Creative Direction for (Smart) Dummies—Buying Your Way to Creativity and Innovation

CHRISTOPHER CHEUNG: So welcome. Thanks, everybody, for attending my session. My name's Chris. And today we're going to talk about creative direction for smart dummies. An alternative name for this is also AE119271, how to cook with humans, because I think it's really kind of about that. I don't really see a distinction between what is creative. I know spreadsheet guys that are as creative as some of the designers I know. And I really just wanted to use this session to share with you a raw brain dump of various things that I've had to do to compensate using other people to get useful work done.

So hopefully it's semi-structured and has some value to each of you in its own way. But it will be freestyle. So why am I, maybe, marginally credible for this topic? I have a career that's kind gone all over the place and in an unexpected way. Of course, it all starts on your right hand side, my life, before I had a career. And I think was really great growing up and realizing stuff I liked. Like I really liked, like, sci-fi and fantasy stuff as a kid. It inspired me. You know, you dream of creating stuff and that's how I got into drawing. And then I realized my folks didn't let me go into art school, so I had to go into design school.

And that was like the best thing ever because going to design school taught me a lot of structured thinking, you know, because I guess systemic ways to look at problems. And that ultimately got me into high tech. And then that became this really interesting amalgamation of all these skills or curiosities. And I think a lot of you-- obviously, you are at Autodesk University, so you guys deal with technology. You guys deal with having to fix things, build things, change things. So I think we're very much on the same page.

The one thing that I think is super cool about my career, though, is that I used to always think that need to be a church and state. But however, after two decades I'm realizing that I actually can't tell which side something has been driven from, whether it was because I liked something, whether I got a dog and it affected something that I just did on this other side, it's amazing. And I think that decoupling that and accepting that as a whole is a really great way to have introspection of yourself. But anyways, I've gone from working at Autodesk and other software development firms, working with a lot of-- I mean, a lot of you guys, actually, in the audience. Thanks for supporting me, by the way.

But having worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, products, buildings, structures, fashion. And that had eventually given me courage to do things on my own, like why not, right? Like, why not? And then to realize that you can contribute in different ways. Earlier we were talking about how it was really hard for me to give up design because I always thought that was a special magic piece. But more and more I'm realizing that design, as it's penetrating all the other aspects of a business problem, I actually am as happy to do design of a business model as I am to do a drawing. So weird but awesome.

These are ripples. There's a lot of other ripples that affect us in our life. But for me, these are the ones that stand out the most. As I said, I always thought I was on this side, creative. But you know, when you get a job and you realize, what do you mean I can't make it awesome because we can't afford that? You have to factor in all of these requirements. And constraints are incredible that way, right? We can't actually get something successfully done without having really hard constraints that really challenge us to make something to deliver to those requirements. And as we all know and we saw on Andrew's day one keynote, technology is driving so much change and it's interlocked with kind of how we exist and how we-- our lifestyles.

So the intersections of all these is what I think is very interesting. And I do think it's important more than ever now that the creative piece lives in all the other domains, because I do know many designers. I feel victimized by, technology's changed. Now I have to learn new software. And then they feel victimized by the change. And I actually think, because all of us tend to be in this kind of creative problem solving space, we've got to get ahead of that. We've got to get ahead of that and own that because it sucks to have the world change around you and you didn't expect it.

One of the things I remember dealing with a lot is the aspect of, I cannot, or I can't. I actually argue that it's, I won't. But for example, when Thomas and I, back there, started releasing design packages and drawing packages, people would go like, I can't draw. I'm not into that. And I always say, like, who cares? And I would show them some of the cruddy drawings that directors and film directors, and even designers would draw, like chicken scratch, ugly stuff. But yet those are the things that communicated something that allowed designers to be constrained. It has to look a little bit like this, right?

So a crappy drawing is so vital to communication. But the I can't is much broader. A lot of people don't even want to deal with creative people, for good reason. They're nuts. But I think that you don't have to be individually talented to be able to get the results. And that's why I thought of this topic as interesting. I think the topic is that people are like, I'm not creative so I want to hire a designer. But the reality is, somebody's got to control that and give the constraints to that. And that's kind of roughly what I wanted to talk about.

So I actually don't think it's I can't because I know for sure that anyone can. They just have to be willing to. You have to commit to it. I'm a firm believer in that whole 10,000 hours thing, in the sense that, yeah, the first time sucks and you can give up. Or you can say, I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. And that is, interesting enough, that's a parallel to design thinking, the whole iterative process. And we have to live that. That's how we improve. That's how we feel challenge.

So what I'm going to share with you is literally not-- probably laughed out of schools and stuff. You won't want to teach this to your students. But the point is, I just think that, I'm going to share with you a deconstruction of kind of how I view working with creatives to get results because anyone can do it.

So why is this important? I mean, I think it's important for a number of reasons. I listed all of these. And by the way, I mean, no one needs to take any notes. I will email any of this crap out to anybody, or new stuff if you want. Totally willing to share. I think creativity is really important because we all know that it's a race to the bottom, right? I can buy any tool that you guys use and I'll use it too.

Anyone can offer pretty much parity functionality. But then you're going to compete with price? Good luck. So I think it's really important to look at the problem. The problem might not be those things. So you need to, I think, have very creative approaches to stay competitive, right? I mean, sometimes when I look at companies that have these really, really extensive roadmaps, sometimes I actually go, your problem is not your roadmap because no one gives a crap whether you add those features or not. What are they actually self-identifying with? With your crappy logo? With your inaccessible business cards that are too small for my old eyes to adjust to read?

There's all these little subtle things that we can adopt into solving a problem that we typically pigeonhole ourselves and say, well, I'm just a developer so I'm going to fix this piece, when I actually think we only ask why. I think the second one is pretty important. We are dealing with a very sophisticated audience. And when I say sophisticated, I don't mean smart. I mean, people are exposed to 3D visualization by default. People are exposed to touch things and that's what we're used to. That's the new normal.

But it means that we have to be prepared to engage not just at the level they expect, but often we do have to find the way to generate new interest. And that kind of relates to innovation, like how do you make yourself relevant? So being aware that even a buyer, not even an end customer, or a software vendor, like all of these people are working at this level that is so much higher than it was even five years ago.

Shifting consumer behaviors, I think, is really important. Because a lot of companies think they have it nailed. And then all of a sudden an entire population base is willing to pay $1 for something when you are selling it for $50,000. And wishing that it would go back to that is a really crappy strategy. Access to technology, one of the reasons why I'm an independent right now is because I can't think of a job that I can get that would touch on all the areas of interest that I want to touch on. I want to work on AI stuff and I want to work on creative stuff. And as you can see, I want to pack artists into it because I actually really think the world can benefit from art being kind of elevated beyond just thumbnail sketches.

So access to technology is really offering people like me to work at a caliber of a much larger organization. And humans are part of that. I can suck humans in without having to learn how to program. I can suck amazing artists in without having to improve my drawing skills. So these are the options that we have, all of us have, to leverage for either our personal gain or for the gain of our business entity or corporation.

Changing workforce is important. The reason why it's really cool to get third party help now is because this whole pattern that's happened now is most of the workforce is getting to a point where it's remote or freelance. So you're getting a ton of talent out there that you could not have afforded in the past. And I'm going to actually show you some stuff in some of my projects where I'm able to actually get some of my buddies and contacts, or people I don't know who work at ILM or at key brands that just want to do something else for a little bit. So two hours of their time, their thought into one project, who are you competing against?

You're able to have like Lucas Arts dudes right in there from the beginning. And why? Because people are looking for interesting problems to work on. So anyways, the bullet points. The world is changing. It actually means that all of us can engage people in many more ways than before. Democratization, we talked about that.

Automation, so Andrew mentioned that. I'm both sides, Skynet as well as, yeah, it's kind of cool. But it's going to be a whole lot more than drive our cars, right? Because what that means for all of us is it means that we have to reinterpret what the experience of sitting in a car is. Do we all sit in the back with sippy cups and watch movies now? Like it isn't just the car of we know it today. So I'm just-- like an example of that, yes, that's probably tip over first. But then, they're going to run our business.

Oh, I'm was talking to a reporter the other day and we were talking about how crazy it's going to be because you know when you incorporate a business? It becomes a legal entity. And then we, as humans, we feed that entity by saying, these are the brand words that we use. This is what we care about. This is our mission. And I think that's awesome. Can you imagine when AI goes like, well, I am now the company. You told me all these things and now I'm going enforce that. How crazy will that be that the entity itself will be able to be, not necessarily self-aware, but that it will be running the directives like in Robocop, remember? Boop, boop, boop. It's going to happen, dude.

This is the other reason, which personally I think is super important. I always struggled when I was working with designers, architects. We were always chasing films for our inspiration. We were always chasing those guys that we went to school with, but they ended up working at-- they ended up working at Pixar while we chose the path of this. And they were so free and unconstrained, aside from time and their director. And yet, we know that most of the product innovation has been driven by demand that we did not generate. It's because we wanted to be these guys with tricorders.

We wanted to be people sticking crap in our ears to listen to stuff. And that's all become true. And you know, all of it's come true. That's the thing. I haven't looked at one ridiculous thing that's like, that's ridiculous fantasy. Like, oh my god, aside from the aliens, which you know, maybe. I don't know yet. But aside from that side of sci-fi, we've made the things that we want, real. So I think it's really important for us to take control of this as creators, as designers, because it's a huge opportunity. Otherwise we're going to be catching up to-- remember those times all those people loved that movie 40 years ago, that's why all the products look like that.

That's what all of us are willing to buy those Darth Vader outfits now, and it's OK to wear them to work. Here's an example of a friend of mine. He actually has graduated as an industrial designer. And he ended up getting a job at Ubisoft. And his name is Martin Deschambault. He's a concept artist, amazing designer, and he just got his first book out. And that book is all the dreams he had as a kid. So even though he had a design job at Ubisoft working on crazy titles, he still had the dreams that he had as a child that he finally got out as an adult.

So this is awesome. I was lucky enough to be part of the book launch last week, so I really thought I'd give a shout out because we think a lot of things are dead. Like books, why do I buy that? I can get it on a Kindle or whatever. But like all these things, you know, creative people find ways. So what's the problem? What is the problem? What did I write?

Yeah, we talked about that. So what happens when you can't compete? You know you can't compete on price and functionality. So what do you need? What is it that makes customers or makes partners think that you're awesome? This one's super important but obvious-- you know that I totally think it's credible. I don't have the right people or I'm not good at managing. No, you got to do it. You got to do it.

And my point is, I actually don't think we should leave it to movie makers to define the demand in the next 10 years. I think we can figure out ways because nobody says that we can't make movies and because of YouTube, because of all these-- actually, I have friends that don't even do creative stuff that have had Netflix pitches that have been approved. Access, right?

So the value of working with creative people is you don't necessarily know what this magic thing after you think about it, as you emerge from the pool of thought, you don't even know what this magic golden thing is. So that's why I think it's really important to network with people, to work with people, to deliberately work with people that you don't even think relate to what you do. That's what innovation is. Innovation is not invention. Invention is I made something that didn't exist.

Whereas innovation is you're taking pieces and you're providing new value from existing components. And you know, that's like cooking, the fusion thing. Throw on some-- throw some kimchi on those eggs and that's the new thing. And it really is parallel to that. So that makes it a lot easier. I'm not asking anyone to write patents to solve a problem. I'm asking people to think of ways of what we have to deliver new value, to stay ahead.

So what can a creative person do? Some of you guys are creative, so I know it's meaningless. But those of you who are not, when you think about pairing yourself up with somebody who is a creative, and there's a lot of different types as we talked about, what can they do? They're really good at looking at a problem in a completely different way, even though they might not have the domain expertise, they're sometimes good at all of a sudden researching it and they will see things that, even though you stare at it for your entire career, you don't look at it that way.

So you get a lot of fresh perspective, fresh ideas. So that's something that I generally-- I get asked to look at crazy problems of industries I know nothing about, and then it kind of works for the people I work with. They're like, we did not think of that. We did not think that was allowed. And I'm like, what does that mean, that wasn't allowed? They're really great at giving you specialties. So if you already know exactly what you want, but you just want it rendered in a super crazy, luscious, disturbing awesome way, you can find a guy for that.

And if you want something that's a little bit more raw, and discovery-oriented, you'll be able to find people who are really strong at that. You might not find someone who's good at all of it, but that's kind of the cool thing I'm trying to describe. You actually are able to-- it's kind of like the app for that, there's a human for that. They generate ideas and as I said, they execute content based on your instructions.

So how do you do this? So I randomly go on Google and just grab a whole bunch of process images. I'm a huge fan of process. But the reality is, processes are really dependent on who's involved in the process. So when I grab these images, it's just to show process is important. I don't care what process you use. But you have to find a process that works with who is involved so that you can get your task done. Yeah, so all these things are great. They show sequences. They show steps.

Often I've been thinking of them more as which way books. We have a chance to write our own which way book, and that's really what a process is. You're trying to build a framework by which you can survive all the, well, what happens if it didn't work? You should have a plan for that, a framework. So this is one way that I think that all of us can start on a creative project with some peers right away. First one is just freaking get started. That's the hardest commit. That's the commit button.

Now all it needs is someone to commit saying, I do want to do something. And as we know, you can procrastinate it out and go, I'm not going to do-- oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. My point is, you have to do that one first because everything else is meaningless. Define-- if you take a look at design thinking, descriptions, they have this whole thing that you don't define until you've empathized and understood exactly what you want. OK, good. It's true, right?

But my point is that the definition is an ongoing piece. So once you commit, then decide what it is that you want, what is it that you're doing with a creative person? And then you write that brief. After you write that brief, then I describe here that you recruit them after, but that you also have to rewrite the brief after you've recruited them because the thing that you thought you wanted, and you meet this person and you're like, this person is so amazing. I want them to do more or less. So your brief is not static, I guess is what I'm saying.

And then it's called test or it's called assessment in a lot of processes, but that's true. You should always get feedback, you should always figure out your stuff. Test it and make sure it's right. Oh, that's a weird transition. Yeah, just get started. We talked about it, commit. It could be a tiny thing. It can be tiny. It could be like, I think our company needs a song. And that is low risk. And if everyone hates the song, then you don't roll it out. And then you went through the experience of making a song.

But yeah, it would be great for it to be something small and useful to yourself or to your company, a proof point. And then draft up the plan. Of course I just put this generic decision tree meaning, you kind of figure out roughly the plan here. And then of course-- why is it doing the droplet? Well, you guys have to deal with that, not me. Yeah, so when you define it, my description of that is requirements. And all of you guys know how to deal with requirements and write requirements.

But I think one of the big things is the goal. A lot of people have a really hard time with the goal. And then they get stuck with ROI things and they're scared that their manager's going to yell at them because it doesn't have ROI, which is a good thing. But my whole point is that goal really has to define what you want to measure. And that measure might be, hey, are we actually able to bring in some fresh talent that only costs us this much money, and we have these new ideas? Or we have a new logo? Or we have that song.

So you have to come up with that, and rationalize that, and then communicate that who your stakeholders are. Because I'm on my own, I don't have to justify anything. So my goals are very modest. For example, like even when I work with artist do these images, I love bringing artists in to just-- this slide is going to talk about this and they give me this weird crap back, but it's because I give them the creative freedom. But those are because my goals are, I really want to see what working dynamic I have with this artist that I loved his work for 20 years.

So my success quotient is like, I hated working with them. Check, that was very successful. If it was that I was selling 50,000 t-shirts of this, then I could tell you I haven't sold 50,000 t-shirts and I totally failed. But why set myself up for that? The context. Your definition has to describe the context of this work because you're bringing on people who don't have the context. And you don't want to give them a complicated story, life story. You need to get them on board really fast so they can get engaged. And as I said, part of that's what success means and it's great when you know for yourself but you also can communicate that to your freelance artist, your consultant, whoever it is you're bringing onboard, what is success? That's probably one of the critical pieces.

I love this really popular quote. I think it's true. And this is why I love words so much. I think words are like the Kung Fu of design. The more intimate you are to the problem, it's true, if you really state your problem really well, it really sets up the solution. If you have these really wonky missions from companies, you're like, did you mean this? Did you mean that? It gets harder. You're like, I wasn't sure. I thought I did the mission. So somehow being able to state your problem. GI Land, it's like knowing is half the battle, same deal, right?

So this is just a snapshot of one of the briefs I do. And some of the briefs, when I know somebody, I can actually send two lines in text and it just works. But depending on where you are, I like to put a lot of things in there. Like I even tend to put in the budget I have, the time budget in there so they can look at the assignment and go, I can't. I don't have the free time. I throw in things like the scope, meaning my specifications. If I want images, I give them the sizes and then they can ask me if, no, that's not the right size if you want it for print. But you get the conversation going.

This guy is pretty awesome. So I actually put concepts to explore. Sometimes it's like, I'm not even sure what I want, which is OK. It's like, I just need something in that direction. And then you let their skills come up right. But that's tough. For example, if you're going-- if you don't want to spend a lot of money [INAUDIBLE] a student, it's really tough to do that. It's really tough to get them to free their mind up to deliver you that magic. So you probably give them exactly what you want. Draw a guy who's holding a pen and doing this. And then they'll be more likely to succeed, until you realize that they have that special je-ne-sais-quoi and creativity.

Oh, last part is, it's important to mention in your brief, the process. That screws up everybody because here's the one thing, if you're working at a big organization, you have a process. The worst thing you can do is when you bring on the freelancer who is going to do what? 20 hours? That you make them suffer through learning your process and I'm now giving you account to our box thing, and all your images go into this folder. Do you really want to pay this guy to, you know, add that to his-- I'm just saying, you've got to find a process that really works to get the most out of that individual. And you define it in there so that you guys can book work to it.

In my case it's like, draw me these rounds of art and they we'll iterate on that. And then we'll work on a final round at x time. And they always have an emergency pull, which just like, I can't do it. I need more time, which is normal. But you need to kind of describe that. So after you have that, you recruit. It's definitely good to know what type of project you have. Because if you need a UX designer, you find a UX designer. There's no catch all. You do have to find the right talent. And that's actually, you'd think, really hard. But I was going to share with you that I think that is actually not so bad.

Once you define the project, it's really good to kind of then get a sense of the type of resource you want. And I have these little drawings I like to imagine resources as, obviously, a little person, or a small ship, which might be more than one person, or large, you know, ships which have lots of people inside doing stuff, like an agency or a partner, like going to a big company that helps you do the full service, that have project managers. It's really important because they offer different things. Really fast, nimble, individual guy is great. But if they can't manage their own time, you're screwed because they're not going to be delivering your stuff.

So do you go with a guy who has maybe an agent? Sure. Or do you go to like a full blown service that you know that, I don't care if half your team is sick, because you're an agency, you always deliver. Whereas when you realize on that that one guy and they break their arm and they can't use a mouse for six weeks, you're not going to get those renders. They're not going to come in. So yeah, you've got to pick. And maybe you think you want an individual and then it ends up being that you get a full agency because it scales, or you combine them all. Two freelancers plus half of an agency.

So where's a good place to find people? My big deal is to always go to where they are. And I mentioned communities. Committees are a great place to start. When I thought about doing this, I no longer had the big corporations that would help source talent for me. So I realized that when I was starting to go, you know, if I needed somebody to do visualizations, like architectural stuff, oh, there's a community for that. One of the things which I'll share shortly is going for the talent that you didn't expect to deliver.

So I actually have used Art Station recently and I was quite blown away by it. But if you want an industrial designer, something that actually has much more of that design thinking process built into them, Coroflot is pretty good. I put in a couple of different types of conferences, awesome. Hackathons I've go into, too. You go into a Hackathon. You hang out and mentor some of these kids. And all the sudden you're like, I've got to find a project to work with this guy. He's so awesome. So it is a networking exercise, and that is painful for some people.

But it's really great to meet people face to face. It's really great to be able to see their work on any of these community-type sites. And let me share a story that I had. So when I started on my own, I was always really, should I only ask my friends? I have lots of friends, I should ask-- but you don't want to do that because they're busy and they do you a favor. And then all the sudden you're driving them to the airport forever because they gave you one drawing. I actually bought an ad, right, and actually the Art Station guys are here.

And I actually bought an ad and I said I roughly am looking for people who can do this range of art. And I actually specifically said, I'm only looking for freelance. And I was nervous because all the job posting at Art Station are beside Ubisoft and Epic Games. And I'm just putting this thing like, does anybody have five or six hours a month to do-- I got, in the first day, 300 applicants. So that's 300 links to portfolios and letters of saying why they should help me. And then by the end of GDC, because I posted it while I was at GDC, 1,700 different artists from around the world.

I know. You're looking at me because I was like, what? I couldn't hire people. I couldn't even find resumes. But the cool part was that what I discovered was I hit a sweet spot. And I won't tell you the company, but one letter said this, it's like this sounds abstract but it sounds interesting because you mentioned that you wanted much more future thinking art. I've been drawing chests for eight years. You know, fantasy games are popular. The guy's been drawing chests for eight years. Are they beautiful chests with gold and stuff flying out? Yeah, for sure.

But he was desperately looking for a project that was like sci-fi. So I suddenly had all this access to talent that works on stuff that blows your mind in whatever, Battlefront or whatever you play. And all of a sudden you're like, this guy wants to work with me. I loved that. And that was only an example of showing, like, when you put something out there and you're honest about your definition, my definition of what a freelance, how many hours, being honest about it. I actually got much more. I actually had to have three friends help me go through the portfolios.

And the worst thing is I had to respond with MailChimp. How do you respond to 1,700 people, right? So review. This is actually hard for people who haven't been trained in creative. Because it's like, what do you do? Like when people deliver the work now, you're staring at it going, I don't even really know if this is good. So that's a big problem, except I think you can handle it by one. You make sure you set the milestones and review stages. Meaning, if you're bringing someone on, don't just say, I'm waiting for them to deliver. Go, hey, can you show me some sketches after the first few days?

You work that out so that you have a chance to get into it. And collaborate as much as often. Some creative people I'll just leave until they deliver because I trust them. But other people, you don't, so you kind of figure that out. One thing that's really important, there's a lot of amazing tools to allow good collaboration and annotation. I was going to mention a whole bunch of stuff, like it's really awesome how the collaboration tools, like even in BIM 360 Team, Fusion collaboration, where you're actually send stuff in.

But the reality is, when you're bringing in people who aren't of that world, you're not going to make them learn to sign on to some Autodesk single sign on ID. So you find the lowest possible, you know-- like here's an example. We started using Google Docs because I was changing the descriptions. So he goes, yeah. And then he started pasting stuff in there. And then he started saying stuff. And it was pretty awesome. This two page brief ended up growling with all of his concepts sketches inside. That was pretty awesome. And what did I say? I love it, see. It worked out.

Oh yeah, here's another thing. First, when you actually get stuff back, let it soak. Don't react. I had a friend send me some stuff and I hated it. And I didn't want-- and I slept over it. And then I realized something when I was thinking about it, she was designing from the outside in. And I was designing from the inside out. I wanted stuff to be me. And I'm like, oh, I'm Canadian too, so I'm really subtle and passive. But she was like, oh no, you have a freaking big mouth. Your company needs to be this.

I thought about it a lot. I ended up taking all of her stuff, 100%, no changes and I actually used it. Because if I hated it after two months, after I printed the business cards and stuff, I'd throw it away and change it, right? No one said I can't. So that is something that's really important to remember. Another piece is to leverage others. This is a photograph of me in Portland. I'm going to share one of my projects as a case study later. But I wasn't sure if it was a good idea, so actually leveraged my relationship with Tinker Hatfield. Years ago he started working with Thomas and I because he was using sketchbook to do all his shoe designs with Federer and stuff, like real drawing on his iPad.

So I showed him all these concepts. And the guy spent two hours with me going through every single concept piece. And he said, this stuff has meat, you should do it. And what I'm saying is, if you don't feel like you know how to judge between, let's say, three logo types that you're given, talk to people. Of course, on the converse side, I can tell you-- I can have a lot of designer friends who have perfect designs only to have their client's wife say, I don't like green. And then, zip. It's like what?

But the reality is, from a client side, though, you have to use the tools you trust. You can't have some freelance guy telling you this is the perfect thing for the future. And then you just go with it because you're scared of them. You have to make the call because you own it. You're paying for that. You are the client. And just be really good at providing feedback, especially if you want to keep the relationship. If you just go silent after someone, even if it was a good job or a bad job, if you don't say it didn't work out because that's not the style I wanted, that's really kind of a cruel way of managing, you know, somebody who you're hoping to have a working relationship with.

And if it works, then you can absorb external talent into your own crazy pipelines. And this is how I envision my pipelines, one idea has a billion things that have to be done and each of them have their own process of ideating and all that. So you integrate these people strategically into where they will help you. So here's case study mode. So the that picture where you saw Tinker kind of looking at art, that whole thing about taking back inspiring the future, I've been struggling at that. I always thought about, oh, what if I design products that are in the future? And then what if I build the context, and that means I have to build the whole world.

And then I have a lot of friends that do that and I realize how hard it is. When you try to build a world, that's difficult, right? Like you see them in the movies. They build what Terell building looks like. And then you see them for 18 seconds. And you go like, sometimes it actually goes-- 18 seconds is enough. But I struggle with that, because I was going, I want to design these things but I can't find a way to tackle a world. I had to build a context. So what happens is I wanted to build-- I decided to build sports from the future, not as fiction. I wanted to build sports in the future as a context for everything else around sports.

I'm not interested in sports. But I think that it gives a nucleus that allows me freedom to build how they live, maybe even what they eat. But I don't have to make it a big deal like in-- so what I do is I report the news. And what's interesting about this project was it required me to do a lot of design thinking. I had to come up with the context and a framework of what the future was. And then I realized because sports is only beautiful because it's non-deterministic. Otherwise it's fiction. I could write a story, this player wins. This player dies. I didn't want that.

So we had to create the rules. And that rule went into the simulator, which is basically a headless game. So then the machine actually started generating scores. And then those scores and possession time and all these things were then hand it off like a ticker tape to sportswriters that I hired. So I have a guy from ESPN, a writer from National Post, they started contributing. And they started reading these things and they're like, why did the goalie score? And I go, I don't know. Why don't you tell me?

And they were like, this is weird. And they started writing. And they got hooked. They got hooked to reporting what this machine was telling them and figuring out why things happened. And then from that, I just needed people to actually visual-- I don't know how to write stories. So I have artists actually interpreting the stories. So it's this kind of chain. And then that goes up to the audience. And the audience actually hopefully gives me feedback that affects the design. And eventually that's going to help me eventually build products that are today but of the future, because it runs parallel. I'm running real time 60 years ahead every day.

So it's a-- and I just can't wait to make the fantasy football of fantasy football. It's a total mind trip, right? It's like, but it's not real. But is it? Because why do we want to buy things that we watched in movies 30 years ago? It was seeded that you want that 30 years ago. I'm playing with pretending and predicting the designs that suit the context of this world.

But anyways, what I wanted to show you, with all the little different pieces, it's a bit discombobulated, but that means I had to build the league. So that's the Martian Arrow Football League, and football as in soccer. So I needed to get a really good artists to give me the league logo. Art, lots of iterations and we ended up with them this kind of cool kicking man, which looks like the jumping man, on purpose it looks like the jumping man. But that was really helpful to set context. Graphics kind of help us imagine pieces. Then I had to realize that I had to back-- I had to figure out how population growth on Mars would be.

So I had to go full spreadsheet. I had to look at different growth patterns, how much immigration versus natural births. So I actually had like so many spreadsheets that started defining all these because I wanted it to be non-deterministic. But I also needed a population that could sustain a professional league, which in my head I set in a little small town world. Yeah, you can totally see 100,000 people across multiple colonies being able to have sport, like clubs. So this was related to the context or the definition.

So I had to do all this front end work to figure out the context of this planet. And then I started getting people-- this is Kurt Kaufman. He worked on Star Wars Episode One and Two. I was able to buy some of his time. Not a lot. Like his day rate was a bit insane. But when I tried getting people who were much cheaper, I had to spend that much more time. Like once he whipped this out, I was like, of course there's engineering projects going around. The colonies themselves are really just where people live. And where do they work?

So a lot of ideas are coming out and then we start talking about how people live. And how people live, meaning like do they carve into it, because there's all the radiation? Like that's so expensive to deal with. Maybe something of the colonies go underground, so that affects the architecture. So these are ideation drawings. And then we stopped doing ideation. He started doing these, which at first I was going, aw, I want the sexy sketchy stuff. But the reality is, he cranked these out so fast, I got like 12 of these in a day. And I ended up not being able to choose, so I decided to use all of them.

Like we started making all these, what we called, inverted-- these inverted skyscrapers, where they're basic cylinders are dug. And you know, we'd have these reflectors that reflect the light into these skyscrapers. And what's crazy was we're like, then what's the machine that built that? So we then started getting into, how was that built? Because I needed that all this stuff for the context of the definition of-- like some people were now going to have to-- when I write articles-- are going to refer to this material when they talk about how the world exists.

So I had to build all the concept around even guys kicking a ball, which, what do they wear? Base layers. I had a lot of problems. I got a little bit too anal. I don't want it to look too armored. It's not an Iron Man thing. These are EV suits. You know, there's no atmosphere or very little atmosphere, but it's protective. But they need pads. And I actually ended up, honestly, wasting way too much time on this because I got too passionate about it. The funny thing is, I ended up going with this and just defining that I needed a lycra suit to go on top. Because it made no sense to me that you'd paint the all the colors on to these armored pieces.