is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
This tee-shirt, which nods to the tech, design and art communities, was designed by James T. Green, a friend and producer on our last season of “Wireframe.” When you buy it, all proceeds go to organizations working to fight structural racism. Get it at jamestgreen.com.
2.
I have only this tiny corner of the Internet that I can call my own, and generally no one expects me to weigh in on the issues of the day beyond the narrow scope of design, tech and movies. But for the past few weeks I’ve felt a need and a responsibility to write something about the horrific murder of George Floyd and the outpouring of protest that’s followed.
Watching video of Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis sickened me to my core. But it didn’t really surprise me. And neither did the many, many other similar videos of police brutality that preceded it, going all the way back to the beating of Rodney King in 1991, which happened to take place while I was going to school in Los Angeles. Nor was I really surprised by the many, many videos of police officers brazenly using excessive force on protesters in the wake of Floyd’s death.
America is deeply racist. I’ve known this since I was a kid. We all know this, every one of us, even if we don’t all admit it.
And even if we do believe this, the trick of it all is that we’re not always aware of or willing to acknowledge the depths of this racism, even when we’re looking right at it. There is an indistinct but unmistakably expansive gray area in which even those of us who feel that we are deeply supportive of anti-racist policies, laws and individual conduct can still reside, buffered from the injustice that others cannot avoid. This nether zone not only shields us from perceiving the full extent of racism but it also dampens any urgency we may feel to do anything substantive about it.
The fact of the matter is that for many of us, it’s convenient to ignore the racist aspects of our society. It’s imperative, even. Because unless we ignore it we’ll have to do something about it. We’d need to either accept it, which means accepting our own hypocrisy. Or we’d need to actually take action, which means we’d have to challenge or even relinquish many of the privileges that are granted to us by virtue of the color of our skin or our willingness to look the other way.
It’s a deeply wicked bargain, one way or the other. And I’ve made this bargain myself, if I’m honest. As an Asian-American, I’ve been a victim of racism, but to nowhere near the extent that African Americans are routinely victimized. And I’ve also been complicit in racism’s perpetuation by dint of the fact that I’ve done virtually nothing about it. I’ve been complicit in racism in that I’ve done very little to effect change in a system that benefits me but disadvantages and brutalizes others.
3.
One thing I’ve come to accept since 2016 is that fear, hatred and racism are among the most powerful forces on earth. This has really always been true throughout human history, but in American society we tend to focus only on a handful of their most strident expressions. And even then, we really only consider with any depth our finest moments, those historical events when we’ve been able to marshal truly potent responses: the Civil War, the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement.
But I’ve also come to understand that the real menace of fear, hatred and racism lies not just in these flash points of history, when the contrast between freedom and tyranny are most stark. The real menace is in how infinitely adaptable and resilient these forces are.
Even after they’ve been put down, disbanded or made to heel, they find a way. They discard their censured hallmarks, whether it’s chains, swastikas or segregation laws. And then they change—evolve—into new, more subtle ways of exerting their influence: mass incarceration, “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing, methodical dismantling of social and economic safety nets. These methods come into focus slowly, sporadically, in fits and starts from disparate corners, and with little notice or scant examination. They co-opt progressive ideals and insert themselves into virtuous agendas, and they assert themselves in popular culture and common language. Their inflection point, the moment when they’ve succeeded, is the moment when society at large accepts them as policies, as laws, as common sense, as pragmatism—while assuming that these methods apply to “other people.”
This moment in time, George Floyd’s moment, Breonna Taylor’s moment, Ahmaud Arbery’s moment, is ripe with potential, and we must act on it, must transform it from mass protests to structural change. But our challenge is also that we must also renew our vigilance and our ability to understand how fear, hatred and racism will adapt and change yet again. Because they will.
4.
It feels distasteful to me to salvage any kind of a silver lining from the horror of George Floyd’s death, but I am grateful for the way that public support for Black Lives Matter and for systemic change in policing has surged over just a handful of weeks. That’s reason for hope.
I’m also grateful for the clarifying light that these events have thrown on own my understanding, and humbled by the realization of how much I need to do to live up to the principles that I endeavor to pass along to my children. Particularly the idea that we cannot right the world simply by not doing wrong—we must do right, too, and particularly we must do right by those who have been perpetually wronged. Especially when their lives are being unjustly and viciously sacrificed by a brutal system.
I’m grateful for the understanding of how much work I really need to do. How much I need to learn, how much I need to ask, how much I need to listen, how much I need to speak up, how much I need to read, how much I need to expect of myself and of my family and my friends, how much I need to give, how much I need to change anything I can possibly change.
But it really shouldn’t have taken the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many more for all of us, for me, to get this clarity. I’ve been looking away for far too long, and now that it finally has my attention, I can never look away again.
If you care about design, I would posit that the most pressing evolutionary challenge it faces is not design systems or design-to-code or even accessible design, as worthwhile as perfecting those pursuits might be. Rather, the single most consequential barrier to design’s next level of success is simply explaining itself to society at large.
What is design? And how does it work? Answer those questions in clear, relatable language and the world suddenly becomes a very different place in which to practice our craft.
Writer and design thinker Scott Berkun’s new book “How Design Makes the World” does a shockingly good job of doing just that. In twenty crisply written chapters across just over two-hundred pages, Berkun breaks down the mechanics of design and demonstrates its ubiquity and importance to nearly every aspect of life. It’s a cogent, incredibly illuminating antidote to the fog and mystery that has shrouded the practice of design for practically its entire history.
When I was lucky enough to read it in galleys prior to its publication, I felt a curious mixture of joy and professional jealousy. On the one hand, “How Design Makes the World” is an instant classic that every designer will want to read and own for themselves —as well as, probably, to gift copies to the clients and stakeholders they work with. And on the other hand, having been intensely interested myself for a long time in this idea of making design more understandable, I couldn’t help but think, “I wish I’d written this book.” Berkun has done a wonderful service in writing this, not just to the world of design, but to the world at large. He was kind enough to agree to discuss the book with me in an interview that we conducted over email.
Khoi Vinh: First, tell me about this title. It doesn’t lack for ambition. What is the message you’re trying to send, and how did you settle on it?
Scott Berkun: To the depression of many designers, the good work we do goes largely unnoticed. This should change! The world has so many problems today that would be easier to solve if people benefited from the knowledge designers have. But designers aren’t great at inviting people in and warmly teaching them to see. The title was the clearest way to establish the stakes—design affects everything—but make it inviting and welcoming.
So is the title—and the book—intended more for an audience of designers? Or others?
It’s intended for both in a clever way. It’s designed around powerful stories, so no jargon or background is needed. Executives, programmers and just about anyone is welcomed in to learn. For designers it gives a fresh set of stories to share and better tactics for teaching others, while giving them new hope and inspiration about why what they do is so important.
What made you realize that you needed to write this book?
I studied design in college but my career was mostly as a general project leader, a decision maker who had to bring everyone together. I’ve spent most of my life in the middle, translating between executives, engineers, marketers and designers, and designers usually have the low ground in organizations. Every designer has to teach their coworkers themselves, and start over with new teams and projects. It’s tiring. We have good books on our shelves, but they weren’t designed to solve this. I was well suited for this task and no one else had done it.
I’ve felt that exhaustion of having to explain the fundamentals of design, over and over, myself. Why do you think that even with design’s profile being higher than ever, we still struggle to define exactly what it is to the uninitiated?
One part is the high profile of design isn’t uniform. A few companies are clearly design-driven, and they get talked about often at design conferences, but most teams at most companies are not led with design as a strategy. It’s a tougher landscape. A second part is many designers don’t like or don’t want to be ambassadors. They just want to “design” and see pioneering as an unrewarding chore, which is okay—but then who is going to make it better now and for the next generation? Third, there aren’t many tools that help. Most design books, courses and movies are made for designers, not for everyone else. Fourth, there’s a lot of fear among some designers that if they teach too much, they’ll be out of a job. Many designers want to be better respected and understood but feel it’s beneath them or dangerous to make design less mysterious and invest in changing things.
That last part especially resonates with me. I’ve come to believe that, consciously or subconsciously, many designers are actually invested in people not understanding the craft. How deep do you think this runs?
It’s as deep as it can get. Many designers have been picked on and disrespected, sometimes even in design school! Some were art kids who didn’t fit in. They know that creativity is personally important, but they also know that most people, including possibly their parents, do not understand it or respect it. They’ve seen design trivialized generally by culture. Psychologically that weighs on how any person sees their profession. The fear is that if their boss or coworker learns a tiny bit, they’ll think “I’m a designer now” and they’ll get fired. There’s safety in quietly doing a job and not revealing too much, so “the secret magic” remains theirs. Of course it’s usually the opposite: teach someone the first taste of a skill and they get new eyes—suddenly they see how much they don’t know. But that requires confidence in how your profession is perceived. That’s definitely a common thread in design culture: a conflict between ambition and fear. They want good design to be popular and respected, including their own work, but fear doing the things required to make that happen.
I wonder if you think stakeholders or clients, especially, are also complicit in this? I’ve always had the impression that a certain class of client—often very high in the pecking order—want to hire designers who can dazzle them, or their board of directors, with design mystery or theatrics.
I’m fascinated by how most people think of creative work as high excitement, as their experience with it is mostly from TV and movies. Every pitch meeting on shows like “Mad Men” is just three minutes long, with an orchestrated soundtrack and Emmy-worthy dialogue performed by actors with off the charts charisma. It’s no wonder stakeholders and clients tend to want magic. They have no other conception of what it’s supposed to feel like to have discussions about ideas. So I agree they are complicit, but often from ignorance.
On one side, getting clients is sales work and dazzling people can help sell. And early in a project an inspiring (but unrealistic) prototype can get a team excited. Hard to argue against that. But when it’s deceptive or defeats the clients own goals, it breaks the golden rule. It’s up to the professional, the designer in our case, to show there’s a better way to think about what good is. This is similar perhaps to how a doctor would advise a patient that they don’t need an MRI for a paper cut. Since design will never be at the center of culture (but we can get much closer!), how good we are at explaining it and being ambassadors is critical. But it takes skill to do this without adding friction and if you’re struggling to pay bills and your clients demand magic shows, it’s hard to resist for long. Yet if we all do this, the status quo remains.
Okay so it sounds like it’s safe to say that there are some serious myths or misconceptions that you’re out to dismantle. Can you describe how your book tries to do that?
There are two big ones I take on directly in the book. One: that design is hard to explain. It’s not! The trap is trying to teach it with theory and posturing (“I want you to learn… to be impressed by what I know!”), a trap many experts fall into. But we know people’s brains learn best from stories. How did UI design make the Notre Dame Cathedral fire worse? That’s a story. Why did a city rotate half of its streets forty-five degrees so driving is confusing and dangerous? That’s a story too. The book is a series of well-crafted stories, each unpacked in entertaining ways using concepts from design to explain why these good or bad things have happened to all of us. It does the heavy lifting designers need to do with their co-workers and communities (and often for the designers themselves, who can use a refreshed view on what they do and why).
Two: that design is just the trivial surface of things. Most people think of design as a layer on top, the final paint color or style (which is often harder and more powerful than people think). But design goes all the way down. Why is the border between India and Pakistan where it is, and often in conflict? Someone designed it. Why is the nearest bus stop one block or fifty blocks from where you live? Someone designed that too. Why does a McDonald’s cheeseburger have three buns? And where’d that “special sauce” come from? Again, it was designed! The book’s stories come from a wide variety of places (by design!) to connects how the challenges of say mobile app design shares a lineage with hundreds of other kinds of design work, and seeing it that way changes how you we the world and what we can do in it.
The breadth of the stories in the book is impressive, both in variety and also in demonstrating how design is really just everywhere.
Glad you feel that way!
Are these stories that you’ve collected over the years, or did you start with specific principles you wanted to examine and then came to find the stories through research?
I’m obsessed with these kinds of stories and have been studying them since college. I’m just fascinated by how everything works (or doesn’t!). But once I have a rough outline of what a book is supposed to do for the reader, I start looking at the news and anything I read more carefully. I become a design investigator. I’ll dig up obscure books that often have fresh takes and examples (popular books often sing the same notes). I don’t respect category boundaries: many great design stories come from engineering or business or history writing. I do lots of research and then in early drafts the game is figuring out which stories can fit where, if it all. And then in later drafts it’s how it all fits together. It’s a design process, really. And some great stories I hoped to use just don’t fit, much like a designer discovers some of their best ideas need to get cut to make space for the other ideas to shine.
Which of the stories that did make it into the book do you think are the most surprising or most instructive?
It’s staggering to think that much of the Notre Dame Cathedral burned to the ground because of a basic usability problem any junior design student could have solved. That shock wakes readers up, which is why it’s early in the book. And the irony that something built well enough more than six hundred years ago to still be here was decimated by a design flaw created here and now in our proud era of high technology. That contrast makes clear design is indeed everywhere, both the good and the bad. Had a couple of more people known design basics so many terrible things that happened would have been wonderful things instead. I’d really like to help change that.
That one is a real eye opener, for sure, and so heartbreaking. What strikes me about that story is that as it was reported, and it was reported extensively, design barely got a mention. In fact, for most of these stories, design is really a secondary narrative, hidden in the background. It’s almost as if as a culture, or maybe as a species, humans can’t see design, even when it’s hiding in plain sight—or even when it produces tragic outcomes like the fire at Notre Dame. Would you agree?
I feel that way but I’m not sure of the cause. Some of the challenge is that news itself is designed! And as an industry they’ve been so decimated for the last 20 years it’s hard to even calculate how their reduced ability to investigate and explain things has impacted us. They do involve design experts when it’s something like the butterfly ballot, or the Boeing 737 MAX, but that’s only if the journalist thinks to ask one and has a basic notion of how design isn’t only aesthetics or interior design but is integral to everything. There’s just not enough design literacy yet in the people who write the news.
One self-inflicted trap is that good designers strive for their work to become invisible. Even now I’m not thinking about the design of the keyboard I’m typing on, the screen I’m looking at or the email software I’m using (okay, well now I am, but you get my point) and I wrote a book on why we should notice everything!
I wonder if when we shifted into consumer culture, where fewer people make things, it’s easier to imagine that phones and cars just fall from the sky in finished form. We’re exposed to far less of the process of how everything, from food, to technology, to laws, are made. I’m hopeful though: we are naturally curious creatures. All it takes is the right spark, or story or question and people’s sense of wonder rises.
How much are you actually trying to stoke that sense of wonder, to get more people interested in design, with this book?
As much as possible! But I wrote the book with professional designers in mind too—many of us have become jaded, tired of trying to explain it with the same old stories. I wanted to give us a fresh way to think about what we do and the profound possibilities of a society that was more design literate.
So can you imagine a future where design is much better understood, much more present in our everyday thinking as a society? And, aside from the key role that this book might play, what is necessary for us to get there?
I can! In a way I’ve seen it. In 1994 I couldn’t get a job doing interaction design (what we now call UX design). A career doing it didn’t exist. I’d never have imagined then how well accepted and understood the role of design would become in the tech world. Not even close. But we know there’s a long way to go. We just need to make it an inspiring mission and give more designers the skills and tools to show the way and celebrate the people who’ve done it and are doing it now. And for that reason and more thanks for what you do and for taking the time to interview me here.
It’s the weekend so I’m sneaking in an incredibly tardy housekeeping post here: a full wrap-up of my movie watching from 2019. Like my monthly roundups, I’ve been doing this for the past several years as a way of assessing what I’ve seen—usually not five months after the year has wrapped, but better late than never.
The way it works is: every time I watch a movie, I log it in my Letterboxd film diary. Then, at the beginning of each month (more or less), I post a recap of what I watched the previous month. After the year is over, I put all of the roundups together in a single post, along with a top ten list.
Currently, in May of 2020, I’m in the middle of my fifth year of doing this, which is nuts. In my first year, 2016, I watched a total of 189 movies. In 2017, I watched 191 movies. In 2018 I watched 201. And last year, I watched 219. (You can see Letterboxd’s automatically generated overview of my year here.)
Top Ten
One of the benefits of posting this so late in the following year is that I had the time to actually watch more of the previous year’s films than I normally do. As a result this list of my favorites looks slightly different now than it would have looked back in January, say. Reassessing the year now I realize that only the first five or so feel absolutely essential to me. The rest are worthwhile for sure, but I’m less passionate about them than I was about the lower spots on previous years’ lists. This actually seems like a fairly accurate reflection of the fact that most of 2019, at least leading up to the traditional, late-year awards season, was a terrible time for movies.
“Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood” (2019) ★★★★ A more expansive, complete idea of what a movie can be than anything else released in 2019.
“Knives Out” (2019) ★★★★ I almost don’t even care about the political morality tale at its heart because every beat feels like pure entertainment.
“Uncut Gems” (2019) ★★★★ Breathlessly alive like few other movies in recent memory.
“1917” (2019) ★★★★ Largely a technical accomplishment but I really did feel something when I watched it.
“The Wedding Guest” (2019) ★★★★ Your mileage may vary on this one but it’s the sort of brainy, anti-thriller that I find irresistible, plus it’s a showcase for its two incredible vibrant South Asian leads.
“High Flying Bird” (2019) ★★★★ Puts huge demands on the viewer to keep up.
“The Souvenir” (2019) ★★★★ Fully believable descent into the the helplessness of loving someone bent on self-destruction.
“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (2019) ★★★★ An amazing performance from Tom Hanks and an incredibly judicious narrative exploration of what it takes to be good.
“Parasite” (2019) ★★★½ I really was blown away by this movie but I just couldn’t work up any passion for the final act and how it undermined everything that preceded it.
“Marriage Story” (2019) ★★★½ Too well-directed and emotionally honest to be denied, even if it’s irritatingly fixated on privileged living.
“How to Train Your Dragon 2” (2014) ★★★ Apparently our current decade’s films are obsessed with the idea of mother figures being banished to purgatory.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” (2010) ★★½ What this franchise needed but never got was a creative team more interested in making good movies than in adapting the books.
“Hail, Caesar!” (2016) ★★★½ You know the term “inside baseball”? This is “inside Hollywood,” but, like, old. I mean, I enjoyed every minute of it. Rewatched.
“Okko’s Inn” (2018) ★★ Little more than an excuse for gorgeous hand-drawn animation.
“The Hateful Eight” (2015) ★★★½ Rewatched. How to stage a play for the cinema.
“sex, lies, and videotape” (1989) ★★★½ Rewatched. Like a blueprint for independent cinema, and yet still so much less interesting than what Soderbergh would go on to do.
“Mother” (2009) ★★★★ So emotionally true it’s harrowing.
“The Killing” (1956) ★★★★★ Rewatched. My favorite Kubrick work; a definitive text for every heist movie that followed.
“Ford v Ferrari” (2018) ★★★ Perfectly fine but it’s easy to imagine what it could’ve been in the hands of a more distinctive directorial talent than James Mangold.
“Do the Right Thing” (1989) ★★★★½ Rewatched. Electrifyingly urgent, even thirty years later.
“Suspiria” (2018) ★½ Shallow ideas dressed up with high class pretensions.
“Chris Claremont’s X-Men” (2018) ★★ A look back to when comics grew up, before the rest of the world noticed.
“Knives Out” (2019) ★★★★ One hundred percent pure entertainment.
“Marriage Story” (2019) ★★★½ Impeccably directed but distractingly preoccupied with lives of privilege.
“Uncut Gems” (2019) ★★★★ More successfully distortive than most fantasy movies, and also happens to finally solve the question of what to do with the Adam Sandler persona.
If you’re spending your pandemic working your way through the seemingly endless lists of movies and television recommendations for quarantine life, then I salute you. That has not been my experience. Instead, I’m barely keeping up—if I’m honest, I’m not keeping up—with all of my duties as an employee, parent, ersatz home schooler and, as our house falls apart, barely competent handyman.
Still, somehow I managed to watch thirteen movies last month, which is surprisingly not far off from my usual low of around sixteen or so. (I just went back and checked, and for some unaccountable reason, I watched only a dozen last June.) As I’ve said in the past, the way I’m fitting in all these viewings is by first, largely abstaining from television (which I largely gave up several years ago and without regrets), and second, by watching most of these movies in short snippets as brief as ten or fifteen minutes. It’s sort of like the best advice about getting enough exercise: you just gotta make the time.
Don’t tell my boss, but I’ve also taken to watching this stuff while I’m working. Midway through April it occurred to me that I could (occasionally) prop up my iPad next to and at about the same eye level as my monitor and rewatch a film with the sound turned all the way down—and no one would be the wiser. Foreign films, or at least films with subtitles, work best so I can get a sense of what’s happening, since I’m really only dipping back into the movie every five or ten minutes or so and only then for a few moments. It’s definitely not what you would call focused viewing (and I’m not counting movies I watch this way in lists like the one below) but I find it adds a little boost to my day, sort of the way looking at a painting can give you a shot of creative energy. Even catching short glimpses of a movie—even a movie I didn’t find particularly notable the first time around—is worthwhile, especially if I get to find a new appreciation for the way a given scene was shot, lit or edited. These are the little pleasures that make self quarantining more bearable.
Overall, though, April was not the most interesting month of movie viewing for me. Probably the most notable, new-ish films I saw were: Robert Eggers’s arthouse psycho-horror-drama “The Lighthouse,” which people raved about and I thought was fine (though not a great choice to lift one’s spirits during quarantining); and Corneliu Poromboiu’s overly conceptual policier “The Whistlers,” which was memorable mostly for lead actor Catrinel Marlon’s searing gaze. I also saw Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s slasher B-movie “Ready or Not,” which was amusing and unpretentious if not particularly brainy. None of these are essential viewing though.
Here is the full list of what I watched in April.
“Emma” (1996) ★★★ I could watch another dozen remakes of this story.
“Tangled” (2010) ★★½ Disney seems to think it can outsmart stereotypes by playing into them.
“The Lighthouse” (2019) ★★★½ Sumptuously crafted but a disappointingly predictable rendering of lunacy.
“Based on a True Story” (2017) ★★ Roman Polanski brings together two intensely watchable actresses, concocts a tantalizing conflict for them, and forgets to do anything with it all.
“Sons of the Desert” (1933) ★★★½ The sheer delight of Laurel and Hardy’s slapstick genius, stretched to its narrative limits.
“Vendetta of a Samurai” (1952) ★★★★ An unsparing indictment of the falsity of combat glory, wrapped inside a samurai flick.
“Knives Out” (2019) ★★★★ Rewatched. Had a ball again.
I shared my work from home setup in a post earlier this month, but I’ve since had to set up a second workspace at home too—this one for podcasting. That’s right, quarantine measures or no, we’re hard at work on a third season of “Wireframe,” the documentary series on user experience design that I host for Adobe. (Find all the previous episodes at adobe.ly/wireframe.)
As much as I enjoy sitting at my desk, there was never a hope that I’d be able to record good quality audio there. My home office is on the ground floor and faces the street where the sound of passing cars, buses and, sadly, ambulances is too frequent to be avoided. So I retreated to a corner of our basement where the ambient noise is considerably less problematic. I know nothing about sound production but the fine folks at Pacific Content, with whom we’ve partnered to produce this upcoming third season, shipped me exactly what I needed.
The heart of the setup is a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB audio interface which essentially allows my 2016 MacBook Pro to capture high quality sound. (The two are connected by USB-C, which may actually be the first time I’ve ever actually connected two USB-C devices together.) I have a Shure Beta 58A microphone (with a windstopper) connected to the Scarlett, and it’s propped up with an Amazon Basics tripod mic stand with boom. During sessions I capture my own audio with QuickTime while also talking with the rest of the production crew via video conference. That pretty much monopolizes the screen real estate on my MacBook, so I also like to use my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro to read from episode scripts and to take notes. And I listen to the whole thing with my trusty Sony MDR-V6 over-the-ear studio headphones (which are debatably the same as the more easily found MDR-7506 model), also plugged into the Scarlett.
This all sounds like we’ve been doing this podcasting-from-home thing for weeks but in truth we’re just getting started and still working out the kinks. I do miss the feel of a real recording studio and the ability to interact in person with the crew, but I’m really enjoying the convenience of being able to do pretty much the same thing from home. I’m also grateful to be able to continue working on “Wireframe” despite being in lockdown. We’ve got a great season planned, with lots of great stories about design and how it shapes technology to fit into our lives—including stories about how design, technology and living have changed since pandemic set in. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our third season kicks off later this year.
Back before our sense of normalcy was completely reset, 330,000 people used to pass through Times Square in New York City each day. Now it’s a ghost town.
I took these pictures during a somewhat irresponsible outing to midtown Manhattan on Friday night. After being cooped up for weeks at home in Brooklyn, my family and I decided to bust out of quarantine and drive into Manhattan. We headed to our favorite pizza joint, a tiny takeout shop in midtown, and ate a few slices in the car, parked right in front on West Thirty-ninth Street. It used to be impossible to ever find a spot there.
Then at about seven o’clock we drove uptown with the windows rolled down to hear the cheering as healthcare workers changed shifts, a daily ritual throughout Manhattan and in other cities that for some reason doesn’t take place in our Brooklyn neighborhood. We were practically gliding north on Eighth Avenue with the traffic lights in our favor, unimpeded by the sparse traffic on the road with us, and with the music of wild cheering and banging pots and pans on every block. I got choked up listening to it.
Fifteen minutes later it was getting dark already. We stopped on Broadway at Times Square, parked the car at yet another curbside spot that I honestly never in my life dreamed I’d ever be able to park in, and got out to explore within just a few city blocks. There were a handful of other pedestrians there, maybe less than a dozen. One of them was another opportunistic amateur photographer who asked to take a photo of us. A few people in masks were standing outside a boba tea shop, waiting for their orders. Once in a while a bicyclist would zip by, usually carrying a big, insulated food delivery bag with the name of some restaurant or delivery service emblazoned on it. And there was a police officer standing in front of the massive TKTS red steps, usually a favorite spot for dozens of tourists to rest their feet and take pictures, now cordoned off and deserted.
Not a single one of Times Square’s famous neon lights or mammoth, animated billboards had been turned off. They were all blinking, flashing, blaring their irrepressible marketing pitches out onto the bottom of a nearly soulless urban ravine. The sun had set completely by now and the lights were wildly vibrant but somehow remote, like a chandelier someone had forgotten to turn off when they’d left the house. Most of the ads were still selling to a world and time ignorant of COVID-19, but some had even been updated with inspirational corporate messages about persisting through the pandemic. Still they all seemed like echoes from the past.
Mostly Times Square felt eerie. And tense. There was the danger of somehow contracting the coronavirus, of course, which is omnipresent these days. But I also felt ill at ease about the outing, guilty about playing tourist amid a crisis, even in my own city. It really felt like we were not supposed to be there, both because we hear so much that the responsible thing is to stay home these days, but also because it felt somehow unnatural. For New York City residents especially, Times Square has never felt like a desirable place to spend your time, mostly because it was always insufferably congested with foot traffic. In the absence of people though, it felt no cozier. The architecture, the wide open square, the disturbing quiet felt forbidding to humans.
We were only there for about ten minutes before I started to think I couldn’t take it much longer. At the corner where Forty-fifth Street, Broadway and Sixth Avenue all somehow intersect at impossible angles, two men had set up what amounted to a soap box. One of them wore a balaclava, entirely masking his identity. He was shouting through a microphone attached to a portable speaker, sounding off on some political diatribe to no one in particular. I heard him spew some disgruntled invective about China and the virus, and I thought about how the pandemic had become a cowardly excuse for racist miscreants everywhere to take out their fear on Asian people. I suddenly felt nervous, maybe a bit scared, not just for me but for my kids, too. The vast emptiness of what used to be the world’s busiest city square felt even less hospitable now, maybe even a bit hostile, even. We walked back to our car and drove home.
Between all the pandemic-mandated video conferences and cooking and cleaning and my kids’ remote schooling, I watched just over a dozen movies in March. That’s only about half of what I saw the previous month, way back when life was normal—or at least when we we were all still laboring under the mistaken impression that things were normal. Of course, anything I managed to watch I watched at home, since cineplexes are not an option. But I did get to see “The Invisible Man,” which was only released in theaters at the end of February and is already out on home video. I do sorely miss theaters but I have to be grateful too to live in an age when there are so many ways to watch new movies.
Happy as I was to see it so soon, unfortunately I found director Leigh Whannell’s new take on “The Invisible Man” to be a bit of a drag. It’s less a 21st century horror film than a fairly ludicrous ’80s-style domestic thriller in the “Fatal Attraction” mold. And while it does cleverly invert the perspective of the story by focusing on the title character’s besieged love interest, it’s so overly impressed by its wokeness that it can’t stop announcing its own virtues to the audience. Subtle, it’s not. All that said, “The Invisible Man” is still reasonably suspenseful and so not a terrible way to spend two hours. Plus, Elizabeth Moss. Her performance here, like pretty much everything she’s done for the past decade, is proof that she’s one of our great living actors.
Like a lot of people I also went back and rewatched Stephen Soderbergh’s 2011 medical thriller “Contagion” which, if you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably still heard about how it was eerily prescient about our current circumstance. I’m still not sure I quite understand the perverse curiosity that made revisiting this pandemic tale irresistible (The Times took a crack at explaining the phenomenon in this article). It’s a bit like the lure of horror films, I guess, or maybe the base appeal of masochism in the face of impending doom.
By contrast, I also tried, for a minute, to watch Wolfgang Petersen’s “Outbreak” from 1995, a similar tale of a world overrun by pandemic. I’d never seen it before but from its very first frames it was so clearly unconvincing, so Hollywood, I couldn’t bear to keep watching and turned it off. As a film, “Contagion” is so much scarier because it’s so much more real, but what’s truly captivating about it is Soderbergh’s singular ability to tell a story that feels both unflinchingly realistic and escapist at the same time. Every frame, every cut, every line of dialog feels both objectively, almost clinically detached and also emotionally vibrant, even skewed. The verisimilitude is horrifying, but the artistry is mesmerizing.
Film audiences have really come to take Soderbergh for granted in recent years, probably due at least in part to his obvious compulsion for working constantly. He released two superb films in 2019, “High Flying Bird” and “The Laundromat”, that barely registered in popular conversation. It’s a bit sad that it took a horrific global pandemic for us to go back and appreciate how amazing “Contagion” was. It’s a reminder that he’s made over a half dozen equally worthwhile films since.
Here is the complete list of all fourteen films I watched in March.
“Early Man” (2018) ★★½ Charming but weightless, and disappointingly short on ambition for an Aardman film.
“Zazie dans le Métro” (1960) ★★★½ Bananas dream logic from the dawn of the French New Wave.
“Hidden Figures” (2016) ★★ Does everything by the book, which means it contains almost zero surprises.
“Contagion” (2011) ★★★★ Rewatched. Its prescience is frightening and illuminating but it’s also maybe the best medical thriller ever made.
“Onward” (2020) ★★★★ Doesn’t broadcast its artistry as loudly as Pixar’s more prominent features, but still deeply felt and satisfying.
“Clockwatchers” (1997) ★★★½ Mostly excellent meditation on the mundanity of office life a quarter centur ago(!?). Worth it just to see Parker Posey at the height of her powers.
“Shoulder Arms” (1918) ★★★★ Chaplin at the battlefront. Filmed a century before Sam Mendes’s “1917” and every bit as technically accomplished, plus funnier.
“Jojo Rabbit” (2019) ★★½ Seems to have been made on a dare because there can be no other reason for this movie to exist.
“The Invisible Man” (2020) ★★½ This movie seems to have a very important message of some kind. It was hard to tell amidst all the screamingly obvious clichés.
“Spies in Disguise” (2019) ★★ A feast of CG texture mapping, and that’s about it.
“Birdman of Alcatraz” (1962) ★★★★ Rewatched. An issues movie about penology that veers on the didactic, but Burt Lancaster carries the whole thing with his uniquely fragile hyper-masculinity.
This video produced by researchers at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar demonstrates the effect on the air surrounding a person when they cough. Starting clockwise at top left, it shows as a baseline the air flow during normal breathing, then while coughing unrestricted, while coughing into the hand, while coughing into the elbow, while coughing into a dust mask, and finally while coughing into a surgical mask.
The contrast in how air is moved between coughing unrestricted and coughing with a surgical mask is dramatic; the former travels forward explosively like a cannon while the latter combusts upwards more like a puff of smoke. Yet it’s still shocking—though I suppose it shouldn’t be—how much the surgical mask does not suppress. The university has more on how they were able to capture this visualization at uni-weimar.de.
Below is a similar visualization from Dr. Lydia Bourouiba at M.I.T. that shows, at 2,000 frames per second, how the micro-droplets of an unrestricted sneeze travel directly in front of a person in a “turbulent gas cloud.” The visual clarity here is even more striking and, though sneezing is not as closely associated with COVID-19 as coughing, still horrifying. The video shows how micro-droplets can continue to spread well beyond the six-foot safety zone we’ve all become acutely aware of in recent weeks. In an accompanying article, Dr. Bourouiba writes:
Peak exhalation speeds can reach up to 33 to 100 feet per second (10-30 m/s), creating a cloud that can span approximately 23 to 27 feet (7-8 m).
It’s worth noting that so much is still not known about COVID-19 so it’s probably not wise to draw conclusions exclusively from these videos about how the coronavirus spreads. Still, if nothing else, these visualizations underscore the importance of social distancing and the value of wearing masks in public.
In the spirt of sharing as a remedy to isolation, I thought I’d share a peek at my home office, the space where I’m spending virtually every hour of my days since we were all forced to start working remotely just a few short weeks ago. It’s an L-shaped desk in the front room of the bottom floor of our house in Brooklyn. In the picture above one of my boys is sitting adjacent to my seat, on a video call with his teacher.
I count myself lucky to have the space to dedicate to an office, and also lucky to genuinely enjoy being there. There are many downsides to being more or less confined to our own homes but having this working area just a flight of stairs away from my family is actually a huge joy for me.
Plus, this office has all of my stuff; the equipment and the books and the gadgets that help me feel creative and stay focused. I’ve never really been one of those people who could work productively for hours at a time at coffee shops because I really just needed all my paraphernalia around me and arranged just so in order to really get in the zone. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s here, in case you’re looking for tips for your own WFH setup as well.
My main computer is this 27-inch, Retina 5K iMac from 2017. I’m actually not a fan of laptops and would much prefer having a huge, stationary monitor and the horsepower of an iMac and rely on an iPad for computing on the go.
I’ve got a ton of peripherals attached to this iMac too, including a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball and an Apple Magic Keyboard; I find that switching back and forth eases repetitive strain on my wrists. I’ve also got a Matias Wireless Aluminum Keyboard which connects to up to four devices via Bluetooth, very handy for the other computers that I have to add to this mix occasionally. Also essential but hidden in this picture is a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M document scanner, an essential tool for getting rid of paper clutter.
I also use this aging 13-inch, Retina MacBook Pro from 2015 as essentially a dedicated video conferencing station. It’s hooked up to a Jabra Speak 410 which is exceptionally loud and clear as a conferencing speaker and microphone. With so much going on in the house these days though, I usually use the Jabra just as a mic and plug in my Sony MDR-V6 over-the-ear headphones (still the best sounding headphones out there for my money) as a speaker instead. The laptop is propped up on a Bent Ply Laptop Stand, a really beautiful design originally created by Eric Pfeiffer for Evernote many years ago (I bought it as a remaindered sale item when Evernote realized they had no business selling office hardware). Since the laptop is elevated by the stand I use a Logitech MX Ergo wireless trackball as a mouse with it.
We’re a Google Home household and I keep a Google Home Mini on my desk for, among other functions, the broadcast feature, which allows all the similar devices in the house to act as an intercom system. It’s great for not having to yell between floors to get someone else’s attention.
When it’s warm out, I use this surprisingly effective Lasko 4000 Air Stik oscillating fan to cool off. Directly under that spot of the desk, hidden from view, is a small Honeywell Uberheat ceramic space heater for use during cooler weather. Since it’s usually just me on the floor where my office is, these save me a ton on HVAC bills.
I keep this Page-a-Day New Words Calendar on my desk, and every morning I tear off another sheet like a nerd but I relish it. Today’s word (as I write this) is auriferous.
A few years ago I decided to upgrade our house to mesh wi-fi hardware and chose the Netgear Orbi system for the fact that unlike many other mesh wi-fi systems, it’s not centrally managed by its manufacturer. I keep this Orbi Satellite node here to extend the network throughout this floor and it works great.
This 2016 MacBook Pro is my official work laptop. Usually of course it’s at the office but I took it with me when we were all asked to work from home. I hardly ever touch it though, as it’s practically redundant with the other devices I already have at home. Plus it’s only got USB-C ports which I still find to be irritating.
Many years ago I sprang for this Herman Miller Aeron chair when I spotted it on sale. I’m generally skeptical of the promises of office chair ergonomics but I haven’t found a better built chair than this one.
This dark object tucked under the desk is a paper shredder. If it’s not obvious I’m pretty enthusiastic about getting rid of paper.
Usually when there’s not a pandemic on, I use this Baron Fig Roamer Tote as my work bag. But even without the daily commute, I still find this bag super handy for transporting tech gear within the house, as I sometimes find myself working from other rooms when someone in the family needs to use the office for privacy.
Obscured slightly behind the chair here is my 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018, attached to a Brydge Pro keyboard. I always keep it handy and given the choice it would be my preferred computer. I’ll also occasionally use it as a secondary monitor for the iMac via macOS’s excellent Sidecar feature.
Yes we still have a house phone line! Actually it’s a VOIP line from Vonage, connected to a VTech DECT handset system. It’s much clearer sounding than cell phones (I hate talking on cell phones) and it’s free to call our family overseas.
When I get a break from video calls I like to play music from my Mac through these Creative Labs Gigaworks bookshelf speakers (the right speaker is at the far end of the shelf). Being able to play music out loud is one of the best perks of working from home.
You can find virtually everything on this list to buy for yourself somewhere—except the L-shaped desk itself. That and the shelves installed in that little nook above my seat were built for me not long after we moved into this house by a carpenter I found via a friend’s referral. The guy was a real artist with wood; not only did he custom fit these items to the exact dimensions of this particular space, but he built in all kinds of amazing details to the pieces. You can see how the legs of the desk actually include vertical storage; the drawers open and close with complete silence; towards the back of the desk he drilled 1-1/2 inch holes for cables that lead to a hidden raceway where wires can be threaded and hidden.
This carpenter was also an impeccable craftsman; every edge lines up perfectly and even after seven years of regular use, not a single edge has chipped or a single part has broken. I keep referring to him in the past tense because unfortunately not long after finishing this project he left the custom carpentry business altogether. (So unfortunately I can’t refer friends in search of a carpenter to him.) Still, the abundant care and craftsmanship with which he invested this setup is one of the reasons it’s such a pleasure to sit here, day in and day out. Not that i wouldn’t prefer getting back out into the rest of the world, mind you.
