Beauty Across the Board
Rich Fulcher on game design, UX systems, and beautifying Google products
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 since the launch of Material Design, which explores the inception, evolution, and future of Google’s design system.
For the final episode in this series, Liam talks with Rich Fulcher, former Google UX director and Material design lead. Fulcher remembers the career-defining journey of creating Material, what it was like to make beauty a UX priority, how to pressure test a system, and what he’s learned about world-building across disciplines. Today, he’s creating board games, continuing to apply the design-thinking and problem-solving skills developed during his time at Google.
In this episode, Rich Fulcher speaks about…
How being a designer shapes your worldview:
“Once you are a designer and you have been doing design thinking for decades, you never get to shed that. You still look at the rest of the world as a series of design problems or design opportunities.”
Reaching beyond functionality and achieving beauty:
“How do we not just kind of pass the toothbrush test of ‘do we make products that users use twice a day to make some meaningful difference in their lives?’ But ‘how do we make it pleasurable to use that toothbrush?’”
The simplistic world of pre-Material UX:
“This is maybe a comment that just will feel ridiculous now that it's 10 years on. But we were just living in a different world of interface design that was very like, ‘Go to this screen. Now go through the doorway and present this screen.’”
Just how crafty Material was at the start:
“I remember running down to the local hobby shop partway through Material development, and I just picked up a bunch of wooden shapes, a bunch of different colors of paper, varieties of thicknesses, just like scrapbooking paper and things like that.”
The resounding influence of the Material system:
“We didn't know it immediately — but in Material, we were building a system for building design systems.”
Design by Specht Studio x Google Design. Motion by Yanis Berrewaerts.