Life as a Lego Piece. Google’s Tea Uglow on life, the universe, and technology.

There was a Romanian tractor driver, and a Korean heart surgeon. And they had been practicing for 3 days. We recruited them all through doing YouTube videos, and just no one believed it — they turned out to be really awesome. Not like world class, but really awesome. Definitely worthy of a Carnegie Hall moment. It was a spectacular moment. That was very cool.

I feel like our project, The Ghost Project with Sandpit, was the most fulfilling. For me it was the most complete project that we’ve ever done. We set out to achieve something using technology — the idea of being able to hear the thoughts of an actor as you watch them. And to be able to switch between performers.

That we actually created something that can’t be done. The theatre experience was rich and powerful. It wouldn’t have been possible without this hidden technology. That to me is perfect. Where the technology basically amplifies and creates in a completely new paradigm for a theatrical experience. That was a really perfect moment for me.

How do you stay creatively fit?

I walk a lot. I don’t really go and see things, if that’s what you mean. I’m not terribly culturally inclined. I do some things, but I don’t consume a lot of culture. I just walk a lot. And I look at people and what they’re doing, and what lives they lead. And I listen to myself and I listen to the things that worry me. Those things are interesting.

Seriously, I probably walk an hour and a half or 2 hours a day. Then I arrive somewhere and I ask one of my lovely team to do something. It’s very weird. I don’t even know how it works.

When have you worked with a technology and realised that it just didn’t cut the mustard?

Oh I had a lovely project, which I really liked about 4 years ago. It was basically Face Swap. It was a Chrome experiment. It was Face Swap before Face Swap. But basically we were using the camera to take your face, and then putting it into a music video, so that you could kind of sing along. We got a long way through this, and then suddenly the team that I was working with phoned me and said, “So we’ve realised we’ve only been testing it on Macs, and it doesn’t actually work on PC’s. But you can download a plugin.” And I thought “Oh no. No, that’s not going to work. So you’re telling me that 90% of users won’t be able to do it?” You’ll just sort of throw your phone across the road. It was a really lovely idea. But there you go.

What’s a technological trend that you’ve observed that looks like trouble?

Trouble? Oh I think the whole trend of technology looks like trouble. I think there is a really a difficult gap between what is interesting technologically and what is necessary for human society. The human problem that is being solved, is that almost always retrospectively added back onto what was an interesting problem to solve from a technological perspective.

I think that’s something that we could do a better job of addressing. It’s just a lot less interesting from an engineering perspective to start from a human centred position. It’s like we’re interested in the technologies, and then we see how they apply to existing patterns and existing kinds of human behaviour.

There was a big spike in productivity when computers first arrived. And then since then there’s really fallen off and we don’t know why. Which is it’s a really interesting question. It’s like does that mean that we’re not using the technology in the right way, or does that mean we’re not using the humans in the right way?

What do you do when you get stuck?

Oh, I tend to give up when I get stuck. I put things down. And then I pick them up again. When I get stuck, when I get really stuck, I put an idea down, and I totally abandon it. Sometimes without telling the team that are working on it. And then I normally come back to things. I can’t quite decide whether this is because I’m lazy, or because I believe that every idea has its time. Or because I’m not really that creative, and I just keep re-purposing things.

I do find it very interesting the way that you see these echoes of ideas that you had much, much earlier. Or you see echoes of different projects. You see things both in your work and other people’s work, and things that have influenced you over and over again. And sometimes they’re very strong, and sometimes they’re not. If you could construct an entire catalogue of your work on a kind of timeline you would see the same ideas echo through.

I do think that when I get stuck, I tend to leave things. And then they’ll come back in 2 months, 6 months, a year — 10 years. The books thing that we just did is an idea from almost 10 years ago. But we didn’t have smartphones, and I didn’t have a team. There was no way of doing those things back then.

I love this idea that every idea has its time.

It’s true. The other thing is that ideas need alignment. Not like astrology but like how there are alignments of partners. Because nothing happens without other people. None of the projects I’ve worked on happen without other people being in the right place at the right time.

We needed to be in the right place at the right time. We needed Adelaide Fringe to be in the right place at the right time. We needed your marketing team to be in the right place at the right time. We needed various different sponsors. I needed to have the right team of people in place. Grumpy Sailor needed to be moving in the direction that they were at that moment. Lots of things. You can push and shunt and pull people into position a little bit but mainly, people have to kind of be lined up and ready. I’ll pivot an entire project around an idea because it means that the whole thing can actually happen.

To that point about getting stuck, quite often, it’s as much about the external influences, and the positioning of what you’re doing that means it’s stuck. It seems such a criminal thing to do but sometimes you need to turn the whole conceptual framework of what it is that you’re doing around, and point it in a slightly different direction.

Ideas are not precious, they don’t deserve to exist. There’s too many of them.

I think there was something very serendipitous about the ghost project as well. I’m still shocked that everything kind of fell into place.

Yeah, everything fall into place. When it does, it does. And that’s great. A lot of the time it doesn’t. You don’t even know that it doesn’t. You don’t even know that you don’t have the right actors there, or you don’t even know that someone’s about to blow up because of a personal problem — or whatever it is. Luck. Who would have thought it? Lots of luck.

When do you say no?

I get other people to say no for me. Is that terrible? I really do. I’m so bad at saying no. I can always hire someone to do that because I’m basically just a coward and I want to be liked.

I think that’s a short answer. I’m terrible at saying no. I wish I was better. I have been trying, and I’m trying to learn. And I’m 40 years old, I’m an adult. I know when it’s not a good idea. But I still hate the crushing sensation of being told that something can’t happen. And knowing that that’s not actually true anyway. So I just like to give people other ways to let things exist. But it weighs on me, so sometimes I delegate.

What’s the most disappointing thing about living in the future, now that we’re here?

Isn’t that funny, we were talking about this the other day. The future is always perfect. We don’t project the completely regular irritations of human existence into the future. Things that don’t work don’t go into the future.

I keep wanting to write this slightly sci-fi dystopian sort of short story. About 100 years into the future, where everything is still a bit broken — just kind of a bit broken.

There could be a whole genre of dystopic comedies about the things that niggle us today and will continue to niggle us. Think about the things that annoy you at the moment. Like losing WiFi coverage in a lift. You’re like, “What? What? You can’t put WiFi in the lift??” And you think it’s still kind of amazing that we can be walking along on either side of the planet, video conferencing each other but it cuts out when you get in the lift.

The things that annoy you are just the things that we forget were once incredible. That’s what’s annoying about the future. The things which you just had stopped thinking were magic, and start taking for granted. The second we start taking things for granted (and believe me, I work at Google), that’s when you begin to find grievance.

The second you stop and sit there in the present, and you just think quite how amazing not just technology, but pretty much everything is. Like everything. From supply chains around the world, to the civilised manner which most of us live our lives, for most of our lives. We are very lucky to live in an environment where we are relatively happy and secure and warm, with light and electricity and food, and an economic system — and this extraordinary technology.

So frankly, if you actually stop and think about it, everything’s pretty amazing. But we tend not to behave like that. And I can’t work out whether that’s what drives us forward, and whether that’s what makes us creative and incredible? Or whether that’s just what makes us really annoying as a species.

I actually really want to write it.

All these things! Finding time to do things, that’s the main problem. Also, I want to do an expansion on ‘ A Curiosity of Doubts ‘. I’ve realised I actually kind of want to do it as a whole series of things about those people. I think I’m going to call it, ‘The Joy of Doubt. For Insecure People in an Insecure Time.’ And it’s just going to kind of be all about how nothing is real anyway, so you should stop worrying about it.

Originally published at https://www.wearesandpit.com.