Stefan Sagmeister on Why the World Looks Worse Than It Is, and How Design Can Show the Long View
The Long Now Foundation
At a Long Now Talk in San Francisco on February 17, 2026, designer Stefan Sagmeister made a case for what host Lisa Kay Solomon called "informed optimism." His argument is that the world can be terrible and better at the same time, and that which one we see depends on the time frame. Short news cycles favor catastrophe. Most real improvements happen slowly over decades. For several years Sagmeister has turned long-term data on human progress into paintings, sculptures, clothing, glassware and public installations, with the aim of offering people "a tiny bite of a carrot" in a media environment that mostly supplies the stick. After the talk, Solomon interviewed him about critics and enthusiasts, exhibition design, his sabbaticals, constraints, and the future of design.
An Audience Poll and the "Optimism Gap"
Sagmeister opened with a show of hands. He asked who thought humanity would end soon, who thought things would be bad, who thought they would be boring, who was carefully optimistic, and who thought things would be great. A handful chose the bleak options. Most chose careful optimism or "great," and he called it "the most positive audience I've ever seen." He then asked the same question about their personal futures, and the answers shifted further toward "things will be great."
He said this pattern is common enough that psychologists study it under the name of the optimism gap. People in poor and rich countries alike believe they are doing better than the world. The effect covers opinions too: we tend to think we care more about the environment than other people do. He said the gap grows as the circle widens. Your family seems fine, your friends a little less so, the city less again, the country terrible, and the world worst of all.
A Dinner in Rome and the State of Democracy
Sagmeister said the project began during his time as designer in residence at the American Academy in Rome. The food program there was run by Alice Waters, and he said the food was so good that all 75 or so resident artists, architects, writers, filmmakers and puppeteers stayed for lunch and dinner. Seating rotated every night. One evening he sat beside a lawyer who worked at a European court, the spouse of one of the resident artists. The lawyer told him that events in Poland and Brazil meant the end of modern democracy.
Sagmeister did not argue at the table. Back in his studio he searched for the history of modern democracy. By his account, 200 years ago there was one democratic country, the United States. About 100 years ago, after World War I, there were 16. Today the United Nations counts 86 countries as proper democracies, and for the first time more than half of humanity lives under a democratic system. He described the lawyer as someone who "reads five newspapers in three languages every single day" and still had "no clue about the world that he lives in." That conversation was seven years ago. Sagmeister said the world was then about five years past its most democratic point in history. He found the gap between perception and data a promising subject for a communication designer, especially since many of his friends think the way his dinner companion did.
Why We Catastrophize
Sagmeister gave two explanations. The first is the shift in media from yearly almanacs to monthly and weekly magazines, then daily papers, always-on television, and constant social media. The shorter the cycle, the more negative the news, because scandals and catastrophes fit a short cycle well. Good developments take a long time, so they "almost fall out" of it.
The second is biology. He described the amygdala as a shortcut that lets danger register before the eyes have even finished sending information to the brain. Positive information gets no such shortcut. The mechanism made sense for Stone Age ancestors, but he said his own life is very safe, and he believes it would be better informed if he also looked at things over the long term. Across 10, 100 or 200 years, he said, "basically everything has gotten better."
To head off the objection that "better" is subjective, he proposed a shared baseline: most people would rather be alive than dead, fed than hungry, knowledgeable than ignorant, living in a democracy than a dictatorship, healthy than sick, and at peace than at war. These things can be measured, he said, and they have been, by trustworthy sources over roughly 200 years. All of them have improved.
Family History as Data: Old Paintings with Holes Cut in Them
He acknowledged that averaged data can feel cold, so he turned to his own family. His great-great-grandparents, Jacob and Johanna Sagmeister, lost six children. The children did not die at birth but at ages one, two, four, and one at eight. He stressed that this was not unusual bad luck. Around 200 years ago in Central Europe, only about 60 percent of children survived to adulthood. His great-grandparents lost five children, even though they belonged to the elite of western Austria. What made them elite, he said, was literacy: only about 15 percent of Austrians in their generation could read and write.
That generation ran a small antique shop in his hometown of Bregenz, and the unsold stock ended up in the attic of the house where he grew up. Sagmeister took some of those old paintings, cut large holes in them, and inserted new canvases that look like minimal art but are data visualizations. One piece concerns his grandmother, the first woman in his family allowed to vote. She had to wait until she was 48, because Austria introduced women's suffrage only in 1919. In the painting, a tiny yellow dot marks how many women worldwide could vote then, and a large purple circle shows how many can now. He said the only state that still bars women from voting is the Vatican, "not a great record for a place founded by a woman and her baby."
He was careful not to claim that everything is fine. In 1990, he said, half of Americans thought women should go back to the kitchen. That share has fallen to about 20 percent, which he still called a shocking number.
Clothing, Glassware and a Deliberately Lazy Fashion Brand
Sagmeister wanted the work outside galleries as well, so he made a small clothing line. Each item visualizes one data set, and the label inside explains it. One coat shows the fall in violent death: according to him, 500 years ago the chance of being killed by another person was 25 times higher than today. The line has 12 items and no seasons or future collections. He called it "probably the single most lazy fashion brand on earth." The logo is a koala stoned on eucalyptus, which he bought for $200 from a discount logo site instead of designing it. On the online store, the koala looks less happy if you remove something from your cart.
For the Viennese company Lobmeyr he made a set of hand-painted glasses showing small environmental successes. One tracks the rise in signatories to the Kyoto treaty, represented by leaves scaled to the actual data.
Environmental Worries, Then and Now
Sagmeister listed what worried him when he was young: exploding populations, inevitable famines, advancing deserts, multiplying garbage dumps, falling sperm counts, and oil running out. When he moved to New York City, the Hudson was so dark and sluggish that nobody would imagine anything lived in it, let alone eat fish from it. He said New York State public health guidance now advises only pregnant people and infants under six months against eating Hudson fish, and it looks to him as if healthy fish will come from the river very soon.
He then addressed climate change directly, calling it "the elephant in the room." He noted that humans began emitting CO2 when they discovered fire and accelerated sharply during the industrial revolution. He pointed again to his grandmother. She mended socks, never owned a car and never flew, yet by his account her carbon footprint was about 10 tons a year. That is double the average Austrian's today of about five tons (he admitted his own is higher). He attributed this to how inefficiently her generation burned coal and wood. He also said humanity has solved big environmental problems before. Acid rain and dying forests dominated headlines in the 1990s, and he said the problem is now basically gone in the United States and Europe, with other countries making progress too.
Bringing the Exhibition to Ukraine
On war, Sagmeister described a turn he had not expected. A German podcast host asked whether he would bring his message to Ukraine. He said absolutely not, because people with bombs falling on them have no interest in hearing that war deaths are declining overall. A week later a woman from Ukraine contacted him to say they would like to hear it. He agreed on the condition that a full hour of discussion follow his talk.
In that discussion, one woman suggested translating his book into Ukrainian. He thought it would never happen, but it did. Someone else proposed bringing the exhibition to Ukraine. He doubted that too, since there were no flights, but the organizers found a sponsor and made it happen. A few months later he flew to Warsaw, was driven to the border, walked across, and was picked up by another car. Lviv turned out to be a lively city of cobblestone streets and about a million people, with UNESCO World Heritage status. The show was housed in converted shipping containers in a park, which he described as surprisingly elegant, with good lighting and sound.
He and the organizers discussed whether to include the war-related paintings, which show that fewer people die in wars now than in any earlier period. He then spoke at a venue before 3,000 people in the room and 5,000 online, all of them, he assumed, in Ukraine given how hard it was to enter the country. He thought part of the excitement came from relief at an event not directly about the war, since people there were so tired of it. He said he lost count of how many times people thanked him for coming to Ukraine and bringing something so positive.
Despair Paralyzes: The Carrot and the Stick
Sagmeister said negative news matters because it jolts people into action. When everything is negative, though, people stop trying, and "the apocalypse becomes just background noise." He cited a global survey from the previous year of 10,000 people aged 15 to 25, in which, as he reported it, 53 percent thought humanity would not survive within their lifetimes. For him, that is the core problem, because "despair doesn't motivate, it paralyzes."
His studio has made a wall installation in several places, a "history of the end of the world" featuring very smart historical figures, Isaac Newton among them, who predicted the apocalypse and were wrong. He suggested a kind of narcissism is involved: since we could not be the first people on earth, it feels appealing to be the last.
He argued the stakes are political. Pointing to an image on screen, he said "this kind of crap" is possible only when most people in a country believe everything is terrible and used to be much better. He blamed quality media for this "just as much" as partisan outlets, naming the New York Times alongside Fox News, and the audience applauded. He described asking Republicans when America was great. It could not have been ten years ago, because Obama was president, and Ronald Reagan had already run on "Make America Great Again." In his view, America was never great in that sense, just as the world never was. Nostalgia is a "mind trick," because we forget bad things faster than good ones.
He insisted this is not a call to relax. Things improved because people fought hard for women's rights, democracy, food, peace and education. As a model of social change, he cited anti-smoking campaigns. By his account, almost every country halved its smoking rate, and the UK cut it to a quarter. He argued those campaigns worked by combining fear (warning labels and disease photos) with promises of better health and money saved. The media currently supplies plenty of stick, he said, and his work tries to offer a little carrot.
How the Pieces Are Made
Sagmeister said the process feels closer to songwriting than to graphic design. His studio used to design album covers, and watching bands in the studio, he saw that a song could start from a rhythm, a lyric or a mood. His pieces work the same way. One might start from a data set, another from a subject, another from an old painting. He usually tests dozens of combinations, and sometimes shape leads, sometimes surface, sometimes a mix of meaning and form. "The images look simple because the process is complex," he said.
He described the steps. The team separates the historic canvas from its frame, tests the paint's flexibility, digitizes the forms, cuts them with a CNC machine, and folds the canvas inward. The inserts go through repeated rounds of painting and sanding before resin is poured and they are set into the old canvases. A restoration expert is part of the team. He said the studio's atmosphere has changed completely from that of a commercial graphic design office. The team also casts bronze. In one piece he bought a 17th-century Jesus figure that had no arms or legs, added bronze limbs, and painted them in automotive paint, again based on data.
On whether this is art or design, he said viewers shouldn't care: "If it moves you, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't." You can have an experience in front of a Picasso or a Milton Glaser. As a maker, though, he leans toward calling it design. He takes a very large subject, human development, and tries to communicate it, which he considers pretty much the definition of communication design. The studio also makes lenticular prints that change as viewers walk past, focusing on more recent data.
Public Commissions: A Bike Path, Wind Fish and Hospital Tunnels
The studio still takes clients who let it work on its subject in their spaces. In Arkansas it set mosaics directly into the concrete of a bike path: more than a hundred local insect species that appear to carry gemstones up an office building cyclists can ride straight into. On the roof terrace the insects deposit the gems into one of his favorite sentences. In the same town the studio installed two giant fish made of hundreds of thousands of small stainless-steel pellets that move in the wind. When the fish were finished, he overheard two boys of about twelve, and one told the other, "I think it's made out of water."
Sagmeister said he drinks 12 to 14 espressos a day, so the espresso cup seemed a good medium for his message. One cup shows how inequality in the UK has changed over the past 100 years. The data curve on the saucer reflects into the cup's curved mirrored surface. It shows inequality was once much worse, reached its lowest point about 40 years ago, and has since risen again.
In Toronto, he said, five major hospitals are connected by underground tunnels. Patients who need an operating theater their own hospital lacks are wheeled through them. He called the tunnels "the bleakest hallway ever," a place "where optimism goes to die." The budget allowed only paint, so he showed before-and-after images of tunnels covered in nature imagery. He said studies suggest such imagery calms patients, while noting wryly that of the roughly hundred studies he read on healing and design, most ended by concluding that more studies are needed. There was also no money to hide pipes and air-conditioning ducts, so the design incorporates them. The tunnels leading to the hospital called SickKids were made more playful and child-friendly.
Work Meant to Be Lived With
Sagmeister contrasted this project with his earlier large exhibitions, such as The Happy Show and a show on beauty, which "sold nothing" because they were about ideas rather than commerce. These paintings are meant to be bought, hung in a living room, and used as a reminder that whatever is trending on X "really isn't the full story." Collectors tell him the old-looking pieces often start good dinner conversations. For people who can't afford a painting, the studio made perforated posters that visitors can take home for free, which he said seems to work well. A fuller version of the idea appears in a book published by Phaidon, promoted with videos in which a manatee interviews him.
The work has been shown at 3,500 meters in the Alps, in Ginza in central Tokyo, in a Tadao Ando building in Mexico, and in a Zaha Hadid building in Seoul. In Korea the studio used inflatable dancing figures, the kind seen at gas stations, as a bar chart. The outdoor installation celebrated Korean life expectancy rising, by his figures, from 27 to 83 years in just over a century. The studio also ran a small experiment there. Visitors drew faces on ping-pong balls at the start and end of the show, and by his account there were a few more smiling faces at the end.
In Shanghai the show included embroideries by master craftspeople from Suzhou, a nearby city known for crafts. They are done entirely by hand, are almost photorealistic, and render typography legibly in thread. They visualize the decline of illiteracy and famine over two centuries.
Two True Headlines
Sagmeister said that 200 years ago, 90 percent of people lived in extreme poverty under a small ruling elite. He called one of his most startling data points a finding by a Nobel Prize–winning economist: the typical energy value of a meal in France in 1700 equaled that of a meal in the Republic of Congo today, which he described as among the most malnourished countries on earth. He said the United Nations predicts the end of extreme poverty within our lifetimes. The headline "135,000 people escaped extreme poverty today," he said, could truthfully have run every day for the past 25 years.
His point is that the grim view and the hopeful view are both true, and the difference lies in the time frame. "X or Twitter gives you one point of view, history will give you a completely different one." He urged the audience, whether they have four followers or four million, to post about the long term, while admitting it isn't easy. He cited a study in Nature from the previous year showing that positive headlines get fewer clicks, and joked that his book would have sold far more under a gloomier title.
He repeated the opening poll. This time about half the room chose "carefully optimistic" and about a third chose "great." He closed on a personal note. When he is anxious, he is of little use to friends, family or the world. When he is doing well, he is much better for the people around him. His advice was to scroll less and read more nonfiction with the time saved: "You'll feel less anxious and you'll know more."
Critics, Enthusiasts, and Why Good News Is Boring
In the conversation that followed, Solomon raised a point from his book: we tend to see critics as smarter than enthusiasts. Sagmeister cited a survey from one of Steven Pinker's books showing that a critic who hates a book is judged more intelligent than one who loves it, who seems naive or Pollyanna-ish. He also said John Stuart Mill observed centuries ago that we treat those who warn of danger as wise sages and ignore the positive voices. We are wired this way, he said, and he is no exception.
He gave an example against himself. He has stayed in touch with David Byrne, whose band Talking Heads his studio designed covers for. Byrne funds a small media outlet, Reasons to Be Cheerful, which pays journalists out of his own money to pursue positive stories. Sagmeister follows it because he likes Byrne, but admitted he almost never reads it: "It's just so boring."
He offered what he called a suspicion without proof. Designers who call themselves problem solvers, he said, are mostly too lazy to take on the harder problem of beauty. Solving a problem beautifully is much harder than just solving it, and he estimated that 95 or 98 percent of the problems designers solve are easy. He thinks journalism has an equivalent. Everyone wants to be interesting and get clicks, and a negative story is the easy default. Many in the media also see their job as reporting what went wrong today, so everything that worked out falls away.
Designing Exhibitions That Involve the Viewer
Solomon asked how he gets beyond functional charts to work that engages people. Sagmeister said an exhibition designer has one major advantage: the visitors are in your space, so you can do things with them. His earlier large shows did this extensively. After COVID, he said, big shows became hard. The museums he can get into, which he called "a B+ museum" level since institutions like the Met or MoMA have enough curators not to want outside exhibitions (or, he allowed, his shows might not be good enough), ran short of money. So he made very small exhibitions for a while and is now scaling up again, with a large exhibition planned for Paris.
His goal is to involve visitors as much as possible, because if they have to do something, discover something, or work something out, they will remember it better. He does not want interactive screens, or screens at all, since anything on a screen could be delivered on a website at home. He wants an exhibition to be a place where people, often in groups of two or three, see something themselves and talk about it together in front of the work. He said almost no other medium offers that: television a little, online and phones not at all. He designs for a general audience and called designing for designers "the most boring," something that quickly turns insular.
Sabbaticals and Reflection
Sagmeister is known for closing his studio every seven years for a sabbatical. He said success tends to make you busy, and busyness makes it hard to step back and reconsider. He was afraid before the first one. He expected to be forgotten, to look unprofessional, and to lose all his clients. None of it happened. Lou Reed even moved his album release date so the studio could still design the cover. The second, third and fourth sabbaticals were easy because he knew they would work.
His reasoning is that a year of thinking produces different results from a weekend, because you think about things on a different time scale. During sabbaticals the studio started projects it would never have started in normal operation, such as making a film with no prior experience while clients were calling with deadlines. Having done four, he said, most of the projects dearest to him began during a sabbatical. Without them, roughly 80 percent of the work he now considers meaningful would not exist. Solomon added that his diary-keeping has moved ideas between reflection and commercial work.
Constraints and the Paralysis of Total Freedom
Asked about constraints, Sagmeister said designers are used to working within a brief that sets a timeline, a budget, maybe a color scheme. Most are comfortable inside those limits and sometimes push against them, because they define a world to work in. One of his first clients with almost no constraints was a French billboard company that offered a series of five billboards and told him to do something. Being able to do anything turned out to be very hard, and he was lost for a long time.
He eventually found a list in his diary titled "things I've learned in my life so far," with 15 or 20 entries, and decided to publish one because he at least knew it was true. He found it self-centered, but the series drew a strong response and was republished dozens of times around the world. More followed, and he began persuading clients to run his "things I've learned" sentences, without their logos, on media they had paid for. "I'm pretty good salesperson, as you can tell," he joked. Solomon mentioned the book of the same name and the billboard maxim "Trying to look good limits my life," as well as a piece made of 10,000 live bananas that changed over time.
Audience Questions: Beauty, Leverage, and Labels
Grace Hawthorne of the Stanford d.school asked whether the flood of accessible content has dulled or sharpened people's sense of beauty and compassion. On beauty, Sagmeister said he thinks it has gone up, and that he sees more beauty now than 20 years ago. His example was New York's three ugliest institutional spaces: LaGuardia Airport, Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He quoted a line he attributed to the architect Rudolph about Penn Station: "we used to arrive as kings, now we come as rats." He cited a New England systems institute that maps the sentiment of tweets by location, in which Penn Station always shows red (more negative) and Grand Central green. LaGuardia has been renovated, "not fantastic, but a thousand times better," Penn Station is mid-renovation, and the Port Authority terminal is being replaced. In his view, the idea that everything is about functionality was a mistaken version of functionalism that prevailed roughly from the 1950s to 2000. He thinks the world hit peak ugliness around 2000 and is now on a better path. On compassion, he said he couldn't say.
An audience member named Caitlyn asked for the single highest-leverage way to turn the message into action. Sagmeister said that in publishing it would be brilliant if writing something positive and interesting became a recognized goal, seen as a harder and more rewarding challenge than negativity. He named the German weekly Die Zeit as an example: a successful quality paper that is not all positive but has, he believes, a higher share of substantive positive news than any publication he knows, "not cats being rescued off trees." He assumed they work very hard at it. He asked media people in the room to email him if they figure out how to establish that challenge. He returned to the chair analogy: he could design a hundred ergonomically acceptable chairs before dinner, but a chair that makes sense in 2026 and is beautiful means "fighting 5,000 years of chair history."
Another audience member noted that visualizing data without labels asks more of the viewer. Sagmeister said the team tried everything: paintings alone, take-away lists, QR codes, traditional labels. What works best, he found, is a handwritten title and one sentence explaining the piece, with the painting's origin and data sources in small type below. That format gets people to read the most. He said he hates reading in museums like everyone else, so the team works to keep the text precise, with the sources small for those who want them.
The Best Case for Design's Future
The last question, from Kevin Kelly, asked what the best-case future for design would be if everything went right. Sagmeister said he had joined an AI board at Adobe the previous week, "with a lot of caution." The future he would like draws on his mentor, Tibor Kalman, best known for Colors magazine. According to Sagmeister, Kalman could not design or lay out a page and pretended not to know what Helvetica was, which became something of a running bit. But he was charismatic, had a strong point of view, good ideas and a vision, and knew how to hire people who could execute, Sagmeister included. Sagmeister considered Kalman's the best design company in New York at the time. He can see a future in which a designer is someone with a strong point of view who makes things happen through both AI and traditional means, and he said that would be a joyful way to be a designer.
Solomon closed by noting his conviction that things with a human touch are better designed. She gave him macarons from a Bay Area bakery, a nod to one of his maxims about enjoying the finer material things in small quantities. There were six.
Good evening and welcome to our Long Now talk with Stefan Sagmeister. We are just so delighted to see all of you here braving the elements, showing up to an oversold house for this conversation. My name is Lisa K. Solomon. I am your host from the Long Now Foundation. Tonight is about hope and informed optimism.
Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most acclaimed and accomplished designers of our time. Whether it's exploring concepts of beauty, happiness, and more recently progress over time, his approach is to interrogate the question, push the boundaries of potential outcomes, and then create something that is totally new and spectacular. Stefan's Finally, Something Good asks us to zoom out to see beyond our immediate anxiety and to experience progress not just as data but as beauty. Please join me in welcoming Stefan Sagmeister to the stage.
Well, hello everybody. It truly is a pleasure to be here. Of course, I have to say that. In this case, I actually truly mean it because this organization has been a huge influence on me. Some of you actually might even think that or might know a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about, but we'll start with a little survey just with a show of hands.
Who here thinks that humanity will end pretty soon? So, nobody here thinks humanity will end pretty soon. This is No, there's a couple five. How about who thinks it will be bad? Okay. Do you have about 20 will be better? Not so many. Carefully optimistic. Wow, look at this. Amazing. This is the most positive audience I've ever seen in my life. And who thinks things will be great? So, we have number four clearly wins out. I think things will be great and it will be better about even.
Now, let's see about you personally. Who thinks that they're going to die pretty quickly? One person first row. Things will be bad. Very few. Better, also few. Are carefully optimistic, the vast majority. And things will be great. Wow.
So what you've seen even in this hyper optimistic crowd is that you believe that you're doing better than what the world is doing. And this is so widely spread, this is so unbelievably common, that there actually is a whole field of study in psychology called the optimism gap. Because every single person in the world thinks exactly the same. In poor countries, in rich countries, and it's not just your personal well-being. It's even opinions. We all think we care much more about the environment than we think other people would. And this becomes the worse the wider the circle. So you might think your family is still quite nice, the friends less so, the city less so, the country terrible, and the world obso.
Now I started to think about all of this when I was a designer in residence at this place. This is the American Academy in Rome. They give you a gorgeous studio with a view all over Rome. And the very, very best thing about the academy is that the food is delicious. They had Alice Waters doing a food program. The food in the American Academy is pretty much better than it is anywhere else in Rome. And the consequence of this of course is that all the 75 artists, designers, architects, writers, filmmakers, puppeteers, whoever is there, they all stay for lunch and dinner. And while you're working all day in your beautiful studio, you're meeting twice a day for a very salon-like kind of dinner. And they have a system where you're at a different space every night.
And one night I was placed next to a very smart lawyer. He worked at the European court. He was the husband of one of the invited artists. And he told me that what we are seeing right now in Poland and in Brazil really means the end of modern democracy. And I didn't really comment much on this, but I thought it was interesting enough so that after dinner I went back into the studio where I did a little bit of research, meaning I put into Google, what is modern democracy? When did it start? What's the story?
And it turned out that if you looked at it 200 years ago, there was a single democratic country, the United States. 100 years ago, there were 16 after World War I. And the United Nations today say that there are 86 countries that they would say are proper democracies. It's for the first time in human history that more than half of all people live in a democratic system.
So my highly educated lawyer, a guy who reads five newspapers in three languages every single day, had no clue about the world that he lives in. No idea. He completely, utterly misjudged the situation that he's in. At that point when he told me this, this was seven years ago, we were five years away from absolute top of the pops peak democratic situation. Five years before, the world had never in the history of the world been more democratic, and this highly educated guy thinks it's all going to end. This of course I thought was a very juicy subject for a communication designer like myself, specifically because so many of my friends think exactly like my dinner companion.
How did this come about? Well, one reason is that we used to have media that was yearly, like these almanacs, that went to monthly, weekly magazines, daily newspapers, always-on shows and constant social media. And of course, the shorter the news cycle, the more negative the news, because scandals and catastrophes happen to work brilliantly in that tiny short cycle. But while things that are actually good need an incredibly long time to become good and they almost fall out.
In addition, my brain contains a shortcut, the amygdala, that allows negative news to come in, but doesn't do the same thing for positivity. My brain can actually feel the danger before my eyes have a chance to send it back to the brain. And of course, all of this comes from our predecessors in the Stone Age that really had a lot of reason for the amygdala to keep them safe. But I lead a very safe life.
And I'm convinced that this life would be much better informed if I would also look at it from the long-term point of view. Because if I look at any human development from the long-term perspective, 10, 100, 200 years, basically everything has gotten better. Now you might say, well, what do you mean by better? We might have a different kind of opinion of what is good and what is bad. And I would make a proposal that in this room we actually all have a very similar kind of idea what it means to be better.
I would say that we all would rather be alive than dead. We'd rather have food than be hungry. We'd rather be knowledgeable than stupid. We would rather live in a democracy than a dictatorship. We would rather be healthy than sick and we would rather be at peace than at war. And the thing is these things can actually be measured. And the fantastic thing is that these things actually have been measured. We have fantastic data from very trustable sources that measured over the past 200 years and all of them have improved.
Now, of course, you might say, well, this is a little cold. It's data. It's averaged. Doesn't really deal with my own life. And I'd say, yep, you have a point. So, let's look at my family. These are my great-great-grandparents, Jacob and Johanna Sagmeister.
Let's do another show of hands. Who has children here? Wow, almost as many as happy people around here. Now I would say the many that just raised the hand, I think all of you would agree with me that the possible worst thing that could happen to you in your life, the absolute worst, would be the death of a child.
Now this happened to my great-great-grandparents not once or twice but six times. Six of their kids died and they didn't die at childbirth. They died as one, two, four. One died as an eight-year-old. These were real people. These were part of their families and they died. Now, they were not haunted by terrible luck. It was just normal for 200 years ago what happened to pretty much any family in Central Europe. Only 60% of all children survived into adulthood.
My great-grandparents, the next generation of Sagmeisters, didn't do all that much better. Five of their children died. And this happened even though they actually belonged to the elite in Western Austria. And what made them part of the elite is because they could read and write, and only 15% of all Austrians of their generation could read and write. And they owned a small antique store in my hometown of Bregenz. And all the stuff that they couldn't sell wound up in the attic of the house that I grew up in. So, I took some of these paintings and cut giant holes into them and put new canvases in them that kind of looked like minimal art but really were data visualizations.
My grandmother Yosephini was actually the first woman in my family for whom it was possible to vote. And she had to wait until she was 48 years old because female voting came into Austria only in 1919. That tiny yellow dot, you can hardly see it up there, is how many women worldwide were allowed to vote. Almost none. The giant purple circle shows how many women are voting now, pretty much in every country around the world. The only one that does not allow women to vote is the Vatican, which is not a great record for a place founded by a woman and her baby.
So, universal voting rights expanded, female representation in government increased, more women are working than ever before. So, does that mean everything is fantastic? Does terrible AI animation show us that things are just hunky-dory? Well, of course not. In 1990, half of all Americans thought that women should go back into the kitchen. Half. This has been reduced down to now 20%, which still seems like quite a shocking number.
And we want those things to be out there, not just in galleries, but also on clothes. So we created a whole little line of pieces. Every one visualizes a data set and is then inside explained by the label. Like this coat shows the unbelievable drop in violent death all around the world. 500 years ago, your chances of being killed by the hand of another man were 25 times as high as they are today.
And so we created a whole bunch of items. There's 12 items, but we don't do seasons. There won't be any next collections. So, we probably are the single most lazy fashion brand on earth, which of course led directly to this logo, the koala stoned on eucalyptus. Clearly the laziest animal in the forest. And in the same spirit, I actually did not design this koala logo myself, but I bought it for $200 on one of those discount logo websites. When you buy something in the online cart, the koala is very happy. If you take it out again, less so.
So this set of hand-painted glasses for the Viennese company Lobmeyr shows some of the small successes concerning the environment, like the rise in the signatories of the Kyoto treaty, represented by the number of leaves and scaled to actual data.
You know, when I was young, I worried about a whole bunch of things. There were population numbers exploding. You had inevitable famines. The deserts were advancing. Garbage dumps were multiplying. Sperm counts were lowering. And the oil was running out. And then when I moved to New York City, the Hudson was this dark, slow-moving clog that you just wouldn't even have the idea that there would be a living creature in there, let alone that you would eat something that came out of the Hudson. Now, if you go to the New York State public health site, they say, "Well, if you're pregnant or below 6 months old, you still shouldn't eat fish from the Hudson, but for everybody else, it's fine." And it looks like that we are going to have real healthy fish from the Hudson very, very soon.
Now obviously let's talk about the elephant in the room, the climate catastrophe. Clearly that did not happen 200 years ago. We actually started putting CO2 into the atmosphere when we invented fire. Then we put a real turbo behind it during the industrial revolution.
And one interesting point is that if you look at my grandmother, the one who was the first in my family to vote, she was a very frugal lady. She mended all the socks, never had a car, never ever was in an airplane, and still her CO2 footprint was double of mine. How is that possible? Didn't do anything and had a 10-ton CO2 footprint per year, while mine, well, actually mine is higher, but the average Austrian would be five. The stuff that her generation burned, the coal and the wood, was so unbelievably inefficient that they got up to such an incredibly high footprint.
In addition, I would say that we actually did solve very large problems before. I see that many of you in this audience are old enough to have gone through all the headlines in the '90s about acid rain, the dying of the forests. We now in the United States and in Europe can say that this problem is basically gone. We actually tackled it, and other countries are making fantastic progress too.
Let's pivot and talk about war. So, how about Ukraine? Obviously, it's terrible. So I was on a podcast in Germany and the host asked me, would you bring this message to Ukraine? And I said no, absolutely not. If you have bombs falling on your head, you have no interest in the fact that overall wars and death in wars is going down. And a week later, I get contacted from a woman in Ukraine and she says, "Actually, we would love to get this message." And I said, "Well, I'll do this if we have a full hour of discussion possible afterwards." And this is exactly what happened.
And in that discussion, the first woman got up and said, "We should get your book translated in Ukrainian." And I thought, "This will never ever happen." But then ultimately it did. And then somebody else said, "We should bring the exhibition over to Ukraine." And I thought, "Well, you can't even fly there. It says like no plane traffic. This will absolutely never happen." But they figured it out and they got a sponsor and it got created and the whole thing happened.
And I found myself a couple of months later going to Warsaw, going to the border, walking over the border, being picked up by another car from the border. Lviv of course turned out to be a completely lively city. All cobblestone streets, a million people, UNESCO World Heritage status. And the show was housed in fantastically converted shipping containers in the middle of the city in a park, surprisingly elegant with fantastic lighting and sound. And I had a quick talk with the organizers: should we actually show these war-related paintings? You know, fewer people do die in wars than in any other part in history.
And I wound up speaking very much like here at a place called Desarium. 3,000 people in the room, 5,000 online. Clearly all of them from Ukraine, considering how difficult it is to get in the country. And I think you can see sort of the excitement. Part of this, of course, also is just everybody was so happy that something was happening that wasn't directly talking about the war, considering how sick everybody over there is about that. And I can tell you I lost complete count of how often I've heard the message, thank you for coming to Ukraine and bringing something so positive.
Of course, I do believe that negative news plays a very important role. It does jolt us into action. But if it's all negative, people just simply stop trying. At a certain point, the apocalypse becomes just background noise. And in a very important global survey last year with 10,000 young people from around the world between 15 and 25, only 53% thought that humanity will not survive within their lifetimes. 53%. So that's basically the problem, because despair doesn't motivate, it paralyzes.
We've created a wall like this in various places. This really is a history of the end of the world, showing some of the very smartest people from history, Isaac Newton among them, that predicted the end of the world and were wrong about it. I also believe there's a certain kind of narcissism involved here. We could not have been the first people to trot on earth, so we would somehow find it sexy to be the last ones.
Now all of this is not trivial. This kind of crap is only possible when a majority of people in the country thinks everything is terrible and it used to be so much better. And I blame the quality media. I blame the New York Times for this situation just as much as I do Fox News.
If I ask Republicans, so tell me, when was it great, America? 10 years ago? Couldn't have been because
Obama was in charge. In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran with the exact same line: Make America great again. So it couldn't have been great then. America was never great in the exact same way the world was never great.
All this nostalgia is a complete mind trick because we do tend to forget the bad things quicker and we remember the good things. And things didn't become good by themselves, of course. They became good because people fought super hard for it, for women's rights, for democracy, for food, peace, education. Obviously, it didn't just happen. So this is not a call to sit back and relax.
If I look at the past decades, how did social change happen? A great example would be the unbelievable success of the no smoking campaigns. Almost every country around the world cut the numbers of smokers into half. Some of them, like the UK, cut them into a quarter. And if I see how these campaigns were working, it was through positive and negative reinforcements. We had fear, the warning label, the terrible photos of what kind of disease you're going to get. But then you also had the promise of better health. You had the promise of all the money that you save. It really was a strategy of the carrot and the stick. And right now the media gives us plenty of the stick. And what I'm really trying to do is to offer a tiny bite of a carrot here and there.
I'll talk quickly about the process. It actually is enjoyable, so I kept making more and more of these. It feels closer to songwriting than to graphic design. We used to design a whole bunch of album covers, and when I watched these bands in the studio, it was very clear that when they wrote or when they worked on a song, it could start with a rhythm, a lyric, a mood; it could come from anywhere. And this is sort of very similar, because every piece can start with something different: a data set, a subject, an old painting. I normally test dozens of combinations. Sometimes the shape, sometimes the surface is in the lead, sometimes it's a mix of meaning and form.
The images look simple because the process is complex. We normally start separating the historic canvas from its frame. Test the paint's flexibility. Digitize the forms. Cut them with a CNC machine. Fold the canvas inside. Then the inserts. We paint, sand, paint, sand, paint, sand, paint again, and ultimately pour resin before they're inserted into the canvases. And we have restoration experts as part of the team. The overall atmosphere in the studio changed radically from a commercial graphic design office.
Here we are casting bronze, which results in a new sculpture, or this one. In this case, I bought a 17th-century Jesus that had no arms and legs. And then these arms and legs are added in bronze and then painted in automotive paint. But of course, again, it's data based, data related.
Now you might say, so is this art or is this design? And from a viewer's point of view, I'd say, who cares? Who gives a [ __ ]? If it moves you, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I can have an experience in front of a Picasso or in front of a Milton Glaser. It doesn't really matter. But as a maker, I kind of have to care, and there I lean towards design because I do use the language of a designer, meaning I look at a very large subject matter, human development, a pretty large subject matter, and I try to communicate it. And so I would say that that's pretty much the definition of communication design. And so I do believe this is still very much design.
And we also created these lenticular prints that change as you walk by. They focus on more recent data. There is a whole ton of them.
And then here and there, if a client allows us to do our subject in their space, we still do accept clients. So this is a bike path in Arkansas. We used another very long-lasting technique. These mosaics were then set directly into the concrete of a bike path. It's over a hundred different insects, all local insects from Arkansas. They'd carry those gemstones all the way up this office building that you can bike into directly, and then on the roof terrace they deposit those gemstones into one of my favorite sentences.
In the same town, we also placed these two giant fish. And they are made out of hundreds of thousands of tiny little stainless steel pellets that are ultimately then animated by the wind. I stood in front of it when it was done, and there were two boys, about 12-year-olds, looking at it, and one said to the other, "I think it's made out of water."
I drink between 12 and 14 cups of espresso every day. So the espresso cup is a very fine medium to drive this message home. This one shows how inequality developed over the past 100 years in the UK. You'll ultimately be able to see the data curve reflected up from the saucer into the curved mirrored surface of the cup. When it comes down, you see, and then this is ultimately the data curve. You see that inequality actually used to be much worse, was the lowest somewhere 40 years ago, and then went up again.
The five major hospitals of Canada are actually all in Toronto, and they are underground connected by these tunnels, so that if you need a surgery theater that is not offered in the hospital that you're in, you're going to be wheeled through one of these tunnels. Now, imagine the bleakest hallway ever. This is truly where optimism goes to die. And luckily we were asked to redesign them. The budget was low, so we couldn't really have any proper architectural interventions. We basically could paint it. So this is a before picture, and then this is after, and before, and after, and before, and after.
Imagery from nature helped. Studies had shown that that calms patients, even though I think I read about a hundred studies connected to healing and design, and most of them ended with a sentence like, well, summing up, it is clear that more studies are necessary. But we also didn't have the budgets to hide any of the pipes and the air conditioning ducts, so we just incorporated all of that into the design. And one of these hospitals is actually called SickKids, and of course the tunnels that led to that hospital we made more playful and child-friendly.
Now, we had done large exhibitions like The Happy Show, or we did one on beauty, and these exhibitions really sold nothing. They were about ideas, not about commerce. But this work is actually quite different. It's really meant to be bought and hung in a living room and lived with, and basically used as a reminder that what was just trending on X really isn't the full story. It does not necessarily mean the end of the world. And collectors tell me that because of their old look, they often lead to quite nice dinner conversations.
Now, of course, not everybody can afford to buy a painting. So we also made these perforated posters, and everybody is free to take one home, and that also seems to work quite well. There's a more detailed version of this entire idea out in a book published by Phaidon, and we made some promo videos for this where a manatee is interviewing me.
The chances that something good is going to come out are just better.
We've shown this kind of work at 3,500 meters in the Alps, as well as in the center of Tokyo in Ginza, in a Tadao Ando building in Mexico, and in one by Zaha Hadid in Seoul. In Korea, we used those silly air dancers, those inflatable guys that you might know from gas stations, as a data bar chart. Life expectancy in Korea went from 27 to 83 years in just over 100 years. And this outdoor installation is basically celebrating that.
At the beginning and at the end, we also ran a small experiment. Visitors drew faces on ping-pong balls at the very beginning of the show, with some mixed results. And then at the end of the show, again, there were clearly a couple more smiling faces all around.
The exhibition posters also tend to carry data. And this one was from Shanghai, where we also showed these embroideries created by Chinese masters in Suzhou. This is a city close to Shanghai, a craft-oriented city. All of this stuff is done by hand, and the results are basically photorealistic. You can still read this typography in the hand embroidery. They, of course, visualize the decrease of illiteracy and famines over the past two centuries.
You know, 200 years ago, 90% of all people lived in extreme poverty, with only a very small elite ruling over them. And this is one of my most startling data points, discovered by a Nobel Prize-winning economist. The typical energy value of a meal in France in 1700 was the same as it is today in the Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo being among the most malnourished countries on earth right now. And the United Nations actually predicts that we will see the end of extreme poverty in our lifetime. The headline "135,000 people escaped extreme poverty today" could have run truthfully every single day for the past 25 years.
So both of these statements are absolutely true. It literally just depends on your own time frame. X or Twitter gives you one point of view; history will give you a completely different one. So if you post something, whether it's to your four followers or to 4 million, try posting something about the long term.
And this will be not so easy. There's a study in the journal Nature from last year that shows very, very clearly that positive headlines just do get fewer clicks. So we could have actually sold significantly more books with this title, and we could have really had a bestseller on our hands.
Let's try this again. Who thinks humanity will end? It will be bad. Five, 10. Bold. Five. Carefully optimistic? I'd say a good half. And things will be great? Unbelievable. A third. Yes. The most positive audience I've ever seen.
So when I'm anxious, I'm really of very little help to everyone, friends, family, or the world. I'm just not all that useful. If I'm doing well, I am so much better for the people surrounding me. So if you want a more balanced view of the world, I would urge you to scroll less through social media and, with the time saved, read more nonfiction books. You'll feel less anxious and you'll know more. Thank you so much.
[applause]
Thank you. I want to stress again that so many of those magnificent data visualizations are described beautifully in this extraordinary book, and they are available, because I just want to hold on to every one of them. I want to go back to something you said earlier, where you talked about how we are wired to take in news and how that served our ancestors, the amygdala putting us in a freeze or flight state, which is in many ways the exact opposite of what we need right now. We need to be generative and generous to handle some of the complexity. You make another point where you talk about how we also seem to value critics more than we value enthusiasts. That somehow we find that they're smarter, or we somehow assign an elite or an academic lens to those that are quick to come up with a critique. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that component.
Well, I think there's a survey in one of the Pinker books that shows very clearly that the critic who hates the book is seen as much smarter, more intelligent, than the critic who loves the book, who is kind of more naive, Pollyanna, and so on. I know that John Stuart Mill said it already hundreds of years ago, that we always think of the person who warns of fantastic danger as the wise sage, while we ignore the positive ones. I think it's basically, yes, exactly like you just pointed out, we are wired that way.
And the sad part is that I myself am exactly the same way. You might have seen, of the album covers we designed, we also did stuff for Talking Heads and David Byrne, and we stayed in touch, and David has, I think he spoke here, no? Yes. And so, for those of you who have seen this, David has a small media company called Reasons to be Cheerful, where he basically hires, from his own money, journalists to go after positive stories. And of course I follow it because, you know, I very much like David, enjoy his company, but I have to admit I almost never read it. It's just so boring. [laughter]
And I think that's the challenge. Like, that's the thing. It's my suspicion, and I don't have proof on that one, but my suspicion is, just like designers who always say that they are problem solvers are mostly just too lazy to tackle the very much harder problem of beauty, because it's so much more difficult to solve a problem beautifully than just to solve it. 95 or 98% of all problems designers solve are super easy to solve, and it's just laziness. When you say, "Oh, I just want to make a utilitarian chair," like, "Fuck you. This is like nothing, you know."
And I feel there is an equivalent going on in journalism, where it's just so much easier to write, everybody wants to be interesting, to be interesting and to get clicks with a negative story, that that's the default thing. And I also believe that many people in the media see their job as to report on what went wrong today. Like, that's sort of almost the definition, and all the things that actually worked out fine of course fall off.
Yeah. I mean, I think we see so clearly how you tied in a way of inviting people to take a longer perspective that was much more than functional, much more than those charts, and really inviting, based on the selection of artifacts and how you then overlaid a new language to talk about progress that really engages people. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that process of thinking about what would really get to that point of engaging, not boring, not something that you would turn off, not something that felt like, really, look, eat your beets, it really is better. How did you think about that combination to get to that level beyond function, but really to beauty?
I mean, I think in the world of exhibitions, as a designer you have one significant advantage, which is that the people are in your space. So you can do something with them. Now, we did that extensively in those previous shows. Those very large shows were difficult to do after COVID, because the museums that we can get into, which would be probably, I don't know, like a B+ museum, like we can't get into the Metropolitan or into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, because they have so many curators they wouldn't want an exhibition that comes from outside, and maybe the exhibition isn't good enough to get in there, that's very possible too. But we can get into the next tier, and those museums ran out of money after COVID. So then I made very small exhibitions, but now we're enlarging again, since we're some time away.
And there the goal is to involve the viewer as much as possible, because if the visitor does something, if there is something to discover, if her and his brain have to work on figuring this out, the memory will be stronger. And so right now we are planning a big exhibition for Paris, and there's definitely going to be things that also involve the viewer, which is, I think, a fantastic advantage of being in an exhibition. Like, I don't really want to see interactive screens or any screens really, because then I can deliver it on a website, or I can deliver it to people at home. Like, I don't need them to come here.
So I want an exhibition to create the space where you see something by yourself, but more often in a group with two, three people, and you can talk about what you're seeing and what you're experiencing right there. There is almost no other medium. Definitely TV a little bit, but not really; online not at all, the phone not at all. So I think that's a real big thing, this experience of being able to discuss something when you're in front of it with your partner or your friends or your family. I think it is a strong one.
And I think that goes without saying, we designed these exhibitions for a general audience. To me, designing for designers is just the most boring. It also, I think, leads very quickly to cynicism. That's just not all that interesting.
Yeah. In addition to the streaming of negative news that seems constant, the doomscrolling, there's also another component of it, which is the attention splicing, that we're just, we're distracted all the
time. And yet so much of your work, as seen here tonight, but also your practice in general, is taking time for reflection, taking time to take in, to really sit with the question. And of course, you're famous for taking a sabbatical every seven years to go deep on a topic: happiness, beauty. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of reflection in the work.
Well, I found that if you build anything successful, it's very much likely going to be that you're going to be very busy. And in that busyness, I find it's very difficult to really step back and reconsider. The first sabbatical was a big deal. I was very scared of it. I thought we're going to be forgotten. I thought it's going to look very unprofessional. I thought all our clients will leave us. And luckily, it turned out that these were all assumptions in my head that didn't turn out to be true at all. Lou Reed actually moved his album date, his release date, so we could still design the cover.
And then the second, the third, and the fourth sabbatical were super easy because I knew they're going to work. And the fact is that if you have a year to think about something, the results are just going to be different than if you have a weekend to think about something, because you're going to think about different things, things of a different time scale. Like we started projects in the sabbatical that we would have never started in the design studio, because you can't think of starting a film when you never made one, when clients are calling and this has to be done and this has to be done.
So I would say, looking back, because I've done four, there is something to look back on. I can say that most, not all, but most of the projects that are now dear to my heart had their origin in one of the sabbaticals, which literally means that, not having done the sabbaticals, 80% of the work that I, looking back, think of as meaningful for me to do would have never existed, which is kind of crazy. So I would say it couldn't have been more fruitful.
Dare I say it's a long-term perspective on taking reflection. And also you are an avid diary keeper, and in reading some of the work you've done about how they weave in and out from reflection to commercial opportunities, just keeping that constant ritual of having a diary also seemed to be very useful when you were tasked with some commercial opportunities. I want to talk about one more important component of the design process, which again you mentioned a little bit in the tunnels and the hospital project, which is constraints: that design is not just about being able to design anything for anyone, but is also about navigating constraints, perceived or real. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how constraints have shown up in your work and maybe some ways that you tend to think of them as part of the input.
I mean, I think for all designers it's very, very clear that we work within a brief, but that includes a timeline, it includes a budget. It might include a color scheme. It might include very, very tight constraints. And I think most of us are very comfortable working within them, sometimes pushing against them, but it gives you a world to work in that is actually quite comfortable.
And for me, when I first started to break out of the client world, well, in the very beginning it was actually clients. One of the first clients that had almost no constraints was a French billboard company that just said, we have series of five billboards, do something. And I could have done absolutely anything. And this turned out to be super difficult, because what do I do when I can do anything? I was lost for a long time. And then ultimately I found a list in my diary that said "Things I've learned in my life so far." And I had written like 15 or 20 points underneath that. And I thought I'll just publish one of these, because at least I know it to be true.
And ultimately, surprisingly to me, even though I found it quite self-centered, this series of billboards created incredible feedback. Lots of people wrote; it got republished dozens and dozens of times all around the world. So we did another one and then another one, and then, because they all seemed to work, as in with lots of feedback, people were interested in them, I started to talk clients into letting us do one of my "things I've learned" sentences on their media that they paid for, without their logo on it. So I'm a pretty good salesperson, as you can tell. [laughter]
I love that. And I love the one on the billboards. And I want to put a plug, which you did not ask me to do, for this other book, which is just an extraordinary piece of art, Things I've Learned in My Life So Far. Each one is its own maxim. And for the billboard project, it was "Trying to look good limits my life." And imagine seeing that. And again, just the extraordinary breadth of mediums that you use to communicate these maxims. Like there's one that's made out of 10,000 bananas that changed over time, that were live bananas. And just extraordinary to see the risk-taking. And I think what's so clear about your work is the strong point of view that each piece brings, and I have to believe a lot of that is the reflection and the clarity that you have and the commitment to the craft and the process.
I want to get into some of these fabulous audience questions. We have many. The first I want to bring in comes from Grace Hawthorne, who is a colleague and teacher at the d.school, author of Making Possibilities Happen. And she wonders, do you think the deluge of accessible content has desensitized or heightened people's sense of beauty and compassion today?
Wow. Beauty, I think possibly up. I definitely see more beauty now than I did 20 years ago. And there is some, let's say if I take New York as an example.
The worst three things in New York, I would say by far the ugliest things in New York, other than the Facebook office, but the big institutional things, would have been LaGuardia Airport, Penn Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I mean really examples of horror, of where souls went to die. Even the brutalist architect Rudolph said about Penn Station, "We used to arrive as kings, now we come as rats."
Literally loved by nobody. I've never ever heard anybody say a good word about Penn Station. And I have scientific proof of how much it is hated. There is a New England large systems institute that does it with sentiment on Twitter, where they can show geographically how many positive and negative tweets come out of a certain point. And Penn Station is always red, meaning more negative than positive comes out. And let's say Grand Central is always green, more positive. Anyway, LaGuardia has been renovated. Very nice. Not fantastic, but a thousand times better. Penn Station is in the middle of it, and the Port Authority is also going.
So I think this idea that it's all just about functionality was really a wrong idea of functionalism, mostly between the 50s and, I would say, the year 2000. And I think we reached peak ugliness around 2000 and are on a better path. Empathy, I'm not sure. I couldn't say. Yeah.
Well, that's some good news. We're on a better path of beauty. Caitlyn has a great question. She wants to know, "What is the single most high-lever thing that can be done to translate this message and galvanize people to action?"
Wow.
We are optimistic and we want to move out here.
The single most high-lever thing. Well, if you're in publishing, I would say if this could become a trend in publishing, that the person who can write positive and interesting, that that somehow is a goal. It's a challenge. It's a task that's much more juicy, much more interesting, much more difficult to achieve than the negativity. I think that would be brilliant.
There is an example of that. There's a German weekly that looks like a paper called Die Zeit. It's a quality paper. It's super successful, and it's obviously not all positive, but I would say it has a much higher percentage of positive news that is not fluff. You know, we're not talking about cats being rescued off trees. Than any other publication that I know. And I'm sure they're working their ass off, because it's difficult. It really is.
I think if people in, and I'm sure there's a lot of people in media here, if anybody who is in charge or is part of media could somehow figure out, or send me a mail on how to do that, to create this challenge, that this would be a goal, that this is actually a difficult thing to achieve, and work on that.
I know that on my side, in the design world, I think making something beautiful is that. And there I can give you the example: if I have to design a chair that's just ergonomically okay and doesn't have any other things to do, I can design a hundred of these before we go for dinner, because I know the height, I know the appropriate angle, and then I can still, either from history, it's just very easy to design a hundred functioning chairs. But if that chair has to make sense in 2026 and be beautiful, I am suddenly dealing with one of the most difficult design problems there is, because I'm fighting 5,000 years of chair history. It's a really, really difficult problem. And so if that's possible in media, with something that's positive but interesting, that captures the attention, I think that would be amazing.
Artloo seems to pick up on how you've done that with this tremendous exhibit, where he says visualizing data as you do, without labels and titles, requires more work from the viewer. So here I think you are achieving this invitation to lean into something good, but also to make it be engaging.
But also there we tried out everything. So we tried out just the paintings and somewhere else a list that you can take. We tried out QR codes. We tried out traditional labels. What I now found works the best is that I write the title and a sentence of what it is about in handwriting, and then have everything else, all the data, where the painting comes from, where the source of the data comes from, in small set type underneath it. I found that that seems to get people to read the most. I, like everybody else, hate reading in museums. You're standing. You don't want to read very long texts. So we work very hard to keep it as precise as possible. And then the actual data, specifically sources and things, are really very small, for those people who really want to know. Yeah.
That is a deep commitment to craft, not just iterating on the piece, but also how the piece is communicated, and to keep at it. Our final question tonight I want to offer from Kevin Kelly, who wants to know, if everything went right, what is the best-case scenario for the future of design?
Ha. I recently, last week, joined this AI board at Adobe, with a lot of caution. And I think one future that I could see that I would very much like is this.
I had a mentor, super important to me. His name was Tibor Kalman. If there's designers in the room, you might know him. Yes. His most famous piece of work was probably Colors magazine, that's still around. And Tibor could not design. He didn't know how to do a layout. He did not master the craft and the skill of design. You know, he always pretended not to know what Helvetica was. He did know what Helvetica was, but the whole thing became a little bit of a shtick. But he was very charismatic. He had a very strong point of view. He had a whole bunch of good ideas, and he had a vision. And so he knew how to hire people who could do it, including me. I worked for him for a while.
And from my point of view, this was the best design company in New York at that time. And I could see that, moving forward, a designer is a person with a very strong point of view who can make things happen, with AI and with traditional means. But I would think that that would be a joyful way to be a designer.
Well, again, we hear the point of view at the center, and I know you have a strong point of view that things that have a human touch are always better designed. Stefan, I want to thank you so much for joining us, and I have a final special gift for you. I know one of your maxims in here is to make sure that you enjoy the finer things in life, the material things, in small quantities. So I could not get you your macarons from Switzerland, but I did get you some macarons from a bakery in the Bay Area.
Thank you so much. Just six.
Thank you. [applause]
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