Interview with Robert Creighton of Red Cape Studio in the Education of Designers

Hey everyone. My name is Ian Peterman, CEO of Peterman Design Firm and host of Conscious Design. And today I'm welcoming to the show Robert. He is also an industrial designer and it's really great to have you on here. You really love your experience and the stuff that you've been doing.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting.

Yeah, so one of the biggest things we— we have 2 big topics to talk about, but the first is really education of designers. And you've entered that space some from exhibit design, but you also— we talked quite a bit about it. So let's talk about systems in design and how that needs to be part of the education process. Tell a little bit more.

So I started teaching about 7 years ago. That was something that when I moved out here from— moved— I'm based in Los Angeles. When I moved out to LA from New York, that was certainly one of the things that I wanted to work on, was to teach. There's 3 different product design programs within the greater LA area. There's ArtCenter Otis, and then California State University at Long Beach. They're all a little different. All the programs are a little different. I teach at Otis. I've had experience with the other 2 programs as They're all, they all do different things really, really well. At Otis, in my experience, the program was founded more from a craft direction, I guess. So there's a fairly strong connection to materials, but it's also kind of open-ended, as these things are, as industrial design programs are. And it's called a product design program, so maybe there's some distinction there.

Okay.

Versus maybe an industrial design program. I tend to wrap everything under the term industrial design, and I have arguments about that with people. That's sort of a grand argument within the field itself. Should it be called industrial design? What does that mean? Should it be called something else, considering how broad and varied the field is? Pardon me. So I think that in thinking about when you reached out to me about conscious design, and thinking about the educational experience, I went in thinking that I would kind of listen for a little while, see how that program is run. I've been— I've taught a lot of different classes, and I think that there's these takeaways that I keep coming back to. Some of them are— probably all of them ultimately are fairly connected to a more traditional definition of industrial design, where you're really getting at the core of problems. But I think in the, in the context of the world in which we live and the speed at which product design happens these days, which is, I think, really highly influenced by the speed at which UI/UX and app design happens. So we've taken a lot of what software design is, we've shoved it into product design, physical product design, not digital product design. And that's really, really difficult when you're talking about mold making, when you're talking about actual materials and all the things that can go wrong in that, and that you can't push out a V1 product and then all of a sudden go back and make these quick changes to the mold like you can with software.

So you're committing, no pushing out the update.

Yeah, exactly. You're committing in a very different way. And I think that one of the things that comes along with that, that I think tracks with these changes that we've seen, or change may be too strong a word, but an understanding, a recognition that, look, the world is We do some things really, really well across the world in terms of product design. It's changed dramatically since I graduated 20-some years ago, 23 years ago, I think. And we see some of the problems that come along with that. So you have tremendous supply chain all over the world, but you have really big problems that come along with that. So the reason why I'm bringing that up is because the environmental impact that we have across the world. When we focus on the environmental piece, when we focus on fish dying in the oceans, or we focus on plastic going into the oceans, that's really valid. We can look at that from a design standpoint and make some changes. Within the educational sphere, I think when we consider conscious design, that's usually the procedure that we use. So I think traditionally we've said, well, let's look at a new material, let's look at an existing product that we can reshred and reconstitute as something else. That's a fairly common one. And so if you're asking a student to, you know, manufacture a material from scratch, then what you're really talking about is taking something that's existing, remaking it into something else. And that's, you know, it's somewhat limited because we're not chemical engineers, we're not material scientists as designers, but we can ask those questions. I think the challenge, and the thing that's really interesting to me when it comes to conscious design, is to be conscious about this broader the broader impact. And so again, when we— it's easy to get halted when you say environmental design, you say green design. And I think when we talk about systems design, as it relates to having a consciousness, to being conscious about design, to being thoughtful about design, when we approach it from that standpoint, I think educationally, I think it's a really— it's a good place to be. Because it doesn't— from my experience, it doesn't stop you as a student from considering really wonderful, wild ideas. It doesn't make you feel like you're always destroying the world, which I suppose sometimes you are with product design. Instead, the hope, at least in my experience teaching these students, is to get them to really think more broadly about the impact. And so again, traditionally, we've talked about green design, we focus on a single product. We focus on this one material, we're going to redesign this one thing, and it's a misnomer. It was always a part of a system, we just never thought about it as a system. So I think that as designers, we tend to think about them as individual objects, we tend to celebrate them as individual objects, we tend to teach students to celebrate them as individual objects. It's the beautiful chair, it's the beautiful bottle, it's the beautiful whatever the thing is— oven, refrigerator, car, name the object. without, as the designer, thinking about the impact of the entire system. And so I've spent a lot of time within my classes trying to help them focus on, hey, these things are all impacting these other things going on around the world in ways that you can't directly fix through your design.

Right.

But you can be thoughtful about it. You can be conscious about it. And you are playing, as a designer, a critical role in this process. And you have to, you got to accept that. And you either have to embrace it, I think, moving forward, you either have to embrace that or you have to get out of the way. Because I don't think that we can continue the way that we're going. And so exposing the students to that, I think, is helpful in getting them to be, to your word, more conscious about it, to just be more thoughtful about it.

Well, and that's a really good point because A lot of education is super focused on, you know, the technical skills. So you need to be able to draw, you need to be able to 3D model, here's some materials. And even when I started, when I graduated my design, we had an option to like minor in sustainability, but that was just like, oh, use a biodegradable plastic instead of plastic, not thinking about the system. And I think there's a broader conversation too, now that people The last year and a half has really kind of broken the bubble, and things like diversity and equity and inclusion and these other concepts within products and within the systems that we work in are now being questioned and now being looked at and saying, oh, we should probably fix that. I would actually have the argument that as product designers, as tangible product designers, we have one of the most key components and positions in directing that, because we get to decide what does a product look like. We can help actually change the system and guide it, not that we'll do it directly necessarily with everything, right? Right. But even, even after I've talked to people, most people don't realize how deep a supply chain is. Like, I just talked to someone on Monday that we were talking about pencil, just a regular, a regular number 2, you know, Ticonderoga pencil you'd pick up for school. And somebody did a video of actually showing all the different countries and all the different companies it requires to make Pencil, which is like 3, 4, 4 raw material components, maybe 5. But, you know, it gets painted, it gets shaped, it gets—

it's—

there's all this work that gets put into it. We don't think about— even as designers, we go, oh, this is a great pencil, look at how beautiful the pencil is, it works. And then we've— we all kind of just have collective amnesia about everything else related to it. So it's Yeah, it seems very missing in our design education, but also as professionals. Like, it's not as very— we get absorbed into the design, it looks pretty, good render kind of side to it. So that's— and it's great that you're kind of helping people, students expand their minds into there's a system. There's a system to attach attached to everything that you're doing.

I think I was just going to say that I think that there's— in the end, it comes down to a set of questions, right? A set of choices that we make. I mean, many, many things in our life ultimately surround that, either that word choice or question. And you want to be conscious about making those choices. And I think that's, again, where that word— I think I like the word conscious. that's where that word comes in again, when you're in— and I think there's, there's a whole other side to the education piece that I don't think we need to discuss right now, but that has really been—

Right.

It's cast a spotlight through the pandemic on it, and that is the cost of education. So if we're talking about, you know, Otis as a private institution, it's expensive to go there. It's— I think the tuition is $49,000 a year or something like that. Now, that's the top line number. I don't know what the number is per student, what they really pay. It's, it's like that at every university. There's tuition number that you see on the website, and then there's the tuition you actually pay because of everything else. But having said that, the question is, well, if, you know, I'm teaching students that are all over the world during the pandemic, they're back in Russia, they're back in China, they're back in Taiwan, they're back in South Korea. So if you don't have to be on campus, what's the benefit of paying to be on this campus? Where do we— what is the real value that we're bringing to those students? And so I I think that that piece of it, you really got to ask yourself, well, what is this experience for? And if it was purely— I think this is where it gets, for me, kind of confusing. Or maybe confusing is the wrong word. Maybe just challenging sounds like a nicer word. Or maybe this is really the opportunity if I'm a designer. But the question is that if I was strictly teaching students to go get a job, which is what they need when they graduate from school, I would be teaching UI/UX every time. Because 90% of the jobs that are listed under product design are digital, they're not physical.

Right.

Because that's the moment that we're in, right? And it was like when I graduated in the late '90s, there was the tech boom back then. It was all website design. That's what people were hiring then. That's what people wanted to go in because that was kind of the coolest thing to do, was interesting, was new. There's tremendous amount of money being thrown at it like there is now. But the flip side of that is that what we're really trying to teach them is a process. Right, that's what design is, and that process can be applied to a lot of different ideas. It can be applied to potentially anything you want to work on. You know, whether that's some kind of hospital administration, or whether that's making a new kind of pizza, or whether that's designing a new car, it doesn't really matter what the problems are that you're trying to attach the design process to. You can use it to try and solve those. So in the end, I think what I'm trying to help the students see then is this broader impact And the choices that you make relative to that impact, the conscious choices that you make. And so in the moment when you graduate, the choice may be, I need a job, I need to pay off my loan. I'm with you there. That makes a total huge amount of sense to me.

Yep.

But the long-term choice, yeah, might be different. And when you're in your career, and I think this is one of the things that I think students don't always think about, particularly undergrad students, is, are you— do you really want to make it a career? Because when you talk to people who've been doing this for 20 years or 30 years, they've had a whole series of choices they've had to make, right, every few years, and they've tried to be hopefully conscious about making those choices to do the things that they want to do, and to your point, to work on the things that they want to work on, to work on the things that are going to have an impact long term. That's where you can start to have an impact as you get into your career, and that's because hopefully you've been exposed to these ideas earlier and you can be thoughtful in the choices that you make moving forward so that you can change these bits that are moving around the world in physical ways that we really do genuinely— some of them we genuinely need to change. Some of that stuff really shouldn't be made. That's the reality. Some products never should hit the market. But nobody's asking that question, right? Nobody's being conscious about should. They're purely thinking about, I think, the short-term gain, short-term financial gain for that particular business, which again, I get, but long-term, it's having a negative impact. So the students that we are training now, they have to be thinking longer term than previous generations were. I mean, I think that's where the jobs are going to be. That's the reality. I don't think that they're— I don't think the jobs that I potentially would have had right out of school are going to be there in another 10 or 20 years. I think those will be gone. They'll be replaced by other kinds of jobs. And the designers moving forward are going to be asked And asking different kinds of questions. So the hope is that we're helping those students now really think about what those questions are to have the greatest impact that they can have out of school.

Right. Well, and that's, that's a really good point in that it's not— it's a design strategy. It's your design thinking process. How do you really, really, if you boil it really down, it's just problem solving and critical thinking. I think that's That's really what you're doing. And you're— ideally, we're expanding that and, you know, showing the technical side of it as well and expanding it. But at the end of the day, you should have basically a formula of, well, if you think through things in this process, you'll be able to figure out a solution to the problem. And, you know, it'll be a design solution.

Mm-hmm.

But you're right, like hospital administration and These are design solutions. These are— there's people that I've met, people that have worked, they have a design background, but they end up designing systems. So they end up designing processes. And the same approach, it can be— they learn the same skills, basic skills. They learn the same design thinking skills, and they can apply to a whole bunch of different areas, which is interesting to point out because, like you said, we've gone through several booms.

Yeah.

Websites were really hot. Now that's highly commoditized. Nobody's jumping out of school in droves looking for high-paying web design jobs because there's not as many there. Apps are the thing to be on now, and I'm sure in 10 years there'll be some new design field that's running, but there's also really successful designers that were designing in the '90s that are still designing now. And they're not designing websites, they're designing apps. So they're using a process that just works. They're creating solutions to their thinking process. So I think that's— I think that's really important to be able to disseminate. And the other thing you mentioning, like conscious design, is you also have to be aware. If you're not aware and don't know, if you're not conscious of it, you can't actually begin to apply. Like if you're not No one tells you that blue is blue, you'll never know. You'll be the one person not knowing what that blue is blue. So without that knowledge and without, without, you know, conversations like this and you talking to your students and saying, hey, there is this, will never switch over and you'll end up being in a place where you don't know enough to actually do something. And I think that's— That's where a lot of— I've seen is people are— they just don't know. And once you tell them, they go, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. I understand. And now I can do something about it rather than not knowing what's going on or what all is involved, especially in the system level of what are all the pieces. How does a product impact the social The societal level of the town that it's— that product, raw materials getting pulled from the earth in. Like, what is that? What does that look like? And if you don't think about it, you won't ever know. And so it's bringing awareness to people is really important at the educational level, because that's when we're all young and impressionable and can be told things and we'll, we'll go after a little bit more, I think.

I think too that there's this issue, and I'm not sure really what the right balance is, and I have a fondness for the word balance because I think choice, balance, opportunity, these things are critical in our lives and kind of any component of your life, and certainly as a designer you have that. And so it's this balance between what really is your responsibility. to making this particular decision? What is your responsibility to some space somewhere off in another country where they're mining lithium? Because you need that for your batteries, because what you're creating is a super cool new wireless headphone that you can't replace the batteries in. And it's amazing. And the experience is fantastic of using it because it just connects whenever I want it to connect and I can wander about and it's great. And I don't have to have a cable that's gonna catch on my table saw anymore. It's fabulous, you know, it's a really great thing, only that there's this— it's a part of the system, it doesn't exist in isolation. And so the under— there's an awareness to your word that I think is really important, and an exposure that we— that as an educator you can give to the students. What they choose to do with that ultimately as they become professionals is really up to them, but you can provide them with that information and then they have to figure out the right balance. So we can formulate projects that hopefully help them ask those questions like, where is the balance for this particular thing? Do I— does the benefit of the physical experience, of the end user experience outweigh the negative that's on the other end? And I'm going to try and mitigate that problem to someplace where they're mining lithium by doing something beyond the end user, because I'm a manufacturer now and I'm going to take back the product and I'm going to recycle it. So I'm going to try and mitigate that. Is it something else? And so when I think that the— as a designer, you know, I've heard this from students and I've said that I've felt this as well. I'll have some student, they're bending something out of plywood again. Like, man, that's— it's a cool material. I totally dig it. It's fabulous. You know, I love bentwood furniture. I love some of that furniture that came out of the '50s and the '60s. My grandfather was an architect in LA during that time. Like, he knew all those folks.

Right.

It's fabulous, you know. And they say, man, I wish I could have just lived back then. Like, nobody cared, right? We were— it didn't matter because, because when you look at the graph of plastic, it looks like this, and it starts from, you know, 1937 or something.

We invented it and just everywhere.

But in that moment, it was fine. Everyone's using fiberglass, great. Like, we're barehanded, like, shoving the fiberglass in the mold. No worries.

Asbestos is fine.

Like, yeah, it's probably—

everything was fine.

Right. So I wish I could go back. And then you realize, I think, when you start to think about that, one, they weren't thinking about it as a system. They weren't thinking about— they weren't even asking the questions necessarily about what could the problems be, what might the problems be. But I think critically, when you look back at all the folks who we have, who we traditionally— and granted, we don't always do a good job of giving students design history. We've left out a lot of people. That's one of the things that I think is really good about the conversation that's coming up about DEI, et cetera, et cetera, having to do with really rethinking how we look at art design history and all these folks who were really impactful as designers who we don't talk about. But if you look at those folks who were really— who did really great work, and those could be the ones, all the names that we know, it could be the folks who were less celebrated and maybe are starting to be celebrated now, those people wouldn't be working with those materials now. those people would be growing their own materials. Those people would be thinking, they'd be asking all the questions that we're starting to talk about because they were at the cutting edge. And so I think it's— that's another one of those exposure pieces from my experience to try and integrate into the program, to ingratiate the students with this idea that in this moment, if you really want to do great work, you want to be at the cutting edge of particularly material research.

Right.

That's where the impact is That's such a good point.

I've never thought of that. That's really— because yeah, you get— I remember design history classes were all, you know, famous people and you talk about them and everybody's like, oh, well, let's— we got to design like they did.

Yeah.

But no one— I don't think— you're the first person I've heard say, well, yeah, think about what they would be doing if they were alive and in their 30s designing today. They wouldn't be doing what they were doing then.

They're not going to be bending plywood. Yeah, they're going to be doing something completely different. I mean, you think of— and so that's when you look around at— I like the organization What Can Design Do. They just had a no-waste challenge. I didn't participate in it. Some of the designs that came out are really interesting. You look around the world at some of the design challenges that are there, and you find those things where people are really pushing the boundaries. And it could be crap. I mean, from a design standpoint, from aesthetics, it could be terrible. But you have to look at what— or I think the students need to look at what's underneath that. What makes this worthwhile? That's really interesting. And what you find, I think, typically is that when people are operating in that kind of mental space, in that headspace of asking a lot, it's doing exactly what designers should do. And that's the thing that's critical about this, that the process hasn't changed, right?

No.

The materials change, the opportunities change, and then there's an understanding of our impact on the world that changes. And so if we apply the same, it could, you could call it a tired old process with a new name, design thinking or something else, It's still the same thing, but you have to embrace it, live in it, and ask all those questions. There's Don Norman who teaches down in San Diego. I remember he wrote an article about design thinking a number of years ago and got a lot of flack on all the ID sites with people. He was not into the word at that time. He was saying it was becoming like the word innovation. It's sort of meaningless. Everybody uses it, but they don't know what the hell it means. So why are we using it? it all, he got all this flak. He wrote a rebuttal then, or a response, and in that response he talked about this thing that for me, it's stuck with me all these years, and that is the idea of being the person in the room who asks dumb questions. That word in particular, those 2 words, dumb questions, that really, really stuck with me, because when designers are doing their work really, really well, we're the person who asks those questions. We're the one who's the filter. I use this a lot with my students. I want them to feel comfortable not being the smartest person in the room. Because everybody else in the room, all the other consultants in the room who want to be the smartest folks in the room, are afraid to ask the question because you don't want to seem dumb. But asking the dumb question is what designers need to do, because asking the dumb question gets you to a deeper level of understanding where the problem really resides. And often then that is at the systems level. So it's not, well, why can't it be purple? Or why can't it be made out of metal steel instead of aluminum? But you keep going down and down and you sometimes get to this question that no one wants to ask, which is, Why are we making this product? That's a scary, scary question. And on some level, it's a dumb question to ask for your job, and maybe it's a dumb question to ask, but it's a really important question to ask given where we are in the world and given the potential for impact that you can have if you come at it from a different standpoint. And there's a litany of companies that have done a really good job of asking those kinds of questions. Most of them are service-based, but you could look at Airbnb, you can look at a bunch of others. They ask those questions. It doesn't mean that those companies are all great or that their impacts are all great, but they often then disrupt these huge industries because they're asking these core questions really deep, or that's how it seems to me anyway.

Well, I think that's very accurate because it's— and maybe they're just asking— actually, likely they're asking a question that was asked maybe 10 years ago, But nobody had asked the question in 10 years. So why are we, why are we building this product? Why do we, why do we exist? Why are we doing this?

Right.

I think that, that is definitely like that curiosity.

Yeah.

Gets as, as you, as you sit there and work, you know, we, if you become an expert at toy design, you're going to ask only the questions because you've already answered You've already asked those questions at some point, so you're only going to be asking new questions. You're not really going to go back, and you're going to be really focused on just toys. And that's where I see, like, inter— teams that have different experience points. You bring in an automotive and you bring in a toy, like, they're going to ask questions that the other would never have thought about in their field because it's been 20 years, it's been 30 years.

Right. They ask that question.

I think that's also— it can be achieved by introducing different industries to each other and putting them on one team and having them go into some third field and design something that's unrelated. And I've definitely taken advantage of that in my own— running my own teams, intentionally making people work on projects that is not their expertise, because then they ask all those questions because they're— They're no longer the expert in the room, which is kind of, is just that feel like once you are no longer the expert, you ask those questions, which may be dumb, but there's not really—

Critical.

They're not really dumb questions. Well, if you ask it twice, then, then maybe it's dumb, but ask it once then and get a real answer like that. That's diving, diving deeper. Creating an experience of learning, which I think is also a good segue point to jump into the experiential portion of your design experience.

Mm-hmm.

In that when you're designing, you know, asking those dumb questions, those are the only questions children ask and people that are learning are asking. And so how does that, how does that play into how you So you've done museums, you've done kid-related, like how does that play into designing experiences where that is your target market, is all people that are asking those questions?

That's a great question. I think that the— that same— I mean, I think I've, you know, you find things as a professional, you can read widely and you bump into things that are really interesting to you. That article has stuck with me all these time— all this time about asking dumb questions. There's a second one that's when I went back to school, I studied semiotics. I studied the American School of Semiotics by this guy Charles Peirce. There's a French school by Saussure. The American school is triadic. Everything is relational in threes. And at the core of it are this thing called firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Firstness is sort of a sense of something before you can identify it, before you even can put it into words. Secondness is fact. It's something that's like, it's wood, it's hard, I can't walk through the table, that kind of thing. And thirdness is pattern. And these are really base-level ideas within his system of semiotics, which gets very vast. He was searching for a theory of everything. But the reason why I bring it up is because those 2 things, they're sitting in the back of my mind always when I'm in meetings. So whether it's asking dumb questions or it's firstness, secondness, and thirdness, these things I find to be foundational Spaces for me to exist within so that I can stay in a learning space. And I think that's getting back to the things that you were just talking about. It's when designers are really great, there is the execution, and that's a— there's a vast world of execution that needs to actually happen to really build the thing. There's a whole lot of steps that have to happen.

And you want experts there. You want, you want your engineer to know their math. That's— you do.

And You want designers to be able to speak that language and speak with them and be able to really design things that can be built. You don't want to be living in a pie-in-the-sky world. But at the front end, and this is where I would take it back to this idea of the impact of software design and product design, if we rush the front end, then the back end doesn't really matter. The back end, you're still going to build a cool thing, but you're going to build a thing that no one wants or that no one needs because you rushed the front end, because you didn't determine what the problem was or whether or not the world should have this thing, whether or not this object should ever be made in the first place. That's true in exhibits as well. That's true in physical experiences. If you define the problems incorrectly, if you define the learning modalities incorrectly, what you get in the end is something that no one wants to stay in, no one wants to learn from, and you have a failure. And so what I find the benefit and the negative in this world is that although they tend to be private entities, there are certainly state-funded institutions that I work with that are probably even slower than the private institutions, but they're not— they do not see themselves as— they see themselves differently from other businesses. They're not selling a product, right? They are selling an experience, but they're selling a cultural experience. And the result of that, and I think also because the way that they're built, probably closer, frankly, to educational institutions, they're highly bureaucratic museums. They're slow as a result. This is all kinds of museums. It doesn't matter if it's an art museum, or a science center or a natural history museum. They're just, they're very bureaucratic. And so they're slow to make decisions. And the result is a lot of meetings. That's unfortunate. It can be unfortunate for your budget, right? If you're burning money in meetings.

Yeah.

But it can be great for being able to sit in this space and ask these questions again and again and again and again to filter out all the nonsense and get down to what really matters. What are we really trying to communicate? someone. And I think often enough, you go on Amazon, you look at the product, you walk through a store, and you look at the projects, and I'm scratching my head wondering what the hell they were thinking in the meeting. What were they actually saying when they defined what the problem was, or who their client was, who their customer, potential customer could be? How did they answer that question? Because it doesn't seem like they answered it at all. Sitting in these meetings with scientists, with curators, with history folks, You get to ask, in my experience, because I come in as an amateur every single time on those projects. I recognize that I'm an amateur. I recognize that I don't know what in the world I'm talking about, and it frees me to be in a learning mode, to ask the dumb questions, and to force those folks who are experts to have to explain it to me. Because if they can't explain it to me, there's no way that we can explain it to the general public. Right, so we become, and I kind of like this position, frankly, we become the filter, right? I think designers often can be that filter between whether it's a manufacturer, whether it's the state government, whether it's a state institution like a museum or a private museum, and their customer. And their customer is the person coming through, the visitor to that institution. So if I can be the filter, that's a great place to be because I'm in a space where I have to Naturally recognize what are the needs of the people coming through, the visitor, and that could be physical needs, that could be emotional, that could be something learning, a different mode of learning. And so you wind up asking a lot of— I wind up asking a lot of what I think seem like kind of dumb questions. I don't know another way to put it, but I feel like a kid when I'm in those meetings. I usually feel like I'm the youngest person in the room. I don't have any idea what I'm talking about. And I just draw, right? That's exactly what a child does. So I'm apparently— I'm still a child, but that's a great place to be when you're a designer because it forces you to, or it allows you to just drive the conversation forward. So when we're talking about, well, how do we— you know, there's these different kinds of squirrels that live in LA. There's a couple different kinds of squirrels that live in LA, and some of them are really successful and some are not. The ones that are no longer successful, they used to all live here. They all live in the mountains now. They live in the mountains because they were all run over by cars, and they were run over by cars because they can't cross the power lines. But the other squirrels who were introduced from Wisconsin or somewhere like that, they're non-native, they're everywhere. And they're everywhere because they can cross the power lines. They don't get run over by the cars. So they just had a lot— they made a lot of babies, and they were very successful. Well, so how do we figure out how to tell that story? And it's really easy to write it down. It's easy to tell it in a, you know, do a picture, but then why is it at a museum? Why am I coming to a museum to read it on a wall? Why is that any better than me reading it in a book? And so you then have to figure out some other method to communicate those things, to be conscious about really thinking through, how am I going to— what am I— what do I really want someone to leave with? If I ask them after they run through the exhibit at, you know, 10 miles an hour, what do they walk away with? And so to do that, you really have to focus in on these key, these critical concepts, and then you kind of lay those out and then try and figure out the depth of them from there. And I, you know, I want to tie it back to something you said before, which was the potential for bringing in people of different disciplines, which has naturally always been the way that I've worked because of museums. You have to have all these people of different disciplines. There isn't— I can't design it all on my own. I don't know enough to do that. So we then have to have lighting designers, we have to have media people, we have to have scientists. And one of the things that I think is a— that I like to see, it is certainly always the case, or more often the case, I would say not always the case, but more often the case within the museum world. It was certainly from a gender perspective much more diverse than other fields. There's lots of women who work within museums, not as much at higher levels. That's starting to change. But I think what we're seeing now is a recognition that there, we really still need even greater diversity in there. And that's what I wanted to mention is that you talked about bringing in different folks for teams and that's being in a meeting and being able to ask some questions. The ability to do that, the ability to be in a learning space, if you have a greater diversity in your team, it always, always leads to better questions because all of them have different life experiences. And so that's very, very true within a museum setting, particularly if we're talking about foundational, you know, foundational learning things for kids within a city like LA. There's a ton of kids in Los Angeles. The LA Natural History Museum gets 650,000 students coming through their institution every year. A high percentage of those students don't have dirt to dig in. Like, it's just, it's, it's, that seems baffling to me, but there isn't any dirt. There's no dirt at the school. schools because they're all asphalt. There's no dirt where they live because it's all concrete. So they've never dug in the dirt. So when they think about dirt, they think it's dirty. They don't think that, oh, life is in the dirt. There's all these creatures in the dirt. Our food comes out of the dirt. Dirt is really important. There's a whole lot to learn. There's literally a world of dirt, which is not the way I always thought about dirt.

Right.

Helping students understand that is really important and having people who have different life experiences are part of the team gets you closer to that, because that's not my experience growing up. And so I may not think that way. I might not recognize that that is an issue, but somebody else, another designer who comes with a different background, they might recognize that that's an issue, or a different member of the team working within the museum, they might recognize that. So the diversity, I think that piece, which can be kind of overwrought within the within the media space, when it hits— when you hit the ground with it, particularly in the design meeting, it can be groundbreaking listening to people who have different experiences. It's really, really critical, I think. And it stems from this one piece, which is being able to ask questions. I mean, to me, it all ties back to that. I don't mean to simplify it too much, but it's so critical to ask good questions, to be curious. Their curiosity will come from a different place than mine, and that's a good thing.

Right. Well, I think that's where, like, being a child gets a little bit of a bad rap, but it really— it's when you're acting like a child that way, it's— you should— we should all be that way. If we all asked those dumb questions more, we'd probably get a different— we'd have a little bit of a different world we'd live in if we actually asked those questions. Because as you said, the reality is that the answer is going to be different too, right? You talk to somebody that grew up in an asphalt world where dirt wasn't— like, they didn't have access to dirt, which you don't— like, I, I did. I grew up with access to dirt, so I didn't— right? My— as a child especially, the comprehension that someone would not have access to dirt— well, it's under us. Like, don't you always have access? Like, shouldn't it always be there? And then you know, you grow up and figure out, oh yeah, there's concrete cities and kids that live in apartments and go to school and they literally walk on streets and sidewalk and that's it.

Right.

And then, then you slowly figure it out and they're gonna have, you know, kid with and without, they're gonna have different answers when you ask them, you know, the dumb question. They're gonna have 2 different answers, which is part of why that question— questions aren't always really dumb. They just they're a basic level question, and then you figure out, oh, you have a different set of life experiences, and so your answer is actually different than my answer to that question. And that's— yeah, as you build your diversity, it's pretty impressive to me that— and I hadn't really thought about it— like, all the people that are required to put a museum, you know, experience together, it does create— kind of that ideal mixing pot of, you have your scientists and you have your designers and then you have, you know, I'd imagine if you're doing a cultural experience, you have people from that culture plus everything else. So you're now, you're really mixing together people that most likely probably wouldn't be in a room together. Like there's—

Right.

Often I feel like that could be a mixing point where Really, you would just wouldn't get together typically unless you're like maybe casually, but often, you know, scientists and everyone don't all just mix together. So it's— that would be quite an interesting experience to have such a varied group of people together on a project.

For sure. I think that— I mean, that's at its best. Obviously, it doesn't always work at its best, but that's at its best. But I think, you know, if we tie it back to conscious design, I think I probably mentioned this when we spoke before, but there's an opportunity, I think, here within that space that I— when I had been working in that field for 7 or 8 years, when I moved, I was kind of burnt out on it. I wasn't really seeing— I wanted to do some other things, wanted to make some stuff. Still like making stuff. One of the things that I think has always drawn me back to the world of museums, and I almost don't like the word museum because there's a connotation to it that can be really limiting. You say museum, you have a certain set of expectations because of that word. I think the reality is that it's a public square. And so there aren't many physical public squares left within— this all speaks specifically to the US, but places where everybody gets together and you can have a shared experience. So one could argue that a movie theater might be that, only you don't really talk about the movies so much while you're there.

Right.

Within a museum exhibit, there's an opportunity to actually have conversations with people, to have those kind of bump-into-each-other conversations, to talk about things that are challenging with people who maybe you wouldn't normally have a chance to talk to. And there's a lot of issues within, certainly within this country, that we kind of need to address. And the only way that I know within a democracy to do that is to talk about them. And what we don't see, or as much as I would like to see, is those conversations happening within online spaces. So I know that to some degree that they do in some places, but too often those spaces are driven by large algorithms, whether that's Facebook or Twitter or any of the others. And those algorithms are driving you to talk to people who you're going to already be talking to, people who support your idea or people who are just going to make you upset. Rather than having a conversation. So in person, it's harder to yell. It's harder to get in somebody's face. It's easier to have a slightly more cordial conversation, or at least respectful conversation with somebody you might disagree with. And you're there. I think that there's a real benefit within, one, to be physical, but two, to be next to the actual stuff. That matters. And it still matters. And it I don't see it being replaced. And so I think that when I think about that word that you first approached me with, conscious design, that comes back directly to what are the projects that I really want to work on? What is worth working on? I love art museums, and those can be really moving and impactful, but I've worked on other projects that I find that are, I would call them more cultural projects, where I don't know anything about it, or maybe I know a little bit about but not a lot. And there's the stuff. So an example of that would be a project that I worked on at CAM here in California, California African American Museum. It's state-funded, mostly an art museum, but they had a curator who was doing more history exhibits, and they had one that was about slavery in California, which I knew nothing about. I didn't know any of it had stretched to California, which it certainly did. And one of the pieces was this neck I don't even know what it's officially called, neck collar for slaves, the actual thing. That's a thing, an object that is impactful to be next to. It matters because you know that it was on someone's neck, you know that someone was bought and sold and wore this thing around their neck. It's hard to have a— to be flippant about slavery when you're standing next to something that is part of that history, that's directly part of that history. And so I think that there's a space there within museums to— I think they have a role to play that they don't always realize that they can play, and that there are sometimes, I think, some museum administrators are a little bit afraid to play that role sometimes. I think there's an opening up of that, which is good across the country. So there's museums that are taking on this role a little more seriously. And I think having that space where you can really have that conversation in person that can be moderated conversations next to the actual stuff. That it's easy online to dismiss that something, oh, that's not real, it's fake. Yeah, here's this thing. It's—

you could—

yeah, I'm sure some people would say, well, that's not real, that's a 3D-printed model of this thing or whatever, you know. I mean, it's hard to do that.

People say that when they go to NASA, so when they go to space museums and claim like— so that group of people will always exist.

Yes.

Unfortunately. But, but yeah, it's— and that's— I've experienced that in going to historical museums in, in different places. I, I went to— I had the opportunity to go to Spain, and I went to a nautical museum there. And there's nothing like standing next to a chunk of ship that's hundreds of years old, preserved, going, yeah, this was actually a part of a ship And you look at it, you're like, yep, that's, that's a piece of ship. Like, you're— you see pieces or you see, you know, something brought, brought from a pyramid, and you're like, that's such a different experience than looking at pictures. You can look through pictures all you want, but when you're standing next to it, you actually start to look at it, you start to think about it, you begin to, you know, actually take it in as a real life piece, and it's very, it's very hard to just like briskly walk past because it's, it's there. It's not just, it's not just a picture on a wall you can just quickly walk by. It's there. And even, I mean, even paintings, you don't just run by them either. You'll scroll by a picture of it pretty quickly, but in person, all of a sudden people are standing around a painting looking at it for 20 minutes. It doesn't really happen when you're looking at a photo of something. So it's We have that experience, that kind of reaction to things.

I think that we don't totally understand why that is. What is that connection that we as humans have with an object? I don't know if we really can— maybe we'll understand that. Maybe people have, you know, put folks in MRI machines and done, you know, brain imaging when they look at different objects so they can begin to understand, you know, why do these things trigger stuff in our brains. There's certainly dopamine hits that can happen that are the direct result of maybe the design of something. But there's also something else that happens that you— and this gets back to Peirce's theory of semiotics— you feel it, but you can't put into words why you feel it. 9 times out of 10, somebody will say, well, I like that car. Why? Well, I just do. I just like it. Well, why? Well, I just like it. It's just this thing that you're feeling. It's internal. It's really hard, I think, and I think this is the real challenge of being a designer, is to be begin to understand why it is people feel these things for objects. And so if I take it all the way back to teaching, I can spend all day talking about systems, we can talk about the impact all over the world, but in the end, when you're designing physical products, it does come down to this thing. And what we were just describing, the fact that when you walk through the museum and you're confronted with this thing that's 1,000 years old, you think, oh my gosh, this is this real thing. Somebody actually made this 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, some Egyptian thing. Somebody touched it. Somebody touched it. It's a moving— another human touches it. It's a moving experience to be there. So you wonder, what are the things that we make now, of the bazillion number of objects that we design and build every year, that's actually worth a damn? And so it comes back to this idea, I think, to some degree of, on one side, it's the system. And so if you're talking about designing a phone, I want to talk all about the system. Because there shouldn't be anything left when I'm done using the phone. It should totally disintegrate, or it should be completely taken apart and reclaim all the materials. You should never throw away an object like that, because really it doesn't have any purpose beyond the experience of using it in the moment. But the flip side of that is the craft side, right? When there's a human making this thing, there's not that many of them in the world, and you can see the hand of the maker there. That really has value. And so I think understanding from an education standpoint both sides of that as a designer, if you can understand both those sides, I think you're a better designer for it, regardless of what you apply it to. Because I really do wonder what's— if you go dig in the— I mean, you think about, we found Roman amphora, they're a couple thousand years old, we pull them out, they're amazing because some ship sank with these things. They're still there in different places on the bottom of the ocean. giant clay pots, they're made out of clay, they last a long time. What are we going to pull out of the ocean in 2,000 more years? We're going to be pulling plastic bottles out of the ocean or something like that. So what does that stuff mean? And is that a good idea? And there's an ethical question there that we don't yet really talk about enough within most design programs that I think is valid, that I think you can begin to get to through systems, through objects, is kind of the ethics of stuff, the ethics of what do we create for the world? What is worth creating? And what is that impact? Nobody thought about that. I, or I doubt they did when they were making some water jug 2,000 years ago. Right. They didn't need to, but we need to.

And I, but I would, I would, I would also counter with that. Cause I, in a conversation with the architect, we talked about how architecture has changed over the years and You know, we build, and it— I think it's indicative of our mentality of building things. And this goes back to— I use the term legacy building. Like, what is your legacy? We all have one. Whether you want to recognize that you have one or not is up to you, but we all have one and we all leave one. And at least especially in architecture, like, you know, a lot of the buildings Ancient structures, a lot of thought got put into it. Like, the pyramids were not just haphazardly thrown together.

Yeah.

On any continent, any pyramid built by any civilization was not a haphazard thing. It took a lot of people and a lot of time, and they built it to last as a monument. And they built— we built structures to do that. And now we're very much, how quickly can we slap together a house And we're not thinking about, you know, who's going to live in it, how they're going to enjoy living in it. It's just, oh, we can do this and it looks this way. Cool, done. Let's go build another 100 of those exact houses. And we don't build— like, collectively, when's the last time we built a giant monument? Like, it's been a while. It's been a while since— probably the last, like, really huge group of them was churches, and nobody's building giant cathedrals with huge paintings, and no one's doing that anymore. So we also do that with our products. We don't— and we don't think about this, this ethics side. We don't think about the ethics. What are we going to leave behind? What are we trying to leave behind? Because we're not really thinking about the fact that we are leaving something behind.

Right.

Every time. Every time we make something, it's gonna— something's gonna be left behind. And we're not, we're not asking the question, what, what are we leaving behind and why are we leaving it behind? Like, why, why and what is that going to do 100 years from now? What is that gonna, you know, Mm-hmm. I use it, like, what's gonna— if somebody digs up in the ocean 2,000 years from now, are they gonna say, wow, this is amazing, or it's another plastic bottle? Gee, thanks. That was great. Now what? Like, that— is that what we're leaving behind as a civilization is just plastic bottles on the ocean floor? In which case, yeah, I think that question is a good question to ask. What are we— what are we leaving behind? What is the ethics behind that? Um, yeah, but that's, that's a whole— that's a whole conversation. That's a rabbit hole. Um, But it's a question we should be asking. And it's, you know, maybe you could ask your students come fall and see what they think about it. Because that's a— yeah, I don't know how to ask that to more people, but we should be. We should figure out a way to do that.

It's tough. We should be. I mean, I think that some things will change. I think you have to be a— at least to some degree, an eternal optimist to be a designer, because otherwise, what's the point? If you're not an eternal optimist, you're always designing something for the future, right? So if you're not an optimist for the future, if you're— on my darker days, looking at the world, you might go hide in a cave. Right. So that doesn't seem like a very good solution. So instead, you got to try and be an optimist and think, okay, there are ways that we can have a positive impact. There are ways that we can change things. And I hope that exposing the students to ideas gets some percentage of them to really think deeply about this stuff. And I mean, I got to believe that that's true, because when you look around the world, you consistently are confronted with people who are doing great, amazing things. Other humans in other countries all over the place asking these same kinds of questions and trying out solutions to them. That's a great thing. It just takes a long time.

So, you know, change isn't always fast.

Yeah, it's slow, or as fast as we want.

Amazing.

Well, excellent.

I really appreciate you being on, on here. It's been great chatting about all of this. I think, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot more in education and ethics we could, we could rabbit hole into, but I think this has been really great. I really appreciate it. And for everyone who's watching this, if they want to get a hold of you, work with you, which I highly recommend if you're doing any kind of museum exhibits, definitely should talk to Robert. How do people find you? How do you want people to find you?

Yeah, the best way— well, you can look me up on LinkedIn, Robert Creighton, and you can find me. I'm sure I'm on the IDSA's various websites, but then my website's Red Cape Studio. I wore a red cape when I was a kid. I think I thought I was Superman. So redcapestudio.com, that's where you can find me. Yeah, it was the one thing my mom kept, so I still have it.

Oh, that's awesome.

That is the—

that is an awesome story behind your name. I didn't know that, and I like your name, the name of your studio, even better now.

There it is.

Awesome.

Perfect. Excellent. Well, it was a real treat, Ian. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Robert. All right, have a great day.

You too.