Facebook x MoMA: “Designers are the enzyme for innovation”
- Exclusive talk between Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at MoMA, and Luke Woods, Head of Product Design at Facebook
- Modern design is about objects and architecture: the digital world is where we live and breathe, not just “use”
- Can small design decisions act like acupuncture, enabling large ripples of societal change?
When Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s Senior Curator of Architecture & Design, and Luke Woods, Facebook’s Head of Product Design sat down to talk at TOA 2016, it was a one-off and fascinating meeting between two people whose thoughts on design affect millions of people.
Digest their thoughts in this exclusive TOA.life State Of Play conversation: essential for designers, creators, coders and artists alike. Read the extract below or watch their conversation — expertly moderated by Anne Pascual, Executive Design Director at IDEO Munich.
Anne Pascual: I discovered that you both have one interesting thing in common: the Boeing 747. Paola, you said you wanted to acquire a Boeing 747 for the collection at MoMA, and Luke, you were an intern at Boeing in 2008. So to dig into your pasts, what made you go into the field of design?
Paola Antonelli: I grew up in Italy, so design is absolutely normal in Italy — you talk about it like football and food and politics and it was so normal I never thought about “going into design.” I wanted to be an economist, a journalist, an astronaut, a nuclear physicist… I went into economics and I hated it so much that I went to architectural school because it was the farthest thing from economics. There were 15,000 architecture students in Milan. It was complete anarchy!
Luke Woods: I grew up in the United States, and design was not one of the common topics at the dinner table! And I came into the field of design in an idiosyncratic way: I had a babysitter as a child and her kids happened to be in design school at the University of Cincinnati, and they were sharing with me their sketchbooks, with drawings of sneakers, automobiles. I just thought that was so cool!
That’s actually one thing I’d like to see change in the world — it would be incredible if we could help more people at an earlier stage get exposed to this design industry and the impact they could make as designers.
AP: What are the big shifts you have noticed in your years in this field? What are the tensions that design is uncovering?
PA: The idea of “object” has changed. People used to think of chairs, cars, graphic design — if you think about it, the interface of an ATM or a Metrocard is a piece of design, and so is the controller that enables you to play Pacman or Grand Theft Auto. It really is all design.
And people are starting to understand that the digital world is a place we inhabit, and that we have to design by means of architecture and object design — not behaviour design.
LW: I have seen big changes in the industry and more products become digital. Digital products are quite fast to build relative to physical products. They also enable us to log data and understand how people are using them.
Digital products are also really never finished; you can keep refining, almost in real time. One of the constants in the face of that change is that what really drives designers is solving problems for people, and empathy.
PA: Everything has changed and everything has stayed the same.
AP: Paola, do you have an example from one of your exhibitions where design has brought a new perspective on things?
PA: There are gigantic issues going on in the US — what just happened in Minneapolis [the shooting of Philando Castile] and Baton Rouge [the shooting of Alton Sterling]— this amazing tension that seems impossible to resolve. And I’m thinking of an object of design — the hoodie — an object that stands for so much of this misunderstanding and real tension.
So redesigning the hoodie as a symbol is something I’ve been talking about with an activist, DeRay McKesson, and a designer, Kerby Jean-Raymond from Pyer Moss — to make something that could be a spark for positive change.
Now you might say, “Oh my god — you’re going to tackle these problems with fashion?” Well, not really — it’s just about “acupuncture” — a little gesture of design can go into the pressure point that can enable a change that then becomes a chain reaction.
Designers bring things down to human scale, and if they’re good they’re able to be non-threatening and extremely powerful.
AP: Once a tech company reached a certain scale, they are almost asking themselves, “what is beyond tech?” Because technology is really a commodity and at some point tools can be rebuilt. But what comes after that? Why do tech companies exist?
LW: What really drives me and all of us at Facebook is technology as a service bringing people together — it’s all about people and the technology that is at your disposal at any given point in time might change.
But I would push back a bit on the notion that technology is a commodity. I do think we’re living in a world where there are important technological breakthroughs that unlock new ways of solving human problems.
PA: And I like to think that designers are the ones that transform revolutions into real life — so that innovation would not happen without design. I like to say that designers are the enzyme for innovation.
LW: Design and tech and art are different tales on similar things. The types of skills that designers bring to the table, like empathy, and thinking of people, are super valuable skills for companies as strategies shift.
AP: How do you create an environment and conditions for designers to thrive — and be motivated to change the world?
LW: Today is a great time to be a designer. I think it’s also a good time to consider how to bring more people into the field of design.
I think designers thrive when they have autonomy; when they’re given a question or broad problem to solve and they have some space to chart a course towards solving that. They don’t thrive very much when they are prescribed to do something.
PA: There’s a desperate lack of diversity in the design field too, and it’s not a problem of not having enough money; it’s a problem of trying to improve your state in society of and of thinking of design as a profession that will heighten your possibilities.
It’s amazing — the moment you go in front of an audience of kids who are not, for instance, from Manhattan, they immediately “get it” the moment you explain it’s a profession, and what happens. They just don’t know it exists.
For the full, frank and fascinating discussion between these two design leaders — including how video games influence “real” life, synthetic biology and its ethical considerations, sustainable design and the answer to the thorny question of what separates “art” and “design” — make sure you watch the video of this one-off meeting.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
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