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Comments on Fast Company’s Design in Tech Report Press Coverage

I’ve learned a lot about how the press can turn a short telephone conversation into something sensationalistic, and slightly twist what I really said. But their business model requires getting attention ā€” so I understand the WHY behind it all. What I didn’t expect was to find so many folks out there who rushed to turn it into a platform for how they see the world in contrast to an imagined (and diametric) position that I carried. THAT has been the most interesting learning for me.

When I read the clickbait-y headline I almost fell out of my chair šŸ˜±. But I immediately recognized and understood that Fast Company is a business ā€” and their job is to generate interest in a topic to improve their business position.

Context: Most interviews that get written about you donā€™t have sign off from the interviewee (me) so you never what or how an article is going to come out. In the early 2000s I was misquoted by Wired and it felt a bit icky ā€” so thatā€™s why I started a blog in 2004 on WordPress. Because my blog let me speak in my own words, versus the interpretations by someone else.

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On Simplicity, in WSJ Magazine

WSJ Magazine, March 6, 2019

When I began studying design 30 years ago, I started as a technologist. Itā€™s a very complex worldā€”computer code, chip designā€”and I realized how important it was to make things simple, because it concerned everything in your daily life. If those things you bump into in your house or carry around with you were complex, they were going to make your life terrible. I wrote simple computer programs that would produce complex outcomes. I simplified complex technological experiences. Many designers love to live in a KonMari-style house where everything is super-duper organized; their clothes are folded standing up, and thereā€™s joy or whatever. But I tend to like complexity and diversity around me. Creative people are inherently spatial learners. They understand through objects in their environments. Itā€™s what feeds their spatial memory, their creativity.