Bobulate

“Woo” was the sound a 1984 Yamaha electric keyboard makes when a young girl procrastinates practicing piano. Our baby grand with all its keys lived in the living room on display, its repertoire governed by my piano teacher, my mother, recitals, and the expectations of daily practicing. The Yamaha, by contrast, was in my bedroom with buttons and pre-set voices rendering its keys to be possibility.

I would stand over it with the particular frozen-ness of a child confronting freedom thinking, in whatever syntax I had at the time, “Now that choice is infinite, how do I decide what to play?”

It was 20 years before when Robert Moog demonstrated a music-making device, a homemade synthesizer of sorts, at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York, and opened curious maker minds. Where a pianist has 88 keys and three pedals to work with, a Moog player has access to knobs and cables that can produce any sound a human has the imagination to construct. The question was no longer what note? It was: what exactly are you trying to say?

Bob Moog’s badge at the 1964 convention via Bob Moog foundation

The current disruption with generative toolmaking, agentic coding, and rapidly emerging AI-assisted processes create the opportunity to decouple certain kinds of making from the tools. The knobs and cables are invisible, replaced by text fields, but the framework is the same. The questions about what to make and why have just moved upstream.

See also:
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith,
modern synth wizard
and the process behind
her otherworldly music

The first generation of synthesizer musicians, largely responded to this vertigo starting by imitating the thing they already knew. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (a favorite, apparently, when I was three years old) had success by showing machines could replicate Bach. Laurie Spiegel used touch-sensitive plates and sequencers for a more experimental approach and moved the mental model forward. The revolution was not that music machines could sound like a harpsichord. The revolution was that they didn’t have to.

Generative tools for design leave us with a similar question: when we can make anything, what is worth making? The mistake would be to repeat the harpsichord replicator error at scale: to use a tool capable of anything primarily to replicate what already exists, to ask the machine to write in the style of Didion or paint in the manner of Hopper, and call that success. One of the lesson of the synthesizer is that the first generation often imitates. This is not a failure of imagination so much as a necessary stage of grief: mourning the loss of the old constraint, which, it turns out, we confuse with craft itself. 

Coda
This past holiday season, we spent time as a family gathered at my parents’ house. Each holiday, we have a tradition where everyone present must play an instrument or, if not, sing. Because of recent downsizing, the house is without its baby grand, so for the holiday, we rented a digital piano. At the end of a long evening, someone found and pressed the digital piano’s “Demo” button. We sat, while the piano self-played a music recital long into the evening.

Somehow, for that moment in time, it was exactly right.

Click, silence, clack, silence, silence… is the sound the keyboard makes when a ten-year-old is learning how to code her own game for the first time. 

My Dad showed how ASCII, typed line by line, could make tiny characters resolve, magically, into motion from imagination. Meanwhile, my childhood best friend was at home with her Atari consoles and new games, unaware I was nearby learning how to create “any and all games” I wanted. 

When complete, truthfully, my first game looked a bit different than it did in my imagination, the black letterforms hesitated across a line on a screen, no match for color characters. But it worked. And my Dad seemed to gain an almost-mischievous kick out of our collaboration.

See also:
The entirety of a life

I thought of this time recently when our family rediscovered one of my Dad’s first blogs launched almost 20 years ago. He took to making blogs on WordPress, just like he loved making in his workshop, his garage, and his office. With the newness of blogs, ideas swooshed into reality with a publish button, and my Dad was off writing and creating about things he noticed, with yet another platform to share ideas, on one’s own terms, into the world.

Our parents ran their own business. On the side, our Dad volunteered as a PBS cameraman, hosted his own local politics cable access show at our public library, and served on the boards of Scranton Tomorrow, the local zoo, and more. Our Mom, among countless other things, made time to found the first co-ed soccer league for our surrounding towns and played violin in local orchestras. When other kids got store-bought gifts, my Dad taught us to make our own. Learning to drive in our house also meant fixing the car yourself. We learned the value of making and disrupting. But mostly, how to be whole and kind humans, using noticing as an opportunity for making and making change.

Our Dad passed away one year ago. Finding those early blog posts again is just one small reminder of how grateful I am for so much, including his writing and ideas that live in the open. When I think of us standing together at that rudimentary computer all those years ago, him trying to convince me that each keystroke could become Frogger, he wasn’t teaching me code at all, of course. He was teaching possibility. I’ve tried to be off making since.

It is a sentence already.

That’s advice from The Education of a Design Writer, a new book edited by Molly Heintz and Steven Heller, designers, writers, and longtime co-conspirators at SVA. Steve has been shaping how we think and write about design for decades, and in this new collection (in full disclosure, I have a short entry in the book), he reminds us that writing, like design, is an act of structure, discipline, and curiosity.

He writes in his Preface:

“Whether long or short form, writing is a discipline. Discipline demands structure. Design is a discipline too.”

I’ve always existed in that parallel, how both writing and design begin as messy acts of noticing, then find their form through attention.

And in the age of AI, this reminder feels especially necessary. Machines can now write with startling fluency, but what they produce isn’t writing in the way Steve means it. It lacks the structure that comes from doubt, the rhythm that comes from rewriting, the decisions that come from a depth of care. Writing is not word generation, however expert; it’s shaping perception. It is design, made visible with/though/by/in language.

Steve then includes a deceptively simple piece of advice, passed down from writer his former editor at The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus:

“You can’t go wrong starting a sentence with ‘It is’ because it is a sentence already.”

The “no” quote
originally said
by Deena Chochinov,
who uses it in
management consulting.

The elegance of that advice, of starting with a simple framework, feels almost radical now. Amid all the noise, all the auto-completes and predictive texts, there’s something deeply human about starting with a simple framework.

Design writing, at its best, helps us see the world differently and more clearly. And sometimes, the clearest thing we can say is also the shortest.

A friend recently texted me: “No is a complete sentence.”

It is.

Designers don’t respond to culture; they anticipate it, question it, and are responsible for shaping its direction. And at this moment, that role feels more urgent than ever.

In his new book, The Design Loft, Albert Shum reflects on design and design leadership and, as a result, invites readers to reflect, reimagine, and rethink the possibility for design in the future. As the role of design education and design leadership shifts toward cultivating intent and frameworks for questioning, this book shares insights into our responsibilities. I am honored to have been part of writing a brief foreword.

At SVA, Albert had introduced a course on Responsible Design in the MFA Interaction Design program, teaching the first of its kind in the curriculum, continuing to challenge what the concept meant to students. Today, design tools are more accessible than they’ve ever been. The “what” is easy to reach. It’s the “why” that makes the difference.

Creative pursuits hold an inherent need for choice, whether we consider our medium design, music, art, literature, dance, buildings, landscape, or fashion. Each project we choose becomes a kind of time capsule, a reflection of what design values at a moment in time. Each one, a tool that provides new kinds of access: to services, to systems, to stories, and each centering the human experience as we move toward new futures.

Chris Ashworth’s soulful design for the cover

The Design Loft invites readers to rethink the possibilities for the future of design. We build on what came before us, acting out experiments and projects so we too can anticipate and open up possibilities. In order to do that, you have to build reference points and material. Now you have a guide.

Consider hurrying off to obtain a copy for yourself and start reflecting forward.

Pre-iPhone, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram, pre-Slack. Pre-rideshare, pre-blockchain, pre-crypto, pre-Zoom. Pre-Hurricane Sandy, Pre-Women’s Marches, Pre-Covid, Pre-X. It was before any of these behavior-changing products, services, and transformative moments the MFA Interaction Design Program at SVA was launched into the world. And yet, from the start, it was designed for the future — preparing students not just for what was next, but for what they could imagine into being.

Since June 2008, I’ve had the immense privilege of serving as its Founding Chair. The program, co-founded with Steven Heller, helps shape the evolving relationship between people and technology. Over these years, human’s relationship with technology has transformed dramatically — interfaces have become infused with intelligence, and intelligence has increasingly dissolved into our behaviors and environments, giving rise to new disciplines and designers’ vital role in responsible AI, ethics, and centering humanity in technology. And with it, the program has evolved.

I’m delighted to share that Adriana Valdez Young has taken on the role of Chair of the MFA Interaction Design to bring the program into its next chapter. She invests a rare and critical blend of creative foresight, thoughtful leadership, and vision rooted in equity, inclusion, and creative innovation. I’ll remain Founding Chair, Advisor to the Chair, and part-time faculty member — supporting the next era of this remarkable community. 

It’s a meaningful milestone. Adriana is a remarkable leader: formerly as Director of Programs and faculty member, she helped evolve the design curriculum — launching needed initiatives in emerging technologies. She partnered with me as Interim and Associate Chair, advancing learning models to include capacities in ethics, AI, spatial computing, and founding a Spatial Computing Lab. Her leadership ensures students can continue the program’s vision, evolved for 2025 forward.

MFA Interaction Design original identity, designed by The Heads of State in 2008

Students have shaped the foundation of a digital design landscape. Faculty have taught me more than I can express. And as a community, we uphold the values of SVA’s co-founder Silas Rhodes who challenged us: “An idea is just an idea until you make it real.” Adriana’s leadership continues this legacy — ensuring students have the tools to build the future only they can envision.

It has been the privilege of a lifetime to lead this program through a time of transformation and expansion. My first office was in a converted facilities closet! Today, we occupy a beautiful studio space in Chelsea, NYC — and a Visible Futures Lab that we helped shape — that has hosted countless classes, crits, celebrations, and moments of transformation and discovery. Over the past 17 years, our community has journeyed from Governor’s Island to the Arctic Circle. I couldn’t be prouder of what our faculty, students, alumni, and staff have accomplished.

Here’s to the future — and the ideas, platforms, and futures students will make real. There’s a profound and inspiring future ahead of this program, and I can’t wait to see what the community builds together.

On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating students at SVA, I sat behind the unmatched Robert Caro himself during a not-brief graduation ceremony where he would deliver the final Commencement address. I would ask him to sign the hidden book afterward as we walked offstage.

I knew nothing of what seminal authors did after a Commencement address or how to approach one for an autograph of a book hidden under a robe. Yet I was determined. It was 20 years earlier when I had moved to New York City, and used the subway as a reading device for the book. I wrote once about reading Caro’s book for Field Tested Books, a guide to reading a specific book in a specific place, from Coudal Partners:

I’d travel throughout the city in the molded plastic seats of the 1975 Pullman Standard F train. As I read about the making of our parks and transport systems, I’d pass the same on the subway. Sunset Park, 4th Avenue, 2nd Avenue. Two lives, two stories — one on the page, one out the window. But I never finished it. 465 of its pages are unread. Today, my neighborhood replaces chapters. My block replaces pages. My conversations are my marginalia. The city has taken me over.

As I walked off stage that day after the ceremony at Radio City, I learned Caro had been swiftly escorted backstage and picked up by car. Poof. He had left undetected, working behind the scenes as he does, to continue his work. My copy of the book: still unsigned. 

I was, then, irrationally excited to learn of 99% Invisible’s power broker book club, 100 pages at a time, commencing January. I am in.

After all this time, I admit I still have 465 pages to go, two decades after starting the book. So it’s for the best. Now I can finish it. And, like my relationship to New York City itself, my relationship with the book continues.

Empathy is traveling. Traveling from yourself to expand and meet another in their place and context. Travel I did this past week along with nine others to walk alongside Craig Mod, Kevin Kelly, and walkers for a Walk and Talk. With an unbending pace, we walked for seven days in the hills of northern Thailand, across local farms, across elephant camps, across rivers, across bridges and under waterfalls, and into the reality of cultures and one another’s lives. 100.3 kilometers on a path.

This path was a Walk and Talk, a gathering of about 10 people, beginning at the highest point at Doi Inthanon, then descending many conversations and adventures later into the old city of Chiang Mai. It was a path, chartered by our thoughtful local walking partner and seven days unfolded long and full with conversations in sets of two and three, as we traversed together each day. As we traveled, we journeyed in layers — those in the evenings, Jeffersonian Dinner-style, and those in groups by day, winding our ways into each other’s ideas and context. With this formula, empathy quickly emerged.

More than one hundred years before, back in 1909, at least one significant thing happened: someone named Edward Titchener coined the word “empathy.” I learned this from Rebecca Solnit who notes the root word “path” is from the Greek for “passion or suffering.” And “[i]t’s a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so.”

On Day Four of our own journey, our empathy and attention turned toward another walking companion, a small dog who joined our group. This spirited and besmitten dog joined us at an elephant camp where we had lodged the night before. Gaining the name “TD” for “Thai Dog,” he trailed us over fields and hills, roads and villages, swimming his way down a river to stay with us at one stage.

The river may have been the end of our time with TD, but he traversed tangles of trees, rocks, and swam to hop a bamboo raft and float with us, showing off his rather unflappable side when we got to land. He followed us another 50+ kilometers into the old city of Chiang Mai.

Through the generosity of a series of strangers in the old city, we found TD vet care and a permanent home where he could live north of the city among fields, a (female) dog friend, other animal companions. The particular tenacity of his loyalty was shared and passed on to a caretaker through the kindness of Thai strangers who helped us get him there. Empathy traveled.

Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Ten days later, they are mingled and entwined — the stories, the remarkable people, the dinner topics, the walking, TD. They are mingled and entwined in a path forward from the hills to Chiang Mai into today and a series of tomorrows. One where everyone gets to return to a home full and expanded.

Coda: So grateful to Kevin and Craig and Chris. Could have walked another 100.3 kilometers — with some rest in between. Thanks to Silvia for manifesting, dog care, and high-speed tuk-tuk rides. Here is everything Craig and Kevin have learned about these walk-and-talks.

We used to make these crayon mashups as kids. They were combinations of all of our favorite crayons in the box. Choose a couple of most-loved Crayolas, bake them together in a cupcake tin, let them cool, and you had a super-giant-crayon combo of favorites. A paraffin disc of possibility. You could draw with that thing for what seemed like forever.

I think the length of happy can be sort of like that crayon mashup: you get to color only with your favorites with no end in sight. But the hard part is choosing your favorites, leaving most others behind. And if you knew when it would end, you might stop drawing, speed up drawing, overthink the drawing. But when you have only color and paper and tomorrow, you keep on sketching.

“Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes. And the changes are what you become. Change the outcome by changing your circle.” That’s Seth Godin in a passage I learned from Tina Roth Eisenberg in an unmissable Guy Raz interview about her journey to human mashups, CreativeMornings, and happiness.

The trick to the super-crayon was to keep adding new favorites back into the tin, baking, and repeating, for many tomorrows to come. Combining favorites to make new life happinesses.

“Are you alright?” It was Hanna calling my mobile phone in the middle of July. I had left my Brooklyn neighborhood for upstate New York that summer month “to write” and Hanna, my neighborhood dry cleaner was calling to check in on me — never having called before — worried that something had happened to me since she didn’t see me walking by daily with my dog.

This is New York.

It was on this day 23 years ago that I moved to New York City, intending only to stop here on my way to something else. It seems the city has become my something else, many times over, its pedestrians upon dog parks upon stoops upon protesters upon subways upon heat-lamped dinners becoming the backdrop and material of my world.

Today, I enjoyed looking back on some of my city accounting since:

• The city that is a goal
• New York City startups, and designing for people
• Where the water towers are
• OK and real New York
• In unicum
• Sudden rejuvenation
• There are roughly five New Yorks
• New York truths according to Gopnik
• Teammates
• This is New York
• The thing about long-term relationships

Am I alright? I am indeed, for I have known what it is to have been a New Yorker.

January has been Month One of something unknown. “All human beings are invited to have a friendship with the unknown,” shared poet and author David Whyte.

This is my formal acceptance of that invitation.

This month, I’ve intentionally wandered into opportunities whose dimensions are unknown. “How long will this last?” a friend asked, listening to what I’m doing. That is unknown, of course, I replied. That is the point of Month One, and all months going forward.

I accept.

I escaped yardwork. Weeding, raking, planting, raking, sweeping — no matter the job, I could worm out of it. When all four kids and two parents spread out into each corner of the yard on a Saturday morning, I strode across the lawn with an excuse.

It’s not that I disliked invasive species, it was the act of being committed against my will that was the issue. (I was also 13 years old and disliked nearly everything.) I had to demonstrate my independence.

Today, I find excuses to spend nearly all my time in my own garden. I chase down opportunities to weed, find excuses to plant, I rake, I sweep, I stare at dirt, and simply observe small bits of life in between. All states bring equal joy: green, grey, wound, discordant, bloomed, browned, fallen — all owning their place, all participating. Without participation, there would not be the opportunity for experience. John Dewey reminds us:

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

To see the greens, the reds, the browns, and love it all is what is worth staying for. In our work, to love both the dark side of one’s workmanship and the shining side of one’s craft is perhaps to experience one’s true self.

To have the integrity to respect all states — and participate in humanity — might be one definition of grace. How we use it is up to us.