Now that I have more of an understanding of filmmaking and an understanding of costume within film, it’s helped me build a team around it—and I would like to continue doing it, because for me, it’s a great escape from my job. It helps me balance out a bit, and being creative without the commerce element feels like a very different exercise—it’s about characterization, and there’s no preciousness around it representing just one vision.

That’s what I love about very good cinema: Those textures you find in the 1950s or ’60s with the clothing—it’s never just a flat surface. You have Lee, played by Daniel, at the beginning wearing this shirt that’s optic white…. [There’s] this idea of it being pristine, like cocaine. By the end of it, after his heroin trip and everything else getting darker and darker, it becomes dirtier…. I like following those threads. With costume, you can do things like that which are more subtle, whereas sometimes with fashion, it has to be loud for people to grab on. In film, you have to lure the audience in and let them know who the character is in a way that unfolds. It’s not about the bang of fashion where it’s a 15-minute show that has to sell you this one idea.

What I find amazing about these pieces is that, as you said, they could be plucked out of a store today, and I did quite like having those things in the film—because sometimes we feel like we’re inventing everything now, but then you realize there were people in the past who were even further ahead than we are.

As the creative director of a fashion house—or two fashion houses—you’re always the decision-maker and the person everyone is turning to to weigh in on everything and have the final say. Working as the costume designer, did it feel pleasant to relinquish that total control for a little while? Yes, I enjoy it. It’s quite nice sometimes to be submissive in life. [Laughs.] I quite like not being in that driving seat all the time, because it makes you think differently when you’re back in the driving seat. I think it’s really helped me with my journey within fashion. It’s nice to restart—it keeps your feet on the ground. I think, in fashion, it’s very easy to levitate off the ground. It helped me to rechallenge myself, and to have those moments in Rome where I really felt like a student again, saying, “I don’t know how this works—but how do I make it work?”

I think with Loewe, for example, it might have affected the way I really reduced the menswear down in the recent show. It became a form of textural classicism—very precise. And I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

I think it’s really important for me to keep doing my day job, because it sharpens my knife outside of it. And I think they can dovetail into one another.

We were actually introduced by Karla Otto. It was one of those meetings where I felt like I had known Luca all my life. We were meant to just have a coffee, but then we chatted all afternoon. I just feel like we are searching for the same things but in different fields, so it’s really nice to be able to collaborate in this way—which requires a huge amount of trust in each other—but pushing each other too. And there are not many people, I think, who understand clothing as deeply as Luca does.

I think Allerton may have inspired this idea of building a perfection that is almost like an armor, but then ultimately, you see that there are holes in it—in the trouser, in the sweater. It all looks very together at first, but then you realize it’s not.

there were plenty of memorable moments for Jonathan Anderson—but few were quite as awe-inspiring as his first day of filming, walking through the back lot of Rome’s legendary Cinecittà Studios. “One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard, and it reminded me of the scene when Norma goes to the studios, and there’s just cinema happening,” Anderson says over Zoom from Los Angeles, where Queer had premiered the night before, with genuine wide-eyed wonderment. “You enter into one of those dark spaces and find a stage lit as a 1950s Mexican street. Then you’re in the middle of the jungle. If you were to ask a child what cinema is, it would be this.”

Wealthy tech executives spending their fortunes on real estate or more imaginative adventures is a staple of Silicon Valley culture. Some buy islands, others build yachts longer than a football field or fund quixotic flying car projects. Mr. Ive’s fixation on a single city block, by comparison, seems modest.

At LoveFrom, he has tried to trust his instincts. Buying one building led to buying another. A discussion about a new yarn led to his first fashion apparel. Work with one client, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, led to meeting Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.

He bought it for $8.5 million and discovered its backdoor led to a parking lot encircled by the block’s buildings. He wanted to turn the parking lot into a green space, but learned that he needed to own another building on the block to control the parking lot. So a year later, he bought a neighboring, 33,000-square-foot building for $17 million.

Mr. Weeks cringed. San Francisco’s commercial real estate market would crash during the pandemic, and more than a third of its offices remain vacant. “I don’t really think you need to do that,” Mr. Weeks told Mr. Ive. “I can get you office space.”

worries faded after neighbors met Mr. Ive. He offered to reduce some tenants’ rents, did free design work for others and won over Mr. Peskin, a frequent critic of development in his district, with his plans to preserve the existing buildings.

Over five years, Mr. Ive and Mr. Newson hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer who work across three areas: work for the love of it, which they do without pay; work for clients, which includes Airbnb and Ferrari; and work for themselves, which includes the building renovation.

The project has given Mr. Elkann an appreciation for LoveFrom’s process. In January, he visited the firm’s studio for an hourslong meeting about the car’s steering wheel. He listened as Mr. Ive and others talked about the appropriate steering wheel length and how a driver should hold it. Ferrari’s chief test driver tested an early prototype of the wheel, which borrowed design elements from the company’s sports car and racecar history, to assess how it would perform. “Paying attention to the steering wheel in a car that you want to drive and what the physicality of what that means is something that Jony was very clear about,” Mr. Elkann said. He added that the result is “something really, really different.”

there are three big categories of barriers. The application barrier, the interview barrier, and the document barrier. And that’s what we spent most of our time iterating on and building a system that could slowly learn about those barriers and then intervene against them.

The application is asking, “Are you convicted of this? Are you convicted of that? Are you convicted of this other thing?” What is that saying to you, as a person, about what the system thinks of you?

Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview. Most state agencies are really slammed right now for a bunch of reasons, including Medicaid unwinding. And many of the people assisting on Medicaid are the same workers who process SNAP applications. If you missed your phone interview, you have to call to reschedule it. But in many states, you can’t get through, or you have to call over and over and over again. For a lot of people, if they don’t catch that first interview call, they’re screwed and they’re not going to be approved.

getting to your point about how a website can fix this —  the end result was lowest-burden application form that actually gets a caseworker what they need to efficiently and effectively process it. We did a lot of iteration to figure out that sweet spot.

We didn’t need to do some hard system integration that would potentially take years to develop — we were just using the system as it existed. Another big advantage was that we had to do a lot of built-in data validation because we could not submit anything that was going to fail the county application. We discovered some weird edge cases by doing this.

A lot of times when you want to build a new front end for these programs, it becomes this multiyear, massive project where you’re replacing everything all at once. But if you think about it, there’s a lot of potential in just taking the interfaces you have today, building better ones on top of them, and then using those existing ones as the point of integration.

Government tends to take a more high-modernist approach to the software it builds, which is like “we’re going to plan and know up front how everything is, and that way we’re never going to have to make changes.” In terms of accreting layers — yes, you can get to that point. But I think a lot of the arguments I hear that call for a fundamental transformation suffer from the same high-modernist thinking that is the source of much of the status quo.

If you slowly do this kind of stuff, you can build resilient and durable interventions in the system without knocking it over wholesale. For example, I mentioned procedural denials. It would be adding regulations, it would be making technology systems changes, blah, blah, blah, to have every state report why people are denied, at what rate, across every state up to the federal government. It would take years to do that, but that would be a really, really powerful change in terms of guiding feedback loops that the program has.

when you start to read about civic technology, it very, very quickly becomes clear that things that look like they are tech problems are actually about institutional culture, or about policy, or about regulatory requirements.

If you have an application where you think people are struggling, you can measure how much time people take on each page. A lot of what technology provides is more rigorous measurement of the burdens themselves. A lot of these technologies have been developed in commercial software because there’s such a massive incentive to get people who start a transaction to finish it. But we can transplant a lot of those into government services and have orders of magnitude better situational awareness.

There’s this starting point thesis: Tech can solve these government problems, right? There’s healthcare.gov and the call to bring techies into government, blah, blah, blah. Then there’s the antithesis, where all these people say, well, no, it’s institutional problems. It’s legal problems. It’s political problems. I think either is sort of an extreme distortion of reality. I see a lot of more oblique levers that technology can pull in this area.

LLMs seem to be a fundamental breakthrough in manipulating words, and at the end of the day, a lot of government is words. I’ve been doing some active experimentation with this because I find it very promising. One common question people have is, “Who’s in my household for the purposes of SNAP?” That’s actually really complicated when you think about people who are living in poverty — they might be staying with a neighbor some of the time, or have roommates but don’t share food, or had to move back home because they lost their job.

I’ve been taking verbatim posts from Reddit that are related to the household question and inputting them into LLMs with some custom prompts that I’ve been iterating on, as well as with the full verbatim federal regulations about household definition. And these models do seem pretty capable at doing some base-level reasoning over complex, convoluted policy words in a way that I think could be really promising.

caseworkers are spending a lot of their time figuring out, wait, what rule in this 200-page policy manual is actually relevant in this specific circumstance? I think LLMS are going to be really impactful there.

It is certainly the case that I’ve seen some productive tensions in counties where there’s more of a mix of that and what you might consider California-style Republicans who are like, “We want to run this like a business, we want to be efficient.” That tension between efficiency and big, ambitious policies can be a healthy, productive one. I don’t know to what extent that exists at the state level, and I think there’s hints of more of an interest in focusing on state-level government working better and getting those fundamentals right, and then doing the more ambitious things on a more steady foundation.

California seemed to really try to take every ambitious option that the feds give us on a whole lot of fronts. I think the corollary of that is that we don’t necessarily get the fundamental operational execution of these programs to a strong place, and we then go and start adding tons and tons of additional complexity on top of them.

There are certain design principles you can apply to this like composition, hierarchy, color theory, and so on, but to the regular consumer, it’s the gestalt of all your design decisions that ultimately makes an emotional connection. We know emotion is so much of what drives purchasing behavior so the more nebulous goal of visual design is often pulling those levers in just the right ratio to elicit a desired connection to your product.

ven something as foundational as increasing white space in your design can instantly improve a customer’s perception of your brand’s worth when it’s done intentionally.

almost all clients agree that they need better look and feel in their digital experience, that they are looking to add some type of emotional signal that’s missing. But when it comes time to accept changes that address those problems, I’ve had several instances where clients are resistant to solutions that depart too significantly from what they’re already comfortable with. Usually that reservation is overcome when I correlate the visual changes to the ways in which the user experience is improved and the resulting impact on business performance. There will be also times when a client expresses to us that they’ve never been satisfied with their brand or website and they point to competitors that evoke certain emotional qualities that they are aspiring to capture. In those cases it’s quite rewarding to be able to translate those more nebulous feelings into concrete terminology that gives us specific visual principles to bring in or improve on.

I think most of the clients knew that good design would provide value, but ultimately I think they thought of it as the expression of the passion that fueled their business to begin with. It was something that made their vision tangible. A way to package (for lack of better term) their product or value to their prospects or market.

In marketing, I think visual design is used to guide a decision, while in applications it’s to isolate a decision. A marketing site might have one task in a flow, while an application can have many. With marketing, I might see it once, so a more liberal use of color or embellishment drives a more memorable or emotional guidance. In an application I (potentially) use it more frequently and am more task driven than emotionally driven, so something more plain is less fatiguing over time.

the most successful tools do both well, and understand the complimentary relationship. Take Linear’s recent popularity in the design community for example. The app is considerably plainer than the marketing site, but there’s a common undercurrent and degree of polish that is present in both and when you use the application there’s a degree of subliminal appreciation for how the design is simplified.

I believe recent macOS and iPadOS updates directionally point towards touch interaction and easier context switching more than they point towards the importance of “glassmorphism” or a soft and friendly vibe with larger border radius. Similarly, the return of skeuomorphism can hint at the need for more affordance. Focusing on the lighting, material effect, noise, or composition without understanding why they’re being used just leads to chasing aesthetics, but not usability.

Is the founder focused on a market opportunity, or a way that they want to change and improve our daily lives? It’s the difference between pitching the tool vs. the benefit. The best founders are always focused on the benefit—they’re putting themselves in the shoes of the consumer, instead of just building something because they can.

On how to identify a winning founder: “Great, thoughtful design. Great design tells you if the founder is focused, has good taste, understands the simplicity required to connect with the average consumer, and has a strong, specific point of view on what they’re building. It has always been my barometer. Great design is harder to identify than it sounds, though.”

By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”

“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”

i don't even really care if the answer is right, as long as the person i'm talking to can talk about complexity cogently. if i'm interviewing for an entry-level position, i don't even really care about that, we can teach it, it's not that hard.

Anecdotally I have noticed junior engineers being increasingly difficult to work with since many of them are leetcode drones who have issues working and figuring things out on their own. They got really good at passing 'the test' but did not develop many other skills relating to technology and many times do not really have an outside interest in it beyond being able to get a job.