Design x Violet Whitney
Senior Product Manager at Sidewalk Labs & Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Zach Vieth on December 9, 2020.
How would you describe your design career?
I’m very interested in the overlap between human-computer interaction and user experience design (UX) within the built environment. Some of the aspects I find interesting relate to programming the use of physical space rather than just treating it as an object. I’m interested in democratizing design in general.
I’ve been teaching a class with Gaby Brainard called “Measuring the Great Indoors.” We’ve been doing a lot of work on projection mapping and studying how a person interacts with the physical environment. I’ve also started a product at Sidewalk Labs called Delve, a generative design tool for neighborhood development. I currently work on Delve as a product manager with an expert interdisciplinary team of architects (computational design flavor), software engineers, business development specialists, and our product director.
What role has teaching in academia played in your career, and how has it changed the way you think about design?
Working in academia has made me comfortable with open-ended thinking and working on projects that are not immediately market-ready. I can easily suspend disbelief and say, “What if the world looked like this?” instead of focusing on “How are we going to sell this product?” It also allows me to do more long-term thinking, 10 to 15 years out versus one to two years.
How can designers not in academia benefit from an academic approach?
It’s kind of nerdy, but just having the space to think about ideas open-endedly is probably the most important benefit I get from academia. It’s essential to have safe social spaces for creative thought.
“It’s essential to have safe social spaces for creative thought..”
This could be a group you set up at work, or maybe a book club you start, where you meet people interested in similar things to you. The point is, these spaces provide the kind of headspace to discuss and generate ideas about something you’re all passionate about. Also, reaching out to friends doing exciting things and saying, “You two don’t know each other yet, but we’re all interested in this one thing, so let’s get together and discuss what we’re working on.”
When you think about disrupting entrenched design processes like architecture and urban design, how do we challenge long-standing linear workflows and adopt new thinking?
When everyone is only looking at their own part of a linear process, you have to find a way to incentivize people to look holistically for the best option. There are parts of the process that a lot of people don’t really need or want. We try to look at the outcome a person will pay for and leapfrog over other parts of the process by focusing on a design’s performance rather than the act of designing itself. This works because usually, someone is willing to pay for something if it gets them to the desired outcome. I think it does require a change in the process of how things usually work and thus requires changing incentives a little bit too.
How do you come up with projects you want to tackle?
Most of the things I want to tackle have to do with a long term passion. If you look at my projects, they probably seem eclectic, but then, if you dig a little bit into them, you’ll see I have an obsession with the way information is tied to physical things, or the program (uses) of physical spaces and that relationship to technology. So there are a lot of projects that have to do with organizing spatial information.
It’s about focusing on a portion of the problem related to a specific topic. Allow yourself to start having conversations around an idea, and then as you work on things, it just appears in your work because you start to see it everywhere. The more you notice something, the more you begin to see it in other ways elsewhere, and then start to explore it in your work.
What are some design opportunities you’ve been thinking about recently?
I think Zoom and remote work could have a drastic impact on our behavior. We should design our telecommunication interactions, but we shouldn’t tie them to a screen. The physical computer on a 2D surface, fixed in a particular location, just doesn’t make sense, especially when we start thinking about our homes as work environments and having all these other programmatic functions. For example, instead of flying to see family, I just walk into the kitchen and run into my mom. Because we happen to both be in our Kitchens, we run into each other’s projection and therefore have a more candid serendipitous conversation.
Also, isn’t it interesting how Yelp and social media are actually changing where people go in cities? They are choreographing people based on what the user interface (UI) dictates, and that is going to change where people go in physical space. There are many other examples of services like this that are shaping our experience of cities.
This reminds me of emerging spatial technology. How might we design with currently conceived interfaces like augmented reality (AR) and voice interactions (Siri, Alexa, etc.)?
I’m honestly not a huge fan of AR because it’s such an individual experience. I’m more interested in projection mapping, where, if you use a projector and a camera, anything is an interface. If you get good computer vision that understands what the space is and what objects are interacting, suddenly everything is an interface, and it’s more social. It can be something that you and other people in the space are experiencing.
Everything we have in the design of our homes and our Zoom interactions is very action-oriented and directive. I turn a light switch on and off, or on Zoom, I’m speaking at you to communicate information. Whereas there’s a lot of ambient information that happens if you’re in a space with someone. For example, you hear or see someone in the distance. The light outside from the sun is much more ambient and gradual. So I think there are cues for more serendipitous interactions that we could harness.
What do you think are important techniques for designers to have in our toolkit as we approach design in these interactive mediums?
It depends on the type of designer, but for architects and urban designers, having many spatial skills and spatial reasoning is useful to think about interactions. For example, in a physical plan in space, they can conceptualize something like walking through a door that could cause another action to happen. Another skill would be to be able to talk about routines and behaviors. Not a list that you write, but by drawing a vignette that includes where and what interaction happens and how it sequences over time. Also, the ability to diagram and think of this whole system is helpful.
What advice would you give to aspiring designers in any field?
A couple of things. One, be genuine about the things you’re interested in, and two, keep following the thread of what keeps you interested.
What does genuine mean to you?
Don’t try to mold yourself into some version of what you think others think good design is. You should listen to the part of yourself that recognizes your other important skills and experiences. People should have a sense of pride in their capabilities and how they see the world and realize their skill sets are already in demand.
Many architects transitioning into tech, especially in the UX area, ask what they can do to break into the space. They have been trying to format their portfolios around being a UX designer. They have these stories about being interested in UX, but they’re still interested in stuff related to the built environment. Large tech companies like Amazon, Seamless, and Yelp still have to deal with logistics and spatial problems. People don’t need to put together portfolios that make them look like user experience designers, they should be describing their existing skill sets—demonstrating that they can think systemically and spatially—whether that’s visualizing spatial data or showing the sequence of a user’s experience in physical space.
