Thomas Girard
Finding Creativity in Unexpected Places
In this brand new episode of Brave UX, Thomas Girard brings a thoughtful lens to design, creativity, and resilience 🌍 — sharing why processes matter 🧠, and how the quiet work of reflection can shape the future of design 🚀
Highlights include:
- Why Airports Feel Like Home
- Preparing for a Two-Minute TEDx Talk
- Why Processes Must Endure Despite AI
- The Origins of Unique Ways of Prototyping
- Life or Death Typography: Why It Matters
Who is Thomas Girard?
Thomas Girard is a design educator, writer, and speaker whose work bridges creativity, innovation, and resilience 🌍.
He’s delivered keynotes at events like UXIndia, been a delegate at Sorbonne University, and has earned multiple Emerging Scholar awards for his research in design and the humanities.
As a TEDx speaker, his talk “How to Feel at Home in the Airport” has reached over 100,000 viewers and been translated into 18 languages, reflecting his global resonance.
Thomas is also the author of *Son of Greg Girard*, a memoir exploring the intersections of family legacy and creative practice. From his home base in Vancouver, he hosts the podcast “UNIQUEWAYS,” where he interviews diverse voices about success and creativity 🎙️.
Transcript
- Thomas Girard:
- The processes and methods around design. I think we need to continue to focus on those. We use the word low fidelity prototyping, but that can mean many things and I think this just focus on making and what making means thinking and what thinking means speaking and what speaking means and how those kind of factor into design I think are extremely important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who want an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting our field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Thomas Girard. Thomas is a design educator, writer, and speaker with a deep interest in creativity, innovation, and resilience. His work has been recognised with multiple emerging scholar awards, including at the Design Principles and Practises Conference in Barcelona and the New Directions in the Humanities conference in Madrid as a TEDx speaker.
- His talk, How to Feel at Home in the Airport, has been viewed over 100,000 times and translated into 18 languages reflecting his broad appeal to global audiences.
- In his memoir, son of Greg Girard Thomas explores the intersections of family legacy design and creativity, offering a personal perspective on the influences that have shaped his work. He has also delivered keynotes at UX India and has been an invited delegate at Sorbonne University where he has contributed to discussions on design and learning based in Vancouver, Canada.
- Thomas also hosts the podcast UNIQUEWAYS where he speaks with guests from diverse backgrounds to uncover different perspectives on success and creativity. And now he's here with me for this episode of Brave UX. Thomas, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Thomas Girard:
- Thanks so much. Glad to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's good to have you here, Thomas, and you are someone who has had quite a broad international life, from what I could tell at least. And you spent years living in Shanghai, some time in New Delhi, and also now your current place of residence is home in Vancouver. How would you say that these various and quite diverse places that you've lived have influenced your approach to design?
- Thomas Girard:
- That's a great question to note on that specifically. Probably starting out in 2018 or 2019, I was contemplating doing a master's and at that time I had spent time in the developing world, as you said, and spent a lot of time in Vancouver and really was starting to think about the bigger places in the world, thinking about the New York, thinking about the Paris and the London and how could I get to those places, how could I escape this Canada and was accepted to Royal College of Art London and was really excited about that. They have an information experience design programme there that's a really great master's, but I couldn't figure out how to get to London and how to move there and found a programme here in Vancouver that was connected to University of Oxford, and that was appealing to me only later because they're also connected to a graduate school called Wolfson College, which is connected to Oxford Centre for Life writing. That was an angle of being able to cover life writing and autobiography later on, but that was really an avenue for me to access other parts of the world, which I think maybe I had rejected initially seeing the developing world and wanting to explore, explore and be curious. It was only later that I wanted to be in the bigger places.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wondered about that time in the developing world and I discovered as part of my research for our conversation that your father, Greg Girard, who I mentioned in your introduction is quite a well, well-regarded Canadian photographer and he's known as far as I could tell for capturing cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai before they changed forever, before their current state. If you like, and this is a big assumption, but I imagine growing up in a household like that you may have been exposed to some creative pursuits like your dad's photography. If that was the case, how did that exposure, that early exposure, how did it shape the way that you see yourself as a citizen of the world?
- Thomas Girard:
- It was big. My dad, as you said, is an notable photographer and he was travelling and shooting as a photojournalist or as an art world photographer in those places early on places like Shanghai and Hong Kong and Japan somewhat, and so I was growing up in a conventional life in Vancouver at that time and only got to know him through our travels together later on in those places. So in my late teens, in my early twenties, in my mid twenties when we were travelling together, I got exposed to those places in those parts of the world and because they were so foreign to me, they didn't really register. And so what happened is actually what happened with Ted, which was that when I was proposing a topic for Ted, I just blurted out that I want to do a talk about airports, and I imagine that's because of my time with my dad travelling in strange places and having the only familiar thing being the airports. And so I arrived at how to feel at home in the airport through my dad and those travels. I think I've never really put it as explicitly as that, but I believe that's probably true now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking about that because in your talk you said, and I'll quote you now, my favourite places to be are the airports. Now I know that was a snapshot in time when you delivered that talk, and perhaps that's changed, but if you think about that statement, I was curious to understand what was it about or what is it about airports that make them such a special or compelling place to you?
- Thomas Girard:
- If you watch the talk, it's just a two minute talk and it is really about the familiarity of airports. So when you're in an unfamiliar place, the one thing that's familiar is the airports. There's a great anthropologist named Mark Aga who writes a book, wrote a book about non places, which are places that are kind of a void of identity or void of the real kind of strong identifiers that a lot of other places give you. And so I saw that and I saw airports and I was like, yeah, airports are really, I mean, I feel really relaxed in them, but I feel like that's in part because nothing is really registering is kind of like this blurred place, this non place, and that's what it was for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In that talk, you also observed how people often overlook how similar cultures can be, or at least that was one of my outtakes, and I was curious about this idea, this notion, what is it or what's an experience that you can think of when you've entered another culture where you've had this idea that there are these undersurface similarities that you've experienced?
- Thomas Girard:
- In my twenties, I made a move to Shanghai and I lived there for a stretch, a short stretch, and started to become familiar enough that I was able to kind of break it apart and be like, oh, that's what's happening with this part. That's what's happening with that part. And at one part I was at their domestic airport called Home Chow and I was like, wow, this airport is so nice. I wonder why that is. And I had been in Shanghai for a while already, so it's like, oh, well, it's kind of western. It's kind of familiar to me, and maybe that's why that is. At that time I was really starting to break apart things like that. Things like going for a walk in then neighbourhood in Shanghai and what that meant, how bizarre even a short walk would be and how many strange things I would encounter that were strange to me at least. Then the side of that, so the Starbucks or the Costa Cafe and the kind of environment that those proposed, which were in away the non places. Right,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And following that thread along, you've also suggested that when people travel because of the stock difference that they can encounter, and in this case it sounded like you were immersed in Shanghai for some time or long enough to start to piece together a little bit about how the Environment city worked, but you've suggested that people start to crave the familiar things, and I was curious about this to understand from your perspective, what does that mean for designers who are shaping or trying to design or shape experiences for people that are either in liminal places or liminal head spaces?
- Thomas Girard:
- Yeah, that's a great topic. I mean to shift away from the developing world, to contextualise that in a more current way. I would say recently I gave a talk in Paris at the SAR barn. I found myself wanting to just walk around Paris. I was like, you know what? I'm not going to take the train. I'm not going to take an Uber. I'm going to walk. I was just walking and I would see would just walk, anybody walks through a neighbourhood and was walking to the Sar Bon where I was giving a talk, and along the walk I would encounter places that I had learned about growing up in university. I'd seen pictures of it and suddenly it's there just on a casual walk, how could that be possible? And that kind of idea was a reframing of my initial kind of experiences around the developing world.
- Now it's like, okay, I'm in a very western place, a very big place, and still it's these kind of bizarre, unfamiliar, strange things, but strange in a very different way, not because I could never imagine them happening, but because I could never imagine them happening to me. So that was something that came to me later, but I guess to package it all, it's kind of been through all these travels both early in life in the developing world and later on in the bigger cities that I've found myself with this juxtaposition of the familiar and the non-familiar places and sometimes being attracted to the familiar simply because you need some of that. Sometimes you crave it, I feel.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Which of the cities that you've lived in would you say have shifted your perspective on design the most?
- Thomas Girard:
- Hong Kong. I had an early trip to Hong Kong when I was 19 or 20 years old and did an internship at an architecture firm there and was on my own maybe for the first time and subletting this loft from a restoration artist and walking up a hill and taking a train to go to the architecture firm. That was a real kind of formative experience just because it was so early on and I would say in that way Hong Kong had a big impact on me. I haven't been back recently and I can't say what it's like now, but that would've been a big one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah. I want to come back and ask you a little bit more about your TED Talk. As I mentioned in your introduction, it's over 100,000 views, which is quite some success there with that, and you spent as far as I could tell, a year or so preparing to deliver those two minutes, how did forcing that brevity impact the design of your talk?
- Thomas Girard:
- It was scary. I mean, I was preparing in a way by repetition. It was a bizarre preparation. Part of it was these kind of auditions where you didn't know if you were going to be in the talks or not and you're kind of delivering your talk and crossing your fingers at the same time. It's very scary, but at the same time, you really have to be internalising the talk already at that point, so you're already kind of committed even though you don't know if you're going to be in or not. That was a big part of it for me. Part of it was there are certain ways that you deliver a Ted talk rules that you have to follow or suggestions that you have to take. There's an organiser there that keeps you on track and not all of the material that you want gets in and out of all the material that you don't want gets left out. So some of the material you're memorising is stuff that it is not that easy to memorise. It's not just commonplace for you. So I found that to be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, over that year, I mean immense growth over that year trying to really understand what those two minutes would be, changing it from memorising to internalising to talking, it's your friend to a kind of natural ability to talk about it in any way slowly and carefully or rapidly or conversationally. I mean you really start to unpack the different elements of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And after that year of preparation, by the time you stepped onto that stage and you were ready to give your talk, did you feel like you'd done enough?
- Thomas Girard:
- It's interesting on the day of, we're still this time in the auditorium without the people, without the guests there yet, and at that point the lighting is all set up and when you look out into the audience you can't see anything. The light is kind of in your face and it seems all dark, so it kind of feel like you're just giving the talk to no one, and I gave the rehearsal on the day of and the organizer's like, it's different now. It's changed and I didn't know if I should be scared or not. I was confident that it could come out in any way that it needed to and that would be fine, but it was jarring and when actually delivering it in context, the kind of progression from being in the audience seat to walking down the stairs and getting micd up to walking onto the stage onto the red circle and then your two minutes starts, it's kind of dreamlike. It's very kind of surreal and I enjoyed that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Did you end up giving it from memory or did you freestyle as you were going in the end?
- Thomas Girard:
- I gave it from memory. I would say the cadence of it was maybe shifted a little bit. I would say that looking around at the audience was something that was added that was a little bit different. I did, it was more performative than I had originally anticipated and I was more confident I think when I gave it than I had ever been with it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've previously said about preparing to speak and I'm not sure if it was specifically about this talk, it may have been others you've said, and I'll quote you again, when I do public speaking, I'm actually listening to myself talk, and I thought about that and I wondered what that I had in mind. This dynamic feedback loop that's going on between what you're saying, what you're hearing yourself say and what you might say next, is that an accurate way of encapsulating that thought or is there a different way that you could communicate what that's like for you?
- Thomas Girard:
- I feel that when you do public speaking and you're actually in the actual recording of it or the actual delivery of it, there's a certain permanence that starts to happen to it, a kind of solid form of language to quote bringhurst that starts to happen and when that happens you start to realise the finalisation of it that starts to happen. When that happens to me, it starts to kind of echo in my head and I'm kind of listening to myself and at that point there's no changing it. It's already set, but that actual delivery of it is different, is different than all of the preparation. It's the real thing and the real thing is different than anything else.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- To me, I connect with that, particularly when I'm forming questions often on the fire for these conversations. Some point I'll get this little voice in my head saying, I think you've probably said enough now you need to wrap it up, or perhaps it's a little bit of the inner critic going, you didn't really need to say that part before you followed on with the question, so I certainly do get that, and I think there is that added positive pressure in many ways if you can get around it and master it of the fact that it's permanent, like what we're doing here, having this conversation conversation, although there will be an editor, right, but it's mostly permanent what we say.
- Thomas Girard:
- I definitely experienced it that way. I feel that although you may feel like you need to change things, they can't be changed anymore. I mean in a way you can because of the editing, but there is a kind of permanence to it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Throughout your career, you've done a lot of talking to a lot of different audiences now there'll be plenty of people listening who will be a bit terrified at the prospect of standing up in front of people and giving a talk, and I know from listening to things you've said about yourself in the past, Thomas, that this public speaking persona isn't a persona that you had always embraced. What would you recommend to people that are considering stepping onto the stage or into the spotlight for the first time to help them assuage or overcome some of their reservations that they might have?
- Thomas Girard:
- I would say just jump in and do it sooner rather than later. The planning, the hesitation is the worst part of it. It will be difficult. There will be hurdles doing it. Initially you will make mistakes, but do that real time and don't just wait on it. The waiting on it is excruciating. I mean, it's really the worst thing, and yeah, you're right. I didn't see myself as a public speaker and it would've been as early as high school that I would've been kind of giving these presentations in my high school class absolutely shaking, terrified, and later when I decided that public speaking was going to be a thing, probably after art school realising that there was no escaping it, I kind of told myself, okay, you're going to be the introverted public speaker and there's no escaping that, so I would say there's an angle for everyone. Will you have imposter syndrome? Probably. Will you be the introverted public speaker? Maybe, but that's okay and it's better to do it. Agreed,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I feel like it's also completely natural and understandable that people will have those feelings as the reason why the public speaking is up there behind the fear of death as things that people aren't too keen on. I also completely hear what you're saying about just jumping in and doing it. In fact, I was having a conversation with my wife the other day about some things we'd done a little earlier on in our life like skydiving and bungee jumping and that moment if you hesitate on the platform when they say, okay, you can go, that moment if you hesitate creates the most anxiety and dread if you don't jump straight away. You have to just accept it and do it and go with it. Otherwise you can talk yourself out of it, and so that's just something that came to mind while you were explaining that, and I want to talk about speaking in a different sense now and that is more broadly as a community of designers and that is that you've said, and I'll quote you again, that designers often only talk to other designers. I know there's some irony here because we are designers talking to other designers most likely who are listening. Are you also guilty of living in that echo chamber or have you found a way to exist both inside and outside of the design community?
- Thomas Girard:
- I've worked really hard to emphasise certain words that are more recognisable for a mainstream audience, so trying to give the talk in Paris and being at the Sarbane, I feel like the word sarbane is recognisable beyond just an academic word. The word Ted is something that people know and it's not just a design word. I worked really hard to bring those into my vocabulary because I was so niche, because so few people understood except designers and design educators and design academics. It was a hard thing to break out of and I still work at doing that. I feel like design is especially susceptible to this kind of nicheness that is good in what you feel like you're part of something, but at the same time you can't have the dinner table conversation about it as you can with some other topics.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thomas, you mentioned the ban and how that word, that place exists outside of the pure lens or world of design, but I do want to ask you now about design education because academia is a world that you have existed in for some time now and I understand that that's where you currently find yourself most at home. When you think about design education and where it's currently at, based on what you've recently experienced with your master's programme experie, what would you say its greatest strength is currently?
- Thomas Girard:
- I would say that the strength that I came to terms with recently was that people are still drinking the Kool-Aid for design. That's probably a good thing. The big tech layoffs and the UX layoffs that went from big tech and trickled down to smaller companies were a scary thing because there were such talented people finding themselves in that situation, but at the same time, there were still young people that were still drawn to UX and design. Depending where you were in the world, that could be completely true and not just bay area perspective, but in a global way. I know that in Hong Kong for example, UX was really taking off and things like journey mapping were still new and customer discovery and certain things were still new at the time where they were old in parts of the western world and that made me happy. That made me say, okay, design has legs still and it's not going to disappear. I would say yeah, the young people who I would say maybe shouldn't be pursuing design at this point are in a way the best thing that's happening for design because it keeps that continuity going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's this tendency in design education to treat it training for jobs, and I understand why that is, to treat it as vocational training. How do you think about the teaching of the next generation of designers and what's really important to you about getting right in that education?
- Thomas Girard:
- That's a great topic and things like design and academia design and scholarly design, these are really good things and certain areas are allowing those to blossom. Things like service design, which are more cerebral tend to really emphasise this scholarly design. I first learned about that. I received an emerging scholar award in Barcelona and travelled there and found that there were hundreds of design academics there talking in this language about conceptual design, and I was relieved. I said to myself, this is what we need and this is what we need more of later. That became reaffirmed at a conference called UX India. I was in Sorbonnegalore for their conference and they had lots of people engaging with this notion of UX that was outside of just the vocational aspect of it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned relief. What was the nature of the relief that you experienced?
- Thomas Girard:
- I was worried that UX was going to go away. I felt that worry for a time up until quite recently, it seemed that there was so much talent that was not being used that it might go away, and it was only later that I realised that it's not going away.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've argued previously that the technologies are changing and I think probably the most obvious new technology that's arisen in recent years is conversational or generative ai, but you've said that the ways that we approach them shouldn't. In your words, so when you think about the word ways, what are those ways that you believe as designers, we don't need to change?
- Thomas Girard:
- You're touching on great topics here. I mean, what I'm talking about is really the continuity of processes and methods around UX and design that can continue to manifest regardless of what technologies come along. We can always do user testing in some way. We can always be people first in some way and focus on who we're designing for. I think when I learned about the Strategizer books business model canvas, value proposition design and their focus on people and users and creating something for someone, I think those ideas were really important for my belief that design could keep going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And thinking about generative AI specifically now and its impact on the field of design, I mean you mentioned earlier that you had hope seeing the younger generation coming through, and also I suppose what you've seen out there in academia at conferences as well, that there's still a place in the world for what we're doing, but how do you feel that if at all, generative AI has shifted or changed the posture that designers need to adopt in order to be successful in the coming years?
- Thomas Girard:
- Well, incorporating AI into what you do is of course important in the academic world. We think about the ethics of AI quite a bit and how that needs to be a focus. I think I was worried that AI was something so big that it would shift everything and it could avalanche over top of UX and design and only later decided that UX and AI could pair together and you could approach AI with a design lens. That came to me later. I didn't believe that initially. At first, I believe that AI was going to swamp everything, and it's hard not to think that when you spend time on social media and you see the kinds of dialogue happening around ai, but when you really, as a designer with some of years experience, think back and wonder about how technology has shifted throughout time, you realise that AI probably won't avalanche over top of everything, so I think I was happy to contextualise AI and say, okay, design can still exist and we can still focus on users and an audience and create AI based things as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You know how we were talking about the ways or the methods of design, they still have a place. The heart of design still has a place in the present and into the future. If you were in a position where you could rewrite the curriculum for the design programme that you went through, what's one thing that you feel that you would remove that you could subtract from design education?
- Thomas Girard:
- I think the first thing to remove is figma, or is the software and all of the process oriented things like paper prototyping, affinity diagramming, card sorting, things like that, those keep those and let the technology be the last thing that you incorporate. I would remove the traditional sense of technology from it and keep in the process oriented things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's an interesting tension that you're touching on there, Thomas. It's almost as if it's, this is my framing that white collar, blue collar tension between design as a academic field versus a vocational trade, and it's often seemed to me from the outside, I haven't been through a design programme in many years, but it seems like there's a amalgamation or at least many universities try to bring those two things together in the design curriculum.
- Thomas Girard:
- Yeah, I think it's true. I think in a way it goes beyond that though design education has really evolved and now with more four year programmes and six year programmes and master's in design in various specialties, I think a lot of that has really opened up the option for doing more and thinking more about design rather than rather just getting it done, which was so much so at the beginning. Another important topic would be when I was studying in art school studying communication design, we had this very big focus on this kind of ivory tower idea of design. This idea that the designer is this somehow genius person and this genius individual that you approach for the knowledge and now and even a few years ago, but up until now it's become much more collaborative and design has become much more of a team-based thing where you work together through problems to, in a way get to as good a point as you can get to, and there isn't that pressure, in my view anyways, to get it perfect anymore. Now it's like let's get it as good as we can. Let's work together and get it as good as we can, and that's a real good move forward. I think
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of getting it as good as we can, and earlier you mentioned prototyping is one of the methods that we should retain and design education. It could be central, one of those things that's central to what designers learn. You have experimented with low fidelity prototyping through conversation, which was not something that I had heard of before. What led you to discovering or experimenting with that mode of prototyping and how in practical terms does it work? When I was
- Thomas Girard:
- Giving the TED Talk, I was getting approached a lot more to do public speaking. I hadn't done that at that time and needed a topic to talk about, and so I created this thing called Unique Ways of Prototyping, which was essentially a low fidelity way of prototyping or even a no fidelity way of prototyping, which would be conversational prototyping. That idea didn't seem to be widespread at that time, and I wanted to have something to talk about that was mine and started to talk about that idea. That idea evolved over time and essentially evolved into the podcast, but before it did that it very much gained legs and became different mutations of low fidelity prototyping. It was unique ways of prototyping for idea validation. It was unique ways of prototyping for instigating change. It was unique ways of prototyping or unique ways of making. There were very many kind of iterations of it, and that allowed me to work through this idea that low fidelity prototyping and processes and methods were extremely important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If we talk about unique ways now as a podcast is the evolution of that. What has surprised you the most? You've done over 200 episodes, so you've been producing at a phenomenal clip, this content and having these conversations out of all of them, what has surprised you the most about producing your own podcast?
- Thomas Girard:
- At the time that I started the podcast, I was very much in the academic area and I was looking at other academics that had a bit of a spotlight on 'em and saw people like Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Rachel Botsman, and saw their big difference from what I was doing was that they had a podcast. I wanted to focus on that idea of the academic with the spotlight, and so I said, okay, I need to do this podcast. I didn't know if it was going to work and I didn't know how to do it. I had been a guest on other shows and was able to model something off of some of these other shows, but basically didn't know what I was doing and didn't know if it would keep going earlier. I talked about the importance of just jumping in. That was around public speaking, but I felt like podcasting was a similar space for me, but I had done that before with public speaking, and so it made it easier to just jump in with podcasting and give it a try at that time also, it was very good timing.
- Podcasting had just evolved from being this kind of celebrity focused idea into being the podcasting for everyone, or at least it was evolving into that space, and so I was able to kind of do podcasting in that way. Yeah, it got easier. After a hundred episodes, much easier. After 200 episodes, you start to get people who don't see it as Thomas's little side project, but they see it as the Unique Ways podcast. They see it as the unique Ways 20 Questions, and that takes down a barrier for me and that allows me to get guests that I don't know or don't have a personal connection to, but they just want to be on the show.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about the Unique Ways 20, I think you said 20 questions.
- Thomas Girard:
- Yeah. The Unique Ways 20 Questions is something that I modelled after one of the podcasts that I had been on before and realised that a spontaneous conversation probably wasn't going to work for me and I was going to need something more solid, especially for people to agree to be on the show. So I created these 20 questions and if there was ever anyone who wanted to be on the show, I would send them the 20 questions, and what I realised quite quickly was after I sent 'em the 20 questions they send Yes right away, and that was great, so I was just like, oh, well, I'll send it every time, and it became a kind of design system, part of a design system for me where I would share the 20 questions and that would be a real kind of way of instigating the episode. Yeah, I think the 20 questions are about designers lives. They're about designers, non-design aspects of what they do, and that might've stemmed from the prototyping and low fidelity prototyping I was doing that was in a way not designed in a software sense, and then kind of moving that into, well, designers are people too. What are they like outside of design?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And out of those 20 questions, is there one question that you feel is particularly good at opening up the conversations that you've been having?
- Thomas Girard:
- I have a question about place, about the notion of place, and I like that question because it expands into different directions. It can be a geographic place or it can be more of a philosophical place. I think different people have ideas about place and there's a topic of placemaking now, and I think Place in general is quite expansive,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well at risk of ruthlessly stealing a question about place. Then I'm going to ask you one, and that's to do with what you said about when you started the Unique Ways podcast that you were in this place of academia, and I sensed, and I could be wrong, I sensed that perhaps since that had started since the podcast started, perhaps you have changed your focus and I was curious, what place are you now currently in or where do you currently want to head next?
- Thomas Girard:
- I started making five-year plans. My first five year plan would've been five years ago or 10 years ago, but I started focusing on five-year plans and even thought what would a 10 year plan look like? To the extent that I was like, okay, well what if I ran the podcast for 10 years? What would that look like? And I've said this before and I kind of still think it's true. It's like if you make a 10 year plan, the time seems to go by really quickly and you get old really fast because you're zooming through the 10 year plan. I was like, well, maybe I shouldn't do that, but I think the five-year plans are really good. I think that became a focus only after starting to record the podcast with some consistency, I guess I would say. I started to realise that I can plan out my time better in that way. That would be the place I'm at now is looking at time and how time is not just a resource, but something that you can work with
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Looking at time in that way. Are you speaking in the personal sense as well as the professional? Is this bleeding into your work in design as well?
- Thomas Girard:
- Yeah, on the podcast we talk about work-life balance as well. Yeah, I think definitely because of the podcast, I've been focused very much on the life of a designer and what that is, and I've of course kind of pointed the camera back on me and said, what is my life like and what does it mean to have an upbringing that was attached to design and now be that person, but also be a person who's human?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You once believed that if you did what you loved that the money would follow. And when you were 40, which I think is a few years ago, not that many years ago, but a few years ago you said, and I'll quote you now, I realised that's not true, and I was curious to ask how if at all, has that changed what you pursued potentially in realisation?
- Thomas Girard:
- It changed. It changed. You reach a point of true desperation where nothing is going to work financially, and when you hit that point, some options start to reveal themselves. I'm not saying they're good options, but you start to think, oh, there actually is a way I can sustain this. And those end up being, I mean, I often ask the question, if you have a choice of nothing or something bad, which one do you take? And I came to a point in my life where it's like, well just take the bad thing because that can lead to a good thing. If you take nothing at all, you end up in this blank space where it's very difficult to move forward. If you take the bad thing, at least you can move on. So I think, yeah, in terms of financial longevity, I think realising that life was broader or bigger in that sense than I realised and I could keep it going more easily than I initially realised that came to surface.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- When you speak of keeping it going, what specifically are you speaking about?
- Thomas Girard:
- Falling back on traditional income sources. Things like teaching and writing were always things that I could rely on, and I kind of forgot that in a way or kind of dismissed that on my journey and then realised that, oh yeah, still those things still exist. Just because you've put them on the back burner, it doesn't mean they aren't there anymore.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Your career is one that has been through several chapters. You've moved between design practise into academia, and I'm not quite sure where you are currently, but definitely we'd be keen to know. I know you've spoken about and written about typography. You've obviously published a memoir recently, so there's quite a body of work and a series of interconnected, but quite discreet and different things that you've contributed. Have you ever felt, whether it's external or internal pressure to focus on just one of those things?
- Thomas Girard:
- If I have, it's been the podcast. I've put a lot of things on the back burner to keep recording and to keep the studio going and to be able to keep the podcast going. I've turned down some good advice about putting the podcast on the back burner and focusing more on things that monetize in a traditional sense, but I was like, you know what? The podcast really connects people and it connects me to people, connects people to each other. I think in terms of community building, it's really important and in terms of just moving forward for me as a person is really important, and I was like, I can't let go of
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That. It's interesting how you identified the advices good, but there's obviously something quite compelling for the reasons you've outlined there about keeping the podcast going. Thomas, I noticed that you recently had a celebration of your 200th episode, and so hearing you talk about just what the Unique Ways podcast means to you, I imagine that must have been quite a special moment for you, it was a live event. What was that like being at a celebration of something that you created and put 200 episodes into the world? What was that feeling like?
- Thomas Girard:
- It was magical. I mean, it was ordinary because I had looked at other podcasters and saw that they were doing live podcasts and panels of live podcasts, and it was like, well, I need to do that too, but actually organising it and running it was a different story. For so long, I had been able to go into events and do my singular part, a public speaking engagement, a workshop, something like that. This kind of whole event around something I made was different. It was in a way more significant. It's interesting. I didn't fully realise that, and then I started typing into AI and into chat GBT, and they were like, your most significant event of 2024 was your 200 plus guest celebration chat. GBT is telling me this. This must be true, but I think it was a lot of work, but it was necessary and a real step forward for the podcast. I had had other events around the podcast before, but nothing of that substance.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned five-year plans earlier, just where in the five-year plan does the podcast feature?
- Thomas Girard:
- It's been about three years, but thinking about what it would look like for 10 years of the podcast is something that is still in the back of my mind, especially as I kind of struggle a little bit more this time to make a five-year plan. I think the one thing that sticks for me is thinking long-term about the podcast and thinking about the number of years like that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What's the struggle at the moment in terms of the five year plan?
- Thomas Girard:
- It's always a struggle of inertia for me, so I came to the idea of 10 years with the podcast and couldn't really move forward in terms of planning for five years or 10 years beyond that. I kind of came to that point and that wasn't a certain kind of endpoint for me, so maybe that's how I decide to do something or to not to do something. And of course what might happen is I might think, oh, 10 years of the podcast is not going to work anymore, and that might propel me to a next idea around a five year plan or 10 year plan, but if I keep moving forward with thinking it's going to be 10 years of the podcast, then that's probably what it'll be.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wondered if this, thinking ahead, this projecting what the future might look like, this planning, if it might've been somewhat related to your time working at the Innovation Design Centre at Lenovo, where I understand that you had a series or a portfolio of products that you were working on that were pushing out that three to five year horizon for coming to market.
- Thomas Girard:
- Yeah. You did your research. That's true. It was definitely a formative time at Lenovo and Beijing and Hong Kong. I think that definitely got me thinking what things look like when you project years into the future, and I was still young enough that I hadn't thought in that way yet, and after that really started to think in that way
- Brendan Jarvis:
- From that time. I know that might be going back a wee while, so maybe your memory's a little sketchy here, so tell me if it is, but from that time where you were on the ground there doing that kind of work, sort of almost midterm crystal ball gazing with product design, what did that teach you about the hands-on work of a designer?
- Thomas Girard:
- It taught me that the hands-on work of a designer can more or less be done by anyone, and when you have a group of user experience, people of, in that case UI designers and G UI designers, maybe 40 or 50 of us, when I went in there, I was able to just kind of imagine things and do a lot of whiteboarding activities and start to do a lot of idea generation, and at that time, unique ways of prototyping didn't exist and low fidelity prototyping wasn't on my radar yet, but during that time at Lenovo, those are the things that started to unfold a little bit more, particularly because in Beijing there was a big language barrier and so in a way to get out my English language ideas that the whiteboarding was the way to do it and conversations maybe became more significant, I think, in the English language than they had been before, and I started to really analyse them and say, oh, a conversation is something more than what I thought it was originally.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's interesting. So it was a primarily English language workplace or you had to also learn how to speak in Chinese.
- Thomas Girard:
- It was not a primarily English language workplace, but everybody had to speak English with me. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How was your Chinese? It's
- Thomas Girard:
- Terrible.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Hey, thinking about something different now in particular, it's typography. You recently published a book called Life or Death Typography, and that title, life or Death typography stopped your father in his tracks. I understand. When you first shared that with him, what exactly does life or death typography mean to you?
- Thomas Girard:
- What I realised was a premonition about life or death, typography, which was an anecdote that I had early on in my career about typography being poorly designed on an election ballot causing a shift in who got elected, and that was before us. Topics were so central and I kind of created that writing and that speaking based on that idea, I think that would be what was life or death about it was that an election could result in life or death.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In the process of writing, researching and immersing yourself in this topic, what real world life or death scenarios did you encounter that typography is central to leading to a happy outcome?
- Thomas Girard:
- I really thought that typography done well could prevent deaths. I mean, in another interview I talk about how things like rope highway signage or pill bottles or like I said, election ballots, if they're designed well, they'll result in essentially people's lives being saved. I mean, if somebody, I use the example of somebody driving to a emergency department of a hospital and having to take in the typography very quickly and subconsciously and how that could lead to arriving in time at the emergency department. I mean, things like that. When you study typography too much like I have, you start to think about those good scenarios. I guess sometimes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perhaps a funny scenario that you've spoken about before is the use of comic sands, which would be strange to see on a speed sign or something to do with road directions or something like that. There would be this friction, I suppose, between what you are seeing as a consumer of that typography and what the intent of that topography is trying to communicate and what our expectations of things in certain contexts are that how do designers know? And perhaps as we are getting quite in the weeds here with topography, but how do designers know when they've selected the right typeface for the job?
- Thomas Girard:
- Go to typography.com. Hoffler and Jones, it used to be called, but they split. They do beautiful typography. Pentagram uses their typography. Just choose good type.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, so just do good design. But is there anything that you've seen that, I mean some of it seems self evident. Is it self evident and maybe there's no question here. Should it be self evident to a well-trained designer, what the right typeface is? Is this what you're trying to tell me?
- Thomas Girard:
- Type is about focusing on legibility and readability, so having that focus is extremely important. Picking well-crafted type, timeless type is important. Knowing who the type designer is and understanding the time period that it was created, those kind of contextualization are important. I guess these are the kind of bits and bolts that you learn about when you're studying typography as a young person. At least that's what I learned. I think these days, maybe as design history gets put on the back burner a little bit, I think that typography needs to continue to be a focus in that way. So that's the things that I just mentioned end up in the curriculum. But yeah, do all designers have that? Probably not. And should they all have it? Probably.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Why do you say that?
- Thomas Girard:
- Save lives.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yep. That certainly sounds like an important outcome when you think about that, when you think about the prevalence and the type is omnipresent, that it often goes unnoticed, right? But you've suggested that, and these are your own words, that topography is everything, which is quite a big all encompassing statement, but for most people, they're not going to be aware of that. We're just not keyed in if it's not our thing. What's one moment that you think could help people understand or awaken them to the power and the importance of typography that you've experienced in your life rather than just being blind consumers of it?
- Thomas Girard:
- It's happened a number of times where I would say moving design and typography from being a niche thing into being dinner table conversation is extremely important. People like Debbie Millman are doing that in a certain way. John Meda with his kind of broad strokes of being a geek at MIT to running a design school to working in venture capital and now he's said Microsoft is that VP of ai. That kind of stretching and saying, I can exist in these different environments is extremely important. I don't know if it's happened yet or at what point it will happen. That design will be every day enough that it's where it needs to be. I don't think it's there yet. I think it's on its way.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thomas, I understand that your teaching advanced typography in Vancouver, where do you start with your students, presuming because it's advanced that they have some exposure to it, but where's the first place you start with that first session, that first lecture,
- Thomas Girard:
- I give a project called Type Around the Neighbourhood where we just walk around Vancouver and look at type in the environment and talk about it in any way that we can. Usually, you can gauge in that way how much people know about it and how much people know if it's importance or it's lack of importance, how much people know about its prevalence and its ubiquity type is everywhere, and if you go for a walk, even a short walk, anywhere really, at least in Vancouver, you'll see type a lot of it and you'll be able to pick up on it. So that's where I start.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do your students ever come back with anything that surprises you?
- Thomas Girard:
- We show our results from that kind of walk. We take photos with our mobile phones and share them together afterwards. Do I get surprised sometimes. I mean, Ty always is surprising. It's so everywhere that it's impossible to predict fully.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thinking about the bringing things down to a close here for our conversation, you've previously spoken about themes regarding tradition and also reinvention, whether it be in typography, design, education or prototyping. And clearly in some of these areas you've been pushing some boundaries. So as the world of design continues to evolve, it seems like that is just something that we cannot escape. What's one thing you believe in that we must not lose?
- Thomas Girard:
- The processes and methods around design? I think we need to continue to focus on those. We use the word in this episode, we use the word low fidelity prototyping, but that can mean many things, and I think this just focus on making and what making means thinking and what thinking means speaking and what speaking means, and how those kind of factor into design, I think are extremely important.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So you've just spoken there about in the broader practise of design, things that we should retain. I want you to turn your lens now inward and think about your own experience, your own person, and thinking back about your career, whether that's your time that you spent at Lenovo in Shanghai, or perhaps it's public speaking or perhaps it's related to do with your teaching. What's a belief that perhaps you held earlier on in your career that you've since completely changed your mind about?
- Thomas Girard:
- When I finished art school, I was getting hired to do logos and interfaces. That's what UX designers did then, and that's what I got hired to do. I also got hired to do things that I had taught myself, like programming, but basically what I had learned in art school was that we need to make good logos with a focus on typography, and we need to be able to make interfaces, at least in the visual sense, and that has really shifted. I think that would be the number one, and it's always shifting. I mean, as technologies evolve, as design education evolves, the things that we learn and the things that we implement change. So the only things that don't change, what are they? I think they're the processes and methods sometimes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thomas, that's a great place for us to end this conversation. I've certainly enjoyed it. We've covered some broad and interesting topics today. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me.
- Thomas Girard:
- Thanks so much. It's a pleasure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My pleasure. And you're most welcome, Thomas. If people want to connect with you and are interested in your books and your public speaking, what's the best place for them or best way for them to do that?
- Thomas Girard:
- Sure. If you want to check out my podcast, go to unique ways.ca one word, unique ways, and if you want to grab my latest book, it would probably be my memoir, which is called Son of Greg Girard. It's available wherever you find books.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Excellent. Thank you, Thomas, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us. Everything that Thomas and I have covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find, where can find unique ways and his books.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe. So the podcast turns up every couple of weeks in your feed. And also tell maybe just one other person about the show if you've found value from this conversation and others like it at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or you can find a link to my profile in the show notes. Lastly, you might want to try finding me at my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.