This season's special series celebrating ten years since the launch of Material Design continues with Software Engineering Manager and Musical Theater Writer Will Larche, who talks about his path to become an engineering manager at Google. Larche, a self-proclaimed “design fan,” describes engineering as “creativity with constraints.” Here, he explains how the development of Material over the years has led to closer collaboration between design and engineering, and imagines how new AI experiments might open up a new era of “Star Trek design.”

This episode is part of a special series celebrating ten years of Material Design. In the episode, Liam speaks with Bethany Fong, a Design Director at Meta who was a pivotal figure in the creation of Material Design.

During her time at Google, Fong was responsible for designing the first set of Material components (including Material’s signature Floating Action Button), and went on to become a design Lead on the team.

In their conversation, Liam and Bethany talk about the tactile nature of design, the importance of keeping a notebook, and how the heady early days of Material unfolded.

👉 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

This season begins with a special series celebrating ten years since the launch of Material Design, which will explore the inception, evolution, and future of Google’s design approach. The first episode features the founder of Material Design and Design VP Matías Duarte, whose work on the system has pushed design forward at Google and across devices everywhere.

In their conversation, Liam and Matías unpack how interfaces are made, used, and understood—and identify opportunities to move them further into the future via a highly crafted, individualized design approach.

👉 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

Liam speaks with Googlers Connie Shi, a software engineer on Material Design, and Matvei Malkov, a software engineer on Jetpack Compose, and the trio unpack what makes coding a creative practice, and which creative choices are required when you build a design system for other developers around the world.

The wide-ranging conversation turns from complex problem solving and technical logic to the concept of creativity as the question-provoking quality of a thought.

📝 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

Liam and Google Fonts Specialist Dave Crossland explore what digital type can teach us about digital production, emotional expression, and where we fit in the world as designers; and how – with a little imagination – we might unlock new possibilities.

📑 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

In this episode, Liam speaks with Judith Donath, the founder of MIT’s Sociable Media Lab, inventor of e-cards, and author of The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Donath’s work offers crucial insights into the sociality of digital products and platforms, and the opportunities we have as digital producers to make things that truly meet sociable ends. In the episode, Donath unpacks some of this work, exploring potential futures for life online and the joy of learning (and sharing) something new.

📑 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

Liam speaks with Aline Borges, a Zürich-based floral designer who’s made the leap from fashion coordination for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to independent floral design and installations. The conversation covers what it’s like to move between different creative fields (and countries), how to think about composition to tackle almost any creative challenge, and the courage and community it takes to start on a new venture.

📑 Read a full transcript

📻 Subscribe to Design Notes

In this episode, we revisit a conversation from Season 1 with new media artist Harvey Moon, recorded in his San Francisco studio.

Liam and Harvey discuss how Moon’s work reveals unseen properties of the world around us, the process of creating one’s own creative tools, and the kind of art that’s only made possible through collaboration with machines.

The conversation expands on ideas about the way the world around us is designed and redesigned, and where that places us as designers.

Read the full transcript: https://www.iamli.am/design-notes-podcast/harvey-moon-new-media-artist 

Subscribe to Design Notes:

👉Google Podcasts

👉iTunes

👉Spotify

👉Pocket Casts

👉RSS

Liam speaks with streetscape and public space designer Ignacio Ciocchini, who’s created much of the public furniture that New Yorkers encounter every single day – from benches that provide personal space, to entire built landscapes for Bryant Park, to chargers for electric vehicles and more.

The conversation ranges from the materiality of the built environment, to the ways in which it expands, constrains, and informs our experiences of life and socialization in a city, with a look toward the more human-focused future that Ciocchini envisions.

Read the full transcript: https://www.iamli.am/design-notes-podcast/ignacio-ciocchini-nyc-public-furniture

Subscribe to Design Notes:

👉Google Podcasts

👉iTunes

👉Spotify

👉Pocket Casts

👉RSS

In this episode, we revisit a conversation from Season 1 with Kerry Murphy, co-founder of digital fashion house The Fabricant. We uncover how data are spun into virtual threads, and how virtual embodiment can foster self-actualization.

In designing couture that doesn’t—or can’t—exist in physical space, The Fabricant also explores ideas of embodiment and self-actualization. Murphy pushes these concepts even further, by interacting with his own “virtual twin,” composed from 3D-scans of his body.

Read the full transcript: https://www.iamli.am/design-notes-podcast/kerry-murphy-founder-the-fabricant 

Subscribe to Design Notes:

👉Google Podcasts

👉iTunes

👉Spotify

👉Pocket Casts

👉RSS

Liam speaks to Tom Boellstorff, Anthropologist and UCI Professor, whose ethnographic work in Second Life (documented in his book, Coming of Age in Second Life) provides important insights into how virtual space – and our interface with it – informs and interacts with our lives in actual space.

In virtual worlds like Second Life, inhabitants exist only through their own acts of creation, which also serve as a primary mode of experiencing life in virtual space.

Full transcript + images: https://www.iamli.am/design-notes-podcast/tom-boellstorff-virtual-anthropology 

Subscribe to Design Notes:

👉Google Podcasts

👉iTunes

👉Spotify

👉Pocket Casts

👉RSS