Scott Dadich is a designer, magazine editor, and filmmaker. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of WIRED Magazine, he now runs Godfrey Dadich Partners, a brand strategy and design company, where he is the Co-Founder and CEO. He joins to discuss his illustrious career and the multi-Emmy nominated series he created and produced, “Abstract: The Art of Design.”
Debbie Millman:
Scott Dadich is a designer, a magazine editor, and a filmmaker. He was the Creative Director of Texas Monthly magazine before he became the Creative Director of WIRED magazine. He worked with Apple and Adobe to create the WIRED tablet edition and oversaw the development of Conde Nast digital magazine storytelling, which included the New Yorker‘s iPad edition as well. Scott was then appointed Editor-in-Chief of WIRED magazine where he brought someone named Barack Obama in to guest edit an issue, and he did this while Barack Obama was still President. Scott has created and produced the multi-Emmy nominated series for Netflix called Abstract: The Art of Design. More recently, he founded and is now CEO of Godfrey Dadich Partners, a brand strategy and design company. Scott Dadich, welcome to Design Matters.
Scott Dadich:
Debbie, thank you so much for having me. This is a total thrill.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, for me too. Scott, I have a quite specific first question for you. Is it true you measure the precise temperature of the water that you use to brew your coffee with?
Scott Dadich:
This is true. Yes, this is true. I was gifted a beautiful Fellow kettle a few years ago by its designers, very good friends of mine, Josh Morenstein and Nick Cronan over at Branch. And I found out that once I got that temperature right to 187 and had been starting to measure my beans, that it was the perfect pour over ritual for me. So a combination of strength of coffee and speed of delivery and yes, I’m just a little bit obsessive as you can tell.
Debbie Millman:
I kind of like that. I will share some of my obsessive tendencies with you as well to even more deeply bond. But curious to know if you really can tell the difference between 186 and 188?
Scott Dadich:
That is not a thing that my palate is so finely tuned to. This is a bit of laziness. This is the exact temperature that I can start drinking it as soon as I finish brewing it, I don’t have to wait for it to cool off. So if you extra beans in there and you get the strength you’re looking for, but the speed of caffeine intake is augmented.
Debbie Millman:
I also understand you organize your sneakers and your iPhone apps by color and it bothers you when the canned beverages in your office refrigerator aren’t positioned so that the labels all face outwards.
Scott Dadich:
Oh, boy. Yes. You have your sources, don’t you?
Debbie Millman:
Well, I was so happy to see this because I’m like that too with labels. So in my shower, all of the shampoo and soap and all of that, all of the bottles need to be facing outwards, and all the sort of pumps need to be facing in a certain direction. And when Roxane and I first got together and she saw me do that, she was like, “Whoa.” A little Sleeping With the Enemy I think- [inaudible 00:03:24]
Scott Dadich:
This is entirely irrational-
Debbie Millman:
I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movie.
Scott Dadich:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Like, “What do you mean? It has to be neat. It has to be an-” [inaudible 00:03:30]
Scott Dadich:
This is how the world works or it should work.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I can tell when something is a millimeter off on a table, if the vase is not in the right position or the glasses aren’t exactly right, and when I saw this I thought, “Oh my god, my kindred spirit.”
Scott Dadich:
There are more people like you, Debbie. Yes, I am one of them.
Debbie Millman:
Scott, you grew up in Lubbock, is that how you pronounce it-
Scott Dadich:
Lubbock.
Debbie Millman:
Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock, Texas.
Scott Dadich:
Yes. Lubbock, Texas.
Debbie Millman:
And what you’ve described was a house stacked with magazines. What was your family reading at that time?
Scott Dadich:
My mom was a nursing instructor and professor at School of Medicine at Texas Tech, so she always had textbooks around. My dad was a voracious reader as well, so there was always ephemera and my mom was grading papers, but magazines were a big part of that reading and that sort of lifestyle. I remember very explicitly having Martha Stewart Living show up at the house and I don’t remember the exact year, but it was a revelation to go through those pages.
Speaking of finding joy in ordering things and color organization and the sort of frameworks that Martha and Gail were providing in its pages, that was just an amazing discovery for me. But I remember getting Texas Monthly at the checkout stand at the local grocery store. I remember the first time I started subscribing to Road and Track magazine and having that come in the mailbox every month. It just felt like this blast from the future, this sort of letter from the future that got to arrive and what was a pretty sleepy sort of town and a simple lifestyle, simple people, good people, but it was getting that window into what felt like a much bigger and broader world that was so compelling.
Debbie Millman:
I loved when Martha Stewart repositioned housekeeping to home keeping and I felt that was-
Scott Dadich:
Yes. Wasn’t that brilliant?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, so much more respectful to the craft.
Scott Dadich:
Well, and finding a joy in a study, a photo study. Looking at the different hues and colors of eggs. It was just like, what a beautiful idea, and it just caused you to slow down and take life in a different way and really take and note the observations of form and color, utility in ways that I don’t think I’d ever contemplated before.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you discovered quite a bit of joy in the pages of Martha Stewart Living and now I understand. I was going to ask you why and eggs. That’s all we need to know, eggs.
Scott Dadich:
Eggs. It all comes back to eggs.
Debbie Millman:
Now, the first magazine you bought yourself was the August 1994 issue of WIRED magazine. Why that magazine and why that particular issue?
Scott Dadich:
Oh my God, I remember that really explicitly. The chance to be at Book People, this wonderful bookstore in Austin and I didn’t have any money at all and I would scrape together coins out of the couch cushion to basically go and see what magazine I could buy. And my roommate and I were obsessed with Myst, the PC game. And I think this magazine had random Robin Miller on the cover of it was Blue, it was that classic sort of WIRED severe photo angle and neon inks. And I probably stood there reading the magazine at the bookstore, but it was one of those that absolutely made it to the cash wrap and I think the $4 left in my pocket to make sure I took that back to the dorm, that magazine, it was a really compelling moment for me to sort of understand that there were these huge worlds out there and people creating those worlds, designing them and the sort of compelling packaging of that experience. And that magazine in particular was just a total revelation for me.
Debbie Millman:
You said that at that very moment you fell in love with what magazines could do and reading that reminded me that I had one of those moments as well. My mom always got McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal and I loved reading them. I loved the Betsy McCall paper dolls that you can cut out in the back of the magazine and of course, can this marriage be saved, from Ladies Home Journal. But she had a very, very wealthy friend named Carolyn, and every now and then she would invite us over to swim in her pool and I must’ve been about 12, 13 years old and Carolyn had a subscription to Vogue and that is the moment I fell in love with magazines and could not believe that women looked like Patty Hansen.
Scott Dadich:
It’s such a transformative moment. It really feels like… Our friend DJ Stout calls that variations on a rectangle, but I still love that idea that that page, that rectangle can transport you in time and space to meet these fabulous people like Patty or Randa- [inaudible 00:08:44]
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Scott Dadich:
There’s something really special about that format.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you were also interested in cars and racing and you built so many model cars, your entire bedroom looked like a model making factory. And you’ve said that the magazine Motor Trend and Road & Track also became what you described as a lifeline out of Lubbock, and I’m wondering why you felt like you needed a lifeline?
Scott Dadich:
That’s a great question. I found so much joy in making and craft and I started probably with model planes, but the cars ended up speaking to me more because probably some of the design elements, the flashy colors and the swooping curves and the sort of sex appeal of sports cars and being able to design them and make them myself with my own hands in my bedroom was an amazing discovery for me. If I’m honest about growing up in Lubbock, while there were wonderful people and it was a very safe and sort of quaint place to grow up, there wasn’t a lot of activity. I remember being bored quite a bit. It’s a farming town, really honest folks working the land and trying to do their best to make it in sometimes a very harsh environment. The weather is strange and the storms are big, but when you look at the landscape, I don’t remember seeing a mountain or big trees for a long, long time, probably into middle school or high school, and I don’t remember going to the ocean until I was probably late high school.
So the idea that there was this world out there, again, that sort of perspective into other fields and pursuits, and I think probably I’m not alone in finding so much vision and appeal in motor racing in particular. The sort of white knuckling and the thrills and the crashes and also the design elements really spoke to me. That’s why I love F1 today, and the deliveries, and the performance issues, and the off-track drama, and the racing line, and the physics of it all. It really sort of tied together so many passions and interests for me.
Debbie Millman:
At that point did you consider doing something professionally with cars, whether it be a driver or designer?
Scott Dadich:
I didn’t in terms of a racing career, I’d never had the resources even to contemplate that, that could be a possibility. But I definitely got the bug around car design and I remember that I was good at math, and science in school and I had good grades there, and speaking to high school guidance counselors and friends and being encouraged to look into that idea. And again, the magazines that I had been exposed to were really vehicles to think about how that might be possible, whether that was going to engineering school, pursuing mechanical engineering, getting a job in Detroit, that was one of the… I remember one of the early ideas that could be a path for me to pursue that passion. Ultimately, it wasn’t the math part of it. While I was good at it, I just didn’t find the interest in it and it wasn’t sort of the vector into what ultimately I was able to discover in design being my passion.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you excelled so much at math and science. Your high school guidance counselor really encouraged your parents to push you towards a career in mechanical engineering and you ended up getting a scholarship to I believe the University of Texas.
Scott Dadich:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
Did you turn that scholarship down?
Scott Dadich:
Eventually I did. I went the first year as a freshman and began that coursework. University of Texas, a great school, but what I found really through that first and second semester, that wasn’t the right school for me. I was in massive math classes with a thousand people in beginning coursework and then doing homework late hours and early hours. And the sort of complexities and it was really the first time that I was pulled away from ultimately that safe environment of Lubbock. It was a lot. I was also sick. I was suffering from anorexia at the time, so I wasn’t eating and I wasn’t healthy. So it was sort of a combinatory effect of being in the wrong path, needing to focus on getting well and addressing the issues underlying the anorexia. And finding something a little bit closer to what would ultimately be my path.
I dropped out of engineering school and dropped some of my math coursework and started to look at radio, television and film and took some classes there that spring semester. But ultimately it was a decision and supported really by incredible healthcare providers at University of Texas to withdraw and re-enroll at Texas Tech and basically start over. I moved back in with my best friend from high school and we got an apartment. And just basically start with a clean slate and figure out what was going to be my path because engineering wasn’t going to be it even though the skill mesh was sort of there on paper.
Debbie Millman:
How did your parents feel about this pivot?
Scott Dadich:
I don’t know. I think they were pretty upset. We didn’t come from any means and my mom worked really hard, as did my dad. So to have a scholarship provided to me and the grades that I had worked hard to get in high school that facilitated that, that was something I had to put on the shelf and walk away from, I think was pretty tough. Ultimately though, they were supportive of the decision and provided me with the space to go figure it out. And as I was becoming an older human being and making decisions for myself, they really stepped back to let me make those mistakes and make those affirmations and make the choices that ultimately would lead me to some success.
Debbie Millman:
As I was doing my research and came across some of the information that you’ve just shared, I was struck by how hard that must have been, but also how much courage it took to really take a stand for your own life despite not knowing what could unfold. That’s really, really incredible to say I don’t want to do what’s come so easy to me, to do something I yet have discovered I want to do. It really is quite remarkable, especially what ultimately how your life has unfurled.
Scott Dadich:
Well, thank you, Debbie. It was scary. I remember basically feeling that I had no choice and that if I stayed on that path and kept doing what I was doing that I wouldn’t survive. Just to be really blunt about it, I remember trying to walk up the hill from my dorm room at University of Texas to the cafeteria to get my one meal a day and not being able to go up the hill. I literally couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength to go up and there were a couple moments where I was like, this has got to stop. So something profound has got to change and again, that I had great healthcare at University of Texas to be able to support that decision. Saved my life. I mean, full stop.
Debbie Millman:
You moved in with your best friend that you just mentioned and he was working at the very first bagel shop in all of Lubbock and you got a job there as a bagel maker. And went in every day at three in the morning, made the bagels, got everything ready for the day and then went on to school. How did you manage that pace?
Scott Dadich:
That was a lot, but I think coming out of the trauma of being ill and the reset on schooling, it provided me with a new sense of control and it’s been a lot of therapy to unpack this and the control issues that often are at the root of an eating disorder, like the one that I’ve struggled with. That safety of that space to come in, open the shop up, I’m the only one there. It’s dark. I can put some music on and I can create and make with my hands in a very sort of solitary and focused and controlled environment and that my delivery was important. That I had to be there and the shop had to get opened up and Phil and Mary and the owners of the shop would be there and get the cash register going in the morning. I felt a great sense of responsibility.
So it put some new guardrails in place where I think I was looking for other kinds of guardrails and other mechanisms and behaviors. And I would also credit that environment and the structure and the culture and the support that I got from my bosses, the owners of the shop and my colleagues there was also part of my healing journey. And also to be around food again honestly, and to be making food actually provided me a little bit of safety to contemplate what I was doing as an individual.
Debbie Millman:
I’m wondering if you can tell us about the day the owner, I believe Marian told you about a sign painter arriving the next day to make signs for the bagel shop.
Scott Dadich:
This was one of those, you can’t believe it kind of moments, but I’ve talked to Marian about this since then that she did. She let me know that there’d be a sign painter coming in and the shop was new. I mean this was a completely new enterprise, Phil and Marion, these wonderful people who had just recently moved to Lubbock and had this dream to open this bagel bakery. So there were various improvements happening all the time. A fresh coat of paint here or a new cash register there, some new tables and chairs. So it was a very entrepreneurial effort. It was like a very family literally a mom-and-pop shop. And Marion told me about that sign painter coming in and I was struggling. I was working hard as I could, but still I think probably making it on four or 500 bucks a month in pay, and I just leapt at the chance to make a few extra dollars.
So I offered to Marion to say, “Whatever, you’re going to pay that sign painter, pay me half and I’ll do it because I’m good at lettering and my engineering coursework.” And just having some experience in liking to draw in high school, I figured that I could do that and had some facility to do that. So Marian called my bluff and said, “Well, okay, well here’s the menu boards. I’ll get you some markers and chalks and you can go at it.” So I stayed up all night one night and bled into the morning making the bagels the next day and had the signs all ready to go.
And one of our regular customers, a woman named Sonia Aguirre came in and she asked about the new boards. “Oh, I love the new menu boards, who did those?” And Marion points at me in the back and I’m there making bagels, and I think at this time I’m 19, maybe just 20. And Sonia came back and she said, “I started my career as a sign painter and you’ve got some skill kid.” And she gave me a business card and she said, “I’m an art director at this ad agency in town. You should come see me and maybe I’ll set you up with an internship.” And I didn’t know at all what an art director was. I didn’t know that that could be a job let alone that this would be one of my life’s passions. Went to go see Sonia and sure enough she saw kindly on me and gave me an unpaid internship. So my first task was to learn QuarkXPress-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, QuarkXPress.
Scott Dadich:
She and the design director, this guy named Mike Meister that gave me… My first job was to set classified ads, so those little three-line classified ads looking for a dog groomer, selling a car, and I just loved typesetting and the rest is sort of history. It was that opportunity from the bagel boards into classified ads where my love of letter forms and setting type was affirmed just through some random happenstance of a sign painting incident.
Debbie Millman:
Now I understand you also became enraptured with Photoshop.
Scott Dadich:
Oh. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And tell us about those collages.
Scott Dadich:
Well, this was probably a few months later, maybe even a semester later because after I had taken the design internship, Mike and Sonia actually offered me a job. So I was able to work less at the bagel shop and actually start working at the agency and I shifted my major. I actually went into a design communications track and one of the first and early coursework pathways there was in the Macintosh and learning the creative suite, and this was brand new at the time. I remember the instructor at the time had just procured eight new Macintosh’s for the computer lab, and this was a radical delivery for the design school at Texas Tech. And we had lab hours and the whole nine yards, but Photoshop really captured my attention. We had one scanner and I’m still a hardcore reader of Road & Track and Car and Driver, and I would take my magazines in and scan them and then start creating Photoshop collages that were the rage at the time.
You would see these terrible ads in their pages, and I would try to recreate those. The Viper GTS with this electric blue and these big white racing stripes really captured my fancy and I would just go and spend hours and hours and hours scanning and working in Photoshop and adding layers. And that was another sort of passion point for me where the things started to click together between the love of cars and design and the technical aspects of design, the tools of design. And the technological aspects of having new tools like a Macintosh and the Creative Suite, I don’t even know if it was called the Creative Suite. We had Photoshop, we had Illustrator.
Debbie Millman:
Exactly. Yeah. Well, I think you thought at the time that you could make a whole career out of making the collages and you called it becoming a Photoshop jockey.
Scott Dadich:
I don’t know where I came up with that, but…
Debbie Millman:
I love that so much.
Scott Dadich:
I had to be… I thought this… There were still these lingering dreams of getting to Detroit and getting into the car business and this was sort of one hair-brained idea that maybe I had not been able to pursue the engineering pathway, but maybe the artistic one would be the one that ultimately got me there.
Debbie Millman:
During your senior year at Texas Tech, you were recruited to produce some communication materials for the university, and I believe this is where you first met the legendary designer DJ Stout, who was at that point, the longtime art director at Texas Monthly and was also a Texas Tech alum. What was that first meeting like with him?
Scott Dadich:
DJ came into one of our design classes, so Frank and Jane Cheatham were the August leaders of the design communications program at Texas Tech, and DJ was even then just a legendary alum. So much so that there was a case or bulletin board the sort of the shrine to DJ and his work, all of his layouts and posters and ephemera and magazines at the time produced a lot of those materials and books to sort of support the publication. So all of those got pinned up and I remember one day we were told that the guy who did all of that with the big point toward the shrine, the DJ Shrine was going to come talk to us, so you better be at class that day. And sure enough, DJ came in. There must’ve been 12 or 15 of us at a tiny class, and DJ showed us some slides and he had a whole presentation and talked about his path and his design process and showed us his sketchbooks and working with people like Dan Winters and I just was absolutely smitten.
So the dots started to click for me that even thinking back to Martha Stewart or Texas Monthly, this thing that had been on the coffee table at my parents’ house was made by folks like this guy. I just made it a point to get to know him. So approached him after the talk and asked for his email and asked to stay in touch. And DJ and the enormous generosity that he’s always provided me and so many other students, again, kind of like Sonya took kindly on me and agreed to meet with me. So that was the first meeting of what ultimately ended up being many and a conversation that has gone on for years and years. I actually just talked to DJ last week, so it’s just such a treat to have him in my life and what a privilege that he has been so generous with me.
Debbie Millman:
In early 2000, DJ left Texas Monthly to become a partner at Pentagram and recommended you for the job at Texas Monthly. What was that like for you?
Scott Dadich:
That was even to this day, even reflecting you described that moment, I still get chills about that. I remember so explicitly getting that email from DJ. So we had stayed in touch and with the alumni communications and the work I was doing at Texas Tech and for Texas Tech at that time, I had good reason to sort of be down there and be in touch with him and I would send him layouts. I was working on the university’s research magazine, a science magazine called Vistas. So I would seek DJ’s input and send him the latest issues and he’d say, “Good job,” or “You missed the mark on that one.” And he was very, very kind with his time and we had met or something, he had indicated that some change was going to be coming ahead and when it came time for him to leave and he announced and he let me know that he’d be going across town to open the Pentagram office, he had introduced me to the leadership and the editor in chief Greg Curtis. So I made my way down and was invited to an interview.
Debbie Millman:
What do you think DJ saw in you at the time to make that recommendation?
Scott Dadich:
That’s a great question. I look back at the work and I don’t see it. I don’t know what I was… Probably a curiosity enough. There was no craft there. I was still a student really in trying to figure out my own design voice and frankly, most of the layouts that I was producing for Vistas were just copies of WIRED magazine. Literally trying to duplicate what I was seeing in other forms and formats, bringing in colors and grid systems and working with great photographers like the ones I was able to at Texas Monthly. I started to learn how to direct and how to assign the craft of a magazine. So perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was a bit of passion, certainly a bit of hubris and thinking that I might be capable of doing something like that. But I think there’s also something about young folks growing up in Texas and being close to the land and the place and the ideas that are shared in that publication that I had an affinity for the stories that were being told, it was much more probably that overlap than it was anything craft related.
Debbie Millman:
You spent six years as art director of Texas Monthly and have said that Evan Smith, the editor-in-chief, taught you how to be a journalist and how to write and how to edit. How did he help you do that in your role as art director?
Scott Dadich:
Evan was and has been like a big brother to me. It was funny, because I interviewed with his predecessor, Greg Curtis, and then I got the job. And then I think it was like a week later, Greg announced that he was retiring and that Evan was taking over. So Evan as a first time editor in chief, me as a first time leader in the creative department, we had a bit of figuring out to do. And I remember we’d had just in incredible rouse and arguments and shouting fights about design theories and headlines and who wanted to win this battle versus that and what was going to go on the cover. And there was a great affection I think there that developed really quickly and I just saw what an incredible mind Evan was, but even more what a masterful newsroom, what an incredible group of journalists was able to do together.
People like Pamela Colloff or Mimi Swartz or John Spong or Skip Hollandsworth, Greg and Gary Cartwright. Getting to read these manuscripts and seeing these and knowing these people as human beings and knowing what the reporting cycle and process was. And then watching Evan work as an editor to help shape and hone a lineup or a headline and the generosity commitment to supporting one another, “And this could be a little bit better. We could do this, but this layout could be more easy to understand or this headline could be clear.” There was just a real generosity in the interplay between all those different disciplines.
Debbie Millman:
You were there for six years and then went on to become the creative director at WIRED. Was that something you pursued or was that another serendipitous type of experience in your life?
Scott Dadich:
It was a little bit of both. I remember feeling a bit restless at Texas Monthly at that point. I had started to enter some of our layouts into design competitions and I was invited to the Society of Publication designers in New York and had started to meet other folks like me in the magazine business. And was really starting to hear the siren song of the New York publishing scene and had many, many friends saying, “You can do this. You should come out, try to get a job out here.”
And I’d interviewed a couple of times, I remember being close and in some contention for a job at Esquire at one point and not getting it and feeling pretty low about that because Esquire at that point was really one of the great magazines in my life and something I really enjoyed consuming every inch, of every word within it. So I was down in the mouth and probably pouting a bit and being a bit of a spoiled brat when I got a call from some folks at WIRED that there was an opening coming up, and unfortunately, Darren, the previous creative director, had passed away. So there was a search and there’s sort of a moment of pause and reflect and think about what the future of WIRED was going to be. So again, sort of serendipity and kind of can’t believe it back in reflection that that opportunity existed at that time.
Debbie Millman:
You started at WIRED in 2006 and speaking of awards, beginning in 2008, you became the first person to win both the National Magazine Award for Design and the Society of Publication Designers Magazine of the Year Award for three consecutive years. How did you get so good at designing magazines?
Scott Dadich:
This was a team sport. I mean, just through and through some bizarre combination of time, and place, and team, and having colleagues around me that loved magazines as much as I did. Whether that was Wyatt Mitchell or Bob Cone, and again, that sort of spirit and esprit de corps of an incredible newsroom coming together that every word could be argued over, every color choice, every design decision could be obsessed over.
And being at a point in my life where I could work 18 hours a day and had the stamina, and had the interest in doing that and getting an apartment literally across the street from the magazine, so I could roll out of bed and go to work and do it all over again every single day. Wyatt was so important to that work and really shared in all of those successes in particular as a manager, as a friend, as a leader, as someone who could mentor a team of younger folks coming into their craft, of me who was probably too precocious in many ways and too ambitious on a bunch of other ways, but it was entirely a team sport. This was nothing to do with an individual achievement.
Debbie Millman:
Nevertheless, it is a feat as someone who has judged those competitions numerous times, not back then, but more in the last couple of years. Those are hard awards to win and the competition is fierce. You’re talking about the New York Times and New York Magazine and list goes on and on and on, New Yorker. So it is quite a feat, and I don’t want our listeners to not understand that part.
In any case, in the summer of 2009, two years after the launch of the iPhone, you went to Apple headquarters. And the rumor at the time was that Apple was working on a larger touchscreen device, and I read that you commissioned an actual physical mock-up of what you thought and expected it to look like. Estimating everything from the screen size and aspect ratio to the weight of the battery, then devised a visual design user interface and interface architecture for the still hypothetical touch screen tablet. And then presented the mock-up to Apple along with a video presentation. So I have like 8 million questions for you. What gave you the impetus to do this? And then I guess the next question is what was their reaction?
Scott Dadich:
Well, it all started with a conversation with Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief at the time. It was during a performance review, so I was having my annual review and Chris was always keen to say, “You need to step it up and what are your next ambitions? And this is WIRED. We have to always be inventing, always be pressing ahead. If we don’t have the future here yet, we need to invent it, we need to go make it.” And I had sort of had these rumblings thinking about what a high fidelity magazine experience would look like in a touchscreen, and having had used the iPhone at this time for a couple of years really could start to see how this would work. There was also a factor where, again, speaking of control issues, the wire.com experience was not actually overseen by the magazine staff. So we’d send the magazine to the printer every month and then we’d put it on a series of discs and print it out in a binder and literally walk it across the hall to this other team, and they would put it on the internet.
And that felt bad for everybody I think. It didn’t give us the design agency, it wasn’t journalistically sound, it really wasn’t a fit for our readership. So there was a lot of thinking about what if we could just control the whole chain and what if the same team of people could actually apply the magazine vision and the magazine process to something that felt more akin to the glitz and the precision and the immersion of a really beautiful printed magazine experience. So one of my colleagues, a designer that I still work with today, Margaret Swart and I, we carved off some of our monthly illustrator budget and took a couple extra cycles to think about, “Well, what would this do and what would this look like and how would we lay out a magazine?” And we produced some digital prototypes and animated them and actually rendered out what basically looked like a giant iPhone at that time.
And that ended up being a thing that we narrated and we had some video capabilities at WIRED, and put together basically a little sizzle reel demo thing. And there were a lot of vision demos on starting to crop up on YouTube at that time, so by no means a unique phenomenon, but through the Conde Nast relationships, through emergent conversations that we’re starting to develop at Apple, at Adobe, we found ourselves in Cupertino that summer and meeting with certain executives that took interest in it I think to a point that we began a conversation that emerged later with what became the WIRED app.
Debbie Millman:
So you began working with Apple and Adobe to first create the WIRED tablet edition. How much of your original mocked up design was similar to what Apple had already been making or creating as they were developing their tablet or developing the iPad?
Scott Dadich:
Yeah, I think a key distinction here is that Conde Nast as the magazine side of the equation, as the creator side of the equation had a really strong relationship with Adobe as the tool authors and the tool creators. So we were paired with a really brilliant team of designers, and producers, and technologists to think about the technical aspects of that, and that’s really where the iPad or the tablet vision was starting to form in terms of what is this device? If it’s not Apple, someone’s going to do this. We had met with HP at the time, and there were many, many conversations about large touchscreen devices.
The Apple conversation was distinct and Apple and Adobe were not getting along at the time. So there was some brokerage of us saying, “As the narrative designers, as the journalists, as the magazine makers, we need you both to play nice because there is something at the heart of this idea.” And it came from that, and ultimately it didn’t look exactly like what we had sketched out that summer before, but there were a lot of commonalities and there was certainly a lot wrong with it. It was a very much a 1.0 idea and expression, but a lot of that we were able to think about, “Well, that’s one issue. Let’s try it again in the next issue, we’ll move on.” That goes away and we get another chance to try it again. So it was a highly iterative season and for ultimately what ended up being several years.
Debbie Millman:
Shortly thereafter, you were named Vice President of editorial platforms for WIRED parent company, Conde Nast, and there you led the development of all of the Conde Nast Digital magazine storytelling. This was fairly epic as it was the first example of a major publisher re-imagining the print experience for the touchscreen format. And at the time you just talked about the experimentation and the iteration and 1.0 and so forth. Did you have a strong sense of what you wanted this platform to be, and then work to iterate toward that? Or were you iterating each sort of phase to maximize the potential of each individual phase?
Scott Dadich:
A little bit of both or a little bit of all of it. In the assignment to work with the whole portfolio of Conde Nast publications, we found and we designed a series of experiences and feature ads that were specific to the platform. So for example, Golf Digest is as a magazine predicated on service journalism on teaching. So you can imagine having video formats and how-to’s and explainers for the game of golf would push the tooling and would push the technical aspects of what we were actually delivering in the file format. And what we’re delivering in the experiential side of is this more of a video experience or is this something you continue to read versus the New Yorker, which would be a weekly, and really text driven, and needed to be lightweight, and needed to download in the background, and needed to be assimilated into a highly technical weekly printing process. Make sure that that magazine is hitting people’s mailboxes and newsstands that Monday morning.
So there were different technical challenges as we worked our way through the building, but then there were also narrative challenges and there was also a sort of platform challenge that we needed this to scale. So that really came full circle when we started working with colleagues and even competitors in the industry across town at other publishing houses, trying to lever Adobe and Apple into creating some standards that would make this process easier. It would make it easier for consumers to consume, make it easier to download, make it easier and better for readers. So it was a series of efforts that was fairly byzantine looking back on it, but had everything to do with really trying to push the boundaries of the journalistic experience as much as anything.
Debbie Millman:
In 2012 during Hurricane Sandy in New York City, you found out that the editor-in-chief of WIRED was going to be moving on. What made you decide to throw your hat into the ring for the job as editor-in-chief/
Scott Dadich:
I never fell out of love with WIRED. I was asked to move to New York and take that platform’s job on in the digital space, and it was a thrill for me because I was dating this amazing woman named Amy. So there was a pretty good reason… She was living in New York, so it was a pretty good reason for me to be in New York a lot more. I was also going out to the West Coast a lot to meet with Apple and Adobe. So it felt like my colleagues and I were always on the West coast and I always had one foot in WIRED, and even as I was seeing the folks after me continue to care for WIRED, including Chris Anderson.
So it was a pretty easy feeling and something that really was right under the surface when I found out that Chris was going to move on and start his own company, for me to go to Tom Wallace, the editorial director and raise my hand and say, “If you’d have me, I would love to be considered.” And it just so happened that that Hurricane Sandy moment came and the conditions were right, and again, a series of circumstances that I kind of can’t believe looking back on it, but ones that ended with me back in San Francisco and this time with my wife Amy.
Debbie Millman:
In your first editor’s letter you wrote, “Let’s blow some shit up.” Do you think you did?
Scott Dadich:
Yeah, we probably did. We definitely sure as shit tried, as we’d like to say in Texas.
Debbie Millman:
Under your editorship. Speaking of awards, WIRED earned 10 Webby Awards, more than 100 medals from the Society of Publication Designers, a James Beard Foundation Award, Foreign National Magazine Awards for Design. You tripled WIRED‘s reach on social media, increased traffic to wire.com by 50%, and racked up over 1 billion annual page views to the site. 1 billion with a B. That’s a pretty spectacular run. Did you feel invincible or did you worry that you had to keep that degree of success consistent year-on-year?
Scott Dadich:
Certainly there was an intense feeling of not doing well enough, of really being on a treadmill and really feeling pressures competitively because during those years there were such an explosion of other activities threatening the magazine landscape and ultimately the attention model that magazines had thrived under. It used to be that your eyes and your attention to read a magazine were sufficient to support the economic imperatives of the business by buying it, by subscribing to it, by having advertisers commit. But when a thing called Instagram can also deliver that attention and engagement, that’s a threat. When a game can capture your evening instead of reading an article on wire.com or when watching a Netflix show is going to be just as enjoyable.
I think those were the imperatives that really pushed us forward much more so than saying we have to do better than our competitors across the street. So it was a pretty intense time, and I think given the platform imperatives, given that we did have to operate a print magazine, a daily website publishing 50 or 60 stories a day, full social media channels, a retail business at the holidays and events business, bringing people into live contexts. There were complexities that were sort of staggering, so it felt like a sprint every single day.
Debbie Millman:
Some of your biggest accomplishments at WIRED were the collaborations you forged with guest editors and your exclusive interviews, and somehow you were able to get an exclusive sit down interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and you wrote this about the experience. “Just a few people on Earth know where I was and why in Moscow to sit down with Edward Snowden, it was a secret that required great efforts to keep. I told coworkers and friends that I was traveling to Paris for some work, but the harder part was covering my digital tracks. Snowden himself had shown how illusory our assumption of privacy really is, a lesson we took to heart. That meant avoiding smartphones, encrypting files, holding secret meetings.” Scott, how did you get that interview in the first place?
Scott Dadich:
That was a process that took probably the better part of eight or nine months. My very dear friend, Platon longtime collaborator dating back to my earliest days at Texas Monthly, and I had talked about this as a get, this is a thing. And we thought in first terms of the visual and we thought in first terms of the cover, very much in a George Lewis kind of condition like we need to make an iconic cover, and this is a moment, an individual who would deserve such a treatment. Then came the very real practicalities of what he had or had not done, and the arguments in the newsroom about our obligation to cover his actions, whether we agreed with them or not, whether we could reach him or not, but it was my responsibility as the editor of WIRED to reach out and to find a channel appropriate to find him.
We were looking at news reports and wire clippings and the access that The Guardian was getting and what we’re seeing on channels like social media and Twitter. So we had some indications, but ultimately got a connection that Platon and I had raised to an individual who knew his lawyer. So we’ve got a communication over to him and we waited and we checked in and we waited and we checked in. And I don’t remember the exact date, but we got a communication back that if I were to be in Moscow on such and such a date and such and such a time at such and such a hotel, maybe conditions would be right for a meeting.
Debbie Millman:
And you and a photographer went, I believe?
Scott Dadich:
Yeah, so Platon and the photographer, we packed up some cases and his assistant and our photo editor, we all met in Moscow. And the secrecy and the sort of skullduggery of it seems over the top or maybe to some seemed over the top at the time, but I did have to communicate to a couple of my colleagues at Conde Nast, and I also sought the advice of several of the other editors in chief that I had trusted very deeply and have very strong relationships given my previous work with them. So I just sought some advice and it turns out that a couple of them, and one of them in particular had been over in Russia and had been hacked and had his smartphone compromised and banking details and all the sort of things that you can imagine would be really terrifying to encounter. So there was a very real cautionary tale about why the secrecy was going to be required, whether it was from people chasing Snowden or other actors or government officials. We just didn’t know, and there was a lot to be careful about.
Debbie Millman:
Did you know for sure he was going to show up or was it… Were you just hoping he’d show up?
Scott Dadich:
We really didn’t, and we were hoping, and I did… We stopped in Paris and I met Platon at Charles de Gaulle and at the gate, and I had sent my iPhone in a FedEx packet back to Amy in San Francisco. So I was phoneless until we got to the Moscow airport. Platon and I bought burner phones and no one knew those numbers, no one knew how to reach us. We were there. We did not bring computers, we were not online, we left no digital signatures. We checked into that hotel and we waited. We sat and we waited and sure enough the phone rang and it was Ed himself, this voice on the phone at the pre appointed time called out and said, “I understand you’re in room so-and-so, and I’ll be there in about an hour.” Sure enough, there was a knock at the door about an hour later, like the longest hour of my life, waiting to see if that was going to happen, and he ended up showing up.
Debbie Millman:
Scott, as an interviewer, I need to ask this question. It might not be as interesting to my listeners as it will be to me, but I can’t resist. How did you prepare for that interview?
Scott Dadich:
Well, obviously we had just read everything we could get our hands on, stayed as current as we could on news events, on government positions and what the Obama Administration was doing. Obviously, we had an incredible amount of opinion and reporting background from our colleagues in the newsroom, so you feel pretty well-prepared. I was there not only to meet with him, oversee the photo shoot and then facilitate the interview for Jim Bamford, our incredible journalist who’s going to write the profile. So Jim was also there and meeting with him the next day, but Platon and I ended up having the very first interaction with him in that hotel room, which lasted about four hours that afternoon.
Debbie Millman:
You also oversaw issues guest edited by Christopher Nolan, Serena Williams, Bill Gates, JJ Abrams, and as I mentioned in my intro, President Barack Obama while he was still in office. How much collaboration did you do with President Obama on this issue?
Scott Dadich:
Quite a bit. That was an issue that came about in the spring of 2016, and looking back on, I’m actually shocked how much cooperation and collaboration we got, not only from the president, but from his team at the White House. It was always the case that these individuals, these guest editors had to given their stature, given their responsibilities, rely not only on the WIRED newsroom, but on also usually the guest editors team or chief of staff or communications leaders. So there was always a very collaborative approach. Again, that team sport in making a magazine is a precondition of the engagement.
But when we pitched the idea to the team at the White House and this wonderful leader named Jason Goldman, chief digital officer who really got us in the door and really saw and understood what this could be, getting us in front of folks like Jen Psaki and knowing that this [inaudible 00:52:50] still, this could not be propaganda and this had to be a journalistic exercise and there would be preconditions on our side. It was still a process where we got the president’s fingerprints on manuscripts, and specific notes, and story lineups, and comments on headlines, and even very good edits to the stories themselves. He’s a great writer, obviously has just a wonderful command of language and of ideas. So it was just a pretty magical experience, I think for our newsroom and for the entire team got to work on it.
Debbie Millman:
Did you have to edit the president or kill any of his ideas?
Scott Dadich:
We didn’t kill any of his ideas. He definitely killed many of our ideas, and that’s sort of the way that it works. We provide a big slate and a big pathway for us to explore together. So the saying no to things is actually part of how the guest editorship really takes shape.
Debbie Millman:
You conducted an interview with President Obama for the issue, and this was in 2016, and when I reread it in preparation for an interview, I was struck by this statement he made. “Traditionally, when we think about security and protecting ourselves, we think in terms of armor or walls. Increasingly I find myself looking to medicine and thinking about viruses and antibodies. What I spend a lot of time worrying about are things like pandemics.” This was in 2016.
Scott Dadich:
Wow. I’ve not reread that. I’ve not gone back to that in many years, certainly before. Wow, that is uncanny, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Right. I got shivers when I saw it- [inaudible 00:54:33]
Scott Dadich:
I just got chills. I just got chills [inaudible 00:54:36]. That’s amazing. It’s not surprising. He is just so brilliant, and so well-read, and so curious. And obviously had such incredible access to so many vectors of information, but that is just absolutely breathtaking to hear those words again.
Debbie Millman:
Another of your initiatives was launching WIRED by Design, which was a three-day design retreat at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, and two of the attendees there, Dave O’Connor and Justin Wilkes approached you and asked if you had any thoughts about how to transform what was on stage into a documentary or a series. That I believe was the seed of Abstract, your television show. Is that correct?
Scott Dadich:
That is exactly right. There were a number of threads that had started Abstract, including a conference event that a number of my friends and I put on together in Portland, Maine in 2011. It was an idea that we needed to get up and stage and share our creative process and talk about creativity in order to progress the creative process. So that’s actually where the name abstract started, and it was actually a live gathering well before I was editor-in-chief of WIRED. The WIRED by Design element was really interesting because we were able to gather a really intimate group of folks. I think there were about 300 folks at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, this legendary place, and it fostered a really warm embrace for creative discourse and having folks like Dave and Justin there alongside luminary designers like Bjarke Ingels on stage, or Christophe Neimann or Wyatt Mitchell, and having those individuals talk about the design process and the design decisions that had to be made felt really interesting.
And it was a moment where Netflix was investing pretty heavily in documentary formats, especially in documentary series. And Dave and Justin in particular were really well suited to think about how to bring a production like that to life. So it wasn’t long after that that we started talking with our friend Morgan Neville. Obviously incredible documentary filmmaker, director, producer, Oscar-winning for Twenty Feet From Stardom, and Morgan got the idea just right out of the gate as well. So Morgan co-created with us, and it was sort of like kismet to think about having all those ideas come together and into that documentary format and go chase and follow some of our design heroes and tell their stories.
Debbie Millman:
The show was actually green-lit by Netflix on the spot, and the full title is Abstract: The Art of Design, and it was structured as an eight-episode documentary series about visionary designers who shaped the world around us from architecture to illustration, cars to typography. And just some of the guests in the first season were graphic designer and artist, Paula Scher, illustrator, Christophe Neimann, stage designer, Es Devlin, Nike shoe designer, Tinker Hatfield. Scott, what was the criteria for choosing the designers you did? There was a real collaborative spirit in **+each episode, and I was wondering if that figured into how you made the choice about who to feature?
Scott Dadich:
That’s an awesome question, Debbie, because when we would approach potential subjects that collaboration was one of the things that really had to be there. Even after our first conversation that we had this notion that we wanted them to almost co-create the episodes with us, but because they were designers, they had a process, because they were designers, they knew how to tell stories, because they were designers, they were connected to subcultures of the design. So you pretty quickly got to create a list of things that we viewed as requirements for what we ended up calling a casting matrix and knowing that we had an eight-episode order, we wanted to approach designers from different fields, maybe even from fields that most folks wouldn’t even consider as design or contemplate, like meet back at the bagel shop, but didn’t even know that you could be an art director and that was a field that you could pursue.
But we had to be able to see what these folks did, and we had to see that over the course of time. We had to see their works develop and sometimes not develop or sometimes fail, and they had to be willing to bring us into their worlds from a production standpoint. So that mix, finding the right diversity of backgrounds and as individuals and of creative practices ended up being the thing that helped us take a list of probably 300 people globally and whittled that down into the eight yeses that ended up being the first season.
Debbie Millman:
Wow, that’s an effort. I had no idea that there were that many designers in consideration. With the designers that you ultimately chose, how hard was it for them to sort of have that peak under the hood? It didn’t seem like it was in any of the episodes. In fact, there seemed to be quite a lot of joy in expressing their process or their methodology or even just the way that they went about practicing their craft. Did you find that something that you had to foster or help bring about, or was it something that was harder for them?
Scott Dadich:
It was a little bit of both. I maybe put my thumb on the scale with some of the casting because Christopher Neimann was the first person that I called, he’s one of my most dear friends for 20 plus years. So there’s just a preexisting trust and a companionship and a creative comradery that we had leaned on for many, many many years. So I don’t even think Christophe even heard the rest of my sentence when I first asked him to join us versus incredible luminary heroes like Paula, who I just couldn’t even believe I was getting to meet, let alone follow her process. And we didn’t have a preexisting show to point to and say, “it’s going to be like this, just trust us. And I know this camera is right in your face while you’re trying to work, but I promise you the shot is going to be flattering and it’s going to be illuminating to the process.”
So it was a bit of both and some of it’s sort of a wild hair and to say to Platon, “I want to go see the Village you grew up in Greece and why that actually ended up shaping your creative process.” Versus being with Bjarke to say, “I need to be with you for a full year to follow this design process and all the way up to the construction of the Serpentine Gallery.” So it was a different process based on each individuals versus something like Christophe, where we just decamped to Berlin and filmed every day for a week, and then went to New York and filmed for a couple more days and that was it. We shot the whole episode in one week. So it was quite a diversity of trust building and creative process on both sides of the camera.
Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite aspects, aside from seeing these luminous designers making what they make was also seeing a little bit about who they were as human beings. I loved how you featured Paula and Seymour and captured the dynamic between the two of them was just perfection.
Scott Dadich:
Just such a wonderful relationship, and to see them half bickering over what’s for lunch as Paula is going to head back to the studio in the afternoon, those are the real moments. I think showing some of the rough edges and showing that we’re all humans and you got to feed yourself at some point, or Ralph and Doris going dancing for dance classes and that salsa night. That’s what makes us people and that’s what makes design interesting I think.
Debbie Millman:
Abstract was released in 2017 and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2018. The second season of Abstract launched in more than 190 countries in over 30 languages for 150 million Netflix subscribers in 2019. Season two was also nominated for an Emmy Award and was also named Best Episodic Series of 2019 by the International Documentary Association. And you’ve said that making Abstract was one of the most joyful periods of your entire life. Will there ever be a season three?
Scott Dadich:
Oh, please, Debbie. I really hope so. Funny enough, we were casting season three when the pandemic hit.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I read that.
Scott Dadich:
You talk about the scale of Abstract and the precision and richness that Netflix imbued in it and the investment that they made in it, such that we could travel the world and meet these amazing people. That takes a huge crew. So to make a season of Abstract was about 300 people and we were in 17, 20, 25 cities per season, so obviously the pandemic shut that down. And a lot changed during those years when we couldn’t travel and certainly viewing habits changed and things like Tiger King and true crime really came to dominate Netflix’s business model, but I will never say never. We still stay in touch with our friends and maybe if your amazing listeners will raise a chorus, we can get that third season green-lit.
Debbie Millman:
Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Scott Dadich:
It sure would, count me in.
Debbie Millman:
Now while you were working on Abstract, you were still at WIRED for some of that and as you worked on the series, you began to feel as if it were time to take your own next step in your own creativity and you stated this, “Can I do this for myself? Can I choose to work with people where we go chase an idea in the way that we were trying to profile it with the subjects of Abstract?” At this time, were you thinking, “Okay, it’s a defining moment, it’s a fork in the road.” Did you have a sense that this was what you needed to do and go off and do something on your own?
Scott Dadich:
I definitely felt compelled by those motivations that you just described. I think at that point I had been at Conde Nast 10, 11 years, WIRED for most of those years, and there’s something that happens when you’re at WIRED. You meet all these incredible founders and they come into the office and we get to interview them or they get to talk to the staff in and off the record or we get to create a photo shoot around them. And you gain some proximity and you get to talk to them and understand their creative process. And even where WIRED is, the actual physical location here in San Francisco, there’s a coffee shop across the street where you would see the founders of Twitter and you’d be in line with Jack, and then you’d be using Twitter that afternoon. It was sort of crazy and heady this mix of people making things and chasing dreams and following their passions.
Abstract, really supercharged that for me. And I was talking to a friend the other day, we were actually just reflecting a bit on our career paths and what gets us to here as we get a little bit older. And I’ve come to understand that it’s sort of these eight and 10 year arcs where that yearning for discovery, that sort of restlessness really does sort of grab hold of me. So those were certainly feelings that I was having, even though I was having the time of my life at WIRED. And then paired with the moment of working with the president, I felt like that was sort of the pinnacle. I couldn’t really think of things that I hadn’t wanted to try and hadn’t been able to achieve, whether that was meeting with Edward Snowden in Moscow or sitting down with the president in the Roosevelt Room. So the boxes sort of felt all checked, and I think those were probably some of the ingredients that led to me casting my eye to the horizon.
Debbie Millman:
As you were casting, did you have a sense that you wanted to start your own agency or that there were somewhere else you wanted to go? What gave you the courage and confidence to make that decision?
Scott Dadich:
There were a couple different ideas. I still think about all the different thoughts in my head about what I want to do with my creativity, with my creative impulses. Whether that’s being stationed in a leadership position at a technology company, that’s something that gets talked about a lot out here. You just bump into leaders and get to know leaders at all these amazing companies that really shape the future here in Silicon Valley. I had conversations like that. I had conversations with friends about a different kind of magazine path or a way to pursue the filmmaking path full-time.
And then ultimately meeting some friends at this agency across town that ultimately were very, very helpful in shaping WIRED‘s vision, shaping WIRED‘s editorial craft, and setting the editorial charter and vision for WIRED that enabled that growth that you described earlier. And having seen them do it and having seen them build this firm and help clients from all stripes solve storytelling challenges, narrative challenges, brand challenges, design challenges. And to be able to do that in a way that could also bring abstract into the mix ultimately was the path that felt like the right one. It was scary. I remember seeing you about that time as we were launching, but it was also felt like the right sort of mix of ingredients even though we maybe weren’t quite sure what we were going to be making with those ingredients.
Debbie Millman:
You started your agency, Godfrey Dadich Partners on February 1st, 2017, and at Godfrey Dadich Partners, you seek to bring together the best of strategy, design, product and journalism to build story-driven brands. One of my favorite projects of yours is the Nike film you did with Billie Eilish. What are some of the projects you would say you’re most proud of now after nearly eight years at Godfrey Dadich?
Scott Dadich:
I love that film. That was directed and produced by a brilliant colleague of mine named Paula Chowles, who actually used to be the executive producer for video at WIRED. So we worked together for more than a decade, and that was in the height of the pandemic in a tough production. We’ve been trusted by Nike a number of times over the years. Probably my favorite Nike project, aside from working with Tinker on the Abstract episode, was a series of films and really one key long-form documentary about their sustainable manufacturing process called Space Hippie. Where we got to go into the factories in Vietnam where the shoes are manufactured, where in the space kitchen in Portland, where Tinker and his colleagues were inventing new fabrics and new design methodologies and new methods of making sustainable shoes.
So that was about a two-year process as well. That really sort of scratched a lot of the processes we built in making Abstract, but to do that in a context that told a very important story about sustainability and resource management and the sort of choicefulness that we need to operate within as designers. So that was something that a lot of folks saw at the time, maybe in the SNKRS app, but it was also a very important storytelling tool within the halls of Nike.
Debbie Millman:
As you mentioned, you are in your eighth year running Godfrey Dadich, which is the longest you’ve ever been in one position. You said in an interview that your dream job is one that you felt you could do for the rest of your life and not run out of challenges. Is that this job?
Scott Dadich:
I think it is. I really hope it is. I feel challenged every day if that’s one of the things that needs to be considered. I love the access to challenges that we have. I love the clients that we get to work with, whether that’s the folks inventing new modes of generative AI up at Microsoft or quantum computing at IBM. It’s kind of breathtaking to get to continue to have a lot of the access that we had at WIRED, but in these new contexts and new storytelling contexts. So there’s a lot to love about this and I hope to be lucky enough that my colleagues will keep me around and the challenges will be plentiful enough that we can keep the lights on.
Debbie Millman:
I was reading something about your thoughts on AI and you used the term extended intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence, and I thought that really changes the way in which you think about the relationship of this kind of intelligence.
Scott Dadich:
That’s absolutely true. There’s so much changing. It’s such a rapid clip. We talked for a number of years at WIRED about the concept. Obviously this is a very old concept in computing and something we’ve covered for many, many years as journalists, the artificial intelligence. But we started to talk about augmented intelligence and more recently extended intelligence because AI and generative AI in particular is such a powerful tool that it is changing the nature and shape of work. That is really at the heart of our assignment and partnership with Microsoft on Work Lab, talking about the future of modern work and how tools like AI are shaping that. And really what it’s doing is raising the bar for us as individuals, as collaborators, as creators. It’s breaking through the career ceiling. It’s changing the very nature of how we collaborate and that we’re starting to see people, power users in particular, extend and reshape their workday in ways I think we couldn’t even conceive of even just 18 months ago.
Debbie Millman:
I find it so interesting, some of the conversations and objections that I’m hearing. I’m a bit older than you are, Scott. So I went through the transition from working on a drafting table to working on a desk with a monitor-
Scott Dadich:
Now, now Debbie-
Debbie Millman:
… and at that time now-
Scott Dadich:
… I did that too. I remember the Ruby lift and sending the copy out to the service bureau. We’re not that different my friend.
Debbie Millman:
But I don’t know. I mean, do you remember some of the same fears about the computer taking away the soul of what we do and-
Scott Dadich:
Totally.
Debbie Millman:
… taking away jobs. And we’re hearing the same arguments now, and I’m just remembering how many jobs were created because of the new technology and how that has fundamentally changed our ability to make things in ways we never thought possible in the early eighties. And now here it is at another tipping point.
Scott Dadich:
Isn’t that amazing? Never conceived of the differences that we’re encountering today. It is pretty breathtaking and it’s really thrilling to test some of the boundaries of it and see how it’s helping us envision new creative outputs. Literally last night, some friends and I were having dinner and talking about, I was describing what you just did, the pay step board and remembering in my first days at Texas Monthly, we had to send the copy out to the bus station on a zip drive. So that the service bureau in Houston could help put the inches of copy and we’d measure the length of his story and column inches and then get to paste that back up. There was a guy whose job it was to drive that disc to the bus station, and you think about, “Well, that’s a job that doesn’t need to exist anymore.” But you think about all the other new roles that get created, it’s almost breathtaking to conceive of where we’re headed.
Debbie Millman:
Well, this actually teased me up for my last question. What haven’t you done that you still want to do?
Scott Dadich:
I want to direct a feature film. A narrative film. One of my heroes is a guy named Jeff Nichols, very, very dear friend of mine, and he has a new movie coming out just a couple of weeks called The Bike Riders that I’ve been talking to Jeff about that film, probably eight or 10 years that he’s been trying to make, and it’s amazing. I got to see it. But everything that thrilled me about Abstract, but in the fully created world of narrative, cinematic storytelling feels like an avenue that I really have to figure out at some point in my career. So if I can figure out a way to do it, that’s going to be something that I’m certainly keen on chasing.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure out how to do it-
Scott Dadich:
One way or another-
Debbie Millman:
And then personally and selfishly, I’d love to see Abstract the magazine. I think that would be just delicious-
Scott Dadich:
Wouldn’t that be fun? Yeah. That-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, my God.
Scott Dadich:
… would not be the worst thing.
Debbie Millman:
Full circle. Scott, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining
me today on Design Matters.
Scott Dadich:
Debbie, it’s an absolute honor. Thank you for this podcast and for inspiring so many of us for so many years. What a thrill.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. To see the depth and the breadth of Scott’s work, you can go to godfreydadich.com. This is the 19th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.