Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical.

00:00:18 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about the product, it’s about music company and a small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Nicholas Klein of FIMA. Hey there. And Nico, I know you have been working from Europe with a US centric, maybe even a San Francisco-centric team for a few years. How do you find that experience of having the evening be your team time?

00:00:48 - Speaker 1: I think that looking at the upside of I haven’t set an alarm in the last 2 years to get up for work. I think that’s definitely on the plus side of this, but I like to kind of like keep my Friday evenings free, that kind of like gives me a little bit of like time of just spending a normal week evening, I would say.

00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the uh there was a nice thread recently about some Europe to US times and I think on the Europe side, the trick is, of course, you are giving up a lot of your evenings, but you gotta make some room in there for a social event, be, you know, be able to have dinner with friends or whatever here and there, and yeah, I agree, no alarms slash morning is more free form is a huge benefit.

So for me, very well worth the extra cost of maybe needing to be a little more on my game in the evening than I would normally need to be.

And let’s hear about your career journey a little bit, so I think you have quite a bit of interesting milestones along the way, including Sketch Runner and artifacts, which we talked about a little bit with Jason Wa recently here on the podcast, and I think it’s how I first discovered your work. Love to hear the steps that brought you along the way here.

00:02:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I studied interaction design in Schwebmund, and it’s a tiny, tiny school in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in Germany.

So I studied interaction design and I think what was very interesting kind of like studying interaction design was that you get taught these like behemoths of tools. So you get taught Flash, you get taught Illustrator, you get taught Photoshop in like classes, and you never really think about kind of like manipulating those tools themselves.

And interaction design in general was really interesting because it was just about the relationship of humans to technology and application design, kind of a concrete UI design was one part of this.

And I’ve never really thought about kind of like, hey, I’m learning how to design software. And tools are just software that is also being designed somewhere far, far away, but on a hack day in Hamburg where we were working on sketch plug-ins, kind of like started and like I continued to working with the team in kind of like designing and building sketch runner, and there was a plug-in with which you kind of like can still like insert components and apply styles from like a command like spot like UI.

00:03:09 - Speaker 2: I remember using this a little bit back in my sketch days, and it was quite remarkable to me at the time to bring a command line interface to a design tool. I feel like nowadays command palettes are fairly common and power tools, maybe superhuman, and some others. There’s an article from Repole where they describe a little bit the rise of the command palette, and the command lines traditionally uh kind of engineering centric, I don’t know, Unixy particular kind of power user making its way into much more of these tools, but I feel like Sketch Runner was a little ahead of its time insofar as bringing that to a design tool.

00:03:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fascinating. We’ve seen that like this aspect of I know the name of the command and originally it started with finding a way to make plug-ins more easily kind of like executable.

That was the start during the hack day, like, hey, there are so many plug-ins being built for sketch. How can we make them more accessible and faster to kind of like execute? And then it kind of like we realized there are so many features that we can add on to this.

And the moment that was like really exciting for me was that I was still studying in Schwabsmund.

And I saw someone from the Airbnb design systems team talk about sketch runner kind of like on a meet up and then kind of like also tweeting about this. And I was just like, holy shit, this is really happening right now.

And so at that moment I realized that like, hey, there is a potential for changing design tools. They’re also just software that are to be designed basically, and that kind of like got me hooked into design tools. After graduation, I was an intern at Shopify. And continued working on sketch plugins there. I was building Polaris telescope. It’s kind of like a tool from within Sketch, you could kind of like see the documentation for the design system components.

00:04:56 - Speaker 2: These were internal kind of plug-ins or tools at. Shopify or something for release to the outside world.

00:05:02 - Speaker 1: It started as an internal tool, but then since like Shopify is a public design system and is being used by third party people to design applications for the Shopify platform, we also kind of like made it available publicly.

And during that time, I applied at FIMA.

And one nice story was that at the end of my internship at Shopify, I had this option of going to FIMA and starting an internship there or staying at Shopify full time. And I remember my mentor telling me to kind of like take the job at Sigma because it was like, yeah, this is more interesting to you, you just kind of like go there and that was a nice kind of like end for this work at Shopify was very kind of like welcoming to let me go, if that sounds right.

00:05:43 - Speaker 2: That’s great, and this was early days for Figma, right? Pretty small team. I mean, I think nowadays it’s a giant in the design space slash startup space, but maybe this was a little riskier of a jump to go to this smaller, less proven team at the time.

00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think Stigma definitely hasn’t caught on as kind of like a major tool in the space at that time.

Um, when I joined, we were, I think around 35, maybe 40 people in San Francisco, and that was it, like that was the whole company. And I think we’re now at above 250, but I’m not exactly sure when that is. I’m coming up on 3 years now, and it’s been fascinating to see.

The change in the company itself or kind of like seeing it grow, but also just in the product and in the acceptance of the product in the market. Kind of like seeing how many people and how many companies have switched entirely of using FIMA, it’s still kind of like mind blowing that this actually has happened over the last years and yeah, it’s great to be a part of that.

00:06:42 - Speaker 2: Also seems fun to maybe grow in your career along with the company and see those, yeah, that rapid evolution, that hypergrowth over time can be nerve-wracking at times, at least in my experience, but also potentially really rewarding experience. It’s certainly a great learning experience.

00:06:59 - Speaker 1: Definitely, definitely, especially this aspect of Getting things kind of like onto a roadmap and actually making that happen. When you’re studying, you’re kind of like greenfield projects and you can like imagine the most beautiful things, but then when you’re building a product, you have to kind of like find a way for this to actually happen.

It’s been interesting. I’ve been working on mostly focused on prototyping things and it’s been interesting that kind of like slowly we’re getting into this position where it’s like less features are immediately clear of what should happen, kind of like coming next. But it’s the things we’ve been talking about 3 years ago are slowly coming to the space where now they are actually being shipped, and we can now stand on top of them and look even further. And that’s pretty exciting to see that like these wild thoughts are now becoming reality, and now you’re thinking newer wild thoughts and I like that.

00:07:53 - Speaker 2: How do you find designing for designers? On one hand, maybe that sounds great cause you can maybe introspect your own needs a little bit, but on the other hand, it sounds miserable because they’re incredibly fussy.

00:08:05 - Speaker 1: I actually love it cause imagine the case where kind of like I would now just be a designer, basically, and I would like have all these ideas of how this design tool could be better.

I kind of like love working for designers because seeing what they do.

With the features that you imagine, is so much cooler than the feature itself.

So kind of like building things where other people can build things, it’s just really rewarding that on one hand, and then the other hand is that having designers and user tests, but also kind of like having designers design features for you.

Because I really want this feature. It is amazing. Just today, I’ve seen a tweet thread about how comments in Figma could work and it’s just amazing of how much detail and how much love people put into these ideas of helping us improve our product essentially.

00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And speaking of that, I’ll also throw out, you are a new user and customer, so thank you for your business.

That came to mind because, yeah, you’ve given us really great long detailed feedback along the way, both in the forms of concrete suggestions, you know, it could work like this.

But also I think cause you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that, sometimes more the why, like what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, what’s the feeling you’re having when you go to do a particular thing and you get this particular result, and I think you, you started with us around the time of the beta, and you know, then it was a pretty rough around the edges thing and you saw the potential, but it didn’t really Fit into your flow, but you gave us great feedback anyways and kind of check back periodically and eventually became something that hopefully fits into your creative workflow a little bit.

00:09:38 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. Like, I’ve been using it a lot more recently, especially since the alpha of like the 2D canvas.

That has really changed the game for me, but I think especially kind of like seeing new too of like from a more, I would say maybe more research experiment to actually kind of like, hey, this is a day to day tool for me.

And what I love a lot is how the relationship to the device changes based on the input.

Just through using a pencil, it’s just a significantly different experience, a far more intimate experience really with the device, because it really feels like just I’m writing on paper. Paper with superpowers, right? Like I can drag things around and I can really easily switch my tools, and so I love using it. It’s really great.

00:10:22 - Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you, and thanks for the new marketing slogan. We might need to swap that out on the website.

People with superpowers. So our topic today is collaborative creativity.

And this is something, you know, Mark and I have been talking a lot about, we’ve been talking about a lot of the team because as we think about sort of multi-user features and when or if those make sense for you, and in general, I think the incredible collaboration features that are in a lot of the current, let’s say, suite of tools that a lot of folks in the tech world use, that’s Figma, of course, but it’s also something like Notion, Google Docs going back a little bit further, maybe something like Air Table, and so then you have this question about like how does solo work work or how do we sort of interleave together the solo time and then the working with others, you know, pairing or whatever you wanna call that, there’s feedback cycles and all that sort of thing. So to me it’s a very vast and interesting topic and I know you have a pretty developed, it seems to me from our conversations in the past on it, you have a pretty developed or rapidly developing, let’s say thesis on this, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you think about collaborative creativity.

00:11:31 - Speaker 1: I think it’s interesting also kind of like tying back to how you introduced me in the beginning, that this is a topic I’ve ultimately been working on for a couple of years now, on and off really.

But my bachelor’s thesis was on this aspect of personal creativity and knowledge management, and I think at the core it’s kind of like, where do ideas come from and how could computers be set up to support these.

But then recently kind of like flipping a lot more around this value of iteration, as kind of like working on Figma as a design tool, but also the value of collaboration and the combination of those two. And I think that the concept of collaborative creativity includes all of those aspects and kind of like brings it together. And I think it’s interesting that really fruitful moments where working together with other people, those memories just always kind of like relate to being together in the same physical space. And being able to work on top of each other’s ideas really fluently, and because we trust each other, we can like figure out a problem that we have in our heads really, really quickly. And this kind of rapid iteration, this rapid building on top of each other’s ideas is, I think, at the core of collaborative creativity or is collaborative creativity itself.

00:12:45 - Speaker 2: So, give us some examples of collaborative creativity. There’s obviously like, I guess what you described there is sort of being with your colleagues, you know, in a meeting room, brainstorming on a whiteboard, but how do you see this, especially in the modern distributed world.

00:13:10 - Speaker 2: What I’ve recently seen on Twitter a lot, it’s also funny but like I’ve seen these things on Twitter, but like these TikTok remixes, and I think just recently there’s this like sea shank, the sea shanty TikToks, those are great to describe what those are in case you haven’t seen them is basically people singing these songs in harmony, but they do it by one person records singing. And then the next person essentially layers their singing on top of that video, and you see all the faces and hear all the voices together, but of course it’s a very much an asynchronous process in many cases I think these people didn’t even necessarily know each other.

00:13:37 - Speaker 1: And I think that’s just so fascinating because it’s really good and I think it’s a different example. So while this collaborative creativity in the whiteboarding space feels more like an immediate way of collaborative creativity, this is definitely, it’s still the same core idea. It’s just kind of like happening asynchronously. And I think those tools like TikTok allow for this to happen because I’m able to build on top of your idea. I’m able to take your idea and not necessarily manipulate. directly, but adds to it, which creates this fascinating effect.

00:14:10 - Speaker 2: I feel like that takes us to the whole realm of sort of maybe like remix culture, certainly open source is very much built on that as well. And of course a lot of discussion, maybe not so currently, but maybe in the last decade about kind of copyright law and how that in many ways interferes with this potentially great remix culture. You had DJs and that sort of thing. You see that in the spectrum of collaborative creativity.

00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely. I think it’s an important aspect, and we’ll get later in more detail to this that like the ultimate or kind of like original owner of ideas should be in full control over what others can do with this, essentially. I think that’s a key part of establishing trust in such a kind of like network of people who could work on the same thing. And I think that that’s one aspect of how to kind of like establish this way of working.

00:15:04 - Speaker 2: I mean, idea ownership is so fuzzy, even if you leave the realm of, I don’t know, public copyright, intellectual property, whatever.

I think even on a team making a shared document, in most cases the teams I’ve been on, I and others on the team feel sort of uncomfortable doing heavy edits to someone else’s documents unless they were very specifically invited.

You know, you can leave comments, maybe you can make a little fix, good suggestion changes, you can add something to the bottom, but you have this sense of like, OK, they own this and you don’t kind of want to mess it up. You feel like you’re a guest there, even if it’s in a team workspace, just sort of an interesting, I don’t know, we have this innate sense of ownership, I think, over ideas or a creative output, which may or may not be logical, but nevertheless seems to be part of the human experience.

00:15:52 - Speaker 1: I wonder how much of this ultimately comes back to the tools themselves too, in the sense that what I’ve seen happening in teams using FIMA a lot, that kind of like allowed this very immediate way of collaboratively iterating on the same space that person A creates an idea, creates a couple of marks for this.

Person B comes in and takes kind of like the second. and explores the second mark further.

Person C kind of like uses something else and kind of like just draws out their their direction of this. And at some point, maybe some person zooms out and sees the connecting dots between of those and kind of like puts these things together.

And I think at that point.

What has happened is that people inspired each other, but it’s very, very fuzzy of kind of like who had the key spark of it. And so I think at that point what we’ve seen happening, that’s actually really fascinating is that the culture of teams changed towards a culture where it feels more like our ideas over my ideas. Where just because the tools are not just because of those tools, but also because of the tools, it enabled people to take that ownership less seriously, because they realized if we take that ownership less seriously, we can actually arrive at better solutions down the road.

00:17:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.

And even speaking in terms of just coming back to the more just brainstorming in a group verbally or whatever, one of the ways I know the best collaboration, some of the people that I’ve worked with over many years, including Mark here, is that often it’s just not really clear exactly as you said, where the idea came from, and every so often I feel like I catch it in the moment happening. There’s one case I remember of, we’re trying to, I think it was actually just a debugging kind of scenario pair programming kind of thing. And the way we found the idea that ultimately was the breakthrough was actually one person said something and I misheard them. I was like, oh, that’s brilliant, that’s totally it. And, you know, they respond with, oh no, that wasn’t what I was saying, but now that you mentioned it, and so, wait, whose idea was that exactly? Clearly it was the product of our back and forth to claim that was one person’s idea would be, I guess, like a pointless endeavor to try to assign it to a single name.

00:18:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely the case that creativity, whether it’s among multiple people or with yourself over time, is a very iterative process that involves taking a lot of ideas, remixing them, borrowing stuff, eliminating stuff, adding variants, exploring, playing. I know there’s something you’ve thought a lot about because I’m curious if you have more theories on how this works.

00:18:27 - Speaker 1: One thing that during our bassists thesis and also kind of like now getting back to this a lot, is this concept of bisociation from Arthur Koestler, and it’s essentially this idea that Any form of kind of like creativity, be it like humor or science or art or conflict just I would also just include problem solving, is this aspect where you have a spark that ultimately originates from two orthogonal kind of like planes of thought or two orthogonal kind of like spaces of ideas, and because they meet. They create a new thing or when they meet, they create a new thing. It’s slightly different than association, which just means the connection between those two things, but that the connection itself is a new thing, existing from two independent frames of thoughts. That’s like at the core of where ideas come from.

00:19:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I even go so far as to say, or maybe I’ve heard creativity defined as connecting unrelated ideas, but maybe where this fellow Arthur Koestler, I guess his last name, where his work maybe it’s this idea of two different frames or two different domains where it’s an unexpected connection, and in fact one of the things that I think I see written in kind of like how to have good ideas type. Books like Steven Johnson’s works or whatever, is often about people who are in different domains. They work in one field, for example, and then they go to solve a problem in another field and they’re able to apply ideas that are commonplace in one field in this new place, and that’s that weird intersection that produces something truly new.

00:19:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think part of the challenge here is the ideas need to be primed in a sense to be joined or synthesized. So that’s why things like chewing over ideas, discussing, debating, remixing, these are all different ways to basically ruminate on the content, and by doing so you sort of prepare it for synthesis with another idea.

00:20:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that was one of the things that was also really fascinating to read through, is basically kind of like debunking this myth of this eureka moment. Whereas like, you expect this eureka moment to be this like singular entity where everything kind of like goes from 0 to 100 and it’s like all kind of like falls in place, but then you look closely at these stories around Newton and around Darwin, and you kind of like see that they have had their theories around for years before this, and they were really close. And so it’s not that in this eureka moment everything fell into place. It’s just maybe this last thing connected. But 95% of this idea was likely existing already or of this theory or of this concept.

00:20:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and a sort of corollary of this is that you can’t stare at something too hard. Like if you just sit down and think really hard about a particular idea or even a particular problem, you’re likely to be too constrained in your thinking, you’re get a sort of tunnel vision that obscures these other ideas that you need to connect in. So you really have to step back, chew on some other domains, chew on some other topics, and then hope that eventually it will sort of pop out as a synthesis with your other problem domain.

00:21:24 - Speaker 1: There was some interesting research we’ve read into and if there’s any kind of like neuroscientists there and I’m like representing this inaccurately, let me know, but that basically you have a set of stacks of possible kind of like positions for thoughts or snippets of thoughts, and between that stack you can create connections.

And if this is a new connection, that would be considered an idea, and you do that in your subconscious all the time.

But basically, when you’re staring at something for too long, all of your stack will be kind of full with all the things you’ve read and worked on. And there is a point where you just don’t see any new angles on this content, cause like the stack is the same things since 3 hours, but then you go outside, you summarize these stacks. They become kind of like less defined and more blurry, and then you see a dog walking around and some other things kind of like are popping up, and suddenly they’re like, oh, I could connect those two together, because suddenly you are free of these distractions.

That’s the perfect shower moment actually fits perfectly into this. Because in the shower, there’s just not a lot of things you can do in the shower. You’re kind of like just naked there and alone with your thoughts, quite literally.

00:22:37 - Speaker 3: Rich Hickey makes a similar point in his talk, hammock Driven Development, which I very highly recommend.

00:22:44 - Speaker 2: I’ve probably recommended it on this podcast before, Mark, it’s always tricky because I think you’ve mentioned that enough times now. I’m probably gonna stop putting it in the show notes. OK. But clearly I can see it’s a high impact piece, so everyone should go and read it.

00:22:56 - Speaker 3: He makes the point, there’s also a sort of priority que element to this, which is you have end domains that you’ve ever thought about, but to pick a number, the top 7 that you’ve thought about most recently are sort of candidates for this background mind synthesis to happen.

That’s not exactly true, but there’s a sense of the things that you’ve chewed on more recently. are more likely to be part of a synthesis of an idea.

And so part of the work is actually to constantly shuffle your priority cue around by changing the ideas that you read about or think about together in time, and eventually you kind of find the right combination of 7 things in your head in the shower and out pops the shower idea.

00:23:31 - Speaker 1: I think this is great. Yeah, there’s a ton of approaches on how computers, but also just processes and behaviors can support this concept of by association, kind of like make the right content available at the right time is something where I think all played with of recommended content, right? But also. As a way to structure your research in a different, more natural way, ultimately follows the same goal. It’s about kind of like making the content, the knowledge that you have available at the right time, so it can be in your head, so you can connect it to other things, to new ideas. And I think that’s also where I would place muse into the space, that kind of like it’s a space primarily for kind of like maybe marinating on your ideas and exploring it maybe in different ways. Here’s a PDF, here’s a video of someone explaining this. How do you see the role of muse in this personal creative process?

00:24:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, that’s certainly exactly how I use it.

I feel like one of the cornerstone maybe features we introduced was the excerpting, which the idea of pulling out pieces.

This isn’t quite a remix, it’s almost the reverse of that. It’s almost like a deconstruction, and for me I often have successive stages of that, which is, OK, I’ve read a few books on a particular topic. Now I wanna go and kind of apply that knowledge to a domain. And I’ve got my Kindle highlights and I’m pulling those, and there’s a pretty easy way to pull that in this PDF to muse and then I’ve sort of got those there and I can go through it and then I can pull out of my highlights, sort of like highlight my highlights or something like that, but I exert out the ones I think are most relevant. And then importantly order them, so they’re sort of near each other in different combinations, or do a little bit of the affinity mapping thing or something like that, push it around, but yeah, part of what I’m trying to do there is boil down to some components that hopefully for me will add up into a call it a new idea or a strategy for whatever problem I’m specifically trying to solve in the moment.

00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I think this fits into what we learned during our special the well. We interviewed an historian and she had a word document, which was, I think, up to 300 pages long, and it was just a glossary of words and references to other places where she’s read about these words in other books and other sections. And just that document alone, it was just 300 pages of references to other content. And just seeing that and how people use even a very simple tool like Word basically for something like this knowledge management task, like this humongous knowledge management task was pretty inspiring too.

00:26:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting spectrum here with tools for thought in terms of how explicit they try to make these connections and how much the tool is actually designed to output those.

So Muse is, I would say on the end of the spectrum, it’s more like you’re meant to marinate with your content, then it’s swimming around in your head and out are gonna pop new ideas from your head.

And that’s good for like intuitive domains and coming up with new ideas and brainstorming and things like that. But then when you’re writing a history paper, for example, you need extremely specific documented references, and so there it’s more important to have a very explicit trace of every connection that you might have made in the past so you can substantiate all your claims and have all your sites. And I think both of those things have their place, but I think it’s important not to confuse their purposes. I think you can’t force having new ideas by kind of structuring all your stuff in a graph or something. And conversely, if you try to intuit your way to a history paper, you’re gonna have a bad time. So I think that both of those extremes have their uses.

00:27:10 - Speaker 1: Definitely, I think that another thing that fits into this is how can you frames of thought come into your mind, kind of like diving more more deeply into iteration itself. I love this model, this, I think it’s a mind sketch model from Bill Buxton that is kind of like outlined in sketching User Experiences.

It’s an amazing book.

My roommate recommended it to me because he did his bachelor’s thesis on how to prototyping tool, and he basically gave this to me, I think 1 year ago or something, after I was already working for nearly 2 years on prototyping at Figma, I hadn’t seen that book before. And then when I read this, like a lot of what is today originates from this book.

And the core process of federation is this aspect that you create something, you externalize something. Because you externalize this knowledge, you can now take a step back and evaluate what you’ve created and learn from it.

00:28:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and in Buxton’s model, that’s the sketch.

And when he talks about making a sketch that has this very, it’s not just a pencil on paper or that has a particular line width or something like that.

It’s specifically that it is a very rough and purposely Not complete, leaves a lot to the imagination, maybe raises more questions than answers, but it is this externalization that then you can step back from. You can both share it with others, but even just yourself, you can step back from, you can look at it, kind of look at it from different angles, squint at it a little bit, and it will reveal new things that that same idea just purely in your mind might not.

00:28:45 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly, and I think that’s just amazing that that’s possible, that we as humans are capable of doing this, of externalizing our own ideas and then gaining new knowledge because we’ve done that. Like, where does this information come from?

00:28:59 - Speaker 3: I think there’s actually a lot going on there, right? Because some of the knowledge you get from the process of actually having to externalize it, cause you’re changing the format basically, and that involves processing of everything. You’re also learning by looking at it and seeing, for example, the empty space, which wouldn’t have been present in your associative mind.

And you’re also learning at it by being able to show people.

You’re also learning by being able to refer to it later in time, and you’re also freeing up space in your mental priority queue because you no longer are subconsciously thinking, I have to remember this, I have to remember this.

So it seems like a simple thing, but there’s so many different ways in which you’re learning just by doing the simple process.

00:29:34 - Speaker 1: What I love is, or also where the core of my thesis is placed around is essentially, what are the models now with collaboration that fit into this? Cause you mentioned it that collaboration can help with this process as well. And of course I can show it to someone and they can kind of like communicate things back to me, and they can talk about this and directly give me some kind of advice on how to change things.

But I think it’s interesting to look at it more closely on collaboration through creation, or communication through creation or manipulation, essentially, that if I create something and let’s say I create a file, I create a design file, and I sent this design file to you, and now you have a copy of this design file, and you make changes in this design file and send it back to me.

Or I just kind of like take a screenshot and send it to you and you scribble on top of that screenshot and send it back. That’s the first step, kind of like the first model of collaborative iteration, and I would call it kind of redundant collaborative federation, cause we duplicate these objects, and because we’ve duplicated these objects, we can collaborate on those, and I think that has been in a lot of times the way we just collaborated on nearly anything in the digital space. Like duplicating things in the digital world is slightly harder. But in the digital world, it has been like this since email basically existed.

00:30:55 - Speaker 3: And I’m curious if you see that as a strictly inferior form of collaboration or if it’s more like a different mode.

So to my mind, to my hand here.

I feel like that’s one of a few possible modes of multi-user collaboration and it has its uses. So for example, when Adam and I are writing, we’ll often have a draft and we’ll send a bunch of other individuals their own unique copy of the draft so they can be able to write whatever they want and they’re not getting groupthink by seeing everyone else’s comments. And then we take all those comments and we synthesize them in another draft, and then you might go into another type of collaboration, which is everyone’s looking at the same document and making real-time edits because you’re kind of converging. It’s a different use case.

00:31:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely, and I think that that was one of the big steps basically that for me at least internally you kind of like wrapping my head around this, is not looking at these different modes of collaborative federation as good or bad, but it’s just solving different types of problems, solving different kind of like steps in the process essentially cause what you’re saying is totally right, like what this redundancy also helps is comparison. And when we talk kind of like more detail about these like open canvas tools like Figma.

What happens a lot of times just inside of those is redundant iteration as well, right? Like I’m duplicating this frame, I’m just not changing this frame because I need the ability to compare this.

What you’ve kind of like mentioned is the need for different audiences of people ultimately, and different audience levels have to respond to the relative content level inside of there. If there’s a lot of work in progress comments. That you don’t want leadership to see, you might want to bring this into a different document where there’s an empty collaborative space. So that definitely makes sense. I think it just solves for different purposes.

00:32:36 - Speaker 2: That potentially could take us to a whole other space or a whole other discussion topic, which is feedback, what is feedback, how to give good feedback, how to solicit good feedback.

Probably we don’t wanna, uh, get too diverted on that, but it, it comes to mind because talking about the different audiences, if you’re presenting something to your boss, to a client, or to anyone where you know their time and attention bandwidth is limited, and you want to get there.

Like big picture view on things or just kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down, or keep them in the loop. And that’s different from, here’s my teammate, we’re both collaborating on this thing and we want to really go into all the fine details together. You’re just seeking something different from the feedback and being aware of what it is that you’re seeking in that feedback loop can help you have the right format or the right level of detail.

00:33:25 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that for a tool or for a creative tool, essentially, it is important that people are in control. Like this is kind of like looping back to what we’ve discussed at the start, that people can be fluently moving between the different ways of collaborating, and that they kind of can invite the stakeholder with certain permissions, and the client with certain permissions, and the teammate. And I think the question is kind of like, can this still happen in the same space, although those people have different permissions.

00:33:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something that I feel like we’re still organically discovering as tool makers. So if you go back to the before times where everyone was emailing attachments to each other, that worked very well for the what you call redundant collaboration use case. You just send someone a copy and they can do whatever they want, and then we’re done they can send it back.

But then if you want to have a Shared unified state somewhere, that’s really hard in that world.

And then we got this whole world of new tools including Sigma and Google Docs, and that makes the real-time synchronized shared collaborative space, first class, but I feel like sometimes it actually makes it hard to do the individual private collaboration, often just because it’s really hard to make a copy of stuff. I feel like in Google Docs, for example, just to make a copy of a document is a bit of a heavyweight operation, it takes a few seconds and makes weird names and so on. One of the reasons I think it happens more often in Figma is that it’s very easy to make a copy, especially if you’re doing a very lightweight copy on the same canvas, you just highlight command C, V, I think, and that just pops out a new version, then you can kind of scribble on that and then go back and do your merge later. Another tool example here would be Git, which I feel like has its UX challenges, but it does get this right. Well, plus GitHub. It didn’t have this before GitHub. You know, the local Git gives you the privacy to do whatever you want and mess with stuff, and then GitHub provides the unified central state.

00:35:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that I would categorize all of those into kind of like restricted collaboration or restricted collaborative federation because they somehow constrain how the different people can manipulate these shared objects. Either they kind of like restricted through having a private copy first that you need to kind of update manually or through kind of like enabling people to limit someone’s access in there.

One thing that I’ve seen quite often now is that in Google Docs and in paper, the like, is that people create their kind of like appendix, trash, don’t look below here.

Yes, these kind of spatially close areas because it maps toigma too. I was like, here’s my trash area, don’t look at these things in here like, like, like please don’t, these are bad ideas.

There’s an interesting aspect there that I would love to dive deeper into at some point around like, why can’t we let those things go. Oftentimes you don’t look at these things, but you kind of still want them to be there. You want them to keep them around because in the case you need them. You feel really bad if they’re gone.

00:36:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, old notebooks is the same way.

Even older muse boards for me in a lot of cases are things that are mostly just historically interesting.

Every once in a while it’s kind of cool to be able to reference it, but the reality is, you want that end thing. You usually don’t need any of the steps that led up to it. Get history. the same thing. Like you could probably for almost any project, go in and chop off all the Git history from, you know, prior to a week ago, and it wouldn’t really make any difference for any day to day work, but yet there’s that feeling of something lost, something important that every once in a while it’s nice to be able to reference.

00:36:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I feel like there’s that temporal angle of eventually you might want to archive something, but I also feel like there’s sometimes a tooling limitation where, especially in these modern apps, they’re very oriented around enterprise work groups, and so if you want to have a personal space, it’s a little bit unnatural, you either need to go out into your my driver. Something which is a whole ordeal, or you need to effectively carve off your own little personal space within a document by hitting enter 10 times and saying mark notes and typing below that. And one of the things we’ve explored in the lab and with views is, can you make that more fluid by making the transition between the personal and the collaborative space much more seamless.

The analogy that I always come back to is the university department. where you have a private office and you have your faculty lounge, and you can take a few steps over and back and you can bring your papers over and back and you can check out the whiteboard across the hall. And that’s sort of very seamless collaboration, where it’s all the same office building, it’s just different zones are demarcated slightly differently, and it’s very lightweight to move in between them. That’s the kind of vibe I’m hoping for with digital tools.

00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that would be amazing. Like the current solution basically in Figma is that like drafts or new files always open in drafts and drafts are private by default.

So that creativity as an intimate process can start in private, because oftentimes there’s a ton of internal barriers in your head of like, is this really a right idea? Do I want to share this? There might be kind of like external barriers of a culture in which kind of like bad in quotes, bad. Ideas are shut down from the beginning, or you’re fearing being judged for those ideas or just sharing those ideas in general. And I think there’s a ton that like how this flow can just feel a lot more fluent as you described.

I could imagine like news sports, basically, this is my private news board and we can be together in the same news port, but down here, like inside, I’m zooming into this space, that’s my office space, right? Yeah, exactly. This is new.

Because office space, you’re just technically not allowed to go in there. I think there’s a ton of fun stuff of how the interface paradigms will change the relationship of how we look at these digital collaborative spaces and how we also kind of find ourselves leveraging the cultural habits that we have with shared physical spaces and bringing them into these digital spaces.

If you’re in an office building, it seems like decades ago that you’re like in an office building, right? But like you have this cultural understanding that you don’t go into someone else’s office, especially when there’s other people sitting in there. You just wouldn’t do this, right? And in digital spaces, it feels different, but I’m interested to see kind of like how this will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years.

00:39:28 - Speaker 2: I think learning from the physical spaces and the social cues and all that that we’ve built up over a very long time and trying to bring some of that to digital. is certainly a rich well to tap.

I also feel like sort of video chat and screen sharing and things around the live synchronous video and audio might also have some clues for us. One to me that’s pretty telling is the screen share stuff, which of course is just huge for a distributed team, and I’ve gotten pretty handy with setting up my screen in a particular way so that I’ve got a window to share that’s kind of the right size and orientation, so it’ll look reasonable on most people’s desktops.

But then if you actually have a multi-window flow, you wanna show, now you kind of need to share your whole desktop, and for some reason that seems way more intimate. I don’t even have, like, I don’t know, text messages going to my Mac, so it’s not like someone’s gonna see a personal message come in on my notification center, I don’t think, but still there’s this. that that’s a much more really letting someone into your private space, which is kind of interesting. And then, of course, there’s all the stuff around. If you have other devices that you need to show like an iPad, or you’ve got an external camera that’s showing, which we often need for showing a person actually using the iPad with their hands. So I feel like there’s a lot there that affords opportunities, but also we need to adapt to and how we think about collaboration and privacy and synchronous and asynchronous for how we work together in, let’s say the modern virtual office.

00:40:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve mentioned this theory before that a lot of collaborative and social technology first appears in games.

And according to that theory, within a few years, professionals will need to use OBS to do exactly that.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with OBS, but it’s a program for streamers to basically render their stream from a bunch of different windows and graphics and stuff and kind of.

Deposits it all together into whatever they want to present.

And I actually know some professionals who do use this for things like teaching classes where you need to composite a bunch of stuff together. Well, the best program in the world for that is what streamers use. So just use that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that or a technology like that becomes standard in the same way that microphones and ring lights and all that stuff did become standard for office workers.

00:41:37 - Speaker 1: Zoom definitely, I think there’s Studio Beta, which is I think basically like Snapchat like filters for Zoom, and I think there’s some feature in there that look like integrate kind of like a PowerPoint slide presentation, right, into your background and maybe key things out or something.

And I think that’s a start in this. I think you’re totally right that like these things will just become a lot more accessible for day to day work of kind of like creating these mixed media streaming environments.

One thing I’m really interested in though is this aspect of kind of like what makes this work ultimately in the end, like, what is the oil for this collaborative iteration process of we are improving each other’s idea really work, and I think that there’s a bunch of things to dive into in this aspect around the culture for collaborative creativity. Cause we’ve touched on it a little bit, but this aspect of people can feel comfortable sharing bad ideas, essentially, is what at the beginning of an iterative process, right? Like the ideas you’re going to share are not ideal. And if we look at collaborative iteration and we see that there’s value in bringing people together that trust each other, what cultures would we have or kind of like what cultural shifts would need to happen for this to become more fluent.

00:42:55 - Speaker 2: Well, trust certainly seems like a huge part of it, and that’s how you actually build trust on a team, you know, it’s one thing if you’re longtime friends or longtime collaborators, but when you have particularly, for example, a fast growing company, as we were talking about earlier, and you have essentially relative strangers, maybe from different backgrounds that come together, it’s probably even harder when you have less or no in person time.

In the world we live in now.

And so, is that something software can solve at all or is this purely a classic human management problem and we need to like do exercises where we fall backwards into each other’s arms in order to be able to make a a shared document uh together successfully.

00:43:34 - Speaker 1: I think it’s actually kind of like interpersonal maturity and interpersonal relationship that we have to learn through the tools. Tools can give us guardrails. Like, if I know that this is a production thing, this is the thing that is used in production, I’m definitely going to kind of like use GitUp and will restrict the access to this and maybe only allow me to merge things into the main branch and like have these guardrails and structures in place so that collaboration can also grow in this environment.

But then separately, being together in the same file at the same time. At any point in time, you could hit command A, select everything and hit the delete key and just get rid of everything that’s there. Yet we still don’t do it. So the tools still allow this. They still allow fucking up each other’s work. So the fallback has to be a cultural way of working together.

But one thing that we’ve seen with Sigma is that Sigma grows rapidly inside of a company once you invite other people, and they kind of, they invite other people, they create content, they invite other people, so it’s beautiful to see that.

But then separately, one thing that at the beginning seemed kind of like independent of all of this was that like Halloween 2019. I’ve seen a lot of people dressed up as figma cursors for Halloween. And I was like, why is this happening, right? Why are you dressing up as feeling my curses? Why do people have kind of like group costumes where everyone is a thing about curses and they’re just like roaming around this like space. And it’s been fascinating looking back at this, because I think looking at the culture and looking at the tools, is that what FigMA had enabled for these teams was that they trusted each other, and now they were able to build on top of each other’s ideas in a far more efficient way than they’ve ever done before.

And it might have even helped them to establish these cultures in the first place. To be like, now that we are in the same space, this maturity of how we work together becomes more important.

We see how beautiful it is when it works, and now we actively want to work towards this, so that it’s not kind of like, oh yeah, this is like randomly happening, that I’m able to have another idea because you’ve had an idea and put this down and shared it. It’s not serendipity, it’s actually something that we can actively to work for.

And so I believe that like the tools that open up these collaborative processes actually can incite a change of making cultures more inclusive and more open and more respectful to work with, and especially getting rid of the Steve Jobsmith of like, hey, good feedback is like direct feedback, right? Like this is dog shit. It’s not gonna help you in the long run build better ideas or come up with better ideas.

00:46:17 - Speaker 2: On the feedback side, I feel like the culture, it’s culture, it certainly is trust, but when I’m working with a new person, whether it’s on a writing project, something product design related, or even things externally in my personal life, you know, collaborating with a cohabitation partner on Decor, for example, I feel like when you’re first doing a project together, you’re first exploring that part of a relationship with someone, a new colleague, whatever it is, and I’ve sort of learned to prime people a little bit though, like, if you share something with me, I’m gonna give you tons of feedback, usually. Like, often I’ve gotten the feedback on my feedback that it’s sort of a fire hose and can be overwhelming, and I’ve actually learned to even try to trim it down a little bit to like the key points. But that’s also because it’s kind of a golden rule thing, that’s what I like to receive. And in particularly I like really stream of consciousness feedback. I don’t want you to do my thinking for me. What I want you to do is react. I want your hot take, I want your snap reaction of this made me feel like this, and this made me feel Like this, and this made me angry, and this made me happy, and this made me confused. And, you know, it’s not to say that every single point of feedback is something I’m gonna do something about, but that overlaid with feedback from others is how I get a picture of how something I’ve created is. Perceived or potentially could impact an audience, but that’s not necessarily maybe how others work, and maybe they’re surprised by that in both directions. So I really try to establish that up front. You share the thing with me, I’m gonna give you this style of feedback, and likewise, if I’m sharing a thing with you, this is what I want, is this kind of heavy feedback.

00:47:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think like getting everyone to share these thoughts in the first place, I think is going to be a big change instead of companies where with tools like FIMA, people now have the ability to communicate visually. Anyone in the organization now basically has the ability to communicate visually.

But that they are actively actually doing this and using this requires them ultimately to put down ideas that they might not be sure about at that point. And that might be common for designers, right, to kind of like share early thoughts.

But if we talk about kind of like PMs or engineers who may have a design idea, or an architecture idea of how something could work, maybe slightly differently, or if the user flow kind of like breaks off here and goes to the path, those things can be amazing ideas even if they’re just shared in the form of a diagram, or a little scribble, or a little kind of like, I don’t know, just like jotting on something, yeah, but those people have to also feel comfortable in sharing this in the first place. And if you’re an engineer in a company or if you’re a PM in a company and you might not be sure of how this design tool space is owned by the designers, right? Can I use this? Does that make me a designer? If that makes me a designer, are other people like annoyed that I call myself a designer, like, there’s nothing about this. It’s just kind of like a core skill of being able to communicate visually, and it can help discussions, especially if that happens in spaces where other people can take those visual objects. And immediately iterate on them. Like we’re still in this concept, we’re still in a space where people can work on top of these ideas again. But I think the key barrier that we’ve often seen is that people kind of like are a little bit shy of sharing this idea in the first place, cause they might feel that, oh, this like, will shine badly back to me. And I think that’s a call for designers essentially of sharing the bad work more openly. We have a design work in progress channel and it’s fascinating to see how much is like work that’s just happening is visible there. Although it’s not always polished, although it’s not always kind of like perfect, it’s so just like, you see that these things are happening. And it has become kind of like one of the most active channels because it established a culture of a different kind of critique, not this culture of kind of like, hey, we shouldn’t ship this, right? Like if you share something in this official design critique channel, you might get feedback of like, hey, maybe we shouldn’t ship this. This is not up to our quality standards. But then it’s like work in progress channel where the quality was just said very differently. The feedback is a lot more of like, yes and style, of like, oh yeah, we could do this too, or like, hey, this could fit into this project that I’m working on, and it feels very different culturally.

00:50:25 - Speaker 2: I have the sense, maybe it’s a stereotype or just reflects some of the designers I’ve worked with over the years, but the designer archetype for me is someone who is much more likely to want to stay in their ivory tower longer and kind of really polish something until everything is completely perfect and without any conceivable critique, and maybe to a straw man a little bit like a delicates. Flake, where when someone says, you know, I don’t completely 100% like this, they’re very upset and maybe engineering types, again, this is perhaps just a stereotype, but are more likely to be a little more willing to take feedback on work in progress. I don’t know, do you think that’s accurate? Is that an outdated point of view, or is that accurate, but something you think you and your team are working to change with your product?

00:51:11 - Speaker 1: I’m lucky that I can say that it’s like outdated for me, that the people that I work with are at least kind of like don’t show this kind of behavior that significantly, at least.

I think it definitely exists. It definitely exists. I remember reading the first comments of Figma being published on design and use. If this is the future of design, I’m like changing careers. And I even remember the video, I think. It was like from Sandwich video, this like first initial teaser ad of route Pigma when it first launched, and I remember kind of like it showing a use case where someone just moved something like 10 pixels. Some senior designer moved something 10 pixels and it’s like, oh yeah, I just tightened it up a pitch. And I’m like, if this is the future of collaboration, I wouldn’t be sure if that would have worked. But I think this aspect of once you feel the value of other people adding freely to your ideas, and at the same time also being respected for the things that you’ve done, and you realize that you can now take from all of these ideas and you can like combine them into new ideas, and those are maybe your ideas again, that feeling of being able to tap into everyone else’s mind. I think it is amazing.

And one thing that comes to mind is something that started very early on at FIMA that ultimately kind of like kicked off this value of collaboration or this thinking about the value of collaboration a lot more for me, because I initially joined Figma because I liked the components overriding behavior. I was like, hey, this is cool, like I can overwrite more stuff than in sketch. So I got intrigued by that, but then I joined Figma and I was working on the common pins and I just like outlined a couple of the states that we need for common pins. And we joined into the design grid. There’s just a couple of people. Dylan was also working joining Design grids at the time, that was kind of like how small the company was. And then we just for 15 minutes just riffed on top of each other’s ideas. And then I went back from this design grid room with this file in my computer that everyone literally around that has something to do with design at FIA at the time worked on. And it was an amazing feeling because I’d sat there, I was like, there’s so many good ideas in here. And the beautiful thing was that they were not named. I wasn’t even sure who created which parts in this document, and my role as a diner was then to look at these things and see kind of like, how can I combine them into something that is most promising. And so coming back to your question, I hope that this experience pushes people towards working more in the open. Because they see the value of this open iteration, they see the innovative value in being able to tap into other people’s minds, cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical.

00:53:57 - Speaker 2: It’s really powerful, and yeah, it’s kind of vulnerability, but then if you open yourself to that, it’s simultaneously open yourself to it with a team of other people who are doing the same thing, and then have that experience of the shared mind and how much more powerful that is, then maybe that. Charges you up to see the value of it and be more open in the future. Whereas maybe if you get the reverse experience, if you try to open yourself that way, you don’t have the right team or the right culture or the right setting, and you get shut down or you feel rejected or something like that, and then that’s maybe a negative feedback cycle of the same kind.

00:54:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and this is also one of the underlying motivations of why I’m trying to build this model on top of the core aspect of what thought or creativity is for a single mind.

That, you know, creativity is pushed through having a diverse set of thoughts in your head, and that the question is, how can these diverse set of thoughts come into your head, and that at that point, you realize that like if other people share their bold ideas and if you’re comfortable sharing their wildest dreams, even though they might be kind of like going against company policy or something, that those things can be the missing spark that someone else needs.

And so that because this is tied to kind of like the core aspect of creativity in the mind, you can’t really argue with this. And so that I hope that through this and through experiencing this and the tools and the products that we build, that companies see the value in an open and inclusive design process where people can feel safe of sharing ideas and do not have these experiences that you describe.

And I hope that in the next 50, 100 years or something. That’s just seen as an old way of working if you don’t allow people to work like this together.

00:55:40 - Speaker 2: I feel like I can see a parallel there with open source, and in fact the style of working in public with strangers on a code base over time or relative strangers, and that in turn fed back into even private collaboration on code, which is there’s just a different perspective or a different way to be creative, maybe, but you have to bootstrap and do it. So maybe you’re helping do that for design and maybe even the larger world of technology.

00:56:10 - Speaker 1: I think the beauty in this too is that I think it could help design, elevate from being seen as this thing that people do in making things pretty, to be a lot more focused on an aspect of problem solving, essentially, that problem solving in an open solution space.

We just don’t have any idea of where to go next or how to evaluate your idea in the beginning, that design can kind of like feel bigger than that, and because it feels bigger than like UI design as we know it today.

That through that it becomes more inclusive too, and people might identify more with, hey, I also work creatively. I also iterate on my ideas. These are words that I use out of a context from like a UI design context or general design context, but I might apply the same iterative strategy to my financing models, or my strategy plan or business model. And all of these are creative outputs in some way. And all of these can be iterated upon and have the potential to be improved through the thoughts from others, but the culture needs to allow for this to happen.

00:57:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think of designers. Both a way to connect why you’re doing what you’re doing and why it matters to what decisions you actually make, and then making a series of decisions which are thoughtful and considered and not arbitrary. And from that perspective, you absolutely can design a UI just the same way you can design a financial model, just the same way you can design a building, or you can design a trip. There’s a similar process there with the right kind of thinking can get consistently good results.

00:57:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and in the same way that you can apply this process of what is traditionally software design to other domains, I think you can also flip that around and you can bring people from other domains into the software design process. I think if design wants to be about how the thing works, it really needs to grapple with all the realities and complexities of the real world, a lot of aspects of which the capital D designers aren’t the experts in. Patrick McKenzie at 11 on Twitter actually had a pretty good thread about this recently, where he was pointing out that there’s an emerging consensus that there’s a set of people who kind of get software and therefore you can contribute to his design. It’s not just capital D designers or capital P product managers, it’s also people like the user ops team who engage with the customers day to day. I think finding new tools and practices that can tap into that will be helpful.

00:58:36 - Speaker 1: I totally agree and I think it fits well to this aspect of this need for mixed media inside of news, right? The same way that you need to look at an idea or at information in general, in different ways, like, here’s a video, here’s an excerpt from a PDF. Here’s the PDF with me scribbled on top of this and adding other images to this.

So kind of like combining these different dimensions of this at that point, very abstract thought. In exactly the same way, these different dimensions need to be looked at and considered throughout the entire process, right? That these dimensions just need more clarity and more preciseness, the closer you get towards the end goal. But that of course, like a designer can’t have all these things in mind that are required to get this over the finish line. And a funny example was when I was working at Shopify, I was working on the financial services payments settings page. Yeah, exactly. Payment settings, and there’s contracts with Mastercard or with Visa or with Stripe. I can’t remember exactly who we had which contracts with. But they partly defined the size of the icons in pixels for the design. And I was like, OK, this is cool, but this is also not my level of expertise. Like I’m not gonna read the legal contract that we have with these companies to understand how to make these design decisions. But this is ultimately just a different creative dimension, important for this problem at hand, and it needs to be understood and if other people can help you understand this, then that’s great.

01:00:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I never thought of the mixed media canvas aspect of news as having some elements in common with the sort of a team with a lot of people with different skill sets, which is, I think the classic team uh arrangements back in, I guess olden times now, but certainly when I got into software was all the designers sit in a room together and they all use Photoshop and all the engineers sit in a room together and they use, you know, their code editors and all the salespeople sit in a room.

They think of their team as being the designers or the engineers or the salespeople rather than a team as a group of people with different skills that are working together to a common cause, this particular feature we want to ship, this product we’re making, this initiative we’re doing, this event we’re putting on, and you need people with different skills, and furthermore, that you all respect each other, have different things to bring to the table and different perspectives, and you need to put those together into a shared mind in order to have a good Outcome.

We’ve made maybe a similar argument about the mixed media, which is sort of siloing into your images go into your photos app and your text goes into your text editor, and it’s like, well, no, the ideas and knowledge come in many forms and to build new good ideas, you need to get those different types of media altogether and arrange them all together.

01:01:27 - Speaker 1: I think it allows everyone to have their own personal access to this abstract concept of an idea, right? Like, if I think more in diagrams, then it helps me understand this abstract concept of an idea, and now I can communicate with you on a different level, on a better founded level, while you might think in a different way.

And what I like about this, and also kind of like about this flow of iteration is how it somehow also ties back to the history of computers in general. And kind of like how we transitioned from computers being these huge rooms, right, that multiple people operate the same computer and you kind of like create punch cards and put those together.

This relates to the book, The Dream Machine, which is by far my favorite book of kind of like computer history essentially cause it shows the step of moving computers from these rooms as these kind of like places where you give some task to. And you get a response a couple of hours later to these personal machines that I can immediately iterate with, that the computer can give me immediate feedback on the interactions that I do, which is the core of allowing me to use it as a tool for thought, right? The other one is still a tool for thought, it’s just a very, very slow one. But I wonder that these paradigms we’ve had on a desktop and implications and all of those aspects, they fit very well to a personal process of this. But what we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that the digital space that I have opened on my computer is very often, more often than like 5 years ago, shared with others at the same time. The amount of time I’m in a Zoom call and I do share my screen is tremendous, or I’m in a Figma file with other people. And so I wonder, will we move from an era from personal computing to collaborative computing even? What does that look like? I don’t know. I’m intrigued to find out. I think it could help us use those computers as tools for collaborative thought, to kind of like add something to that saying.

01:03:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and we’ve seen in our conversation today and in a lot of the previous podcasts that we’ve done, that it’s very good for your tools to resonate with how the problem actually works.

So for example, the problem is multimedia, your tools should be multimedia. The problem is cross functional, the teams should be cross functional, and so on.

And I think what we’re discovering on this podcast in the process of this creative collaboration is. We still have some learning and some theorizing to do about the exact nature of collaboration and therefore how the tools should work. Again, it sounds so easy. It’s just, you know, people are just working together. They’re all in the same space or something. Yes, it’s a piece of it, but there’s all these little nuances of how people work together. So I think as we better understand that and make it more explicit, we can develop tools that better resonate with that aspect of the real world.

01:04:13 - Speaker 1: Yes, 100%, and help to bring more of these experiences that we probably all have of like, hey, we’re together in this room, and we stayed together in this room for 3 hours, and we like, really got a huge amount of progress because we were able to work together so rapidly, that the more of these experiences can happen in the digital world.

01:04:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, on one hand, and maybe this comes back to kind of where we started the conversation, but it feels like on one hand, we’re both trying to catch up to physical spaces with our digital tools. But then at the same time, we’re also just starting to step into things that are only possible in the digital or virtual space or never possible in the physical world, and the combination of those two tracks developing, it feels like we’re only in the very beginning, the very stone ages of that, but seeing the ways that can and I think will develop. I think that makes it a very exciting time for collaborative creativity.

01:05:08 - Speaker 1: One thing I come back to as an image that I have in my head from time to time, is, imagine we’re sculptures, we’re together in a studio, and there’s like this granite block of, I don’t know, 3 m tall, 2 m wide or something, and we’re kind of like actively working on this together and kind of like creating the sculpture.

And the wireless thing I think about this aspect of being in digital space, is that duplication is free. Right? Now imagine that same scenario in the physical space, and you kind of like hold option, hold your physical option key or something, and you, you drag out the sculpture, and there’s a new sculpture, right? And there’s another sculpture, and there’s another sculpture, and suddenly you’re in this room of like, I don’t know, 20,000 sculptures, which would be impossible to do, creating this in the physical world, right? But in the digital world that’s possible. So what is the upside of this? In the long run, how will this change creative expression even? I really don’t know. I’m really excited to see.

01:06:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s really exciting. I think we have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do in this space, and some of it is a little bit scary or intimidating at times, you know, we’ve seen some fallout from social networking technologies and so on, but I think the majority of it is very positive and exciting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can figure out.

01:06:27 - Speaker 2: Well, and I guess speaking of feedback, if any of our listeners out there have some for this episode, feel free to reach out to us at MAHQ on Twitter or we’re hello at museapp.com on email. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Niko, really great to. collaborate with you creatively about this big topic, and I was already excited about it, but I think now I even have more sense of what the potential for collaborative digital tools are and leaves me feeling really excited. So thanks for coming on.

01:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I think it’s been a fun last few weeks where I’ve started to listen to more podcasts and just the depth of the conversations in this podcast has been astonishing. So, yeah, I feel really honored to be part of this.

01:07:12 - Speaker 2: Thanks so much for coming on and we’ll see you both around in digital spaces, if not physical ones.