Untitled

Discuss this episode in the Muse community

Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter

---

Show notes

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity.

00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky.

00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there.

00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly?

00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still fingers crossed that it’ll become something.

00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart brand work from what was the 70s or 80s.

00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic.

00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that.

00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see.

00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can sign up to screen that I guess.

00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know.

00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart Brand in general that came out recently?

00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman year, so I’m pretty committed at this point.

00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that there’s a lot of interest in his work.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover, especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so.

00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks. I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so early on?

00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple more weeks left, which I’m very excited about.

00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations.

00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far.

00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already?

00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like counting down the days, but we’re getting there.

And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma at the end of the year.

And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling, specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time, that just really clicked for me.

And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion, I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper and explore what impact they could have.

I think that there’s something about making something that enables other people to make other things that is just like incredibly gratifying for me in a way that no other product design projects really touch.

And I think more broadly, I’m really interested in the combined power of like design and tech to foster creativity and community across the board, and that was definitely like the inspiration behind this thesis and also like a through line to just things that interest me across the board and in terms of like doing school and work at the same time, I think it’s really just about The space that the pandemic has provided for free time, sadly, I definitely have profited.

00:05:30 - Speaker 2: Uh, so that’s your productivity hack is be doing this all during a massive lockdown that prevents other kinds of fun things that.

00:05:38 - Speaker 1: Exactly, it’s the best one. I highly recommend. No, it’s kind of the worst, and I feel honestly a little bit guilty to have like done so well during such a terrible time, but then at the same time, I’m very grateful. So there we have it.

00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of that hits on things that speak very much to me, and I think others that I feel like are in our field, however you want to define that, they’re making tools to help others create, which I think is in many ways a harder or more interesting product design problem.

It’s one that maybe historically has not been seen as very sexy when you think of, I don’t know, productivity tools, whether it’s a word processor or a video editing tool or something like that. They don’t have the same kind of sleek attention to detail that often more consumer products do.

Maybe that’s starting to change now and at least I hope a little bit this concept of a tools for thought field which we talked about with all the way back in our podcast episode with Andy Matuschek about kind of transforming. From the stodgy idea of, I don’t know, word processors have been the same for 25 years and very utilitarian and just the word design doesn’t get associated with them. Maybe that’s starting to change now, which I’m very excited about.

00:06:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And also it’s interesting because I think I’m young enough to have grown up with those tools and like been in Photoshop from a very young age, and there’s something. Definitely about them that is just so intimidating and so difficult to comprehend from somebody who is not like acclimated to the environment and doesn’t understand the principles that they operate on, and I think that that’s slowly changing, but it’s definitely like, it’s still happening, we’re still figuring out the best way to do it cause it is complicated, and they’re offering a lot of different things in the same place.

00:07:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing about computing in general and creative tools in particular is they’re just so new on a relative time scale. We’re still figuring it all out. There’s some established practices, but when you compare it to a lot of other fields where I don’t know if you’re a woodworker, the best tools for doing woodworking have been slowly refined over the course of hundreds of years, and here in computing we’re still kind of just banging two rocks together to figure out how to make things, so.

00:07:52 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, we’re definitely still figuring things out.

00:07:56 - Speaker 2: Have you found there’s any particular, I don’t know, skills or approaches that came from this kind of film visual design background that you talked about that translate well and give you unique insights that maybe some of your colleagues don’t have doing digital product design?

00:08:10 - Speaker 1: Hm, that’s an interesting question. I mean, inherently audio and video software is.

Incredibly hard to understand, and I think that it takes a preexisting like knowledge and investment and really being able to go into these tools that are just like an incredibly blank slate, and they offer so much possibility, but where it is is like up to you to really figure out and even understand what you’re looking for.

And so I think Having that background in feeling comfortable just tackling these like interfaces that are very unfriendly, honestly, it does help, and I think it also helps me to understand a lot of the principles that some of the other creative tools are just beginning to adopt, and there’s a lot of like efficiency and abstraction work that has been developed and cultivated in Video and audio tools that is just beginning to kind of pop up its head in just more simple, more like consumer everyday creative tools.

And I also think that fundamentally having a background in like video is also just like a Background in storytelling, which is applicable everywhere, and I think it’s becoming even more applicable in tools like design tools and writing tools and being able to help foster those stories and also to kind of weave in the story of the tool is kind of an underrated thing. And it’s not the primary concern, but it definitely is a piece of the broader puzzle of getting people to feel comfortable enough to create in the tools. So there’s something interesting there, but it’s definitely still in its nascent form.

00:09:52 - Speaker 3: Molly, it’s interesting that you mentioned growing up with complex tools like Photoshop and that being a help in using other tools in the future.

I didn’t grow up on Photoshop, I grew up on Kipics. I remember when I first tried to learn programming, the tools were so foreign and unapproachable that I almost completely bounced off the field.

It was like VI, which is an incredible maze and like all the Java server side stuff. It was just completely wild. And it was only because of Ruby on Rails that I found something that I could basically get working and running end to end. And once you go through it a few times, you kind of calibrate on like how terrible things should be when you’re first learning something. But I do think a lot of people just bounce off these complex Pro Tools for a reason like that.

00:10:32 - Speaker 1: 100%. I feel very lucky to have become comfortable in them at a very young age, and that was through like pirating Photoshop and getting gifted a Wacom tablet and just really starting by making really, really rudimentary like digital art and things like that.

But it definitely was like the type of thing that I would try to teach my friends and things like that and kind of bring it into other areas, and it was just not adopted.

It was like my understanding and knowledge of the tool was something that I definitely took for granted for a very long time.

And it definitely has made me think differently too about creative tools across the board of like, wow, if you really invest in like getting people in these tools at a young age and really acclimated and understanding how they work, like there’s a lot of potential there, but it’s not scalable. So like there has to be other approaches other than that, so interesting problem that we’re only beginning to run up into.

00:11:31 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is computers and creativity, which is not at all coincidentally, the name of your thesis which you published recently, and of course I’ll link that in the show notes here, and I recommend everyone go read it. Not only is it great content, but a beautiful presentation that really takes good advantage of sort of the web as an article format. So naturally folks can go read it, but maybe for those that haven’t yet, just to prime the discussion here, maybe you want to give us a brief summary of its contents.

00:12:01 - Speaker 1: Most definitely, yeah, so my thesis is really about how can digital creative tools best augment human creativity and collaboration.

And it’s really looking at the potential of creative tools as co-creators with human beings and examining kind of returning to the original vision of creative tools and how we can extract some of the things that were realized and some of them that weren’t and kind of analyze that for the present of creative tools and to kind of contextualize that with an observation, from my vantage point, I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to Amplify human action or thought versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively. And so if that’s true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that’s like very uniquely the computer’s strong suit. So the paper delves into a lot of different areas and kind of the history and analyzing the present, but The main point here and like the TLDR that I kind of reach is that to foster optimal human innovation, digital creative tools really need to be interoperable or basically talk to each other. They need to be moldable or customizable to different phases of the creative process. They need to be efficient abstracted, which is similar to moldable. They basically just need to Accommodate more or less complexity at different stages, and lastly, they just need to be community driven so that people can be inspired and get help when they’re creating. So that is the very abbreviated version of my very long blog post, but I’d love to dig deeper into all of that.

00:13:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that resonates very much with stuff we’d love to talk about here and things Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about.

Yeah, I guess maybe to dig in a little bit on, for example, that first section where you look back at what you called the original vision or or sort of the history.

And folks who’ve been banging around in the tool space for some time will certainly recognize a lot of this, Engelbart and K and Hypercard and Flash, and Dynabook and so on, but I think it’s one of the nicer collections of summarizing all that, that isn’t, I don’t know, a super long book, so it’s a nice way to get up to speed on that. Now, it is interesting with Sort of look at this history, which I think is often presented as kind of yeah, there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the Stone Ages to us, the 1960s, the 1970s, and then in some ways we lost our way and we ended up with, I don’t know, social media and Kind of lock down appliance like smartphones and in fact there’s this glorious world of I don’t know, small talk and dying a book and mother of all demos style stuff that we still need to build or we haven’t built or something like that. Do you see it as like that’s an unfulfilled vision or the flip side could be, OK, well, they had some cool ideas, some of those worked out, practiced, some of them didn’t. The reason. We don’t have everything there is that maybe some of it wasn’t practical, and I’m never fully sure how to think about the kind of lionization that we do some of these past figures.

00:15:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way.

I think that there’s a lot of tension and just basically more analysis that needs to be done there.

I think that it’s very easy to put these people on a pedestal and just say, wow, look at this incredible vision that they outlined, and we do that, and I think that they do present some really compelling ideas and their way of framing computers as being a tool to almost augment human intelligence is something that I particularly am pretty compelled by, but obviously a lot of their ideas did fail and there’s reasons for that. Um, and I also think that they were operating in an environment that was largely kind of independent from the actual business environment and like the technology sector as we see it today. So, like, will those ideas actually thrive in reality and especially in the consumer preferences and like relationship we have with tech today. Maybe not, but I think that they Still present some really interesting kind of principles and ways of looking at computers that we can definitely take some inspiration from. And I also think that like we rely on a lot of the principles that they established. And I think it’s just really important to like recognize that and kind of piece apart what we took and what we didn’t, and maybe what we can take more of or what we should reconsider. I just think that fundamentally This is great of history, especially in a field like tech, which is kind of in some ways pretty disconnected from its own history. And there’s almost kind of like a pride in that of moving so quickly that we don’t even look to the past.

00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, or I’d almost listed as a sort of willful disregard of history because I think there’s the classic, I don’t know, why combinator or startup founder.

Out of school, it’s actually their naivety that allows them to reinvent, you know, they’re not dragged down by the legacy baggage of how we do things today. They can just think about it in kind of a green field way and dream up a new idea and maybe technology has changed enough that there’s new parameters and they can really do something new, but that comes at the expense of, well, actual naivete and reinventing everything. And not using scholarship of the past to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t in order to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would.

Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what you should do going forward into the future. And yeah, the young naive startup founder or other types that we hold up as our role models sometimes in technology are not into scholarship of the past, let’s say.

00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Very well put. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I’m very curious though to hear what both of you think of, as you put it like the lionization of Engelbart and Kay and all of those people, cause it seems to be a pretty disputed topic.

00:18:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this opens a quite an interesting door for me. My sense is that a lot of people look at what these early pioneers did, and intuitively they feel like that is good, it should have succeeded. Why don’t we have this? They had it 50 years ago, what’s going on? And at the same time, the current reality, like you were saying, is not exactly that. And I think it’s really important to understand why that is, and I think you were alluding to what’s happening where a lot of this study and analysis has been at the level of the tools.

So it’s like what’s on the screen, how do you program it? What’s the user interface even, but there’s an entire complex system around how software is developed and used.

And like you were saying, I think the reason that the vision for the software and the reality of the software don’t line up is because we haven’t understood or Accounted for how that ecosystem works.

So sometimes I call this the political economy of software development. There’s weird path dependence, there’s economic incentives. You got to understand all of that if you are going to understand how we came to where we are now. And on the flip side, if you want to predict and guide the future in that direction, you need to become a sort of political economist of software and get in not only the interfaces in the code, but also the funding and the incentives and legal stuff and all that.

00:19:39 - Speaker 1: Hm, yeah, that’s very well put too. I definitely agree. I think there’s so much complexity and also just like context that’s missing from so many of the analysis of these past tools, and they’re very like independent floating ideas versus actually tangible grounded concepts that could be turned into something real.

00:19:58 - Speaker 2: I think a lot of what you both said to me kind of just describes that these folks were visionaries in the sense of also being sort of ivory tower academics or whether or not they were an academic, they were purposefully somewhat disconnected from, for example, commercial realities and that is part of what allowed them to have big dreams.

And those dreams are still inspiring to this day, but then if those dreams are to become reality, at some point they do have to be connected to the real world, and this is a huge problem in research generally, which is there’s a technology transfer, how does something go from the lab or From that more idea space that science excels at into something practical that you can use and there isn’t a good path.

This is something that the I can switch research lab where Mark and I are both participants is trying to improve upon, but yeah, it’s a really hard problem because a lot of times the same people, it’s a very different kind of person that can have the big dreams versus that can kind of make it into reality.

And when you think of one of the most famous examples, Xerox Park, and some of the ideas they had there, and Steve Jobs basically got a glimpse of it. He was a guy that was good at actualizing things. He got a glimpse of it and then basically stole it and then went and made a practical thing. And of course, often the visionaries feel, no, you left out important parts, but leaving out parts is actually part of how you make something come to reality.

So I don’t want to dismiss these historic folks as The academics that don’t know how to bring their ideas to reality.

In many cases they did make great working software or even hardware that in some cases went on to turn into underpinnings of tools we have today, right? Small talk turned into Objective C and that, you know, fed into Ruby and. SWF and other languages that, for example, we use heavily on the Muse team, you know, these are very much things that are in the real world. But maybe there is an acknowledgement that the big dreams aren’t enough, you need to do something to connect it to reality. Yeah.

00:21:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think there are two separate axes here.

So there’s the axis of What are you looking at? So it could be pure software, or it could be called the software ecosystem, and then there’s the axis of visionary and idealist versus in the weeds pragmatist.

And I think in our discussion that we might have been kind of conflating those two things, but in fact, I think you can have, and I think we need more visionary idealists on the political economy side of software.

Probably the closest thing we’ve seen to that is the original free software movement and that obviously got some traction and made some progress, but I think we need to re-date that for the world of cloud and mobile, where the original free software vision basically broke down, I would say.

Just as an aside, this is one of my favorite creativity techniques where you identify the axes, you know, the rows and the columns of the spreadsheet, and you label each row in each column, and you see often you know what the entries in certain of those boxes are, but you can perhaps intuit that one of the boxes hasn’t been filled. yet or given a name or explored and just by sort of drawing the map like that, you can identify new quadrants. There’s a cool research paper that I read on this about data structures where they kind of identified all the different ways you can build data structures and then found the blank spots in the maps and went and synthesized those new data structures just on the basis of this cell in the spreadsheet should exist.

00:23:24 - Speaker 1: So fascinating. That is awesome. I can like visually imagine that in my brain. It’s great.

00:23:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if it sounds like I have a critique for some of these historic visionaries, let me bring the positive side, which is I do totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing that is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in, yeah, social media, consumer, I’m not.

Exactly sure what everything is oriented around commerce and again, things that are all good commerce, entertainment, these things are fine. I consume these, but the reason I got interested in computers at a very young age is seeing their potential for creativity and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit.

And it’s a good reminder to go back and look at some of this history, maybe especially because these folks didn’t have any of that prior stuff.

Computers were still so new, particularly personal computing was essentially, you know, they were in the process of inventing it, thinking what could people do if they had access to computers with graphics and networking and all the things that nowadays we take for granted, but they dreamed of something very different from the world we have today, and that can be very grounding to look back at that and take a bit of a blank slate from where we are today. So yeah, I personally take a lot of inspiration from all their work as well.

00:24:44 - Speaker 1: Totally agree. I think there’s something too very compelling about.

At least for me when I was reading these texts, how they kind of frame computers as partners with human beings, and I kind of integrate that as like a co-creation relationship, which is definitely a very squishy one that I think we’re still defining, but there’s something that feels very like a breath of fresh air to think about the computer as like a counterpart instead of something that is Potentially replacing us or stealing our attention or something of that sort, even just asking so much of us.

It’s more like, oh, the computer is here to help. And I think that that in particular is something that I hope we optimize more for in creative tools specifically, and there’s a lot of potential there.

00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Very well said. I do feel like more often than not in the modern world you’re stealing your attention as one example.

You’re sort of fighting against the computer and perhaps it’s not the computer itself, it’s the whole world of computing, the internet, or email inboxes, notifications, the way that the web works, and so on that you’re often either fighting.

Again this thing trying to make you do things you don’t want to do or take away your attention or distract you, or it wants you to do its chores, you know, click this, update this, do this, fill out this box, and it should be a tool quietly waiting for what you’re asking of it and to, as you said, co-create and help you in what you’re trying to do.

I like this quote from the original Tron movie which is at one point the bad guy basically says, look, you know, the systems are overloaded because we don’t have time to handle every little user request, and the guy he’s speaking to is kind of the wise and old computer sciences, actually user requests is what computers are for, and I feel like it’s so often forgotten.

They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human has to serve the computer or perhaps the business. Interests and I’m a capitalist, so don’t get me wrong, but the business needs, the KPI of whoever designed the product, it’s asking me to do things to serve that rather than my needs.

00:26:49 - Speaker 1: I love that quote. That is fantastic. I want that on a bumper sticker.

00:26:54 - Speaker 3: It’s great. Related to this, Molly, one thing I really appreciate about your thesis was you surface this idea of, I forget what you call it, but I would call it like vibe, basically, it’s like emotion, motivation, valence. I think that’s so important because if you have software that’s giving you a hard time, it’s not just a tactical or mechanical issue. It’s now you’re in a whole different mindset of, uh, you know, I’m dealing with the check boxes or whatever, and you’re much less likely to be creative and to keep doing it going forward and so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit in your own words about that aspect of creative software.

00:27:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that this is one that is like just beginning to form and it’s mainly because we’ve advanced to a point where there’s enough competition that we can actually focus on vibes or whatever you want to call it.

And I think when I was writing about this, and it’s something I think about a lot. I definitely think about software like Figma, which I think that there’s something to be said for just bringing a more playful approach and just treating the user with more respect and really trying to validate them, not get in their way.

It really comes back to establishing the baseline of being like a very good piece of software that does the job well.

But beyond that, how you can actually differentiate the piece of software, especially in creative tools, it’s really just about like the personality and the kind of attitude that the software brings to the user, and I think you see that reflected in the way that it talks to the user and the colors and just little visual things and even just like the ambient environment of their landing page. It’s just very small things, but they do add up, and it in the increasing A larger landscape of creative tools, people are going to pick the one that they identify more with.

And I think that that is incredibly interesting to me personally, from like a storytelling perspective of like how we can try to create things that are more inclusive to more people and just try to get more people in the tool that might not have a background and experience scaling these tools and really navigating these usually dark gray interfaces. But yeah, I think vibe is, it’s a nascent field for software. We’re still figuring it out.

00:29:04 - Speaker 2: So there’s a section in here titled Standardization, which I think is about file formats and ultimately is how tools work together and actually something we’ve talked about on this podcast before, including with Balant from Kraft talking about the different ways he wanted to try to have essentially toolmaker humility, which is realizing that the tool you were creating for your users.

One of many that they are using and you should try to as much as possible, be a good citizen and work together, although in many ways it seems with the highly sandboxed world that we get in kind of mobile apps as well as to some degree, maybe the web and cloud, you have these silos and they just aren’t really designed to work together.

So what do you see as kind of the future going forward from here for, I don’t know, tools working together?

00:29:51 - Speaker 1: I think honestly, if I had to pick one concept for this project that I really like strongly stand behind and is like the hill that I’m willing to die on, it would probably be this one. I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity.

And specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that there’s so much to be said for tools amplifying the power of our brains and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and limiting creation to a single piece of software’s capabilities is just kind of crazy if you step back and think about it.

And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each other would just fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and introduce in more collaborators and really just expand the project’s constraints beyond any One tool.

And this is a really hard one. Like, solving this problem is something that I feel like is a huge problem that I just don’t even know how to approach because it is pretty much in direct contradiction to the current business models of most creative tool companies. But I’d love to hear both of your thoughts on this because it’s a huge topic and it’s definitely one ripe with controversy.

00:31:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to expand on the motivation here, I think collaborating across tools can mean several different things. It can mean, like you were saying, you have a given project and at different stages of the project, you want to be able to use different tools.

That’s one case where an open format would help.

You might want to collaborate with other people.

And they might want to use their own tools, which is different from yours.

It’s another case. And also there’s this element of time where over time software tools tend to atrophy.

Companies come and go, you know, platforms change, but you at least want your data and to be able to carry that with you in some sort of archive at least.

So there are many cases where having such interoperability would be helpful.

Yes, it’s extremely hard and by the way, I think this is a prime example of the political economy issue. It’s very easy to say we should have X, and even if X is relatively easy to do, which is not in this case, there’s still this huge issue of the.

We should. That’s quite the weasel phrase, right? Really, it’s, if we were to accomplish this, we would need a bunch of companies or individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves, lower their profitability, make their products worse for the customers in the short term to get to some other global maximum.

It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important.

00:32:36 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, and it’s definitely like invisible work that does not really result in much actual profit for the company, it’s much more of like a long term investment that would require all the companies getting on the same page and really agreeing to terms and it’s really a long term relationship with each other too, which is kind of crazy to even fathom how that could happen.

00:33:00 - Speaker 2: I guess to highlight what I consider a bright spot or a positive version of this, I do think files on some of these flat file formats, which includes plaintext.txt, markdown. Image formats, PNG, JPEG, probably yeah, MP4 movies increasingly audio clips, PDFs.

Now PDFs come with a lot of baggage. They are very complex to render, but ultimately there are pretty standardized ways to do that. And importantly, yeah, PDF does not demand. You have, for example, Adobe Acrobat, maybe it did at one time, but now it’s a tool you can open with. very standard viewers on any platform you can edit it and so on.

It’s something we strive for in Muse because we kind of have this value but again where we are subject to the same constraints as others working with, especially making an app on a platform like iOS.

But for example, we do store most of the raw, you know, when you drag an image in, we store that as a raw image in one of these standard file formats and in fact, if you do a bundle. Export you just get a zip archive that it contains as much as possible formats, you know, the ink is in SVG and that sort of thing. So we try to do that as much as we can.

Now in practice, a muse bundle zip archive that has a bunch of loose media in it and is not sort of you know arranged on this board maybe is of mixed value. So I guess that does lead into maybe one of the more standard objections. The standardization, which is essentially that it is maybe counter to innovation. It creates a lowest common denominator. If every markdown editor, for example, has to support that format, if you want to do something interesting like make it really easy to embed video with captions of particular time clips, and that’s just not part of the format, so you just can’t do it or you break away and do something, you basically break the format in order to add that innovation to your tool.

00:34:51 - Speaker 3: I do remain optimistic that it can, and in fact will be solved. I think we will get a general purpose data medium that’s kind of like JSON is for the synchronous single user case.

It natively allows collaboration.

Obviously we’ve been working a little bit towards this with automerge and so forth in the lab, but I think it’s eventually going to happen, but it’s gonna take a lot of work and I suspect it’s probably not gonna happen by a bunch of people getting in a, you know, enormous room and everyone saying, OK, let’s form the consortium for X and do a two year study, and blah blah blah.

I think it will be an organic, messy process led by some champions somewhere, whether they’re individuals or companies, but I do think it’s possible. And when we get there, it’ll be great. And like you were saying, we are, I don’t know if you were saying this on the podcast or if I read this in your thesis, but we’re relatively early in this world of collaborative software. It seems so obvious to us that you have Google Docs and Figma, but that’s I don’t know what, 10 years old or something, so also just gotta give it a little bit of time.

00:35:49 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, I think we’re still figuring it out and really trying to understand like what to prioritize and what is the most important in the long term and just beginning to think long term, that this is going to be around and I think we’re still like even developing the social norms and values that we as like the users and the makers like care about.

There’s a lot of development still happening. There that is like incredibly interesting and I think it’ll all shake out OK, but we just have to like really nail down what’s important and how we’re gonna like think about this in the long term, because even though things like standardization are not particularly enticing, like if we want it to be around for a while and if we want our work to be compounding, then it’s like you said, increasingly important.

00:36:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll offer as a counter example to the, you know, standardization and innovation dilemma, the web, where essentially there has been a lot of innovation on the web, but no one company owns that format, and perhaps there’s some complaints you can have about a particular browser monoculture at any given time, Google Chrome at the moment. It is truly an open format, you can parse it with a lot of different tools, and it will have, I think, the longevity that will go beyond any particular browser.

00:37:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s some, we do a whole podcast on protocols and stuff, but I do think there are some important lessons in the web stack, one of which is they’re relatively thin layers, or at least the layers that work the best are pretty thin.

So whenever you make a layer that’s an abstraction or protocol, you get the benefit of aligning some decision space, and if it’s a relatively thick layer, you get the benefit of you’re aligning a lot of decisions together, so there’s a lot of interoperability, but then you run a sort of exponential risk of one of those things being wrong and then the whole game breaks apart.

So the layers for the web are thin enough that, at least in the lower layers, you could plausibly say there aren’t huge mistakes, such that people would want to go off and do something totally different, at least for the original web use case. So here in this case, I think we’re more likely, for example, to have success with the interoperability standard that’s more like JSON and less like address book standard format, right? Something that’s less like the business objects, or if you have those, they emerge kind of organically out of more general purpose data medium, so I don’t know, we’ll see.

00:38:03 - Speaker 1: Can’t wait to see.

00:38:04 - Speaker 2: We’ve hinted a few times, I think you’ve mentioned a few times kind of the the relationship between collaboration and creativity and the co-creation element, and from my perspective, this is a relatively new element of computing creativity. You mentioned using Photoshop, growing up on Photoshop. That was a private activity. Maybe you could send a file to someone else at very great effort by putting it on a floppy disk and carrying it over to them.

But you didn’t really do that very often. It was typically a private activity and furthermore, I think for many creativity is often something that is a little bit done in private.

It’s sort of this vulnerable act, but then perhaps that’s changing partially because of collaborative software like Google Docs and FigMA and Notion and others.

And in fact, we had a whole episode with Nicholas Cline from Sigma, who I think you might know, basically talking about, he’s also a younger guy, and I think, you know, for him, there is less of this creativity is this thing done in private, of course you make stuff together with friends, with colleagues. That’s just how it’s been. So maybe that’s culture is changing partially because the tools are changing. But for the purposes of computers and creativity and how you see it Molly, what do you see as the relationship between creating together versus a more private activity?

00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I think this is a really interesting one, and I think we’re still figuring it out from my perspective. I think creative tools, ideally should accommodate for both, um, from my perspective, I think right now they kind of still fall into two buckets of either solo or collaborative and collaborative in like the Google Docs or FIMA sense.

And I think there’s immense value in having tools that do both. They optimize for incredible solo creation and incredible multiplayer building upon each other’s ideas, and I admittedly, I think I lean more in the direction of like how Nico thinks about these things of allowing in more collaborators earlier on and feeling comfortable doing so because I grew up with these tools in a fully collaborative Google Docs form. But I do think that what’s interesting here is that these tools are so new, and we’re still just like as human beings figuring out what is expected and like what does ownership mean in these environments and just trying to establish like social norms there, and that is like a very squishy one that I think will just take time.

But for me, this really just like reinforces the value of moldability and ideally the tool would just accommodate, like I said, both solo and collaborative work and provide you like the resources and tools that you need to create those environments for yourself because I think Tools being less opinionated about an assumptive about what you need in those modes is going to be a great thing.

I would love to see for tools to give you the features that you need to really create your unique creative space, whatever that looks like.

And I think this also comes back to what Niko was talking about when he was talking about like the flywheel effect of collaboration. And really creating in the same spaces and building upon each other’s ideas. I think that that is a very different mode than like the solo creation kind of brainstorming, but ideally the tool could scale to both. So that’s like my current thinking. But I think that’s really hard, and I think that that’s two completely different things and optimizing for very, very different, almost in some ways audiences like those are sometimes the same person, but oftentimes they’re not or they’re a different subset of people and I don’t know, I think news is an interesting example here too, and I’m curious to hear what both of your thinking is because obviously that is optimizing more for the generative like solo environment in a really wonderful way.

00:42:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the challenge of a true thinking tool and really, you know, we’re trying to cover the very earliest part of the ideation funnel, let’s call it, or the creation funnel, which is that early ideation where you normally use a sketchbook or a whiteboard, something that is not at all intended to be a final artifact, but is about figuring out what you want to make in the first place or making a decision or just forming up your vision rather than any deliverable artifact.

And that is something that does tend to be maybe creativity at its most private, like something about a sketchbook is just something that you really feel is truly private.

And in fact, you know, we’ve been looking into things to try to add some collaborative capabilities, hopefully building on our values around privacy and sort of a calm sanctuary and all that sort of thing, but it is a real challenge.

We could easily lose what’s good and we have even heard from Users and customers, they say no, or they’re worried, right? They say, I don’t necessarily want you to add that because then it’ll turn into this more chaotic environment that I associate with these team spaces, for example. So, I think there is a way to cut that Gordian knot, but it’s a huge design challenge, obviously.

00:43:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the goal is definitely to eventually accommodate all the different types or topologies of social or non-social collaboration, and it is my hope that we’re able to eventually do it in one tool, because as you have a project, you tend not to want to be jumping around through different tools, or at least to do so only with very good interoperability, and every time you do do a jump there’s a bit of an activation energy costs.

And yeah, as we’ve studied the creative process by talking with creative professionals and in other ways, we have found that there’s maybe a half dozen different typical topologies.

There’s you’re basically ideating alone, there’s call and response feedback, there’s real time, kind of everyone at the whiteboard collaboration, there’s a sync building up a corpus together like a tracker, uh and there’s like presentation and sharing in real time.

And I think it’s possible to get all of those in one tool, but it will take some time.

The reason we started with the initial ideation phase was a felt like that was the most underserved, and the one we had the most unique angle on, and also there’s something to doing the first step first, if you will, just in terms of building up the full user journey over time.

00:44:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I do imagine with any tool that has both collaborative capabilities as well as solo capabilities, and by the way, exactly as Mark said, collaborative actually covers a whole host of different modalities, even just talking about synchronous versus asynchronous, for example, I think one of the big things we’ve learned. From Google Docs, it’s not really about the real-time collaboration. It’s about having a document you know is up to date and in pract