Beauty Across the Board: Rich Fulcher on Making Beauty a UX Priority at Google

design notes is a show about creative work and what it teaches us I'm your host Liams bradin in this episode we're wrapping up a special series celebrating 10 years since the launch of material design and joining me is one of the original team members former ux director and material design lead Rich vulture who's now moved on to another passion the design of board games in the episode rich and I talk about how material shaped his career what it means to make Beauty a priority in a business setting and what he's learned about World building across disciplines we had a great discussion and I'm so glad to close out this special miniseries with Rich let's get started Rich welcome to design notes hi it's great to be here good to see you again I it's so and I am really glad to uh yeah have you on the show as part of this series I think this will be the final episode in the M10 Series so we bring it in the closer yeah exactly I actually want to ask first of all what you're up to now and also the journey that got you there including your time and material I didn't know what a designer was for a long stretch of my life I was doing things that were related to design um as a kid um I was you know drawing Maps or drawing cartoons or doing different illustration work um you know building out for role playing games all these you know modules and Dungeons and things like that and populating it with encounters and enemies but from a school perspective I was always interested in kind of math and science I jumped into computers at a pretty early age my dad had one of the first uh personal computers the Timex Sinclair 1000 which was quite ancient and then I had you know a series of computers from there but in college I studied computer science I studied electrical engineering computer science engineering only came out kind of later in my program and when I went to graduate school I was studying computer science I was focused on computer graphics and Ray tracing and things like that but along the way I as part of being a working grad student I taught non- major classes in the computer science department so I was teaching students had to use word or Excel you know products at that time and just watching these otherwise perfectly intelligent college students flail in front of these unresponsive ill-designed interfaces and I got really interested in well who are the people that make these things uh and I took my first class in human computer interaction uh not even a design class more of a research oriented class and then from there it just kind of continued to be this area of focus for me where I was like well maybe I'm not going to be a programmer maybe I'm front-end engineer and I'll you know build these interfaces but I just kept G digging into design and design learn that word uh and kind of pushed on that ever since um I had a number of small jobs doing like frontend logistical software um but then I got a job at America Online uh in its Heyday um and I worked for as a designer in their what they call the community they didn't even call it a division it was just they called it a dlet a small Division I know it's so cute uh and I worked on a bunch of products like uh AOL Instant Messenger uh fledgling um blogging product at the time and then by that point I was just you know very much a working interaction designer I would go on to work at too a startup that was later acquired by Dell a few kind of interesting places but then by 2009 I found myself with the opportunity to join Google and specifically to join the Android team and then from there I spent my next 12 or 13 years as part of Google in various ways one of those was uh material design which we'll definitely talk about when I left Google I kind of moved into quasi retirement I'm no longer working Tech but you never really leave design behind once you are a designer and you have been doing design thinking for decades you never get to shed that you still look at the rest of the world as a series of design problems

or design opportunities I found that to be very true so in terms of what I'm doing now um I'm doing a few different things lot of volunteering work some of that has been as an elections official for the county here in California so I ran a in-person voting Center in the last election and in the prior primary election earlier this year and that is just an amazing bit of kind of system and service design to look at as well just kind of all these voters with very distinct needs for what they're hoping to get out of in-person voting or assistance there and just trying to build systems that feel very secure and very trusting for the user uh but also can kind of meet a lot of different tasks that they have so that's been part of what I've been doing they part is I've just embraced my lifelong kind of interest and passion into board game design U so I've been doing that uh in a way uh I've gotten my first title accepted for a publisher it'll be a couple of years now still to see it hit the market uh but that's been a really fun exercise because it pulls together all the threads of design uh in my experience you know I'm doing interaction design building out the mechanism in the systems I'm doing you know technical writing in composing the rule books I'm doing some graphic design doing a little research every time you run a play test so it's been a fun way to continue in my career in a way that um doesn't feel nearly as professional yeah okay first of all you have to come back on the show when the game launches because I think there's like a whole episode multiple episodes there sounds good second at the beginning you said that for a long time you didn't know what a designer is and now you cannot stop being a designer so I want to get your take on what being a designer means like what it means generally or what it means to you in your life I think the quick foundational definition is a designer is a problem solver and I know that's just over Brad but it's I always come back to in that first you know HCI class that I mentioned this kind of definition of the field which was we're focused on users who use tasks to accomplish a goal and in support of that they have some tools uh and they're operating in a context and that like those five things I think drive a lot of definition of not just design but of user experience broadly who are the users what are the big things they want to achieve what are the smaller things they're trying to do to move towards that direction what can we create for them and what is the context in which they're going to use that thing we create I don't know I even when I'm not actively working like in Tech on design I find myself coming back to those it's not natural for people to talk about their goals but you kind of need to get at that a little bit to well which set of tasks should you be doing to get there and things like that and I think context is super important and is one of the easiest things to kind of ignore like what else is happening with this user right now not like intrinsic to who they are but what else are they experiencing are they rushed are they worried are they operating something that's very unfamiliar to them so I think all of those facets come into play when I think about design yeah I can't help but like the ideas of this kind of straightforward human computer interaction definition plus the concept of like watching people try to use Excel and the concept of role playing games like these are like smashing together in my head in terms of like how contextual and contingent these experiences are and like all the different factors that could be influencing it that you're kind of you're like occupying a certain mindset that allows you to uncover that absolutely I mean I use the word conductor a lot to talk about systems and kind of designers like it may not even be that we're building each thing that's in front of the user but we're the order we present things in the way that we're trying to understand where the user is before they engage with the tool at first like there's a lot of that isn't just making the

thing that goes into understanding its broader kind of applications and sense of views okay so we are here today because it is material's 10th anniversary all year long um but you were actually at Google for several years before material even started up and I want to get your perspective on what design was like at Google before that moment sure I'll cave out that I think my experience might be a little bit different than others because I did join directly into Android definitely had a little bit of a reputation within the company of being a uh the pirate ship amidst the uh the flotilla of other products uh where it just behaved a bit differently and if you're around in 2009 and you're looking at the kind of the competition in the smartphone and smart device space there was just a lot of Liberty to focus heavily on design and user experience so I think Google as a whole when I joined certainly a very engineering forward company in a lot of ways and I think that was utterly key to so much of its early success Android felt a little bit different though it was very much close partnership across a relatively small team between design and Engineering I can cast my mind back to when I came in for my first interview uh in person and I wound up you know part of the way Google approaches interviewing as they bring in a cross functional team to talk to you you're not just a designer talking to other designers so I was talking to an engineering manager on Android and I think maybe we were like the second or third question in and he was like well know what would you change about Android and I said well I really think the backstack and navigation behaviors are a little bit confusing for users and then he's like well what would you change about that and then we SP the next 35 or 40 minutes like on a whiteboard walking through all these kind of thorny edge cases around you know what does it mean to go back and forward and when do you kind of do a lateral move when you push and pop things on onto the stack of screens and I remember leaving that interview thinking man I think that went well and I know I want to work here because that was a like really clear signal to me that there was this opportunity for engineering and design to do really wonderful work together so that was Android so I think across the company we had a wonderful slate of user experience designers and researchers they were really pushing to do Innovative groundbreaking work but I think there was air amount of constraint on them you know I think it was just kind of the identity of the company at the time I don't attribute any kind of ill will to any of that um but I think there was this reputation that Google lived to that it was like yeah um design is important um but we're going to be engineering first or product and business first and I think that started to change and I think Android was part of that but I also want to credit you know the leadership at the top I remember there's this there was this practice in Google of a weekly all hands you know meaning like thousands of people could tune in and see this event this TGF was the nickname for it and we had one where a few uxers myself included were invited to kind of speak on the topic of beauty and this was very much brought by our CEO at the time who was just like yep we're an engineering company but we really need to think about how do people perceive the things that we make how do we not just kind of pass the toothbrush test of do we make products that users use twice a day to make some meaningful difference in their lives but how do we make it pleasurable to use that toothbrush a rewarding experience and that in retrospect it didn't feel like it at the time it felt like oh this is cool that we had that opportunity but it was a little bit of a pivot point for the company where I think it was like okay if you were a you know uxer in a meeting two weeks after that two months after that you could be like but do you remember when Larry told us about beauty and how important that was and you just had this kind of new wedge to kind of press for a little bit more not necessarily change but just more time and opportunity and space to really take design seriously and design quality

seriously and material kind of emerged as a kind of a second moment following that there had been some ground work that had been laid and then we had this opportunity from teams across the company from not just mobile but from web as well to try to take a bigger step in that direction it's striking that the explicit pursuit of beauty was not always part of you know it wasn't always a given when making products it just wasn't and you know it's interesting to try to reflect back and you look back at you know a Google search results page from 12 years ago or something like that not only is it you know that different Google logo at the top of it but it is very much the classic you know 10 Blue Links and the Box above it super valuable right there's a reason Google became such an incredibly valuable company and a resource that people used every day because it did a thing just exceedingly well and directly mhm but it also did it in a very sanitary way it was very you know clinical or Spartan you didn't really kind of emotionally engage with that it was just truly a doorway onto something else and I think you look at a search results page right now between you know how much imagery it might include how many different facets of possible forward directions that it can hint at you know maybe has an AI summary of uh a response to your question it's just so much richer now and it just affords so much more of a sense of opportunity you back to those users tasks and goals we were presuming that you know the question meets with you know a one siiz fits Hall response with the 10 Blue Links and now it's this possibility of like well maybe you're interested in this direction like what's the first thing you can tell us after your query that that's going to help steer us towards something that's going to be good for you yeah that reminds me of um a conversation I think I had with Zach Gibson a couple years ago where he told me that material kind of thought about the company's mission statement of uh organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful can't believe I pulled that out nicely done try um but thinking about that mission statement as a design challenge that the design is not just enhancing the experience or like helping you do a task but it's actually interacting with the fundamental nature of the information itself and how accessible and how useful it is to you yeah I remember we had a bunch of slides early in material that we taking that mission statement you know print it out in proper type and then you'd go to the next slide and we just had a little carrot at the end of it and then handwritten in and beautiful um that didn't have to be like an afterthought that could be just as core to what it means to serve the users in that way and to provide that information that was always a kind of a rallying Cry For Us in the early days of material I can't help but fall a little bit into the philosophy of the situation also I want to dig into what are some of the constituent parts of beauty especially when it comes to software that's a great question I'm just going to start rattling things off great absolutely there's just you know the aesthetic beauty of it so let's start there let's start from the surface but as you dig past that it's well not just like does it look good static how did it appear how does it exit and get start to get to Transitions you to animation Something Beautiful might be just how efficient was it might be how did it work for me and my set of contextual abilities and constraints so I think Beauty has so many facets yes aesthetic yes kind of functional but also accessibility universality you know the kind of immediacy of understanding you know intuitiveness if we want to call it that and I think some of that is every discipline kind of has their own model of what beautiful is including engineering including product and that lens is really just one of do I really

appreciate the way this thing was made for that lens that I'm applying to it um I guess I'm coming around to Beauties in the eye of the beholder but I think there's that aspect of like what are you bringing as the person experiencing it that's going to spark that reaction of beauty to you yeah there's a strong like subjective or emotional uh component there yes um I think getting back into the system itself uh in my conversation with Bethany she told me that in the beginning of material you were working on navigation and patterns uh on a small three person team with her and Dave Chu is that right yes what was that like as I mean first of all um to be on a team with Rich vulture Bethany uh Fong and Dave was like a dream absolutely but being on that team taking on like such big chunks of the system like what was that like did you have a sense of the kind of scale and also the implications of the work back then we had a good sense of the scale that kept expanding on us almost on a weekly basis it felt like but we knew it was large and definitely iged by going from kind of just Google to for Google and for the rest of the world to build all of their interfaces in so it got big it was a really wonderful exciting scary period of design work I think especially for that team as being interaction design focused we were in a place of reacting to a lot of the kind of conceptual visual work that had already been achieved by the team and which was super excited we were you know thrilled to kind of jump in and bring our lens uh to Bear a little bit more but thinking about you know even calling it navigations and patterns I think just fundamentally we were trying to systematize to rationalize all this wonderful creative output from a bunch of different mod in application contexts both real and imaginary um to turn that into something that could actually have coherency across applications um I know when you had your conversation with Bethany there was a lot of discussion about kind of the mechanical operation of things at the component level and I think the same is true at the system level we spent a lot of time thinking about what the properties of material what we call you know paper at the time would be um how can it operate how can it split or heal or raise or lower in the Z plane when can it shift could it fold could it Bend you know just trying to understand from this kind of amazing outpouring of design effort that had already occurred okay well what are the rules that actually bind this universe together what's going to make it feel like a functional universe that has some degree of consistency as opposed to just you know a series of wonderful but maybe two disparate from each other experiences I would hear authors talk about you know World building for Fantasy or science fiction and it's always just like well what are that core set of rules that under underg this world that they're building that give it a coherence and that are going to animate kind of the other things they want to do within that context and I think we really thought about the work in that way yeah it reminds me um I had a conversation with Adrien Secord for the show uh recently and we got talking about creating kind of you know the interface as like a Pocket World like in terms of how important it is to have internal consistency so that you can kind of like Orient your things yourself and things like that and um it strikes me that working on a system level to create that kind of coherence or yeah that kind of orientation that you also have to embody it or instantiate it somehow like creating especially for something like navig um creating kind of a test ground or

like a portal into that world where you can see how it's going what was the process like specifically on kind of the navigation and the things that connect all these principles like throughout an app yeah I really agree with that perspective we focus a lot on what we called pressure testing the system so it it's very much okay here's a bunch of directions let's build things that feel like end experiences and so we used the our short hand was you know vignettes so we were like okay we're going to tell a short little story inside this application that shows this task for this user um just to kind of illustrate not just what do these individual screens look like but what does uh a coherent set of actions across it look like and then we're going to make another Vette in a different context then another and another do those all feel like they're speaking the same language not just visually but are does the navigation feel the same um are the scene to scene transitions kind of um relating to each other um and that was a critical part of how we evaluated basically every designed decision that we were making and once we built out those vignettes then you're like well what if the floating action button worked in this way or had this size okay put it across all the vignettes let's look and we intentionally tried to pick things that would be broadly representative so there was you know uh a communication task a navigation you vignette a composition vignette a more playful thing a simple info lookup we try to kind of cover a large terrain of Poss possible test types with the way that we selected those it's never going to be comprehensive but at least it's giving you a meaningful test bed and you start to understand where the riffs start to come in where like well this is working really well for this set of tasks but this one over here just doesn't feel like it's Landing uh which is okay as long as you find another alternate approach that still fits within the system that lands in that context so it was something where we got to the point where we like knew the names of these apps and we used it again for later versions of material as well and for these you know fictional but realistic apps that we construct we like knew them as not just their brands but we never built these apps in many cases but we just kind of knew what they were and what every screen was and it's like they existed uh sufficiently in detail from the for a designer to engage with yeah there's something there that I think is really important to focus in on which is that you created a set of vignettes that were like realistic product cases I mean I've looked back through the documentation like in many cases there were really well fleshed out like parameters for what the product is like what the brand is all of that stuff but importantly and interestingly they were not Google products can you talk about that decision so initially they were our first set was very much just Google products but then we realized we're doing a diservice here we're like just focusing on the world as it is and just our world um so we knew we needed to broaden and then we very consciously said well let's pick brand expressing that are almost antithetical to Google's in some way um let's pick products that are in spaces that Google isn't competing with in um and that was a very conscious decision again towards that pursuit of how much of the terrain do we think we can cover with a good set of Representative vignettes um that is still large but manageable you know a dozen different vignettes to try to represent hundreds of apps it's a stretch or thousands of apps or tens of thousands but there was still enough uh and there was enough variety within and we'd occasionally add something if we really felt like we had a gap that was a blind spot for us was there anything from that process that really surprised you like once it was built out in such a tangible kind of realistic way I think the more seriously we took the vignettes the more we saw the need for customization within the system like the earlier versions of material don't have the later versions than the material shape or color systems or any

of that uh and the vignettes were one of the early things pointing us towards you know we wish we just had a couple of levers here uh for how to approach this if we could just move a little bit outside of this defined you know color system if we could bring a little bit more of the brand to Bear by using shape in this way so that was I think a really early signal for what drive a lot of um M2 and forward I want to get into in kind of a broader sense how this experience of building out material design kind of informed or changed your practice as a designer I think a couple of things come to mind the first um and this is maybe a comment that just will feel ridiculous you know now that it's 10 years on but like we were just living in a different world of interface design that was very like go to this screen now go through doorway and present this screen and that was just the state of application design a lot of web design even a lot of mobile design at the time that's why I was having that conversation at my interview about like navigation and back Stacks because it was all that I don't get from one screen to another and because we were leveraging so much excellent work in motion design and transitions as a core part of what material was going to mean that really adjusted my thinking I was going to say broke let's be more polite but it moved me to a more it's not that we have to draw or design to this screen then that screen but we can have a more fluid exploration of like okay how does the context change back to context to present the right tools back to tools for the user um in a way that maybe doesn't feel like they walked through this doorway and now they're in a different room um because the cognitive load of that is real like every time it's like whole screen goes away new screen comes back the user has this moment of like where am I now how do I get back to where I was and we really wanted to make much more gentle transitions to help the user more readily understand how the context had changed around them oh you hit that Floating Action button to compose something well that button's going to you know expand upward and that's going to be the kind of edit or the transition that happens into that next scene so it really changed my thinking you know I was writing specifications as an inter action designer that was just like okay here's this screen now here's two or three pages of breaking down everything that happens then we do another screen and that just didn't apply anymore like we had to entirely rethink well how are we communicating design in this model where things are just kind of scaling growing shifting expanding there's lots of kind of interim states of the screen but we're not rejo the whole screen we're just kind of building more complex patterns within it um so that was very much a this is great this is feels like a very powerful Way Forward but a bunch of the old tools that relied on aren't going to serve us going forward so we're going to have to adjust our practice to account for that more um so that was a huge change for material you know i' been a practicing you know interaction designer for you know well more than a decade at that point and it's like well nope you're just going to have to rearn a lot about what your day-to-day work is like which is exciting yeah the word model really stands out to me there because there's a big part of it I think I remember hearing uh Matias um back when material launched and I was just a wide-eyed agency designer like taking it all in he talked a lot about user intent and how the user is in control of the interface and how important that is for helping people understand things and how yeah making the interface is like helping someone create that map in their head it's also very consciously trying to flip the relationship of like you're the user going into this place and you're experiencing it and you're kind of to you're like walking through a an environment note you're kind of subservient as the user to that world that's been built for you like it's an opportunity but it's also a cage it's this mhm like you're bound to whatever

the way that's constructed and material wanted to really focus on well how do you make the user feel empowered and part of that is you take an action and that changes the space you didn't leave the space but what you did caused it to be you know transformed in some way and all the way down to the like well how do we have animations that radiate from the user's touch like that sense of went all the way to well what if the touch their finger touching glass or their the click of the mouse pointer was the driver for how energy gets imparted into the system that's the trigger that animation stems from yeah it was a very conscious choice that we became a kind of a rallying point how do you think about that like something that you know I'm designing screens all day throwing up like thousands of rectangles on the board but I'm always conscious of this boundary that you mentioned like the glass of the display or the surface of the screen especially as we're talking about the interface as an environment and mental modeling and everything how do you think about that as a constraint on the design we tried to look for ways to kind of break a little bit outside of that thinking for material when we're trying to kind of rationalize all this system we had this conceit that the entire world should be able to live between the palm of your hand and the glass at the front of the phone so that you know how many ever millimeters of distance is the full like drawing depth of what you can see on the screen so we tried to you know imagine well what's really happening inside of that world I remember running down to the local hobby shop partway through the material development and I just picked up a bunch of wooden shapes a bunch of different colors of paper varieties of thicknesses just like scrapbooking paper and things like that a few like round wooden discs that became Floating Action buttons and things like that and we would just kind of physically play with those bits of material and we' you know take an X-Acto Knife and kind of slice it down the center and we'd get some tape and kind of connected back and we really want to kind of rationalize that little micro universe that pocket world uh inside that space I remember when we did the first reveal of kind of early material thinking to the teams outside of the material team so the application teams that were like we hear this thing coming what is this thing that you've been working on that we had lots of kind of beautiful work we could point to but we also made a point of getting an overhead projector you know one of the a camera posed above a flatbed surface where you can just kind of project what's happening on that and we take all those sheets of paper and those we have them stacked up we knew so many sheets of a sticky note were this much in Z height and things like that so we'd actually like build it up and we would be like well okay this is how material behaves this is how paper works and would be physically moving those things around seeing the Shadows they create seeing how they lift or move or pass under each other and just kind of trying to get other designers that Shand that we had developed on the team for how we had conceptualized the space was an important thing for us to communicate very early on speaking of other designers I'm curious how you think material changed other people design practice I think it really helped reinforce the movement toward design system that was kind of already a little bit in place I think we had pattern libraries component libraries we had brand guidelines visual guides like those all existed it was often Atomic where it was like you'd have one of those or you might be in a company that has a set of brand guidelines that's over in one place they have a pattern Library that's somewhere else they have a component also so we really wanted to pull that together into something that felt like a comprehensive system that kind have married all those parts together we were adding in that focus on transition on scene setting on choreography which was new very much in a lot of ways we're trying to pull in more guidance around accessibility that you know might have been another separate segment in the past as well but I think even more so was the sense

of I think there had been a movement of like oh yeah you should get a design system if you're were talking to somebody um at you starting up a new product and maybe they're starting up a small ux team that idea seemed very Out Of Reach for a lot of teams it's like well that seems crazy expensive in terms of our work and engineering's work to realize something like that what we wound up building we didn't know it immediately but in material we were building a system for building Design Systems um we we're building something that would ultimately have enough flexibility and like if you move years down the line that's getting to different subsystems it's getting it to design tokens or variables but is the like okay here's a baseline for you that you customize your heart out on top of it but still have something that feels very robust foundationally but bespoke for you as you employ it and I think that was part of what made material revolutionary yeah that also really um makes a connection in my mind between what we were saying about the kind of users experience erence and how their intention shapes their experience of an app um it really highlights that materials users are not just users they're also like other teams other designers and Engineers we talk about the onion layer of users that we have for material so there was like the stewards of the system at the heart of the onion you know the people that are all building it directly that the material team and then there's the teams in product areas at Google that cover a number of different products but they're focused on coherency within their product Suite so maybe that's the team that's responsible for driveing docs and sheets or something like that then there's the designer for an individual product whether that's at Google or elsewhere and then finally layers and layers out is the actual end user of that product and we had to account for thinking about users at all kind of layers of that you know set of concentric spheres how do we make sure we're building something that can be used by that team that manages multiple apps but is also valuable for the designer who's doing something that's an important extension of the system for their specific application context and how does it still feel coherent to a user who's using 40 different apps across their device that are all tied to this foundational system yeah as I say we understood scale we knew that we were biting off a lot when we did this um yes I also want to know how working on material you know influenced and shaped your journey Beyond being an interaction designer to being a design leader and Beyond you know I came to Google as an interaction designer a few years in I started doing people management largely of other interaction designers we started material we had that you know tight team that we talked about of interaction leads or designers but I think one great virtue of my time on material was I as a people manager I got to have the luxury of managing people with very different expertise than I you know it's one thing to kind of lead a team of people where your own experience in that field is like immediately helpful to them and you can help them solve problems or see different ways of thinking about that and you could kind of nudge them in interesting ways and maybe they're following a career progression that you've walked yourself but once you start leading people where you know for me you know managing um a motion designer managing um writers of various bents right managing uh ux program managers it's one it's just humbling because you become aware of like how much you just don't know but it's very exciting because then you're like okay well this is great I get to learn all about this discipline from someone on the inside of it and understand kind of what their tension points are or what's kind of blocking them in their work and how I might be able to help unlock that so it's great if you're a very curious person because you have this exposure to all these other people that are kind of really weighed into something um and you get just see like at least the tip of

the iceberg of their processes which is always fascinating and then I guess my other takeaway is then it's like well this is a design problem on in and of itself like just how do I how do we best organize teams to make use of all these proficiencies what should the interface of our team out to others look like to engineering to product how do we partner with different specializations like research and things like that so that was always very interesting and then you start to see even like the longer term series of challenges because you don't want to be just looking at the problem in front of you want to be helping to lead the team towards some more distant goals and for me that was very much this process of like wow we're going to build this you know design system we're going to design this design system that seems hard and then you go a little bit further out just like well we're also going to have to support this with a robust set of engineering components that actually make this practical for everybody else to realize the things that are in this design system well that seems hard even harder and then it becomes well we you're going to have to make sure that all these many different teams at the company and even beyond our company are able to fruitfully use this design system to meet their needs well that's hard and then you go even further still where it's like well and ideally they're not going to have to like invest in a different design system two years down line 3 years in line so how do you think about building in this in a way such that it is truly organic and sustainable and accommodates the best thinking from everybody else who's using the system in a way that they feel ownership of it as opposed to just the small team so like this series of very much people and people interaction problems became part of the legacy of my exper period on material before we close I want to get back to your game design and you don't have to reveal anything I don't want any spoilers but I want to talk kind of qualitatively um you said that earlier in your journey you were involved in game design as well and now you are gearing up to publish a game and I'm interested in how you reflect on the experience of Designing a game having passed through this large uh like huge design System project at a huge company with huge constraints how you passed from that into game design where you see differences similarities how it has felt to you on a personal level uh to work on something like that yeah I mean I guess the biggest difference I'll start with is how uncol aborative and exercise it is compared to everything in my professional career it is very um solitary work in a lot of ways of just like I have this vision for this thing I'm trying to construct what do I need to do to build that out what new skills do I need to learn to get me a little you know closer to what that idealized version is and absolutely like that'll change as it moves through publication and kind of more hands come in to bring their expertise but just at the level of initial construction and pitching and even play testing it's very much a well I guess I'm just in charge of this world which is a pretty unfamiliar feeling compared to you know the rightly collaborative work that i' engaged in for so much of my career so that's one notable difference I guess the similarity is I think about I can't not think about systems um so for a game you're kind of for the type of game I've been working on it's a kind of game where there are different stories that can be told within the game so might get referred to as scenarios where okay at the start of this version of the game this player's going to have these pieces you're going to use this board and this other player is going to have these pieces and here's the rules that they're going to used to interact that could just tweak the rules in different ways so when you're building those scenarios that's really the game that's the experience that people are going to sit down and have when they play the game but behind all of that is the system well what are the rules the pieces the boards all of that you can take and you can assemble together in different ways to build different stories different games so that has been the kind of place where I fall back on many of the things I learned in material it's like oh I'm going to need a way to

pressure test this system so I better build that at least a couple of test scenarios that I can play quickly that are going to let me know if this rule is working if this component is fitting in where it needs I'm going to need to think about like What's the total complexity of the system like how many words are is it going to take to explain this thing what do people already think they understand about the game based on other games that they've played so there's so much of that where I feel like um a privilege of being able to employ the many lessons that I picked up at Google that's really cool well as I said before once the game comes out or shortly before it comes out maybe we have to have you back on the show that would be delightful rich thank you so much uh for being with me today it's great to close out this series with your perspective like all the guests that I've had on and many others you're one of the people on material Who I Really respect and was really inspired my own Journey so thanks thank you so much Liam and it was a part of retiring was also the realization that you Google had been the place and the teams that I had worked with and the others I'd collaborated with where I just done the best work of my career and I just couldn't imagine a finer set and the material team is a very special team and I really appreciated all them all the years I got to spend working with them it's beautiful thanks rich thank you can subscribe to design notes on YouTube music Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you're listening right now if you like the episode pass it on to a friend and leave us a rating stay tuned for more conversations with creative practitioners across disciplines that will help us learn piece by piece what inspires and unites us in our work and as always thank you so much for listening