Will Larche

Will Larche on the synergy between design and engineering

Code and Creativity

*Design Notes is a podcast by Liam Spradlin about creative work and what it teaches us. This season begins with a special series [celebrating ten years](https://design.google/library/celebrating-ten-years-of-material-design) since the launch of Material Design, which explores the inception, evolution, and future of Google’s design system.*

*The third episode features Will Larche, who leads an engineering team at Google that tackles the ways that AI might improve engineering work. Larche talks about his path to become an engineering manager at Google (and its relationship to his work in musical theater). A self-proclaimed “design fan,” Larche describes engineering as “a study of choices.” Here, he explains how the development of Material over the years has led to closer collaboration between design and engineering, and imagines how new AI experiments might open up an abstract new era of interface design à la* Star Trek.

The early impact of Material Design:
 
## “When I was managing designers, I had already seen the power of Material Design to help someone fundamentally, and change the path of a product from *uh-oh* to *wow*.”

How engineers can approach ideas with a “maybe” attitude:
 
## “Whenever designers, product people, marketers, whoever, come to an engineer, the engineer needs to say *maybe*. Listen to it, evaluate it, and give them the time to see that it might still be no — but don’t start with no.”

The ability to personalize UI with Material 3:
 
## “Dynamic color, user-selected contrast, the HCT colorspace… those are the greatest things that I’ve touched here, because they brought new concepts that hadn’t existed before in order to personalize UI.”

The new frontier of AI:
 
## “If we kind of gave these experiments and let the computers do things, we might end up with new paradigms, new components, new sorts of things that just haven't been explored yet. And then we could end up with that *Star Trek* design, because it organically happened and worked for somebody, which I think is really cool.”

Building love and joy into the details of an interface:
 
## “You don’t cry while you’re cooking, because then people will get sad when they eat.”

1_Will_Larche

Find a complete transcript of the episode [here](https://storage.googleapis.com/gd-misc/DesignNotes/DesignNotes_Transcript_Will-Larche.pdf).

Listen to all episodes of Design Notes [here](https://pod.link/designnotes).

Code and Creativity

“When I was managing designers, I had already seen the power of Material Design to help someone fundamentally, and change the path of a product from uh-oh to wow.”

“Whenever designers, product people, marketers, whoever, come to an engineer, the engineer needs to say maybe. Listen to it, evaluate it, and give them the time to see that it might still be no — but don’t start with no.”

“Dynamic color, user-selected contrast, the HCT colorspace… those are the greatest things that I’ve touched here, because they brought new concepts that hadn’t existed before in order to personalize UI.”

“You don’t cry while you’re cooking, because then people will get sad when they eat.”