This is the Italian Philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). You may have heard his name before. But even if you studied philosophy, chances are you don’t know exactly what he said.
The packaging of his product was all right. The typography, the illustrations, and the bookbinding were neither especially good nor especially bad. The naming was great. The title of his main oeuvre Principi di Scienza Nuova, was spot on, it encapsulated his main idea, but the book did not deliver what it promised.
He promised the principle of a new science and he had the core idea for it in his hands for decades, but while he was writing the opus magnus, he got distracted by religion, history, mythology, and philology and messed it all up.
It may not be fair to call his book boring, but it was dark, twisted, and not even closely as entertaining as he may have thought. It’s such a shame. The difficult form it took in the end directly contradicts the very simple original idea. Vico’s original idea could have been the Pizza Margherita of Philosophy. A simple dish that everybody loves and enjoys. Instead, he made an Anglo-Saxon tripe stew with sauerkraut in a hot chocolate sauce.
[Italian accent] If you drink a lot of beer, you know beer. But to truly understand beer, you have to…
…brew it yourself.
To understand leather, you have to tan it.
To understand ropes, you have to twist them with your own hands.
To understand wooden structures, you must get to work with hammers and saws and work the wood.
To understand chairs, you have to build them.
How much do you know about the physical reality of books compared to a bookbinder?
If you bake bread, you understand it better than just eating it. You get the main idea, right? But here’s the catch: If knowing requires making, how can we understand nature?
With Vico, we can argue the real or realizing value of scientific experiments lies not in confirming our theories, but in rebuilding nature.
Newton’s prism experiment rebuilds the reality of white light. The vacuum tube experiment that proves gravity with a feather and a lead ball falling at the same speed when you suck the air out of the glass tubes? It’s a model of a world without air to make us experience pure gravity.
The silent admiration we felt for the science teachers, that built those cool models was more than well deserved. Making these models—or better: let us build these models, make, touch, and see their effect—is at least as instructive as measuring the results.
By making tangible scientific models we recreate the world. And this—not the mathematical verification—makes us understand it. The more tangible the experiments are, the better we understand the world we reconstructed through them.
Making and breaking is how kids learn. We learn languages by speaking, not by starting with grammar.
If you want to learn to dance, you have to start moving your behind.
Things made truthfully, with know-how, feel more real. This is why fast-made, poorly understood products feel… fake.
And time is expensive. We build better what we understand, but understanding takes time and money. Learning means failing, and failing until we make it work.
Quality and innovation are slow and expensive because they are tiny things that come at the cost of long cycles of big repetitive failures. You can’t innovate without failing. You can’t fail without pain.
We went so far down that road that today, a lot of products are designed to break on purpose. The German word “Sollbruchstelle” refers to intentional weak points designed for profit, leading to waste. And we have come to accept that as normal. That’s why the back of the iPhone is made of glass. It’s not because of “the antenna.”
As consumers, we accept the cheap and the fake. We also know that the faster the development, the bigger the mountain of trash we all leave behind. It’s upsetting how corrupt we have become, but products have become so cheap that we happily buy them. Fast fashion like Ikea, Shein are depressingly successful.
We know and still accept the simple logic that quality is good and that good is expensive, even though luxury brands have completely undermined that notion by offering cheap crap for increasingly high prices.
Italian prosecutors found out that Dior paid $57 to produce bags retailing for $2,780. Dior is not the only luxury brand selling air.
What if we started to ignore time and fully focus on quality? It’s a bit scary, but it’s not that far-fetched. The old logic is still intact. Quality products last longer, and people say they are willing to pay more for them. There must be money to be made with the opposite of fast and cheap and fake.
iA Writer is a writing app for people who just want to write.
It’s the opposite of Word, which does everything but doesn’t excel at writing. This is how it looks if a class full of pupils uses Word.
This is the same class using iA Writer. As you can see [go back and forth between this and the previous slide] iA Writer focuses on writing, allowing users to focus on translating thoughts into words. We’ve sold a million copies and paid its bills. After eight years, we tried a new approach. Here’s some of the stuff we built since then:
We made our own fonts because we care about typography. We wanted a monospace with a wider w and m to have a better grey value. I can explain why, but the clock is ticking… :-)
Okay, this is important though: One reason why we made our own fonts was that… most digital fonts don’t offer traditional gradings and width, which is needed for a good performance of smaller and bigger sizes. This is classic typography stuff that you may not care about but appreciate when someone else spends their time on it.
We also built features like parts-of-speech highlighting to help find lazy adjectives, empty adverbs, and…
…clichés. Again, you may not care that much, but professional writers love that we spend so much time on it because it saves them a lot of time.
Two years ago, ChatGPT came out. Every other app became a ChatGPT wrapper, but we spent nine months building an authorship feature to distinguish your writing from what you paste. One of the problems with using AI is that at some point you don’t remember what you wrote and what you pasted. And that makes you feel lost… in time.
This is how it looks. It separates story and visuals. You start with the story. Then you add the visuals. Avoiding the procrastination of choosing fonts, colors, layout, and pushing textboxes saves a lot of, you guessed it, time.
It doesn’t look like much at first.
The layout is dynamic. Just like your Website. It adapts to screen size. Unlike Google and everybody else, you can use your custom fonts with a custom template.
You can look at it on a phone, on a tablet and on a regular computer without black bars, distortion or zooming in and out.
It differentiates between what you show and what you say. So you can send people a text handout. It looks and works like a Website with text and images. This is nice because it saves your audience a lot of… [whisper: time]
Of course, it offers a fullscreen mode, but what is really cool is that…
…you can look at the presentation in a desktop or mobile browser, the story shows as subtitles.
It comes in colors. This doesn’t save time but it feels nice and gives orientation. The default presentations go from blue (the cold start) to red (climax) to the finish (in gold).
It’s not the first presentation app on a phone.
But becuse it’s so focused, and with it’s story first approach completely free of fiddling, it could it is the first one that is really easy and fun to use.
Right now, right here, on the teleprompter, it looks like this. I’ve been reading most of this because it’s the first time I’m giving this presentation and I am a little intimidated talking about managing our products to 800 professional product managers.
Quality requires understanding, and understanding takes time.
The time we invest in our products becomes time saved for our users. It feels like an expensive gift. Putting time into a product is expensive. It takes courage and generosity. But users feel it. A lot of our users understand and appreciate the present (and the presence) of time in our products.
They pay for our products and we are thankful for that, but when they thank us in return for the extra time we put into our products, and they thank us in return, it feels better than making disposable stuff. The more time we invest the more they save. Not having deadlines sometimes keeps me awake at night, but when I talk to some of our customers it again all makes so much sense.
As you may have guessed, I have no formal design or product management training. I studied philosophy and after 6 years at uni, I got bored of putting the world in my mind, so I finished my degree and started to work at a design company, to and put my mind into the world.
These days, I enjoy walking on the tightrope between the two: philosophy and design. It’s risky but so much fun walking from one end to the other. I want to believe that what we do is both philosophy and design. Not artificial intelligence but Intelligent artifacts.
This is our Notebook. It took 10 years to make.
This is how it looks when you open it.
This is how it looks when you’ve written in it.
It has watermark lines.
How does that help?
You can see them on a blank paper.
On written paper, they disappear because of the stronger contrast between the ink and the paper. It’s an optical illusion used as key element of the product. Yeah, I know how that sounds. But who doesn’t like to look at optical illusions? Now, we made them more than just fun. We make them work for you.
People love the idea but they love the product even more. They spend 70 euros on a notebook and come back thanking us. There is more than just an accidental connection between thinking of other people and thanking them. When customers use our products and realize that we have been thinking about them and not us when we made the notebooks is what makes customers thankful for the time we invested.
People who appreciate quality know that over time they save money. We may not all fully understand that products made thoughtfully over a long period of time hold the most precious gift inside: The gift of time. But we all feel it. Good products feel more real because someone put their time and energy into shaping them.
The packaging for the notebook alone took a year to perfect. It took so much nerve to make. Now, if you don’t buy any of what I just said, I can’t blame you. I tried to sell the idea of a much smarter person and if he failed, why would I succeed?
Gianbattista Vico tried to explain his whole life that the Verum is the Factum. Thought and words matter but ultimately, truth shows in what we do. Factum comes from Lat. facere, to make. A fact is literally what is done. (And yeah, the most popular word in English has the same root.) Truth is not primarily in what we think and say, but what we create.
I know that in a time of so-called alternative facts some of this may sound a bit suspicious. And that’s why, to close, I’d simply like to invite you to check it out yourself down here, during the coffee break. I brought one example of the notebook we made for you to look at, and touch.