#02 - Future of storytelling
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Hello and welcome to the Future of UX podcast. I'm Patricia Reiners, UX/UI designer and creative resident at Adobe. In this episode, I spoke with John Koch, vice president at Hulu, an online streaming platform with 28 million users.

He has been working in the design industry for quite some time now and went from working at Wired Japan to switching to the digital design and ending up as the vice president at Hulu. We talked about how the view on design is changing in our society and the business environment at the moment and he shared his take on creative curiosity and how important it is to stay curious as a designer.

But most importantly, he shared his vision about the future of design and those skills which will become important in the future. Please enjoy this wonderful episode. Have fun. Hi, John, and thank you so much for making the time for us today. I really appreciate it. And before we are going to start with the main topic, I would like to start with some shorter questions. The first one would be,

What do you do for a living? That's a good question. Well, first of all, thanks, Patricia. It's nice to be on your podcast. My title is VP or Vice President of Product Design at Hulu.

And what I do on a day-to-day basis is oversee a team of around 40 designers. We have offices both in Los Angeles and in Seattle. Hulu does have offices in New York and Beijing and a lot of other sales offices too. But the primary day-to-day job is actually overseeing the product development and design of Hulu across living room devices, which range from Roku devices

to Xbox, web, and also mobile, so iOS and Android. And in addition to making sure that we develop product features, we also focus on culture and personal development of the design team in order to make them better and make the company benefit from them becoming engaged and stronger what they do.

That sounds interesting. So could you share a little bit about your background? So how did you get there?

Well, you know, it's interesting because when I was starting in the field, there wasn't really a thing called UX design. And in fact, in college and university, design was primarily communication design, graphic design, you know, the idea that you would become a designer that would work in an agency. And what was interesting is that I'm old enough to where computers were just starting to infiltrate

universities when I was in college. And I was always fascinated with Apple and the ability to work in Photoshop. And so what happened is that my first proper job probably was at Wired Magazine. And during that time, Wired was a startup.

So with the qualifications you had is, you know, could you actually use the software and could you make something? It was very much a demo or die ethos. You know, the idea is, you know, if you could do it, then do it. And I got involved with Wired primarily because I could speak Japanese and they were launching a Wired Japan where they had launched a Wired Japan and I was coming in to help out on that.

And I had a few things going for me. I was capable of speaking Japanese. I was able to work with computers and I had a design and art background. But the first time I came across actual product design was probably web design. And at the time, there was, again, at the early days of the internet, there wasn't a whole lot of instruction. You kind of figured out how to

develop websites by copying source code from other websites and looking at the HTML and then swapping out different images and trying to figure out how it's going to work. But it was an interesting time because

This was also a time when print publishing was actually moving into digital technology. Before that, it had all been like cameras and photostat machines. And then we were using Quark at the time. It was kind of the precursor to InDesign with Adobe. And it was a mess and it was difficult. And you had to send giant files across the country. And you had these dial-up modems and it took forever.

And I thought that was really fascinating. And I love print, but I ended up working over on the website part of the company called Hotwired, H-O-T-W-I-R-E-D, not Hotwire, the travel company, but Hotwired. And over there, I started learning more about what would become application design. And it was the early days. And this is when a software called Flash was actually around too.

And the funny thing about any new technology is that whenever something new starts, there's a tendency to copy existing paradigms. So, you know, like when TV first started, it kind of copied radio formats and very similar kind of way of structuring stories. And that kind of goes back all the way, you know, to the theater era.

And when the web came out, the kind of mentality was, oh, it's a magazine. It's a magazine online. And so literally you had these flash sites at the time which looked like pages turning and they would take forever and it was very graphic heavy. So it took a lot to kind of break the dependency on old models and realize, well, wait a minute, this is not a magazine or a newspaper. This is something completely different. And that's where it became fascinating for me

to kind of learn on the job in terms of actual learning about product design and UX design. My schooling was primarily at Wired because everybody was learning on the job. And now, of course, they have UX classes and courses in colleges, but at the time it just didn't exist. So you had to kind of figure it out as you went.

And then you would then pass on information and then you just keep kind of fumbling your way forward until you got to where you need to be. So ultimately, starting at Wired, getting into digital technology, doing a startup, moving to L.A., getting into the local industry, which was, you know, Hollywood. I worked at CBS where I was VP of Interactive.

And I'm skipping a lot of detail, but then ultimately what happened is that I ended up in e-commerce. I worked at Magento, which is an open source e-commerce platform, which is now actually was acquired by Adobe last year.

But at the time, it was acquired by eBay. So I was head of eBay Enterprise Design at the time as well. So I was a lot in the last, I don't know, last decade, I was working in e-commerce, but then I decided to come back into the media tech environment. And that's how I ended up at Hulu.

So I'll stop there because I can kind of ramble on for a while otherwise. No, that sounds really awesome. And I would like to know how your really interesting and variety background helps you today in your day-to-day job. Well, you know, it's interesting. I'm a big believer that you should do something beyond your day job. And I actually actively encourage people

my design team to pursue things that are not designed. And this kind of goes back to a basic concept that I have that, you know, when you are a young person, you have all these interests and desires and passions for different things that, you know, from literature to film, you know, to science, to technology. And for whatever reason, as we get older, we limit people down saying you can only do one of these four things that you want to do. And I remember like giving a speech

about a year and a half ago to these Princeton design students. And I said, you can imagine you have this huge amount of potential and capability that you have because you're the top of the top design brilliant people. And I'm holding my hands up. So you hold up your hands about a foot from each other. And I said, this represents your potential and everything you can do. But unfortunately, when you go into a job with a job description,

Like at any great company, whether it's Apple or Amazon or, you know, or Google or whatever, they're going to kind of reduce everything you can do down to about this. Now I'm holding my hands about two inches away from each other.

And it's not really the fault of the company because what they need is that job description fulfilled, right? The two inches that I'm holding away from my hands from each other. But you're actually capable, again, of the full, you know, if I pull my hands back out, the full foot of abilities. But the problem is that all the other things you can do doesn't directly benefit the job description as they measure it.

And there's this thing called KPIs, key performance indicators. And how do you measure your ability to be constructive to the company? And I also thought that was really weird because what I do is I tend to hire people within the job description that's posted, but then I talk to them and find out what they're actually interested in doing. Because if I can expand and understand what it is that they're actually really interested in doing, which may be something that's not directly tied into design,

and that can develop a product or project within the company that appeals to that part of their sensibility too, then I've got them super engaged. Now they're doing the work for people versus one. Even though it's counterintuitive to encourage designers or creatives or anybody in a company to do things beyond their day job, it actually increases the value to the company.

Because now they have a healthy sense of who they are beyond the job title of the company, whatever it is, accountant, lawyer, or designer. And then they can bring perspective and new points of view to how they're approaching a design problem. And so to me, if you're doing something like in a day-to-day process of going to your job, you're giving away a lot to a company.

And that's fine. The company is paying you well, giving you health benefits, and that's the exchange. I will give you my craft and my thinking. You will provide the monetary reimbursement for my time here. But beyond that, your life is going by. And so if you're not engaged with what you're doing, then to me, it doesn't matter how much money or compensation or benefits,

benefits you're getting, you are still losing the ultimate value, which is your time, right? So

The thing that's interesting to me is that since you give away so much of your time to other things like your company or even your family or your friends or whatever the case is, most people very rarely are comfortable with the idea of doing something specifically for themselves. They think it's selfish or they think it's indulgent. But the irony is the more you do that, let's say meditation, which is a very singular experience, the more that you actually unlock

Because through contemplation, you actually know what it is you're interested in doing and you can unlock that. And it's something that's specifically for you. And it could be yoga. It could be going for hikes. It could be drawing. But whatever it is, it has to be something that is not there to make money or to help other people. But it allows you to kind of commune with what's really important for you.

And if you have that foundation, let's say you do in the morning before you come into work, then you kind of did your real work for the day and you feel like you have a relief. And now you can go in and do your job and you have a different perspective. You can bring more energy to it. You can bring different points of view to it. And then you're not reliant on

on feeling that who you are as a person is tied into a title. You know, because so much of life is tied into like, I'm a fill in the blank, you know, I'm a designer, I'm a director in LA, I'm an actor, you know, or I'm a creative director, or I'm a CEO. And, you know, if you should be, well, you should be proud of whatever title you have, you should be proud of the company you work at. But if you become too reliant on that, then your sense of self starts to disappear. And you become very reactionary.

to what other people want or think versus doing what's right, let's say for the customer or what's right for you. And if you don't lose sight of that, and I think that again, spending time on things that are intimately yours, it could be ceramics, you know, it could be doing standup comedy at night. Those are the things that actually fill the battery, in my opinion, that then allows you to kind of bring your best self to work.

So I hope that kind of answers your question. Yes, absolutely. I think you're bringing up a really important point. So I would like to know, what do you think about the design industry today? So you've been there for quite some time, like you mentioned. So what does today look like for UX designers or product designers generally? Well, on one level, I think we are the...

We're at a time of great change because on one level you have very strong design-led companies, the most classic one being, of course, Apple, and the first really big famous designer being Johnny Ive who came out of Apple. But then you also have companies which are design-led, experience-led companies like Airbnb, which

It was famously co-founded by two of the three founders who are designers and one developer. And so there's a holistic kind of point of view to design as being an integral part of the product development process. And design is not an afterthought, but it actually is at the very beginning of any kind of feature development or product development process. That's relatively new.

Traditionally, older companies tend to think of design as decoration or as a service.

So all the real work is done by the product people who develop requirements and then they throw it over to the designers to make it look pretty, as they say. And then it's then given to the developers to then make it into a thing. But again, the problem with that is it's called waterfall, which means you're just basically throwing the concept over the wall to the next person.

And that never works really well. You should be more, you know, use agile methodology is much better. But in order to do that, you know, you have to start a project out, you know, literally like at a round table with representation from product, you know, from development, from design, some sort of program management and project management should be there.

And then ideally, I think even you should have brand and marketing aware at the very inception of anything. So then it's a equal circle of people thinking at the same time. And you're starting all at the same time, and then you're all on the same page. And then the trick is then to communicate amongst the whole group where things are throughout the whole process.

I think the word design has a lot of misconceptions, especially for older companies who tend to think of design, especially product design, and they conflate it with graphic design or communication design. And that being said, I do think there's a commonality of design culture that should be, you know,

taken up by the whole company. So yes, of course, product design and brand design and market design are different. But if you up-level at a very high level, there's principles that are the same. And then if you are not careful, what you often have in a company is a separation between marketing, brand, and product. And there's not the communication that it should be there. So you oftentimes have a disconnect between the thing that's being made and the thing that's being sold to

to the public. Luckily, in my company, Hulu, we're very good at actually communicating with each other across different departments on this particular area. But in general, most companies, you can actually see there's a huge disconnect between it. And then through no fault of their own, a lot of people who become CEOs or head of tech companies or product companies tend to, again, think of design in very service-oriented points of view.

And you'll notice even within most tech companies or even media companies that design tends to report into product. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but what happens is it almost symbolically means that product tells design what to do and design goes off and does it.

And I think, again, it should be a dialogue between the two. And I actually think it should be development in the room too, because then there's a free flow of ideas and then developers can oftentimes come up with amazing design solutions that designers haven't thought of.

And more and more, a lot of the designers that we have actually have development background. And a lot of young designers, of course, know Framer, they know how to use Sketch, they know how to use Abstract. And there's technologies that start to bring the worlds of product design and technology closer to each other.

Kind of going back to your original question, I think that on one level, product and UX design is changing radically for younger companies, like the, again, the Airbnbs, the Lyfts, companies that have been made in the last decade. And then I think they're affecting larger companies. I think Google understood the value of design over time. And then I think certain companies never quite got it. Like

You know, like Yahoo had trouble, you know, but if you look at Yahoo's, you know, yahoo.com from like, you know, 2001 to a few years ago, it didn't change a whole lot. And maybe it was effective for them. I don't know. But the point being is different companies have up-leveled and taken on what design thinking is at different points in their career to different levels of success or not. And I do think that ultimately,

design thinking and culture has to be kind of top-down. You need to have leaders in the company that truly believe it and make it into a practice. It's very difficult to try to convince

your superiors about the value of something, you need to have them bought in as well. And again, that's the reason why younger companies that tend to already have design thinking imbued in their DNA have an easier time versus older companies that are trying to learn it. And I think older companies can. I think there are companies that have turned around and go, "Okay, we are going to change how we approach things." And by the way, design thinking is not just with Apple. If you go back

Even to IBM back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a famous designer named Paul Rand who actually designed the IBM logo. And IBM became very much a design-led company.

And so it's not like it's something that's brand new. It's been around for a long time, but it's just different companies have adopted it different ways. But I think what's interesting now is that millennials and generation Gen Z, they're expecting good design. And the difference was like, you know, back when,

I was coming up again with a web and, you know, like in 1999, it was an amazing thing that I could click on a website and a box of, you know, stuff that I ordered off of eBay would show up a week later. I mean, that was a miracle.

So you didn't worry too much about how the user experience was. You were just like, it works, you know, and that was the level of like acceptance that you had to worry about. But now, you know, of course, you know, everybody has gotten very used to extraordinary UX design, whether it's on an iPad or on an Android or, you know, like on a Samsung. So it is necessary just to be relevant to have extraordinarily easy, clean,

an intuitive design, I think, going forward. Absolutely. And so because you brought it up, you just did a huge redesign of Hulu during the last years. And I would like to

I would like to know if you had some kind of a guiding light or some specific industry trends you were following or some visions you are believing in, which are going to be important for the future. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things. I mean, the industry in general tends to look at everybody else. You tend to copy each other.

inadvertently or on purpose. And whoever the dominant player tends to be the person who sets the standard. And essentially, again, like 12 years ago when I was at CBS, when we were redesigning cbs.com,

At the time, there was this notion that everything had to be above the fold. And what that meant is it had to fit within the screen that you were looking at because no one scrolled. Everybody scrolls now, but at the time, everybody's like, no one would look below the fold in order to look at the information below it. So you tend to cram everything in the very top of the website. And so my solution at the time was to rotate stuff.

And I think I may or my team may have been inadvertently responsible for the rise of the carousel, you know, which I apologize for. You know, but, you know, that horrible thing where you like you get to see a screen for a second, then it moves and, oh, you know, it moves. But that was an attempt at actually trying to cram more information into a short period in a small space.

And what happened though, is I remember as soon as we launched that, about two months later, everybody else on the other competitor networks were doing the same thing. So when we were launching, approaching the redesign of Hulu, I kind of thought it'd be good not to look at the competition, but to look at good UX in general, just understand how good user experience is for humans in general, but not necessarily within the industry of entertainment. And

I also thought, well, again, going back to Wired, one thing I learned when I was at Wired is that there was this concept of a patron saint, you know, someone who was kind of symbolic of the company. And at the time it was Marshall McLuhan. And Marshall McLuhan was a very famous Canadian theorist about media and he...

He had a book called The Medium is the Massage. And he talked about a lot of the ideas of how we would be dealing with future technology communications, the advent of the internet, way before it happened, like back in the 1960s, he was talking about this. And so having a patron saint of Hulu

kind of came to my mind. So as we were redesigning the UX, I thought, well, what would be symbolic for a patron saint of this product? And about a week after I started in January of 2016, David Bowie died. And I was a big David Bowie fan and I thought, oh, that would be appropriate

to have David Bowie as the patron saint because he was always changing. And so I codenamed the UX Bowie. And the idea was that the UX and the product would change according to customer needs and according to technology, and it would be evolving. Because most of the time, most companies kind of launch and they leave. They tend to go, okay, that's it for a few years, and we'll just modify it.

But I realized it was the emergence of so much new technology and the need to be agile and the way that people in general are engaging with applications and technology that we would have to move and keep changing as well. So one inspiration at a very high level would be Bowie. And then I thought about the idea of the campfire and that

traditionally storytelling was told around the campfire. You know, our ancestors, you know, going, you know, millennia back, uh, the shaman, you know, or the shamaness would say to the people, here's where you come from. Here's your ancestry. And this whole thing told verbally, verbally. And, um,

"Here's where you should go to hunt buffalo, and here's where you should avoid because it's dangerous." This became the oral tradition of telling story, and it was around a campfire. I thought, well, the new campfire, the new glow of the campfire is the RGB screen of the computer monitor or the living room television or the mobile phone, and it's around this that we gather.

So this light to me was ambient and it felt to me like it felt a lot like this artist I know who's alive still, but he's been around for a long time named James Turrell. And James Turrell does these amazing giant lightscapes and you enter into them and you feel immersed in these different colors. And I thought, you know, between the kind of zen, calm, beautiful color escapes of Turrell

and then the rock and roll changing ethos of David Bowie, that these two poles would be a good kind of way to bounce between the thinking on how we approached the redesign. And the other thing that I thought about was like, well, instead of focusing too heavily on the actual UX initially, how do human beings actually interact with

television and film. And so I commissioned a short vision video, like the second month I was here,

that basically took all the features that we were talking about and then made it into a movie. Like, how does a day in the life of young people as they actually were interacting with their devices and showing, you know, like someone, you know, like a young man watching sports on TV, then taking it onto his phone, getting into an Uber and then going, you know, and just continuously carrying the experience with him.

a young lady who has her iPad and she's in Central Park and she's watching her shows and she's carrying it with her. And then how all these people got together at the end of the day on the rooftop in Brooklyn to watch Game of Thrones. And so there was a whole kind of story from the beginning, early in the morning, when you're watching the news, it's being pushed to you. And I didn't worry too much about the UX. Ironically, the UX that we did put into the film turned out to be pretty close to what we ended up doing.

which kind of tells you a lot about like if you envision something, it tends to happen. So you can see I'm working very widely, right? And I'm starting very high with these patron saints and kind of the feeling of the product. Then how do people actually use it? All right, so the...

So this is very wide and what you want to do is you want to work very analog at this point too. So a lot of our discussions were on paper. Everything is being drawn out and I want to make sure that we're not getting digital too quickly because it's very easy to be seduced by the beauty of digital renderings of things. But really, what is the concept we're doing? What are our principles?

And then once we're agreed to what our principles and tenets are, then we can start to then go, well, here's the problems we're trying to solve, and then here's how we should go about it. But I think unless you're very clear about what the problems are you're solving, it's very easy to come up with a bunch of solutions which have no relevance to any problem. You just think it'd be a cool thing to do. So it took months of actually just getting people

coordinated, both from a high level, C-level executive to go, "Yeah, I think this is the right direction." And you're interviewing people. It's very much a part of the whole process of actually talking to stakeholders, both internally and externally, and then understanding what the technologies can and can't do, and then developing an experience that you think that would work.

Both, I think, you know, for masses of people, but also it has to have a very strong personality to it. And this is always the balance between doing testing with a lot of people to get their input, which is what you need, and balancing that against having a strong creative point of view, you know, because you have to be together because if you don't,

you end up doing focus group design, which is, you know, designed by committee. And as I say, you end up with a camel, not a horse, you know, or, you know, or you end up with the, a faster horse, not a car, you know? And so you have to at times be able to go, okay, I I'm getting the input. Uh, but then you have to imagine something that they could never have imagined, you know, because you can imagine that if you had, uh, when the iPhone came out, everybody said, Oh, no one's ever going to use it because it doesn't have a keyboard. And, um,

you know, it's glass, you know, who's going to do that? If you had done focus groups to that point, everybody would say, well, my BlackBerry is the best thing to use because it has a keyboard.

And then, of course, something which is radically different, like the iPhone, completely changed the whole paradigm. So you have to be aware of that, too. And so there's times you want to make sure that you are fulfilling an existing kind of paradigm that people are used to using. But then you want to kind of push them over into the next thing, into the next thing. And that's where the approach with Hulu was. Well, we were bringing live TV into what's called OTT or over the top.

And, you know, how do we do that in a way that appeals to young people? Because the median age, I think, of Hulu users is around 31 years old. And most television and traditional sense of TV skews older, you know, like people in their 50s. But I remember, like, again, not to overuse Apple, but like I remember when the iPhone came out, people said, well, I'll never use that. Older people never use that.

but younger people did. And as they used it, they influenced their mothers and fathers and grandparents. And so now, like my 80 year old mother-in-law texts with my wife emojis all the time, and is a power user on texting. So

My theory was that if we design the Hulu experience for a younger generation, they will quickly adapt to it. And then they will basically help teach their parents and their grandparents, et cetera. And it'll become natural over time. Same thing, like when an unorthodox UX happens,

uh, like when Snapchat, you know, came out, anybody over the age of 25 was struggling, you know, with it, but then it became normalized and people go, okay, I understand this. And now bits of it then infiltrated to like Instagram and stories and people really knew how to, and then even that stories thing went into Facebook, which is an older demographic. And so you see it flows over time. And, and so I think you have to, um,

be aware of what the competition is doing with their user experience, but not be too influenced by it. Kind of go back to the core question of what problem is it you're trying to solve?

and then address it with principles, and then make a logical design construct based upon that. But gear it towards not an existing older demographic, but gear it towards younger demographics in general without ostracizing the older generation. There's a way to kind of ease it in so that both... Like someone who... In my ideal world,

We'll have AI eventually, and we'll have recommendations around the UX so that it'll actually change according to who's using it. So like my daughter would have a very dense view on her mobile experience of Hulu in the future or any application. Whereas my mother would have a large font, black and white, easy to use, and it would change just dynamically because it knows who's using it and how they use it. And I think in the future...

you'll see much more natural modification as the machine gets smarter about listening to you and what your needs are. So I hope that kind of answers the question. Yes, absolutely. It does.

And I would like to go back to something you said earlier, because you mentioned KPIs and focus groups. And this is something I find really, really interesting, because at some point there might be a conflict between relying too much on focus group and data and KPIs. And on the other hand, coming up with an innovative solution with something new. What is your take on that?

about that well i think data you know it's important but it's like anything you have to use it in a balance and um you know there's a book that um called blink that was written by malcolm gladwell i don't know about 10 years ago and um you know to give you know you know i'm gonna kind of botch the story but basically there was a um a sculpture i think it's called a chorus that was being uh acquired by the met i believe i make it beginning the museum's mixed up um but the um

It's an ancient sculpture and it had been carbon dated, you know, and all the metrics on it were correct. It was the right kind of sculpture that, you know, the marks on it were correct. The stone was aged correctly. Everything about it from a metrics perspective was correct and that this museum was going to buy it. And then a famous director of the Met named Thomas Hoving, you know, walked in the room, saw it and within a second said, nope, that's a fake.

And they're like, "No, no, no, no. You're off your rocker. It's completely correct." And so they went back and they checked again and he was right. It was a fake. So the question was, how did he know? What is that gut instinct? And for him, it came from years of having done it, having been around it, having deeply consumed the information.

that went from being information to knowledge to wisdom. And then he was able to do what's called thin slicing, taking a small amount of information and being able to extrapolate a whole world from it very quickly in a way that not even computers at this point can do. And so I actually wrote a blog about this recently, which is called Your Gut Knows. And I think that you can have all this data and you should have data and you should have research.

But then at a certain point, you have to go, okay, in spite of all this, I'm going to make a decision which may seem counterintuitive, but I think it's going to address an unseen need or an unobvious problem that we're not addressing. And sometimes even when you're making the intuitive gut decision, you don't know why consciously. But I think that most companies are dubious about that. But in reality, when you are...

A lot of industries rely on this ability to have that kind of gut decision-making. So, you know, as an example in Hollywood, you know, there's been a lot of algorithms have been run about like, you know, if you have this kind of character and this kind of storyline, you know, that it'll be a blockbuster film. And yet it doesn't always work, you know, and what people rely on, you know, is not just the artistry of certain directors and writers, but their intuition, right?

And it's a strange thing. You can do metrics and, you know, a ton of this is metrics and it's risk aversion and risk mitigation and I get it. But a huge amount of anything that moves innovation forward is completely counterintuitive to everything that's happened before. And there's this moment, you know, as a creative person where you go from like,

I think this is the right thing to do. And then you have everybody telling you that you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. And as you move the pendulum over, you get to this very existential moment of complete isolation, the dark soul of the night, you know, like, or the, I'm sorry, the dark night of the soul rather. And you feel like I'm going to get fired, you know, like where something terrible is going to happen.

But the interesting thing is that if you get through it, then you'll find that if you're successful, then everybody comes over and joins the party and says, oh, that's brilliant. You're right. And then they oftentimes forget that you were the person pushing it over. But if you don't do that, then nothing progresses. And by the way, if you fail and you will fail, it's okay too, because you're failing the right way. You're not failing because you're afraid. And this comes into the idea of creative courage, right?

You know, and creative courage is something that I think everybody who's in any industry should have. And it's the ability to go, okay, well, you know, here's status quo. I'm going to try to change that. And by doing that, I put myself at risk. And I think the reason why

most people conform and most people are afraid of that. It's biological. As we go back to historical man and woman, we were in tribes and if you non-conformed to the tribe, you would be isolated and thrown out, which means you would die. The equivalent to that now is to be in a company or any group environment and to be thrown out means you're fired. The second worst punishment beyond death is actually isolation.

You know, it's where they put people in isolation or they banish them or you're shunned. You're told that, you know, that you must be over there. So every creative person at some point, maybe sometimes multiple times in a week or a day, feels that isolation, you know, and that's the hard part. And the reason why it's good to have community with other creative people.

and like minds is that as you're going through those moments of isolation, you can have community, you can commiserate with other people and they can help you get across that divide. Because the failure is what you're concerned about. And the interesting thing is that if you actually fail and you fail again quickly, then you're okay.

But it's only when you are thinking that, you know, you are your job, you are the project and it fails that you're in trouble. So like, you know, I've, I've, I've, you know, I paint too. So I've done many paintings that are complete failures. But I don't think necessarily that I'm a failure as an artist. It just means that that painting was a failure, you know, and same thing you do with design. When we do design critiques,

I point out to people like, the critique is not about you as a designer. It's about the product that's been, the solution you've made. And if that design cannot take the critique internally, it will not be able to take the critique externally. And so we have to do that. And same thing happens even with writing or whatever. And there's times, of course, by the way, that you believe that your work is right,

And it may be, it's just that it's the wrong time. And it might be after you're dead that people go, oh yeah, Patricia was right about that thing. But oftentimes that's too late. So I think that's a huge part of it, going back to your question about the balance of data and intuition. I think it's not either or, it's both. And you'll find that

really strong brands have very strong creative points of view internally. And those strong points of view are then translated both in the values of the company. Let's say like, you know, Patagonia really believes in not only being outdoors, but giving back, you know, or Nike really believes in, you know, health in a lot of ways as a health lifestyle. So I think that when you have an alignment between the company values and

and the way that you're producing a product that addresses those things. And I think that you're doing pretty good.

Absolutely. This definitely makes a lot of sense. And what would you recommend young designers who are just starting out, who don't really have this kind of gut feeling or a lot of experience? How should they deal with design decision in general? How should they be ready for the future of automation? Yeah, well, I'll take it backwards. Number one, I think...

In this world of increasing AI and automation, I think creativity is going to be the main differentiator. It'll take a long time for AI, if ever, to catch up with the nonlinear thinking of a human being. But in terms of like getting into it, one thing that I was asked about this recently at a coffee talk as to who my mentors were, and I didn't really have any. I had like one.

serious mentor who was a Japanese painter living in Paris when I was a young painter named Yoshida Kenji. And one of the things he told me, and because he was a very interesting guy, he, he had been called up as a kamikaze pilot when he was 16 years old. And on the day that he was literally going to be put into a plane and they locked you in the plane, but they welded it shut so you couldn't get out. And they gave you no parachute that he was, he,

about to go into the plane when the war was declared over and he was told he didn't have to do it so he realized at that point that there are no rules you know that life can be whatever it is you want to be and so he decided i'm gonna go to paris and i'm gonna paint because that's what i wanted to do and he did he went to paris in the 60s didn't speak a word of french and uh

you know, and told me his whole story when he spoke a very old dialect of Japanese. And I speak Japanese, but it was hard at times to understand him because it was almost like it had been frozen in time back in, you know, that time period. So he told me, you know, he saw me struggling with an art, you know, a painting once. And he goes, John, John, stop, stop. And I go, what? He goes, art and creativity is not about making something. It's about letting something out.

You know, you don't try to make it. You just let it out. And that stuck with me as a mentor. But I probably have had more negative mentors than positive mentors. I've had really terrible bosses. And, you know, but the thing is, you can learn from bad examples as much as you can learn from good examples. You can be you can have bad parents and you can become a bad parent or you can say, well, I'm not going to do that. And you have to work really hard not to.

That being said, if I was a young designer, what I would probably would have appreciated when I was coming up was actual true mentorship and finding someone who I admired and asked them to help mentor me. Even if it's an email, occasional email or what have you, or nowadays a Zoom call, you know, it's easy to do. But I think mentorship is useful because it helps to accelerate things. So, yeah.

One of the things that I did is I wrote a book recently called The Art of Creative Rebellion, and it's coming out on January 21st of 2020. But I wrote it because I had been given these speeches and I was at a South by Southwest conference and I was actually speaking. And after the speech, I had a bunch of people come up to me and say, hey, do you have a book? I want to learn more about how you do what you do. And I said, well, I don't have one.

And my wife said, why don't you write a book, you know, that you would write to a beginning designer? And so I kind of wrote this book, you know, The Art of Creative Rebellion as a kind of like letters to a young poet, you know, that Rilke did, you know, to a designer, you know. But then I thought also I would add in some personal stories. And I found that people responded to the personal stories a lot more. So I ended up adding more personal stories to it.

And then I realized that the book was applicable to not only young designers, but to executives who could understand how design is made. And then I realized that the book was actually applicable to more than design. It's actually applicable to anybody trying to just live in this corporate world and, you know, survive and thrive. And so that since I wasn't able to mentor as many people as I'd like to, I thought, well, this is a way to mentor.

you know, at scale through a book. So again, going back to it, I would say like number one, you know, read everything. You know, I'm a huge believer in just consuming massive amounts of information and then discarding it because, you know, it'll filter through and become yours. And then secondly, if you can find people that you can, who can mentor you, because you'd be surprised how many leaders will take the time out

to spend with someone just to help them, because it'll help in a lot of ways, pass forward knowledge and hopefully that becomes wisdom so that people can avoid the problems that maybe I've encountered. You'll have your own, everybody has their own. You're gonna have your own issue, but perhaps it'll help you address those issues a lot better and deal with them in your own way.

Because I'm a firm believer there's no one can stop you from having your own mistakes. But I think if you can alleviate people's suffering a little bit by saying, here are some tools and here are some ways to approach it, don't despair. You know, you're not alone. These things happen. And just keep going. Yeah.

Absolutely. Thanks for the advice. I think really, really helpful for many people. And speaking about resources, you already mentioned one book, which is kind of funny because I ordered it yesterday and got it today. The Blink book. Oh, really? That's funny.

yeah really funny so uh do you have some other books or blogs or articles you would recommend reading yeah i feel like i think you can um you know if you're listening to design things you know design matters by debbie millman is good um you know i think uh actually uh russell brand you know actually is interesting from a podcast perspective because he talks about

a little bit more spiritual stuff, but I think it's an important thing to consider as you're trying to keep your integrity and soul in this more and more mechanized world. I think also one of the more common ones is Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss has a kind of like optimizing yourself kind of blog. I think there's applications like I would consider probably Headspace is good for meditation.

I meditate every morning and it helps kind of ground me. And in terms of books, I think that beyond promoting my own book, I think you should also look at, I think actually Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is actually an amazing book.

Um, I think, uh, there's also, you know, Ways of Seeing by John Berger is really good. These are older books. Um, but I think that, uh, there was a lot of books that influenced me and I should probably just put a whole list on my website. It might be easier to do that. Uh, cause I, I read a lot, you know, and, and, and this age of, um,

Less and less reading. I think it's important to read and it can be audio books too. But I think what reading does is it allows you to be contemplative and you need to be contemplative in order to come up with new ideas.

And in this world of constant, you know, ADHD, ADD, you know, fill in the acronym for attention deficit life that we're in, which is made worse by a constant bombardment by push notifications on your phone or Instagram, Snapchat, you know, TikTok, whatever the case is. What happens is that you end up like losing the ability to think deeply about things.

And by reading, what it does is it actually forces you to slow down and it forces you to focus. And what you'll find is that in those moments of slowing down and focus, it's like being in the bathroom taking a shower. That's where the ideas happen. And the ideas will start to come to the fore.

as you read. And you'll notice that every great leader that you hear about, Elon Musk, Bill Gates to Sheryl Sandberg, read a lot. They read deeply. And so I think that what I can do if it's useful is I can send you a link to maybe books that I would recommend reading because I can't think of any huge number of them right now.

But there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of really great books that you can read that'll help, you know, get you in the right mindset for, you know, pursuing this. I'm going to link your website anyways. So if you have some books there or like a book list or anything, then people will find it, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I have a blog site there too. So then I'll try to, you know, do a blog on, I'll write this down and actually, you know, books.

So now I have like two final questions. One is, what do you think the industry of UX will look like in 20 years? I know it's a really tough question and you can't answer it. What do you think? Yeah, I think that with the advent of AI, that more and more

designs will be done and generated automatically through pre-existing pattern libraries that will probably happen on a basic level with machine learning and AI. I don't think it's going to completely make the designer redundant. I just think that the designer will have to think in terms of systems. And I think that there'll be three-dimensional UX. I do think that we are headed toward at least a mixed reality.

if not straight out VR, AR. I don't think it's going to be ready player one necessarily immediately, but I do think that you're going to have a lot of overlay that'll happen. First with glasses, then with contact lenses and who knows, eventually a chip. So I think that the challenge for design will move from a relatively two-dimensional kind of experience on a screen into an actual three-dimensional environment, which will not be able to be

totally taken over by AI, but it'll actually be an area that will continue to expand. So I think it's very exciting in a lot of ways. I think that the ability to continuously design and find design within emerging technologies as they grow will be the area that we're going into. And the thing is, it's funny, people...

We're in a hockey stick right now of design and technology development because I gave us as an example the other day, but it's interesting because back in 2000, years ago, I went to a record company and I said, hey,

I think you should digitize your catalog of music and then allow people to listen to it on the phone, like a radio, and then hit the pound key if they want to bookmark a song and hit the star key if they want to buy the song and then download it. And after about 30 minutes, the two executives looked at me and said, okay, this meeting's over. John, no one will ever effing listen to music on a phone. Goodbye.

And then, you know, fast forward to the mid 2000s and how we were looking at mobile phones and the idea of looking at television on the mobile phone. And around 2006, I had a friend of mine who was the VP of mobile at CBS, and I had him show and demonstrate what he had done in Germany to my tech team. Mind you, these are tech development HTML developers.

who, you know, themselves were only about a decade old. And, you know, at that time in 2006 of actually having worked in technology and they, at the end of the presentation, they said, you know, hey,

dude no one's ever going to text in america you know texting is not going to happen you know so every time you have this you have this resistance and so i think right now the resistance is to oh ar and vr it'll never happen it's going to happen and it's going to happen in ways that we're not even aware of um and it'll happen quickly so i think that you know one of my advice you know for um

for young people is to stay young, even as you get older. Don't always, I mean, appreciate where you came from, appreciate the history of your time, but always be of the now. You know, it's like the poet Baudelaire said, always the new, you know, like always the new. Because no one has ever become famous for repeating the past.

Not that you're trying to be famous, but no one's ever done anything innovative because of that. It's always because you're breaking new ground and you're disrupting. Everybody from Virginia Woolf to Picasso to Amelia Earhart have all broken rules. And that's what you have to do in order to do anything. So you got to make yourself uncomfortable. So anyway, in 2020, or not 2020, in 20 years from now,

I think the things that we're thinking about right now as being terribly uncomfortable will be the norm. So let's stay excited for the future. Yeah, that would be interesting.

So when people want to follow your work, want to follow like your, what you write, what you paint, where can people find you? Like online, of course. Oh, well, you can find me at john-couch.com. So it's J-O-H-N with a hyphen, C-O-U-C-H.com. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm also on Medium, on medium.com and on Twitter. And yeah,

I also publish weekly, well, I try to do weekly, a newsletter, which you can sign up for on my website. But if you miss it there, it gets published to LinkedIn and Medium as well. And so I try to take a lot of the concepts that we're talking about and then extrapolate further on them and try to think about them in different ways. And I try not to stay only on design. I try to talk about just in general, how do you lead a life of engagement?

how do you engage? Now, obviously I'm looking at through the design lens a lot, but it's not just design. It's like, how do you make sure that you're not staying

in a state of what I call the muck. And the muck is where you just kind of walk through your day. You try to get to lunchtime. After lunch, you try to get to dinnertime. After dinner, you try to just go have a drink. After you have a drink, you just want to go watch TV and you want to go to sleep. And then days go by, weeks go by, years go by. And then you keep wishing you had done the thing that you had thought about when you were 21. So if you want to write a book, now is a good time. If you want to record an album, now is a good time.

If you want to do anything, don't deny yourself. You know, going back to the earlier conversation, you know, do something beyond your day job. Do something that fulfills you. Because, you know, the cliche is, you know, life is short. It is. And it doesn't, you're not guaranteed you're going to live to an old age. And the thing that old people do say as they're, you know, on their deathbed, not to be morbid, is they regret the things they didn't do. You know, not the things they did do. It's also things they didn't try. Right.

So, you know, don't worry about being the best at something. Just go try it. Yes. Awesome. I think those are really beautiful last words to finish this episode. So thank you, John. Thank you so much for sharing all of those information and your experiences with us. It was really interesting. So thanks a lot. Thank you, Patricia. I appreciate it.

I hope you enjoyed this episode with John Coach. Let me know if you have any feedback or recommendations. And if you like this episode, please rate us on iTunes. I would really appreciate it. So I wish you a great day and hear you in the future.