East Meets West

A recent trip to the Bay Area reminds Jessica that design can mean something very different in technology companies than it does for “classically trained graphic designers of a certain generation,” i.e. her and Michael.

 Her experience of the design culture there took her back to a visit to an early computer lab:

The children working, who were maybe 6 or 7 years old, grabbed the mouse interchangeably. And I remember coming home and thinking, if anybody grabbed my age the mouse from me, I’d smack them. Right?

And it was the beginning for me, my first indication of a culture of transparency that I really had to will myself to understand. Because it was not—to your point about the signature, the imprimatur of the artist—the idea that creativity or creation came from a level of authorship and one voice…

Culturally, what has shifted is that they work in teams and they don’t have the same kind of understanding of one person making one thing at one time.

Jessica also visited the Facebook Analog Research Lab, where she participated in a workshop with students from Alternatives in Action, an Oakland high school.

Michael connects his fondness for analog machines with his father, who sold printing presses in the 1960s:

If you wanted to buy a Heidelberg or a Miehle or even a linotype machine in northeast Ohio, you probably had to go through Lenny Bierut.

Also mentioned: