Last month I had the opportunity to speak at THU’s Sound & Music, an online event featuring sound and music professionals working in domains such as film and games. The talk and many others are currently available with a very reasonably priced ticket on the THU platform. Many thanks to the people at THU for the invitation and for putting such an inspiring event together!

THU were also kind enough to let me share my slides and speaker notes here. Putting the talk together was a fair challenge as there was a lot I wanted to cover. But with the help of friends and colleagues I was able to focus it on my work at Ableton and the characteristic of authenticity — a quality that has been very important in my design practice and that I felt was worth spreading further.

While the audience wasn’t necessarily other design practioners, I hope it can still be interesting as I touch on subjects like the design of Ableton Live, creative practice, and the values in my work. Onto the slides:

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Some years ago during a lunch outing with colleagues at Ableton, a passing joke was made along the lines of “Yeah, Live is very wabi-sabi.” Live being Ableton’s rather technical and modernist music-making software, and wabi-sabi being a traditional Japanese aesthetic theory anchored in impermanence and subjectivity. While the quip was a sarcastic comment made in jest, it did stick in my head a bit. Live certainly exhibits a modernist design philosophy based on explicit rationality, but it also has an austereness and simplicity that I associate with Japanese design. Since then I’ve been curious to better understand the overlap between conventional European modernism and traditional Japanese values of beauty.

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If you’re extremely familiar with songwriter Bill Callahan, you might already have read the title of this post with the same delivery as in his song Writing. If not, that’s okay, but perhaps consider giving that quality piece of music a listen.

The last time I wrote a blog post was December 5th, 2012, which was, oh, only 13 years ago. It was also on a different website, which I’d be happy to link to if said website didn’t have a problematic SSL certificate. Even before that my earliest blogging was in 2000, a whopping 26 years ago at the time of writing this (and only a few years after the concept of a “blog” was defined). Suffice it to say that to write again now is to do so in a very different context. But with that new context comes a blank slate, as well as accumulated experiences and new motivations.

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