When Google Design Went URL to IRL

Rob Giampietro is Head of Creative at Notion in New York. Previously at Google on the Insight＋Innovation, Google AI/RMI, and Material Design teams, Rob’s key projects included the first SPAN Design & Technology global conferences, an overhaul of the Google Fonts directory, and a Google-branded customization of Material Design.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Rob delves into the origins of the SPAN conference that helped define the design identity of Google, and explores how creating unique cultural events for a global audience brought Material to life in a whole new way.

In many people’s minds, Google’s design reputation in the early 2010s was associated with the “41 shades of blue” moment — overly tested, engineering-led, and lacking a singular vision — so Material Design, a conscious attempt by Google to reset its internal design narrative, came as a really pleasant surprise.

I got excited about Material Design by using it. When it launched in 2014, I was leading brand and interactive work at a studio called Project Projects and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. As someone who made websites, I saw Material as a way to make them faster and more consistent. As a teacher working to update a design curriculum for my students, it was also a great reference guide to start learning how to make stuff in the digital world.

At the time, Material was gaining traction in the design community, but Google wanted to broaden the number of people who knew about it and felt connected to it. Because it was a free and open resource, they wanted to encourage people to use it! I was brought on as the UX design manager and site lead for the New York City Material Design studio, leading creative projects for our design outreach efforts. One of those efforts was a 2015 design conference called SPAN: Conversations about Design and Technology.

Like FORM the year prior, SPAN started a conversation. It was a way to activate Google’s tools and ideas about design, in physical spaces around the world. We wanted that dialogue to be two-way — what we could offer the community and what we could learn from the community. It was global in terms of Google’s scale, and hyperlocal in terms of being extra aware of the communities and sites where we were gathering people. With a few years until our next major release of Material Theming in 2018, we realized it was a great way to keep the dialogue about our system open and active. We also felt it was important that the conference offered more than just panels about Material Design, because Google is as much a cultural actor as it is a technological actor. With the interfaces people use everyday, we’re putting culture out in the world, and we wanted to be thoughtful about that and try to make good culture.

The first year we hosted SPAN, the event was held in two cities: New York and London. We created a book, the SPAN Reader, that became a kind of collector’s item.

And we had such a fantastic lineup. John Harwood, author of the book The Interface, chronicled the transformative history of IBM’s design program. Nick Benson, a MacArthur genius grant–winning stone carver, spoke about materiality. Taeyoon Choi led a workshop on how to put together a handmade computer. Paul Ford expanded on his groundbreaking Bloomberg piece What Is Code?, which had inspired everyone on our team in the months leading up to the first edition of SPAN.

I’ll never forget the moment when Luna Maurer went on stage. She’s an amazing artistic designer whose work explores how algorithms and responsive design can be used to make these unique, unpredictable forms and modes of social interaction. She gave a talk about her work and methodology, which she calls “conditional design,” to all these Android developers, and they gave her a standing ovation. It was, like: Wow, we can build a bridge built between design culture and deep technology. It was one of the most incredible convergences of design, engineering, and creativity that I've ever been a part of — and it did its job, helping establish Google as a design authority.

When AIGA honored Google with the Corporate Leadership Award in 2018, just a few years after our first SPAN, we felt like the perception in the design community was starting to shift to something more inspiring than “41 shades of blue.” SPAN had a significant role to play in catalyzing public understanding of the growing importance of design within Google.