Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and just the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same.

00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. I’m joined today by Wei Wei Xu of Sprout. Hello. And one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast for some reason is cities. Weiwei, you’re in Shanghai right now, and what’s the transit situation like? How do you get around town?

00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I live a little bit outside of the downtown area, so it takes about 30 minutes by walking to get to the metro station and. Shared bikes are really common over here, so it’s super convenient to get around with shared bikes, but I also got my hands on to one of these one wheel electric scooter lately and I’ve been a big fan of skateboarding since I was a kid. I’ve tried all kinds of boards, so I thought it’s just super slick to try scooting around on one of these electric scooters and That’s what I’ve been doing lately.

00:01:34 - Speaker 2: And in practice, do you end up in the bike lane? Do you go on the sidewalks? I feel like one of the challenges with the scooter micro mobility thing is that you sort of don’t have a great place to go. You’re sort of a little slow for the bike lane, but certainly probably too fast for the sidewalk.

00:01:50 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely something that everybody’s still trying to figure out, especially here, the policy here is a lot more strict and electric scooters are meant to be a toy, something that you play with in parks and in closed communities rather than on the street, so. It’s kind of like softly allowed on pedestrian walkways and not really on the bike lanes, but bike lanes over here are super protected and they are not right next to cars like in a lot of the cities I’ve been to in America, so either way, I feel pretty safe, but whether it is legal or not is kind of a different question.

00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, protected bike lanes or something I I’m a big fan of as a person who gets around mainly by bike, although even there when you talk about legal gray areas and new technologies that sit sort of in between the e-bike thing, which has gotten pretty huge, but then that also seems to challenge, OK, now you can go really fast and with not a lot of effort with this motorized thing that at this point is almost like a low powered motorcycle or something like that, but you get to ride in the bike lane, that feels a little weird, yeah, so.

Technology that sits on these in between spaces then ends up forcing a change in not only policy but also just social norms and expectations.

00:03:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these in between spaces really fascinating and that could be in the transportation world. I grew up with a mixed cultural background and so, Dwelling in the in between spaces of that has also been something that I grew up struggling with and have now sort of surrendered to in some way, but those in between spaces are something that’s really beautiful and also sometimes really confusing.

00:03:38 - Speaker 2: Makes sense, but also presents opportunity because you have perspective that no one else has, right? Yeah. And once you tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve done some very interesting academic work as well as all sorts of, I feel you’re all over in the kind of tools for thought, independent research, next generation computing space.

00:03:57 - Speaker 1: I would say that I’ve been on this journey of learning more about myself and I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I’m trying to do.

Perhaps this is what most people do, but I was lucky enough to study interaction design, that was a fairly new program in the school I attended and through that process, I was introduced to the history of personal computing and That whole genre, that whole world and being layered into that got me really, really curious about what it took to get us to where we are nowadays and also where are we headed and I started looking for places where they’re thinking about the future and thinking about alternative paths that haven’t really been explored or illuminated in different ways and That led to working at and also spending a lot of time at this research group called Dynamicland and I’ve also been sort of being in a part of the creative design school environment has also gotten me really interested in the creative process and also this idea of creative expression.

So being immersed in a group of designers, creatives and also researchers has led me to where I am nowadays and What I’m trying to do nowadays is exploring what ways can we take ideas into people’s hands and into reality rather than having them sitting or like brewing in research spaces which is also really fascinating but I think I’m just going through this journey of exploring where I am and who I am and also what’s my relationship with the world.

00:05:40 - Speaker 2: Hopefully that’s all the journey we’re all perpetually on, but it’s good you have the self-awareness of it. Maybe there’s an arrogance of youth that sometimes comes with young people early in their adult life where they feel they’ve got it all figured out or they know their path or something when, honestly, it’s just forever a journey of discovery.

00:05:56 - Speaker 1: I think whenever I feel like I’ve gotten it or I understand what’s going on, life hits me in a hard way and it’s like, nope, you don’t have it, you don’t know what you’re doing and then you go into this other cycle of like learning more about yourself and understanding that there’s just so much more possibilities and so much more unknowns.

00:06:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that’s not something, at least for a person that has a growth mindset or is forever seeking to learn the lessons life has to teach. I’m going through that still in my 40s here, I’ve seen my mom who’s in her 70s, also going through that. There’s just always more, the world always has more to teach, and there’s more to learn about yourself and about other humans, about our society and how to live best in it.

So hopefully that never ends. That’s a good thing. Totally.

And you hinted at something we’ve talked about privately a few times, which is sort of taking ideas from the research space or the big thinking space or the ivory tower space and trying to bring it to a practical reality and for sure that’s part of why muse exists, you know, Mark and I were in this research lab working on this stuff and saw an opportunity for something that we said, you know, this could be a product people could really use.

We could bring these weird HCI ideas and see if we can bring them into, well, a regular app in the app store and see if that would work or be possible. And I think we talked about it with, I believe it was a former colleague of yours, Jason Yuan, and the episode he was in, great Meta Muse episode if you’re interested in design things, I’ll link that in the show notes.

But he’s talked about that as well, which is, yeah, I think he may have also done a stint at Dynamicland.

They both worked together at MSpace, and the best thinking big picture thinking and forward thinking comes from places that are a little bit disconnected from commercial realities. You’re not about shipping a product that’s going to make a bunch of money tomorrow, but you’re thinking longer term. But that in turn can lead to a kind of disconnection from the world and not really bringing what you’re making to the world. So I know that’s something you’re thinking about how to best bridge those worlds, which is one of many reasons I wanted to bring you on the podcast.

00:08:01 - Speaker 1: I think the phrase thinking about it is a really nice way to put it in another way to put it is struggling with this spectrum.

00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Oh, I think those are two sides of the same coin. Genuinely interesting or hard intellectual or emotional challenge, you wrestle with it, you struggle with it, you fight with it. It’s not a civilized activity at all in some ways.

00:08:25 - Speaker 1: No, it’s not.

00:08:27 - Speaker 2: And tell us a bit about Sprout.

00:08:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Sprout is a product that came out of MakeSpace and MakeSpace was started with Jason Yuan, Aza Raskin and Mei Li Ku and it’s a project and also um really us trying to answer a question of how do we collaborate and communicate. With each other online and also through computers in a way where we can actually feel more of each other’s presence where all kinds of media formats and all kinds of files can coexist with each other rather than being confined by different apps and different windows that only support its own unique kind of media files.

So, In a way, Sprout is a canvas-based collaboration tool that value and also respect video presence and telepresence and we spend quite a bit of time thinking about this gradient of synchronous communication, collaboration. Versus asynchronous communication and collaboration because collaboration doesn’t happen on one end of the spectrum, it’s continuous and so how do we create space, how do we communicate and collaborate in a way where it helps us grow and learn together.

00:09:46 - Speaker 2: One of the things that was striking to me about the initial MakeSpace landing page is, on one hand, it did kind of have a look of, I guess video and specifically, you know, webcam videos of people’s faces who are participating in the meeting, let’s call it virtual meeting. That’s a very front and center idea, so immediately you think, OK, it’s video chat like Google Hangout or Zoom or FaceTime, but the reality is the main or if you use the early version, which you’ve given me a peek at. It is this media canvas in many ways that shares some of the same heritage that Muse does, which is you can put images, you can draw, you can put text, you can put links, and one of the things you can put is your own real-time face, and that’s like a useful addition to the meeting, but it’s not really the center point. It almost inverts the video chat thing and then so I’m not sure whether to think of it maybe coming back to your point of living in those in between spaces, you could think of it as Zoom, but with kind of a working canvas, but it really inverts that because I feel the video chat side of it is just sort of a subset of this larger open canvas or you could think of it as open canvas kind of collaborative whiteboard space, a mirror type thing, but it integrates video chat, real-time video and audio chat in a big way, but I think either. Those descriptions sort of does deserve us to at least what I imagine your vision to be that is finding a middle space there that takes elements from both of those but leaves behind many elements of them could potentially be a more interesting or future facing or next generation way for us to have online meetings, discussions, brainstormings, and so on.

00:11:24 - Speaker 1: I’m constantly working on describing Sprout in better ways because video is the channel or the medium that it sort of like communicate and share our presence and intention with each other.

So when we’re using tools like Zoom to meet each other. We are primarily communicating with each other through video and audio, but when it comes to Sprout, your video is attached to your cursor and so it’s not really about the video, it’s more about where your attentions are and it’s more about where your presence is and how you’re sharing it with each other.

So for example, On the canvas when you’re in Sprout, you could be going into the opposite corner of another person and that other person could feel that you’re feeling shy or you’re trying to run away from a topic, you’re trying to run away from this discussion and that’s perhaps body language, that’s also attention that’s just the entire dynamic of collaborating and communicating with each other.

00:12:23 - Speaker 3: That’s interesting. So does this mean if you’re on a video call and sprout, and someone goes to check Twitter with their mouse, their face actually like flies off the screen, in the same way that if you would see someone’s eyes, you know, leaving the room.

00:12:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so you see their cursor going to the corner and then once they’re in a different tab, their cursor will move around and so when they switch back to the tab, their cursor will be in a different XY position and so it would jump over to that new location and so those are the different ways that you would sense and feel each other’s presence or lack of presence.

00:12:57 - Speaker 3: That’s funny, nice.

00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, they get tension. We wrote about this a little bit in our pointing and virtual spaces memo, but I feel like the body language in group settings or meetings, presentations, that sort of thing, or even like classroom situations, attention and where people’s attention are and how focused they are is really important.

And I suppose one version of that is a teacher that is going to wrap you over the knuckles with the ruler because you’re not paying sufficient attention to the lesson.

But another one would be if I’m giving a talk somewhere, it’s really useful to me to see when people are engaged, leaning forward, really curious about what I’m saying versus their kind of eyes are wandering a little bit and looking at their other screen and what have you, and that helps me know where the audience is at and how I can sort of tune what I’m saying or presenting to better meet them where they’re at.

00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when meeting and collaborating in person, there’s so much little cues and little signals that you can pick up and when doing so online, a lot of that are being stripped away. So what we spend thinking a lot about is in what ways can we bring some of those. Back and in a way that respect each other’s real presence and just the fact that we’re not just our eyes and our mouth and we have feelings, we have our fingers, we have our body and how do we communicate or try to channel a little bit of that to each other.

00:14:27 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is expressive tools, and I kind of pose this idea to you Weiwei based on what’s on your personal site. I’ll just take a moment to quote directly from there, if you don’t mind, which is, you say, currently I’m gardening at Maspace now Sprout, because computing environments can and should be more fluid, playful, equitable, fun, humane, and expressive. Obviously that. Really speaks to me and Mark and the whole Muse team. We’ve spoken about fluid and playful, for example, in depth on this podcast, but expressive was one that jumped out at me a little bit because first I was thinking, OK, what evokes a strong feeling, but I’m trying to think about what that means in practice, particularly for me as a toolmaker.

Is it desirable to make my tools expressive? And if so, how do you do that? So I was curious to zoom in on that. Can you tell us more about what an expressive tool is for you or what that phrase means?

00:15:22 - Speaker 1: When I think about expressive tools. Perhaps we can step back a little bit and think about why do we create as tool makers and when we are trying to create in some way, we’re trying to express and it’s a different kind of way of expressing, but it’s still a form of expression. So when we create tools, can we enable others to express. A lot of the productivity tools that we are familiar with today, they help us in becoming more productive and they help us in getting work done, but some of the times they may not enable us in communicating the feelings or the other little bits and things here and there that’s beyond the factual part of what we are trying to accomplish here. So, I’m curious for both of you, are there tools that you feel like are more expressive than others or less expressive than others and why do they come to mind?

00:16:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in the digital world, I’ve been a huge fan of emojis and all of their offshoots, you know, they have emojis and texting obviously, but also like ReactGs and Slack and Vote Gs and Discord or whatever, and they’re great because they’re very compact, but they, unlike text, they express more of the range of human emotions, which is so important when you’re working collaboratively. Relatedly, I also think a lot of gifts and memes are very expressive and it’s a little bit goofy sometimes, but that’s another fun digital expressive medium.

00:16:59 - Speaker 2: For me, I think the first place my mind went was a lot of analog world, I guess crafting type things. I really like Sharpies and butcher paper, for example, for kind of reform ideation. I also like calligraphy pens. I took a calligraphy class once a really long time ago. I’m not particularly good at it, but just this tip where it’s even the markers which are pretty easy to work with, but they have this. Angled tip that allows you to, or almost demands that when you write, your line is gonna be a lot more interesting because it’s gonna have thick and thin parts.

Highlighters are another one I’ve always, and in a way, actually, a lot of these analog kind of ideation tools like Sharpies and butcher paper and highlighters, they’ve been collecting dust since I have used, but in some cases I pulled them out cause I still like the feel of that in the same way that I really like the feel of paper books, but in the end, I haven’t really read paper books since I’ve had a Kindle for 10 years, but there is, of course, something very evocative about the analog world, and also certain kinds of kitchen tools or like sushi knives. I really like something like fabric as a material, a creation material, maybe cause it’s got texture and color and it moves in interesting ways, those kinds of things.

I guess they’re all roughly grouped under like a crafty kind of artistic space.

So yeah, then when you come to the digital world, It’s a lot harder to think of them in a way because yeah, computers are traditionally, at least there are these pragmatic, mathematical computing machines use it to compute your quarter to projected earnings, spreadsheet thingy thing, but of course, certainly in the last decade or so, we’ve seen a lot more playfulness and fun through social media and memes and emojis and so on.

There’s a few from my childhood as well, that kind of I thought of when you offered this prompt, which includes things like deluxe paint or mod trackers, but I don’t know how much those are.

You know, is it that when you are a child, everything is a more expressive tool because you’re more expressive as a person and so therefore I have that nostalgia attached, or is it actually for me there was something really kind of special and unique about the Pixel art in the kind of Amiga Atari ST age when you had computers were getting like just good enough for their graphics and sound. really impressive video and audio art, but it still was this very constrained format that this medium had a very unique look to it that you wouldn’t mistake for any other. So I’m not sure how much that is sort of childhood memories attached and how much that was a truly special and therefore an expressive time for sort of computing or medium things. That’s yeah, a little bit on my list.

00:19:41 - Speaker 3: Adam, I do think there’s something there to our childhood tools because when you become an adult and you’re working with serious productivity tools designed by proper professionals, they tend to really focus on the business process like the goal of the software is to produce a sales chart or the goal of the software is to document a flow in a factory.

And I feel like often we like lose the plot in terms of how important the emotions and feelings and human side of digital communication is. And we often have to go back to the kids stuff because that’s all they have, you know, they don’t have any real job, right? We have to go back to their texting and their Discord emojis, right, to actually bring the humanity back into our tools. So I think there’s something to that.

00:20:22 - Speaker 1: I find that really fascinating when this past year I’ve been able to spend more time in Taipei and Shanghai and as a part of that, I got to be surrounded by more kids than when I was living in San Francisco and I’m just fascinated by how kids would Dream and just run around and do whatever they want without caring about what others are thinking and that’s something really interesting because I almost feel like I’m forgetting how to do that unfortunately and I’m still trying to understand and figure that out and As a part of being around kids, I’m thinking more about in what ways can we bring some of those back and why do we express or maybe the emotion of expressing is a result and where it’s originating is Just being ourselves.

We consider kids as they’re expressing or they’re doing things on their own, they’re being kids, but what they’re really doing is they’re being themselves and we’re classifying that as expressing and That’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to understand, are we expressing or maybe we expressing is the result of being ourselves. So when it comes to building tools and also working, trying to do work through digital tools or analog tools, can we be ourselves or in what ways can we enable more of us being ourselves?

00:21:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. And your comment about there not being a lot of kids in San Francisco is reminding me of this idea of multi-generational households and communities, and it’s so nice there because you get the mix of the incredible energy and carefreeness of the kids and the wisdom and experience of the older generation and maybe the Engagement in the productive economy of the middle aged folks, and they’re all kind of learning from each other. And that’s one of the things that I like when you can see in software. I go back to the example of Discord, if you’re actually doing productive work, like give a serious job that uses Discord. Kind of get some of those young kid, you know, vibes basically coming through and that’s really cool. So now I’m thinking, what’s the equivalent of a multi-generational community in the software world? Can we have a tool that pulls from all of those different life stages to bring those different energies in?

00:22:40 - Speaker 2: Discord is one of the ones that I had thought of as well in terms of that it does bring a lot of vibe or style to particularly this gamer style, even though they’ve expanded beyond that, and you’ve got Slack, which in many ways is a pretty directly comparable product, but has a completely different vibe. It’s a playful, lighthearted thing, but maybe in their own way, they’re each playful or they each have like a youthful quality, but they just feel like completely different culturally.

00:23:07 - Speaker 1: And I think that comes back to the culture or the personality of a team that’s creating those tools or the intent of creating the tools. So in some way it comes back to what are the creator’s goal and inevitably we project our own intentions or our own wishes into the tools that we’re building. Sometimes those are intentional, sometimes they’re not, but, The ability in which we can express through a tool is also shaped by the tool makers.

00:23:40 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s for me as a toolmaker, it’s a very desirable thing that I get to. This is a form of art for me, this is a form of self-expression, and hopefully the things that I want to put into whatever tool I’m working on at the time, match up with a market need, right? When we were working on Pirou, for example, and we had a particular vibe that came through in that, and maybe that matched with what developers needed or didn’t need at the time, similarly with Muse, and we have kind of this, I don’t know what the word is for it, philosophical, serene, thoughtfulness. Hopefully that connects to a tool for deep thinking.

So I think you can be a little thoughtful about that is, do the things that I have to express as a person or the vibe that I and my team want to put off to those match with the thing that we’re trying to create or the need that we’re trying to fill.

There is a practical side, of course, but if you can match those up well, it’s really nice.

And I also like on the flip side, or when I’m on the other side of that equation, a user or a customer, I really like it when a lot of persons. of the team comes through, whether or not their exact vibe or artistic style matches what I personally would do, just the fact that it’s showing something about who they are as people, and that tends to happen, especially on smaller teams because each individual can have more of a contribution, and the bigger it gets, the more it all blurs together into a homogeneous kind of corporate.

Nothing, which also is fine for many kinds of products that are needed in the marketplace, but I have this interest in kind of niche, weird, independently created software. So I like that you immediately went to the thing underlying expression and expressive tools, which is why we want to create or in some cases need to create or driven to create as creative people.

How do you answer that question for yourself? What do you see in others ultimately, why do we want to expressive tools and why do we want to create things?

00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I’ve been trying to understand this for myself and also for collaborators that I’ve been lucky enough to work with.

For me, right now, there is this desire to fill some kind of hole that I think I have within me and I’m not sure what that hole might be, but, It may not be related to technology itself or the medium itself, but I think it may go beyond that a little bit.

I think it has to do with this intrinsic curiosity and probably intertwined with ego that I have and I think there is also to put it in a perhaps cheesy way, I think there is also this desire to care about others and also to be cared by others and Expressing is a way to feel that.

I think in some way, our desire or my desire to express and to create comes back to learning more about myself, learning more about others and also learning more about the surroundings that I’m in right now.

00:26:35 - Speaker 2: That resonates with me partially because I don’t know if you consider yourself an introvert, but I consider myself a very extreme introvert, that is to say, many kinds of social interactions are challenging for me, and I actually find it much easier to connect with others over creation.

Something they have made that I appreciate, something I have made that they appreciate, and that becomes the starting point for connection.

A lot of my very great friendships.

I never know entirely what to call them, it sounds too crass to call it like my network and networking, but there are many folks that I’ve either worked with as former colleagues, or even maybe I’ve never worked with him at them at a conference or I know they’re worked some other way, or we had them on the podcast or something, and then we go on to just have more of a Friendship, but it’s a friendship that is based around a mutual passion for some element of product creation or some artistic endeavor and maybe an encouragement for each other, you know, sort of like cheering each other on and whatever you know early raw product or other kinds of creations we are pursuing.

But yeah, that for me ends up being a cornerstone for a lot, not all but many very great relationships in my life. So, I don’t know if I think of that as like a hole to fill or a deficiency, it’s just a different way to relate to others. I hope no better or worse that other ways one might be able to relate to others.

00:27:57 - Speaker 1: And in some way, I think that’s really beautiful because when we connect and when we get to know each other, it’s often through a topic or through a shared. Experience that we’re having across time or across space. So with both Sprout and Muse, I feel like we’re trying to create spaces digitally for us to be connecting with ourselves or connecting with others through objects, through topics. Rather than just by talking or hand waving about something and that’s the beauty of being able to create spaces that enable and respect the variety of objects and topics for us to be talking about and co-creating together.

00:28:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that speaks to me because I just find that, especially when I’m connecting with someone new that I don’t know very well, having a visual aid of some kind, even just a simple napkin sketch, just makes it easier to make that connection.

As a toolmaker creating the space, you want it to be artistic, you want it to be expressive, but there does also need to be a practical element.

This is a product that people will pay for or have some way of sustaining itself. It exists in the economy. How do you balance or trade off very pragmatic technology needs or just solving a problem people have and are willing to pay for kind of needs against your desires as a creator, to express yourself, to make the kind of thing that You feel as an artistic expression of the things you value.

00:29:31 - Speaker 1: Earlier we touched on this idea of thinking about topics and thinking about the dynamic between research and also commercial work or struggling with these bridges, these gaps.

I think when it comes to building products and also building features, there’s also this. Process of struggling and understanding what do people need and what do I need as a toolmaker and who am I creating for a lot of the times we are creating things by following inklings or by following ideas that we’ve accumulated from different experiences through life when it comes to Understanding whether those inklings are useful or are practical or not, a lot of it I feel comes back to iterating and it also comes back to being open to what might be there for you.

So it again comes back to this idea of like letting go of ego and being open to what the world has to offer and also what people who are using the tool who are also spending time with the tool has to say about the tool itself.

00:30:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s almost an element of play here. I’ve heard a definition of play, which is like, you’re undertaking an activity without so much of a focus on the end goal and like as much of a commitment to that. And so here the idea is you just try some stuff. And you’re OK with that thing not working or working in a way that you didn’t anticipate.

And I think you need to have an element of that, especially as we’re exploring these new areas of the map, like what does digital mean for group communication and expressivity and belonging. So yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about the work that you’re doing cause I feel like it is very playful and is exploring more areas of the map.

00:31:23 - Speaker 1: It always comes back to these motions that we make with each other, so it’s playing, it’s interacting, it’s learning, it’s dancing and through that process, also through different stakeholders, so we’re playing and we’re also communicating and learning with our teammates, but we’re also learning from our customers or folks that are using the tool. Whether it’s recurring or just one time, all of that are processes that we go through to really understand what we’re trying to do and also what we’re trying to offer.

00:31:59 - Speaker 2: Now one thing I’d be interested to dig in on a little bit is expressiveness of the tool, that is its ability to help you express yourself versus the tool being something you as in you Weiwei or you mark, are expressing about the world.

This came up recently on the Muse team a little bit, which is we’ve always come down on the side of making. Our tool kind of as neutral and minimalist as possible, really try to get out of the way and make it so that you make your own canvas and space, and if you like a dark heavy metal aesthetic, you can do that, and if you like a light and airy gardening aesthetic, you can do that.

As much as possible, we’re not conveying a huge amount of personality through the product, and the reason it came up recently is we added this backstage pass feature, which is basically kind of has a little bit of a rock and roll style vibe, and we did a little bit more stylization, kemorphic stuff on the menu, not too heavy, but it was intended to just be a little more fun and playful and express a bit more of this character.

And yeah, I’m curious, particularly because at least Sprout as I’ve seen it so far, definitely has a lot of I think character even just in the mouse cursors and the way the names are rendered and some of the default elements you can put down before the user puts in their own content. So I’m curious how you see the difference between a tool that helps you express versus a tool you’re creating that expresses something you see or feel about the world.

00:33:30 - Speaker 1: I think it essentially comes back down to what opinions we have and are trying to put forth and the current visual iteration of Sprout is just one iteration that we have and one opinion we have, we may move on from it or we may stick with it depending on how people are reacting to it, but currently with Sprout, There’s this stationary vibe that we’ve added to it, so we’ve been referencing, we’ve been referencing stickers, different pens and also pencil boxes, washing tape, all of those tools and also little things that help us decorate our journals or even just our workspace in real life and What we hope to do is create further interface for people to customize that because that’s one opinion. The stationary vibe is one opinion that we have, but imposing it on everyone may not be the right thing to do, so. A plan we have is to create toolbars where you can change that for yourself and also create themes and also create skins or stickers for yourself to create the kind of vibe you want to set for the room.

00:34:44 - Speaker 3: That’s awesome. Regular listeners of the podcast will have heard this rant already, but I’m such a big fan of giving users agency over their creative environment, you know, they’re pouring their whole heart into this digital canvas. It’s nice if you let them choose the colors of the walls and the shape of the pens they’re using and stuff. That’s cool.

00:35:03 - Speaker 2: I feel theming and skins, maybe they fell out of fashion, maybe like WAmp was the peak sort of theming age for computing, and I don’t know if that’s maybe because as design and designers got more clout, let’s say, and then it becomes a platform for them to express a unique personality.

And I think again people do like that, like coming back to the slack and Discord examples.

That something that has a lot of personality and expresses itself through the copy, through the colors, through little animations inside the UI, but then once you’ve designed that whole thing, adding kind of skinning capability and letting other people mess with your beautifully chosen color palette or whatever is something that maybe is a little bit antithetical to, I think, kind of the current status quo and I don’t know, software design.

00:35:56 - Speaker 3: I don’t know. I feel like this skinnable future is already here, it’s back, it’s just not evenly distributed. Look at things like Minecraft, there’s a big mod and skinning culture there, even Twitch and Discord, there’s a lot that you can do, and even Apple has caught up recently and they had this, I’m not a user, so I’m gonna describe it poorly, but like the customizable home screen.

00:36:17 - Speaker 3: The widgets, yeah, yeah, it seems so basic, but it was this enormous hit because people like.

00:36:21 - Speaker 2: Control their creative environments, especially something like your phone, I think that’s not specifically a creative tool, but it is something that you have with you all the time. It’s very personal.

You look at it continuously. I think this is a reason why phone covers are also sort of a popular personalization item, so it’s a very obvious one maybe to project a little bit in the same way that clothes or jewelry or makeup or You know, the kind of art you hang on the wall in your home, these are all things that you’re making an environment that makes you feel good, but also expressing to others, here’s the kind of person I am, the things I find beautiful, the things I value.

00:36:58 - Speaker 1: In some way, I also feel like creating and also setting the tone of my own space, whether it’s digitally or physically is also a way to slow down.

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been immersed with a lot more of the digital spaces that have always been around, but I think the pandemic has given me a lot more time to spend time on or with the screens and so much of The internet world is moving at a pace that’s not necessarily human or that’s not necessarily matching our own human pacing.

I think with us, we are thinking about time at so many different time frames, so there’s our own heartbeat. But then computers are able to process things at milliseconds, so we are able to refresh news feeds and social media feeds at that speed, but being able to customize our own space and also being able to take the time. To let our own personality, let our own voice come through a tool or a space that we are a part of, is also a way to slow down a little bit to perhaps move and stroll around rather than being on a treadmill and pushed forward all the time.

00:38:17 - Speaker 2: In a way it does seem like we were rushing towards a world of extremes or perhaps we’re trying to rather than find a middle balanced place end up with both the hyper fast, exactly as you said, the 24 hour news cycle and refreshing your feed and everything has this frantic pace to it. But then on the other hand, where meditation has become incredibly popular and people are always seeking these retreats and ways to slow down and disconnect because it becomes too much.

Certainly my hope, and I think some of what we’re channeling through the Muse product a little bit, but also, I guess just in my own life, I feel like it should be less that I’m either hyper adrenalized, jacked into the news feed crazy thing, and that I need to take a 10 day silence retreat just to like recover from that, and then I jack back into that.

That instead I could find kind of a middle thing here, just to give you one small example, Mark, you and I talked about kind of the schedule for which to release these podcast episodes when we got started, and you felt, and I think you’re right, we could easily produce enough content to do, for example, a weekly publication, but I actually like that if you do a little bit more slowly, we do every 2 weeks. I like that it gives you a little more time to invest in the episode itself, to prepare the guests, to make sure the content you have is good, to review afterwards and see if any edits are needed. And maybe that just means it’s less work for me overall, but for me, there’s something about that pacing that is often enough that I feel like it’s fresh and frequent and lively, but slow enough that it feels almost deliberately slowed down compared to, I don’t know, a lot of podcasts I’ve subscribed to that have multiple episodes a week and there’s just no way I can listen to all of them. And that of course leads you to listening at the sped up rate, you know, you got all these features of this, cut out the silence. and skip over the thingy thing and listen to 1.5x or 2X to try to download as much information to your brain as you possibly can and maybe I’m just a purist, but I just like to listen to my podcast at regular like I’m I’m in a conversation and I’m listening to folks talk. You know, I don’t complain when I’m talking to my friends that I wish they’d talk faster so we can get to the end of this conversation, so it’s more efficient, you know.

00:40:32 - Speaker 3: And that’s surprising. I’m a 2.5 xer myself, so we’re very different on this one.

00:40:36 - Speaker 1: I’m a 1.8.

00:40:41 - Speaker 2: Well, do you have ways to sort of attune yourself just in separately from any software you’re building, just ways to make your life and especially your digital life, be at the pace that you feel is natural, is best for your health, is the right one for you?

00:41:00 - Speaker 1: To be honest, I think I’ve been struggling with it, especially because of the pandemic. I think the pandemic has made myself in one way more immersed in the digital world and in another way more aware of how much I’m immersed in the digital world and I think I’ve been doing a little bit of what you just shared which is oscillating between the extremes of being hyper online and being hyper offline and trying to stay away from the screens from the technology. What I found myself doing a lot of the times is comparing myself to others and comparing my own achievements and the work I’ve done with others and that leads to fairly unhealthy places and right now what I’m trying to do is focus on trying to be in the middle, not oscillating into the extremes but just being at my own pacing and being myself, whatever that means and letting go of expectations. I’m curious for you both, are there things that you’re doing to curate or also structure your own digital spaces?

00:42:06 - Speaker 2: For me, one of the biggest ones is notification management and mostly just turning them off a lot.

In some ways that comes in the form of, I don’t have an email address I’ve used for years that’s the one I used to sign up for services because no matter whether they say they’re not going to send you marketing emails, eventually they are, and I just have a separate place I can channel those, for example, but device notifications, I think are a particularly sort of thorny area because on one hand, There, I think the introduction of general purpose notifications first on Android and later on iOS made smartphones vastly more useful.

On the other hand, they lead to, I don’t know, breaking news alerts and you know, someone liked your posts and sucking you back in engagement loops that I find extremely unhealthy.

And so to me they’re right, if I can do for myself a good job with, for example, I turn off 100% notifications on. On the desktop and on the iPad, cause those are workspaces. My phone is my notification device, so I can just silence it and put it face down if I ever don’t wanna hear notifications.

But then I also very kind of aggressively manage those in terms of what apps are allowed me to send me notifications, including a lot of the default system Apple apps I have to turn off notifications for because they send me junk about photo memories or something like that, that’s just not what I want that for.

And that’s an ongoing effort there and in a way I think the right notifications actually can reduce my call stress or increase my ability to be in the moment because I know that I can be raised by a colleague if there’s something important that they need me for, then And that’s good. I can just leave my phone in my pocket and be in the moment doing whatever I’m doing, not being worried about that there’s something I need to check, because I think checking of inboxes and sort of the polling versus the push system of notifications also has its own compulsive, unhealthy loops, but yeah, that’s forever a work in progress, I think.

00:44:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I have a tactical answer here, and then I have a more strategic one. So on a tactics front, I’m just trying to be really mindful of all the, it’s bad on purpose to make you click stuff, which is now incredibly rampant. You just got to be really aware of it because there are so many organizations whose now entire purpose is to generate bad titles to make you click. And then once you realize that’s a dynamic, you can, you know, block and filter all this stuff, but it’s very easy to fall into that hole and that makes you very, you know, mad, which is the entire purpose, right, of this clickbait. So that’s helped me a lot.

But on the more strategic front, I kind of want to turn back to our original topic of expressivity because we’ve been talking mostly in terms of individuals, right? Like us as individual creators, but I think there’s this huge element of group expressivity and belonging.

And especially now we had this double whammy of one, we’ve had the secular trend of atomization, at least in the West, that’s been going on for a long time. People are more by themselves, and then obviously we got hit with COVID, which isolated people more. And I feel like in the last 6 to 12 months, those have really stacked up and people have realized that they don’t have enough social interaction and group belonging, and they’re sort of scrambling to get it. And I think potentially digital tools could help a lot. There’s all kinds of exploration that we need to do in terms of what are the patterns, what are the technologies, what are the institutions that help form this group belonging. There’s all kinds of different stuff we’re gonna need. So that’s one of the reasons I’m excited to see people explore the space of how can we use digital tools to help bridge this gap. So that’s one thing I’ve been exploring personally, like, you know, try to find the right online communities and ways of building community and ways of connecting still early stages, but I think that’s gonna be important.

00:45:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was in our episode on what we can learn from video games.

You talked in depth about the Discord phenomenon.

Which, you know, to my mind, I saw it as a group chat product that was similar in a lot of ways to Slack, it’s a different aesthetic, but you opened my eyes to there’s a whole huge culture around how these servers are run, and the custom emojis, and the product may be similar on the surface, but there’s a whole huge cultural thing around gamers who unite or find community in games they either enjoy playing or in many cases, players they enjoy watching. And then they have found very effective ways to make new kinds of digital meeting spaces.

00:46:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s one area where I do think people are really onto something, and it does connect back to a classic form of belonging, which is sports teams.

So back in the before times, people would have local sports teams that they were really big fan of, and everyone who was physically around you and you we would spend time with would be a fan of these teams too.

And the game itself wasn’t really a huge deal, and people would say it was obviously, but it’s more about having a locus of conversation and belonging where everyone in your community believes that, you know, in my case it’s like the Packers, you know, the Packers should do really well. That’s something you can talk about and get excited about and discuss, but in many cases we’re losing things like that and so what replaces it.

00:47:05 - Speaker 2: I may have mentioned this when we were discussing that before, but professional sports and in particular the building of, I don’t know, tribal affiliation or community around rooting for a particular team is not something I ever understood. Maybe a classic kind of nerd thing, whatever. Maybe I just didn’t grow up in the right places, but Living in Germany, where football is a very big activity, what you might call soccer, and in particular when there’s these big championships, the World Cup, just a couple of months ago we had the European Cup, and it’s everybody, really everybody’s watching, like if I go to take my dog for a walk when a game is on. The streets are empty, and you just hear time delayed the game playing out of people’s windows and local corner stores have it and everything like that.

And it’s actually as a result of that, I’ve gotten into it a bit. I end up following the matches as they get closer to the thing, and we invite friends over, and you can have that conversation. Like, oh, did you catch that game between, you know, Denmark and whatever last night? Wow, that was quite a, what have you. And I don’t imagine this is the sort of thing I would do on an ongoing basis, but just for this brief moment in time where these championships are happening and sort of everyone seems to be tuned into that a little bit, you know, I kind of get it.

00:48:18 - Speaker 3: Another sort of pattern here is conversation pieces, so that you might in your physical home have a sort of weird object, you know, it was the football used for the touchdown pass on such and such Super Bowl game or whatever.

And ideally it looks a little weird, or has some sort of demarcation, so that when people come in, they’re like, oh, what’s that? Well, let me tell you about it. And then you have a whole conversation and one of the reasons why I like tools like MakeSpace is they have this kind of personalizable. environment so you can create a little bit more of that dynamic, you know, come over to my space on the screen and let me tell you about whatever, you know, my stickers, and you can see and have a little bit of a conversation around it. So I think there’s all these little patterns we need to refigure out in the digital world.

00:49:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the sense of belonging is perhaps one of the main reasons I think I have a desire to express and earlier I mentioned this desire to care and also to be cared by others and I do think the root of that is the sense of belonging that I and perhaps others are trying to feel.

00:49:26 - Speaker 2: Belonging is one of the most basic human needs in many ways.

We are truly social animals, and as Mark said, we’ve atomized or deconstructed a lot of the very traditional structures by which we had belonging, which I think in most respects is probably a win, at least in the sense of many times you were stuck with a default structure that may or may not suit you.

And so now you have more freedom and choice to find the place that feels like home, or a group that feels like a family versus kind of inheriting some from your circumstances where you happen to be born, and if you don’t like it, too bad. But yeah, I think in many ways we’ve blown it away and have yet to fully find good replacements, or even a way offer people a path to finding those replacements.

00:50:17 - Speaker 3: So I’m curious then if you all have particular frontiers of digital expressivity and belonging, they are interested in exploring different things you’re excited about or looking forward to trying or looking forward to continue to try. So it might be this idea of mixing in video with canvases, or it might be customization or it might be gamer style social interactions. In my case it would be like I really want to bring emojis to everything, including new they’re so powerful.

00:50:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one for me that I’m a big fan of is personal homepages. I think I’ve heard this echoed a little bit and people.

Reminiscing on the web kind of late 90s, early 2000s, where it was much more get a shared host and just hack together your HTML and PHP file as best you could, maybe GeoCities, for example, as one kind of maybe often maligned example, but the idea that creating a personal home page and a weird space on the web that expressed what you had to say was commonplace.

And nowadays, of course you can still do that, but typically people rely more on their social media profiles, but those are very prescribed. You can kind of upload the avatar image and maybe you get a banner and you can change a couple of colors, but it just does not have anywhere near that well expressiveness. And I semi recently redid my personal homepage and that felt really good even keeping it really simple because it’s a chance to stop and reflect on.

At least career wise, who am I, what do I value, what am I trying to accomplish, what are the things I’ve done already that I’m proud of, what do I want people to get in touch with me about for more future facing things, and I often find myself encouraging.

Others, I have friends who are artists or musicians, they have a small business or something, and I find myself encouraging them to just make a small, simple personal homepage, because I think it’s as much about, yeah, it’s nice to have this calling card basically that you can give to someone before you meet them and they can add a little something about you, but I think it’s also really that chance for reflection. is who do I want to be, and it’s not just who am I now, which is obviously part of it, but that aspirational element.

And if you really need to boil it down to a web page, so yeah, maybe it has some animations and maybe it has some images and it has some colors and has some type and it has some copy, you have a lot of freedom in one way, but in another way it needs to just sort of briefly state who you are and maybe have your picture and something like that.

I don’t know, I’m just a big, big fan of personal home pages. It always makes me smile when there’s someone new I’m going to meet, or what have you, and they can, you know, make me their homepage or have it in their signature or something, and great, I can go read about this person and we can get past that initial, maybe this comes back to being an introvert and get past that initial small talk phase, and we go straight to what are they about, what do they value, what’s the core of who they, at least that they want to show publicly to the world. So, I don’t know if that’s a frontier exactly, it almost seems backward looking, but more personal home pages, especially for creators and creative types, is something that I hope the future holds.

00:53:27 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and our just like the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same and one of my good friend Kicks Condor and I joke about how a lot of the web has adopted this color of guab, which is gray with a little blue and nothing else. And so I agree with you and what you said resonated a lot in terms of are there internet corners that we can carve out and can we make places online that feel more like our living room or our bedroom rather than this giant lobby or this giant stadium that nobody really belong to but it’s big enough for anyone and everyone to come through.

00:54:27 - Speaker 2: So I guess what I’m saying is bring back my space. At least the MySpace vision, right? That’s kind of what it was. Maybe it wasn’t a good implementation, but that was the idea.

00:54:37 - Speaker 1: My hope is that we’re just constantly going through these different phases, we get tired of simplicity or just the sameness and then we go back into all kinds of crazy ways to colorize, to stylize everything and then perhaps that then becomes too much for our eyes and for our brain and then we sort of like go back to things in a quote unquote simpler times, but yeah.

00:55:06 - Speaker 2: So maybe a cultural pendulum between weirdness and explosive diversity versus homogeneity and understatedness.

00:55:17 - Speaker 1: And to go back to your question mark, I think something that I’ve been thinking a lot about as a part of this journey of building sprout is Are there more ways for us to create secret handshake or to show each other our body language in the spaces that we spend time in and as we collaborate through the internet. Something that we’ve done by spending time on spatial canvases of different kinds is we found we’re able to make gestures and also hand wave at each other. They’re in different ways, so we call it cursor waves where you can make very small wiggles and very fast wiggles or you can make big waves where it feels like you’re trying to shout or like get someone’s attention from far away, but those are moments where it feels like we can communicate a little bit more or connect a little bit more beyond just looking at each other or saying hi to each other.

00:56:14 - Speaker 2: It also points to maybe how much this is a frontier that you’re operating in where the status quo that we’re starting from, which is the video chat, static squares, you know, if it’s pretty advanced, maybe you have a menu somewhere where you can put one of three emojis briefly overlaying your video as an option. But the room for expressions of different kinds, even the one you described that as you describe it sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but it actually ends up being fresh and novel. It just shows how much unexplored frontier there really is here.

00:56:49 - Speaker 1: The other day I was talking to a friend and thinking about how the film industry in the 1st 40 years of the film industry, there wasn’t really sound and there wasn’t really the idea of montage and we’re only at the early phase of internet and computing, so it’s always really exciting to think about what might be ahead of us and what kind of path we can pay for ourselves and also for each other.

00:57:15 - Speaker 2: I love the film industry comparison because clearly the technology got better over the years, color film, audio, higher quality images and sound.

But fundamentally going back even 50, 80 years, you have the video format taking a camera and pointing it at some humans that are doing some kind of action or telling some kind of story.

You could do most of what you can do now in modern filmmaking, I think. But most of these techniques had to be discovered, and it’s always interesting to me when you go and watch one of these culturally important or sort of like touchstone films, So reflecting on Citizen Kane recently, just because I watched the Netflix film Mank, which kind of is a reference to that, and then Jaws is another interesting one, where it was kind of one of the first action blockbusters. You go back and watch films like these two, and a lot of things they do just seem obvious or Not that remarkable by modern, but they invented a lot of what came to be the modern filmmaking techniques, modern storytelling techniques. So of course you take it for granted now because it’s this known quality, but at the time it was breakthrough storytelling. In many cases it’s about how the camera is angled or where it’s positioned or how they do the edits or something about how the dialogue fits together with the way the story is being told. All of those things could have. And done 100 years ago, they just weren’t because there were techniques that had to be discovered and learning how to use the medium well took a long, long time, generations, and there’s no reason to think computing would be any different, even if you froze all the technology, things like displays and hard drives and pointing devices and things exactly as it is today, and then you can assume it would take decades, if not generations to really truly get the most out of this unique new medium that’s before us.

00:59:07 - Speaker 1: Mhm. There’s always so much more remixing that we can do and I think that’s the main reason why I find Nintendo as a company really inspiring because they’re always working with what they talk about as withering technology, they’re never using the most advanced technology. The products that they are building and instead through remixing and through understanding the essence of the medium that they are trying to work with, they are able to create really, really delightful experiences for families, for individuals, for gamers.

00:59:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Nintendo is one of my favorite kind of of sort of big long term corporate entities that are one of the most inspired and reliably inspired over the decades, and yeah, one of the things they do is in their console hardware, including the Switch, which I have right now, it’s the only sort of dedicated game.

The thing I have in my home, and in no way is it the cutting edge of hardware and sort of gamers that care about being the absolute pinnacle of graphics technology or whatever kind of shake their heads.

Why would you want this? But you slice it a different way and you say, how do you give a fun, delightful, and approachable experience, especially maybe for more casual players, and do something innovative, but it’s not about just pushing the most graphics horsepower possible. It’s about finding new ways to have fun and play together.

01:00:34 - Speaker 1: So is it fair to say and to conclude that the reason why we’re expressing and the desire to express is to have fun and laugh and make giggles together?

01:00:45 - Speaker 2: I will take that. I will take that. That sounds a lot better to me than filling some kind of hole in my soul slash an ego thing, but maybe it’s some of both, let’s be honest. Well, on that note, let’s wrap it there.

Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or on email, hello@museapp.com.

You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.

We, I want to thank you for working to make computing and our online gathering spaces more fun, more expressive, and perhaps help us tap that sense of belonging. It sounds like a heavy set of responsibilities when I put it that way, but I also think it’s a wide open frontier and the work you’re doing so far, I think really is promising.

01:01:33 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, and I hope that we’ll get to have more fun together.