Six Questions from Kicker: Tom Igoe

One of our favorite things about Kicker is the great company we keep as designers in 2009. Therefore, we’ve created an interview series that profiles some of our favorites. Every few weeks we’ll profile someone new; some you may know well and others who we hope may be new to you. We’ll ask them each six simple questions, hoping to find out a bit about who they are, how they feel about the products around them, and what they think others should know. We hope you enjoy them!

Our first interview features physical computing guru Tom Igoe.

Tom teaches courses and workshops in physical computing and networking, exploring ways to allow digital technologies to sense and respond to a wider range of human physical expression. Tom has written two books on physical computing: “Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers,”co-authored with Dan O’Sullivan, and “Making Things Talk.”  Both have been adopted by digital art and design programs around the world. He is a regular contributor to MAKE magazine on the subject as well. He is a collaborator on the Arduino open source microcontroller project. He hopes someday to work with monkeys, as well.

1. What’s the most cherished product in your life? why?

I remember one time hearing Jodi Foster interviewed, and the interviewer said, in effect, you’re so busy, you must not get a lot of time to enjoy your money. What do you spend money on? “Sheets,” she replied, “Really high threadcount, really good quality sheets.” I thought that sounded nuts at the time. Then I got a good set of bamboo sheets. Holy cow, they are great. So soft, so comfortable! Even my cat noticed the difference. Now he gets irked when I put the old sheets on the bed. When they wear out, I will definitely get another pair. I don’t cherish this set, but I think they are a damn fine product.

“Cherished product” is an oxymoron to me. “Cherished” implies something that’s unique to me, has a history, is a part of my life. “Product” implies something mass market, indistinguishable from others of its kind. I don’t tend to cherish products. I do sometimes fetishize them, like anybody, especially when you’ve got fetish-masters like Jobs and Johnny Ive out there. But as far as things I cherish? Mostly things that’d be useless without the sentimental value: the stuffed dog I got when I was two (friends see it and say “why don’t you throw out that nasty thing?”), the teapot my mom bought me, the wedding photos of my grandparents and parents, that kind of thing. For me, objects gain emotional value (i.e. are cherished) based on their relationships to people, not based on their design, for me. Objects gain more commercial or use value (i.e. are good products) based on their utility, their aesthetics, their form, their behavior — in short, their design.

There are products that I’ve gotten attached to though. I really miss the Macbook 12″ aluminum model. It was the best laptop Apple ever made, and they discontinued it in the name of selling more. That’s total crap to me. Apple could have led the way in service design by saying “We know you love that macbook. Let us put in a new CPU and a nicer screen, maybe clean up the keyboard a bit, and let you keep the basic form.” That would have been kickass. But no, they’re not that innovative.   Anyway, I like my new Macbook just fine too (the 13″ aluminum one, nice screen), but it has no sentimental value. For that matter, the 12″ one didn’t either, but I really hated giving up a machine that worked well just because it didn’t keep up with the times CPU-wise. I also hate the fact that this new machine is an incremental improvement, not an innovation. Incrementation != innovation.

2. What’s the one product you wish you’d designed, and why?

I don’t feel that way about products. When there’s something I think is really well designed, I think, “man, that design team is great,” but I don’t want to have done their work. I want to do as little work as possible, so when someone else does great work, that’s better.

One reason I can’t think of a product I wish I’d designed is because when I know who designed something (which isn’t that often, I’m sometimes oblivious), I admire the thing more because it’s an extension of the person or the team’s mind. For example, when I found out that Tucker Viemeister worked on OXO Good Grips, I thought higher of both of them. I respect Tucker, and I think Good Grips is a good design, so finding out that he did it, that’s really cool.

On the flipside of that, I think that good design is not about personalities. In the ideal sense, the designer is there to serve the needs of the client, the needs of the director, etc. One of my close friends was my boss at the American Repertory Theatre, John Ambrosone. He once told me (when we were in summer stock hell in Corning, NY), that “If they’re looking at the lights, then Fannie Flagg ain’t doing her job.” What he meant was that the audience is there to see the performance, not the design. I think that works two ways. If they’re looking at the lights, then Fannie Flagg ain’t doing her job — but neither are the designers. As a counter-example, take the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical “Starlight Express”. What does anyone remember from that show? The light-up costumes, the actors on roller skates — the design. Why? Because the book and the lyrics were abysmal. Or take “Tron” How many people remember the story? How many people remember the super cool graphic design? Design did its job too well that day.

There are definitely things I wish I’d published or patented, like when I was wandering around Boston organizing first Night in Cyberspace before the web came out, saying to cafe owners, “Really, it’ll bring in *more* customers if you let us put a computer and a phone line at one of the tables!” Man, do I wish I’d patented that. Could you imagine extracting a license fee for every cybercafe on the planet? I’d have a MILLION DOLLARS!

3. What excites you about being a designer? Why do you keep doing it?

I get to make things. And see people use them. And when I’ve done my job well, they do things better, or they enjoy their activities more, as a result of what I made. That’s a great feeling.

Okay, I’m not really altruistic. I really like making things. That’s pretty much all there is to it, there’s just something incredibly satisfying about having an idea and seeing it become a reality. And it’s even more fun (for me) when the idea came from a lively discussion among a number of talented people, which design tends to favor.

4. When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?

I don’t remember. I haven’t always identified as a designer, and I still don’t always. I studied theatre as an undergrad, and focused on lighting design, so I guess I identified as a designer then. For me, a real designer would be more competent at visual and spatial representation than I am. But it’s a useful label to contrast with two professions I tend to hang around: artists and engineers.

I don’t think of myself as an artist, because I think art is primarily a practice of self expression, and requires that you have something unique to express. I don’t feel that I do. I think I’m pretty good at explaining things, or translating things from one domain to another so that they’re easy to understand, but that’s not expression. And I don’t think of myself as an engineer simply because I think engineering is a much more rigorous practice than mine. It’s also one that requires a license. I think that’s good. I like the fact that people who design bridges have to be tested and vetted by more experienced people who’ve designed bridges. So no, I’m not an engineer.

Design is a comfortable label for me because I think a designer’s primary role is to realize something that’s needed to fill a need, whether it be a utility (industrial and interaction designers), an aesthetic need to finish an idea (theatre designers), or to convey an idea (information designers). I think that serving that need is an admirable goal. If that’s what a designer is, then I guess I’m happy to be one.

5. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?

A good friend once told me to stop worrying about what I called myself and to work on what interested me. Learning that made me a lot happier. Whenever I hear people start statements with phrases like “As a designer, I think…”, or “As an artist, I think…”, my eyes glaze over now. I’d rather hear what you think as you, no matter what you are. I get much more done by not worrying about how it’s classified.

6. What are 5 things all designers should know?

1) My undergrad advisor told me “The only thing you need to know as a designer is everything.” I think that’s been good advice, actually, in that the most important tool of a designer is the ability to study and learn. You’re constantly working in domains you’ve never worked in, and you have to approach each one as a novice student, and learn about it before you can design for it. That’s probably the most important thing, I think.

2) Knowing that you’re always working for someone else is also important. You design things for other people to use, enjoy, whatever. Without them, your work doesn’t mean much. That’s sometimes easy to forget.

3) You can’t control what people think, you can only guide what they do. People come with their own assumptions, build their own mental models of the things you make, and often, their model is different than yours. They’re not wrong. But perhaps you didn’t communicate something as clearly as you could have. They may always have a different mental model than you do, but if your design works for them within that mental model, that’s great. They’re not using your thing wrong, they’re using it their way — not yours.

4) Give people credit for intelligence. They’re smarter than any automated system, and you can use that in your designs. Saves you money, time, materials, and heartbreak.

5) You have a sense of humor. Use it.

This was written by jmedich. Posted on Friday, April 3, 2009, at 2:15 pm. Filed under Six Questions. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.