Poets & Thinkers
Poets & Thinkers explores the humanistic future of business leadership through deep, unscripted conversations with visionary minds – from best-selling authors and inspiring artists to leading academic experts and seasoned executives.
Hosted by tech executive, advisor, and Princeton entrepreneurship & design fellow Ben Lehnert, this podcast challenges conventional MBA wisdom, blending creative leadership, liberal arts, and innovation to reimagine what it means to lead in the AI era.
If you believe leadership is both an art and a responsibility, this is your space to listen, reflect, and evolve.
Poets & Thinkers
Slot Machine Creativity: On the value of friction to create meaningful works of art with Nando Costa
What if the struggle and friction in the creative process is actually what makes art meaningful – and what we’re at risk of losing in our rush toward AI efficiency? In this deeply reflective episode of Poets & Thinkers, we explore the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence with Nando Costa, a renowned designer and artist who has been at the very forefront of Generative AI (GenAI) and whose work has shaped the visual identity of major tech companies including Microsoft, Google, and ServiceNow. From his home studio on Bainbridge Island, Nando shares his journey from early GenAI experimentation to a deeper understanding of what makes creativity authentically human.
Nando takes us through his extensive exploration of generative AI, having created over 25,000 pieces using these tools, only to discover their addictive, slot-machine-like qualities and ultimate lack of artistic depth. He reveals how this experience led him to champion “slow photography,” deliberate creative processes, and the irreplaceable value of human intention in artistic work. Through compelling examples – from photographers camping for days to capture the perfect shot to his daughter’s (who’s also an artist) immediate rejection of AI-generated art – Nando illustrates why the time, energy, and personal investment we put into creating something directly correlates to its impact on others.
Throughout our conversation, Nando challenges the dominant narrative that speed and optimization should drive creative work, instead advocating for depth over speed and originality over optimization. His insights on brand work, creative leadership, and the future of design offer a compelling counter-narrative to the “AI will replace everything” mentality, showing how human creativity becomes more precious – not less – in an automated world.
In this thought-provoking discussion, we explore:
- Why generative AI feels addictive but ultimately lacks the depth of human-created art
- How the time and energy invested in creation directly impacts the meaning of the work
- Why Gen Z is gravitating toward analog processes like film photography and vinyl records
- The importance of “slow” and deliberate creative processes in maintaining authenticity
- How friction in the creative act isn’t a bug to be fixed, but a feature to be embraced
- What the future of brand work looks like when anyone can generate content instantly
This episode is an invitation to reconsider our relationship with creative tools and the creative act itself, to value the human struggle that gives art its meaning, and to champion depth and originality in an age of optimization.
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Slow Productivity
- Theo Jansen’s wind-powered beach sculptures
- SomeForm Studio example of curated AI automation in design
Get in touch: ben@poetsandthinkers.co
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poetsandthinkerspodcast/
Subscribe to Poets & Thinkers on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/poets-thinkers/id1799627484
Subscribe to Poets & Thinkers on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4N4jnNEJraemvlHIyUZdww?si=2195345fa6d249fd
Welcome to Poets Thinkers, the podcast where we explore the future of humanistic business leadership. I'm your host, ben, and today I'm speaking with Nando Costa. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. It all started with a burning question I had why does one of the world's most influential visual designers create more than 25,000 AI-generated images and then walks away?
Speaker 1:Nando Costa is a Brazilian-American artist-turned-designer living in the Pacific Northwest, with over 25 years of experience leading design teams that have defined the visual language of our digital world. Through his work at Microsoft, google and ServiceNow, nando has shaped how billions of people experience technology brands, and our collaboration over the years has been incredibly inspiring. At Microsoft, nando and I work closely together as we help craft the company's new design language. Before that, nando led some groundbreaking work on the company's mixed reality experience as HoloLens. Later at Google, he led design outreach for the material design team, and today he directs a team of designers at ServiceNow working on their Horizon design system.
Speaker 1:But it's Nando's journey with Genitive AI that revealed something unexpected about the future of human creativity, and I'm thrilled to get the opportunity to explore this topic with him today. Beyond his corporate achievements, nando is an artist at heart, one who dove headfirst into the world of generative AI when the tools first emerged, only to discover something troubling about our relationship with instant creativity. His experience pushing the tools from Midjourney to GPT, creating thousands of AI images, led him to a profound realization the friction and struggle we try to eliminate from the creative process might be exactly what makes art meaningful. This is a conversation about creative slot machines, slow photography and the irreplaceable value of the human touch in an increasingly automated world.
Speaker 2:Nando where does this podcast find you? Hi? I'm on Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so great. Every time I see a photo or video that you post, I get a little envious, given that you have the water and the waves right in front of your doorstep, which is awesome. Why don't we get started and you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and then we'll dive into the many questions I have for you?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, in practice I'm a designer. I started in print and motion, did all the motions right All the stages, and found myself working in UX these days. And when we met, we met at Microsoft so that's one of the companies, but worked at Google as days. And what we met, we met at Microsoft so that's one of the companies, but worked at Google as well. And now I work for a company called ServiceNow, and so I'm in that space of user experience, which today is all about AI. But deep down I see myself more as an artist At least I like to think of it that way and I try to bring some of those flavors into the design work that I do and more into the personal work that I do at home as well.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of the art and the design work that you've done and many people that might listen to this have seen your work, even if they might not know that consciously, but you have really shaped the look and feel of many of the big tech companies certainly and, through that, also inspired, I think, a lot of up-and-coming designers to follow that aesthetic and general approach that you've laid out and, having worked with you, it's been incredibly inspiring for me personally.
Speaker 1:So, before we dive into all of that work, I am really curious because you were really one of the first people that I talked to and have seen really dive into generative AI as part of the artistic practice, creative practice, very, very early on, when, you know, models became available, what interfaces were really text-based and really kind of crude and cumbersome and all of that, and you really lead into that in a lot of different ways for still images, for moving images, and I know you published a lot of your work. You wrote a lot about your explorations. Tell me a little bit about your early experimentations, your experiences with all of this JDI stuff, and then we'll jump off from there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at the time when the tools started popping up, I happened to be at Google, and you know, google, I think, has a pretty awesome approach to the tools that they're developing, where, you know, employees can just, you know, immediately have access to things or request access, and it's a very open culture. So I benefited from that and got to use some of their internal tools. But at the same time, tools were popping up externally, so Midjourney was the one that was standing out the most. Of course, dali probably was the first one that really saw a lot of recognition, and I found it, I was attracted to that. To me it just felt like another ingredient, another set of tools to play with.
Speaker 2:I've always been somewhat of a restless creative that I get bored using the same tool over and over, so process for me always mattered a lot, and that seemed like a new process to go and investigate, and so I did get sucked in, investigate, and so I did get sucked in I, you know, not probably, but I know I've, uh, created at least, you know, 23, 24, 25 000 images, um, you know, using these tools and, and you know, am I proud of creating that much? Probably not. There's a lot of wasted time looking back, but it did give me, um a more interesting perspective. Right at the time, it felt really like a provocation. Right, we're creating this literally with these instructions go into a machine seconds, come back. There's this. You know, looking back, even it feels more like a slot machine. Right, there's this addictive quality to using it. I don't know if you felt that, but, but I think I do. I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can dive deeper into that in a second, but, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think, if I you know, thinking about this question and in this space in general, and if I were to look back, I remember this is what the 90s, I was living in Brazil and I went to São Paulo Biennial and there was one installation where you walk through a hallway I don't remember the artist's name, but it was a glass hallway, so it was a large room, but they had closed both sides and you had to walk through the room and there were two robots, robotic arms, or shooting, uh, paint right at a wall, at a distance of the opposite wall, away from you actually. In fact, it was the other way around. The machines were further away from you. They would shoot paint at the glass and it was unpredictable. The time between each shot was, you know it would vary and as you're walking through you'd see all that chaos.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden you feel that shot right, and there was an aspect of automation to that that I found fascinating, not so much because it was a robot, but because it wasn't anyone behind it and you know the, the human was sort of somewhat hidden underneath that, that mechanics and, and even more, if I look at the work of, uh, theo jensen I think it's how I pronounce his name the dutch sculptor that makes those um, I think he calls them beasts, these machines that are wind-powered, right, and they kind of fall through the beaches of Holland. Of course there's a lot of building that goes behind that and, of course, has to put into place and the wind pushes it away. Even in the design of the machine, there's something implicit in how it looks and feels and the sound it makes that screams at you automation. And so I've always felt like this idea of art, right, that that someone is not painting or sculpting or performing, it's a thing that's happening in front of you and there's no human intervention per se. That, to me, always felt like this is really cool.
Speaker 2:And I'll just close by kind of getting to a point that I think, aside from these two examples I just gave, really going back to AI, I now really felt like, towards the end, and why I kind of stopped creating so much with it, is that it finally clicked. They're slacking so much artistic depth, right, you can create all these things. There's that jolt of like satisfaction, much like a slot machine. Right when that rush at the beginning? I don't know. I would imagine I'm not, thankfully, addicted to that, but I imagine over time it loses its reward right and over time I'm like what is this for?
Speaker 2:So nowadays I still use out of curiosity and out of information and for my job. I just want to be informed, but less so much about the artistic qualities of the images and videos themselves yeah, and I'm really interested in that part too and I'll ask you about that as well.
Speaker 1:But just to the to the first point here that you're making. I think that's incredibly fascinating because I've gone through a very similar kind of cycle of exploration, also realizing the kind of addictive quality of that instantaneous. You know, you put something in, you get something back and it's not terrible at all, like a lot of the output now is actually really really beautiful, but it lacks the depth. And I think once you are a little bit tuned into you know, in actual artistic practice, you, I think, get to at least question the quality of what you're getting back. And it's, you know.
Speaker 1:I've tried to look for analogies over the last year or two now and I think it's somewhere between this hyper-fast fashion and fast food.
Speaker 1:It's like equally lacking nutrition in a lot of ways and certainly polluting the planet.
Speaker 1:And I think in terms of artificial intelligence and generative AI, the pollution is both real in terms of energy consumption, all of that that's not talked about broadly that often, certainly not in the tech hype cycle narrative, but also in terms of what it gives us as humans.
Speaker 1:So that's one of the many reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you because I think there's something there that we'll need to explore and figure out how do we leverage this certainly extremely powerful technology for good? But also, where do we draw the line and say, okay, this is not serving us or the planet, the world that we want to create, in the way that it can be maybe abused, or maybe in itself? We're not even aware of the way that it can be maybe abused, or maybe in itself, we're not even aware of the way that it's not for lack of a better analogy nutritious to us. Which sort of brings me to a conversation we just had earlier online in comments about a post that John Maeda put out about time as a critical ingredient in making art and especially infusing meaning into art.
Speaker 2:What's your take on that? Well, I, on this, yeah, I've been ruminating on the topic of time and how, um, you know how much time I should, and it's and it's worth devoting to art, and I think, just to kind of connect to the other point that you just made, right about generative ai, sort of being, uh, polluting the world and and not really sort of checking some boxes, I think, at the human level, like for people, right, you'd argue that design is there at the, the most basic level, to solve problems, right, and on the other side, arts, it's kind of like a conversation, right, the person has something to say to express, and then for me, my, for myself and for many others, it's it's kind of like a conversation, right, the person has something to say to express, and then for me, for myself and for many others, it's really like a singular conversation. You don't care that other people even see it, but often it is nice for it to be a conversation too, for other people to then reinterpret what it is that you created, and then it ignites some kind of conversation or emotion, reaction. And I feel that nowadays, if you think, what is Gen AI really doing, right? Not, let's not talk about agentic and agents, but just generative in general. What is it doing? Well, it's saving corporations more money, right.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, is there a problem that's actually saving? Sure, we can go deeper into, you know, the impacts of it may have in healthcare or in some other areas, but up to now, and especially in the creative world, it's there to just create more mass content and then save a buck, right? So if I think more about now, you know, the practice of design and the practice of art and then the role of time, I very much want to claw back all that time and invest into people doing thoughtful work. You know, jenny, I right now, I think we need to move past the novelty aspect of it, right Like it's. You know, what is lacking is our ability to really clearly have something to articulate like what is, what is the what that we're trying to really say with whatever we're creating? Yeah, it's really difficult to engineer that in Gen AI right now to give answers that are aligned with the what you want to say.
Speaker 1:And part of the creative process is also figuring that out through time.
Speaker 1:Right, I think I had this conversation with, actually, some design executives a few weeks ago about the value of the struggle through the creative process.
Speaker 1:Right, it is incredibly important that we learn to accept the discomfort and uncertainty that comes with yes, the friction that comes with the creative process and use that to have that conversation that you mentioned, first and foremost with ourselves, so that we can then bring it to the outside world. And that is equally as important in the design process as it is in the artistic process. I would say that part of kind of wrangling with the problem, wrangling with the potentially best solution, or, in art, more in terms of where you really want to take the art, and that short-circuiting that or trying to get a shortcut through that might feel initially right, as you say, because there's a capitalistic incentive. There's also potentially a biochemical incentive, because it feels so good to just get that feedback really quickly that we don't realize how important it is for us as humans, because we've been making art and expressing ourselves through art for tens of thousands of years, probably since the very early beginnings of humanity. So that conversation is actually really important in the light of this incredible deployment of this, of this technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, and I've always felt like what, to me, at the purest level on this level we've've been talking about the most like humanistic, basic level. To me, the act of creating always felt like my time and my energy went into something and on the other side of that equation, something materialized and came out, and so you could really see how your effort went into the final outcome of that piece, right, whatever it is, whether it's for design or arts, it doesn't matter, music doesn't matter, what is that you're creating? There's this clear sort of equation of time and energy and, to a certain extent, experience, right and know-how of tools or whatever craftsmanship. But on the other side there's that equation Now there's this little reward button. You click, click, click, click, click, click and in the end comes out this thing, and we're trying to equate to the same kind of effect when really it cannot be measured the same way 100, and you know what this brings me to.
Speaker 1:I wrote two years ago I think I wrote this essay on authentically human, and part of that is a kind of philosophic exploration around the Buddhist concept of the eight bodies, where basically the concept outlines or describes that when we make something, we basically leave a part of ourselves in the work that then connects to other humans that interact with it, and that I think widely can apply to anything that we make.
Speaker 1:It can be a very functional tool and it can be a piece of art, and I think what I find so interesting is, in the context of generative AI, there's this very dominant narrative of well, it's just a tool and it's just going to make everything better and more efficient and this and that. But on the other hand, I think we need to have more conversations about what you were saying in terms of what does this say about us? How can I actually say something that's actually important or worth saying and is part of the saying what I need to say, also going through a process that isn't just clicking a button? Right, and that time and that energy and that thought that gets infused or not. Right, and that time and that energy and that thought that gets infused or not right actually makes a really big difference in the way it actually impacts the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think what you're saying connects me to this other important aspect to consider, which is we may not be really truly realizing all the impact that we are going to have. Right, that we're shaping right now on how future generations will engage with all these things. Right, how they're going to learn, how they're going to express in art and how they're going to create design and how they're going to communicate. Right, it has so many ripple effects and we don't yet know what those, you know what the outcome will be. Well, right now we're thinking well, this will revolutionize everything, for the better, for worse. That's something I think it's worth pausing, putting some breaks or at least being hyper aware of along the way. So that's something I'm definitely attuned to.
Speaker 1:I agree. And it brings me to one of the notes actually made when you and I spoke last, where you said we're all feeling our way through it. And I would probably put a little asterisk on the all, because I think there's certainly a lot of people that are feeling their way through it, but not everyone, and in fact I think a lot of people actually are thinking their way through it without feeling their way through it, and that's probably the distinction. And the reason I made that note was I would love to hear your thoughts on maybe a bit more explicitly, because it's sort of already kind of transpired through what you said. But you know, what do we need to look for and how this feels right? Because, at the end of the day, we're making this technology and should be making it to serve humans and serving humanity as a whole. So what do we need to look for? What are you looking for when you explore? Does this feel right or what doesn't sit well with me?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, I think there's so many specifics here, right like so, let me put. Let me, for now, put away the fact that chat tpt has definitely replaced search for me. Right like I? I don't crack open a browser and search for anything anymore. I had, for an interaction with a attorney for something personal just the other day and literally every recommendation that he gave me I had already checked off by consulting Chattopithi ahead of time. Right, I'm thinking this is clearly, at least at the level that he's operating the job that he's performing, easily kind of replaceable for a day-to-day person a small needs here and there for for an issue like a consumer affairs or something you bought or, uh, you know, whatever some guidance you may want to have 100 like that that you will see the value right away.
Speaker 2:When it comes to how we can replace creativity, I think it's not entirely easy to put a finger on it. I don't actually have the quote right here, but I did read an article that popped out the other day. Microsoft Research had some insights around the impacts of generative AI in the workplace and how it made people less prepared for eventualities and how they weren't as kind of on their feet and be able to react as instinctively as they did before. It seemed like people were more dependent on asking a machine to kind of reason over a problem, right. And so now, if we get even more specific, and I think more about imagery, videos or photos. You know, it's been on my mind, definitely because I have a lot of acquaintances and friends that are photographers and, and probably it's one of the most disrupted areas of gen ai right, because somebody can say well, I need a photo of a beautiful landscape. Do I pay hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, or tens, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars for something custom for my brand, or do I want to go click, click, click and then you get 10,000 iterations, you pick one or 10 or 20 for a few bucks.
Speaker 2:Well, to me it actually really matters the story behind, right, the looking of the many portfolios, the seeing and understanding what drives each photographer and their journey to get there, and then the seeing of their process. I know a few. There's one a person that lives across the street from me actually has a camper. He goes out, takes out, you know, scouts, locations, camps over many days, finds the right moment in the right time, captures it, fine-tunes it in his studio, like there's this process behind that, the whole making of it, that, the fact that it there's an actual physical place, there's some idea, there's a reaction in the moment, there's the experience of the weather and having to sleep over those things, to me go such a long way to say wow.
Speaker 2:To me it does value. The fact that I can't get it instantaneously, for, yeah, five bucks is not as important as the human interaction and the process that that person went through. And I feel the same way for cg imagery. Yeah, right, the fact that a 3d artist will like craft a shade, put into place light texture shade or and then animate, to me it matters so much more and so, but I know that I'm the exception and at least right now, right, and especially for those running businesses and they think 100k versus you know, 10 bucks, what would I choose for one process or the other? Um, not if you only can afford the 100k. Um, so how do we craft? You know, uh, a process for, for valuing all that image creation that has existed for so long.
Speaker 2:Uh, at odds with when it's at odds with you know, uh, a machine with a shiny button that you can press and get something. Uh, you know.
Speaker 1:A second later and I think that the nuance or the spectrum that you just painted for the decision making, I think, is probably where we need to end up and develop really good kind of methodologies and mechanisms around, because, you know, there are some situations where it might actually totally make sense to rely on a trustworthy system that can create imagery also that hasn't pirated anyone's content, right like so, it's ethically well done and it allows companies to create beautiful images at the same time, though also acknowledging that there is something really profoundly human about the process that you described of scouting a location, taking a photo, you know, crafting all sorts of stories that we ultimately resonate with as humans, and you know, in that light, I think these conversations themselves are so rich and useful, because the dominant narrative is not that.
Speaker 1:And also another thing that has made me think about was it's really interesting my students, for example and I think there's a general phenomenon around that Gen Z and maybe even Gen Alpha generation how much they go back to connecting to artifacts that have more of that, you know, real world connection from film photos to, you know, vinyl sales, I think at an all time high Right Walkmans and cassette players, and that's really really fascinating, because I think it's not just a trend for trend's sake. I think it's one of those things where it really, you know, those are artifacts of the real world and I think, as humans, we crave that. I know you have a, you have a daughter who's, I think, getting ready um, not not too long from now to go to college, and also as an artist, what do you hear, see, observe from that next generation?
Speaker 2:Well, what was interesting right away is that, especially at the height of the moment when I was fully consumed by Jenny and I, she instantly recoiled at it. She's like, wow, this is not for me and none of my friends really appreciate any of this, and and so she was very quick to react in a way that that she has no interest. Now, years have passed, still no interest, you know, still feeling just as strongly about that. And I do agree with you. Like you know, I moved from really relying religiously on spot, which I still use while I'm in the car and all that, but to actually investing in a more serious, you know, vinyl setup, and it's the ritualistic aspect of listening to music or doing other things. Right, the ritual, I guess consuming and creating things feels a lot more. Yeah, exciting to mean as silly as trading a recipe, right? Do I want to go to a tool like ChatTBT or even online and saying I grabbed that recipe from some random person I've never met? Or would I value more if in a conversation with someone, they said I just cooked something incredible and they give me their recipe? Right, me, that has a more, a stronger value associated with it.
Speaker 2:Now for her coincidentally, she happens to be really interested, at least in the moment, about both ceramics and photography, right? Photography is, you know, as we talked about. It's about experiencing something the real world, seeing people, people seeing places, things, capturing them in interesting ways. And then ceramics is about shaping a hunk of clay right into an object that has now a renewed meaning for you and for other people, and so it's interesting talking to her about this as she goes into the art field. Sometimes the reaction around us is to say art is dead. Artists, you know no longer. No longer, you know you can't make a living doing that, and I think what's interesting to remember is that you know art has always adapted around technology, right like back to photography early days.
Speaker 2:I learned in the dark room with films and projecting, and you know enlarging photos and now how you know everyone has one of these things and can take great photos. It's not the same as that whole process we're talking about, and definitely not the same as imagining a photo and telling AI to go create for you. But I do remember, you know how, all the stages of digital photography, of cameras whether it's RED camera or phantom camera all the digitization of photography and filmmaking and it hasn't stopped people from creating great things. It's more about the perspective that you bring right when you have something to say about a certain thing. The originality is, I think, what's going to matter, and so that's something I continue to cement in for her, and also seeing that she picks up on it right away.
Speaker 1:that's her point about not being excited about ai because it's not original that's fascinating and, and you know, part of the reason I started the the series of conversation on this podcast is because I believe that that's the art challenges the technology and the technology inspires the art, or the other way around. This, you know, paraphrhrasing John Lasseter's quote, is so incredibly important, and especially in a time like this where we're in major transformation certainly one being a major technological transformation is so important to bring the artistic perspective that challenges our own, you know, sense of humanity into all of that. And I think younger generations are a big part of that and give us a really good indicator of where things should go, and certainly us currently making a lot of those decisions, as you said at the very beginning, that I believe we need to take really seriously the responsibility that comes with that. The other question that this brought up to me and I'm not sure if we can find an answer, but I would love to hear it take is, especially when we're looking at children, younger generations, high school kids that are about to go into college, a lot of what we just talked about is something that and maybe the analogy with the fast food certainly might hold true here is it's not evenly distributed the access to that and maybe the analogy with the fast food certainly might hold true here is it's not evenly distributed the access to that right. So essentially your artistic and cognitive palette is shaped by whatever you are surrounded by.
Speaker 1:I wonder if and how we could change and expose more children to the artistic process, Because when you look at our education system, it certainly doesn't do a good job at, you know, building the creative confidence in children across the spectrum, right? In fact, most of our education system is built around the ideas of industrial revolution, of predictive outcomes, repetitive, you know, tasks and all of that. So, as we are born creative through the education system, a lot of the creativity is kind of trained out of that. So, as we are born creative through the education system, a lot of the creativity is kind of trained out of kids. Any thoughts on that and how to, because you've also grown up in different cultures how to think about the exposure to the creative process and any ideas on how we can bring that more to children?
Speaker 2:I don't know if I have the right answer. I think the thoughts that come to mind are well, critical thinking really matters, and you know, the ability to create endless variations on any given topic doesn't contribute at all to that. Right, and back to sort of the point I was making about specifically my daughter. She happens to be really interested in physical things, and that's a really good reminder. Just because we have great digital tools, it doesn't mean that that should be the very first answer. Right, that at least let's begin with the assumption that the physical world still matters. Right, and so if we begin there, then I think everything else kind of falls into place.
Speaker 1:And then gradually right, you insert digital tools to aid right in the creation of something specific and over time then you realize it of.
Speaker 2:you know we need to equip young adult children, young adults, but also professionals still with the critical thinking skills and the kind of foundational skills so that they can determine how to use any new technology, any new tool, in the best way to serve people in the real world exactly, yeah, um, and so so for for me, I think I remembering that I'll give an example back in photography, and that this might help sort of allude to to what I'm thinking as I witness cameras evolving so rapidly and becoming, you know, faster at taking shots, the ability to take 10, 15, 15, 12 shots, you know, in a second. Did that mean that all those 10, 12 shots were incredible? Well, most of the time they really weren't right. You wait and shoot and you get that volume back. But I could tell right away that at least I, in reviewing my own shots, wasn't appreciating them as much. At least I, in reviewing my own shots, wasn't appreciating them as much.
Speaker 2:Eventually, as I shifted over to manual, manual focus, you know, I would have to really kind of get in the moment and breathe, and I refer to that as sort of slow photography, right, which is it's not the moment I pick up the phone and go boom, boom, boom. It's just more of like I'm in the space. There's something special about this space and I would experience the space and I still do this when I travel or when I feel in the mood to go out and photograph here. Can I feel immersed in the space and experience it through my lens, rather than pick up the camera as a tool to then capture and say that I've been here, and so I think the same can apply to other tools. It's the idea of getting the pen and paper, or crafting even a logo, which you know instinctively, you think digital, but so much of it has to do with the ideas that are infused in the logo. Not so much of that. Am I using the right vector tool? Do I have?
Speaker 2:the right trend infused in the shape, and so I think that applies to all. It's just like take your time, think, go out in the world, explore, consume, and your experiences will then help shape kind of your perspective and what else you have else to say, right In whatever you're creating.
Speaker 1:I love that focus on really intentionality and mindfulness in really your own human experience that you can then bring into your work, work which is a, I think, a great way to summarize a lot of what we just talked about.
Speaker 1:I want to shift gears, but I think it's it really nicely connects because as a creative director, you have really and I said this at the very beginning given several of the big tech companies their look and feel. You've been instrumental in the work that you've done at microsoft to really infuseuse the way the company is viewed, the products are viewed and experienced with a completely new, modern touch. You've done a lot of that very similar work at Google and now at ServiceNow. So you really have, with your work, with your creative work, shaped and reshaped the relationship that people have with those brands. Now, basically, picking up from your last point, how do you believe that branding and brand work has to evolve in this world where really a lot of the artifacts can be so, I guess soulless and can be just produced, as we just discussed at length, with the push of a button? How does the brand work have to change? What stays the same, but also what are the things that you foresee will have to drastically change?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, thank you for saying those words, but I would be the first one to definitely want to recognize all of the artists that I got a chance to work with. What I was really proud of the work that we were doing specifically at Microsoft was the fact that it was very much artist-led, right. It was about, uh, you know, curating specific partnerships for whichever problem we wanted to solve, like, whatever story we wanted to tell, whatever feeling we wanted to evoke, right. So, back to that earlier point having a point of view and a perspective on where you want things to go, how you want to shape that narrative was really what mattered. And then the next stage, really that made things really shine, was then giving control to the artist and putting them in the same zone, right, but then allowing them to bring their own experiences and perspectives and processes right. Like often it was about, like, really seeing how they went about their process, even though it was digital, that kind of brought more of that authenticity to the work in general. But kind of circling back a little bit, I think it's I'm not the first person to say that what matters in branding is probably storytelling and trust, right, like do I am I captivated by the stories that this company has to tell me about its products, and do I trust them enough to want to use their products, give them my money? And for me, that relationship is instinctive. It's always felt that way.
Speaker 2:I think you know probably one of the earliest brands as a designer that I felt that way about was Nike. I think Nike has for so long had a really crisp perspective, a really strong editorial hand in everything that they made, and so I felt good about those two things about their brand. But nowadays, with AI right, it has the ability to generate so much content at scale it's going to be important more than ever. That sort of branding and having that perspective has a role to play in the process, because when everything can be synthesized to just like a little push of a button, right, it's authenticity that's going to matter most, right, having a point of view into not just what has been created, but sort of like, why did you create this? And then for me specifically matters also how you created this, right, and so I think, for companies that embrace AI in their branding process, having a strong point of view not just about efficiency but about meaning too, will go a long way, and I'll give credit to some friends of mine, helga and Matthias.
Speaker 2:They run this small studio in Germany called Sumform and they've embraced the idea of automation in some client work they've done. But they've actually created essentially all of the rules and the design elements that will show up in this automation system that they create. But then they create the system right. The tool that then generates the thing, generates the series of images and gives that control to the client. So the client has the same feeling like they're saving dollars saving money being efficient, creating the moment as opposed to saying, let me open a PO and hire this agency to go X. Instead they can crack open the tool and go generate the thing they need, but instead it's being crafted with a point of view that's already been kind of vetted and aligned to a strategy, and I feel like that's the way forward. Eventually we might get there right when there's an AI tool in the end, but really the input is much more human than what it feels nowadays.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting and it reminds me a little bit of I forgot who the client was, but Pentagram got a lot of public shit when the US government Exactly I think it was the US government, I always thought that, but I wasn't 100% sure but they got a lot of public outrage when they, very early on, proposed such a solution which, again, if it is curated and if you control the input, might actually be more of a way forward.
Speaker 1:Here's the other thing that I was thinking about in terms of you know, what could be the downside of leaning onto this tool is the just homogeneous outcomes that we're seeing already. Right Like you can at this point, if you're somewhat, you know, exposed to GPT generated LinkedIn posts from you know potential influencers or even just executives on LinkedIn, then you read the sentence structure and you immediately realize that that is a GPT-generated article. So these artifacts of our own humanity will be really important. So purely just relying on what's there out of the box might not create those you know connection points that you just outlined so well, because they have. You know you actually need that unique point of view, as you said.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I actually reshared the article and I posted on LinkedIn specifically the work that Pentagram had done and for me they stood out so much at the beginning of my career as an agency. I looked up to and they still to this day do incredible work but what I felt it was it didn't. It didn't sit well with me specifically that project, because they were emulating, right through a generative tool, very human gestures exactly and I felt like it was at odds with the tool itself to say I'm going to use this thing to automate this humanistic expression right into seemingly infinite creation as opposed to, you know, using it for something more authentically digital.
Speaker 2:This is the aesthetic you're after. Why not, then, work with real people using real materials? And they did have a little bit of that in the beginning of their process to be, you know, to, to give them credit, but it still felt like he was, yeah, the wrong use of the tool for, for for the project.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think it certainly brought up exactly those kinds of questions which, given how you know nascent the technology is and the methodologies we're building around it, can be both useful to stir the conversation, but also, I agree, it had certainly a negative aftertaste for me as well. Meeting agencies, creatives, designers, would really take more of a stance that goes beyond just the immediate commercialization or commercial use and certainly at least be part of the conversation of okay, here are the things that we don't know, or here are the things that we need to figure out, because they could potentially lead us down a path we want to be on With. That said, I have two more questions for you before we wrap. So the world will look very different in the next 10, 15 years from now.
Speaker 1:My question for you would be, as a creative leader, what do you envision as a future? And maybe, to make it a little bit more kind of pointed and personal we talked about, you mentioned your daughter. She's also an artist. What advice would you give the generation of future artists that your daughter is part of to lead into that future? So, what future do you envision and what advice would you give the next generation of artists to lead into that future?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's difficult to imagine a future where we don't have AI infused into everything. It's just a new reality we live in Right now. It doesn't feel very much. It's at the center of every interaction. So clearly, I think what we're all not holding our breath but it's currently what keeps me excited in the space of UX is sort of like how are you going to shape that If applications, the way we see them today and interact with them today, are dead? What's the next version of that and how can we contribute to that? So that that excites me a lot.
Speaker 2:But I like to think that we don't lose the value of slow and thoughtful work, and when we say slow, often we say okay, if it's slow, why is it even valuable? Well, I would recommend you read this book Slow Productivity. It's going to change my perspective a bit on this idea of speed versus. You know slowness and that you know really impactful work needs to be done fast, especially in this space of technology. You look at any job post nowadays and I would be surprised if it doesn't say fast paced environment. Right, everyone is very excited to say this is a fast paced environment. Great, let's go. Well, I wouldn't be so excited to join a company that you know announces that so proudly, because I don't think it actually yields the best work. So I would say, more importantly, you know anyone that's leading anyone, any creative leader. I hope that we all continue to champion the idea of depth over speed, right, and I love for anyone managing a team.
Speaker 2:This is the biggest point of friction, right? You know, the business and leadership sees the these impeding or this incoming threats or needs or pressures, and the instincts is to say we need to move faster. I would argue is we need to do fewer things, right? So the idea of, like, let's focus on fewer things of high quality, to me is still what gets me excited and up in the morning, and then along with it I would say, originality over optimization.
Speaker 2:Ai is all about, oh, we're going to optimize all these processes, great, but what's left behind? Is it more original? I argue it's not. And so, even if there is a lot of friction in human to human interaction and alignment and all of that, I would argue that along the way, there's more originality perhaps infused into it. And that's not always true if you're trying to make decisions with like 20 people, right. But arguably, if you're saying, oh, half of our processes are automated, does it, does it remove some creativity and originality from the process, especially in the creative field, 100%. So let's, I'd say let's, make sure in the future I want to imagine is a future where true human creativity right is special right and that, as we're saying earlier. We kind of encourage and actually try to infuse some deliberate friction in the creative process.
Speaker 2:So it's not everything is as easy now. Press a button in Figma new app renders in front of your eyes. Go on to some image creation tool. Press a button in Figma new app renders in front of your eyes. Go onto some image creation tool. Press a button, you no longer need to think what kind of thing do I want to imagine? And iterate and suffer through a little bit to get to the other end.
Speaker 1:One of the things that has made me think is we're often sold this idea that friction is bad because it slows down which friction does right, but friction is also necessary to propel us forward. Right, Because if there's no friction, there cannot be any movement. Right, there cannot be any traction. And I think that perspective that you just pointed out, I just want to highlight that I think, is so critical, almost a counter-narrative, which is so important for the creative process and to drive originality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most definitely, I've always. I think it's easy to think that the word you know, friction is just something bad and you need to remove away from it, you know from your process. But I would argue that in this particular case we want to kind of embrace it further, we want to be more deliberate about it, and I'm actually seeking friction right now, away from work, right In my own creative explorations, like the idea of creating a painting and waiting for layer over layer to dry over many, many, many, many days. So weeks later you might have an image that you're happy or not with, right, I want that more so, and that's how I stay.
Speaker 2:Balanced is to say, cool at work is about removing friction outside of work is really about infusing it.
Speaker 2:But I do think that there's room for even corporations to actually ensure that our products, right, that really are shipped at scale, have a certain degree of friction.
Speaker 2:And then, lastly, I would say, like for you know, for my daughter, I think what I would kind of double down on what I said earlier the physical world still matters, right, like it matters that you put some, you know, you put those physical influences, your personal influences, into something that people can experience, and it's difficult to say how can you do that digitally? Well, not everything is digital and in fact, I would like to move away somewhat to our dependency on everything being digital these days. The fact that we're talking over this tool right now yeah sure, we're across the country from each other. That's helpful and that really allowed us to have this conversation. I'd much rather, you know, be sitting in the same space as you, so, as much as we can do more of that, just not because it's convenient. Even if I'm next door to someone, I would rather kind of embrace those physicalities more especially in things that we're creating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think there's a component here that is so critical and I agree with also teaching this to my students. There's a component here that is so critical and I agree with also teaching this to my students, to our children. That is that human to human interaction in the real world. We're in the same space. You can sense people's responses, you can make the same object rather than looking at it as a replication on two screens. Right, you're looking at the same thing, piece of art, product, whatever it is that you're making, and it reminds us of the fact that we share this world that we live in.
Speaker 1:And you know, I I sort of remember how that was for me, being in in an art school and being able to make things with other people in the same studio. It's incredibly powerful. Bringing that sense and enhancing that sense, I think, is, especially in the times now where we're so divided, so polarized, just a critical, cultural, I guess, way of being together that we really need to cultivate. So I think it was a really powerful reminder. With that said, we're at the end of our time and I want to thank you, nato, for this really inspiring conversation. I mean, I've been, um a fan of your work of you. As a person. I've loved working with you for for many, many years and I, um I believe that people will walk away feeling very similarly, um, you know, after this, this conversation. So thank you for your time and we'll link to all your work, also, hopefully, your personal artwork, which I think some of it is online, um, and I hope to see you and hear you again soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, ben. I feel the same way, so I really appreciate the chat with you, but hopefully we'll see each other in person soon. Thank you.
Speaker 1:All right, that's this week's show. Thank you for listening to Poets and Thinkers. If you liked this episode, make sure you hit follow and subscribe to get the latest episodes wherever you.
