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Designer Stefan Sagmeister

Published on Mon, 21 Dec 2020 11:00:00 +0000

For episode 117, we talk to the legendary New York multi-hyphenate about his first horological foray.

Synopsis

In this episode of Hodinkee Radio, host Stephen Pulvirent interviews legendary graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister about his recent collaboration with Belgian watch brand Resence on the Type 3X timepiece. Sagmeister, known for designing album covers for artists like Lou Reed, Jay-Z, and the Rolling Stones, shares how he discovered Resence by browsing watch magazines at Zurich Airport and was drawn to the brand's obsessive approach to reinventing the mechanical watch interface.

The conversation explores Sagmeister's philosophy on the relationship between obsession and poetry in design, and his critique of the watch industry's extreme conservatism—noting that watches haven't changed significantly in 50 to 100 years, unlike almost any other product category. He discusses incorporating his "now is better" philosophy into the watch design, based on long-term data showing humanity's genuine progress across metrics like poverty, health, and democracy, despite short-term media negativity.

Sagmeister and Pulvirent delve into broader design philosophy, particularly the concept of beauty and its impact on human behavior. Sagmeister discusses his book and exhibition on beauty, explaining how the mid-20th century's focus on pure functionality over aesthetics has created ugliness that measurably affects how people feel and act in spaces—citing the contrast between New York's Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal as a prime example. He argues that beauty must return to design briefs, as it's not just aesthetic but functional in improving human experience.

The episode also covers Sagmeister's practice of closing his studio every seven years for year-long sabbaticals, which he credits as the best idea he's ever had for maintaining his passion and producing distinctive work. He discusses upcoming projects including data visualization art pieces and espresso cup designs for illy, all incorporating his long-term thinking philosophy about human progress.

Transcript

Speaker
Stefan Sagmeister In general, I would say if I have a thing to say about watch design, is it that it's unbelievably conservative? I mean it's amazing. They haven't changed in 50 years. Some of them haven't changed in a hundred years. I mean, can you imagine if I don't know the 1953 Cadillac would still look exactly the same as it did in 53? My guess is that because those things are so close to our body we want them we yeah we have an aversion against newness
Stephen Pulvirent Hey everybody, I'm your host Stephen Pulverin and this is Hodinky Radio. Stefan Sagmeister is an absolute legend in the design world. He's designed album covers for the likes of Lou Reed, Jay-Z, and the Rolling Stones, he's got a few Grammys to his name, and his client list includes everyone from HBO to the Guggenheim Museum. He's known for not shying away from controversy and for his forward-looking approach. Recently, he collaborated with the Belgian watch brand Resins to create the Type 3X. This watch uses shape, color, and typography in creative ways to encourage the wearer to think differently about the passage of time. It's a non-traditional take on watchmaking and one that I personally find really compelling. The moment I saw the watch, I knew we had to get Sagmeister on Hodinky Radio. This week, we talk about what it was like for him as a watch amateur to, design a timepiece and to work in dialogue with decades of wristwatch designs that have come before. His perspective is nothing if not unique, and I think the more traditional elements in the watch industry could learn a lot from his human-centric approach. We also talk about some of his other recent projects, including a book all about the notion of beauty and why he closes his agency down every seven years so that everyone can take a sabbatical and recharge. I've been a longtime fan of Zagmeister's work, but getting to speak with him one-on-one and see how his brain works in real time totally blew me away. I know you're gonna love this one. And be sure to stick around at the end of the episode too, we've got a little special treat for you, but I'm not gonna spoil it. So without further ado, let's do this. This week's episode is presented by Grand Seiko and the SLGH003, created to celebrate the brand's 60th anniversary. Stay tuned later in the show to learn about this limited edition watch or visit grandseco.us.com for more Stefan, thanks so much for joining us. So you know the the occasion for us speaking is is that you just did a collaboration with resins. Uh so I figure maybe we'll start there and then we can talk more about watches and design and the relationship between the two and and go from there. Does that uh does that work for you? Perfect. Wonderful. Yeah. Amazing. Uh the first question I have to ask is, you know, R Resence is is a pretty niche brand, even in the world of watches. And I I just want to know, how did how did you first encounter resins? How did they even end up on your radar? Well um I was b
Stefan Sagmeister orn uh five miles from the Swiss border. So I normally when I go home I, fly into Zurich. And then of course in Zurich, obviously there's a whole bunch of watches around, but also here and there, I would pick up on my flight back to New York, I would pick up in Zurich Airport like, one of those gigantic watch magazines, you know, like you know, those fat things that basically show every single watch that has been issued in Switzerland in that year from Basel World, or you know, all of these things. I'm sure that you're probably familiar with those publications. For me, they are more like, you know, I'm an outsider. So for me it's more like it's a fun thing to look through in a plane and then leave it behind. And in that and basically as a game I just when I bought one of these fat magazines I just checked which is my favorite watch and I think it was two years in a row, it was the resin. So then I looked it up and I ultimately actually bought one. And which is unusual for me because I'm not really into expensive watches. So but what but I had enjoyed was just that somebody that late in the game, you know, when digital watches were everywhere, when most people had, you know, an Apple Watch, would completely reinvent the interface of a mechanical watch. And I just thought that there that that sort of obsession is close to my heart. And there is some poetry in there. I mean that it is no real reason to do so. It's basically just for oh I felt and I I'm not I hope that I'm not insulting Benoit with these feelings but uh I felt that there was somebody who just is obsessive about something and I uh I yeah, I like that. I like I'm very much uh we at one time as a studio published a sentence on a big plaza in Amsterdam that said obsessions are good for my work and bad for my life. And I found that resin specifically the type three which I couldn't afford I actually bought the type one because uh it was just a type three was just above my budget uh and the um Oh so I bought one and then I think a friend of mine had met Benoit and he at one time at least over email introduced us and I, you know, wrote two or three nice sentences about how much I loved the watch, and that basically uh was the end of it. And then I think two years later, uh he contacted me. This is Benoit, the founder of Resence, and basically said if I'd be interested in designing the type three, which was was my favorite, but I couldn't uh you know, didn't afford it. Uh and uh my payment for it would be a watch and as well that was not difficult. Uh you know, it's it's very uh it's very rare that within a category, like you l'reiterally your favorite company would call you up and s and ask you to do somet
Stephen Pulvirent hing. Yeah that's pretty special. I I I think the two words I I kinda seized on in your answer are obsession and poetry. And I think that that to me is a is a great way to sum up resence in in kind of in a nutshell. And I wonder, just as as a designer, you know, you can apply it to watches or more broadly, like what do you think is the relationship between those two ideas, obsession and poetry
Stefan Sagmeister ? Well, I would say that I mean there's very clearly one. I mean there's one in literature, without the doubt. I would say that there is one in film. I think that in general, in the I would say in the arts, no matter if these would be the fine arts or the applied arts, the people who do good work tend to see their work as a calling and that from there the step to being obsessed by it is quite a short one I'd say. Like I have I have not seen anybody doing casually good work. It just doesn't happen. It just doesn't it's like you don't stumble over it. It it just doesn't work that way. And uh you know, having now of course worked with Benoit, and also like you know, I saw that how far he is willing to go to make something happen. And of course, from my point of view, because in this case he really was the client, I find that's another necessity where in order to be able to create something that you yourself would find is quoteote unqu good, you need a client that wants it. Like again, this doesn't come by by happenstance. It just doesn't, you know, it's uh these things are difficult and they are normally work-intensive and they require extra anything. Extra time or extra suffering as far as pushing the concept of it's uh and uh benoit has all of that in space so uh which is I think why his tiny little niche company is my favorite and none of the biggies. You know, I mean we'll get to those later. But you know, I mean in general I would say if I have a thing to say about watch design is it that it's unbelievably conservative. I meaning it's amazing what a backwards system that is. I mean that you know basically I don't think that there is a I don't think that there is another field of products that we find to be close to our hearts out there that is so unbelievably conservative than the watch industry. You know, could totally mean, you know, some of the watches you sent over and we we are we are getting to them. I mean they haven't changed in fifty years. Some of them haven't changed in a hundred years. I mean, can you imagine if I don't know the the nineteen fifty three Cadillac would still look exactly the same as it did in fifty three. It's just odd. And I I mean I know the I d I can guess the reasons behind that. I think much of it of course is uh well all of it is us. It's not that the watch industry are such that the people are so incredibly conservative. Maybe they play might play a role also, uh considering the Swiss are dominating and they're not at least the Swiss, the regular Swiss person is not really known for uh its uh its desire to go forward into new frontiers, even though there is a counter-movement and there is fantastic art and fantastic music and all sorts of things really, really well happening in Switzerland. But in general, I think it's us because my guess is that because those things are so close to our body, we want them we yeah, we have an aversion against newness. I think the only other field that I could compare it to is jewelry, which is exactly the same. You know, meaning there is obviously there is new and contemporary jewellery out there, but it's a very difficult field to design in, very difficult because you know there seems to be you either hang a plastic sculpture around your neck and look like a fool, or you have something that's totally based on some art movement of the past, be it the Renaissance or Art Deco, or something in the past that over the years now has become accepted as being jewelry. But there's almost nothing that is oh no there's very little I would say. Like you know you go to a regular jewelry store on Main Street anywhere, and you'll see 95% is basically based on designs that's at least a 50-year-old, but probably ol
Stephen Pulvirent der. Yeah. So so when you start working with with Benoit and his team, I mean obviously resins has already, you know, kind of reimagined the watch in certain ways, but how did you then approach kind of bringing yourself to it and bringing something additionally new as opposed to just kind of like rehashing what Resin has already done. I mean the nice part is as you said, all the difficult stuff
Stefan Sagmeister has already been done by Benoit. So I basically put this uh you know putting the icing on the cake rather than having to bake it. And uh there was a of course I tried to make that icing to infuse that icing with some newness and with some uh with some maybe even you know conceptual uh ingrediances. Um Um I mean one uh and part of those came out of projects that I'm working on anyway and I'm interested in, and other parts came out of uh A idea that just presented itself. I mean the regular uh resence type 3 has a date line going around it. And uh you can tell the date uh you know basically they're at the very edge of the glass it has a date line. And I myself was never really felt that the date was that important, meaning like I normally know the date. So I didn't from a functionality point of view, I wasn't a huge fan of the date. So we were able to change that into basically just these. I'm not sure if you can see them here in this light, in these colored lines that change every day. So basically we printed, you could imagine almost like a stencil with openings on the inside of the glass and have blue and uh and orange lines underneath it. So every day those lines change. So that one day they're orange, one day, one day they're uh blue, which sort of surprisingly has an impact over the overall look of the watch, but it's also it, I think at least in my mind, continues some of that poetry that Benoit has already infused the watch in with sort of like this oh forward marching of time, changing of time. And then of course it says sort of hidden in the in the minutes, it says now is better, which is a line that I've been using for quite a while now, and that's really based on the idea that in general if you think about well I would say it's based on the idea that if you think about time for the long term, you are much better off, and you get much more an accurate reading of where we are as humanity than when you look at Twitter, let's say. And so if you look at from a let's say from a scientific point of view, mainly human developments over the long term. The obvious ones, like you know, how long do we live? You know, most people think living is better than dying, so most of us prefer to be alive than to be dead. Most of us prefer to eat rather than be hungry. Most of us prefer to live in a democracy rather than in a dictatorship. Most of us prefer to be healthy rather than sick. Most of us prefer to be uh living a life rather than dying in a natural catastrophe. And let's say if all of these that I've just mentioned, all of these things have been measured at least for 100 years, some of them for two or three hundred years, and all of them have incredibly improved. There is a wonderful saying out there by Stephen Pinker, a scientist at Harvard, that says the the sent the headline 250,000 people escaped poverty today, could have been run truthfully for the last 25 years every single day. But if you listen to Twitter, that is not the case. Like you know, if you so many of my friends believe or have the impression that uh we are on the edge of the world and we are and it's much worse than it's ever been. When really the exact opposite is true. So that long explanation, this is where now is better comes from
Stephen Pulvirent . It's interesting to me, like the this idea that you know a day can also be measured as opposed to be, you know, it's obviously the rotation of the earth and the you know movement of the solar system, but it's also on a human scale. It's like each day is 250,000 people who escape poverty. And I wonder if there are other ways in which you think about time and the passage of time in that sense as opposed to in a more sort of like celestial scientific sense, but more about like human beings and progress and how we measure our own milestones. I mean I would say just in general
Stefan Sagmeister , uh I try to get away from media that is very short term. Because uh the shorter term the media, the more negative it is. And this is not an opinion, this is fact, meaning that and you can quickly see you just when you check if you compare a weekly magazine like the New Yorker, let's say, that will be more positive than a daily or an hourly newscast. Because it can't it can't concentrate on the scandals that happen every minute or every hour. It has to have that little bit of a long of view. But if you look at a farmer's almanac, that's a whole year, that's again it's much more positive. And that if you and I think that that you can play that for the long term in general, like I think that we as human beings, even though we live much shorter, used to have a longer outlook. I mean that you know most impressive to me was I just checked that again before uh COVID hit uh in February. If you go to St. Marco Cathedral in Venice, you pay an extra dollar and you or an extra euro and you can go up to the altar and on the altar there is this thing called the placadoro, which is literally a golden ball. It's like, you know, whatever, six feet high, I think, and maybe 10-15 feet long. And it is only visible at the time to the cardinal or the priest. It was not visible to the public. And it's basically treated like a piece of jewelry. There are tiny miniature paintings on it. The whole thing is made out of pure gold. It's covered with diamonds and gemstones. It's and the interesting thing is it took them 350 years to make. Now I would have to make the math how many generations that is, but let's say by 20, that would be four times three of I don't know, like maybe maybe 20 generations of people. Probably the same families, because of course at that time once you were a incredibly skilled craftsperson you normally you know kept that in the family and your sons and daughters took that over. So, but just the idea that when they pl when they started this, that they thought, okay, my great grand-grandgrand time 17 son is going to complete that soccer. I mean it it''ss it's a totally different thing versus the quarterly outlook that is you know already seen long in Silicon Valley now. So uh I I feel that and I'm not alone in there, there.' Ths anere interesting uh organization actually in uh close to Silicon Valley uh called the the Foundation of the Wrong Now. And they actually created under unbelievable difficulties and under incredible expense, they are uh making a clock that's going to last for ten thousand years. sounds sort of interesting, but when you think a little bit further, is an unbelievable engineering problem, like a crazy engineering problem. And they literally have some of the best engineers in the world working on this problem, Danny Hill is I think is the lead, uh who might be the smartest person I've ever met in my life. And I think that they have the rights now. I'm not quite sure how far they are, but they they bought a mountain somewhere in the desert and they are uh they're excavating the mountain to build this four or five story clock inside. I think it's and it's not working so basically even if there is a uh a darkness going on over the earth, it will still be working. I think it it will only stop working if the earth stops turning. Okay. And but then from an engineering point of view it's crazy because you know, if you think of the pyramids who are only four thousand years old, and they were and they didn't work like as as design objects, they failed. You know, obviously they were designed to keep the sacrophargos inside safe and none of them did. So basically they failed at to do what they were supposed to do and they're only 4,000 years old. So and of course cementing in a sacrophile sacrophile is a somewhat easier design problem than creating a wall
Stephen Pulvirent . Yeah. Yeah. Slightly slightly easier uh design problem. Exactly. This week's episode is presented by Grand Seiko. This year, Grand Seiko is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary, which in traditional Japanese culture is a year of rebirth. Taking that every bit as seriously as you'd expect, the brand has turned out a handful of new movements and new watches this year, pushing the limits of what contemporary watchmaking can be. One of the highlights though is the SLGH003, a watch that brings together many of the brand's most distinctive elements into one beautiful limited edition. The SLGH003 starts with a stainless steel case and bracelet that utilizes the brand's historic grammar of design principles, with clean geometry and brilliant Zoratsu polished surfaces to reflect a ton of light. The dial is Grand Seiko's signature shade of blue with a sunray pattern, gold text, and a red second's hand to add that little bit of extra dimension to the mix. It's a sort of piece that's a true everyday watch, defying labels like sporty and dressy, and looking good in almost any circumstance. An important part of what makes the SLGH003 special is the movement inside, the caliber 9SA5. This brand new movement is a fresh take on Grand Seco's classic high-beat calibers, but with a ton of innovations packed in. It has a totally new escapement, the dual impulse escapement, to improve both efficiency and durability, and a horizontal gear train that makes it slimmer, cutting down on the size of the watch overall. The 9SA5 is the future of Grand Seco's high beat movements, and in the SLGH003, you get to experience that future right now. Only 1000 pieces of the SLGH003 will be made, and they'll be available exclusively through Grand Seiko boutiques and authorized dealers worldwide. It's a fitting, beautiful way to celebrate this significant milestone in Grand Seiko's history. To learn more about the SLGH003 and Grand Seiko's 60th anniversary, be sure to visit grandseco.us.com. All right, let's get back to the show. I mean, as as we talk about shifting perceptions of time, I w I wonder, you know, this year I think has impacted how a lot of people perceive time and experience time. And I I wonder from your perspective, what you think the result of the last, you know, let's say nine or ten months and however many months ahead of us still in this in this pandemic, how what like the lasting impact of that is going to be on how we experience and sort of like construct notions of time. You know, I'm not sure, Stephen, if I have anything particularly
Stefan Sagmeister interesting to say about this. Meaning that's okay. So it's you know, I think that's the obvious stuff, you know, office life will be impacted and I think there's a lasting one in there or the other ones um like I have I of course I I have some predictions but um uh my predictions in the past have been pretty bad. You know, I thought that I predicted Hillary is going to be president. So uh it's meaning my own guess is that cities will completely recover. My I think that all the people who move out of cities will be bored to tears two years after the vaccine and they're like sitting somewhere in the suburbs or in the country not really My very big hope is and that's a little bit more of a difficult one, is that the small businesses recover. I mean one of the really terrible one of the many terrible consequences that we see right now of course is that quite a quite a good number of the large ones are profiting, specifically the digital large ones. But uh very many, according to the New York Times, about thirty percent of all small businesses in New York will close. And I think that is an incredibly an incredible hardship for the people who own these businesses and work there. But it's also an unbelievable loss of culture. Because you know, if I go to a city that's mostly large box stores, let's say Atlanta. Atlanta is my least favorite city in all of the United States for exactly that reason. Because and then you know I don't know my way around well in Atlanta, and I'm sure there's beautiful places and obviously there's a lot of culture coming out of Atlanta. So I'm not trying to this Atlanta, but if you basically not knowing Atlanta well, just drive down some of the main streets in Atlanta, you have a feeling everything is a bad path and beyond and a TJ Maxx and a whatnot and whatnot. And it's sad. you know I here and there at an airport love to eat some chain junk food but as a as a surrounding of my daily life is so crunching. And I would hope that so many of us feel that way that those small busin
Stephen Pulvirent ess Not just time, but but space and the things we surround ourselves with. And obviously, you know, as as a designer, like you are, you are deeply concerned with with aesthetics and experience and the way people kind of like shape the worlds around them. And I wonder is is that what drew you to being a designer in the first place? Or is that kind of a byproduct of of something else that that we haven't talked about?
Stefan Sagmeister Well I mean in the very first place I think when I was fourteen or fifteen I played in terrible rock bands so I was still somewhat close to music and I figured that or I learned that designing the covers for those albums was an actual job. There were people who actually made livings off that. And that just seemed, I'm I'm not quite sure why, but that just seemed incredibly enticing to me. And so I was lucky enough to know fairly early in my life what I wanted to do. And basically, all through high school, I worked at a magazine designing that magazine, and then you know, learned some stuff from there and then ultimately after many going down many by roads and studying and doing this and that, I you know, opened the studio to basically do that design, you know, design for music., Ye yeahah
Stephen Pulvirent . I mean, I know just to put your your career in context for people, you know, who who may or may not be as familiar with your work, you know, your your career in design started at this moment when there was, you know, still, I think, a prevailing, and correct me if you disagree, modernism was still sort of the prevailing mode of things. Everything was very clean, it was very neutral. It was all of these things, very democratic in in some ways. Um and then you sort of injected a a different energy, I think, into things, an energy that that, you know, uh chaotic might not sound like a good word, but I mean it in a good way. You know, sort of like bringing the unexpected, bringing sort of things that like really hit you in your gut um back into design. Um and then I think we've kind of cycled back in a funny way. Like I think a lot of branding today, whether it's corporate branding or all of these, you know, direct-to-consumer businesses or everything, like there's sort of this like quote-unquote like millennial aesthetic that is just a rehashing of modernism. And I wonder how how you think about your work in this sort of like ebb and flow of of trends in the design world and what you're working towards and what you're maybe working against in certain ways. You see, I mean I actually would probably, you
Stefan Sagmeister know uh I studied I uh I came out of out school in 86. So I would say in the 70s and 80s, what you had, I wouldn't even call it modernism. I think I would call it functionalism. Because the original modernists, like the people who invented this, you know, in the late 19th, early 20th century, they were giants. You know, they really made a change and they made some mistakes too because they couldn't know any better, because they didn't know the consequences yet. But when I was around, when I sort of started to be in design school or think about these things. Many of these excellent modernist ideas have somewhat deteriorated into these into an economic in economic functionalism. You know, basically covering the world with this psychotic sameness that we all suffer from to this very day. Like, you know, the stupid glass box uh carelessly put somewhere, the crappy box that's uh whatever a gas station or a or a or a a longer box for the uh for the strip mall or a a shorter box for the chain store all of these things uh have not they I think that many of us or even most of us would uh consider them ugly, but they're not ugly. Because somebody wanted them to be ugly. I kind of like that ugliness. They're ugly because somebody didn't give a shit. It's sort of like we need some functioning thing over our head so our customers don't get rained on. So this is the cheapest and quickest thing to build. And uh there is a, and I say with some confidence that most of us find them ugly because we see how we react to these spaces. We go there when we have to, but we don't go there when we have a free choice. Meaning that uh nobody goes on holidays next to a McDonald's underneath a uh uh a highway off ramp. Yeah. Uh there might be a hotel there, but it's only hotel because I have to be there. I'm not like choosing that hotel uh uh out of my own free will. And so uh against that stuff I think initially just from a gut feeling we wanted to put something against. Because we also felt that strangely there was this there was this desire within design to basically still have everything look like it was made by a machine. You know, the super clean layouts, you know, a bleeding picture with two set, with two lines of Helvetica or Franklin Gothic set next to it. Or, you know, well, the orderly 1980s public housing project, you know, six blocks in a row with the windows there and the balconies there, with a little bit of a green space in between. All of these things uh work they were done no matter in what system, the Russians did probably more. The communists probably did more than the capitalists. It just uh there was this time, probably I would say between 1950 and the year 2000, when somehow, because of a and I know big what the influences were, because of a particular certain influence of perfect storm elements, humanity thought that beauty is not important. We never thought this before from a million years ago, proofable until the 1950s and starting from the year 2000 again, we are changing again. But in those 50 years, somehow we felt ah it's not that important. It's sort of surface related, who gives a shit? We need functionality
Stephen Pulvirent . Yeah. And and that that sense of beauty, of lost beauty, has become, you know, we'll go back to obsessions. Like it's become something of a an obsession for you and you created a book Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Stefan Sagmeister we created a book and there is uh uh a uh an exhibition that started in Vienna a couple of years ago, went to Frankfurt and Hamburg is now on COVID break, but will restart in April in France.
Stephen Pulvirent Yeah. I love the line on the back of the book, which is: over the course of the last century, beauty was displaced by functionality in design and archite Beauty not only impacts the way we feel, it changes the way we behave. Sagmeister and Walsh show us how this short-sighted disregard of beauty can be reversed. So I want to ask you while we have you here, can you can you unpack that a little bit? Like what how does beauty impact the way we feel and change the way we behave? And then how do you think we can reverse the the disrespect So I give you a good example right
Stefan Sagmeister here from uh New York. We have two train stations in New York, big train stations, functionality is exactly the same. One goes one goes up north and south, one goes uh east and south. Uh they're roughly in the same they're roughly the same size. Uh one one is a nineteen seventies building Penn Station. The other one is a uh Majuria building, I think it's beginning of the 20th century, but it looks nineteenth century, it's Grand Central. So uh and there is a uh uh an institute in Boston called the New England uh complex systems Institute who have have a wonderful algorithm, they measure tweets, and they can the algorithm can say of which location more positive or more negative tweets come out. And they do this geographically so you can look daily or hourly on their Manhattan map and you see oh from this location there's always more negativity coming out and from this location always more positivity and Penn Station is always red and Gr
Stephen Pulvirent and Central is always green. But you can always Which anyone who's ever been to New York can tell you is is instinctively true. Like that is not surprising at all. No, no, it meaning I
Stefan Sagmeister basically you don't need the science for it. You can just walk from one station to the other and at any day at any time, day or night, you will feel a remarkable difference, a measurable difference. And you feel it totally. I'm convinced I didn't check, but it would be an interesting thing to see. I'm sure that there is much more garbage collected from the floor in Penn Station than in Grand Central because people just don't give a shit about the place. When we looked at the individual tweets coming out of uh uh uh Penn Station, it's meaning it's hilarious. You know, you have things like, you know, this is the asshole of the world, or there was one person who uh who reported that I can remember correctly there was a tweet that said the guy next to me is picking boogers out of his beard and eating them. And I would say this typical Penn Station tweet, this does not happen in Grand Central. Yeah, that's uh that sounds about right. But you also see it in many, many I mean this is an extreme uh example. You see it in many other places. You see it for example at JFK or at many at numerous other uh American airports that have been value engineered into nothingness, how aggressive the people are in these airports. I have never I think that New Yorkers behave the shittiest at JFK. And it's interesting because you can fly to Zurich or Munich or Barcelona, which are much better airports, and you don't have that feeling. And it's not that the Americans are more aggressive than let's say the Spaniards, because if you go to a comparable mall in Barcelona, so if you go to a luxury mall in Barcelona that looks basically, like that looks the same, let's say then the Time Bonner Center here in New York. People behave roughly the same. So it literally is the surrounding that brings them down, and there is an unbelievable social cost attached to that. That where people are just nasty to each
Stephen Pulvirent other. And how do you think we break out of building spaces like this? I mean, because you've you've touched on a few of the reasons for it. It's it's often financially motivated or just thoughtless. And I wonder how we get people to either be more thoughtful or be committed to sort of like invest in the spaces rather than viewing them as as just balance sheets. Basically beauty has to go back
Stefan Sagmeister into the brief of all these projects. Like now still and you know for example yesterday I had a call with a very large transportation company that has a very popular app that millions and millions of people use. Beauty is never part of the brief, it's always just functionality. And the thing is, and I basically screamed them then at them yesterday, is even if all if your only goal is functionality, you have to put beauty in into the brief because it is an important function and it will make your app work much better if you really take it seriously. And there was this idiocy around in the second half of the twentieth century, where a total misreading of this famous quote, form equals function. It was misunderstood that this would mean if it works, it's it's automatically good form. And that is just not the case. And and of course the guy who said it, Chicago architect in the late 19th century, never meant it that way. His work was actually completely ornamental. Like you you can still see it in Chicago. It has ornaments all over the place. It definitely was not uh you know purely functional. It was far from being purely functional. But it just fitted designers that way. I think ultimately designers jumped on this functional bandwagon because it is so easy to do. Like all these designers who call themselves, oh I'm a problem solver, you know, the problems are so easy to solve, it's like a joke, you know, but you can call yourself a problem as problem solver. Uh what is difficult to do is to solve a problem beautifully. To solve it, of course you need the functionality. If it doesn't work well, it isn't design, then it's something else, then it might be art or might be a sculpture or whatever. But if I would have to design 50 chairs and all they have to do is to be functional. I can do that before we end this phone call. Like you know, basically I know the ideal sitting heights, I know the angle that the back crust is supposed to be. I know where the armrests are supposed to be. Well, and then I design let's catch one out. Okay, a Renaissance one, an Articot influenced one, maybe a mixture between Renaissance and Articot. Maybe I'll put 20% 50s modernism in their mid-century. I mean it's so easy, it's like a joke. It's it's not even a job. It's like I mean I think we could teach a machine to do that. But if the job is, if the brief is I have to design a chair that is relevant to the twenty first century to our time and beautiful. Well now suddenly I'm in a completely different situation. Now I have to fight against all of Ciao history, which is considerable, uh you know, a couple of thousand no I'm not yeah, uh numero numerous thousands of years, and I have to create something that is good for now, like for this time now. That's a totally different, I mean it's so much more difficult. So my own guess is that many designers loved the ease of functionality, pump themselves up a little bit by saying, well, I'm not about beauty, I'm not about, you know, sort of like comparing it to something that's somehow trivial or maybe commercial, or if they were very ambitious, they might have even compared it to something you know dark, like the Nazis, or something like this. And thought that they really were the people who did the real work closely
Stephen Pulvirent Well I wonder, I mean i it's interesting to hear you talk about this sort of sort of personally, but also I think people should be aware, like you're you're running a studio that is successful and has clients and you know you have a partner, Jessica Walsh, uh, and you have employees. And so I wonder if if a lot of you if you think that a lot of design and designers is about this sort of like ease and laziness, how do you find people to collaborate with and to work as a part of your studio who who can break outside of that? I would imagine that that's a not easy and B that you really need people who like fully embrace that idea. Otherwise it just like I I can't imagine them working well within your studio. Well uh we tended to always hire people
Stefan Sagmeister fresh out of school, very young people. We found that if we did not, if we hired people that had five years experience, which we kind of wanted to, because it also becomes a little bit work intensive if you you know basically teach uh have to show the ropes to many people who just graduated, specifically the practical ropes. But we found that to be much easier than to have hire somebody who has five years experience and then you have to work even harder to make them unlearn all the terrible things that they've learned in their five year practice somewhere else. I also should mention that Jessica and I still work together on beauty projects, but she really took over all the commercial work and I'm just doing uh wonderful projects like Resons and many others
Stephen Pulvirent . Okay, great. Um one of the other things I wanted to make sure we touched on that I I think is interesting both from a design standpoint and you know as we think about time is is the sabbaticals that you instituted at your studio. You know, for people who who don't know, every seven years you essentially shut the studio down for a year. Everybody takes a year to kind of improve themselves and focus on other things, uh, and sort of re-recharge for the next seven years. And uh I wonder how you how you th originally came to that idea, uh, and then sort of how it's how it's worked, because you've now taken what three three sabbaticals over the life of the studio? I mean Okay. Very obv
Stefan Sagmeister iously it's not my idea. Like you know the the term sabbatical comes out of the Bible every seventh year, you should rest. So it's not like you know something that I came up with. And you know, many universities give their penued professors uh a year off, and that's very much meant in it that's very much meant in the exact same way as I've done it, meaning a research year. It came about because af after the first seven years or the first six years really, I felt that the work was getting repetitive. I did a workshop with very mature students who had this time to create wonderful experimentations that I was jealous of. Then my big mentor, the guy that I had worked for before I opened the studio, Tibor Kalman, he died uh and very very young uh that very much uh drove home how short life is and how i really should take you know advantage of the time that uh that I'm here. So that those sort of conspired to try it. I was truly scared in the first sabbatical. I thought all the clients that we carefully built up over the first seven years will leave and go elsewhere. I felt that it will look unprofessional because the first sabbatical C the studio opened in ninety three. The first sabbatical was in two thousand. If you remember, this was the time of the first internet boom, all the design companies were busy shuffling in money, and it felt kind of to even to me it felt sort of unprofessional not to participate in this money shuffling exercise. And none of the fears that I had became true. Our clients the normal reaction was, oh I would love to do that myself. The clients came back after the year. Lou Reed actually moved his album release date so we could still do the cover. So I mean it was uh everything fell into place quite nicely when when we we opened and uh it turned out that when you have a year to think about things, the work that results out of it is different from the people who have an evening to think about things. So that also meant that the work that we did then turned quite different from other design perspectives. So from other design practices. So we were outside of this regular real goal with the cheapest race. And uh which also made meant that even financially it was advantageous. But we obviously there was not a reason to do it. So I would say that it was the best idea I've ever had that ensured that I could continue to see my profession as a calling rather than as a career or as a job. And that is I would say invaluable. Or you know, master card would call it priceless, yes
Stephen Pulvirent . That's that's perfect. I love that. Um well I wonder before before we get to the watch critiques, I I wonder, do you do you have anything upcoming that you want to share with uh with our audience? Any projects you're working on or anything you're you're particularly excited about or that people should go check out right now? Well uh there's a there's a couple of
Stefan Sagmeister other projects I'm working on in this world of long-term thinking. One is I'm working on basically things to hang on the wall that hopefully are enticing or good looking or decorative enough that you would want to hang it on the wall. And it ultimately doesn't quite look like a data visualization, but it is a data visualization of one of the great things that happened over the last hundred years. So as a basically, I want it to be to function as a reminder that things are not bad. And we'll do uh an exhibition of these things at the Thomas Alburn Gallery next April. Uh knock on woods that we can actually open in April, but my guess and I think it's there's a it's a good chance that we can that we will be able to. This Thomas Elbin Gallery is a gallery in Chelsea here in Manhattan. uh so uh I'm looking forward to that and right now working on that and it's uh a pleasurable thing to do. It's sort of like this mix between um using nineteenth century paintings. My great granddad was a uh antique dealer, so we have a attic full of 19th century paintings, and then I also buy some and completely rework these paintings in a uh not completely rework, but very they will look very different afterwards, uh that uh sort of like tie the thinking from then to now and what happened between then and now. But that's one. We've also just uh designed a set of espresso cups outside of uh uh liking watches I. am an incredibly uh intense uh espresso drinker. I drink about uh eight to ten cups a day and so designing espresso cups for Elite was also joyous. And they come in the same, it's the same theme. Let me see if I yes, I have some here. See it's uh not sure if you can see this. So you have well this uh you have a graphic. Let's just see, you have a graphic going on here, and you have a curve now going on in the reflection of this cup. And this curve is basically a data visualization again of something that improved incredibly over the past hundred years. That's super cool. Oh those things uh amazing. It just came out I mean I think a week before the before the watch came out. So it's Oh great. It's also like this is maybe my favorite part of being a designer is when something comes back from manufacturing and it came out the way that you would hope it come out. You know, like the the the in in of course in the case of resins I mean the in the engineering and the the the technology and the the craft there is crazy. I mean uh yeah ye
Stephen Pulvirent ah that's awesome. Well th,ank you so much. That's that's exactly what we were hoping for. And uh we can give you a a couple about 10 minutes back so that you have a little break before your next call. But uh thank you so much for doing this. Really, really enjoyed it and I can tell you this was by a factor of ten the
Stefan Sagmeister longest time I've ever talked about watches
Stephen Pulvirent . Perfect. That's what we're here for. You may have seen that we recently released a limited edition G Shock in collaboration with John Mayer, and while it's long sold out, it was a huge hit. Uh John produced this really incredible unboxing video for us. And I think the audio works just as well as the video, so we wanted to play it for you here
John Mayer . What's up guys? John Mayer here with my very first unboxing video for Ho Dinky in association with Casio, introducing the new John Mayer and Ho Dinky Casio G Shock. I wanted to show you the inspiration for it. It is 1987's Casio SK5 sampling keyboard. This is something that I coveted for a very, very long time, and used it throughout my childhood and then when I came into a little bit of bread as they say I went on the hunt for as pristine a version as I could find and this is it the Casio SK5, pretty new inbox. Here she is. Since it's so old, it's a little bit like a lawnmower. Let's let's just there we go. Which makes it kind of fun. This is a toy, really. The SK5 is a toy with a lot of technological breakthroughs inside of it for the time. You've got four what they call rhythm pads: lion, laser gun high bongo and low bongo to the right of the rhythm pad is the sample pad and this is where the fun really begins so when you turn it on, these are your default sounds. But over here, you have the corresponding sample buttons to the pads. Sample one, two, three, four correspond here. Let's get this out of the way. You're ten years old, it's nineteen eighty seven, you're about to hit the record button, you hit sample one to designate that this is gonna be the sample that's either a short one for one or a long one for one and two. What are you gonna say? I gotta be true to the history of this unit, and what every kid did was this. F now it would be processing, and when you heard the snare, that let you know the sample was ready and then of course the sophomoric joy of hearing it laid out instantly across the keys in pitch and Now I don't know if you can use this. Maybe it's just a whole bunch of beeps you heard. But the point is, when you're a kid, you get your jollies that way. But let's try to make something cool out of this, shall we? No, I don't hold. That's not bad. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It is bad. So I've just uh recorded the sound, manipulated it, reversed it, did some crazy waveform stuff to it. Now let's record it as a loop of sorts. And then play it back. All you really need is one sound to bring over and um Now this may mean nothing to you. But if 1987 you heard this, brought this over to a friend's house, you would do nothing but play this thing. You'd have to go through hundreds of batteries Annoy your friends. Need to put this on a record someday. So not bad for a keyboard that was $149. And I'm really, really thankful that this keyboard came into my life. And when Cassio asked if I would be interested in doing a G Shock, I thought, well, what would be the greatest story to tell about Casio. If people said, why would John Duo G Shock? Well, what's my relationship with things that are Casio? I was always a G Shock wearing kid, and these keyboards changed my life because they introduced musicality in a time when I really didn't come across it so easily. The idea of this watch is to hearken back to the eighties, but have a watch you can wear year after year after year without tiring of it. And I think that it was perfectly executed by Hodinki and Cassio. It's really beautiful, and every time I look at it, I will think about my upbringing as a kid in his bedroom, learning music on a Casio SK-5. And yeah, I hope you see a little of it too. And that is the G-Shock Hodinky John Mayer Casio Watch
Stephen Pulvirent . Thank you to Stefan Sagmeister for recording with us. This week's episode was recorded in Los Angeles and New York City and was produced and edited by Grayson Korhonen. Please remember to subscribe and rate this show. It really does make a difference for us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.