Design leader John Maeda on how to foster creative collaboration on distributed teams

What did real-time remote collaboration look like 30 years ago, in the primitive era before Slack and Zoom? My guest on this episode of The Distributed Podcast knows, because he was there. Designer, author, and automatician for about 3 years, John Maeda. Spent the latter half of the '90s pioneering a new field called computational design at the MIT Media Lab, a legendary sandbox for researchers who wanted to explore and create the future of tech. Computational design was a bold new approach that applied design principles to the creation of hardware, software, and computer networks, and John helped define it from the beginning. By 1999, John had developed enough of a reputation for Esquire magazine to name him one of the 21 most important people of the 21st century. Wired magazine once said that "Maida is to design what Warren Buffett is to finance." My company, Autimattic, has been lucky to have John working with us for the last few years, and he will be moving to Publicis soon. He's been leading a team of about 70 designers scattered all over the world, and before he left, I wanted to talk to him about what it's like. So I'm thrilled that he's able to join me for a discussion about creative collaboration at a distance.

We are here today with John Maeda, who leads what might be, uh, the largest all-distributed design team in the world, at least that we know of. He's the author of 3 books: The Laws of Simplicity, which is actually what introduced me to John's work, Creative Code, and Redesigning Leadership. And I believe there's a 4th book on the way. Is that correct?

There is. It's How to Speak Machine, and thanks for having me on this.

Oh, no problem. So your title is Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion.

Mm-hmm.

Computational design might be a concept that not that many people are familiar with as well.

Tell us about that.

Well, actually, people ask me about that. That's why I thought that How to Speak Machine is the first primer on that, because when we think about the value of design right now because of the technologies we use today, it isn't a picture. It isn't a clever drawing.

Hmm.

If it's computational, if it's driven by code or it's tied to code, it can achieve scale, it can achieve behavior, it can be interactive. If you think of like an, an early computational design system, that would be WordPress. It's interactive. I can use it as a tool. It's not like a poster in the MoMA collection, but it's a usable system that is running with computation. It never gets tired. Want to add a post again? Okay. Want to add another post? Okay. So the computational system never gets tired. Whereas like we're in a room with a beautiful wooden table. This table, if we, we wouldn't want to hurt this table. We don't own this table, I know. But if we like kept hitting at it, it would eventually fracture. It has physical laws, but computational systems behave differently because they're built out of programs.

Where do humans fit in this?

Originally humans and computers interacted like the Hiroshishi's human-computer interface world.

Yeah.

But now computers and computers interact, as you well know. They're hanging out together without us. Especially with AI. They're like hanging out. Like, what do you got? I got this. I got that. Let me give you some of that. So.

I love the concepts of the AIs that train against themselves.

Oh, those are really cool.

AlphaGo, the other things where they have this adversarial learning against itself so it can play hundreds of millions of games in like a day.

That concept you described used to be science fiction, but now because of the resources we have available to us by the cloud or everything we can buy now, that's like a normal thing. If our raw material has changed, then design should have changed too vis-à-vis computer-based systems.

And has it?

It's trying to. That's the one thing I realized is so hard. This is across the tech ecosystem. Is that there's a lot of designers who came from the past.

Mm-hmm.

And so when we look in this room, like the person who designed the texture on that wall over there, that's a kind of design, but it's less relevant to the design of a new release of a new feature that needs something that actually has to ship right now.

Mm-hmm.

And the distance between that design and a design that once it's shipped now has to iterate and improve. At a rapid velocity, that's a different kind of design. And I think most of design, maybe like over 90%, is stuck in the old design, not in computational design. So that's why I wanted to highlight that when I joined your merry band.

Let's say someone's listening to this, a younger person who's not currently in design and wants to go into it and wants to be in this kind of present or future you're describing.

Mm-hmm.

What should they work on?

They should use WordPress.

Okay. So that's a good start.

No, no, actually not, not in a, not in that way. You know, I, I've been using WordPress intensely over 2 years now, getting, getting on 3, and it's really reminded me how the internet works. It's exposed the, the messiness of how information is transmitted, how it's displayed on multiple platforms.

Mm-hmm.

It's like, uh, you know, people who really love WordPress will hate hearing this, but it's kind of like infants for them to walk. There's this baby walker thing. I'm not sure if it's legal anymore. But there's this thing where like a baby can stand up in this walker thing and they can move. They can like move around the room and they're just like, whoa, the baby's moving around.

It's kind of like a, like a little circular thing, right?

With like wheels. Circular thing with wheels on the bottom. Exactly.

I haven't seen one of those recently, but I know what you're talking about.

It must be illegal now for some dangerous reason. Uh, but to me it's been like a baby walker because like, you know, I know a lot of the high-tech stuff, but I lost sense of the basics in many ways.

Jessica, what are some of those basics that people should be familiar with? The basics are, first of all, collaboration.

Collaboration, because—

That's not a basic, that's hard.

Well, I mean, that's a basic that come— if you build software yourself, you don't have to collaborate, right? But by having distributed system, you have to collaborate. So just to get in touch with that, that's been great.

What makes you good at collaboration?

Uh, listening. I think it's number one important thing is like, uh, listening. What is it, the saying? Two ears, one mouth.

So two to one., but everyone can't do that at the same time. Oh yeah. It's physically impossible.

Yeah. The collaboration thing is key and the listening part. Um, the second thing is being technically facile, being able to write poetry in code.

Mm-hmm.

I think for a long time, cuz I was in the classical design world where coding is bad, but coming back into like by Kleiner Perkins and eBay and Automatic, I'm like, oh, coding is good. And why is it good? It's because you have agency. What does creative mean? It means I'm creating. And if you can code, you can do so many things. So collaboration is important and be able to sort of make and code is great. The thing I love is how I think of what I've learned with WordPress. It's like Lego and people will say, ah, it's just Lego. It's not like, uh, real wood, real, like, you know, marble, real concrete. It's like just Lego. But in this world of having an idea, like an MVP or an MLVP, you want Lego to be able to make ideas spun up quickly.

You brought it full circle that you said community made platforms win or lose.

Mm-hmm.

Um, you know, some people say that WordPress is not the best CMS, but it does have one of the largest communities. It's been the most successful. You also said is the first thing that designers need to know, collaboration.

Yes.

So it kind of came to people.

Yeah.

As we said in the intro, you lead definitely one of the larger all-distributed design teams. So if collaboration is important for design, you can't have everyone in the same room around a whiteboard, like, what do you do? What are the challenges? And maybe what are some of the benefits?

You know, you just reminded me how in the early 2000s or late '90s, I had made this system called Design by Numbers., and it was a system to teach anyone how to code. It was very limited. You could only draw in a 100 by 100 square in black and white. Super constrained system, super easy to teach anyone computation. And then two people on my research team, Casey Rees and Ben Fry, who were involved with the system, said, I think this system should be more, less constrained. It should be like, you know, color. And why is it limited to like a 100 by 100?. And so they built this system called Processing, and they did two things. First is they built a community center portal around it. And the second thing they did was they open sourced it. And at the time I'm like, that's never gonna take off. That's a sort of a, whoa, what, what is this? It's never gonna happen. You should do, you should be working on something else. And that's why I never really believed anything I say because I could be wrong.

Hmm.

I was like, I'm so glad they didn't listen to me. And they went off and made this Processing thing. And I think there's like a gazillion books about it. There's communities around it.

Extremely popular.

Yeah.

I had to learn from them the power of community because I spent most of my career making software by myself. Like everything I made by myself, designed every book by myself because that's what I thought people did. The great creators made things by themselves.

Which is also amazing because as you know, so many great artists had workshops. I know. Architects.

I didn't know that. I didn't know Michelangelo didn't paint all those.

Leonardo da Vinci. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I grew up with, uh, today Jeff Koons. My family had no education. We had no books. There was no internet. I had no idea.

The myth of the solo creator might be one of the most corrosive.

How?

To creativity in general, actually.

Oh my gosh, I almost died doing that. I was— got sick, overworked. I was in the hospital for 3 weeks. That went over the line, you know?

You told me about that before to caution me against that.

Oh yeah, it happens.

I appreciate those cautionary tales.

George goes past.

It's worth noting this podcast itself, I mean, it's not a solo endeavor.

I, I agree 100%. And I think that sort of like solo creator myth is something that I strive to break through sharing like my own embarrassing failures around this. And then when working with teams, the number one important thing that I've found is respect.

In working together over these past few years, you seem to exhibit an incredible amount of empathy, which also I think important for design. Maybe we'll add that to the list.

Mm-hmm.

Or I put it on my list. You don't have to put it on yours. How do you balance that empathy with kind of that able to get through these tough things?

One of my favorite artworks I've made in my life, I don't have many things I like that I did. But I was in a meeting at MIT where I was having this feeling of like, whoa, this is like feeling really ugh, you know? I calligraphed on a piece of paper thicker skin 75 times. It's entitled Thicker Skin 75 Times. Huh. And, um, it was sold in an auction for charity for UNICEF in Paris. But it's my proudest piece of artwork because all of my feeling But when it is that simple drawing to remind myself that it really isn't about them, it's about me. Can I have thicker skin?

It's a powerful concept.

Yeah. But it hurts still. Like, it hurts. Like, if there's someone that you really respect and doesn't respect you, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Does it hurt? Of course. Every time it hurts. Like, oh, wow. You let someone down and you don't forget it.

Does that close you off to the full range of human emotions?

It's more of a combination of thicker skin and gratitude.

Gratitude. Okay. That's one we haven't talked about yet.

Yeah. Thicker skin is there if you're like feeling bad. And then the gratitude is there because it's like, this is an awesome world. Like, this is so amazing. Or you'll feel gratitude for someone in your past and that activates something good in you. Like, I always think about how I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for my 11th grade high school chemistry teacher. Mr. Wakefield, who took interest in me as being like the number 2 smart kid in his class. Uh, number 1 kid was like so much smarter, but came from a, a really good background. Whereas I came from a background where, you know, I knew nothing. My parents had no education. We didn't know what the future should be like. I was working after school at my parents' shop on the weekends. I hated summers because I'd work there all the time. And so Mr. Wakefield said to me, you want to go to a good school, you've got to have stuff on your, like, application that makes you credible.

Ah, the extracurriculars.

And I was like, what's that? And so he said, well, make a science club and whatever. So we did that. And then he said, like, you need to, like, take a class at the local university over the summer. And I said, oh, my parents won't let me do that, you know, because I have to work at the store. And then Mr. Wakefield came to the store on Saturday, on the weekend, to talk to my parents.

Wow.

And he didn't have to do that. You know, he's a retired Boeing engineer. He never would venture into the Chinatown area. I mean, he didn't quite fit the whole thing. He came and talked to my parents and said, "You want your son to go to a great university? Let him take the summer off and do this. Give it to him." Hmm. And they did.

And they did. What'd you study that summer?

Organic chemistry. I loved chemistry. I was going to become a chemist. I was only almost going to be at MIT. The only class I didn't fail out of in the first year, like it was a really bad year, was solid state chemistry.

Hmm.

I got like one of these rainbow stickers on my test. Oh, it's the one moment of like, oh, I'm not an imposter. I know, I know. Should I be here? Got the golden sticker that one time. I think of Mr. Wakefield. I think of other people like that who gave me a chance. I feel gratitude towards them. And then it, it gets easy. Like, how can I serve you? How can I help you? It's easier.

One area we didn't fully cover was that chemistry for teams or the collaboration for design teams.

Yeah.

In a remote setting, anything stand out there?

Oh my gosh. So this is all about distributed collaboration too.

I know.

I mean, exchanges around commentary on code in ASCII text, et cetera. Some images, some pull request is initiated. It goes through the shipping. Like I, I think of a, like GitHub or GitLab or any of these, uh, systems like a, a big ship construction site where the, the ship is going through this gigantic tunnel about to like, you know, launch out there. For developers, it's highly developed, but for designers, it's, it's not developed. I mean, that's why I think things like Figma are so popular because they closely emulate high network collaborative spaces that remove the abstraction between storage and actual application. Super reliable, runs fast, and is social to the extent that it's not actually annoying, like Slack can be sometimes.

Hmm.

Why Slack can be annoying.

Slack. Oh my gosh. Slack can be annoying for so many reasons. I, I have some people say to me like, oh, well, you know, you're not Gen Z or millennial, so you don't get it. I'm sorry, but I think I've been able to slack with the best of them. Um, and my, I say you're a pretty good slacker.

I know.

I try, you know, I try, I've tried to be a good slacker, but the, the feeling I have around, uh, a system like Slack is that it moves things so quickly that you can't think fast enough. And the quanta is so small, the message size is so small. And if the organization is like a 6-person startup, I think Slack, fantastic. But anything larger, it isn't about the message, it's about the feeling. Like, how are you feeling, like, for yourself as a leader of all these people? You need to get a sense of how they feel. And from a Slack instance, you can't get that sense of feeling unless someone is really good at choosing the right emoji. You know, you have no idea, like, is this a real— is this a real reaction? You can't tell.

How about, I know creative work, I think creative work requires uninterrupted periods of time. Focus.

That's a good hypothesis. I think you're, you're, you're right. You're, you're right. Yeah, you're right. Because what is it? One of my favorite metaphors is by the late Gordon McKenzie, and it's about how he draws a graph, like a graph across the, like a horizontal line. And then there's like a, the majority of the line is called making milk time, and the endpoint of the line is expressing the milk. So like a cow, a cow's sitting there eating and you're like, come on cow, give me milk, right? Give me milk, cow. Give me milk. And then they're like, where's the milk, cow? And the cow's just sitting there chewing the grass. Like this cow is not working, but actually the cow is making the milk, but the cow is only rewarded when they express the milk. So the, the example, uh, is about how. Creative work takes eating grass time and, like, sitting in the sun. Otherwise, all you get is, like, barely made milk.

And you're leading 75, 80 people around the world 24/7. Mm-hmm. How do you find that making milk time?

Well, you know, I mean, because we're distributed and because we have all kinds of teams that work with designers, I think it's up to the local zone of leadership to be able to create that time. The best that I can do is round robin asking like, what's up? Like, what are you doing? Like, what's, what's you doing outside of work? And then someone will say to me, but that's not work. And I'll say, well, it's your work as a creative person to express yourself. So one thing I'm really happy about is our blog, automatic.design. You may remember in the beginning it was a little hard to get off the ground because there were Some designers felt like, well, why am I gonna blog? What's the point of blogging? Like, what's that for? And my point is blogging is good for you. It's mental health, it's expression, it's sharing your process with the world. And when you relate to the world, your standard of quality floats to that value of the, of the world. It's a market economy of, of ideas. And by putting yourself out there, you become relevant.

I've noticed, you know, talking about the kind of low bandwidth communication of text, downsides of Slack.

Yeah.

You internally and now externally on your YouTube channel—

I'm doing YouTube. I'm a YouTuber now. Oh my gosh, I love it.

Yeah, you create a lot of these videos.

I do.

And I also perceive that you've like literally created a lot of videos, like you edit a lot, you insert emojis.

It is the old— it is the classical, I make it by myself, thank you very much.

Yeah. So why are you using video to communicate internally as well? Like we have so many different tools.

Well, look at, look at you, you're a WordPress World person. You're like, you're like speaking into like a metal thing, holding it with your hand. You're not typing. You're like audio casting. So you, you see the diversity of the ecosystem. So YouTube to me represents really what the younger generation has figured out is so much more convenient.

So should managers at distributed companies or leaders learn video editing?

Uh, thousand, thousand percent yes.

Huh.

Because editing skills are ways to communicate in the same way that blogging is. But be careful to add a closed caption subtitle track because that makes it even more inclusive for those who have problems understanding Spoken English or for a language barrier?

One thing that's cool and actually one of the features I'm most excited about is just launching is our internal video player just launched.

Oh yeah, congrats. Yeah, that was good.

The speed thing, which YouTube has had forever. So you can speed things up or slow them down. I found this kind of interesting for meetings, like what might be a synchronous status meeting.

Yeah.

It might take 15 minutes. You can get through—

Whoa!

—in 10 minutes or 8 minutes depending on your kind of speed of processing.

You can express it.

Especially people who listen to podcasts. I imagine more than half, if not more, are listening to this sped up right now. That is wild. So you can actually kind of train yourselves to be able to listen faster. Ah, and I wonder if it can improve efficiency.

Well, one thing that I'm doing with the team around me is my direct reports on Monday— I didn't, you don't know this— Monday what we do is I have a 1-minute video requirement. On Monday you post your 1-minute video, and that's kind of your standup, but it's async. And then that way you can just sort of comment on the video. Any extra comment can happen by text, but you can also hear in full fidelity, like how someone is experiencing their life and their work. That's really interesting. It's like an async standup.

What are some other things you do in, in leading the team? I know you have a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday publishing schedule.

Yes, I do. Yes.

Tell us about that and then more. Okay.

One thing I'm really excited about is learning the distributed universe and how hard it is to have a point of reference. Because if you work at a physical place, you walk in, you know, everything, you can tell the seasons. There's a kind of Monday, there's a Friday. Monday feels so different than a Friday in like on-prem. So you lose your sense of like, um, gravity. There's that Sandra Bullock film where she's like, was it Gravity? Where she's floating outer space and it's like, which, which way is up? Which way is down? So one thing that I developed after a lot of feedback, as you know, I love feedback. I, uh, every, every negative or positive feedback I'll share internally just with everyone because it's like, it's easier that way. If people wanna talk about me, They've already talked about it because I've shared it and it's easy. But one of the feedback points I got was that I was posting or sharing too much information. Hmm. And then I realized, well, maybe it's because I haven't given it structure. So I gave it structure.

Hmm.

But then I realized that structure isn't as good as time structure. 'Cause time creates gravity in a distributed organization. So Monday's post is about the external world, external realities. Tuesday's post is about business. And Wednesday's post is about organization, and I limit myself to posting in that cadence. Hmm. That way people expect Monday to be a certain thing, Tuesday, Wednesday. The other practice I developed in the team around me is I borrowed a technique developed by Joel Khalifa. He's a designer I used to mentor, but now these people who I mentored are like my teacher. It's a spreadsheet where everyone posts what they're gonna do that week, and then they rate how that goal has been achieved during the week. And so it's just like an old-style Japanese, uh, office. Memo thing, um, and the reason why I use like a Google Sheet and not a special tool is because everyone can authenticate. There's no like, hey, can I get a login? Can I get a login? You know?

Yeah, at our company everyone has a Google account, so. Yeah.

And, and that sheet is open to everyone in the company too. So it's like, I, I love the idea of transparency that you've brought into the Automatic culture or created with your team members over these years. And I think transparency is so important. But clarity also is key.

You said that you love feedback, positive, negative. Yeah. You love sharing it. It's good. What do you think engenders a healthy culture? Like, does everyone on your team take that same approach? And how do you engender a healthy culture of feedback?

You know, uh, I'm laughing because the best feedback is delivered non-anonymously. I know you feel very strongly about that. For me, I feel strongly about this because When you deliver it non-anonymously, you can understand it better. Like, I have two favorite sayings, and they're too long, so I can't memorize them, but one of them is by Coach Pat Summit, and paraphrasing, you know, when you're able to give someone straight feedback, you're showing them the compliment that they will be able to take it. And so when people give me feedback, does it sting that I'm no good at something. Yeah. Like, whoa, I thought I was good at that. And I might think, I think they're kind of wrong. But then when they say what I, how, how I didn't achieve something, I'm like, oh, you're right. I could improve there. If you get it anonymously, you don't know the, the smell or taste of it.

It's like if I gave you— it's missing context for sure.

It's missing, like you have to fill in the rest of the story by 80%.

That also assumes you can't get any anonymous follow-up on it.

Yeah. Well, you know, you can tell everyone like, you know, I got anonymous feedback, this is what I'm doing. Then you give more power to anonymous people than those who actually give you the—

But you share all the feedback anonymous or not, right?

I do, yes. And one of my proudest achievements is the anonymous feedback and the in-name feedback is just as bad.

So people are comfortable saying it, by the way. Right. Right. You know, You also work a lot on inclusion, so that's kind of from a position of privilege as well. Absolutely. You're very powerful, and you're John Maeda.

People think that I'm something, like an octopus with, like, whatever. But that's why a lot of what I do is reiterate that, you know, I'm only as good as what I do now.

So how do you make people who might feel they don't have that privilege to give things to you directly, how do you make them comfortable with that?

Yeah, I haven't cracked that one yet, but it's, like, on my list of— How do I invite them into the fact that my only goal is to serve others? And I cannot do that unless, let's think of all like user research, like unless I have like high fidelity user research, how am I going to improve? Maybe my goal is to center around that concept with more people that I do believe in agile development. I'm a computational system, not organic. And How am I gonna iterate and improve if I don't get really high-fidelity feedback? Maybe I might become much more open to delegation of that, 'cause there are some people who feel that I'm in a privileged position and some people feel privileged enough to go straight with me. Like, if you don't feel comfortable with me, talk to them. Mm-hmm. And I can just anoint that role. But then you lose the fidelity.

I do.

And then I also do recognize that there are those who will always feel something, you know, and it's often not about me. It's someone like me that in their past they had a bad experience. And so I totally understand why there would be no reason that they feel that they could be candid with me because something bad happened in the past.

Are you also that candid with everyone you work with?

Am I that candid? Uh, depends.

Can everyone handle that kind of raw—

You know, that's the challenge of getting older for me. Like when I was younger, I would tell everyone everything I thought. Oh my gosh, people couldn't stand me for a good reason. I mean, it was okay. I forgive them. Actually, I hope they forgive me, but I didn't ask them for that forgiveness. I would just tell them what I think, and I was direct and all the time. And then I realized, wow, this is not working. This is not working because I believe in the, I'll show you respect by telling you what I think. But it's like, no, actually, he doesn't want to hear what I had to say. Whoops. So I changed.

Why is it bad if people are doing the same to you, not giving you the direct feedback?

With people who I develop a strong working relationship with? They do. Then they're the ones who ask me, can I, can I give, can I give you, can I get your feedback?

And so conversely, they, they feel more comfortable with the raw feedback from you. Yeah.

And, and some, it's in, some people can, some people want that. Mm-hmm. Some people can quote handle it, which means that they were privileged in some way where that became— that's doable. But there's some who just had a really difficult life that they just don't want to handle that, and it just hurts them in ways that doesn't help them. And so I've become much more conscious of, huh, well, how do I adapt to what you need?

You know, in design, you're also overseeing everything that goes out to all of our users. Everything we've been saying around feedback is pretty universal. Is there anything specific to distributed that you wanted to throw in there?

In a distributed organization, I think that the value of it is that you can now control your life differently. You know, I know so many people who distributed work has been able to make them better parents, better children to their parents as caregivers. Them coming from that point of view is the beginning of recognizing that this is an amazing kind of job to have. And Do you enjoy the aspect, aspect of those jobs? Yes. Great. Now what kind of work are we doing and how can we safeguard that wonderful thing that you're able to do because of this paradigm? That's what interests me the most, is that it's a really special thing to be able to work distributed. And if you can start from the respect of that versus the wonder of it, then you can all, you can have hard conversations about now what should we do with the work?

Safeguard that. Tell me about your ideal workspace.

My ideal workspace, I'm still QWERTY. We're talking typewriter speak. I know you're like, uh, what is the, how do you say the other one? Dvorak? Thank you. I don't know how to pronounce it. Dvorak. I love a Kinesis keyboard because it's helped me, like, I think, uh, it's the curved ones, right? It's the curved one. In my late 20s, I had really bad RSI because of the way I hold my body, but that really helps. I like to have that nearby. I like it super quiet. I don't like to put headphones on, 'cause it gets straining. Hopefully music going? No music, no music, but hopefully art around just to kind of like distract me.

Besides the Kinesis, any must-have equipment? I think you use a custom camera, right? Oh my gosh.

I have fell in love with this new thing. You know how headset experimentation is so important, uh, for distributed? So it's almost like a hairstyle problem. I found that in-ear musician quality microphone monitor headphones, they're great. Yeah. 'Cause they, there's this— Did you do the custom? There's this memory tip, like, uh, cushion thing that you can get that's super comfortable, sound isolating. For audio quality, it's fantastic. It's amazing. I love good microphones. Podcast quality microphones, the sound quality is so much better. I do love the, the Sennheiser headset for its sound isolation quality. Like I can, we can be talking and I'd be in the airport and and you're like, I don't hear anything. Oh yeah, that's bizarre how well that works.

Noise canceling, not for your ears, for the mic. It's got a noise canceling mic.

That's bizarre how good it is. But I do always feel a little embarrassed wearing it. You have no problem like being in a restaurant and wearing it? No, you look like you're in a call center or something. I can't, I can't go there. You, you go like, yeah, you wear it all. I can't do that.

Yeah, Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, what you go to?

Oh my gosh, I Can't stand all of them. I like audio. I like audio only if I can. I like phone, yeah.

So you make phone calls? I make phone calls, yeah. Wow. Feels good. What's your number one tip for getting things done? Is if you're lucky to have a good assistant.

And if you're less lucky, having any good to-do note system, they always work. So the competency of making a list, So good.

One thing I love about working with you is you go, go, go. So what is your drive there?

My parents worked so hard all their lives. You know, I think about my father. He's like 84 years old. He's hunched over. He can't stand up straight because he was carrying so many heavy things all his life. Wow. My mother, because of the cold water involved in tofu, she— her hands, she can't feel anything. But they worked extraordinarily hard. But they are the example that was set that tells me I, I should do more.

What are some of your habits that contribute to that? Good and bad habits.

I'm not good at vacationing, as you know.

It's not my forte. That was, that was a goal for the year.

You gave me feedback and I took it. I was like, okay, I'll do this vacation thing.

Um, although I think you worked the whole time.

Uh, I had to get stuff done. Uh, but, uh, vacation, not good at. I don't read enough. You read a lot. I'm like, you're always reading. Like, I don't read enough.

You probably read all day, but do you mean books?

Books, books. I'm like consuming information, but I want to get good at reading books.

And finally, at 20 years from now, what percentage of jobs do you think will be distributed?

I think for developers, I think it'll become a norm. I think for whatever we think of for designers, it will be 50/50. 50 for designers who are doing much more of the traditional creative emotional type of work that requires more high-bandwidth collaboration, but it's going to be expensive, that work. But the other half is all going to be computational.

Well, thank you so much, John.

Thank you, that's fun.

That was John Maeda. You can join him on Twitter @John Johann Maeda. That's J-O-H-N-M-A-E-D-A. Slack is a tool that's so widely used, it feels ubiquitous in the tech world. And when everyone uses a tool, sometimes it can be difficult to imagine how it might be improved or how a different tool might be better. It's a privilege to hear someone like John, someone who has spent much of his long career thinking about digital interfaces, dissect the technology and talk about the way that it works and where it falls short. Hearing about the live video chat meets virtual whiteboard tool John helped create in the '90s makes me think about how distributed design teams might use that today. It's a great reminder that devices and interfaces can always be iterated on, which is both a great lesson from computational design and one of the great pleasures of building digital tools. John has a humble, thoughtful approach to distributed collaboration and thinks about how humans operate as much as computers to do. When you're working with people across the globe, sometimes the best collaborative tools are the oldest, like listening, gratitude, and empathy. John's time with Automatic will be coming to a close soon. He's accepted an exciting new role with consulting firm Polysis Sapient, but I hope that his thoughtful and humble approach to distributed collaboration will live on in our design team, and I'm looking forward to him contributing to Automatic as an advisor. Next time on the Distributed Podcast, we'll be talking with Leo Woodridge. Leo helped build a successful distributed startup called Buffer, but he felt something was missing from his life, so he quit his job and turned to the ancient wisdom and mindfulness to achieve emotional resilience. We'll hear Leo's story and learn how distributed workers can avoid the psychological pitfalls that are unique to working remotely. Thanks again for joining us, and see you next time.