Welcome everyone to our first lecture of fall 2018. It's really a wonderful pleasure to be here this evening to welcome Evan Sharp back to the school. As the co-founder of Pinterest, Evan certainly does not need an introduction. Today there are 75 billion pins on over 1 billion boards on Pinterest and more than 200 million people come to the platform each month to explore and experience more than 100 billion ideas. Here at GSAP we like to think that some of his time here helped a little to open the door for this inspiring trajectory. He met Ben Silverman, Pinterest CEO and fellow co-founder through a mutual friend while at GSAP and rumors have it that they began work on Pinterest as a side project in between the end of the school semester and Evan's moving to San Francisco to work for Facebook. There are also further rumors that have contributed to his becoming somewhat of a legend for us here at the school that he may have hacked a very large and well-known museum's database while he was here that his studio project on the question of the archive may have enabled seeds of ideas to form and that the friendships, collegiality and conversations we strive to enable and foster here at the school may have somehow opened up new possibilities for his imagining something Pinterest-like as an extension of his thinking through the visual field and production as well as consumption of images that architecture in great part is and certainly has increasingly become. Beyond those rumors, there are a few key aspects that Evan shared with me earlier today about his time here. A work ethic developed through the intense working hours we often indulge in as time stretches very late in studio an ability to work with uncertainty and a large number of variables giving them shape through the design process and a unique kind of image and visual literacy as we learn to think through images and produce new ones as a way to think through the world and we imagine its possibilities. With Pinterest, Evan's work and trajectory outlined a new possible and very tangible path for how we continue to expand forms of practice bringing design intelligence and thinking data visualization and aesthetic sensibility together in a new way and towards the reinvention of the everyday, a project very much anchored in architecture and as architecture since modernism. But today and moving beyond Pinterest, we're excited to have Evan with us to share some of his broader and more open-ended thoughts, you know, such as maybe how technology can open up new dreamscapes for us as we strive to imagine a different and more creative and sustainable future or how we can strive to render technology more centered on the human experience how we can use it to diversify and expand that experience how we can imagine giving new kinds of embedded depth to images to tell more stories across more contexts and more cultures and more importantly how we can strive through creative practices to lead more creative lives through making and design but also through a certain kind of optimism in these darker times where new ideas and old technologies and old ideas and new technologies can be brought to intersect in unexpected ways again to produce new possible meanings, new ways of sharing, of living, of working and of being together somehow on this planet. So please join me in welcoming Evan Sharp. Hello. Thank you for coming. Those rumors are actually all true. It's very true that Pinterest was built because I really needed inspiration for Studio and I was too lazy to walk down the stairs to the library or the slide library and I was really frustrated I couldn't just search online and find images so we created a product to bookmark them and it turns out we built that for ourselves and then, you know, so many other people wanted to use the same functionality but I'm actually not going to talk a lot about Pinterest today. I hope that's not disappointing. It's been a long time for the last seven to eight years and I really enjoy talking about Pinterest but I thought today it could be really fun for me actually to talk about architecture and building because I've experienced those the last seven or eight years as, I guess, a client and as an occupant and I thought it would be fun for me, maybe not for you but for me, to share some of those thoughts. So before I start, I just wanted to thank Malay and G-SAP and all the staff here for having me and making it so easy for me to come and share my thoughts and being so gracious. Thank you. All right, so this talk is about 15 parts. Some of them are short, some of them are long. If it's too long and you want to go or go to the bathroom, please get up. It won't be offended. It's not a very linear talk. There's not going to be clear takeaway but I do hope some of the ideas are interesting or inspirational and that you can take some of those and play with them over the next year. The name of my talk is Home as a Garden and I'm going to start with a section called The Garden and the Shed. It's a very simple comparison. All right, the mason sees the plant and lays the bricks and dries the mortar and puts on the roof and then the mason is done. What a beautiful shed. And the gardener mends the soil and plants the seeds and supplies the water and the sun and sees what grows and then the gardener weeds and tends and protects and works with the cycle of life and as architects I think we tend to relate to things professionally like masons and actually in my experience talking to people who use Pinterest we relate to a lot of things in our lives like the mason, like we're building a shed, like we see sort of an image of an endpoint and then we work towards that endpoint, build towards it brick by brick until we're done. We diet that way until we hit a target weight or we exercise until we run a certain distance or we work until we hit a certain income and in our heads we'll reach that goal and finish the shed and check it off the list. And that's kind of in contrast to the garden which is never finished. Gardens are interactive and dynamic. You don't grow them directly, you just create the conditions for growth and then you intervene by pruning and fertilizing and watering. Gardens are never finished. They're ritualized and have seasons.  It's amazing, it's like this anti-entropic material. And to me that kind of relationship is an ongoing relationship versus the shed which is an object relationship. We think of sheds or buildings three-dimensionally and we think of gardens four-dimensionally and my limited experience if we approach some of the more important things in life more like a gardener, the self, the family, the body, the profession, the finances, the relationships in our lives and more instead of this the mason if we can create those moments and rituals that enable us to kind of feel that achievement we get on an ongoing basis when we garden it brings things into balance which is quite a radical improvement because the only real difference here between the two actually is that we sort of default to the garden with a relationship that treats that garden with reverence because we see gardens as alive and even though that's kind of an unconscious thing it changes everything and I garden quite a lot if you can't tell quite obsessed with plants right now but even when I garden I'm not consciously thinking about the dignity of the garden or something deep like that but to me that's kind of weird actually it's a sign that I'm missing something maybe missing a basic spiritual practice because I approach my garden kind of emotionally and intellectually and physically but not spiritually like you see a flower broom or you grow a vine up a trellis and that's very emotional or you dig in the dirt and that's very physical or you think about the soil and the sun and that's very intellectual but if I really want to connect to my garden and my deepest self I need to consider the spirit of the garden and by extension my own spirit alright number two Dear building at White Sulphur Springs In architecture school I was taught that the measure of the quality of a building is how well it's designed its structure and its form and how well those things relate to its intended use and when I first met you I was not impressed you look like an old abandoned rehab facility with chip wood paneling and cliche motivational posters and the worst ugly brown carpeting I've ever seen but this week he reminded me that buildings have spirits too spirits that are comprised of impressions left by all the souls that have gone within and that the measure, a great measure of the quality of a building are the lives that have been lived the jobs that have been performed and the transformations that have gone within and that if you want to make a great building you actually don't have to know architecture you just have to know how to love yourself and love your neighbor and by this measure you are one of the most beautiful buildings in the world much love heaven number three, not modernists I feel a kindred with the modernists with the kind of optimism they felt and the way they repurposed all that military technology put them towards living with the manifestos and the images and I think it's probably because they were working on the edge of a big tech revolution like we are today and that speaks to me through time so recently I googled what are the greatest modernist houses because I was trying to educate myself and googled that the top five are falling water the glass house the farnsworth house via Savoy, is that right? close enough and the Eames house now as famous buildings as they primarily impact our lives through images I next took each one of these houses and searched for representative images and studied each using Wikipedia and Pinterest and Google as we do and I think you probably know all these houses but I'm going to go through them anyway farnsworth house designed by Mies van der Rohe in Illinois is a weekend retreat in which the client could engage in hobbies of violin and poetry and nature and he said of his design if you view nature through the glass walls of the farnsworth house it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside that way more is said about nature becomes part of a larger whole alright the glass house derived from the farnsworth house designed by Philip Johnson as his own residence in Connecticut he lived there for 58 years passed away in 2005 falling water Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania near where I grew up as a weekend home in which the client could escape the heat and smoke of Pittsburgh to swim in the water and collect modern art and right side of his building I think you can hear the waterfall when you look at the design and the one I can't pronounce Fils Savoie there you go outside Paris in France designed as a country home in which the inhabitants could retreat by car from the business of the city the realization of his maximum the house should be a machine for living and finally the Eames home originally sketched out by Charles Eames and Aero Saranen and then re-sketched and perfected by Charles and Ray Eames after they spent years visiting the site as their own residence in Pacific Palisades basically Los Angeles, California something strange happens when you get to images of the Eames house like the others we see in the Pacific modernist lines and building materials hitting natural materials but at the same time it's a different feeling entirely this image was taken in the Eames house the night they moved in and I think it's awningly beautiful this is a photo of children playing with a toy system that they designed and as you look at some of these images a pattern starts to emerge so images of the building as a place of practice of the house as a home of artists of creativity of people of love images of a life well lived not really a space occupied by a clean aesthetic but a space occupied by life by living and even though the Eames designed and filled their home with some of the most emblematic objects in the modern age for me at least the Eames house was a home of architecture but it had to bring old ways of living and knowing into the modern world and I think it's a mistake to assume that those objects were the point for them and so the images that the Eames tended to capture of their home show a three dimensional object the house through which they extruded a four dimensional quality of living their home was not really an object to be occupied or used I felt to me at least looking at these images more like an instrument to be played or something after all so how is it that a modernist home speaks to me the most when it was created by someone who wasn't they weren't really architects artists and a designer they didn't design a three dimensional home they really designed a four dimensional home and that's to me because the Eames aren't modernists rather they're the prototype of this next generation I think us of designers whether they knew it or not my perspective is the Eames paved the way for the Eames in our culture that we've lost a lot of the tools we once had to nourish ourselves and the practices of living well every day there are architects who draw houses all around us it's hard to find architects that draw homes and I don't think it's coincidence I just went there a few weeks ago out of all those houses this is the only one I could find occupied by people who had at least by all appearances a personal applied interest in plants alright number four park ranger my parents met in 1975 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on the front steps of this building Independence Hall where this country was born they were both employees of the National Park Service working at Independence Hall in the Liberty Bell during the Bicentennial the 200th birthday of the United States of America and I feel like I have to run for political office one day just so I can use that story as full as potential my father was a park ranger he worked at the Grand Canyon and a few other parks before ending up as a ranger at Independence Hall he's really proud of this by the way he's very proud my mother was a museum curator and an archaeologist and later on in my life we moved from Philadelphia up to Massachusetts where she worked at Minuteman National Historic Park another kind of revolutionary war park and I'm actually proud of this heritage that my childhood is linked with the physical remnants what's a pretty incredible fact that this country was founded on ethical declaration of human rights despite all the hypocrisy of the founding fathers and our failures to live up to that ethical declaration I'm still very grateful to live in a system that's trying to make progress all the time towards this vision and that's rooted in a story and a desire that all people are created equal now later in college I met my wife Christina I'll never forget the first time I took a ride in her car I didn't have a car she did that was pretty great all her doors were stuffed full of these national park brochures she'd been collecting on her cross-country road trips that was really a good thing for me and I've been collecting these brochures as well so it was like what's going on with this one now that we're married I realize we can only collect the national park brochures when we visit a park and looking back I'm realizing more and more as I get a little bit older how much my parents being in the park service or at least that story has influenced my interests in history and architecture in the natural world and design there's only recently that I realized how influential the visual language of the national park service has been in my own language or journey as a designer here we go one of these classic mid-century systems national park service unigrid system designed by Massimo Vignalli in 1977 still in use over 40 years later his designs included a system of publication sizes grids typography illustration and photographic standards and more all with the intent of reducing costs for the park service as well as creating a unified organizational image and all together his design language serves as a sort of visual framework that encompasses many of this nation's most treasured places from the White House to sites of great historical tragedy to natural wonders out west grassland, forest, jungle, desert his simple system encompasses them all sort of the diverse geographical and historical topography of the nation unified by a visual system presenting a unified organizational image not just of the park service but in many ways of the nation itself curated, bounded organized systematic clean understood mediated sort of nature's most awesome forces mediated by an information layer all right, number five headquarters Pinterest has had many headquarters over the last eight years I'll start it here 2009 after just having accepted a job offer at Facebook and taken a leave from GSAP in my three months this is their myth who knew, between quitting GSAP or taking leave and moving out to California to work at Facebook I used my time off to code a passion project with my buddy Ben, it's called Pinterest first year nobody used it years after that it got really big and the very first instantiation was built out of this apartment on the 103rd and Central Park West and also out of this coffee shop in the Whole Foods which was brand new at the time I share, I remember by the window coffee was too expensive but it made it do all right, next headquarters 2010, coding Pinterest out of an apartment in Palo Alto that we shared with another startup two startups one crappy apartment and two of the guys were living in the apartment it was not very pleasant, but we made it work front yard was our main conference room and also our social gathering area lots of programming and then our backyard was our backup conference room it's a true story right now it looks like every day it's kind of what it looks like all right, 2011 we moved into a space with actual commercial zoning it was quite a feat although it was in Palo Alto so we had to wind and dine this landlord until he even got a shot at it but he was an architect so he gave us the lease Palo Alto is insane and we quickly grew into that home despite or perhaps because of the playful atmosphere we built many of the most formative ideas in this office we quickly filled the seating area filled the conference area one day this woman walked in didn't know she was she looked pretty weird until we realized it was Halloween and she dressed as Pinterest and the big thing with startups is learning from failures so what we learned here is time to get some security on the door true story pretty soon we knocked the wall down dividing that space from the one next door and moved in but it wasn't long before we filled both of those spaces and so we had to move again 2012 running out of space in Palo Alto we needed more room Palo Alto was also running out of office space so we turned our eyes to San Francisco which at the time was a fraction of the cost like a fifth the cost of Palo Alto and you could take the train to work that was pretty great and we were getting a bit older as a company we quickly filled this space wasn't quite grown up yet that's the pneumatic powered nerf gun I'll skip the part we get shot in the face we hired more and more people who could of course code until we filled this space as well and it was time to move again and it was time to move again so the good news is 2013 time for a new space that space was 808 Brandon it's kind of a warren of a building and we actually had that space the whole time we were in the last space about 9 months we used it for Frisbee games and this has been our CEO driving a scooter around and it was actually the first time we had the chance to do a build out so I actually hired my first semester studio GSAP prof, Jeanette Kim to do something for us cheap on a small budget it's amazing she used some very minimal moves it was the tiniest amount of money you can imagine but she did a great job just enough of an intrusion on the monolithic floor plates and this building actually really worked really well so this is sort of some screenshots or some photos what it looked like in the end when we moved in the building seemed enormous we used to stare at it before we moved in it was kind of unimaginable that we were able to fill the building but fill we did it's actually been sort of a dream the entire time that we knew would come true which is a really weird feeling it was the first place this building, 808 that we were able to grow into for more than a year it had great sexual qualities great social energy the patina and architectural metaphors were everywhere you looked it's true they blowed up model's hair with fan continuously it was totally crazy I'd be sick all the time we celebrated hitting 100 million users the building was great because it was kind of sauna if you could see all the way across but not so big you didn't still know everybody at least for a while so it wasn't long before we needed more space and that was 2 box down 2015 651 Brandon Street this was the largest office yet and the first time we had real money not a lot but enough money I got that money towards the design and I hired a small local firm I'd always respected Iwamoto Scott seemed like they were the kind of people who had a lot more talent than opportunities to date and I felt like they could do a phenomenal job also a friend of mine who I think might be here Shah had interned there the building itself had been a John Deere factory I'll skip all the metaphors here and it was showroom and Iwamoto Scott did a beautiful job using cheaper materials in a way that looks really expensive and they built this sort of factory for inspiration if that's in real life and we quickly moved in and made this space our own space and if the last office had felt sort of like the early craft user base of Pinterest this office felt more like an international company the one we were becoming and we won a lot of awards from the renovation AI, Medal of Honor California Medal of Honor Architizer Award but not long after we moved in here we had to be finishing design on our next building thanks to the crazy real estate market in San Francisco and that building was 505 Brandon which we just moved into this year retaining 808 Brandon and 651 Brandon it was the first building we occupied that had been built from the ground up although we didn't get to design the structure of the building itself, we got to do the interiors we've only been there a few months so it's still kind of a work in progress and I don't have a ton of photos one thing I insisted on echoing Amalia's work was plunging a staircase down through all six floors to get people circulating sectionally awesome actually totally recommend it still quite a bit of play they were building a Lego Millennium Falcon the day I left to come out here and there's a spectacular view so we'll see where this home takes Pinterest and award season is just starting but we've won a few already we've won the Kaiser A-plus Jury and People's Choice Award and so I wanted to mention those awards what has this experience taught me I don't really know yet but growing up I moved around the US quite a bit so I'm pretty comfortable changing homes but still the speed of the internet pretty crazy doesn't leave much time for gardening but I feel very grateful that we've had the opportunity to shape our own spaces and as great as these spaces are and as beautiful as they look it seems to me as the client what are the spaces for working and how good the space looks in the photos and how good the space is or how likely the space is to be recognized by awards kind of it seems to be the aesthetic of the space the photography of the the aesthetic of the photography of the space that wins the awards and much less about the building functions much less of how environmentally it's doing what it's doing to service the business and in a weird way my favorite building is actually 808 Brandon it was the building that was large enough it was a big team but kind of small enough to know everybody it was the building we lived in the longest the building our employees actually put the stamp on the most and there's actually one thing I could name that has made the biggest difference about how the building feels as a company I think it's been the extent to which the people who work in the space have felt empowered day to day to put their own stamp on the interior even though the functionality of this building is horrible the lighting is disastrous the HVAC is so large you can't even talk but the spirit of the building to me burns the brightest alright number six I am embodied I want to switch the whole tone of this talk for a few minutes to the self some of you won't follow me that's totally fine maybe I'm crazy I'm going to introduce this by playing a clip from the Bay Area philosopher Alan Watts I've always been tremendously interested in what people mean by the word I because it comes out in curious lapses of speech we don't say I am a body we say I have a body and somehow we don't seem to identify ourselves with all of ourselves we say sort of my feet my hands my teeth as if they were something somehow outside me and as far as I can make out most people feel that they are something or other about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes inside the head number seven frontier Americans have always been seduced by the tail that they are seduced by the lore of the frontier a frontier is defined as the area near or beyond a boundary the zone just beyond civilization where one can't depend on a safety net or the zone where two cultures meet and the frontiers in our culture today are unsurprisingly kind of epic multimedia experiences like the frontier of the deep sea which is a frontier we're still discovering let alone understanding or the frontier of the tiny world of particle physics which now somehow is in our cultural imagination because it's become self an epic multimedia experience or space the final frontier but is it really the great frontier of our age it's not any of these rather it's the way we experience and relate to our emotional physical and spiritual selves the great frontier of our age is the journey within everyone has a frontier inside of them but unlike these other frontiers that frontier is invisible and it's never been seen in any of our subjects never directly and without images how are we supposed to know what we're doing with this frontier and without measurable data how are we supposed to know with science and without science how are we supposed to talk about it without being crazy but to me the very fact that this frontier isn't visual or understood by science makes it absolutely essential that we focus our creativity and science poverty, identity, business, design buildings underlying the form and substance of every human domain is human behavior how we act underlying all human behavior are the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual dynamics in play in all of us so all of our society and all of our government is built on the backs of the health of our citizens relationships with themselves and it's in full embrace of the intellect that our culture has really lost I think a lot of its technology it's lost its tools and its frameworks and rituals for interacting with knowing, regulating and living from the self we've really lost touch with the technology that enabled us to fully immerse ourselves in the inner sensory experience of being alive technology in general enables us to move faster and more knowledgeably over land and air and sea to traverse and get to know these mediums in much richer ways so why is the same not true for the self? where is the technology that connects us to ourselves? I was telling Amalek that I cut my finger a couple weeks ago and I put a bandaid on it and I was really happy I had a bandaid and I felt really angry at somebody at work and it was all me and I was like why is there not a bandaid when I feel really angry and the answer is there could be we just haven't built it yet so the question for us is how are we going to get people to care about this inner frontier if we cannot see it or cannot experience it as a multimedia extravaganza whereas Mr. Roger says we need to help our children become more and more aware that what is essential in life is invisible to the eye we need to help our children become more number 8 this is a von Neumann computer diagram of a human our inputs and our outputs we zoom in on our sensory inputs we of course have the five traditional senses as well as a multitude of non-traditional senses and of course of these inputs vision is by far the most dominant five times more of our cerebral cortex is devoted to processing visual sensory information in the next closest sense just touch in other words a picture is worth a thousand words and this is why our most powerful technologies are built to output information visually in other words screens to match our most dominant input vision now here's the thing we're very very good at inputting visual information but we are incapable as machines outputting visual information what I can see right now I cannot show to you the technologies I was born with so for example if I was going to envision a house and all its detail and try to tell you about it I could use a thousand words and you still wouldn't get more than a fraction of its essence a thousand words cannot fully describe a picture so in order to output visual information as beings to close the gap between what we see and what we can represent to others we've developed technology technology of paint technology of figuration technology of photography technology of the internet this is a van Neumann diagram of a smartphone and the smartphone camera of course has created whole new ways of capturing and censoring the world let's look at the inputs of the phone the dominant computing input over time has evolved first the punch card, then the keyboard then the mouse and now the multi-touch screen mostly driven by Apple and recently computing devices with a rapidly evolving list of sensing inputs you don't think about camera, microphone, geolocation accelerometer etc etc etc and the camera of course in particular has been a revolution it's given us a tremendous ability to represent and visualize what we see for other people we now take three to ten photos per day per person primarily to save memories otherwise to save images we once saw and we're really still using the smartphone camera a lot like we used analog cameras but the smartphone hasn't just given people cameras it's given them network cameras that's what social media is networked cameras but there's another revolution coming the camera is poised to become not just a photography tool but creepily enough an eyeball attached not just to a brain that can save memories but a brain that's networked and that can use its computational power to derive meaning from what it sees the impact of this will be unbelievably massive for Pinterest I'll just say that soon digitally images and visuals won't just be a lean back browsing experience but the beginning of a journey an active discovery experience and so in a way for the first time in human history what we're doing is gaining this ability to speak fluently in the language of visual information at fidelities that begin to approach what we can see so how will we use this new language what are we going to articulate number nine is identity for much of the last century how we label ourselves has typically been defined by inherited attributes articulated by choosing from a pre-constructed label like race or nationality or gender or sexuality or age so in other words I'm a white American male heterosexual millennial barely millennial and these types of identity have been typically considered something you're born into but of course not all identity is inherited that way some of it is self-determined just as an example religion or subculture or political affiliation occupation and these can change over time so in 2000 you might have said that I was a Protestant goth conservative student I mean not someone you would want to met and then in 2010 you might what you might have said that I was an agnostic hipster liberal architect a little more your style or maybe today you'd say that I'm a confused confused confused confused and that's because I think we're in the midst of a radical change in how identity is articulated culture is very much the stuff of which identity is formed the more culture you encounter the more specifically you can articulate who you are and today that's increasingly happening given the internet with music and with this new visual language we're using this power to construct much more granular and confusing identities than those pre-constructed labels we used to see and if the great frontier of our age is the journey within right now what I see at work is that the spirit of the age especially with the younger generations is the construction of our own fluid self out of the multimedia language of culture for we as humans are always and always becoming someone else someone we weren't before someone we never saw coming and what we find and when we find something that we love it reveals something about who we are and in doing so it reveals whole new worlds to us as well alright number 10 disruption I live in California California is the land of disruption geologic disruption economic disruption cultural disruption sci-fi in California is of course the edge of the old American frontier in 1542 it contacted 300 dialects of approximately 100 distinct languages resonated across California's mirrored landscapes and the first European explorers trappers and missionaries enter in California were lucky to see the state and the image they painted in all of their journal entries and letters back home was out of a wild Eden it seemed to them that there is no country in the world as well supplied by nature with food for man as California every early visitor that I could find reading some books left records to this effect it was in fact a land of superlatives there are hundreds of thousands of seals and sea lions and millions of salmon spawning in thousands of miles of freshwater habitat and oceanic schools of fish so dense they couldn't row boats through them and the whales well hopefully you know what happened to the whales and inland it was much the same California was a massive flower garden with wildflower prairies that stretched hundreds of miles unbroken across the rolling coastal hills and Great Central Valley and Sierra Nevada Jamir dubbed the state the Pacific land of flowers and the forests were crazy the largest the tallest and the oldest trees on earth are still in California many older than all of western civilization in the white mountains in eastern California there stands today a pine tree that's over 5,000 years old there were millions of migratory birds that covered the plains like snow tool elk in the central valley that came in herds that rivaled the size of Africa's Serengeti jaguars and wolves and grizzlies all of which are now extinct and the California that was encountered by the first Europeans just over 200 years ago was an all together different place from where they came Europe had been relatively degraded for centuries it's wild lands deforested, mined, planted with crops and grazed by sheep and cattle but California in contrast was an untouched natural paradise for man traveler Baynard Taylor wrote his fiance from California in 1849 how much California impressed him as wilderness like some new created world and John Muir of course helped birth the modern environmental movement by writing imagery similar to what I just shared it's a movement that has successfully preserved half a billion acres of land as wilderness and Muir was very much an early proponent of the view we still generally hold today that much of California was pristine and untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans sort of nature in its natural state but there is a great tragedy here and it's a tragedy and a trauma that permeates to the very bones of the state today for what Muir was really seeing when he looked at Yosemite and the Central Valley and all those hundreds of acres of lov flowers were really the gardens of the Miwok and Yokuts there were lands that had been modified and made productive by the native inhabitants for 10 centuries or more sorry 10 millennia or more and what John Muir and those early Europeans didn't have a cultural context to see was that the abundant California they were encountering far from untouched wilderness was in fact the product of millennias of close human stewardship until about 150 years ago almost every square mile of California was hand tended, tilled, sewed, burned and harvested in turn over the millennia creating an enormous larder of tremendous economic and biological wealth that enabled the conquering European and Asian farmers and ranchers and entrepreneurs to imagine themselves as having built a civilization out of the natural and unpeopled wilderness and this kind of contemporary concept of California and actually the whole country as an unspoiled and raw and uninhabited nature a sort of wilderness really erases the cultural balance and harmony not perfect harmony but harmony the indigenous cultures had achieved and in a way it erases an achievement I think a lot of the people in this room are probably chasing now whether we're aware of it or not it's that achievement of building a society it's much more a knit into the natural systems that enable and sustain all of the life on the planet a balance of its government its technology, its culture and its nature and interestingly it's my understanding having read several books that the native California peoples often use the word or their equivalent of the word wilderness as a negative label for land that has not been taken care of by humans for a long time James Rust and Miwok Outer was quoted as saying in the late 1880s the white man sure ruined this country it's turned back to wilderness and all of this has been, it's been haunting me ever since I learned about it I wasn't sure why at first I thought of the original California disruption it is such a direct and devastating transformation of the founding myth of the landscape from an act of heroism and virtue and civilization to one of pretty unimaginable trauma at the genetic level one that still reverberates almost unconsciously every day thankfully we're much more aware than ever of the great human traumas in the history of this country and the ones that are still ongoing but I think we're much less aware of the uncountable traumas we inflict on the natural world did you know that when a bison dies typically the other bison and the herd gather around it which makes them relatively easy to hunt and not the animal that was the most important animal to the pre-European society in a lot of North America went from numbering 30 million or more in 1800 to less than 100 in 1880 did you know that the water line the aquifer line and the great American player used to sit right at the surface for much of the year every gully kind of brimming with liquid before engines kind of whirred through the ocean but the song of the blue whale which is here sped up 10 times so that we can hear it resonated on a deep and ancient frequency and then it's thought it used to carry across the entire Pacific Ocean while our technology has driven us to become the sort of unwitting arbiters of destruction of an ancient culture the ocean itself could have been once this big continuous interweaving harmonic symphony of the mammalian vocalizations of the largest animal to ever have existed in the history of the world this idea that culture is a domain exclusive to humans is utterly absurd and this idea that you can create meaningful change in the world without disrupting something is simply wrong the world we are born into as humans is by default normal to us but it changes occasionally in profound and occasionally in tragically irrevocable ways and the next generation that's born just has no idea what's been lost although it seems to me that our bodies carry these losses and traumas we experience them on an almost cellular level that our entire society today is experiencing a sort of collective cellular spiritual neuroticism and that our body our body knows as we move through the environment that we've lost something great even if we're not conscious of what that is or that we feel that way and it seems to me that our culture is sometimes built on a fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled and I'm not saying our culture is bad, I think I love our culture but we've somehow lost one of the most basic things there is that the point of life is to continuously experience the utter rapture of being alive to live in a way that physically resonates with the spiritual energy lying inside each of us right now and that any meaningful change we make to the world is likely to be a source of both great new beauty as well as traumatic loss there is no birth without death in life or in technology or in the built environment and what matters is that we try as hard as we can to make the changes we do make as carefully as possible and as sensitively as possible to the balance that we have today in the world and that we codify the lessons we learned about how to do that well in the myths we pass along to the next generation all cultures will be founding myths that help people make sense of what is good and bad I grew up in the cradle of the post-war American myth in a society built on the spoils of being kind of the only unscathed power after World War II but as we know the industrial myth in the United States at least is unraveling disrupted from within the same way that the pre-industrial agrarian myth of living on the farm was disrupted in the early 20th century by factories and industry and that disruption of course enabled autocrats to gain power in Europe and much of Asia and back then those autocrats worked up their populace by promising to take them back to the old agrarian society to live on the farm and now that the industrial area is largely history in the United States thanks to globalization and automation and there is no going back now the technology has moved us into a post-industrial information era where the leaders are repeating the same pattern only now the idealized past is of course one of factories and industrial might rather than agrarian might but that's on us because we have not yet offered up the next myth to our society to get them excited about what we're building where is the positive myth of the information age to help guide and direct all of our progress and ensure it's trying to head somewhere good so far what I see in San Francisco is that the only myth that's really strong and the information is the myth of disruption alright number 11 connection 2009 I was sitting up in Avery working in housing studio and got an email from Facebook asking me if I wanted to interview they found my portfolio online to be a product designer which I didn't know what that meant but then surprisingly I realized I was interested so I flew out to interview my friend Brian made me this custom motivational collage just like that I got the job and a lot of what drew me to Facebook at the time was the mission Facebook's mission for the first many years was to make the world more open and connected and to me that's an incredible artifact of history and there's good and bad parts of it to make implying it's going to happen whether the world wants it to or not and connected implying that we'll be building vital infrastructure for the world kind of like plumbers but the problem I think with the internet right now is that unlike plumbers with social sharing platforms you know we're plumbers who struggle to know whether the pipes are connecting or carrying fresh water or raw sewage back when I was a child in the mid 1980s you could turn on the TV and you'd see this it was the pattern that the station broadcast when it ran out of video can you imagine running out of video these days that was life in broadcast culture and in broadcast culture there are a few dozen voices you could tune into that kind of shape the myth or story of what was happening in society and obviously today we're living emphatically in a network culture where we can kind of access any information we want where any voice is validating whatever we think and it's a culture that's in theory empowered us with tools to tell our own story and reach a mass audience and the positive side is there's an enormous diversity of perspectives that now can speak out and never been heard people who are finding a voice for the first time in our society it's also allowing us to stay in touch with family and friends and choose the music we want listen to on the plane watch entertainment but of course like any change there's positive and negative so where there were once a few dozen voices shaping the story of what's happening there are now millions of conflicting voices of very variable quality and integrity and the possibility in network culture of vetting the quality of those voices you're hearing is falling to the viewer today who rarely has the time sometimes not even the inclination or capability to do that work even if they wanted to and so the downside to that is that there were a lot of people who've been empowered who are wrong, uneducated, intolerant who are negative actors who have a really specific agenda they're trying to force through the population it's also led to fragmented myths we no longer have a single myth or myths in the United States and that leads to tribalism and without United Myths it's near impossible to galvanize the whole around a clear story or a vision for the future or a shared dream of how to use all this new technology to make sure the change it's bringing is balanced alright, China now I'd like to look at something pretty extreme but terrifyingly real it's an example of internet technology motivating you to behave not in ways that align with who you are but in ways that align you with the interests of the state and those in power 2014 the government of China publicly announced with the construction of what's called its state-run social credit system and when finished in 2020 the system is going to be administered by both private companies and the government of China it will be mandatory for every citizen of China and what's implemented every citizen will have a score that is based on data harvested from both public and private sources and citizens and actually companies as well are going to be rewarded or punished on the basis of how their behavior aligns or not with the rules set out by those corporations and government that may sound some of you like a futuristic nightmare but it's literally already here Wired reported earlier this year that 9 million people with low scores have already been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights in China trains as well and this fear of taking a hit to your social credit score is stopping undesirable social gatherings from happening in both public and private spaces it's rate limiting internet speed for certain citizens it's restricting access to restaurants and hotels and elite schools to those with a very high score it's regulating access to certain perks on dating websites and a lot more and on the flip side those with really good scores are being rewarded with discounted energy bills and better loans and access to better jobs and faster bureaucratic service the 2014 government outline of the project which I just read pretty recently says a lot of things but this one was interesting a shame fill atmosphere makes honesty and trustworthiness the norm for the conscious behavior of the whole people so behind the obvious things I've already mentioned this is also playing out in like really unpredictable ways if you live in China we have certain parts of China right now if you want to play the really popular online video game Counter-Strike Global Offensive you have to log in with your ID for the game but also your national ID and if you play up to over 10 hours it starts to penalize your social credit score and if you use mods to cheat it also penalizes your social credit score also in a bid to reduce wait times by up to 60% Sesame Credit which is one of the private companies is letting users with a score above 650 see a doctor without lining up to pay and more and this sort of merging of our offline behavior into the infosphere of the online world and the gamification of our real life behavior to me the potential for this is an absolute horror sort of the ultimate in extrinsic motivation of our behavior sort of a lifelong parent watching over your shoulder rewarding or punishing you for your everyday choices it's like the infantilism helicopter parenting mashed up with the inescapable fists of autocratic power what is this going to do to the self to this frontier of the world within us to us knowing ourselves living from that and acting from that and where is the metaphorical privacy of the home where all the technologies that help us live with ourselves and harbor us and refuge us from the outside world number 13 outcomes as we all know and experience these days we live as much in a media environment as we do a physical environment so it's no surprise that the media of our buildings the images and videos and theory that this shapes are what the profession of architecture values and that's by no means unique to architecture but it seems to me especially problematic in architecture sure images may bias high fashion towards visual expression over how it feels to wear something and that's not ideal but a good chunk of fashion is really the visual language of self-expression architecture sure it's a visual language but most of it is this four dimensional built environment that we have to live in every day and doing that and evaluating that by what looks good is a simple and obvious form of insanity to me many of the best parts of my favorite building aren't visual at all it's the way the rain sounds on the roof of my assembly or the social energy I was showing you fostered in the workspace outside my office where like the daily rituals of my neighbor Bob in San Francisco who's lived there in the same house for 60 years I don't have a photo of Bob but I assure you exists now I do hear critiques of course of the impact of visual media on architecture but I don't hear much about plausible alternatives and it's possible I'm not listening closely enough and I'm not knowledgeable enough about architectural practice to suggest a solution or different course of action but I would like to take a minute to play with other ways of relating to buildings to me as a client and at least the 99% of the building's lifespan that matters is the practices that are enabled within the building after initial construction it's called post occupancy and yet how much involvement do we get to have as architects in that lifespan of the building how much accountability is there for architects after the handover I'm asking because I actually don't really know but I can say as a client that clients do a really poor job of thinking about this we tend to spend most of the money we have and we don't leave a lot for substantive post occupancy improvements and I'm just curious if the building industry has ever seriously considered architectural engagements, contractor engagements that last for a longer period of time and if that would actually save money by being more efficient it's interesting to me because consumer internets are a fascinating contrast here for all consumer companies care about to a fault sometimes is the ongoing behavior of our users and customers is what would be called post occupancy phase of digital spaces and at best this enables internet companies to measure and learn and iterate until the architecture of these digital services is really well optimized to the needs of the users and at worst it enables internet companies to sometimes manipulate the behavior of users on a pretty big scale by building digital experiences that prey on really basic instincts something that Pinterest works hard not to do but so what can architects learn from this contrast well I'm not sure but let's do a simple thought experiment pretend to design a home using the methods of basic consumer internet company product development let's say this is a typical one bedroom apartment looks too big to be in New York now let's optimize this for the desired user behavior eating and working and sleeping those are all productive behaviors and maybe time spent looking at media is something we value so I kind of got to this here are a few bold design decisions here first I made one wall of screen and then I positioned the key furniture and fixtures the bathtub the toilet and the pull out sofa so that they face the screen at all times that leaves little time little time moving about wasted next I replaced the kitchen with quite innovative food shoot that delivers food anytime you wish and finally to make sure we really capture as much engaging user behavior as possible I did a bunch of experiments to prove if you remove the door to the apartment it helps people not waste time out in the world and when we A-B these tests when we A-B these changes against our control the original apartment we see a significant increase in the healthy spectrum of user behaviors time sleeping, time defecating time watching media and significant decreases in extraneous non-productive behaviors like time cooking or time moving about or time cleaning or more and we think this really puts users first now of course that's exaggerated for satirical effect because companies are a lot smarter than that really really are they would never ship that but at the same time what I'm trying to make a point here is that I can say with confidence that the form of our digital spaces is incredibly biased by what we can measure with today's technology it's really biased towards how people behave in certain ways and the same industry is very ineffectual at building what against what isn't measurable it doesn't understand why people behave in certain ways and it's not very good understanding what people feel on their services or why and so the impact of digital spaces on the overall offline well-being of the user is highly biased towards what is measurable now I want to ask you architects a question was that new home design good or bad? I don't know why, why was it good or bad? was it bad because the lives that were lived there were not good lives but when have architects as a profession spent much time as a whole investing their energy and actually understanding the quality of the lives lived in their spaces so the question for me is if the lives in a home are good is the architecture good or if the lives in a home are bad is the architecture bad so on one hand I belittle architecture for abdicating the responsibility over how environments affect people on the other hand I belittle tech companies focusing only on what's measurable and what they can't measure so what am I suggesting? I think all I'm suggesting is that architecture tries to define itself more as the shaping of spaces that enable healthy practices of living and working and that architects measure the outcomes of the spaces they build and treat that data that they're measuring with appropriate skepticism and I'm suggesting that consumer internet companies do the same thing I'm suggesting that whether you're an architect of digital space or physical space you have the responsibility to make sure that we're creating environments that empower and enable people in ways that celebrate their individuality and as someone who enjoys the beauty that we get to make as architects and designers sometimes it's really painful for me to have to focus on less aesthetic problems at work but I've come to realize meeting so many users that that sacrifice is very well worth making alright number 14 defend the home where Felix he's good at three things he's good at snuggling he's good at disking alright as architects we all know that home is more than a building it's a state of mind and there's a reason kids draw homes home is your private space it's literally and metaphorically private space you feel safe to relax and be yourself to define what being yourself means homes are one of the few products in our lives that have resisted this sort of crazy business logic of mass branding perhaps the dream being that one day we'll be able to live in a house that really reflects our individual sensibilities but just because you live in a home doesn't mean our house doesn't mean you live in a home and obviously in architecture a lot of thought is given to public and private space we want to allocate the two and secure their boundaries and amplify the psychology of each and a lot of thought is given to how physical decisions translate into physiological decisions this is something that Felix does really well he was born with an innate sense of his home literally and metaphorically if my brother who he likes more than me is outside he yelps with glee and if anyone else is outside he barks and howls in warning how much of boundary is visceral for Felix and he didn't learn this he wasn't taught this he was born with it and I'll tell you no amount of great training takes it away and as a species we humans we really share this psychological need to defend our home to balance life spent out in public with time spent recharging in private and as our environments become more digital as photos of our friends follow us into the most private spaces of our lives the bedroom and the bathroom it's really changing the psychological reality of how we live is this nose totally distracting you to me it's not surprising that the age of the internet is the age of connection but the extent is truly unbelievable recent study shows that we check our phones up to 150 times a day so we are now incredibly connected to what's happening with friends and family, what's happening in the news what's happening with celebrities our phones are giving us access to the world but in turn the world now has access to us all of that news all of those emails, alerts and texts are coming at us all the time no matter where we go and that's just kind of how life is today in today's world but for a lot of people it's a lot I travel quite a bit to meet with users where they live I'm going to Iowa on Monday to do that and talk to them about the internet and the phone and Pinterest and what they love and what they hate and the sense, whether it's conscious or not all of this constant connection is actually disconnecting us from what matters to us it's not universal but it's very very common that people feel overwhelmed and a little stressed by everything going on outside and the theme that comes up over and over again in my conversations is that the hidden costs of connection to the world is a disconnection to the self disconnection from our own personal dreams from maybe what we value from our tastes from how we're feeling every day there are so many products now to connect us with what's happening in the world but where are the products to help us stay connected to ourselves and it's funny because we regularly give children those kinds of products toys, educational materials, classes to help them grow and learn about themselves and gain competency but as adults we don't even realize often that we have that need to connect with ourselves in a way our society from my lens, meeting with people is that we're losing touch with our home and we're losing touch with the fact that time spent in private space on what you want to do isn't just a luxury or a privilege it's actually a fundamental psychological human need it's a mammalian need if you think about Felix it's our number 15 dreams a few blocks from my home in San Francisco as a row of houses and a couple of mid ladies and this prompted the local residents to come together and ban all tour buses on the street what great power these houses have to be able to physically divert hundreds of thousands of people a year to look at their image what an example of the power that images and symbols have a biological experience of being alive what power they have to remake our physical world so I wonder what are our cultures pop culture, most famous homes I don't know the answer to that I don't have time to really dig into it but some came to mind for me personally given where I grew up it's the Cosby Show house Elvis's Graceland it's that apartment from friends it's a Kardashian home not actually their home it's the sex in the city brownstone it's the modern family house it's the bachelor and bachelorette mansion and then I was like let's take a look at who actually builds the most homes in the US I think it's this company called DR Norton and when you visit their website this is their marquee image I'm serious go to drhorton.com images are the language of dreams and many of the public's images of architecture are being produced not by architects by other kinds of image makers like celebrities or marketers or home developers or the producers in film and television and looking at the dreams that these image makers share with the public that seem to appeal to the public you see images of a home that maybe like the Eames home embraces the messiness of living it's called well worn interiors comfortable family and friends this familiar scaffolding for hundreds or thousands of stories spaces filled with the drama of human life and no offense to us architects but I do not see us as the expert dream shapers or even the experts on the home in many ways we've abdicated our agency here in shaping the architectural dreams of society instead we mostly focus at least at this level on monuments of global tourism and art and theory all of which are beautiful for instance of extensions of human creativity but I'd also like us as a profession to have more impact on the buildings most folks live in and that might just be because I've been bit by this bug of scale that comes with working on the internet but I'd like us to remember the role we could be playing satisfying and celebrating the most fundamental human need for shelter because architecture school as you all know isn't just an applied it's an applied craft school and when I was a student here we used to have a keg every Friday up on the landing you guys still do that yes it's the first week I guess you don't know it was the highlight of the week but we also knew that if we were feeling good on Thursday we wanted free food or liquor we could sneak across to the business school which had this incredible larder paid for by that half billion dollar endowment of meats and cheeses and hard liquors and LCD screens and it was really wonderful as an architecture student but I'll tell you what writing a business now the graduates of that school for better or for worse are going to go on to impact a lot of the world's largest businesses and ultimately the dreams and perceptions of a lot of our countries and maybe the world's citizens and I want us to challenge ourselves what percentage of real world homes are we going to be as architecture graduates impacting I don't know the answer to that it's up to you but I'd say looking at the images or dreams that I encounter in culture it feels like we could be having a much bigger impact on that and the world really needs us to do that because dreams are not just trivial imaginings our dreams are manifestations of who we are and who we aspire to be they reflect the self and they shape who we are they shape the self and I'll tell you when we're able to align our dreams with who we are inside and what we value we become more caring and generous and pathetic and purposeful and effective and in a society to me that very quickly appears to be losing its sense of control and ease in the home we have a real chance to help empower and enable people to dream in a way that nourishes the self much more actively because we as image makers now have unprecedented tools for visualizing dreams and we also have platforms in which to share those dreams like never before and as architects and designers and creatives we in this rooms are experts in this visual language of dreams that reading it and speaking it to inspire action so what dreams could we be reading and what dreams do we want people to aspire to a house is a building and a home is much more of a garden it's a way of relating and home of course is soil for the self and by extension soil for society and as democratic citizens we all have a responsibility to care for that soil and as architects we have the chance to make it much richer and when architects show up willing to own the full outcomes of the work they ship in the world I think we're going to find that we have the power to shape the collective dreams of the future much more than we realize today because we must defend the home to be like Felix we have to use our expertise drawing images to create images of a balanced future because of words of the language of knowledge images of the language of dreams and we have an acute need in our society today we have a moral dream a vision of the future that inspires action against the biggest problems of our time but the trick is that vision must include everybody especially the people you don't want it to include it must unite across these divisions that are sharpening so quickly right now it must be bold but it must be achievable and it must be told to everybody and in my opinion this uniting vision is not going to describe the world but it will describe the one problem everyone in society shares and that's the need for better relations with our healthier inner world as human beings so let's remind people that home is a garden it's a mindset it's a spiritual practice that never ends it's about the journey that in order to build a great home you don't need to be an architect you just need to love yourself and find a way to love your neighbor and that's all I have to say and an amazing first lecture also I'm supposed to be giving a response but I mostly want to open it up to the audience but before I wanted to just first of all I really appreciate that we forgot to mention your philosopher in the multi I was an incredible storyteller and it was beautifully told as a story and the chapters were incredibly well written and sort of composed and storytelling is really what we're missing right now to connect the dots and this kind of movement that you did between the kind of personal and the sort of universal is also this connection that we're somehow missing and unable to make in meaningful ways often today personally you took me back to my fascination with Descartes and the Cartesian split between mind and body and enlightenment I actually don't know what you're talking about so Descartes was this very interesting French philosopher and in France when you get educated they want to put you in a little Cartesian box and he said I think therefore I am and it was the kind of beginning of the split between being as only a result of thought and not as a result of your physical embodiment and it took me back to the debate between Voltaire and Rousseau Voltaire said what you said you have to cultivate your garden he was about culture and Rousseau said if you just can feel alive and just let yourself drift that's enough and he was about nature and this kind of split keeps going on anyway I just wanted to just share that your kind of thinking brought all these kind of splits that we try to bring back together to create connection and that was kind of very sort of inspiring to think about you know the house and the city the home and the garden and anyway of course it was very traumatized by your china sort of chapter which is I'll just say most of that is from two articles I found in Wired I'd heard about it so I haven't done rigorous research but that's what Wired says that's how we work now especially when we're busying other things but it sounds like it's very much on the path to being what it sounds like well I think it's beyond that moment is this kind of dark side that is maybe one extreme but in general I think the sense that people are both obsessed in very open-ended ways about the question of identity and hybridity and complexity and at the same time so fearful of that loss of boundary that the conversations we are caught within now in terms of immigration and you know are very anyway I'm just kind of inspired by your talk and all that it's opening up as old ideas that we have to kind of bring an you and wanted to thank you for kind of sharing with us tonight opening it up to our students and audience and Troy? Oh Troy Troy was my T.I. first studio and then my second studio thank you Troy Hi Evan, welcome back and a good friend yeah so there's a kind of there's a blog called Ribbon Farm it has a kind of cult following in Silicon Valley there was a post on it I think a few months ago it was called the premium mediocre life of Maya Millennial and it introduced this term premium mediocre and it was basically a kind of I don't know like a philosophy of like taking premium economy seats on an airplane and turning it into a kind of like new category of product and I think also a kind of product that one would buy to construct their own identity and what was so I you know it was kind of like eating up social media and becoming like a meme and I sent it to a friend of mine who's a it's like a middle age kind of like a Gen X kind of bourgeois German journalist and so he wrote about it in like the New York Times of Germany this profile and he got like all this traction and people got like really excited in Germany and when I read the translation it was interesting because from his point of view it was like this is a new category of consumption that's interesting but what the story was really about was that Maya Millennial was the character and Maya Millennial sits premium economy on a plane which she can't really afford because she has a bunch of student debt and she has her own property because she was born after 1980 and that's what life is like now and but what she did was she would buy premium economy stuff and she would get you know like like quilted toilet paper or whatever and the whole point was just to present an image to her parents that everything's still okay it's not, it's pretty bad and for the generation that she's in and future generations it's like kind of get resources are getting more tightly constrained and so on but it was about presenting this image to the previous generation don't worry it's going to be fine I don't want to freak you out but the culture that's developing amongst you know the tail end of the millennials and even the gen Zed or whatever you want to call them it feels like for me the Maya Millennial story and like having a kind of gen Xer try to interpret it and just totally miss the mark is really like for me the kind of nutshell of my personal experience in the last year or so is that the generational kind of stratification of culture is so thick and so there's a course that I'm teaching here now that's basically on magic because I feel like this millennial generation and younger are living in a world where the systems that were set up to provide kind of civic structure have failed them and as a result they're turning completely outside of them so to go back so one of the means of this kind of younger generation goes back to Descartes but it's talking about Descartes as sort of like the Polynesian lobotomy because it's really about I think kind of recovering almost an earlier kind of metaphysics and animus metaphysics and it's incredible to me I go to like an art opening and there's like all these cool kids with like blue hair and they're talking about like Latin American anthropologists that are developing like new perspectivalist perspectives on and I guess I'm curious so sorry really long thing but the question is you talk about spirit and I find when I talk to like peers my age and older spirit is a metaphor when I talk to my students today and younger, spirit is a thing so I'm curious for you like how literal you know, sorry to call you out in a public forum but how literally do you mean spirit? I mean I think spirit is a word that for me I'm growing to meet it's like a word that you learn but you don't really know what it means in a way, at least I didn't and um not until you feel it that's right, I did this retreat earlier this year it's like that thing I wrote and one of my friends from the retreat, Hi Penny is here but it was it was really about finding I mean I don't know I took out a section of the talk because I was going over about how the language of the self is really missing at least for me and the way I was raised we don't have good frameworks to describe the dynamics we experience because of that we don't feel them very often unless there's an extreme problem and then it's a catastrophe we've got to solve and I think for me spirit was something that I've always had but I haven't really known how to understand or feel and now it's something that I can do I can check in and it's really a label for myself what do I want how do I feel it's sort of the unprogrammed version of myself and it's thinking about that concept and trying to live from that concept even if it's just a psychological trick has been incredibly powerful for me over the last year and I just want to comment quickly on your first point because I remember when I graduated from college as a millennial in debt I remember going to Target and my wife is really good taste and I was so scared because she's going to buy nice stuff I had like $200 in the bank account she put like $300 of the stuff in her because you know I mean in a good way one of the values you have is like don't buy stupid stuff you're going to throw away but when you're broke it's hard to live from that and also afford the everyday stuff but I don't really have anything pithy to say about that generational divide other than man is that real a man is that having a huge impact on how everyone experiences their lives in ways we probably don't even understand cross generationally You have great students Troy Hi Evan it's true we met at a retreat a retreat about connection and so I have a question for you about when you talked about connection what do you feel or do you feel that you have a responsibility as someone who is at the helm of something to help people understand what that means Right now it's a garden meaning my understanding is changing over time hopefully getting better and what I understand is I need my platform to empower and enable people individually and inspire them as much as possible and the way we measure that is through user behavior and also investing a lot of time in talking to people to try and understand how they're experiencing the platform and whether it's doing that or not and that's what I'm working on right now is to try and turn the service we have into an example of a service with a strong ethical foundation that audits itself against that foundation publicly eventually and can serve as an example for other companies because I think there's a lot of desire you know in the valley to have good outcomes people are now to like screw everybody over and I would also say as someone who runs a company the talent in technology is the most valuable thing and so if you have a company that doesn't have a good purpose or has an unethical purpose to help people so everyone wants to do the right thing the trick is what is it and how do you measure that and it's really complicated and right now the only answer I have is I'm working on Pinterest and making that healthy speaking more like personal connection though do you feel like a PSA I don't know I mean I was just curious if you felt like there was a platform from where you are to really kind of help people understand what it means to be personally connected I wrestle with that I think what I heard from you is like should I be talking up a little bit um what I'm trying to do right now is I'll be an example and make sure that I know what I'm talking about because it's relatively easy to tear down and there's nothing wrong with that but it's not helpful at this point because I think tearing down doesn't construct anything meaningful so I'm trying to learn how to construct something meaningful that works and yes I'd love to have a huge platform I just hire a CMO because CMO is a good at getting stories out there so hopefully that helps Hi Evan Thanks for coming I'm not going to be around the bush because the previous question kind of tiptoed on mine not about your responsibility in terms of censorship what you do with a white supremacist board or weaponry boards and how you tackle that but my college roommate who is also in the web world always says when he comes to my office man you are so regulated so what? regulated from ADA compliance to egress to fire life safety when we design out there not in academia but everyday at our desks it's meeting layer upon layer of mandate your world is largely unregulated as of yet and I think it falls on your own shoulders to make those regulations those decisions free speech or not so how how do you feel about the fact that silicon valley is resistant to that regulation but in a way it burdens you with making those choices and also in some ways my friend would say separates you from being a profession like architecture information architect you know I don't know how I feel to be really candid I don't know how I feel but that would lead to the best outcome for people right now I think what's important is we try something I wish I had a better answer but regulation could help companies doing a better job internally could help what I will say is all the companies I know of and I'm pretty focused on Pinterest because it's pretty intense are investing a lot in trying to build healthier information services will it succeed or not I don't know we'll find out I'm optimistic but that's because I'm in technology and technology is optimism but like any I'll the last thing I'll say is like any industry over time you get more regulated that's how it works that's how it should work hello hi first of all thank you for your time after listening to your lecture about the power of the image and that it could represent dreams and us as architects and designers should maybe aspire to design a certain quality of home or living the first thing that comes to mind is that we live in an age where websites such as the one you created give people who aren't necessarily designers the power to collect these powerful images into collections that become sort of their dreams and their aspirations so I kind of wanted to know what's your opinion on the fact that maybe that sense of home or dream part of life nowadays can actually not only be represented in physical architectural space but that part of my conception of home can actually be online on websites such as yours totally it's really beautiful description of the best parts of Pinterest I took out a section kind of just some of what you just said too but yeah I think we spend a lot of our lives in digital spaces now the psychological impact of how a digital space is enabling you to feel is a big part of how healthy we are every day and the role that Pinterest seems to be playing for a lot of people, not everybody is it's maybe the one place on their phone that they go to regularly that's about them it's about their future, their life one of my favorite metaphors for it is it's sort of like Lego it's like a construction set where you assemble things and if Lego is about assembling ordinary worlds that you inhabit make narratives out of as kids Pinterest is about trying to construct a dream world and then when we do our job really well which doesn't always happen those dreams become your real life you act on some of them, you cook stuff you do stuff, you get offline so we're always trying to understand how we show you ideas to inspire you and give you that inspirational energy to get offline and do them in real life I think is really smart and really true in my experience, talking to people so as a company you do have a certain initiative or vision in connecting these two homes and these two realities that are searching your... well, yeah, I think a lot of people use Pinterest literally to design home decor ideas to figure out what they want in their life, to play with what they could be, what their taste might look like and that's really cool and really powerful in this project right now to try and bring a clearer story to the company of how psychologically being on Pinterest feels to a lot of people and it does... it is varied depending on what you're using it for but for a lot of people it does feel like a personal retreat or refuge, it's like the place they go to relax before bed or it's where they go in the morning to feel kind of excited and inspired for the day and that's very different than social media which is usually about what other people are doing Pinterest is about what you're doing Hi, thank you for the thank you for the talk it's really fantastic to know that the status of education of architecture allows for other professions to emerge out of architecture or at least out of the education of architecture and so you're a great story for I think oh thank you I have a question about the notion of norm to me normal is such an interesting and constantly moving, shifting target every year something changes our understanding of normalcy so the speed of norm I don't know if it accelerates over time or decelerates over time but you are a revealer of norm you construct a platform that reveals normalcy what people are interested in we're not interested in through quantifiable amassing we would know what's normal as a distant observer I feel like I'm able to kind of see when things change in terms of its normalcy but I'm really curious about you and your observation in the driver's seat being a person who constructed such a platform for the revealing of normalcy what are some of the key experiences that you've had about this no we're just starting to understand the way trends start and stop and what that means my sense is mathematically they look like traffic almost sort of like all these components interacting and hitting each other and it's really hard to say that's the theme there are exceptions to that but it's really hard to say this is why one kind of normalcy developed or not at least today it's hard for us to figure that out I don't know pictures plays a role in both directions on one hand you search for something and you see the most popular results and that creates a norming feeling on the other hand you can find anything you want and the home feed is highly personalized and a lot of people use it to develop an abnormal sense of aesthetic so it's a great question and I haven't thought much about it thank you for your lecture actually I think in the past year I've seen people from like Warby Parker at Harvard and I feel that you're also part of the same vein of technology kind of leaders going to architecture school and sort of showing an alternative sort of outcome of how architecture school can lead to these other fields so I think that's great I agree with a previous comment where someone said where I think Pinterest has empowered a lot of non designers to be able to start customizing their lives and to create those dreams I also have being in practice I also see that there's also been a lot of misuse and abuse of Pinterest in that the rise of Pinterest has led to the sort of flattening and standardization of these trends where I think a lot of people see the most popular Pinterest feeds and all the developers and all the clients start to want the same thing and so there's been a sort of flattening standardization and I'm curious if your team has thought about that and how to keep Pinterest as diverse as possible do you feel like Pinterest has made design more efficient or more boring in a way I actually disagree with what you say about Pinterest I'm not saying there isn't some truth to it but I was meeting with a big furniture company this morning randomly and all they were talking about is how much more diverse tastes have become in the last five years maybe not Pinterest but just in general how that just means it's hard for them because they have so many things to keep track of in their warehouse and so it's hard to describe causality to a single platform or other but I'll definitely say the internet is having both a normalization and a very diversifying effect on Pinterest we think a lot about how we show you diverse reasons to use the service and so there's a homepage that's personalized to what you seem to be liking recently and to your tastes and we try and make sure we're always showing you something a little different so that maybe it's pushing you in a different direction and that's pretty important but we also want to show yourself that's relevant so it's useful and so that's a balance that we're always working on and measuring and we measure that quantitatively and then we also talk to people right now I think it's kind of too responsive to your behavior as an example if you search for something and then you go to your home feed you search for like instant pot recipe and maybe you go to your home food and it's like half it's about where you're like that's not really what I wanted but so we're constantly tuning the way it selects the ideas you see in your home feed to try and balance diversity and personalization hmm yes the permeation of vision in the history of art in various ways and I'm always bringing up mind, body, split and Descartes etc but the point, the simple point is when the coding starts to work through color and everything else of course I assume it's still kind of structural as coding meaning there are words behind the coding so red is still called red so it's a word before it's a color and it's a word before it's an optic experience maybe, I don't know but it struck me as like wildly wildly interesting just partially in response to your question before when things start to get sorted and presented in ways that precede language and thereby will go somewhere different than language might have taken you yeah which Kiaroskira is part of it suddenly in shade and shadow and light and color and heat then it's red and it's heat and it's thermal and then maybe it starts to go to blankets I don't know, to me that seems to be like an advent it is I'll say I know you're working on I know Pinterest but coding is notoriously structural I believe structuralists and the degree to which you would start to get past the structuralism that's encoding through machine learning which still ultimately is structuralist it's just fast structuralism I guess anyway the question would be you must be thrilled by that because maybe that's the way to get past some of that more reductive sorting even though it's not so reductive you guys are on the verge of launching that kind of yeah you know it's called computer vision so it's an application of machine learning and I'm not a machine learning engineer but I work with a lot of them so my understanding is kind of more conceptual than applied you're a philosopher of the self agreed but one thing we've done recently that's interesting and I might butcher this but I think I understand it is use machine learning to, I think it's called embeddings which is a mathematical understanding and the processes were all developed to understand language mathematically but we've applied them to visual media without words and so we have a mathematical understanding of what parts of images are and how they overlap and how they relate without any words involved and then you can go in and label them later and but that's powering like if you look at a image on pictures and scroll down yes yes like if you look at an image and scroll down you see related images and that's you know what picks those it's a lot of different things going to that but a big thing is visual embeddings, visual signals and they're interesting because they're very subjective you know taste, preference, a lot of that stuff is visual information that no one's really structured and that's one of the things we're capable of doing good and bad his name is Felix hey thank you for the music should we take one last one last question I have the microphone and if I may pass it to whoever had it back there before I have a very short question just to say first of all thank you for speaking with a lot of love and curiosity about things that are both cerebral and felt and thank you for the reminder to ask questions I don't know the answers to and I was taking notes and I found myself writing down in parentheses which I had not expected when I arrived but I want to ask you in the same way that you mentioned the national parks and that feels actually foundational perhaps to your ethos as a person if you could talk about democracy for you personally in terms of what it means to love yourself and love your neighbor or in terms of what that means technologically architecturally for Pinterest it's a great question I don't think I've thought enough about government I probably should have but no no no I use the word democracy guy okay here's something that I think is interesting I don't know if you're from the beginning but there's three dimensional versus four dimensional basic thing but there's this notion in democracy that the collective has its own agency and if you think about it there's actually there's a huge autocracy built in democracy and that you're always under the thumb of every generation in front of you it's interesting to think what would a set of laws look like that preserved the rights of all generations of citizens and how might that change what's regulated I have no idea what that even means but it's pretty interesting to me and then I would just say I do feel personally a responsibility to try and be an active citizen within the confines of reality and it's especially important given that so few people do that today I guess I have the last question so I was really interested by your topic talking about how digital platforms are biased toward things that they can measure and I was thinking back to something that actually Dean Andrao said during the all school orientation or at some point about GCEP having a minor curriculum breakdown between the worlds of visualization and technology and that these two worlds are very quickly colliding data visualizations become a very key component of not only architecture but our society in general and so I was interested especially in the context of companies like Facebook and Twitter and perhaps even your own and so I was interested in the context of how we can measure this amount of data about people what is the next presently unmeasurable factor that would change how your platform operates today It's a great question Well it's coming for better or for worse is the ability to measure how people feel and that's happening in lots of different ways measuring how people feel through surveys. I mean, the nightmare scenario would be, you know, apps could measure how your face looks like when you use them. And thank God, like there's Apple out there who wouldn't allow that to happen through their APIs, but that's not at all implausible. I don't think it's gonna happen. I think we're gonna not let that happen, but how people feel is so powerful. And so I'm really scared because on one hand, measuring how people feel could lead to much better outcomes for users. You could make healthier services, and on the other hand, it could lead to mass manipulation, even more than we have today. So that's an example of a capability, a change that's coming. And you know, the difference to me between design and engineering as a role, not as a label of a person, but as a role, is engineering is about capability. You know, what you could do with technology and design is about suitability, what we should do. So we need to figure out how you design things like measuring your emotions so that when we have that capability, maybe it's regulation or maybe it's just something about the values of the companies, that capability, if we unlock it, is used for better outcomes for people over time, not more manipulative ones. So I evaded your question, but that's kind of the thing that comes to mind. It was a tough question. When you ask what we, what I wanna know is, is your life better or worse? And that's very subjective, because a lot of what happens is offline, and it's really complicated. But hopefully you're feeling empowered, hopefully you're feeling inspired, and hopefully you're feeling enabled to do what you wanna do and living from who you really are inside more than you were before you used the service. Anything we can do to measure that, I think is helping us stay on the right path over time. Thank you. Thank you so much for staying with us. Thank you.


These students have been training really hard this year. They've upped it another level. They've been meeting with the University of Auckland's strength and conditioning coach, Michael Payne, and they've got training schedules going, which they've been completing three times a week. I think we have a better combination and better commitment from the team this year. I think the level of fitness compared to last year was a bit upper level this year, so we are hoping to get three goals this trip. Last year was actually my favourite trip. I've done a lot of Wakama trips, but I think what made it such a good trip is that everyone had really good energy. This year we've been doing a lot more extra training, and I think we're a lot more prepared for the races this year than last year. We've got three trainings a week and gym sessions, and yeah, we've ramped up the kilometres a lot sooner this year, so we're hitting the 30k's already. Big issue is the cold, which just means wearing a lot of thermals when we go out in the water. We've had a few trainings cancelled because of cold conditions. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about going to Hawaii, coming together with other Wakama peddlers around the world. It'll be quite exciting to see how we face up against international teams, so yeah. Yeah, I've found though long, say like a long distance challenging. Different kind of fitness, endurance type of fitness, and I'm not really familiar with that, so that's something that's really challenging. I think the most looking forward to when their third goal, and also just the experience for the new guys that comes into the new team, and get that experience on racing overseas. We as the University think that this trip's really important for student development, not just in their sport, but also as students. So when we go to Hawaii, they're immersing themselves in the culture, and a chance to mix and mingle and to see what life is like outside of uni, while still balancing the university studies.