What my Grandfather’s drill can teach us about designing business software

April 21, 2015 by Margaret Stewart

I come from a long line of blue-collar workers who helped keep New York City running smoothly in the mid-20th century.

My maternal grandfather, Anthony Paretti, was a New York City subway repairman who kept the trains moving safely and on time so people could get to and from work, school, and home. And my paternal grandfather, John Gould, worked for years as a repairman in New York City for the Otis Elevator company.

When my parents downsized their living quarters a few years back, my eight siblings and I helped sort through the stuff they’d accumulated over their almost 60-year marriage. Some things we donated, some we threw out, and some cherished things were divided among us: fine china, antique quilts, old photographs. What I kept was my Grandpa Gould’s old drill.

He used this drill to keep elevators running smoothly in buildings throughout Manhattan for many years. I love the drill’s clarity of purpose, its power, and its durability — his drill has remained in working condition for over half a century. I love his drill because it reminds me that making high quality tools for people is one of the highest leverage things we can do as designers.

Tools amplify human abilities

Sometimes we forget about the role that tools play in our lives. We take them for granted as we integrate them, fluidly and effectively, into our workflows and everyday lives: scissors, hammers, utensils, pencils. Other more complex and sophisticated tools, like medical devices, computer servers, 3D printers, and telescopes, let us reach well beyond what humans could ever accomplish without them.

My grandfather’s drill increased his physical capacity, so he could do things faster and better than he could have with his own, unaided physical strength. With his drill, he allowed people across New York to work and live far above the ground, way up in the sky. A few hundred years ago, this would have been unimaginable, but through the invention and use of many kinds of tools, it is now a commonplace part of the human experience. I think the term ‘tools’ has become so trite that it fails to convey the impressive potential they have to enhance the human experience and increase each person’s potential to do good things in the world.

This is even more true when we look at the impact and potential of digital tools. Software, especially when connected through networks, has the ability to amplify someone’s ideas and actions well beyond what a physical tool can do. Compare the potential audience of a physical megaphone to a YouTube video. Or a physical library to the Google Search engine. Or a physical scrapbook of photos to an Instagram feed. Physical tools and software tools are both valuable in their own right, but there is no denying that digital tools have a massive potential for global impact because they can be distributed so much more widely and efficiently than physical ones. Of course, with this potential comes great responsibility, both on the part of the inventor of the tool and also on the part of the person utilizing it.

Yet our understanding of the craft of digital tools is still in its infancy. The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum recently mounted an exhibit called “Tools: Reaching Beyond Our Grasp,” which celebrates the design of tools throughout human history. The inventive utility of the objects in the collection is enormously inspiring, and some of the designs are also aesthetically breathtaking. The exhibit features everything from Stone Age hand axes made from rocks to 19th-century fishing implements to high tech space gloves designed for the Apollo space missions. But as I walked through the exhibit and later perused the full collection in the excellent printed catalog, I was not surprised by the absence of business software.

Unlike the objects in the exhibit, software designed for businesses are often sorely lacking in craft. One might think this lower bar of design quality doesn’t matter since relatively few people have to use these tools on a daily basis. But the lack of excellent business tools should alarm anyone interested in improving society’s most complex ecosystems, including government, healthcare, education, and advertising.

Why is business software so badly designed? And why should we care?

Unlike widely popular consumer products like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google, only a small percentage of the human population ever use business software, yet their use effects nearly everyone’s lives. They are used to manage budgets and human resources, procure goods and manage the bidding of contracts, transport goods and services, track the progress of students and patients, and help businesses plan and run marketing campaigns to connect their businesses, brands, products, and services to people around the world. Given the impact of these tools on our lives, it is all the more concerning that they are often very difficult to use.

It’s easy to assume that the experience of using these products is bad because there aren’t good designers working on them, but this is not necessarily the case. There are often passionate, talented designers who want to launch great products just as much as those working in consumer-oriented industries. Unfortunately, many things conspire to deliver poor user experiences.

Sometimes the companies developing business software are insufficiently staffed with design resources. Sometimes they don’t conduct enough user research to truly internalize the needs of their core users. Sometimes they have legacy backend systems that make it incredibly difficult to improve the UI, even in obvious ways. And sometimes the leadership in these companies has not adopted a design-led philosophy that prioritizes end-user experience. These influential but poorly designed products live in the shadows, where design quality is often not an imperative. Consequently, they can be bloated with features, suffer from complex and inefficient navigation, and fail to support core use cases. The resulting experiences are too often inefficient, ineffective, and disempowering.

This would be bad enough if people were only subjected to these experiences once in a while, like having to visit the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew your driver’s license. But for some jobs and occupations, people are obliged to use them many hours each day. Can you imagine if a consumer product you had to use many times a day was a miserable, inefficient experience? You’d revolt, change brands, find a better option. But when you are a junior assistant media buyer in an ad agency, or a nurse in the maternity ward, or a teacher in a public school system, you don’t have that kind of power or choice.

But it’s not just about sympathizing with those forced to use poorly designed software. It’s also about recapturing the waste that these inefficient and ineffective tools create. It is hard to calculate the amount of financial and human capital lost through the use of these tools, capital that could be reinvested in better products and services, job creation, and general economic development. This is a hugely exciting opportunity for designers to create not just interesting products, but products that address some of society’s biggest challenges.

The beauty of the beginner’s mind

Three years ago when I joined Facebook to lead the Business Design team, I had no experience designing business software. I’d spent most of my career building consumer applications and experiences like YouTube and Google Search. I’ll admit I was nervous when I started because this work was in some ways far more complex than consumer design. I worried that my lack of ad tech experience would make it hard for me to have the impact I wanted to have. But I could see that improving the quality of business products was one of the biggest levers for improving the experience of using Facebook, by making marketing more relevant and more valuable. Can we even imagine a world where we only see highly relevant marketing messages? Ads that are attuned to our interests, needs, and lives? We are so awash in irrelevant and interruptive advertising that this can be hard to envision, but I am excited to build tools that help make it a reality.

And over time, I realized something even more important: the fact that I wasn’t a domain expert allowed me — and many members of my team who also don’t have an ad tech background — to approach these problems with fresh eyes, unencumbered by “how things are supposed to work.” The beginner’s mind, combined with the expertise of many colleagues who have deep domain knowledge, is a winning combination.

We still have a long way to go to consistently achieve our own aspirations for the quality of products we want to build. There is no denying that it has been a steep learning curve, but if I’m not learning, I’m not growing, and I still hope to grow a lot more before I’m through. Over the years, I’ve learned that there is no free lunch when it comes to having a big impact, and that the constraints and complexities of this work feel like a fair price for the positive change we hope to create in the world.

Moving forward, there’s a lot that my team and I want to share about the things we’ve learned in hopes that others can apply it to their work. And we’d love to engage other teams and companies looking to raise the bar of quality in business software in conversations that help all boats rise with the tide. I believe that if we do our jobs right, then just like my grandfather’s drill, the tools we design can have a huge positive ripple affect in the world. It’s challenging and exhilarating work, and we are very much at the beginning of the journey. I hope many more members of the design community decide to join us.

The Gifts of Growth and Vulnerability

February 10, 2015 by Margaret Stewart

This past holiday season, I by-passed the standard wine and candy and instead gave a number of my colleagues at work two books that have had an enormous impact on me personally and professionally: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, and Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brené Brown.

I am not a big reader; I tend to progress very slowly and usually absorb information more effectively in experiential contexts. But these two books were so relevant and valuable to me that I overcame my reticence to read and as a result they have been highly influential in my efforts to lead teams effectively and to raise my own children compassionately. And most importantly, they have helped me decode things about myself and others. Why do we act the way we do in certain contexts and why do we respond to particular situations in sometimes non-productive ways? Why do we sometimes chafe at what could be helpful feedback? Why do we sometimes try to puff ourselves up and act confident when in fact we need support and help from the people around us? Why do we crave approval when we could be spending all that energy actually becoming better at the things we care most about?

In thinking about how many of us struggle with these questions in our work and personal lives as we manage and parent, I thought that the best gifts I could give my colleagues are the gifts of growth and vulnerability. Of course, these are only books; in the end we are the only ones who, through courage and resilience, can bestow these gifts upon ourselves.

The Gift of Growth

I’ve often talked about the parallels between learning to be a good manager and learning to be a good parent, and no book has brought this connection more clearly to light that than Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck. I first heard Dweck speak years ago at an event held locally in Palo Alto; it was promoted as an opportunity for parents to learn about her research into the development of what she calls a “growth mindset”. This growth mindset is the kind of perspective that encourages positive risk-taking and tenacity in the learning curve. I had observed with my own children fairly stark differences in their individual tolerance for “failure” and relishing the learning curve. One child tried to learn to water ski and gave up after falling twice, never to try again. The other child, a few years later, declared an intent to learn, and tried to get up on water skis….14 times. 14 times before succeeding. As she got back into the boat after finally succeeding at her goal, I said, “Kid, you are going places.” Luckily for me, I’d read Dweck’s book, and could recognize the signs of a growth mindset.

A growth mindset is one that believes our abilities are fluid and changeable. That we can and will learn more skills and even new talents, if we work at it. A “fixed mindset”, on the other hand, believes are talents and abilities are set and static; those with a fixed mind set tend to define their value by the skills they naturally have, and therefore failure at at level is crushing to the self-esteem.

Dweck nicely summarizes her thesis in the following quote:

“For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life?
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
[…]
There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”

Nigel Holmes has developed a great summary of the fixed v growth mindset in this info graphic:

Where do you see yourself in this diagram? I wish I could say I consistently see myself on the growth side, and indeed I think I often exhibit those attributes, but if I am being honest with myself, I can see all kind of examples where I dip into the fixed mindset. Believing I can't address and improve areas of weakness that are holding me back. Avoiding hard conversations or challenges that feel intimidating. And even feeling like success is a zero-sum game, where others doing well might mean there is less opportunity for me. These are painful admissions, but being honest with ourselves is the first step in any road to growth.

One of the most striking findings that Dweck talks about is the fact that a disproportionate number of successful CEOs have learning disabilities, when compared to the general public. Why is this so? Because they have grown up having to work hard, to struggle, and to not accept their abilities as static. They understand that “failure” is, in fact learning. For “gifted” children, the very abilities genetically bestowed upon them can, in fact, be their very undoing. Because many things come easily to them, they are less inclined to have to struggle early on and can become less tolerant of struggle and the learning curve that are critical to growth.

On the surface, this sounds like yet another self-help book filled with platitudes. But her work is extremely convincing and rigorously researched - Stanford doesn’t tend to hire people who are purely motivational speakers. There is resounding evidence that people can, for instance, increase their IQ; one of the things that we have assumed for so long is something we are innately born with and cannot change. As I listened to hear speak that night years ago in a small auditorium in Palo Alto, her words and insights resonated deeply with me, and when I read her book, I was floored by how relevant and actionable her findings were. I know I regularly catch myself, or my colleagues, or my kids, falling into the fixed mindset trap, and on good days, I am able to coach myself or them out of it, into a place where I am open to learning, development, and growth.

Recently, This American Life featured Dweck’s work and a number of stories of people going well beyond what they “should” be able to achieve. If you are hesitant to jump right into the book, this show is a great primer on the concepts of her work and hopefully will encourage you to dig deeper to explore what it means to develop a growth mindset in your colleagues, your kids, and yourself.

Can other people's expectations of you alter what you can do physically? Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller of NPR's new radio show and podcast Invisibilia investigate that question – specifically, they look into something that sounds impossible: if people’s expectations can change whether a blind man can see. Image: National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health.

So we know that embracing failure and learning is crucial to realizing our full potential. The evidence is quite clear. But what keeps us doing it? That is where Brene´ Brown's work comes in.

The Gift of Vulnerability

A few years ago, I was attending the last session of TED 2012 conference, which was winding down to its final speaker, Dr. Brené Brown. The program explained that Brown was a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work who has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. I had no idea what to expect, but the talk ended up having a deep and lasting affect on me. She talked about the difference between shame and guilt. She talked about fear of failure. And she talked about believing ourselves worthy of love AS WE ARE, and not if we clear yet another hurdle in proving ourselves to others or, even more so, to ourselves.

There are many interesting parallels between Dweck and Brown’s work. Both see the critical role of struggle and failure in the development of skills and of character. Dweck approaches this topic from a more clinical and logical point of view, while Brown goes to the heart of why we might cling fast to the self-defeating fixed mind set: our deep-seated fear of being vulnerable.

I grew up in a family where competence was an enormously valued trait. Being good at something felt like the most important thing you could be, and when you look at how the lives of my eight siblings and me have evolved, this explains a lot. Doctors. Lawyers. Bankers. People who excel. People who succeed. This tendency to focus on always doing right and being right is something that I have only recently begun to understand as a major influence in my personal and professional life. The fear of not living up to those high expectations can be crippling to personal growth. To this day, my most stressful times are when I mess something up in front of my family; more than major missteps at work (and those happen too!), these times can cause serious anxiety attacks in me, turning my usual confident self into a bundle of insecurity.

As a manager, I try to encourage people to bring their whole selves to work, to embrace and accept themselves with all their foibles and flaws, and to not try to create a facade of infallibility. No one believes in perfection, so any attempt to present oneself that way comes across as inauthentic, which in my mind is much worse than having areas of weakness. Accepting that lesson for myself, and allowing myself to be imperfect, however, has at times proven more difficult. As it turns out, I am much more forgiving of others than I am of myself.

But your employees, your children, your friends and family look at what you do much more than they pay attention to what you say. If I am unforgiving on my own mistakes or my own areas of weakness, how can I expect others to being forgiving and accepting of themselves and others? I also sometimes struggle to connect the dots between what I find appealing in leaders and what I aspire to myself. For instance, I find it enormously appealing when leaders reveal vulnerabilities; when they admit their missteps, when they reveal things they are struggling with, when they show self-acceptance of their whole selves, or the struggle to do so. These admissions only strengthen my admiration and respect for people, and in fact show them to be stronger than they may have seemed before; the exact opposite of what our culture seems to train us to believe.

In her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, Brown says, “Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness but it is also the birthplace of joy and creativity, of belonging, and of love.” Her research shows that we learned to protect ourselves from vulnerability - from being hurt, diminished, or disappointed - by putting on emotional armor and acting invulnerable when we were children. Brown writes, “Vulnerability is not a weakness; everyone is vulnerable, everyone needs support from friends and family. Trust and vulnerability go hand in hand.”

Perfectionism is a key way that we block ourselves from self-acceptance. If we believe ourselves to be perfect, we can avoid feelings of shame, judgement and blame. And this impacts how we look at and behaves towards others. Brown explains, “We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.”

Her research and findings apply poignantly to parenting as well. “Raising children who are hopeful and who have the courage to be vulnerable means stepping back and letting them experience disappointment, deal with conflict, learn how to assert themselves, and have the opportunity to fail. If we’re always following our children into the arena, hushing the critics, and assuring their victory, they’ll never learn that they have the ability to dare greatly on their own.”

Brown believes we must to a wide range of feelings in order to combat shame, overcome perfectionism, and stop the act of disengagement that separates us from ourselves and others. “Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgment and advice,” she writes, “we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly.”

The title of her book, "Daring Greatly", was inspired by a quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. . . .”

Brown once said that when she read this quote by Roosevelt, she simultaneously wanted and to and feared being that person in the arena. “If we want to be courageous and we want to be in the arena, we're going to get our butts kicked. There is no option. If you want to be brave and show up in your life, you're going to fail. You're going to stumble. You're going to fall. It's part of showing up."

If you don’t want to dive straight into Brown’s book, her original TEDx talk gives an excellent primer not only on her research, but her extraordinary storytelling abilities. Don’t let her folksy style fool you into thinking you shouldn’t take her seriously; she’s a rigorous researcher who is an true expert at making her work accessible to all.

As I look at my colleagues, and my children, and myself, and consider the hopes I have for all of us to grow and flourish, I see these two researchers and their work as inspiring tools to help us all get into the arena, accepting ourselves and others as we are, and reaching new highs of learning and joy.

There's A Conference Room At Facebook HQ Named After A 105-Year-Old Ceramics Designer, And Here's Why...

July 23, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

At work, I have a conference room that is used for my team's design critiques and meetings. When I first got access to it, it was named Hal 9000, and while I appreciate the dark brilliance of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” I had a sneaking suspicion that my conference room was going to unexpectedly turn on me some day. So I changed the name, dedicating it instead to someone I have long admired. We all need heroes; mine happens to be Eva Zeisel, a recently departed 105-year-old ceramics designer.

Eva Zeisel has been an inspiration to me in my work and my life for years. The story of how I first came to discover her, and all the things I've learned about her since, reflects my own evolving set of professional and personal values, the kind of work I want to do, and indeed the kind of woman, mother, and designer I want to be.

By naming the conference room after her, I ensured that I would be seeing and saying her name dozens of times every day, and be asked constantly by my co-workers, “Who is Eva Zeisel?” I start innumerable meetings with a few minutes of inspiration about this woman, this legend, whom I aspire to be like. I try not to have many regrets in my life, but I do regret never actively trying to meet her while she was still with us; just to be in her presence would have been something I would have cherished. Alas, I have instead become an avid student of her life and work through books, images, videos, and the stories of those lucky enough to have known her and worked with her. She is an incredibly important but not very well known figure in design, and so I want to share with you some of what I have learned about her life and her work, so maybe she can be your hero, too.

Discovering Eva During The Great Purge Of 2006

I studied art history in high school and college, but focused on the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and photography versus studying the history of design. So I was never introduced to Eva Zeisel as a student. I was introduced to her work about 8 years ago, around the time my husband and I were celebrating our 10th anniversary. I was in a mode of streamlining our lives, and purging our home of all the things we had accumulated but didn't serve a purpose. It was a decidedly anti-sentimental phase of my life, and my husband joked that if something didn't serve a daily purpose or have our genetic material in it (ie, one of our three children), it was headed to Goodwill. A key focus for me was housewares. How had I accumulated so many sets of dishes in 10 years? Not only did we have “everyday dishes” but there was also formal china and crystal from my wedding, and even Spode Christmas plates. Why on earth had I thought it was a good idea to have a set of plates that get used only one day out of the whole year?

So I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary by selling all my wedding china and crystal on ebay. We hardly ever used any of it, and more importantly I'd become aesthetically allergic to too much ornamentation over the years, preferring sleeker, more modern designs for housewares. I didn't like the idea of being weighed down by this formal albatross which never seemed in sync with my values and day to day living. My mother was horrified. She thought I should hold onto it all for my own daughters, but I told her, 'Why? So they could then feel guilty about not wanting it 30 years from now? Let's stop the madness now."

I searched for a new set of plates that would work for anything and everything, and lucky for me, this search coincided with Crate and Barrel's reissue of Eva Zeisel's Century dinnerware.

Century Ware, originally designed by Eva Zeisel in 1952 and reissued by Crate and Barrel

I admired the simplicity and organic nature of the forms in the collection; so different and such a relief from the overly ornate and visually extroverted traditional china patterns. I thought to myself, "I could live with these for a long, long time," and this has proven to be true. I still delight in taking them out every single day. They seem to work for everything: macaroni and cheese AND Christmas feast. They don't call too much attention to themselves, but they also seem to elevate everything that is placed on them. Not long after I found them, these plates would play a critical role in one of the largest redesigns in the history of the internet. But that's a subject for a future blog post :)

As I grew more and more in love with my new dinnerware, I became more interested in the woman who designed them. I started to read about her life and explore her larger body of work. And I was hooked.

Her Extraordinary, Improbable Life

In a world of flash-in-the-pan celebrity and overnight success, I have always found Eva's story of a lifetime of determination, independence, hard work and overcoming of obstacles as exceptionally inspiring. She was born to a highly educated family in Budapest, Hungary, in 1906. Her mother was the first woman ever to receive a PhD from the University of Budapest, and her family was filled with intellectuals who excelled in the sciences. Eva, on the other hand, was attracted to the arts, and eventually decided to apprentice herself to the last pottery master from the medieval guild, and started her long and illustrious career as an industrial designer.

She spent several years in the highly innovative arts scene of Berlin before deciding to move, on her own at the age of 26, to Soviet Russia. According to the documentary film “Throwing Curves”, Eva was drawn to the social experiment of the USSR, stating that she wanted to find out “what was behind the mountain.” She was particularly intrigued with the challenge of mass production of goods for the massive Russian peasant population. At one point during her stint as artistic director of the Russian China and Glass industry, she was asked to design a plate that could be produced for over 100 million peasants. The challenge of designing for that scale of usage fascinated her, and the idea of bringing good, accessible, appealing design to the masses drove her work.

Mugshot of Eva Zeisel upon her incarceration at NKVD prison in Russia, 1936.

After living in Russia for 5 years, late one night she was arrested and accused of plotting to kill Joseph Stalin. She was imprisoned for 16 months, and 12 of those months were in solitary confinement. Her descriptions of that time were poignant: no human interaction, no color, no nature. She had to reinvent what time meant, because she could not bear to think about the past, and would now allow herself to think about the future, for she was sure each and every day that the authorities would kill her. Then, one day, she was released. To this day, no one knows why she was let go. She was expelled from Russia, moved to Vienna, and re-established contact with her future husband, Hans Zeisel, who had waited for her through her incarceration. She suffered from what we would now describe as post-traumatic stress; this once independent young woman had lost much of her confidence and had a hard time re-engaging in society. Hans took care of her after her release, helping her acclimate to freedom. But that sense of security and safety did not last for long.

Zeisel was Jewish, and within months of moving to Vienna, the Nazis occupied Austria. Eva took the last train out, escaping to England. She and Hans married and with $67 in their pockets, started a new life in the US. She immediately pounded the pavement looking to design for US manufacturers, and she was hired by several major companies to design sophisticated yet approachable and affordable collections for the everyday family and home.

Installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1947. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984 — Installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1947. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984

Her impact on modern household goods design was acknowledged when the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibit of her work in 1947, which was the first show the museum had ever hosted dedicated to a single woman designer, and also the first about contemporary ceramics. She designed a dinnerware set for MOMA called Museum Ware, and it was the first all-white dinnerware set ever produced in the United States. It was controversial, it was spectacular, and it made Eva famous.

Museum Ware, designed for the MOMA and manufactured by Castleton

She worked her whole life, and even five years beyond her 100th birthday, staying engaged in her craft and her calling. In the documentary film “Throwing Curves”, her daughter Jean says that even in her later years, she was always up for adventure, for travel, for discovery. She had a strong drive to make things which helped her build a career spanning nearly eight decades. And she somehow balanced being one of the most influential designers of the last century with being a wife and mother. About 6 months before her passing, a visitor to her home asked Eva what the highlight of her life was; she told him, “Let us separate my work and my life… the high point in my life was having my two children. The high point of my work was the Museum Ware by Castleton China. This is my favorite set. I had a show there [at MoMA] you know, in 1947.”

She died at the age of 105 on December 30, 2011, with numerous design projects in flight, continuing her “playful search for beauty,” as she called it.

Her Remarkable Work

Eva Zeisel is best known for her work in ceramics, but she also designed glassware, furniture, and textiles. Though her best known designs are now over half a century old, they still appear fresh and modern to us today.

There is something about her work that I find appealing and approachable. Perhaps it is a the unapologetic feminine, curvilinear shapes that make them so inviting and even comforting. They beckon you to touch them, hold them; these are not precious, formal objects to be stored away for a special occasion. And even if you are seeing a particular object for the first time, you have a sense of already knowing it. She brought humanism to machine design. Her aesthetic was in many ways a reaction against the Bauhaus, with it's rigid angularity and machine-driven aesthetic. Eva's designs, in contrast, are round, organic, biomorphic. She often featured a mother and child motif in her work, as well as birds, which are likely the influence of Hungarian folks art from her youth.

Her commitment to mass production versus handcrafted goods made her designs affordable to the masses and helped her influence grow; she was only interested in working at scale, and wanted to make good design accessible to all. She believed women should play a critical role in designing the objects they lived with and used, instead of letting men do it for them.

Baby bowl and spoon, designed in 1946, reissued by Neue Galerie

Her work is often designed to be nested and stacked, adding to its practicality, cleverness, and beauty. Throughout her career, she rejected the notion that modern design was necessarily cold, hard, and machine-driven. It could and should be warm, witty, natural, round, and a joy to behold, to live with, and to use. She insisted on humanity as an essential ingredient in good design.

So much of what we see in contemporary tableware design is derivative of her work. Her designs are simple and often without any additional decoration beyond their beautiful form. Standing alone, they are lovely objects to behold, but when you use them as a part of the set table, they showcase the food or the flowers, and don't call too much attention to themselves. In that moment, they are in service of a greater purpose: helping people live their lives with comfort and beauty.

Her Words (And Some of My Own)

“I am a maker of useful things.
Her most famous statement, and the battle cry of the designer. I say battle because it feels that way sometimes. Doing great work that matters to many people is very hard, but knowing that your creativity is being used to solve real problems and hopefully improve people's lives is, for me, a huge motivator in overcoming the inevitable challenges that arise. And the word maker is hugely important as well. We aren't engaged in an intellectual, academic pursuit; we are here to make real things. Hopefully, we will succeed in making useful things, and if we are really, really good, we may succeed in making beautiful, useful things. That's what Eva Zeisel did.

“It always looks like I'm playing, but I'm not; this is serious.”
Design process sometimes looks from the outside to be random, disorganized, without focus. Eva often described herself as engaged in a “playful search for beauty”, and this notion of play had a strong influence in her work and her process. It reminds me of the philosophies of my graduate school mentor, Red Burns, who also believed that important things were discovered through play. Designers need to go wide and sometimes veer into seemingly unrelated territory in order to circle back to the right solution. Extreme efficiency is often an inhibitor to a good outcome.

“I'm not doing anything out of self-expression; I'm trying to be kind to my recipient.”
I love how she calls the person for whom she is designing a “recipient”. And she clearly differentiates what she is doing - designing beautiful but practical and useful things - from art driven by self-expression. That, too, is a worthy goal, but it should not be confused with practical design. This kind of work is not about the designer, the designer's ego, or their portfolio, but about the recipient, and how the design can make life better.

“When I design something, I think of it as a gift to somebody else.”
What a lovely notion! And what a great way to frame the work and the importance of craft. In the tech industry, we are so often in a rush to get things out the door that we often don't take the time to get the fit and finish, the craft of what we do, right. But you would never give a gift to someone important to you that was sloppily made, cracked, or chipped. It would cheapen the act of giving and show a lack of respect and love for the recipient.

“When you begin your work, nothing exists. When it is finished it looks as if it just happened, spontaneously, effortlessly, convincingly. It looks as though it had been there all along.”
Great design seems completely obvious in hindsight, and it's easy to see Eva's work in that way. But her work was revolutionary and inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of designers. We now take for granted the clean,round lines of Museum Ware, but imagine if you'd never seen an all white dinnerware set; it must have felt radical when it first appeared. It was useful and beautiful, yes, but it also challenged societal norms and traditions, moving us into a new age of modernity. Fearlessness in challenging the status quo is a critical tool in the work of a designer.

“I don't like to design single objects. I like my pieces to have a relationship to each other. They can be mother and child, like the Schmoo salt and pepper shakers, or brother and sister like the Birdie salt and peppers, or cousins, like most of my dinnerware sets.”
I love this quote because it shows how nature and human-centered her approach is to her work; the metaphors are consistently about people and relationships and the nature world. It also shows that she was a systems thinker; she didn't see her designs in isolation from each other, and thought deeply about the relationship between objects. This kind of systems and relationship orientation is critical to designing large scale digital systems where even small changes in one area of the experience have sometimes huge, even if unintended, consequences.

Eva Zeisel and her daughter Jean (left), and “Schmoo” mother and child salt and pepper shakers (right), showing that art truly imitates life. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984 — Eva Zeisel and her daughter Jean (left), and “Schmoo” mother and child salt and pepper shakers (right), showing that art truly imitates life. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984

“When I met my designs in the market of a remote village in the West Indies, or in the airport restaurant in Zurich, I felt like the mother of many well-behaved children.”
I love that Eva excelled at mass production but still clearly cherished the things she made. She was a most fertile mother! As a designer, it's important to think about the long term impact of what you are doing today; you designs don't just disappear the moment you move onto something else. They are incorporated into people's lives, and if you are good at what you do, they can stay relevant for a very long time. That sense of raising good children and and wanting them to be well-behaved is a lovely notion and one that only a working mother would be likely to come up with :)

"Hallcraft/Century" Platters and bowl for Hall, c. 1957. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984

“My designs are meant to attract the hand as well as the eye.”
She was way ahead of her time with respect to ergonomics. Her bowls, her cups, and her platters understood the human form and incorporated and accommodated the human use of the object into the object itself. And her designs somehow invite you to take them up, to hold them and use them. After all, what good is a utilitarian object that gets no use? Then it's just a knickknack.

“Because I was a designer and not an intellectual, I felt I was never grown up. I grew old without ever becoming an adult.”
I was so relieved to hear her say this in the “Throwing Curves” documentary. I think “growing up” is the end when you are creative. Indeed, we all start out creative as children, and then in a misguided attempt to educate us, we are often robbed of our creativity and our creative confidence. Holding on to the child inside of you is critical, because it is the thing that helps you audaciously engage in big challenges and bounce back from inevitable failure. And it helps you see how important play is in the invention of new things.

“If you try to do something perfect, I think this is the last time you do anything.”
Though she was driven to excellence, she also had pragmatism about the importance of getting her work made and into the hands of people. If you watch videos of her in collaboration with her assistants, collaborators, and manufacturers, she is very matter of fact about what she wants. There are no histrionics or petulant demands. Somehow she found the balance in her pursuit of excellence and in avoiding the pitfall of things never being perfect enough to release. It's what all designers must strive for, especially in the digital realm.

“Beautiful things make people happy.”
I love that she never felt a conflict between her search for beauty and her role as industrial designer of mass produced housewares. And I love that she interpreted beauty as natural, human, simple, and clean. She understood that good design didn't need to lose its soul in the pursuit of utility and modernity. In fact, it mustn't.

At work on a model for Kispester-Granit, c. 1980s. From Eva Zeisel: Designer for Industry, 1984.

“I don't know the difference between working and not working.”
When your work is creative and is about making things, the line between working and not work is extremely fuzzy. Creative minds like Eva's don't go on vacation; every day, ever experience, every taste, touch and sound is material being gathered for some future endeavor. This can be exhausting and confusing to those who have other callings in life, callings that can be more easily compartmentalized. As I write this blog post, I am on vacation in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. Friends and family mock me for not being able to sit still. If I turn “work” off, that means turning off my email and my project work for my job back at Facebook, but it means turning on a host of other things: learning a new drawing technique, learning how to make pickles, knitting a new pattern, making pies, visiting a factory, watching dancers, collecting leaves. To me, this is work too, and I never want to turn it off.

And last but not least, I love this quote which speaks to the natural drive of the maker, and one who feels a kinship with nature and her past, as well as maintaining a sense of humor...

“When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.”

RIP, Eva Zeisel. Your work, your ideals, and even your birds live on.

References & Resources

“Throwing Curves”, a documentary film about the life and work of Eva Zeisel, available on DVD and online rental through Canobie films

Eva Zeisel's Prison Memoir, available through the online magazine A Public Space ($36/annual subscription)

Eva Zeisel, Wikipedia

Eva Zeisel, Ceramic Artist and Designer, Dies at 105, New York Times

Eva Zeisel: The Playful Search for Beauty, TED Talk

Why Beauty Matters

March 16, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

This past fall, Raul Pantaleo, Co-founder of Tamassociati, accepted the 2013 Curry Stone Humanitarian Design Prize for the work his firm does designing and building healthcare facilities in war-torn areas, such as refugee camps in the Sudan and Sierra Leon. When asked why he works so hard to make his architectural designs not just functional and sustainable, but also beautiful, he explained:

"Beauty is the first message you give the patient, that you consider them as equal."

Wooden blinds shade a public terrace at the Port Sudan pediatric clinic. Photo from Massimo Grimaldi and Emergency.

I was so moved by this notion, and it put into words something that has been hard to articulate over the years of working on highly utilitarian designs for Google, YouTube, and now Facebook. You must design something that solves a real problem and improves the lives of people. And you must design it in a way that people can access and use your creation with a minimum of confusion and strife. But companies, especially high tech companies, have struggled with whether or not beauty really matters. If you get the two first parts right, won't people be satisfied?

The answer is yes. And no. Certainly, no matter how beautiful something is, if it's not useful and usable, it won't make a meaningful impact in the long run. Sure, it may give people a fleeting sense of aesthetic satisfaction, but like a diet of high fructose corn syrup, it doesn't satisfy you for long, and you eventually realize the need for something more substantial, something more valuable and meaningful.

For decades, software was so badly designed that the bar for usability was tragi-comically low. While there were some interesting ideas of products that could add value, like word processing and spreadsheet software, they were so difficult to use that people couldn't access or realize that value. Lotus Notes, various Mircosoft products, and the first generation of search engines are all excellent examples of this. Products that weren't focused enough on their raison d'être, and succumbed to bloating, rendering them either unusable, or so laden with feature sedimentation that people would only access 10% of the utility. Of course, people didn't know to ask for anything better, and sometimes through nearly monopolistic market share, they didn't have a choice anyway.

I remember having conversations at Google where the design team was dissuaded from making anything too polished or "designerly". This urging seemed to stem from two motivations: by investing in polish, there were concerns that the product would be - and equally important - would appear less fast. But there was also a sense of pride in the fact that Google didn't want to appear to value beauty over functionality. By keeping our spartan aesthetic, like some kind of Amish tech movement, we could show ourselves to be more serious about power and functionality. We kept the Google homepage Doodles to ensure that we maintained a sense of levity and didn't look like we were taking ourselves too seriously, but the product experience itself was to be kept as free as possible from what some might describe unnecessary ornamentation.

And people were so happy. Because compared to the other search engines at the time, Google worked SO MUCH BETTER. In fact, people who grew up after Google made its way into the world completely take for granted how high the bar is now for search experience, relative to where it was back in the late 90s. The clarity of purpose and reliability of the Google search engine (you come to a page, there's only one thing you can do, and you type in what you are looking for, and the damn thing finds it almost every time!) was so amazing, that for a time, people didn't want more, or more precisely, they didn't know what to ask for.

And then the iPhone came along. And we had to wrap our heads around something that solved real problems (minicomputer, camera and phone, all wrapped up in one device!), worked really well (way more intuitive than any other phone on the market at the time, by a long shot), and by God, it was beautiful. Sexy. Delightful. Covetable. And all of a sudden, the software we had been using, even the decent stuff, seemed, well, ugly. Soulless. Less than we all deserve. If Google Search tried to launch today with the aesthetics it launched with in 1998, it would be a laughing stock.

Now, to be fair, the technology that we work with, which both empowers and constrains us, has improved a lot in the last 15 years. The browsers and mobile phones of today provide a much more nuanced toolkit for designers and developers to play with. So we shouldn't judge the interfaces of 10 years ago by what we are able and expected to create today. But it's also the norms which are starting to change. People who are now accustomed to the high quality of successful mobile applications are now transferring those expectations to other areas of software.

So here we all are. At the cross roads of the next phase of digital product design. How do we get software fully past the age of ugly into the age of delight? First, we must understand that delight, and even beauty, are going to mean different things to different people, depending on the problems a given product is looking to address. For all products, we want the craft of what we do to reinforce a sense of quality; that the product is well made, is reliable, and can be trusted.

In the world I am currently focused on, the design of business software, the cost of not attending to craft can be very high. If our product looks janky, our industry's favorite term for poorly crafted, then perhaps our customers might start doubting the validity of our data or the reliability of our back end system. Like a profound essay littered with typos, poor craftsmanship can erode confidence in the quality of the ideas, even though in reality those things can be quite separate.

Ultimately, we need to put our products in service of people, and not just in a functional way. We need to surprise and delight them with the small details that show that we really care. I believe if we work to make what we build valuable, usable and delightful, we can create a virtuous cycle of raised expectations.

Design icon Paul Rand once said, "The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with." It's audacious to claim you are going to prove Paul Rand wrong, but let's give it a go, shall we?

A small business owner I met on a recent research trip to Mumbai.

Why I Work on Ads

February 07, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

Prior to working at Facebook, my whole career was spent working on consumer-oriented applications like Google Search, YouTube, and Tripod. I loved every minute of it. Working on things I personally used every day and that my friends and family loved inspired me to pour my heart and soul into my work every day.

Then about two years ago. I got a call from Facebook. They wanted me to come join the design management team. And get this...they wanted me to lead the business design efforts. Me? I had no experience in ads or business tools, no domain expertise. Could I do great work in this area? And if I could, would I be motivated to after all those years on the consumer side? I thought long and hard about it, and thankfully, I decided to jump into a steep learning curve and joined Facebook.

So what made me leave my role at YouTube to come lead the business design team at Facebook? Well, there are many reasons Facebook was appealing to me as a company. Its mission, its leaders, the respect that designers have throughout the company. Check, check, check! But why ads? Some people might think the work I do now is less interesting, less impactful, or less, well, sexy, but after a year and I half, I can tell you it's quite the opposite.

I knew that this role would be the biggest opportunity for me to have impact as a design leader, perhaps in the whole industry. And I’m not just referring to monetary impact, though it's always nice to hear your work mentioned on earnings calls. Fundamentally, it’s about creating positive change in the world, and growing as a designer in the process. The fact is, I think more designers should consider working on business-oriented applications. Let me explain why...

Designers need to understand the design of business and the business of design.
While I've spent most of my life working on consumer experiences, it has always bothered me when designers turn up their noses at the thought of working on or even understanding how the products they design are sustained as a business. Designers should understand the whole picture of what design can do to make a business successful. It's not just about building a great product; it's also about understanding the business models that sustain that experience, and I thought it was time that I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. In addition, this kind of experience rounds out your skills a designer and design leader, and positions you well if you want to start your own company someday.

Designing for people different than yourself is harder, but it's fascinating and rewarding.
Designing for yourself and people like you is fun and intuitive and can inspire great work, but there are so many problems in the world that require designers to go beyond their own life experiences, to walk in others' shoes, and to provide solutions to meet those needs. In fact, I'd posit that designing for people different than yourself is the best way to really magnify your impact as a designer. Even consumer designers eventually grapple with the fact that designing for a global audience requires stepping outside our own experience. Just think of how much less progress we would make as a society if scientists only studied and developed cures for diseases they themselves suffered from. Or if architects didn't get out of their bubble to develop sustainable housing for people in a different socioeconomic bracket than their own?

As a curious person, it's challenging but fascinating to understand and empathize with others versus narrowly thinking about your own experience. In my case, these could include a CMO of a Fortune 500 company looking to launch a major new brand, a new grad media buyer working for a big ad agency managing a dozen clients and hundreds of ad campaigns, an artisan coffee shop owner hoping to bring more customers into her store, a non-profit development director looking to fund a new program, or a grocer selling fruit on a street in Mumbai. You need to work harder to understand these people and their needs, but when you do, you can design solutions infinitely better than what they've had before, and that's exciting and rewarding work. Because instead of the standard change aversion that often comes from changing consumer designs, what we often hear is, "Thank you! This is *so* much better than what we had before!" And that feels pretty damn good. If you are the kind of person who is giddy at the thought of studying the work flows of people in an occupation completely foreign to your experience, you are my people.

The vast majority of enterprise software is a travesty of bad design.
Every time I am forced to log in to a piece of typical enterprise software, I cringe. The bloat. The unnecessary complexity. The aesthetic horror. It's what most consumer software looked like before we woke up and understood that we deserved way, way better; we accepted bad design because we hadn't experienced anything better. But business users have yet to experience that awakening. Thankfully, we've raised the bar across the consumer industry over the past several years, and now it's time to raise the bar for business software, too. We deserve to have business tools that add enormous value, that work intuitively, and are beautiful. Yes, beautiful.

So now you know why I think more designers should get out of their comfort zone and challenge themselves by working on business applications. But why Facebook ads specifically?

The opportunity to reinvent advertising.
Facebook is poised to deliver the most innovative, engaging, personalized advertising people have ever experienced. We can personalize and humanize advertising in ways that no one else can. Many people claim to hate advertising, but the truth is, when the creative is great and when it's highly relevant to us, we love it. It ceases to be an ad, and just becomes great content. And I want to be part of the team that makes it happen at a global scale, and with a human touch.

Improving the measurement of advertising across the industry is a worthy goal.
Digital advertising measurement is fundamentally broken, and anyone deeply involved in this industry knows it. Our work to rebuild and redesign Atlas will democratize the digital advertising industry as it gives fair credit to all of the businesses and publishers who are helping advertisers succeed. There's currently a monoculture of advertising measurement that doesn't give full and fair credit to all of the players involved in helping businesses achieve their goals, whether it's launching a new brand, selling a product online or in a store, or getting people to download a new mobile app. The work Facebook is doing to create more accurate ways to measure online advertising will help the whole industry understand what works and why, and to give credit to the role that all businesses, even the small ones, can play in creating value.

Helping businesses market themselves better improves everyone's experience.
Business, brands, products and services are a critical part of the fabric of people's lives. They help people craft their sense of identity through the connections they forge, whether it's with a small local business, a movie they loved, or a clothing brand they admire. And they also help us navigate the world and the increasingly complex decision landscape before us. Where should I eat dinner tonight? What should I do this weekend? What should I do on my vacation? Connections between people and businesses will generate a lot of the information that we need to help answer these questions in meaningful ways.

I believe in the things that Google, YouTube and Facebook have done and will do to make the world a better place. And now, I get to help sustain and build upon that value in a whole new way. And as it turns out, like the years I spent on consumer products, I’m loving every minute of it. So that, my friends, is why I work on ads. Maybe you should, too.

How I Hurt Myself Knitting

January 30, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

A few months ago, I ended up in urgent care, and left with a wrist brace and pack of cortisone pills. Everyone assumed it was carpal tunnel, but no. In truth, it's a long story. Actually it's not that long, it's just a bit embarrassing. In fact when I told people at work what happened, a number of them said, "You know, you should really come up with a different explanation."

Here's what actually happened: inspired by my 4 close friends who were all expecting babies within a few months of each other, I went on a yarn shopping spree and proceed to knit 4 baby sweaters in the course of about 10 days. And one particularly long bender happened on a 12 hour flight back from Europe. My usual jet lag tactic is to just stay up the whole way back, and so that's just what I did, knitting the whole way. I woke up the next morning with a searing pain running down my wrist; acute tendonitis, the doctor said, and she clucked her tongue at me, admonishing, "Don't you know how dangerous knitting can be?"

What drove such compulsive and apparently self destructive behavior? After all, I could have bought more beautiful, better made baby sweaters that would have cost me far less than the ones I made myself.

The answer is not that simple. I've thought a lot about it since I've had to curb my knitting obsession; in fact, it's made me down right philosophical on the subject of creativity, and the drive to make things. So I asked people; my followers on Twitter, my design colleagues at Facebook, and of course, myself: "Why do I make things? What drives me to create?" Here's what I heard from the Twittersphere:

To hold in my hand, what I dream in my mind.
Being creative, I am unable to NOT make things. I am driven to live a purposeful life. Make the world more beautiful, express myself.
Creating emotions. Improving life of humankind. Being able to sleep better cause I know I contributed something good to the world.

And from my Facebook design colleagues...

Being a consumer gets boring quick. There's no excitement, jeopardy or struggle with the promise of succeeding. I could be vegetating by watching television or get up off my ass and make something that matters to people.
As the years go by, lots of details make that question increasingly challenging to answer. But the basic motivation has never really changed - making stuff is fun.
For myself, I just feel like I need to make stuff all the time, and I've been that way since I was a kid. Since I mostly manage now and don't make a lot of stuff day to day, that means I find myself up at night and on weekends, trying to fill this need because if I don't my soul starts to feel like its dying a little.

That last one was from me.

Now there are a lot of nuances to these responses. But the more I poured through them, and there were many more than I can share here, the more I noticed three themes.

The first and most obvious is that we create for ourselves.

Because it's fun.
Because it feels good.
Because it calms us and keeps us present.
Because we all need to express ourselves.
Because we can.
Because we must.

When she was three, my daughter Isabel used to love making these crazy playdough concoctions. Anything that was in her path would get sucked into the vortex of her sculptures. And when she was done, she’d smash it up and do it all over again. She wasn't focused on the end product; it was all about the fun of making. And she never asked herself whether she was good enough to do it, or whether people might like it. It was her right and duty to make stuff. She loved the process of making something with her own hands, and spending that time getting lost in her interior world where ideas are born. And she found joy in sharing that process with others.

We're all born this way, and as kids, have a seemingly endless capacity to make stuff. Any parent of a preschooler knows this from the reams of paint blobs and crayon scratchings that come home with a big proud smile.

So we make things for ourselves and the joy that it brings us, and sometimes regardless of what others think. But there are other themes that emerge from the comments of the makers.

We also are motivated to create for others.

For some of us, there is altruism associated with making things. We show our love for others by making things for them. We show concern by trying to understand and solve other people's problems. On a personal level, when I knit, or sew or bake for others, I am making things to show I care. Professionally, as a human-centered designer, my goal is to make things that somehow improve people's lives. They are both ways of showing my humanity. I've always believed that design is creativity in service of others. And while we may get personal gratification from the act of making, we also find deep satisfaction in addressing the needs of others.

So we make for ourselves and we make for others.

We all start as makers, but something happens as we grow older. In the process of "growing up", we tell ourselves, or the world tells us, that we are not artists, and that we are not creative. That we should let others do the creating, because they are better at it. Because the assumption is you should only make things if you are great at it, in a way that other people value.

For those who hold on to their creativity, some have even figured out a way to get paid for making stuff. That's a pretty good gig. But many people do not. Many people work at jobs that don't encourage and sometimes even actively discourage creativity. So what are they supposed to do with all that maker energy that they were born with? How can we get people to re-engage with their creative selves? Access to experiencing the arts is a good first step, but it won’t necessarily get people back to making. In order to re-engage people in making, you have to create experiences that are open ended and invite participation from everyone.

We know this from our childhood; that the best toys, the ones that we learned the most from, grew the most with, and that had the longest shelf life, were the ones that were open ended. LEGO. Wood blocks. Simple rag dolls. And of course Play dough. There's no story or script. You make up the story, and you decide when it's done. There's no right or wrong way to play. And like my daughter's creations, you joyfully tear it all down and do it again.

There are billions of people in the world, and they all need and deserve creative outlets. In the engineering world, we talk about scaling things. It's how you take a small idea and grow it to have massive impact. So how do we scale the notion of helping people be and feel creative? This leads me to the last theme that emerged from the responses of makers; it was the idea of turning consumption on it's head.

We help others create.

Throughout my career, I've worked on a number of projects that look to help others create and express themselves. Back in the Jurassic period of the late 90s, I helped build Tripod, one of the original homepage building sites. Later, I worked on YouTube, the world's largest open video platform. And now I'm at Facebook, with over 1 billion users, surely the greatest modern example of the power of connecting people through storytelling and technology. But there are so many others, products that I wished I’d worked, but admire from afar: Pinertest, Instagram, Tumbler and Etsy.

And I've realized over the years that it's evolved into kind of a personal mission to help people be and feel more creative. I truly believe that people are happier when they are empowered to express themselves creatively, even if it's just for themselves.

Occasionally, broadening the population of people who are invited to participate in the making of things can reveal true artists and creators in our midst. YouTube is such a powerful example of this, launch the careers of countless musicians, filmmakers, comedians, and revolutionizing how people teach and learn. And on Facebook, we see makers like Humans of New York and Science is Awesome and countless others engaging and inspiring millions.

But even more than the stars who've emerged from the masses, it's become a vehicle of self-expression for all of us, a way to capture and share the everyday moments of life that bind us together as a human family. Instagram is a great example of this as well, taking everyday, sometimes mundane mobile photos, and with the use of clever filters, elevating them to things worth sharing with the world. It makes us feel like an artist again.

This kind of design, the kind that empowers others to create, is different than traditional design. You have to check your ego at the door. You have to design an agnostic container that doesn't dictate to the makers what they should or shouldn't make, because your design only serves as an amplifier to the content that *they* create. It's not about you, or your portfolio, or the team you work with, or the company you work for. It's about the people who use it, and build on it, and fill it with the stories that connect with other people.

And it can be messy. These open systems can create a lot of stuff than I'll generously describe as low quality. But we all know that nothing great is created without a ton of messes and failures. And if you only see these tools as a means to create a polished, finished product, you are definitely missing the point.

Because like the playdough things my daughter made, it requires you to sometimes look past the end product, and instead value the process. The process that tells all people, regardless of their age, gender, background, religious views, or economic status, that their stories matter and deserve to be heard. Because just like professional makers, the rest of humanity has that need to make.

Because it's fun.
Because it feels good.
Because it calms us and keeps us present.
Because we all need to express ourselves.
Because we can.
Because we must.

At the end of the day, I'm kind of proud that I hurt myself knitting. Because I'm a maker, and dammit, I'm gonna make.

How to Make Chess More Interesting

January 28, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

I got my husband a new chess set for Christmas. He's always loved the game, but hasn't yet succeeded in engaging the kids too much. I thought this amazing set, made by Etsy maker William Gallmeyer of Tool Chess, built out of screws, nuts, and bolts would delight and compel them to try it out. I was two thirds right. My fifteen year old son, Charlie, who knew the basic rules, jumped right in. 12 year old Beatrice learned the rules fairly quickly and seemed to enjoy it. But Isabel, my youngest, wasn't biting.

"Chess rules are boring, " she said.

"So let's write some more interesting ones," said her big sister.

And so they did.

Below are Beatrice and Isabel's "Interesting chess rules." I wish I could pick a favorite.

Interesting Chess Rules (aka Chess Curses)

Whenever a player's piece is taken, they have to draw from the deck of curses, which include:

If you break a curse, you must draw another one and sing a song about what you did and why you won't do it again.
Every time your queen makes a kill, the king must shout, "That's my wife!"
For the rest of the game, your pieces must walk like they are on the fashion show cat walk.
Whenever ones of your pieces is taken, you must have a mini-funeral for the it.
Every time one of your pieces kills a horse, they must ride it into submission.
Whenever your bishop takes someone, you must give the victim a short blessing before sending them off to heaven.
Every time a rook is killed, the killer must stand on top of the rook and shout, "I'm the King of the castle!"
Whenever you put a king in check, or your king is put into check, you must do a short "check dance and song", either happy or sad, depending on the situation.
Whenever you move a knight, you must make horsey noises.
For the rest of the game, whoever you make a move of more then one space, you must say one square at a time the color of that square. Ex: "Black, white, black, white..."
Before you make any move, you must act out a dramatic good bye scene with the space you are moving from.
For the rest of the game, every time you take someone's piece, you must sing, "It's raining {name of piece you took}, Hallelujah!"
Every time you move your king, you must shout, "KING IN DA HOUSE!"
Every time one of your pawns makes a kill, one of your bishops must say, "That's my son!"
Every time the two kings are no the same color square, they must have an epic rap battle about their current situation.
For the rest of the game, talk to your chess pieces like they are people. You must ask before moving them.
Every time two queens are adjacent to each other, they must have a dance off.
Every time your horse jumps over someone, the person they jumped over must express their outrage.
Every kill you make must be ridiculously dragged out with a huge noogie fight.
Every time you kill a pawn, you must make a chess pun.
For the rest of the game, you must move your pieces with your elbow.

Sabering a champagne bottle at TED Global in 2012.

The secrets of sabrage

January 28, 2014 by Margaret Stewart

I love champagne. I grew up with an uncle who drank champagne every day, from tiny little split bottles. I remember as a little kid opening his fridge and the whole door was lined with tiny bottles of bubbly. Years later, when I lived in France, I visited the Champagne region and learned from my hosts that every day, there is something worth celebrating. It might just be that the mailman arrived with the daily bills. Hooray, let’s pop open a bottle! Even when I was pregnant and not drinking much of anything, I was inclined to have bubbly as my special occasional treat. But for my whole life, I had always been terrified of opening a bottle.

And with good reason: the pressure in a champagne bottle is typically between 70 and 90 pounds per square inch. That's two to three times the pressure in your car's tires, about the same as in a double-decker bus' tire.

So there I was, doomed to a life of loving champagne but never being able to open it myself. Was I to depend on others all my life to serve up the bubbly? Thankfully, no. A couple of years ago, I attended a retreat called the Mighty Summit, and my friend Helen Jane taught me how to saber a bottle of champagne. Sabrage, as it is formally called, is a ceremonial way of opening a bottle of champagne.

And all you need is a nice, cold bottle of bubbly, a big knife — it doesn’t need to be a sabre, and it doesn’t even need to be sharp — and an event that deserves some theatrics. Instead of forcing the cork out of the top of the bottle, we just cut out the middle man and shear the whole top of the bottle off. Somehow, this potentially lethal way of opening bottles cured me of my fear. Not particularly logical, but sometimes, in order to face your fears, you need to run straight at them, brandishing a large knife.

So how does it work? Well, all that pressure in the bottle is created during champagne’s second fermentation process, when cane sugar and yeast are added to each bottle. It produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, resulting in the bubbles we all know and love, and the pressure I so feared.

This is also the reason why all champagnes have extremely thick corks and extra thick bottles. But there is a weakness in the bottle. It’s where the two seams going up the sides of the bottle meet with the annulus, which is the glass lip just below the wire basket. And that intersection of fault lines is the secret to sabrage.

How do you do it?

The bottle must be cold, and of decent quality; cheap bottles tend to explode, which creates a decidedly less festive mood. Remove the foil and carefully remove the wire basket. Next, find one of the two seams along the side of the bottle, and remove the foil going down the neck of the bottle.

With your arm extended, hold the bottle firmly by placing the thumb inside the punt at the base of the bottle. Be sure the neck of the bottle is pointing up - about 30 degrees from horizontal. Make sure nothing fragile is in your line of fire, like a glass window, your grandparents, etc.

Oh, and have some glasses ready!

What you’ll do is run the edge of the knife up the seam of the bottle right into that glass lip under the cork. The firm pressure of the knife edge against that weak point in the bottle, along with the pressure already inside, is all it takes, and usually with just one stroke of the knife...

* POP *

I wanted to share this with you in hopes that you will celebrate whatever happened today that brought you joy, made you think, or inspired you to take a risk. And to encourage you to face your fears, learn something new, and take a leap of faith; there may be bubbly on the other side.

Serving up bubbly to June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED.

To my dearest gallbladder....

January 05, 2014 by Margaret Gould Stewart

To my dearest gallbladder,

I want to start this note with an apology; it's clear to me that I've under-valued and under-appreciated you my whole life. Beyond my high school biology courses, I have to admit to being completely oblivious to the role you've played in my digestive process all these years. And I can imagine that must really steam you. I mean, here you are, reliably releasing bile into my intestines to help me break down fatty foods, working like clockwork, and never being given any notice or appreciation. I know I'd eventually get fed up, too.

But I do want to provide some feedback to you on how you went about letting your presence be known. To go from living in complete obscurity to sending me to the ER writhing in a kind of pain that reminded me quite unpleasantly of labor pains was, well, a bit much. I mean, couldn't you have been a bit more subtle? Maybe start with some mild indigestion, or a tinge of discomfort? Did you really need to go full throttle and put me in the fetal position, unable to speak to the triage nurse? And treating me to further attacks when I eat anything fried, rich, spicy, or in other ways delicious seems a bit over the top.

I feel like you and your friend the appendix really need to develop better anger management skills. I mean, I know it's hard to learn that you are, well, let's be blunt, kind of b-team organs which can be removed with no long term health implications. I mean, when people have trouble with their heart, their liver, their kidneys, it's a five alarm issue. With you guys? In my case, a small incision in my belly button and two surgical robotic arms will make light work of your removal.

Don't take it personally; I mean, we have some good years together. But those days are over. This Thursday, your new home will be a bio hazard waste bin in a surgical theatre in a hospital nearby. I wish you the best, and will toast you affectionately over a big plate of fries sometime very soon.

Love,
Margaret

Moving on, with sadness and excitement

April 20, 2012 by Margaret Gould Stewart

One of the trickiest things in life is to know when to move on. From a project, from a relationship, from a job. I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I recently made the decision to move on from my role as Director of User Experience at YouTube.

Even typing that is hard to do. I love YouTube as a product more than anything I've ever worked on before. And the team I've had the pleasure of building and leading is one of the best in the industry. It's filled with talent, and fun, and team work, and kindness.

The past few years I've spent at YouTube, and the two before that leading UX for Google Search, have been extraordinary. I learned more about the craft of UX, creative management, and myself than I learned in the 10 years prior. I am exceptionally proud of the work we've done to build a robust practice of design and user research within the YouTube organization. And the proof is in the pudding: our redesign of YouTube.com in late 2011 was the biggest redesign in the company's history, and represents a serious raising of the bar for quality of design within the company.

But one of the most frequent pieces of advice I give is to leave on an up note. And that is what I've decided to do. Friday, April 20th, will be my last day as the Director of UX for YouTube. And I am so excited to announce that starting in late May, I'll be joining Facebook as Director of Product Design, leading the team focused on ad products. This is such an amazing time for Facebook as a company and as a social phenomenon. I'm itching to learn as much as I can from my new colleagues about the amazing plans for the future and to be a part of making the next generation of advertising experiences the best the world has ever seen, and to work alongside the larger product design team to help chart the course for this product that is changing the world in so many ways.

But first, I'll take a month off (yay!), so prepare for more blog posts, including one that lists all of the ideas my kids suggested for how I should spend my 4 weeks off. My favorite among their suggestions? "Submit several snarky working-mother definitions to Urban Dictionary." :)

Favorite talks from TED 2012

March 14, 2012 by Margaret Gould Stewart

As far as my favorite TED talks from this year, here are the ones I'd most recommend and why (I'll link to them if they are available, but the TED folks tend to roll them out over the course of the year), listed in the order they appeared at the conference:

Susan Cain: "The Power of Introverts" - As a closeted introvert and a manager of many more, this talk really resonated with me. Anyone who thinks of themselves as an extrovert should consider this required viewing, especially if you lead teams. Here's the blog post.
Reuben Margolin, Kinetic Sculptor: A quiet walk through the work of a highly inventive and creative mind. His sculptures feel like they exist in the overlapping space between robotics and ballet. Here is a blog post.
Billy Collins: One of my favorite quotes of the conference: "When I was poet laureate...God I love saying that. Because it's true." Such a dry wit and sharp tongue. It's lovely to see poetry come alive in collaboration with animators, too. Again, here's the blog post.
Sharon Beals: The fragile beauty of birds' nests - I was taken aback by the artistry of Beals' photos, but more importantly, the birds themselves who created the subjects of her work. Some beautiful examples are included in the blog post.
Reggie Watts: How to describe him? Comedian? Musician? DJ? Provocateur? Uh, yes. And God, how I love a good TED roast. And the topper? Turns out he's a really nice guy. Here's the blog post, Reggie's own site, and a TEDx talk he gave ont he East Coast.
Sherry Turkle: This one was a bit painful. When one of the most important thinkers about humans and technology questions whether we need to rethink the impact that over-connectedness is having on our humanity, it causes an audience-wide existential crisis. Turkle asks why we expect more from technology and less from each other. And it's about time. Here's the blog post and a TEDx talk she gave on a similar topic.
Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice - Another favorite quote (paraphrased): "So I submitted a motion to have my 13-year-old, poor, black defendant tried not as an adult, but as a 75 year old white corporate executive." Amen. Here's the blog post, a well as a follow up note from TED's Chris Anderson explaining how the TED community rallied to raise over &1M overnight to end the practice of long term incarceration of children in adult prisons. .
Chip Kidd: So funny, so thought-provoking, so inspiring. I loved this talk, and all that it revealed about someone who is a master at what he does: book design. Here's the blog post.
David Kelly: Creative confidence is something most kids have in spades, but unlearn as they grow older. How can we reverse the trend? IDEO's founder gives a thought-provoking and ultimately very personal talk on why we all need to opt-in to creativity. Here's the blog post.
John Hockenberry: Why would a journalist be featured in a session on design? Because Hockenberry speaks so eloquently on designing a "life of intent." Make sure to stay to the end of this talk and be treated to his gutsy and unique cover of The Beatles' "Get Back". Here's the blog post.
Abigail Washburn: Chinese speaking, stereo-type-busting, banjo-playing, curly-haired wonder Washburn is now a new Stewart Family musical favorite. Here's her website.
John Bohannon & Black Label Movement: "That’s childhood. It’s a Manhattan Project of nakedness.” Sorely needed, frank commentary and reflection on the state of sex ed and talking to kids about sexuality. All wrapped in a wonderfully artful presentation. Here's the blog post, though you really *must* see the video when it gets released.
Rafe Esquith: You can't have an inspiring session on the state and future of education without including Rafe Esquith, and more importantly, his band of merry players, all donning "Will Power" t-shirts in honor of The Bard. If we could clone Esquith and his dedication to these high-achieving lovers-of-learning who mostly come from low-income, non-English-speaking homes, we might be OK. Here's the blog post.
Brené Brown: Appropriately, this vulnerability expert spoke honestly and, well, vulnerably, about a key area of study: shame. How does it differ from guilt? And how does it keep us from being creative, innovative, and happy? Truly worth a watch when it's posted. In the meantime, here's the blog post.

Phew. It was a great week, though as usual, emotionally and intellectually a bit exhausting. Now, the trick is to hone in on the key things you actually want to focus on moving forward, since one person can't move all these needles at the same time. Some things that could change the world, and somethings that are about understanding and changing ourselves. And the realization that those two things are very much connected.

My TED 2012 sketch notes

March 14, 2012 by Margaret Gould Stewart

Here they are: my sketch notes from the annual TED conference held in Long Beach, CA in February. For details on my favorite TED talks of 2012, please check my follow up post.

Hard-earned career advice

February 22, 2012 by Margaret Gould Stewart

A few months back, I was asked my my graduate school mentor, Red Burns, to speak to her class of first year students at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I gave a talk about what it's like to lead design for a brand and community like YouTube, and all of the challenges and opportunities that go along with it. And then I closed with some unsolicited career advice that I thought might be worth sharing more widely. Here it is....

Take smart risks
Sometimes people who don’t understand the arc of my career say, “Wow, you are so lucky to be where you are.” Yes, and.....no. What defines every major change in my career, and in my life, has been taking smart risks. Let’s face it: many things that are worth doing in life are very risky and don’t really make sense at the time: falling in love, having babies, attending Burning Man (which I haven’t done, for the record). But in hindsight, you see that when you develop a taste for smart risk, you open yourself up to many more possibilities and significant growth than if you always play it safe. In my life, that’s meant getting a fellowship that allowed me to live abroad by myself; attending ITP (NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program), a weird sounding graduate program, well before the commercial web made it a no-brainer for the rest of the world to engage in Internet projects; leaving a lucrative freelance business in NYC to join Tripod, a then tiny unknown start up, for a tiny salary because I knew I’d learn more (said start up ended up getting acquired by Lycos); staying home with my kids for 4 years when the industry when through a downturn and work was no longer fun; uprooting and moving my family across the country to join the big leagues in the Bay Area.

Some of these decisions took my financially conservative parents’ breath away. But the fact is I’ve done so much better personally and professionally because of these risks, and I’ve earned my successes by taking them. This issue is particularly relevant for women, as we are socialized to be more risk averse than our male counter-parts. Forbes Magazine reported that a study showed men apply for jobs when they are on average 60% qualified for a job, while women on average wait until they are nearly 100% qualified. The men apparently figure they will learn the rest on the job, and they are right. Ladies, we need to puff up our chests, drink a Red Bull, and remind ourselves that if we feel a bit in over our heads, we are probably on the right track. Which leads me to my next piece of advice....

Women help other women
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help women.” Amen. Women in roles of influence often get to where they are in part because someone along the way took interest in them and encouraged them to do more, be more. And that someone for me has often been another women: Jan Chambers, my scenic design professor at Boston College, who pushed me to take on projects that were just out of my grasp and in the process helped me grow and develop my taste for risk; Red Burns, the founder of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU where I earned my Masters Degree, who showed me that women leaders can be fearless and maternal; Marissa Mayer, head of UX at Google and my close colleague during my time running Google Consumer UX, who created numerous opportunities for me to expand my influence in the design world outside of Google. If you haven’t been helped by women in your organization, find some that you admire and ask. And if you have help to give, then reach out to the young, promising women in your world and give them a hand. You owe it to the future.

Don’t be an ass
Too often, I hear people posit that you have to be a jerk to do great work, especially in the creative professions. I'm sorry, but I just don’t buy it. I know, it’s all too easy to call up the Steve Jobs example. For the record, I never met him, and 99.9% of other people never have either, but his reputation is not that of a person who is easy or pleasant to work with. But here’s the key point: Steve jobs was a genius AND he was a jerk; he wasn’t a genius BECAUSE he was a jerk. And let’s be real; hardly any of us are Steve Jobs. For the rest of us mortals, getting along with people and being a fun, engaging collaborator are critical components to getting great things done. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be hard on yourself and others at times, and that you shouldn’t have high standards and develop a culture of critique. But I don’t believe that has to be coupled with being an ass. My goal as a leader and a colleague is to be straightforward, authentic, optimistic, empowering, and relentless in the pursuit of great design. And I can do that while being kind and fun, and you can, too.

My TED 2011 sketch notes

March 13, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

I've finished scanning and uploading my graphic notes from the 2011 TED conference. I take these notes so I can share the experience of being at TED with as many colleagues and friends as I can, and it's also a great way to retain more info; in fact, there was a TED talk this year by Sunni Brown about the benefits of doodling. Those who doodle can retain up to 30% more information. :) So enjoy, and feel free to annotate the images on Flickr with your thoughts, ideas, reactions. The full set is available on Flickr, or in the slide show below.

I'll be publishing another post soon about my favorite talks from the conference...

TED 2011 sketch notes, a set on Flickr. — T ED 2011 sketch notes, a set on Flickr.

Words of the Dalai Lama hit a bit too close to home...

March 12, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:

"Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

Amazing Palo Alto car garage

March 07, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

I ran by this house in Palo Alto the other day, and had to stop, run back and take a quick photo. What a clever way to add some visual interest to an otherwise forgettable house.

Sounds that build anticipation of something wonderful....

February 07, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

The popping of movie popcorn
The churning of an ATM before it spits out cash
The opening bars of the (old skool) Star Wars theme
The sound of milk being heated at a coffee bar
A bathtub being filled
The sound of massage oil being rubbed between the hands of a masseuse

Others?

Robert J Lang origami falcon at the San Jose Airport

February 04, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

Move over, origami crane. The paper raptors are here! This photo doesn't do justice to how beautiful this piece is; truly amazing craftsmanship and engineering.

Life in a Day amidst Sundance posters

January 29, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart

Sundance posters, originally uploaded by margaretgouldstewart — Sundance posters, originally uploaded by margaretgouldstewart

Graveyard snapshot: Letraset & phone books

January 01, 2011 by Margaret Gould Stewart