still believe deeply in it and, and feel like it's one of the things that keeps me loving my job, which I do. I, you know, I also think that, you know, it's a, it, it is so idealistic as to be dangerous in some cases. So yeah, I, I both think that human centeredness is an extraordinarily important idea and that, you know, that 21st century design field in which I work falls far short of its kind of proclaimed ideology of human centeredness. And, or as I say in the book, that phrase kind of falls short of any substantive political meaning insofar as we're, you know, we're all embedded in corporate life, or many of us are. If we're embedded in government, we've probably recently been laid off. We're, we're either part of the machine or kind of easily expellable from the machine. And however compelling the problems we uncover, we will have the resourcing to solve them only insofar as solving them serves the bottom line or the interests of somebody in power. And so I guess, yes and yes. Yes, I believe in it. And also yes, I'm deeply skeptical and work hard to hold these things at once.
- [42:07]
A
Yeah, speaking of negative capability and being, I guess, skeptical while also being in many ways odd, I. You can't think about contemporary user experience design without thinking about Apple. And just like the way in which one company has really transformed that idea of that encountering complexity. And you, you do a wonderful job of really illustrating how much thinkers in the late 20th century kind of assumed that they were in the most complicated moment to, to, to be alive, which we can contest that or, or think around it. But it, you know, there's certainly a lot of complexity going on technologically and how much Apple takes that and says, let's have really the, a kind of beauty in simplicity. Let's have an interface that allows access to a very complicated thing through the most kind of easy to access form of user experience. And they're really standing on the shoulders of Xerox when they do that. But can you talk a little bit about how Apple comes to kind of really stand in for this mode of user experience?
- [43:27]
C
Yeah, you, you point to a moment in which Apple kind of picked up some of the innovations that had been invented at Xerox parc, things like the graphical user interface, which are now such a major part of the kind of simple, beautiful Apple tools we use. And I picked those things up at Xerox PARC and was able to run with them as Xerox kind of dropped the ball and never really brought them to market in a successful way anyway. Apple did become the kind of exemplar for all of us of building experiences or designing experiences that were as simple as possible to kind of hide and ward off the ostensibly increasing complexity of modern life. I read a little bit about Don Norman, who was an engineer and psychologist, who was one of the many kind of theorists of that inside of Apple. And he was one of the first people to write about user experience, design as a particular kind of category of design, and to your eyes, design as the production of experience. But there are a lot of other characters that could have been central to that story. Jony. I've in particular the designer of many of our most beloved Apple tools could have been there, Steve Jobs himself. Yeah, I couldn't quite bring myself to write about Johnny Eisen or Steve Jobs.
- [45:00]
A
I mean, Jobs are there in the, in the background there, but I think you gave him as. As much due as, as he needs at this point.
- [45:09]
C
Thank you.
- [45:10]
A
What we think of as user experience is fundamentally about what kinds of lived experience certain designers have had, which of course limits what user experience actually means, which user and what kind of experience. And you're an advocate for moving institutions to bring in the broadest possible lived experiences among its design teams. Are we in a moment when user experience is pluralizing? Or does your own advocacy reveal a design flaw that continues to proliferate?
- [45:48]
C
I would like to say that. Well, so in the book I write a bit about Dory Tunstall, a design leader and educator who along with many other.
- [45:58]
A
She is amazing.
- [46:00]
C
She really is. I particularly admire the work she did as dean of the Faculty of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design where she did a huge cluster hire of black design faculty in order to bring more black lived experience into the design field, which she's the first black.
- [46:20]
A
Dean of a design school globally. Is that, is that right?
- [46:24]
C
I think that's right. I mean it's. Which points to the extraordinary problems I.e. that the design field has today, reflecting in any way the demographics of the people for whom it is trying to produce experiences and products. I mean, it's a kind of longer story, although I guess that that does go to the question that you asked. Is user experience design kind of pluralizing, for lack of a better word, or kind of becoming more expansive and capacious? I would like to think so. And also I think that the period of kind of opening and expansion and possibility that experience design has been going through over the last couple of decades is probably coming to an end in so far as institutions are eyeing with great curiosity the capabilities of generative AI to not so much design as in my opinion, insofar as it's not about the imposition of actual human intention on a problem, but reproduce kind of past human intention into a conglomerate of kind of new approach to solving whatever the problem put into the prompt is and, and make kind of, you know, user experience design without a user experience designer. So I, I'll be interested to see, you know, what hiring in UX looks like in five years. And, and, and I'm not sure that it is continuing to learn from the kind of broad lived experiences of all the people who have generously participated in it. Some of whom Dory Tunstall brought into the field.
- [48:11]
A
Yeah, that feels bleak. But her history, as you outline it is undeniable and it set a benchmark and a lofty goal that I hope that as, as you know, automated token systems and large language models begin to kind of take up these, these human roles, that perhaps they will be drawing on sources that are more, more diverse. But I mean, that still feels grim. You, you end with design thinking, which in some ways is the most idealistic of your umbrella categories of, of design. But it's ironically the one that shows us perhaps the deepest limitations in, in design's effort to problem solve the world's greatest and most enduring issues. Can you talk a little bit about what design thinking is and how it came to really dominate a lot of how we think about at least industrial design now and then maybe take us through the ways in which it is limited in, in confronting what a. One of your other figures called indeterminate problems. Problems that we can't know a root source, or at least a singular root source of and therefore are very difficult to kind of wrap our heads around.
- [49:41]
C
Yeah. Thank you. Design thinking is a, is a phrase applied by some of the leaders of a, an industrial and experience design firm called ideo. And it kind of, it brought that term to a market really in the early 2000s, I think it was 2003. They had been an industrial design firm for a couple of decades and they were very successful and the market was changing and a downturn was on the horizon. And they thought, why don't we, rather than kind of selling innovations or kind of selling objects that are, that are innovative, why don't we start packaging and selling our methodology for producing those objects and experiences that are innovative? They became kind of marketers of methodology. So the thing that was fun for me about writing about design thinking or this moment in which design thinking was ascendant is that it, it does bring together all of the discourses that I had written about earlier in the book. I mean, it brings together the idea that design can solve problems and make things work better with the idea that design is about making things more beautiful, but also human centered and creating experiences. It is kind of a package that contains all of, all of those things. When we sign up for design thinking courses or whatever it might be, we get a little bit of each of them of those discourses. But I think as I, as I examined the kind of track record of applications of design thinking, I came across some that were incredibly compelling. I, I find, you know, there's a, there's something called the Nurse Knowledge Exchange or something similar to that at Kaiser that was created through a design thinking process that involves nurses passing off knowledge at the end of one shift to the nurse coming out for the next shift in front of the patient, part of the patient. And it's been extremely successful as a tactic and it came out of design thinking workshops. And I think that's really, really great. And in fact, I benefited from it myself. But design thinking can also mean bringing in a team to a city like Gainesville to try to make the city of Gainesville more competitive over the course of like a six or eight week engagement, kind of consulting engagement by doing things like renaming its departments and doing some Rebranding, et cetera, all of which, you know, is, is interesting and potentially good, but kind of falls flat when the, the problems that the city is facing go much deeper than even the, a problem as posh, deeper than competitiveness as gains do. Got a long, long history of institutional racism and poverty and all of the kind of problems that have beset many American cities. And so there was a lot of hope placed in this design thinking engagement in Gainesville. And ultimately it did, you know, some harm and some good and didn't leave a major positive legacy.
- [52:53]
A
If only our, our problems with major urban centers were simply that they weren't competitive enough, then we could, you know, we could just put, you know, our best problem solver design team on and, you know, be, be settled in no time.
- [53:09]
C
Exactly. Exactly.
- [53:11]
A
So before I let you go, Maggie, I wanted to know a little bit about some things that you've been reading and loving recently. But I'm, I'm also really interested. You give a, a really wonderful sort of bibliography, as the book goes along, of the great design works of the 20th and 21st century. And I wonder if, as you're thinking about the books that you've been reading recently, you could also give us a couple design books for people who want to delve more into these questions of, of how design became to be so fundamental to how we experience life.
- [53:48]
C
Gosh, thanks. You'd think I had or would have an incredible, you know, a perfect answer to that second question because I have taught design and I, and I in some way wrote this book with the intention of bringing it back to students and kind of putting in front of them all these, these, you know, design writings that I want to force them to read, saying, here they all are. It's hard to pick one. I, I wrote about the industrial designer Henry Dreyfus, who was kind of a contemporary of Walter Teague's and both like a competitor and a collaborator with Teague and Dreyfus has a book called Designing for People that I still think is one of the best design books and really does bring together these ideas of problem solving and aesthetics and function and human centeredness, even though it's kind of before the moment of human centeredness in ways that I think I really admire and I, I would love to compel other people to read. Also, it has really little pictures in it that he drew himself. So.
- [54:50]
A
And is this the one that has just never gone out of print since its initial printing?
- [54:55]
C
I think that's right. I think it was published in the late 50s, maybe 1957 or something like that. And it's. It's still in print, very available. I believe the illustrations are the same, so.
- [55:07]
A
Hmm.
- [55:08]
C
You can find it. You can find it anywhere. I recently. I'm just finishing the Dolly Alderton book of a few years ago called Ghosts.
- [55:19]
A
I love that book.
- [55:21]
C
I love this book. I just. I feel so seen by it, not in its particular, like, plot or. Or specific character, but just in its depiction of what it's like to be a person. Always. The thing that I really admire about a work of fiction. I also recently finished Rob Franklin's Great Black Hope and found that just extraordinary. Just so smart and just nuanced and sharp and also, in moments, really beautiful. So I recommend it.
- [55:53]
A
I find his prose styling to be just shocking. Like, it's so good, and it feels very like you're encountering something new in the. In the language. And it's nuanced about. About race and class in a. In a way that's, I think, is quite daring.
- [56:13]
C
I. I deeply agree. And it is. It is something new. Right? It is his first novel. Yeah.
- [56:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and no. I. I had a. I had a chance to interview him and. And he was so smart and interesting thinking about that work. I'd love to interview Dolly Alderton because I find that she is just. She is unmanacled by any, like, tropes of genre. Like, she's writing literary fiction, she's writing romance, she's writing, like, popularized fiction, and she's like, just, like, breaking all the rules. And it's still unbelievably fun. Like, I read lots of things that break all the rules, and I'm like, wow, that's. It's so smart. And it broke all the rules. It wasn't a lot of fun, but it. It broke the rules. But Dolly Alderton just is, like, immensely fun. Yeah.
- [57:07]
C
It's so true. And she must be interested, sort of consciously interested in genre, too. I mean, the. The main character in Ghosts, as you might remember, is writing a cookbook. But the cookbook is also sort of memoir and also non section about memoir and food and memory. Yet it's definitely there. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that always comes to my mind when I think of the delight that rule breaking can engender when. When done right. Is that PowerPoint chapter in the Jennifer Egan book.
- [57:38]
A
Yeah.
- [57:39]
C
Visit from the Goon Squad.
- [57:40]
A
Yep.
- [57:41]
C
Yeah, I. I want more like that and more like.
- [57:44]
A
Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. I remember encountering that when that book first came out and, and just being taken aback by it and, and how well it worked and, and now when we think of PowerPoint and how limited and ugly and exactly boring it is, it's still, I go back to that chapter and it still is kick ass. Even using a technology that's so antiquated and, and which, you know, was a design marvel, I guess, of its time, but now feels so poorly designed.
- [58:20]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. Well, I'll be listening to Burned by Books so that I will kind of keep hearing about those, those moments of kind of transcendent boundary breaking.
- [58:34]
A
Well, I hope, I hope we have some for you coming up and these are great recommendations. I'm going to seek out the Henry Dreyfus because I'm now super into design thanks to Maggie Graham's amazing the Invention of Design, which just kind of challenged in the best way every understanding that I have of design while also making room for me to have some intuitions about how design lives in my life and, and those being okay as definitions as well. But I was just totally stunned by the portraits of the characters that you found in your research that you give to us. And I won't soon forget them as as much as they were singular, they are also part of just this wonderful tapestry of people involved in developing the discourse of design. So thank you so much, Maggie. It was really lovely to get to talk to you about it.
- [59:28]
C
Thank you so much, Chris. It's such an honor to have you as a reader and an interlocutor. Thanks again.
- [59:34]
A
Well, I hope you'll come back on for your next book. Well, that's all from me for now. My great thanks to Maggie Graham for coming on to talk about the invention of design. You can find links to purchase the Invention of Design and all of Maggie's recommended books at the website Burned by books Dot Com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been Burned by Books.
- [60:32]
C
Sam.