The Futures Archive S1E6: The Toilet

Kathleen Fu created the illustrations for each episode.

A big thanks to this season’s sponsor, Automattic.

And to our education partner, Adobe.

Lee Moreau
Welcome to the Futures Archive, a show about human—centered design, where this season, we’ll take an object, look for the human at the center and keep asking questions. I’m Lee Moreau…

Devorah Klein
…and I’m Devorah Klein.

Lee Moreau
On each episode we’re going to start with an object today. That object is the toilet. We’ll look at the history of that object from our perspective as designers who’ve done work in human centered design, not just how it looks and feels, but also the relationship between that object and the people it was designed for…

Devorah Klein
…And with other humans too.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic. Later on, we’ll hear from one of their software engineers, Lena Morita. The Futures Archive’s education partner, this season, is Adobe.

Lee Moreau
Hi, Devorah! Thanks for being with us.

Devorah Klein
Thank you so much, Lee.

Lee Moreau
So before we get started, I want to tell our listeners a little bit about you— design researcher who also holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, and I know you from our pasts working together at IDEO and Continuum, and now you have your own consultancy.

Devorah Klein
Yeah, that’s correct. For the last six or seven years, I’ve worked more independently with a network of other design consultants. I’m particularly interested in design that touches on very deep emotional things, which is why the toilet is my dream thing to talk about.

Lee Moreau
And how much work do you do on toilets?

Devorah Klein
None. But I do a lot of work that is toilet adjacent, in that I work on activities that happen near toilets and toilet stalls. I do a lot of emotionally sensitive design in health care and other aspects like that.

Lee Moreau
Toilet adjacent design consulting. I like that.

Devorah Klein
But I should also mention that growing up, my mom and I would rate toilets, every toilet on a negative five to positive five point scale, and so we would often discuss what made it a positive or a negative.

Lee Moreau
What constitutes a negative five toilet?

Devorah Klein
Yeah. So a zero would be just a standard regular toilet in every mall and every store that you’ve ever been to. As long as it’s reasonably clean and has toilet paper, that’s a standard toilet and there’s soap in the dispensers and paper to wipe your hands. You get demerits for every, every one of those aspects that’s missing. So you can’t wash your hands. That’s really bad. It’s really stinky. There’s no toilet paper. It’s dirty. Those are what get you down to a negative five. Getting into a positive takes a lot more. You have to be architecturally more interesting. You have to provide some sort of additional benefit. So I think there was really only one or two toilets that we ever rated that really got to their full positive five potential. It’s much harder to aspire to an amazing toilet experience.

Lee Moreau
That is not something I think about very often, but I’m trying to remember all of my toileting experiences to see if I have a positive five ranked one, and I’m I’m struggling with that.

Devorah Klein
Yeah, I think that things that again make you positive five, is it a fully enclosed room so that you have privacy? Is it really good quality toilet paper as opposed to just really thin sheets of it? Is it a really nice way to talk to dry your hands? All of those things end up- you need a lot of things to get to a positive five.

Lee Moreau
So just maybe to level set before we begin the conversation, I mean, when we’re talking about toilets, we’re going to be talking about human waste and we can talk about that in terms of like words like defecation and waste, or we can talk about things like poop and— where-where are we on that spectrum in this conversation? Where do you want us to be?

Devorah Klein
I’m comfortable on either end of that. I generally feel like using non slang is sometimes more accessible, since lots of different subcultures have different slang for the same types of bodily waste products. So talking about feces and urine is more universal.

Lee Moreau
So I might actually go into the word poop from time to time just because I have a ten year old and I’m used to talking like that. But you can kind of keep me honest as we go through the conversation and we’ll see where this goes.

Devorah Klein
That’s fine.

Lee Moreau
Now I’m dying to tell you everything we’ve learned about toilets and this space. And so to do that, we’re going to talk to some designers and historians who’ve done a lot of work on this topic. And I want to start with Dr. Francis de los Reyes, professor of civil construction and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University.

Francis de los Reyes
Even in, you know, prehistoric times, we got to take care of our waste, and it’s logical to assume that our ancestors pooped away from their houses because of the smell, right? It’s something that’s repulsive. It’s evolutionary, also.

Lee Moreau
Obviously, this is a very old history, and in some sense, it goes back to the beginning of human civilization.

Devorah Klein
So I think that there is a lot of history around wanting to separate ourselves from bodily waste and from things that we perceive as gross, whether in smell or in being a disease vector. And several years ago, I worked on a project that was we really had to get into what gross meant, and we ended up creating what I like to call the Klein-gross scale, which is a rating of all the different body products in order of grossness. And so on the top, you have things like tears which really aren’t that gross, and eyelashes, which really aren’t very gross at all. And then at the bottom, I was looking at it and I realized that a lot of the things at the bottom are things that we like to put into toilets.

Lee Moreau
This Klein-gross scale is named after you, what prompted the creation of this metric?

Devorah Klein
I think it’s helpful to understand what things are more and less gross, so that we understand how to treat them, to how to make people comfortable, either comfortable with grossness or comfortable that they can separate themselves from grossness.

Lee Moreau
I like that. OK, so this sets us up really well to hear more about this history.

Francis de los Reyes
What’s interesting is that if you look at historical references, you can look at ancient Sumeria, you can look at ancient Indus civilizations, and it appears that they had structures for conveying the waste away, so they had actually toilets quite similar in in the concept of sewer lines, where they would use water for the waste of long way from the houses moving to a lagoon.

Lee Moreau
As I said, that’s Dr. de los Reyes. We start putting things in our waste in lagoons, and then we also later have the kind of, I don’t know, this transport of water that begins to flush our waste away, right, so you can imagine kind of Roman aqueducts. And that takes us to the seventeen hundreds with the what’s kind of the modern toilet that at least we know in this country, which is an innovation to flush the water away and put it someplace else. But the big innovation really came when we invented the s-trap, which is the kind of little curvy thing underneath your toilet that puts a layer of water between you and those stinky sewage gases that were coming up. So the invention of the s-trap in the kind of modern day toilet is one type of toilet that we know, but there are many other types of toilets.

Francis de los Reyes
People are either sitters or squatters. So you either sit on the porcelain bowl or you squat, you know, maybe the the hole is almost flush to the ground and then you have the wipers and washers. And so why would be people who use toilet paper, to wipe, you know, we call this anal cleansing that’s the technical term. And you have people who use water for washing. And so you kind of like, think of it as a two by two matrix theres washers and sitters and so on.

Lee Moreau
So great. We now have a two by two matrix of-of for people that poop, which is great, but as a design exercise we can solve for all these different users and all of their different behaviors. Devorah is this simply form follows function. How do we how do we approach this as designers?

Devorah Klein
What’s interesting is that all of those are perfectly fine solutions. But when you go into a culture that’s not your own, it’s easy to see, oh, how can they use paper when they could use water to wash things away? Oh my goodness, how can you squat when you should be sitting? And I think that it’s hard to understand that they’re all fine solutions, they’ve just developed on different tracks as ways of managing this.

Lee Moreau
So in this episode, we’ve already talked a lot about the toilet and so many different dimensions of the toilet. But I also want to examine the space of the toilet as well. As an architect, I’m curious about how the toilet connects to lots of other systems and other facets of our lives.

Beatriz Colomina
But toilets are always they are in modern architecture.

Lee Moreau
Beatriz Colomina is a professor of architecture and director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University.

Beatriz Colomina
It’s really fascinating because people don’t want to talk about them, but all the architects who you know from the beginning of the century, if you want to limit yourself to the 20th century, are obsessed with the toilet, which is, of course, a new piece of modern equipment.

Lee Moreau
Colomina spoke with us with her longtime collaborator and life partner Mark Wigley, the former dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. They wrote an article about the architectural space of the modern day toilet.

Mark Wigley
We love to talk about what people don’t want to talk about because there’s always something there. And with a toilet, it’s not just that there’s something there. Everything is there, everything. So I think, you know, human dignity is pretty overrated, and the toilet is one way to kind of get to that.

Beatriz Colomina
Mm hmm.

Mark Wigley
Like, there are no heroes on the toilet.

Beatriz Colomina
For me, it’s always the hidden, what is never talked about in modern architecture that I’m interested in. Whether it’s the toilet or or whatever it is or sexuality or, you know, all the things that people don’t want to acknowledge or to or to discuss. Those are the things that I gravitate to.

Lee Moreau
We’re getting to this notion of the stigmatization of toilets as a part of our culture, the activities that take place. Talk about the role of stigma in the design process or how we design around stigma.

Devorah Klein
So I think that stigma is really interesting when it comes to the toilet because these are bodily activities that if your body is functioning well, you’re going to do every day. And yet it’s so embarrassing to talk about it. People have so, this is a place where there’s lots of euphemisms and lots of ways of pretending that these things don’t happen. And it’s really interesting that we have developed stigmas around something that again, is a sign that your body is functioning well.

Lee Moreau
I know you did a project for people who have concerns about HIV and part of that solution was being mindful of privacy as part of that, can you talk about that project?

Devorah Klein
Yeah. So this was a project trying to create the first home HIV test kit. So prior to this, you had to go into a place that was often had a lot of stigma. Public health departments, et cetera, if you wanted to get tested for HIV. And one of the goals was that this would be something that could be used by anyone that would be given out to a homeless population, as well as people who were homed. And the original test kit was very complicated. It had little test tubes and it had to be held at a certain angle. So there was little fixtures, and little stands. And we quickly realized that if you’re homeless, you don’t have a fancy bathroom to set this whole lab kit up in. And in fact, the only place that you would be able to do this test with privacy was going to be in a bathroom stall. So we made a lot of design decisions so that that test could work in that bathroom stall situation, basically creating almost a laptop form that would hold the test strip at exactly the right angle, but it would be all contained, including materials to discard of it with discretion, and it could be completely done in a bathroom stall.

Lee Moreau
And so as part of that solution, you’re trying to take some of the judgment and stigma away from people having to do this in a public setting. Or you’re giving them the kind of privacy and confidence and security through the design of the object.

Devorah Klein
Yeah. And I think recognizing that that toilet stalls hold more than just toilets, they hold other activities in addition to illicit or licentious activities, they are a place that you could test for HIV. They’re a place that people inject diabetes medicine or test for diabetes. They’re a place people breastfeed. They’re a place that people breast pump. There’s lots of things that can happen there because of that enclosure around the toilet.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic, which is building a new web and a new workplace all around the world.

Lena Morita
I’m Lena Morita. I’m a software engineer at Automattic and I’m based in Tokyo, Japan.

Lee Moreau
Lena used to work as a designer.

Lena Morita
This job is actually my first full time developing job. And so as a person with that kind of design background, it was really important for me to choose a workplace that values design. Being a developer is surprisingly similar to being a designer. Maybe some people think that design work is, you know, designing a UI or making a layout or something. But I think most of the work happens before that, like an orchestral conductor. You know, the work of the conductor is not to wave your arms around on the day of the concert, you know. All of the work happens beforehand in the rehearsals and even before the rehearsals where they really analyze the music. And I think design and dev work is kind of similar too.

Lee Moreau
Designing a better web. Join us at Automattic dot com slash design. That’s AUTO-M-A-double T-I-C dot com slash design.

Lee Moreau
So looking at a different cultural context, the notion of the flush toilet is the default here, but it’s not the default everywhere. Let’s go back to Dr. De los Reyes.

Francis de los Reyes
I grew up in the Philippines, I am from the Philippines originally. And you know, when you travel outside the U.S. or the western world, you suddenly realize that really this model of large wastewater treatment is something that the rest of the world really doesn’t have. And you know, you see a lot of pit latrines, you see a lot of septic tanks. And the realization that I’m teaching students, the engineers and leaders of tomorrow, about this system that really applies to a small portion of the world.

Lee Moreau
And this is truly a design challenge, right? When you understand that lots of people don’t have access to sewage systems or toilets. How do we know what different communities need? How does human centered design help us understand this?

Devorah Klein
I think that the basic goal of human centered design is to be present in a community and understand from lots of different stakeholders and from lots of different perspectives, what are the requirements, not just from a plumbing and wastewater waste treatment, but from a cultural treatment? Thinking about issues around gender and different levels of economic privilege— what is going to be appropriate for that? Something that’s going to be appropriate for downtown Tokyo might not be the same thing that’s appropriate in the Philippines, as Dr. de los Reyes said.

Lee Moreau
It goes beyond the single solution of the toilet or even the two by two to a much broader set of possible outcomes and solutions.

Adam Reineck
When we started the process, we really weren’t sure how people would feel about talking about toilets or even working with us on on toilet design.

Lee Moreau
Adam Reinek is a designer and was at IDEO.org where one of his teams worked on this clean team project aimed at creating solutions for urban sanitation challenges. And he and his team conducted research in Kumasi, Ghana, which is a city of about two million people. And at the time, there were only two thousand flushing toilets in the city. So think of that ratio, right? There are lots of other toilets though, there were pit toilets and other configurations of toilets, many of which were full and had been capped or were no longer working. And on one of his trips, he and his team were working on new types of innovation for solving this sanitation problem. And he brought some prototypes to Kumasi to help tests some possible solutions.

Adam Reineck
We would bring the toilet into someone’s home. We had local partners we were working with which kind of introduced the concept and what we were trying to do. And we’d leave this toilet in their home for three days at a time and come back three days later, pick up the toilet, and we’d interview them about their experience. Like what was the good, the bad, the challenging. So we actually found people were really willing to to just like, get into the details, talk about what went wrong, what they wish they had in their home. The sanitation challenges are so apparent and so real life that it’s it’s much more of a part of everyday life than something that you hide in the bathroom. And so the context of trying to improve that challenge for people that live there was was more important than trying to hide behind, not wanting to talk about toilets or privacy.

Devorah Klein
That’s so interesting because it connects back to what we were talking about before, about the development of euphemism and how it can actually get in the way of good design. Adam had this opportunity where people were not constrained by that because they were seeing the actual consequences of poor design. And so it was very it was very apparent to them, and it was very important to them that they get this problem solved. I don’t know a lot about the history of how it became so taboo, but it seems like ultimately it’s doing us a disservice.

Ruth Barcan
The toilet is such a site of paradoxes and contradictions and anxieties and tensions.

Lee Moreau
Ruth Barcan is Honorary Associate Professor at University of Sydney and author of “Dirty Spaces: Communication and Contamination in Men’s Public Toilets.”

Ruth Barcan
This particular moment in time, there’s a lot of work going on thinking about the complexity of how we share spaces with other people and the tension between the toilet as a site where we acknowledge our shared humanness, but also a site where all our differences of class, race, gender identity ability and so on are made very, very evident. And so I think in these shared public spaces, you have objects that are understood to be contaminating because they mediate between us and the human whose use that space just before us. So the toilet seat or the tap or the handle and so on. These objects sort of become these proxies for our fear of human difference of human contact and so on.

Lee Moreau
Listening to Ruth Barcan talk about this, I’m thinking like, oh, that time I use the public toilet and you notice that the seat is warm from the person before you. But somehow you’re you’re not cognizant the fact that it will be warm after you get off of it and the kind of shared, right, these are all things that we interact with that behave in different ways because of our human interaction. And yet we don’t talk about these things. This is not part of-part of the conversation.

Devorah Klein
I did a project a few years ago around breast pump design and especially when people are traveling or away from home, often, unfortunately, a bathroom stall is the only place that you can pump. And it’s this really rough mixture of public and private and gross and not gross, because on one hand, you’re in a bathroom stall, which for all the reasons that Ruth just talked about feels really, really gross. And yet you’re trying to produce really, really, really clean milk for your baby. And that’s really weird. And then in addition to just the touching privacy issues, there’s olfactory privacy issues which aren’t related to breast pumps, but there’s also noise— that you’re using a breast pump, which has a very distinctive sound, and it’s embarrassing and you don’t want to think about what people think you’re doing in there. It’s just horrifying, and people talked a lot about how much they hate having to pump there, but there’s no other option.

Lee Moreau
So how do we go beyond designing for the fundamental functional needs like the people in in Ghana to also designing for the broader emotional needs that people have, right? So we’re we’re kind of moving from this notion of if the efficiency of managing and handling waste into the kind of equity of space and feeling comfortable and not feeling embarrassed or fearful in some of these spaces. Joel Sanders is an architect and professor at Yale University.

Joel Sanders
I’ve been interested in the bathroom since 1996 because I think it’s a site that registers a lot of sort of cultural concerns and anxieties about the body, about gender identity and about the flesh, and about being human.

Lee Moreau
Joel is also the co-founder of Stalled!, which is a project that explores the topic of transgender access to public restrooms in an effort to create safe, sustainable, and inclusive public restrooms for everyone.

Joel Sanders
So what we favor is eliminating the binary traditional bathroom. And in our prototype or model that we advocate is the multi-user facility that organizes the bathroom as one space with communal grooming and washing areas. And the key for privacy is in the stall and have partitioned systems that give greater visual privacy and acoustical privacy. But the other thing that we also have been advocating is the importance of having caregiving rooms because again, what we found that not everyone feels comfortable sharing.

Lee Moreau
And this design effort sounds like it’s acknowledging the needs of different users and also the different activities so that people can feel like they’re themselves while they’re using one of these toilets, right, Devorah?

Devorah Klein
Absolutely. It makes me think a lot of just the Americans with Disabilities Act and how that created a universal design philosophy that ended up serving lots and lots of people. And I think that what Joel is talking about can create these spaces that can serve lots of people better.

Lee Moreau
And make people feel comfortable using spaces on their own terms, right? Whether they’re differently abled or people who are non-binary. You know, one size fits all does not work for a whole lot of people.

Devorah Klein
Right, and it doesn’t have to call anyone out for a specific reason. It just creates a space that, except for maybe it takes more space, I don’t know, or more materials, it’s just better for everybody. And so it feels really like a Win-Win approach to it.

Lee Moreau
So the functional needs are not the only thing that we’re solving for here.

Joel Sanders
We’d like to create bathroom designs that allow the maximum number of differently embodied and identified people to mix and mingle because we believe a democratic society builds respect for human difference by allowing people to interact with one another.

Lee Moreau
So for a whole society of people who don’t like to talk about bathrooms, as we’ve already said, Joel Sanders makes us believe that a better bathroom can lead us, maybe to a better society. And part of that shift is in our openness to talking about it with a little bit more, I don’t know honesty, candor. It’s a conversation that’s going to help to take us there, right?

Devorah Klein
Absolutely. And I think that the more we can talk about it, we can talk about other models of how we manage our waste and we can explore other ways of doing that in a way that would be sustainable and comfortable for us, but also for the servicing people who have to deal with it and thinking about a circular approach to what’s happening to the waste once it leaves us and once it even leaves the building. I think that we need to start the conversation to revisit all of that.

Lee Moreau
So at this point, we have two kind of complementary concerns. One is the design of the toilet itself as an object, and then the other is sort of the toilet as a space or a series of spaces that toilets occupy in the cultural landscape that that creates.

Devorah Klein
Yeah, for me, when I think about those two different problems. It feels like the former the one around waste movement is a really different one. It’s about infrastructure, it’s about waste handling. There’s many different stakeholders that have to think about innovation, to- as we think about what does it mean to do waste flow differently. The privacy issue and the space issue seems very distinct, and it actually, I think, seems like an easier problem to solve. I feel like you’re already starting to see spaces that are moving towards more of a single-stall model with shared handwashing that ends up supporting lots of different people in lots of different needs.

Chelsea Wald
I see this as a universal problem, a global problem, a human problem that needs to be solved for everybody, even though we do have cultural differences.

Lee Moreau
Chelsea Wald is a science writer and the author of Pipe Dreams, a book all about the future potential of toilets.

Chelsea Wald
So the idea of having a center, a massive, centralized sewer system that takes all of the wastewater out of town, essentially like or to the outskirts of town and treats it there in a big plant is the current kind of gold standard. But a lot of people imagine that system getting closer and closer and closer to the person. So maybe it gets to a neighborhood scale. Maybe it gets to a building scale. Maybe it gets to a bathroom scale.

Lee Moreau
So the toilet needs to be part of a larger system, and that system is going to be has to be connected to other stuff. I mean, you can’t just isolate one piece of the equation.

Devorah Klein
Yeah, I think that also connects back to what Adam was talking about. Is there a way that we can do the containment and process that without requiring a sewage system and treatment plants that are so hard to bring to a universal global population? I think that that’s where it feels like there’s an especial opportunity of having something that is more self-contained but still satisfactory that doesn’t require that massive investment.

Lee Moreau
Where does this actually push us? Is there a much future visioning around around the toilet?

Devorah Klein
So I don’t know is the real answer, but I think if you take the the two paths that you talked about, Lee— there’s the technology side of it, and I feel like the innovations that we’ve talked about haven’t been really efficient because I think they’re not solving for the whole part of the problem. And then the social aspects that you talked about, I think that where we’re seeing a lot of innovation is generally towards more privacy of activities, but more comfort in acknowledging that these activities take place. And if you think about the technology and what actually is happening with the toilet versus the box around it, there’s generally trying to be more solid boxes, more containment of what’s happening in them, but also by their existence, then more acknowledgment that these boxes need to exist for a reason.

Lee Moreau
So creating more spaces that are private, where you can accept that all kinds of different activities are taking place in there and eliminate the judgment around what may or may not be happening in there is really part of that solution, right? Actually reframing it not as a place where you go to use the toilet, but a place that you have a private moment, which may include lots of other activities.

Devorah Klein
Exactly. And I think that that in a way is very liberating of that space because it lets it not just be a gross space, but a place for non gross things to happen and just sometimes private catching your breath moments to happen.

Lee Moreau
Devorah, we’ve just spent the last 30 minutes or so talking about toilets. And I think I’m slightly more comfortable talking about this now than when we started, but not much more comfortable. This is going to be a hard topic, right?

Devorah Klein
Well, I think that there’s two ways of thinking about that Lee. I think one is, are we comfortable talking about that in order to design and to innovate? And then the second thing that I think was implicit in what you said is, do we have to be comfortable talking about that societally? I don’t know that we have to. Maybe that’s OK, that that’s a private thing. And maybe that’s OK, that that’s a topic that is not public. As long as we’re comfortable enough talking about it so that we can innovate better solutions. What I do feel like we’ve heard from these people we’ve talked to and in our conversation is that acknowledging the toilet adjacent activities and designing around privacy around them, feels like a more promising path for better meeting people’s needs and innovating around people’s lived realities, not some sort of idealistic, imagined, desirable future.

Lee Moreau
OK, we’re going to change gears a bit here. As you know, every episode of The Futures Archive ends with a prompt, a sort of a design exercise for you, the listener, to keep working on the object and the ideas that we’ve talked about in this week’s show. In life, there are moments when you can be completely private, and we talked about some of those today, but there are plenty of moments when you cannot be private. Imagine that you have a special ability, sort of a superpower to be fully aware of everyone and everything that can observe you in every facet of your life. What we’d like you to do is take 30 minutes to draw an unprivate diagram. Think of it as a system diagram that documents all the people and all the things that see you in a given day. Please post your diagram on Instagram and use the hashtag The Futures Archive, that’s all one word. We will share some of our favorite responses in our Instagram Story at Design Observer. You can read the full prompt on our Instagram and check out some of our favorite responses to last week’s prompt.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is a podcast from Design Observer to keep up with the show go to TFA dot Design Observer dot com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you liked what you heard today, make sure to rate and reviews and please share this with your friends. Devorah, thanks again for being with us, if people want to find out more about you or connect with you, where should they find you?

Devorah Klein
Yeah, it turns out privacy is a big part of my life in all aspects, so probably LinkedIn is that is the best place.

Lee Moreau
Please post your answers for this week’s assignment on Instagram using the hashtag The Futures Archive, that’s one word. We’re really excited to see what you come up with, and make sure you’re following us as well at Design Observer on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The Futures Archive’s education partner is Adobe. For each episode, you can find supporting materials, including further reading, lesson plans and all kinds of activities suitable for college level learners. For more about Adobe’s educational initiatives, follow them at EDEX dot Adobe dot com. And the Futures Archive is brought to you by Automattic. Thanks again to Frances de los Reyes, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina, Adam Reinek, Ruth Barcan, Joel Sanders, and Chelsea Wald for talking to The Futures Archive. You can find more about them and my co-host, Dr. Devorah Klein, in our show notes, as well as links to archival audio and other interesting stuff. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. Owen Agnew edits the show. Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo helped to develop the show. Thanks as always to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand, and to Design Observer executive producer Betsy Vardell.