Episode 2: Whitney Burks
Creativity, Skepticism, and Taking Your Time, with Whitney Burks
Episode 2: Show Notes [TRANSCRIPT below]
When it comes to the intersection of design, biology, and engineering, Whitney Burks has a few ideas about what people in these fields can learn from each other! Whitney is a designer, scientist, former Stanford softball star, and all-around incredible creative. In this episode, she sheds light on her creative strengths and how they manifest themselves in unexpected aspects of her work. She explains how she mixes mechanical engineering and biology in her job, and why she sets up her biology experiments like an engineer. She also shares key insights on experimentation, and the distinction between scientists and designers.
We discuss the importance of finding time to allow meaning, data analysis, data synthesizing, and creative ideas to evolve, and the tension of doing this while also working towards deadlines. For some fascinating insight from someone who understands these very different fields, as well as some great tactics for capturing inspiration every single day, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
• A creative accomplishment that Whitney is proud of: an incredible present she made for a friend.
• How Whitney’s creative strengths manifest themselves in other aspects of her work.
• How she mixes mechanical engineering, where one has control of the outcome, and biology, which is more experimental.
• Why designers should be more like biologists when it comes to being skeptical of feedback.
• How designers can benefit from doing more assessments and assessing more values.
• The importance of establishing a success parameter early on.
• How creating success parameters translates into Whitney’s non-professional creative life.
• Finding time to let meaning, data analysis, data synthesizing, or creative ideas come to her.
• How she deals with the tension of letting things take time and working towards deadlines.
• An example of when Whitney asked for more time for a better result and it worked!
• The role that inspiration plays in driving Whitney’s creative thinking.
• What a ‘goosebumps journal’ is and how Whitney uses one in her creative process.
• How she reviews goosebumps and whether or not they graduate into other aspects of her life.
• A book Whitney recommends: The Overstory by Richard Powers.
Tweetables:
“The truly great ideas are the ones that are after that; the ones that stem off from that initial idea. That’s what I wait for. It's a lot of passive waiting.” — @_whitneyalexis [0:23:53]
“Communicating the value of waiting is the biggest thing because they're always like, 'We need money. Let's keep going.' I try to communicate that, ‘You know how I work, you know I can work fast, I'm actively choosing not to, and this is the reason.’” — @_whitneyalexis [0:28:51]
“[For] inspiration in general, I like looking at other people's things, appreciating them for what they are, and then either optimizing or tweaking for the use case.” — @_whitneyalexis [0:33:03]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
TRANSCRIPT
“WB: It's like a question of where you are in the process, right? If you're setting these expectations early, you're not committed. You're not at the point where you're trying to make a decision to move on and you've already allotted five days or a week of time. You're so far removed from the actual act of doing the thing that you can be partial and about what you actually, or I guess, non-partial about what the result of the situation is. I think that's super helpful; setting that earlier.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:32] JU: Welcome to The Paint & Pipette Podcast. My name is Jeremy Utley. It's my job to illuminate the tactics of world class performers across domains. As a day job, I teach at the Stanford d.school, helping students learn what it takes to come up with ideas, but I've realized I need to stay in the classroom learning myself, and this podcast is my classroom.
[00:01:21] MH: Hey, I'm Marcus Hollinger. I lead Marketing and Creative at Reach Records in Atlanta-based Independent Record Label. I'm also co-founder for Portrait Coffee, where we are seeking to reimagine the picture that comes to mind for folks in specialty coffee. I'm so excited to pull up my desk alongside my good friend and fellow learner, Jeremy, and I think you all are going to love what we have for you this season.
[00:01:52] JU: We've got some amazing stories on deck, and we can't wait to dive in and learn alongside you.
[00:01:56] MH: So, grab your pipette and your paint brush, and let's make something beautiful together.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:02:05] JU: All right. In this episode, we talked with Whitney Burks, designers, scientist, Stanford Softball player, all around incredible creative. We talk with her about what she's learned about design, and what she's learned about science as an engineer, and specifically, what designers need to do to make their experiments more scientific. She espouses the virtue of skepticism, and the benefit of imitating the masters to create new things. She also shares some awesome tactics for capturing inspiration every single day.
All right, I am so excited to be here with my friend and colleague, Whitney Burks. I first got to know Whitney in a class at Stanford while she was a student and a star on the softball team. I quickly realized, I was out of my league when it came to creative practice. Whitney, welcome. It's great to have you with us today.
[00:03:02] WB: It's nice to be here. I'm excited.
[00:03:05] JU: Okay, I am, too. I feel like, 30 minutes, 40 minutes is not going to be nearly enough to even begin to scratch the surface of the creative mastery of Whitney. I'll just dive right in straight away. The question that we love to ask people just kick things off is what's a creative accomplishment that you're particularly proud of? Then we'll dig in from there.
[00:03:25] WB: Yeah. I think, Jeremy, you have a bit of context for this, because you saw the final project, not long ago. But essentially, I have this habit of making very exorbitant presence for people. This one particularly, there's a lot of constraints going on. There was a lot of things that I had to take off to get this one done. I was trying to make a birthday present and essentially, it's like a mimic of a statue that a famous artist did. I looked up the actual statues they're like thousands of dollars, their limited edition. You can only buy them from the resale market at this point. I said, “I know a little bit of modeling, I can paint a bit, I can get this done. I think I can get this done.” But for context birthday was next Tuesday, I would say.
So this is a week or less of time. I'm in the middle of a boot camp with Jeremy as well. I work at a Startup, so work never stops there. I was basically doing two jobs at once that week. Plus, I was let's do this crazy project with –
[00:04:23] JU: For context, Whitney, just on the side. Whitney works full time at a Startup at making Nanostraws, which we can get to that maybe in a little bit, which I don't even understand.
[00:04:32] MH: What?
[00:04:33] JU: Yeah. Marcus is like, hang on, can I drink my glass? Okay, so that's like her superhero job. Then by night, as a caped crusader, she'll teach executives in the Bootcamp with us at the D.School. Then in a moment of downtime, we're all hanging out and we hear this clicking, and we say, “Whitney, what is that clicking?” She's like, “Oh, it's just a 3d model. I'm mocking up an AutoCAD.” That sent us down this rabbit hole of, “Wait, you're doing a third job.” So that's how when she says that, I know about this, what I saw was in the middle of her Startup job, in the middle of a Stanford coaching program. She's also working on this project. I just wanted to give that background, please continue.
[00:05:20] WB: That's exactly how it happened. They're like, “Can you share your screen?” It’s like, “Sure, if you want to look at me twirl things around and in virtual space.” Yeah. So I took on this giant project. It's a pretty famous artist. His name is Hebru Brantley. He's from Chicago, has a cool, just a general like his work is so cool. It's very cartoony, it's like encapsulated in black culture. It's very cool. This person is a true artist from Chicago. Person I’m making the gift for is from Chicago. He's grown up with this art. It's a big thing. It's a big standard to set for sure.
[00:05:56] MH: You just come in on this podcast to basically tell us that you just – you basically just whipped up a Hebru Brantley portrait.
[00:06:05] WB: Yeah. But don't tell Hebru, though. Don’t –
[00:06:06] MH: No, no, no.
[00:06:08] JU: We’ll edit this out.
[00:06:09] MH: Yeah. We’ll edit that part out and –
[00:06:11] WB: Just blur the name –
[00:06:13] MH: We take it with him every day, so we’d be sure not to bring it up in conversation. No, big deal.
[00:06:17] WB: Exactly.
[00:06:17] MH: Yeah, okay. You're making the statue.
[00:06:20] WB: Right.
[00:06:20] MH: You got a week to do it on top of three jobs that you're doing? How do you get this done?
[00:06:26] WB: Yeah. So a lot of it is, I like constraints, constraints are great, but it's also knowing, what my skills are and what I'm good at, right? So these sculptures that he actually makes are not – the way I made the sculpture is not the way he makes the sculpture. Let's put it that way. The reason why is, because I am not a sculptor from the core of the sense of the word. He literally is taking these models, taking a block of clay and working down from there, but I work the other way. It's my engineering side of my brain that works the other way, where it's like, I know what the final product is.
I look at his sculpture and I can get the basic shapes down in a software, do it all through the computer and less like me, getting really into the nuances of shape things by hand. I get to a more practical, this is a software you need measurements to put in the software. Let's do it from there and that's how I started. I knew, I was going to CAD. I know, it was not good at like, just pure carving and modeling thing. I took a mock up and worked from basic shapes and that's how I got started.
[00:07:34] MH: I’m sorry. Because you're speaking all of my language right now. We got culture, we got art, specifically Hebru. I'm like – I’m there with you right now, so you finished this and how I mean, how did you feel about the finished product? How did it go over it when you gave it to the friend?
[00:07:54] WB: It was really cool. I framed it as this, so I finished project. I framed it as it's the true version of limited edition, right? There's limited edition like I'm going to make three or four or I'm going to make five or six. I framed it as, this is the one-of-one never going to be made again version of this kind of gift essentially. I was like, I can't get you but the Hebru standard, but this is the Whitney Burks one-of-one, no one will ever have this. Then I put it in a box. I had it like, you get the action figure, it's in a box, don't open the box it loses value, like presentation of this gift sent it with this, you got a golden ticket, you're a one-to-one, you won the prize essentially.
I gave it to him, he kept looking at it. He kept just, look at the box and then he'd look at me, and look at the box and then look back at me, and for a bit he just was not saying anything. Then he was like, “You made this?” That's what I live for, honestly. There's no purchase gift that I can give that gets that reaction. I think that that's the crazy thing. It's the disbelief of trying to put together what it looks like. Even further, just the time it took to do that and the effort it took to do that. That all being conveyed in one moment is what I live for in gift giving, one [inaudible 00:09:19] general –
[00:09:21] JU: Yeah. So I want to actually see if we can chase this thread, or pull this thread in other part of your life. Does this behavior in any – does this attitude of, I know what my skills are. I can work it the other way. You made this, take whichever thread you want there. Does that manifest itself in other parts of your life or work?
[00:09:44] WB: Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest one obviously is the company I work for. By training, I'm a mechanical engineer. I got some design training. I got some manufacturing training. That typical path for a job is completely different than where I am now. I think the idea that I work technically at a biology company, and I work with cells, and I work with living things I work with a completely different set of experiments that I didn't have the schooling for and ultimately for good reasons. I specifically avoided biology classes, somehow ended up everything –
[00:10:20] JU: I love it. I love it. Biology is just turning over in their graves, you're like, and now I'm making Nano here.
[00:10:26] WB: Here I am, yeah. Working with cells every day. So I think that mindset of what I'm good at, what I have experienced with, helps me in my job, stay grounded in what I can actually accomplish, and what is expected of me and setting the standard.
[00:10:42] MH: That just blows my mind. We were just talking about this. I'm wondering, how do you make that leap from, these are the things that I'm good at. I have mechanical engineering training, but I'm working in biology. We talked about analogies as a method or a resource to make that job, but I'm curious, how do you make that job?
[00:11:06] WB: Yeah. It's very similar to the analogous exploration thing, where you get this core idea, and you just transfer it over to another field. I'd say, for example like biology in general, and life in general is inherently random. So when biologists perform experiments, they set them up a certain way to decrease the randomness of the experiment, so they implement controls, they do replicate, so you have more than one shot at getting this result. Then ultimately, they are very skeptical about the data that they get out of their experiments. I think that's great. I think that's awesome.
On the engineering side, it's all about this precision and knowing beforehand like you put X in, you get X out. I think that those two meld in interesting ways in my job. It's conflicting in a way, because you're like biologists are like, okay we don't know what's going to happen, so we're just going to try to retroactively suss out the situation, figure out where we can cover all our bases. Whereas I’m – I want to know exactly what I'm getting out of here.
[00:12:08] MH: What you're telling us is, we have this collision between control and this other side that's more so like, “Hey, we're just going to set the stage and see what happens. Can you give us an example of a fascinating time when you've been at this intersection and seeing something great happen?
[00:12:27] WB: Yeah. I have definitely been surprised with I guess you could say, relinquishing control of experiments, in a way. I think that I set up my experiments as an engineer would. I want this to happen, and this to come out of it. I think that what I found with working with biologists is that you have to look at things different ways, like the data that you're getting out is not always going to be what's expected, but you always will learn something. So for example, we use this crazy. It's an analysis machine that basically, if you have a cell, you can put something inside the cell, and it will change the color of the cell. Let's say you have 10 cells, the goal is you're trying to put something green in there and you want to look through this machine and see all the green cells. Then you can quantify how many of them are green and things like that –
[00:13:15] JU: You lost me by the way, you lost me – Green. Keep going.
[00:13:18] WB: Yeah. But it's just this idea that we tried to get this very concrete set of data out. The engineer in me is if you have 10 cells, I want 10 cells out that are green after this process. So think of it as a black box, you put cells in, you get green cells out. From the biologist perspective, there's so much else going on inside of that black box that I was not paying attention to. I think that it took me a while to get there, but there's some fascinating things you can learn about how you set up your experiments on the front end, with just the black box that I was just ignoring. It's hard to get into specifics with I don't want talk about lasers for hours, but it's interesting that way.
[00:13:58] JU: Wait, where do lasers come from?
[00:14:00] MH: Yeah. You can’t just drop that on. It's like, what?
[00:14:04] WB: Yeah. The laser is how you tell it's green, essentially. You shoot a laser at the cell, it bounces back and the wavelength tells you that it’s green.
[00:14:12] JU: Okay. Marcus, hold the thought on biology, because I want to make a leap real quick. Will you remember where you're going? I know Marcus, he is on the biological chain. I want to go somewhere weird just for a second and see if there's anything interesting here, really. We teach human centered design together and we teach people to experiment, I want to play with an idea here, because you guys fill in the blank, for example. When I'm testing one of my envision solutions, I hope. I hope what?
[00:14:44] WB: I hope, I’m right, generally.
[00:14:47] JU: Yeah. I hope people like it, right?
[00:14:48] WB: Yeah.
[00:14:48] JU: That's like everybody who tries to have a new solution in the world. They hope people like it. What I was struck by, I mean, and that's our shared context that’s why I mentioned that in terms of design. I'm looking at my notes here. When you said that biologists are always skeptical of the data they get out of an experiment. I would say my observation of most early stage innovators is they aren't skeptical at all. They're like, they liked it. Yes.
[00:15:16] WB: Yeah. Ship it. Make a million of them. Yeah.
[00:15:19] JU: I wonder, can you talk about that, like what you see in science from experimentation? What you think designers need to know about experiments by science? What does it look to be skeptical? How could a designer become more skeptical of experimental feedback?
[00:15:35] WB: Right. Yeah. I think one of the biggest things biologically is just the number of times they will repeat something before they stated as true, or before they even can say that, we accurately answered our hypothesis or a main question. I think the other thing is that biologists will do multiple analysis methods. We talk a lot about, this is assessment, this is how we determine what is good design or what is a good project? Where do we go from here? I think with biologists they do that to the nth degree. That same readout of, is the cell green that I was just talking about? There are five different ways to figure out if that cell is green and they will do all that –
[00:16:19] JU: Not just one. Not just one random –
[00:16:20] WB: Not just one. The engineer in me is, the first one said, yes, it's green move on. Biologists are like, no, it could be green for these other reasons and so then you have to implement controls or then you try a different analysis method. Then by the end of it, you have five different tests or assessments that you're doing just to answer one question, and ultimately –
[00:16:42] JU: So take that attitude into design. If you had to take that scientific mindset, what a design need or what new early stage designers need to be more scientific in their tests?
[00:16:53] WB: Yeah. I think more assessment, just like in quantity, but then also the different values of what you're assessing. So getting really real about what we're testing in this specific test. Then getting skeptical about, okay, but on the worst case scenario, this is what we actually found out, we didn't actually answer a question. How can we take that worst case scenario and completely change the testing that we're doing to get an answer for if that's true? I think with design, a lot of times, you talked about these design cycles and how you just want to prototype test, prototype test. Get things out the door, do them really quickly. I think it's more useful at times, especially early on to make sure that you're setting up your analysis points, and what you're actually, what is good, what is bad. You're like setting the scale before you actually do all these tests.
I think that's really easy to do with numbers or with something as easy as, is the cell green or not green or alive or dead, but it's not so easy to do when you're in a new field of work, whereas with design, you're trying to make things that don't exist, right. So you have to be really honest about what you're testing for.
[00:17:58] JU: My friend, Felipe, he gives us really simple example of say that I believe that a goat lawn mowing service in my neighborhood is a good idea. I have a bunch of goats, he says – and again, he goes through this whole hypothesis formation. Whitney, one thing you're mentioning, I think, Felipe, the end of Felipe's model, he wrote a guest blog post about it, so I could find it. I don't have it in front of me. He says something like, “I’ll know I'm right, if one out of every five of my neighbors signs up for a subscription.”
To me, it's establishing that success parameter. Because the reality is, you can you can execute the entire experiment. If you don't pre define what success looks like, you can rationalize it, “Wow, one out of 20. Amazing. That's 5%.” You can you can rationalize why almost any outcome is a success of sorts, rather than stating at the front, what I – me not knowing what the outcome is, saying right now the success that I would need to be excited about moving forward is very different than seeing the outcome and then trying to decide if I'm excited.
[00:19:04] WB: Right. Because then once you're, it's like a question of where you are in the process, right? If you're setting these expectations early, you're not committed, you're not at the point where you're trying to make a decision to move on and you've already allotted five days or a week of time. You're so far removed from the actual act of doing the thing that you can be partial and about what you actually, I guess non partial about what the result of the situation is. I think that's super helpful.
[00:19:33] JU: That’s awesome.
[00:19:34] MH: Yeah.
[00:19:34] WB: Setting that earlier.
[00:19:36] MH: Yeah. That's wild cool. I'm just a fan to see you all bounce around, but I'm going take Jeremy's move real quick. So this show is called Paint and Pipette, right? You guys, you all just went hand in the pipette, right? I want to see, if I can bring us back – and that’s dope, right? That's – I love that. Let's see – I want to come back to the paint side things, because we started out and this is fantastic, right? We start the show, we hear someone say, I created a Hebru Brantley for a friend of mine and I packaged it and he was blown away. Now I'm also over here, but living in this space of engineering and biology and setting my success parameters and experimenting that way.
Well, I'm curious, how has that mindset translated back over to your creative life or your non-professional creative life? You said, in about the gift you said, you almost said that nothing gets you more excited. Even as a maker or just as a human being how are you – I would have to assume, because humans are complex and we are the common thread in whatever it is that we do, that that mindset has to come home with you or flesh itself out. How does – am I right? Am I off in that assumption? How does that play itself out when you're making these things and giving these gifts to your friend that you love to do?
[00:21:12] WB: In general. I think my personality is that, the thing that I can give you the most, the thing that will matter to me that I can sacrifice to you is not my money, it's not my things, it's just my time. Some of that stems from the fact that I'm always doing so much. It's like, if I can communicate that I took the time out of my normal day to do this thing for you or to put my thoughts around this gift to give to you, that's what I want to convey through everything that I make. So in my creative life, there's so many things that I personally want to make for myself and I have. There are like, bedroom furniture or paintings for my walls, things like that.
I think I focus a lot of my creative life about like, “Okay, who are the people around me? What do they care about? How can I show them through my act of giving them my time that I also care about those things?” That's way different from the humdrum, experimental like you have to get this done, you've got deadlines. We're trying to get things done as soon as possible. I take a step back from that, to let those creative ideas come to me, because they take time. It's not as spelled out as like this is the percentage that we need at the end of the experiment. It takes time to figure out what matters other people, it takes time to figure out how I'm going to execute that. It also takes time to figure out when I'm going to execute that, ultimately.
[00:22:33] MH: I'm going to make another assumption. You tell me if I'm wrong in this and then we can leap wherever we go from here. But that you said, I take a step back to let these ideas come to me, right? It takes time. I'm going to assume, right, we're going to bring, we're going to reach over to the pipette and bring that back. I'm going to assume that it takes time to find meaning, after you've ran these experiments and you've arrived at the place of your success parameters, and maybe even how to communicate those things. Can you talk a little bit about, how do you spend time in that space? How do you deal with time to let either meaning, or data analysis, or data synthesizing, and or creative ideas? How do you deal with time and letting things come to you versus either the seven day deadline and or the deadline to turn in the findings of your results and make something meaningful?
[00:23:32] WB: I think from the creative side, the way I let things come to me as I don't go with the first things that come to mind. If you're thinking of a gift, for example, there's always, you're like, “Oh, that's the thing they mentioned a couple weeks ago.” They literally said they want it I could just get that or make that and oftentimes I push that one to the side and let the next couple of things, the truly great idea who the ones that are after that. The ones that stem off from that initial idea and that's what I wait for. It's a lot of passive waiting. I would say. I think we do a lot of active creation.
[00:24:05] JU: We got to have an example here. You can’t say something like, the truly great ideas are the ones that come after that, and then just move on like that’s like a known established phenomenon. What’s an example?
[00:24:17] WB: Yeah. Okay. Let's take a statue for example. I was like, okay, he likes Hebru Brantley. What are the Hebru Brantley things that I could get him? Then I'd go through the process of, okay, one of his prints, or maybe some shirt, or mug, or something, and then I'm looking around at what he actually has and things that – those things don't evoke the meaning that I want them too, right? It's just like, the physical representation of okay, it is Hebru. It is his things. Here you go. It seems like a cop out in a way. That's the easiest thing to do.
Then you start thinking about, “Okay, if I can't do that, I can't buy the limited edition statue. It's a 1,000 bucks.” Let's take a step further and say like, “Okay, maybe not a Hebru Brantley, or maybe what does something in his life that he needs, or something like that?” I think ultimately, while I was thinking about what is something in his life that he needs, I moved back around to Hebru Brantley again. It's just a different framing of what that solution was. It's not to buy something Hebru Brantley. It’s to make something Hebru Brantley.
Or, to have a representation of not only something he can physically look at, like it's a statue he's putting on his desk. It’s this ideal of something to aspire to, or something to look at that's physically in front of him that's not purchased. I think that thinking about a different gift that I could give brought me right back to my original idea, but in a completely different frame.
[00:25:42] MH: In a new way.
[00:25:44] JU: What's the time period there?
[00:25:46] WB: A couple of days, in this case. I think, the quickness of okay, I need a gift in a week, sped up that process. Oftentimes, I was talking about how you have to sit back and wait, there's a difference between a constraint that's helping you generate more ideas and helping you get things out faster. The opposite of that, where it's like, you have so much time, but you just have to be disciplined to wait for the thing that's good. I think in that case, specifically, it was like, I had so little time that I was just thinking so much faster, that the cycles were happening a lot quicker. I think, ultimately, and in biology with my large data sets that I have, we do experiments.
I've done a 100 experiments this year, so twice a week, essentially, if not more. I'm currently into the year, quarter four, I'm in this process of deep diving into what that data truly means. That has taken years to put together. I think, the timeline is infinite. My boss keeps asking, “Oh, when you're going to be done with the data collection? When you're going to be done with the data collection?” I'm like, well, in my mind, it's an infinite project, because I'm just letting it take me – letting the data take me where it goes.
[00:26:54] MH: Well, and that makes me curious, because I think the stakes are similar, because you sound like a very caring person. To you, there's this internal pressure to express the care that you feel in a certain time, which is the seven days, the birthday. Which you also described in the professional setting, this external pressure, where your boss is like, “Hey, I need those findings. It's Q4.” Internally, you're saying, “Well, this is an infinite process.” I think, that state, or that tension that you're speaking to in work, and we see this in the design setting as well, is something that would make a lot of people skeptical about waiting. That sounds really inefficient. That sounds very unproductive. Maybe take us into that moment. How are you dealing with that moment with your boss? Do you have those questions? If so, how are you dealing with it?
[00:27:53] JU: Plus 1,000. I love that question.
[00:27:55] WB: I think, the biggest way I deal with these contradictions is this idea that I have that you have to give somewhere. You can actively choose were you're giving. I think, that I used my creative life, my outside of work life to balance whatever pressures or non-pressures I'm feeling in my work life. If you take this project example, at the same time that I'm doing this really quick turn-around, let's get this birthday present out. I'm also doing this very long term, let's look at this so, let's do 50 experiments on them. It's going to take the next couple of months.
So it's the balance of those two. It helps me in a way, because I can come to my boss and say, “You know, I can do things fast. I'm actively choosing not to for this reason. The reason is, I'm going to get you something better if you wait, if you have patience to do it.” I think for me, it's communicating the value of waiting is the biggest thing, especially in the workplace, because they're always, we need money, we need money. Let's keep going. So I try to communicate that like, you know how I work, you know I can work fast, I'm actively choosing not to, and this is the reason.
[00:29:07] MH: Okay, so I'm going take your earlier advice. I'm a scientist now. I am a biologist, and I am actively choosing to be skeptical, about what you just said, for the sake of our listeners. In order to help me with this skepticism, can you tell me about a time where you've delivered or where that's worked, where you are able to say, “Listen, you know I can do this, you know I can deliver, but I need time to give you something good.” Can you tell us about a time when you took the time and you gave something good and it went well at work?
[00:29:44] WB: Yeah, absolutely. We're creating a new technology in my job and that's where the engineering part comes in. I work with cells, but the ultimate goal is to create this new product, this new technology, but there are existing technologies on the market obviously. One of the things that we are always pushing against is, let's make our technology better, but we're not so much always pushing against, how does our technology stack up with the market? I think that that's very valuable data to have. It also creates this shift of the conversations that we're having with investors or with external people.
So I was trying to communicate that I wanted to spend the time, spend the money to get a competitor's instrument in house, so that we could do some very comprehensive head to head experiments. They were like, well, do we have to do that right now? It's going to cost this much money. You're going to have to do months more of experiments, because you're essentially you can only do –
[00:30:38] MH: Just give us the first thing. Just give us the first fast thing that you thought about.
[00:30:41] WB: Right. I was like, I'm going to do, I could do this fast thing, I could just do our experiments, get the stuff done, we have this set of data, but it's not complete in my eyes. It's complete when we're comparing it to this competitor, but that's going to take another month. It's going to take two more weeks to get the device in and then another month to get more data on it. But then that final data set was just so much more powerful and it showed when we showed it externally. People were like, “Okay, no, this makes sense.” It's very clear cut, they don't have to make assumptions about, okay, we're showing this data on our side. Then in their head, they have to think about the last time they use this other instrument and make connections on their own. It was a very clear cut, like is is the result, this is the comparison, end of story. Drop mine.
[00:31:29] MH: Basically, what you're saying is these external parties or stakeholders, maybe their investors are sitting here with this new data set, with almost the same face that your friend who got the Hebru Brantley, that’s basically –
[00:31:44] WB: You did this? I’m like, “Yes, I did.” This is what I wanted to show you. This is the thing that I wanted to communicate. It's much more meaningful, much more powerful, because I took that extra month. That's what I'm going for and that's what I'm trying to communicate at the beginning, because that's the hardest part, at the end, when they're holding the data set in their hand. It's really easy to see the value of it, but it's hard to communicate at the beginning why you're taking so much more time.
[00:32:09] MH: Yeah.
[00:32:09] JU: Can you tell us Whitney, I love the picture of balance and recognizing what part of your life needs what. Can you talk about inspiration and the role inspiration plays in driving your creative thinking, whether it's at work, and realizing that you want to make the comparison to a competitor's product or whether it's in your personal life and make the Hebru, I don't want to say knock off, knock up?
[00:32:38] WB: Yeah.
[00:32:40] JU: Something like that. Just talk about inspirations. I think that's a neglected aspect of the creative life that people, I think, my hunch is people don't really, they don't know how to get inspired and so they tolerate not being inspired.
[00:32:57] WB: Yeah. They tolerate doing things that don't inspire them, like working on projects there, just nah, like that. Yeah, I think inspiration in general, I like looking at other people's things, appreciating them for what they are, and then either optimizing or tweaking for the use case. A lot of times, for my – for the statue example, the very clear optimization was like, I'm not going to carve this by hand out of clay. I'm going to model it.
It's like, something that gives value to me, because it's like, I'm going to go through this modeling process. I’m going to use the skills that I have. It's the same thing at the end. It looks the same.
[00:33:35] JU: It’s about the looking, because I get to optimizing. What I want to know is, tell us, you just brushed over this, because it's so natural to you. You said, “I like looking at other people's things.” Take us on a journey of looking at other people's things. What does that look like for you? How do you do it practically? How often do you do it? When do you it? Do you deliberately put?
[00:33:55] MH: Yeah. I have a follow up. I’m going to say, go. Yeah, let’s go.
[00:33:58] WB: Okay. I have a few things for that, how I look at other people's things. One example, I really like reading. One of the things that I've been trying to work on within the last year and a half or so is what I call a goosebumps journal. Essentially, it's like, I read something in a book, and it gives me goosebumps. Then, I underline it right there, I transfer to this journal, and then I have this collection of words, or phrases, or even just context in the story that really meant something to me and really invoked this feeling that I can go back to and look at. I've been trying to do that for other things as well.
I see something on the Internet that I like how it's designed, or I like one specific aspect of it, and I really zoned in on what that aspect is that I liked, and then try to convey that in projects that I do in the future. I may not like the whole chair, but I love the way they connected the legs to the body, or something like that. I focus on that point.
[00:34:55] JU: Also, the digital record or whatever it is.
[00:34:58] WB: Right. Yeah. If it's a product, that I have the digital record of a photo of it, maybe a circle, a very quick circle of, this is the thing that I wanted. For the book version, it's literally the quote. It's like, I don't put what book it's from. I don't put what page it's on. I just put that quote. If it's powerful enough for me to write down, then when I read through it later, I'm going to remember it. I'm going to remember that feeling that it invoked.
[00:35:22] JU: There's something called a commonplace book, that the people of old used to have. They would write down these expressions and quotes. Darwin kept a commonplace book. Ben Franklin kept a commonplace book. Isaac Newton kept a commonplace book. It's basically, this document – It's a Goosebumps journal.
[00:35:43] MH: Yeah. You just have a place in it.
[00:35:44] JU: Are you always looking? I mean, one thing that struck me is you said, “If I like the way the legs connect to the chair,” are you constantly in touch with the Goosebumps sensation? How do you stoke that?
[00:35:59] WB: Yeah. It’s like endorphins. It's like, you're craving it. It's a very powerful emotion when you feel it. I always want to look around and figure out what is invoking that emotion. Then ultimately, to keep it going. I think, it feels so good that you want to keep doing it. It's like, every opportunity that I have, every chance I'm looking around, I'm trying to find the Goosebumps in that thing I'm looking at.
[00:36:23] MH: I've been burning to ask you this. Can we look at something together? If it’s just, maybe something you remember. You said the chair. Let's look at this, whatever this chair was, or maybe a recent quote. Can we look at it together, and can you actively show us in real-time, take us into that.
[00:36:42] WB: I can go grab my Goosebump journal really quick. It's always tiny, little moleskin.
[00:36:47] MH: That’s a moleskin. We need that sponsorship.
[00:36:49] WB: It's just, I'm just working at pages of it. You can see that there's just writing. It's just quotes. There's no context for the book. There's no title. There's no page number. It's just what I was – I read something and instantly, I was like, “Oh, my God. That's beautiful. Let me write that down. I want to recreate that somewhere.” It’s this balance of being in the moment, but also, recording the moment. We do this all the time with design. It didn't happen, unless you recorded it.
When I'm reading, I like being in the moment, so I had to get over this fear that I had of writing in books. I really [inaudible 00:37:28], then corners, writing books, rip covers. That hurts me inside. I had to get over this idea that I'm going to have to hurt this book by writing on it, so that I can stay in the moment, but still capture the goosebumps. When I'm reading, I am reading, I always have a pencil or pen near me, I mark the goosebump. Then, the cool thing is that I just leave it there. I don't do anything with it once I find it.
Then when I finish the book, it's like, the last 20 pages, almost done with this book, I'm really excited, because I get to go back and find all those goosebumps that I had marked the last month or so. Then, officially record them is the idea. I'm flipping through this book, find the goosebump. At the end of the novel, you can get this gauge of the goosebump on page two meant this thing, but the goosebump on page 50 meant something else. Then, the act of writing it down and treasuring it and keeping it is super cool for me.
Even further, the idea that once I write a goosebump in the journal, you're on the last page, I intentionally flip back through the book to see old goosebumps. It's like, this power of just feeling that feeling again, just going back and looking at it.
[00:38:42] JU: Wait. Do you do it every time you write something in? Because that was actually going to be my question. What's your process for reviewing goosebumps?
[00:38:47] WB: Every time I read something in there, I look back through. I do this, like I just flip through like, oh, I'm on the last page, and I just wrote the thing, then I close it. I just open it up, and then the first goosebump that I lay my eyes on. I do that a few times. I can think of the context. A lot of times, it comes back to me. It's like, I'm reading the book again. I'm like, “Oh, yeah. That quote was this book, this time. This is what it made me feel.” I just keep doing that till my heart's content, essentially. Until I'm like, oh, I have to go do something else. It's a fun process for me for sure.
[00:39:19] MH: Yeah, I'm curious. The reason I wanted to look at something together, maybe there were an interesting goosebump you wouldn't mind sharing, is because I want to find out for myself and maybe also, for our listeners, if there's ever an opportunity. Is there an elevated goosebump? Do goosebumps graduate? I'm assuming they do. Is there a goosebump that’s graduated into, let's say, a bump in real life? Maybe if you can't, we're running low on time, but I'm so in on this.
[00:39:51] WB: Do goosebumps graduate? That's a good point. I think, in this sense, not yet. I haven't deterred. I have considered getting some of these tattooed on my body, or that sort of thing like, “Oh, my gosh. That was so cool. That was so powerful.” Then, commitment issues aside, tattoos, they're so permanent. I think, in that sense, I want them to elevate to that level. I'm also back to the engineer, the skeptic in me. I'm also very skeptical about how much things mean for me at a time, versus how much things will mean to me forever.
[00:40:27] MH: Later. Yeah. In a way, and there's that waiting thing as well. Maybe with time, these goosebumps, maybe they graduate, but school is long, or there's this intuitive process that they have to stand the test of time before they resurface. That's awesome. Thank you so much.
[00:40:45] JU: We got to say goodbye to Whitney. Because I mean, otherwise, we're going to go into hours of lasers was it, Whitney?
[00:40:52] WB: Yes. Yeah
[00:40:55] JU: If folks want to look you up, where can they find you? Where can they find your work? Where can they follow you?
[00:41:00] WB: They can follow me on Twitter, but I mostly just re-tweet other people that I think are funny. Realistically, if you really want to define me, you could Google me and find all my softball stuff.
[00:41:10] JU: Oh, softball pics. I’ve seen some of the – I remember, I was driving by campus one time and I saw Whitney on the billboard. She was on the Stanford billboard. It was awesome.
[00:41:21] WB: Yup. Yeah. They can definitely follow me on Twitter. I mean, I have a LinkedIn. It's just the same job I've been at for a while, but –
[00:41:26] MH: Then you say you like to read. We'll let you go. Give us a book. Maybe the last book. It'll be a new book for us that we can go look for some goosebumps.
[00:41:36] WB: Ooh. Have you guys read The Overstory by Ken Powers, I believe. It is a beautifully written book, expressing his love for trees, is how I would phrase it. The whole book is a goosebump. Specifically, there are some very pervasive, over and undertones of environmental justice and loving your environment, but also the stories that intertwine with other living things that you push off. Trees are alive, but they're stationary. You write them off. They're not as interesting as people are. It mixes the undertones of human life and also, their direct interaction with these plant life, or tree life.
[00:42:19] MH: Lovely. Lovely. We've kept you too long. We got to let you go, or else, we'll just be here for hours. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:42:27] JU: Have a fantastic weekend. Thank you for making the time, and we can't wait to share your story with our listeners.
[00:42:34] WB: Thanks for having me. It's great talking to you guys.
[00:42:36] JU: A huge blessing. Thank you.
[00:42:38] WB: Yeah.
[END]
The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.