John Maeda

We have to remember that design in the European sense came from royalty and the desire to be distinctive because they were working with scarce materials.

What's interesting about this era is that this idea of taste doesn't fit when all the materials are available to everyone.

Well, first of all, glad to be here.

I used to think about this a lot when I was at Kleiner Perkins and thinking like, why is it that design is important in 2014, 15?

Like, why was it important?

It was because this weird company called Airbnb was unusually successful.

And if you connect to why design became important, it was because of mobile.

Before mobile, desktop experiences could be crappy and it was okay because you didn't use them very often.

But mobile had high usage and therefore it was bad all the time.

It would be painful.

So that's when it sort of started to happen.

In terms of the relationship now, however, I'm so excited to be on this with Paul because I've been a fan of this moment when we'd be able to auto-design.

And that's since the 90s when I was at MIT.

We thought it was going to be possible one day, and now it's very possible.

And Paul, I think, is someone who's really at the cutting edge of all that.

Well, I mean, if you go back to the 1980s, there was a woman named Muriel Cooper who was unusual because she was a trained print graphic designer.

She designed those book fans on MIT Press.

There's a beautiful logo at MIT Press.

She designed that among other pretty major things at MIT's history publication.

She was the one who imagined a world where people wouldn't want to use the terminal and might want to use this thing called Helvetica.