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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel magical.

00:00:18 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about the product, it’s about music company and a small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Nicholas Klein of FIMA. Hey there. And Nico, I know you have been working from Europe with a US centric, maybe even a San Francisco-centric team for a few years. How do you find that experience of having the evening be your team time?

00:00:48 - Speaker 1: I think that looking at the upside of I haven’t set an alarm in the last 2 years to get up for work. I think that’s definitely on the plus side of this, but I like to kind of like keep my Friday evenings free, that kind of like gives me a little bit of like time of just spending a normal week evening, I would say.

00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the uh there was a nice thread recently about some Europe to US times and I think on the Europe side, the trick is, of course, you are giving up a lot of your evenings, but you gotta make some room in there for a social event, be, you know, be able to have dinner with friends or whatever here and there, and yeah, I agree, no alarms slash morning is more free form is a huge benefit.

So for me, very well worth the extra cost of maybe needing to be a little more on my game in the evening than I would normally need to be.

And let’s hear about your career journey a little bit, so I think you have quite a bit of interesting milestones along the way, including Sketch Runner and artifacts, which we talked about a little bit with Jason Wa recently here on the podcast, and I think it’s how I first discovered your work. Love to hear the steps that brought you along the way here.

00:02:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I studied interaction design in Schwebmund, and it’s a tiny, tiny school in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in Germany.

So I studied interaction design and I think what was very interesting kind of like studying interaction design was that you get taught these like behemoths of tools. So you get taught Flash, you get taught Illustrator, you get taught Photoshop in like classes, and you never really think about kind of like manipulating those tools themselves.

And interaction design in general was really interesting because it was just about the relationship of humans to technology and application design, kind of a concrete UI design was one part of this.

And I’ve never really thought about kind of like, hey, I’m learning how to design software. And tools are just software that is also being designed somewhere far, far away, but on a hack day in Hamburg where we were working on sketch plug-ins, kind of like started and like I continued to working with the team in kind of like designing and building sketch runner, and there was a plug-in with which you kind of like can still like insert components and apply styles from like a command like spot like UI.

00:03:09 - Speaker 2: I remember using this a little bit back in my sketch days, and it was quite remarkable to me at the time to bring a command line interface to a design tool. I feel like nowadays command palettes are fairly common and power tools, maybe superhuman, and some others. There’s an article from Repole where they describe a little bit the rise of the command palette, and the command lines traditionally uh kind of engineering centric, I don’t know, Unixy particular kind of power user making its way into much more of these tools, but I feel like Sketch Runner was a little ahead of its time insofar as bringing that to a design tool.

00:03:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fascinating. We’ve seen that like this aspect of I know the name of the command and originally it started with finding a way to make plug-ins more easily kind of like executable.

That was the start during the hack day, like, hey, there are so many plug-ins being built for sketch. How can we make them more accessible and faster to kind of like execute? And then it kind of like we realized there are so many features that we can add on to this.

And the moment that was like really exciting for me was that I was still studying in Schwabsmund.

And I saw someone from the Airbnb design systems team talk about sketch runner kind of like on a meet up and then kind of like also tweeting about this. And I was just like, holy shit, this is really happening right now.

And so at that moment I realized that like, hey, there is a potential for changing design tools. They’re also just software that are to be designed basically, and that kind of like got me hooked into design tools. After graduation, I was an intern at Shopify. And continued working on sketch plugins there. I was building Polaris telescope. It’s kind of like a tool from within Sketch, you could kind of like see the documentation for the design system components.

00:04:56 - Speaker 2: These were internal kind of plug-ins or tools at. Shopify or something for release to the outside world.

00:05:02 - Speaker 1: It started as an internal tool, but then since like Shopify is a public design system and is being used by third party people to design applications for the Shopify platform, we also kind of like made it available publicly.

And during that time, I applied at FIMA.

And one nice story was that at the end of my internship at Shopify, I had this option of going to FIMA and starting an internship there or staying at Shopify full time. And I remember my mentor telling me to kind of like take the job at Sigma because it was like, yeah, this is more interesting to you, you just kind of like go there and that was a nice kind of like end for this work at Shopify was very kind of like welcoming to let me go, if that sounds right.

00:05:43 - Speaker 2: That’s great, and this was early days for Figma, right? Pretty small team. I mean, I think nowadays it’s a giant in the design space slash startup space, but maybe this was a little riskier of a jump to go to this smaller, less proven team at the time.

00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think Stigma definitely hasn’t caught on as kind of like a major tool in the space at that time.

Um, when I joined, we were, I think around 35, maybe 40 people in San Francisco, and that was it, like that was the whole company. And I think we’re now at above 250, but I’m not exactly sure when that is. I’m coming up on 3 years now, and it’s been fascinating to see.

The change in the company itself or kind of like seeing it grow, but also just in the product and in the acceptance of the product in the market. Kind of like seeing how many people and how many companies have switched entirely of using FIMA, it’s still kind of like mind blowing that this actually has happened over the last years and yeah, it’s great to be a part of that.

00:06:42 - Speaker 2: Also seems fun to maybe grow in your career along with the company and see those, yeah, that rapid evolution, that hypergrowth over time can be nerve-wracking at times, at least in my experience, but also potentially really rewarding experience. It’s certainly a great learning experience.

00:06:59 - Speaker 1: Definitely, definitely, especially this aspect of Getting things kind of like onto a roadmap and actually making that happen. When you’re studying, you’re kind of like greenfield projects and you can like imagine the most beautiful things, but then when you’re building a product, you have to kind of like find a way for this to actually happen.

It’s been interesting. I’ve been working on mostly focused on prototyping things and it’s been interesting that kind of like slowly we’re getting into this position where it’s like less features are immediately clear of what should happen, kind of like coming next. But it’s the things we’ve been talking about 3 years ago are slowly coming to the space where now they are actually being shipped, and we can now stand on top of them and look even further. And that’s pretty exciting to see that like these wild thoughts are now becoming reality, and now you’re thinking newer wild thoughts and I like that.

00:07:53 - Speaker 2: How do you find designing for designers? On one hand, maybe that sounds great cause you can maybe introspect your own needs a little bit, but on the other hand, it sounds miserable because they’re incredibly fussy.

00:08:05 - Speaker 1: I actually love it cause imagine the case where kind of like I would now just be a designer, basically, and I would like have all these ideas of how this design tool could be better.

I kind of like love working for designers because seeing what they do.

With the features that you imagine, is so much cooler than the feature itself.

So kind of like building things where other people can build things, it’s just really rewarding that on one hand, and then the other hand is that having designers and user tests, but also kind of like having designers design features for you.

Because I really want this feature. It is amazing. Just today, I’ve seen a tweet thread about how comments in Figma could work and it’s just amazing of how much detail and how much love people put into these ideas of helping us improve our product essentially.

00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And speaking of that, I’ll also throw out, you are a new user and customer, so thank you for your business.

That came to mind because, yeah, you’ve given us really great long detailed feedback along the way, both in the forms of concrete suggestions, you know, it could work like this.

But also I think cause you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that, sometimes more the why, like what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, what’s the feeling you’re having when you go to do a particular thing and you get this particular result, and I think you, you started with us around the time of the beta, and you know, then it was a pretty rough around the edges thing and you saw the potential, but it didn’t really Fit into your flow, but you gave us great feedback anyways and kind of check back periodically and eventually became something that hopefully fits into your creative workflow a little bit.

00:09:38 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. Like, I’ve been using it a lot more recently, especially since the alpha of like the 2D canvas.

That has really changed the game for me, but I think especially kind of like seeing new too of like from a more, I would say maybe more research experiment to actually kind of like, hey, this is a day to day tool for me.

And what I love a lot is how the relationship to the device changes based on the input.

Just through using a pencil, it’s just a significantly different experience, a far more intimate experience really with the device, because it really feels like just I’m writing on paper. Paper with superpowers, right? Like I can drag things around and I can really easily switch my tools, and so I love using it. It’s really great.

00:10:22 - Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you, and thanks for the new marketing slogan. We might need to swap that out on the website.

People with superpowers. So our topic today is collaborative creativity.

And this is something, you know, Mark and I have been talking a lot about, we’ve been talking about a lot of the team because as we think about sort of multi-user features and when or if those make sense for you, and in general, I think the incredible collaboration features that are in a lot of the current, let’s say, suite of tools that a lot of folks in the tech world use, that’s Figma, of course, but it’s also something like Notion, Google Docs going back a little bit further, maybe something like Air Table, and so then you have this question about like how does solo work work or how do we sort of interleave together the solo time and then the working with others, you know, pairing or whatever you wanna call that, there’s feedback cycles and all that sort of thing. So to me it’s a very vast and interesting topic and I know you have a pretty developed, it seems to me from our conversations in the past on it, you have a pretty developed or rapidly developing, let’s say thesis on this, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you think about collaborative creativity.

00:11:31 - Speaker 1: I think it’s interesting also kind of like tying back to how you introduced me in the beginning, that this is a topic I’ve ultimately been working on for a couple of years now, on and off really.

But my bachelor’s thesis was on this aspect of personal creativity and knowledge management, and I think at the core it’s kind of like, where do ideas come from and how could computers be set up to support these.

But then recently kind of like flipping a lot more around this value of iteration, as kind of like working on Figma as a design tool, but also the value of collaboration and the combination of those two. And I think that the concept of collaborative creativity includes all of those aspects and kind of like brings it together. And I think it’s interesting that really fruitful moments where working together with other people, those memories just always kind of like relate to being together in the same physical space. And being able to work on top of each other’s ideas really fluently, and because we trust each other, we can like figure out a problem that we have in our heads really, really quickly. And this kind of rapid iteration, this rapid building on top of each other’s ideas is, I think, at the core of collaborative creativity or is collaborative creativity itself.

00:12:45 - Speaker 2: So, give us some examples of collaborative creativity. There’s obviously like, I guess what you described there is sort of being with your colleagues, you know, in a meeting room, brainstorming on a whiteboard, but how do you see this, especially in the modern distributed world.

00:13:10 - Speaker 2: What I’ve recently seen on Twitter a lot, it’s also funny but like I’ve seen these things on Twitter, but like these TikTok remixes, and I think just recently there’s this like sea shank, the sea shanty TikToks, those are great to describe what those are in case you haven’t seen them is basically people singing these songs in harmony, but they do it by one person records singing. And then the next person essentially layers their singing on top of that video, and you see all the faces and hear all the voices together, but of course it’s a very much an asynchronous process in many cases I think these people didn’t even necessarily know each other.

00:13:37 - Speaker 1: And I think that’s just so fascinating because it’s really good and I think it’s a different example. So while this collaborative creativity in the whiteboarding space feels more like an immediate way of collaborative creativity, this is definitely, it’s still the same core idea. It’s just kind of like happening asynchronously. And I think those tools like TikTok allow for this to happen because I’m able to build on top of your idea. I’m able to take your idea and not necessarily manipulate. directly, but adds to it, which creates this fascinating effect.

00:14:10 - Speaker 2: I feel like that takes us to the whole realm of sort of maybe like remix culture, certainly open source is very much built on that as well. And of course a lot of discussion, maybe not so currently, but maybe in the last decade about kind of copyright law and how that in many ways interferes with this potentially great remix culture. You had DJs and that sort of thing. You see that in the spectrum of collaborative creativity.

00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely. I think it’s an important aspect, and we’ll get later in more detail to this that like the ultimate or kind of like original owner of ideas should be in full control over what others can do with this, essentially. I think that’s a key part of establishing trust in such a kind of like network of people who could work on the same thing. And I think that that’s one aspect of how to kind of like establish this way of working.

00:15:04 - Speaker 2: I mean, idea ownership is so fuzzy, even if you leave the realm of, I don’t know, public copyright, intellectual property, whatever.

I think even on a team making a shared document, in most cases the teams I’ve been on, I and others on the team feel sort of uncomfortable doing heavy edits to someone else’s documents unless they were very specifically invited.

You know, you can leave comments, maybe you can make a little fix, good suggestion changes, you can add something to the bottom, but you have this sense of like, OK, they own this and you don’t kind of want to mess it up. You feel like you’re a guest there, even if it’s in a team workspace, just sort of an interesting, I don’t know, we have this innate sense of ownership, I think, over ideas or a creative output, which may or may not be logical, but nevertheless seems to be part of the human experience.

00:15:52 - Speaker 1: I wonder how much of this ultimately comes back to the tools themselves too, in the sense that what I’ve seen happening in teams using FIMA a lot, that kind of like allowed this very immediate way of collaboratively iterating on the same space that person A creates an idea, creates a couple of marks for this.

Person B comes in and takes kind of like the second. and explores the second mark further.

Person C kind of like uses something else and kind of like just draws out their their direction of this. And at some point, maybe some person zooms out and sees the connecting dots between of those and kind of like puts these things together.

And I think at that point.

What has happened is that people inspired each other, but it’s very, very fuzzy of kind of like who had the key spark of it. And so I think at that point what we’ve seen happening, that’s actually really fascinating is that the culture of teams changed towards a culture where it feels more like our ideas over my ideas. Where just because the tools are not just because of those tools, but also because of the tools, it enabled people to take that ownership less seriously, because they realized if we take that ownership less seriously, we can actually arrive at better solutions down the road.

00:17:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.

And even speaking in terms of just coming back to the more just brainstorming in a group verbally or whatever, one of the ways I know the best collaboration, some of the people that I’ve worked with over many years, including Mark here, is that often it’s just not really clear exactly as you said, where the idea came from, and every so often I feel like I catch it in the moment happening. There’s one case I remember of, we’re trying to, I think it was actually just a debugging kind of scenario pair programming kind of thing. And the way we found the idea that ultimately was the breakthrough was actually one person said something and I misheard them. I was like, oh, that’s brilliant, that’s totally it. And, you know, they respond with, oh no, that wasn’t what I was saying, but now that you mentioned it, and so, wait, whose idea was that exactly? Clearly it was the product of our back and forth to claim that was one person’s idea would be, I guess, like a pointless endeavor to try to assign it to a single name.

00:18:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely the case that creativity, whether it’s among multiple people or with yourself over time, is a very iterative process that involves taking a lot of ideas, remixing them, borrowing stuff, eliminating stuff, adding variants, exploring, playing. I know there’s something you’ve thought a lot about because I’m curious if you have more theories on how this works.

00:18:27 - Speaker 1: One thing that during our bassists thesis and also kind of like now getting back to this a lot, is this concept of bisociation from Arthur Koestler, and it’s essentially this idea that Any form of kind of like creativity, be it like humor or science or art or conflict just I would also just include problem solving, is this aspect where you have a spark that ultimately originates from two orthogonal kind of like planes of thought or two orthogonal kind of like spaces of ideas, and because they meet. They create a new thing or when they meet, they create a new thing. It’s slightly different than association, which just means the connection between those two things, but that the connection itself is a new thing, existing from two independent frames of thoughts. That’s like at the core of where ideas come from.

00:19:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I even go so far as to say, or maybe I’ve heard creativity defined as connecting unrelated ideas, but maybe where this fellow Arthur Koestler, I guess his last name, where his work maybe it’s this idea of two different frames or two different domains where it’s an unexpected connection, and in fact one of the things that I think I see written in kind of like how to have good ideas type. Books like Steven Johnson’s works or whatever, is often about people who are in different domains. They work in one field, for example, and then they go to solve a problem in another field and they’re able to apply ideas that are commonplace in one field in this new place, and that’s that weird intersection that produces something truly new.

00:19:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think part of the challenge here is the ideas need to be primed in a sense to be joined or synthesized. So that’s why things like chewing over ideas, discussing, debating, remixing, these are all different ways to basically ruminate on the content, and by doing so you sort of prepare it for synthesis with another idea.

00:20:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that was one of the things that was also really fascinating to read through, is basically kind of like debunking this myth of this eureka moment. Whereas like, you expect this eureka moment to be this like singular entity where everything kind of like goes from 0 to 100 and it’s like all kind of like falls in place, but then you look closely at these stories around Newton and around Darwin, and you kind of like see that they have had their theories around for years before this, and they were really close. And so it’s not that in this eureka moment everything fell into place. It’s just maybe this last thing connected. But 95% of this idea was likely existing already or of this theory or of this concept.

00:20:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and a sort of corollary of this is that you can’t stare at something too hard. Like if you just sit down and think really hard about a particular idea or even a particular problem, you’re likely to be too constrained in your thinking, you’re get a sort of tunnel vision that obscures these other ideas that you need to connect in. So you really have to step back, chew on some other domains, chew on some other topics, and then hope that eventually it will sort of pop out as a synthesis with your other problem domain.

00:21:24 - Speaker 1: There was some interesting research we’ve read into and if there’s any kind of like neuroscientists there and I’m like representing this inaccurately, let me know, but that basically you have a set of stacks of possible kind of like positions for thoughts or snippets of thoughts, and between that stack you can create connections.

And if this is a new connection, that would be considered an idea, and you do that in your subconscious all the time.

But basically, when you’re staring at something for too long, all of your stack will be kind of full with all the things you’ve read and worked on. And there is a point where you just don’t see any new angles on this content, cause like the stack is the same things since 3 hours, but then you go outside, you summarize these stacks. They become kind of like less defined and more blurry, and then you see a dog walking around and some other things kind of like are popping up, and suddenly they’re like, oh, I could connect those two together, because suddenly you are free of these distractions.

That’s the perfect shower moment actually fits perfectly into this. Because in the shower, there’s just not a lot of things you can do in the shower. You’re kind of like just naked there and alone with your thoughts, quite literally.

00:22:37 - Speaker 3: Rich Hickey makes a similar point in his talk, hammock Driven Development, which I very highly recommend.

00:22:44 - Speaker 2: I’ve probably recommended it on this podcast before, Mark, it’s always tricky because I think you’ve mentioned that enough times now. I’m probably gonna stop putting it in the show notes. OK. But clearly I can see it’s a high impact piece, so everyone should go and read it.

00:22:56 - Speaker 3: He makes the point, there’s also a sort of priority que element to this, which is you have end domains that you’ve ever thought about, but to pick a number, the top 7 that you’ve thought about most recently are sort of candidates for this background mind synthesis to happen.

That’s not exactly true, but there’s a sense of the things that you’ve chewed on more recently. are more likely to be part of a synthesis of an idea.

And so part of the work is actually to constantly shuffle your priority cue around by changing the ideas that you read about or think about together in time, and eventually you kind of find the right combination of 7 things in your head in the shower and out pops the shower idea.

00:23:31 - Speaker 1: I think this is great. Yeah, there’s a ton of approaches on how computers, but also just processes and behaviors can support this concept of by association, kind of like make the right content available at the right time is something where I think all played with of recommended content, right? But also. As a way to structure your research in a different, more natural way, ultimately follows the same goal. It’s about kind of like making the content, the knowledge that you have available at the right time, so it can be in your head, so you can connect it to other things, to new ideas. And I think that’s also where I would place muse into the space, that kind of like it’s a space primarily for kind of like maybe marinating on your ideas and exploring it maybe in different ways. Here’s a PDF, here’s a video of someone explaining this. How do you see the role of muse in this personal creative process?

00:24:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, that’s certainly exactly how I use it.

I feel like one of the cornerstone maybe features we introduced was the excerpting, which the idea of pulling out pieces.

This isn’t quite a remix, it’s almost the reverse of that. It’s almost like a deconstruction, and for me I often have successive stages of that, which is, OK, I’ve read a few books on a particular topic. Now I wanna go and kind of apply that knowledge to a domain. And I’ve got my Kindle highlights and I’m pulling those, and there’s a pretty easy way to pull that in this PDF to muse and then I’ve sort of got those there and I can go through it and then I can pull out of my highlights, sort of like highlight my highlights or something like that, but I exert out the ones I think are most relevant. And then importantly order them, so they’re sort of near each other in different combinations, or do a little bit of the affinity mapping thing or something like that, push it around, but yeah, part of what I’m trying to do there is boil down to some components that hopefully for me will add up into a call it a new idea or a strategy for whatever problem I’m specifically trying to solve in the moment.

00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I think this fits into what we learned during our special the well. We interviewed an historian and she had a word document, which was, I think, up to 300 pages long, and it was just a glossary of words and references to other places where she’s read about these words in other books and other sections. And just that document alone, it was just 300 pages of references to other content. And just seeing that and how people use even a very simple tool like Word basically for something like this knowledge management task, like this humongous knowledge management task was pretty inspiring too.

00:26:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting spectrum here with tools for thought in terms of how explicit they try to make these connections and how much the tool is actually designed to output those.

So Muse is, I would say on the end of the spectrum, it’s more like you’re meant to marinate with your content, then it’s swimming around in your head and out are gonna pop new ideas from your head.

And that’s good for like intuitive domains and coming up with new ideas and brainstorming and things like that. But then when you’re writing a history paper, for example, you need extremely specific documented references, and so there it’s more important to have a very explicit trace of every connection that you might have made in the past so you can substantiate all your claims and have all your sites. And I think both of those things have their place, but I think it’s important not to confuse their purposes. I think you can’t force having new ideas by kind of structuring all your stuff in a graph or something. And conversely, if you try to intuit your way to a history paper, you’re gonna have a bad time. So I think that both of those extremes have their uses.

00:27:10 - Speaker 1: Definitely, I think that another thing that fits into this is how can you frames of thought come into your mind, kind of like diving more more deeply into iteration itself. I love this model, this, I think it’s a mind sketch model from Bill Buxton that is kind of like outlined in sketching User Experiences.

It’s an amazing book.

My roommate recommended it to me because he did his bachelor’s thesis on how to prototyping tool, and he basically gave this to me, I think 1 year ago or something, after I was already working for nearly 2 years on prototyping at Figma, I hadn’t seen that book before. And then when I read this, like a lot of what is today originates from this book.

And the core process of federation is this aspect that you create something, you externalize something. Because you externalize this knowledge, you can now take a step back and evaluate what you’ve created and learn from it.

00:28:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and in Buxton’s model, that’s the sketch.

And when he talks about making a sketch that has this very, it’s not just a pencil on paper or that has a particular line width or something like that.

It’s specifically that it is a very rough and purposely Not complete, leaves a lot to the imagination, maybe raises more questions than answers, but it is this externalization that then you can step back from. You can both share it with others, but even just yourself, you can step back from, you can look at it, kind of look at it from different angles, squint at it a little bit, and it will reveal new things that that same idea just purely in your mind might not.

00:28:45 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly, and I think that’s just amazing that that’s possible, that we as humans are capable of doing this, of externalizing our own ideas and then gaining new knowledge because we’ve done that. Like, where does this information come from?

00:28:59 - Speaker 3: I think there’s actually a lot going on there, right? Because some of the knowledge you get from the process of actually having to externalize it, cause you’re changing the format basically, and that involves processing of everything. You’re also learning by looking at it and seeing, for example, the empty space, which wouldn’t have been present in your associative mind.

And you’re also learning at it by being able to show people.

You’re also learning by being able to refer to it later in time, and you’re also freeing up space in your mental priority queue because you no longer are subconsciously thinking, I have to remember this, I have to remember this.

So it seems like a simple thing, but there’s so many different ways in which you’re learning just by doing the simple process.

00:29:34 - Speaker 1: What I love is, or also where the core of my thesis is placed around is essentially, what are the models now with collaboration that fit into this? Cause you mentioned it that collaboration can help with this process as well. And of course I can show it to someone and they can kind of like communicate things back to me, and they can talk about this and directly give me some kind of advice on how to change things.

But I think it’s interesting to look at it more closely on collaboration through creation, or communication through creation or manipulation, essentially, that if I create something and let’s say I create a file, I create a design file, and I sent this design file to you, and now you have a copy of this design file, and you make changes in this design file and send it back to me.

Or I just kind of like take a screenshot and send it to you and you scribble on top of that screenshot and send it back. That’s the first step, kind of like the first model of collaborative iteration, and I would call it kind of redundant collaborative federation, cause we duplicate these objects, and because we’ve duplicated these objects, we can collaborate on those, and I think that has been in a lot of times the way we just collaborated on nearly anything in the digital space. Like duplicating things in the digital world is slightly harder. But in the digital world, it has been like this since email basically existed.

00:30:55 - Speaker 3: And I’m curious if you see that as a strictly inferior form of collaboration or if it’s more like a different mode.

So to my mind, to my hand here.

I feel like that’s one of a few possible modes of multi-user collaboration and it has its uses. So for example, when Adam and I are writing, we’ll often have a draft and we’ll send a bunch of other individuals their own unique copy of the draft so they can be able to write whatever they want and they’re not getting groupthink by seeing everyone else’s comments. And then we take all those comments and we synthesize them in another draft, and then you might go into another type of collaboration, which is everyone’s looking at the same document and making real-time edits because you’re kind of converging. It’s a different use case.

00:31:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely, and I think that that was one of the big steps basically that for me at least internally you kind of like wrapping my head around this, is not looking at these different modes of collaborative federation as good or bad, but it’s just solving different types of problems, solving different kind of like steps in the process essentially cause what you’re saying is totally right, like what this redundancy also helps is comparison. And when we talk kind of like more detail about these like open canvas tools like Figma.

What happens a lot of times just inside of those is redundant iteration as well, right? Like I’m duplicating this frame, I’m just not changing this frame because I need the ability to compare this.

What you’ve kind of like mentioned is the need for different audiences of people ultimately, and different audience levels have to respond to the relative content level inside of there. If there’s a lot of work in progress comments. That you don’t want leadership to see, you might want to bring this into a different document where there’s an empty collaborative space. So that definitely makes sense. I think it just solves for different purposes.

00:32:36 - Speaker 2: That potentially could take us to a whole other space or a whole other discussion topic, which is feedback, what is feedback, how to give good feedback, how to solicit good feedback.

Probably we don’t wanna, uh, get too diverted on that, but it, it comes to mind because talking about the different audiences, if you’re presenting something to your boss, to a client, or to anyone where you know their time and attention bandwidth is limited, and you want to get there.

Like big picture view on things or just kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down, or keep them in the loop. And that’s different from, here’s my teammate, we’re both collaborating on this thing and we want to really go into all the fine details together. You’re just seeking something different from the feedback and being aware of what it is that you’re seeking in that feedback loop can help you have the right format or the right level of detail.

00:33:25 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that for a tool or for a creative tool, essentially, it is important that people are in control. Like this is kind of like looping back to what we’ve discussed at the start, that people can be fluently moving between the different ways of collaborating, and that they kind of can invite the stakeholder with certain permissions, and the client with certain permissions, and the teammate. And I think the question is kind of like, can this still happen in the same space, although those people have different permissions.

00:33:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something that I feel like we’re still organically discovering as tool makers. So if you go back to the before times where everyone was emailing attachments to each other, that worked very well for the what you call redundant collaboration use case. You just send someone a copy and they can do whatever they want, and then we’re done they can send it back.

But then if you want to have a Shared unified state somewhere, that’s really hard in that world.

And then we got this whole world of new tools including Sigma and Google Docs, and that makes the real-time synchronized shared collaborative space, first class, but I feel like sometimes it actually makes it hard to do the individual private collaboration, often just because it’s really hard to make a copy of stuff. I feel like in Google Docs, for example, just to make a copy of a document is a bit of a heavyweight operation, it takes a few seconds and makes weird names and so on. One of the reasons I think it happens more often in Figma is that it’s very easy to make a copy, especially if you’re doing a very lightweight copy on the same canvas, you just highlight command C, V, I think, and that just pops out a new version, then you can kind of scribble on that and then go back and do your merge later. Another tool example here would be Git, which I feel like has its UX challenges, but it does get this right. Well, plus GitHub. It didn’t have this before GitHub. You know, the local Git gives you the privacy to do whatever you want and mess with stuff, and then GitHub provides the unified central state.

00:35:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that I would categorize all of those into kind of like restricted collaboration or restricted collaborative federation because they somehow constrain how the different people can manipulate these shared objects. Either they kind of like restricted through having a private copy first that you need to kind of update manually or through kind of like enabling people to limit someone’s access in there.

One thing that I’ve seen quite often now is that in Google Docs and in paper, the like, is that people create their kind of like appendix, trash, don’t look below here.

Yes, these kind of spatially close areas because it maps toigma too. I was like, here’s my trash area, don’t look at these things in here like, like, like please don’t, these are bad ideas.

There’s an interesting aspect there that I would love to dive deeper into at some point around like, why can’t we let those things go. Oftentimes you don’t look at these things, but you kind of still want them to be there. You want them to keep them around because in the case you need them. You feel really bad if they’re gone.

00:36:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, old notebooks is the same way.

Even older muse boards for me in a lot of cases are things that are mostly just historically interesting.

Every once in a while it’s kind of cool to be able to reference it, but the reality is, you want that end thing. You usually don’t need any of the steps that led up to it. Get history. the same thing. Like you could probably for almost any project, go in and chop off all the Git history from, you know, prior to a week ago, and it wouldn’t really make any difference for any day to day work, but yet there’s that feeling of something lost, something important that every once in a while it’s nice to be able to reference.

00:36:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I feel like there’s that temporal angle of eventually you might want to archive something, but I also feel like there’s sometimes a tooling limitation where, especially in these modern apps, they’re very oriented around enterprise work groups, and so if you want to have a personal space, it’s a little bit unnatural, you either need to go out into your my driver. Something which is a whole ordeal, or you need to effectively carve off your own little personal space within a document by hitting enter 10 times and saying mark notes and typing below that. And one of the things we’ve explored in the lab and with views is, can you make that more fluid by making the transition between the personal and the collaborative space much more seamless.

The analogy that I always come back to is the university department. where you have a private office and you have your faculty lounge, and you can take a few steps over and back and you can bring your papers over and back and you can check out the whiteboard across the hall. And that’s sort of very seamless collaboration, where it’s all the same office building, it’s just different zones are demarcated slightly differently, and it’s very lightweight to move in between them. That’s the kind of vibe I’m hoping for with digital tools.

00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that would be amazing. Like the current solution basically in Figma is that like drafts or new files always open in drafts and drafts are private by default.

So that creativity as an intimate process can start in private, because oftentimes there’s a ton of internal barriers in your head of like, is this really a right idea? Do I want to share this? There might be kind of like external barriers of a culture in which kind of like bad in quotes, bad. Ideas are shut down from the beginning, or you’re fearing being judged for those ideas or just sharing those ideas in general. And I think there’s a ton that like how this flow can just feel a lot more fluent as you described.

I could imagine like news sports, basically, this is my private news board and we can be together in the same news port, but down here, like inside, I’m zooming into this space, that’s my office space, right? Yeah, exactly. This is new.

Because office space, you’re just technically not allowed to go in there. I think there’s a ton of fun stuff of how the interface paradigms will change the relationship of how we look at these digital collaborative spaces and how we also kind of find ourselves leveraging the cultural habits that we have with shared physical spaces and bringing them into these digital spaces.

If you’re in an office building, it seems like decades ago that you’re like in an office building, right? But like you have this cultural understanding that you don’t go into someone else’s office, especially when there’s other people sitting in there. You just wouldn’t do this, right? And in digital spaces, it feels different, but I’m interested to see kind of like how this will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years.

00:39:28 - Speaker 2: I think learning from the physical spaces and the social cues and all that that we’ve built up over a very long time and trying to bring some of that to digital. is certainly a rich well to tap.

I also feel like sort of video chat and screen sharing and things around the live synchronous video and audio might also have some clues for us. One to me that’s pretty telling is the screen share stuff, which of course is just huge for a distributed team, and I’ve gotten pretty handy with setting up my screen in a particular way so that I’ve got a window to share that’s kind of the right size and orientation, so it’ll look reasonable on most people’s desktops.

But then if you actually have a multi-window flow, you wanna show, now you kind of need to share your whole desktop, and for some reason that seems way more intimate. I don’t even have, like, I don’t know, text messages going to my Mac, so it’s not like someone’s gonna see a personal message come in on my notification center, I don’t think, but still there’s this. that that’s a much more really letting someone into your private space, which is kind of interesting. And then, of course, there’s all the stuff around. If you have other devices that you need to show like an iPad, or you’ve got an external camera that’s showing, which we often need for showing a person actually using the iPad with their hands. So I feel like there’s a lot there that affords opportunities, but also we need to adapt to and how we think about collaboration and privacy and synchronous and asynchronous for how we work together in, let’s say the modern virtual office.

00:40:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve mentioned this theory before that a lot of collaborative and social technology first appears in games.

And according to that theory, within a few years, professionals will need to use OBS to do exactly that.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with OBS, but it’s a program for streamers to basically render their stream from a bunch of different windows and graphics and stuff and kind of.

Deposits it all together into whatever they want to present.

And I actually know some professionals who do use this for things like teaching classes where you need to composite a bunch of stuff together. Well, the best program in the world for that is what streamers use. So just use that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that or a technology like that becomes standard in the same way that microphones and ring lights and all that stuff did become standard for office workers.

00:41:37 - Speaker 1: Zoom definitely, I think there’s Studio Beta, which is I think basically like Snapchat like filters for Zoom, and I think there’s some feature in there that look like integrate kind of like a PowerPoint slide presentation, right, into your background and maybe key things out or something.

And I think that’s a start in this. I think you’re totally right that like these things will just become a lot more accessible for day to day work of kind of like creating these mixed media streaming environments.

One thing I’m really interested in though is this aspect of kind of like what makes this work ultimately in the end, like, what is the oil for this collaborative iteration process of we are improvin