What Jazz Taught Me About Design

Haley Park at UXDX Community: Mastering Design and Market Dynamics. Video: https://youtu.be/456HMFxc_vc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Jazz and design are essentially the same

[00:00:00] Haley: Hi, I'm Haley. I'm a product designer and aspiring jazz bassist. Right now I work at Square during the day, and I spend a lot of my time outside of work practicing playing jazz bass. I'd like to talk to you today about what jazz taught me about design. Many people in the past have tried to learn from jazz, because there are just so many life lessons that can be learned from jazz. And lessons from jazz are universal, and they're applicable to life in general, like solving problems and teamwork. You can use them in any form. But here I'd like to specifically talk about design and jazz, because jazz and design are essentially the same, and I would like to walk you through why.

The form is sacred

[00:01:03] First of all, the form is sacred. This is what a standard traditional bebop jazz form looks like. Jazz standards usually come from vocal jazz, so it has a melody, and these are the chord changes of the song. This is Billie Holiday singing the melody: "There is no greater love than what I feel for you." Jazz musicians improvise on top of these changes. I have Herbie Hancock's sick solo as an example, and these are the same changes too. By following the form, jazz musicians can play with one another and improvise together.

[00:01:54] How important is the form? I have Oscar Peterson, the legendary jazz pianist, if you're not yet familiar, illustrating the importance of the form: "As you can realize, you're playing a tune and you agree, it's sort of a pact that we're going to play the tune this way, within certain confines. And if I were to go out and suddenly take a left turn on a one-way street, it becomes a little hazardous in the group. And what you end up with is dishevelment." So essentially the form is an agreement between people that allows them to work together.

[00:02:33] In design, the form is much less obvious, but we can find examples and similarities. On the micro level, we have UI elements. These are Square's design system UI components. This is what a search bar looks like, this is what a button looks like, this is what an input field looks like, and so on and so forth. By having this shared expectation of what the shared components look like and how they behave, we can collaborate with other designers and engineers easily, because we have a shared foundation. And we have the freedom to use these components and patterns in a way that fits our needs and goals. We can be creative about what our shared form looks like, just like how there are different jazz standards.

[00:03:16] We also have brand guidelines. Brand guidelines have this shared baseline of what the logo looks like, and what the typography, colors and iconography look like. It lets designers improvise while maintaining this shared language and basis. So you can't break the shared foundation and call this an input field, make this a button, and use this to display critical warnings, because you're breaking the pact and the basis of collaboration.

[00:03:54] This is not just about collaboration within teams or organizations. The form can also exist between designers and the users. I have a few examples of creative tools: here's Figma for 2D designs, Spline for 3D, Framer for web and Final Cut for video. What they have in common is that the layers and navigation panels are on the left and the properties panels are on the right. By adopting this common form, a user can immediately jump into these tools and know where to look, where to find things and what to do with them. This is just one example, but when you break these kinds of expectations that people have, people become frustrated.

[00:04:36] Looking into jazz gives you insight into what a good form is. In jazz, a good form can be either easy or complex. Some musicians like easy standards, some musicians prefer complex standards. But the ground rule is that it needs to be interesting and attractive to the player, and it should have ample room for the players to improvise. I think this gives us good insight into the relationship between design systems and designers, and the relationship between brand guidelines and designers. A great design system would be attractive and provide structure while leaving room for improvisation. And this might even be how great software should behave. Maybe good software should be attractive, and it may provide guardrails while allowing the user to mold it into their own stuff.

Collaboration and comping

[00:05:27] On the shared form, jazz musicians collaborate, and collaboration is fundamental in jazz, much like in our work. Typically in jazz we'll have piano, drums and bass, and sometimes there's a horn player or guitar player or a singer. We'll typically start by playing the head, or the melody, and then people go around and take solos. When the focus is on one player, the others focus on comping. Comping means accompanying or complementing, and the goal of comping is to make whoever's soloing sound good. For example, a sax solo can sound amazing when the band is playing the proper chords and rhythms under that solo.

[00:06:09] I have an example of the amazing Chick Corea Trio and Kenny Garrett, and I'll play a little bit. You can notice how the piano, bass and drum players closely pay attention and adjust what they're playing based on what they're hearing from the sax player. The rhythm section matches the sax player's energy and follows where he's trying to go with the solo.

[00:07:03] Every team or organization has different models of collaboration. At Square, we apply what's called the DRI model. DRI here means the directly responsible individual, and each step in the product development process has a DRI. Here are just a few examples of the roles that we collaborate with on a daily basis. Sometimes the PM takes the DRI role and the others support them. Sometimes the engineers are DRIs, and sometimes the designers are DRIs. For the project to work well, close attention and support from the other roles is essential for the whole band to sound good.

[00:07:46] The field of jazz is full of wisdom in terms of collaborating. Here's Thelonious Monk's 25 tips for musicians, and I highlighted the pieces that are related to playing with other people. Like this one: just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time. So keeping time is everyone's responsibility. You make the drummer sound good, or you support your teammates to produce great work. "Don't play the piano part, I'm playing that. Don't listen to me, I'm supposed to be accompanying you." That's some wisdom on keeping the roles and swimming lanes clear. And that's how people collaborate and improvise together.

Improvising and constraints

[00:08:24] The next thing I want to talk about is improvising. In our work, we designers improvise as well. We try our best to estimate and predict things, but nothing ever stays the same. We need to improvise and make changes on the fly. And jazz is all about improvising. Here's Ella Fitzgerald, who at the end of a great performance completely forgot the lyrics: "It'd be mad goodnight [?]. Oh, what's the next chorus to this song now? This is the one now, I don't know." She starts to improvise like nothing happened, and the band follows along. It's so fun and delightful, and to me this is the kind of thing that makes jazz so fun.

[00:09:19] Here's another story that I think about a lot. It's the story behind Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. At this performance there was some confusion backstage, and the only available piano was tiny and in terrible condition. It was weak in the bass register, and the pedals didn't work properly. Keith Jarrett was also not feeling amazing, so when he saw this piano he just refused to play and was about to leave. But he had to perform, so he worked with this bad piano. He mostly stayed in the middle range of the piano to compensate for the weak bass register. The pedals weren't working properly, so he used more ostinatos and certain left-hand techniques. And the result is this haunting, ritualistic and rhythmical performance. I'm just going to let it finish.

[00:10:18] This album is considered a landmark performance. It's the most famous improvised solo piano album, and a lot of people count it as the best performance of his career. So jazz is unpredictable. Stuff happens, and it's all part of what makes it unique and fun. We get constraints, and they often make us more creative. Being a designer also means you listen a lot. You listen to your customers, you listen to your product, research and engineering partners, and you build on top of their workflows and feedback. Listening to who and what's around you, accepting and making the best out of what you have, is a wonderful skill for both jazz musicians and designers.

[00:11:02] But thinking on your feet and improvising doesn't mean you can just play anything without knowing what you're doing. To be able to improvise and sound good, you have to have built incredible baseline skills. I struggled to build these musical muscles and vocabulary, and from doing that I learned ways to be better at design. So I want to share how jazz taught me ways to be better at design.

Learn from the people who came before you

[00:11:28] One of those ways is to learn from people who came before you. Jazz is so fundamentally rooted in learning from masters, listening to past masters. Here are just some of my favorite masters. Listening to them and learning from them not only helps you build your musical vocabulary, but in a way they shape who you are. As pianist Benny Green put it: "Records that you enjoy listening to, that's like a reflection of what you did and what you're about."

[00:11:59] This is not just about jazz or music. Learning about the designers, designs and visual art movements that came before you helps you understand what you do as a designer. I heard Virgil Abloh say this exact thing in the famous Harvard GSD lecture: "Just having a knowledge of what these different periods in art are can help you give understanding to what you're doing and why you arrive at these ideas. That the whole world evolved in this sort of way."

[00:12:32] In the design world, it seems like developing taste is a hot topic at the moment. I recently came across this article by brand designer Elizabeth Goodspeed: "Collecting pieces of design history felt like an ethical way to bootstrap my taste level while I was still figuring out my own point of view. But as I looked at more old stuff, I realized I didn't actually like all of it. I started to tease out what spoke to me personally and what was simply old." Finding these traces of people across jazz and design, collecting, learning, appreciating old masters and discovering their own voice along the way, gave me a hint that the pathway to developing taste and discovering your voice is pretty universal.

Put in the work: practice and transcribing

[00:13:14] If you want to learn from the people who came before you, you have to put in the work. Practice is the heart of jazz. It's all jazz musicians do, whether you're a beginner or a master. "I practiced the piano way over 100,000, who knows, 150,000 hours, and I still practice." "I used to practice two hours of scales a day at the piano before I even played a song." "I want to practice." "Practicing." "Anything I ever practice." "Just practice." "Technical thing went, and just practices at all." You get the idea. Because nothing matters more in jazz than how good you sound, this simple universal truth, that you need to put in the work to be good at something, is especially true of jazz.

[00:14:04] But the question is, how do you practice? How do you put in the work? One thing that anyone will tell you to do to be better at playing jazz is transcribe. It's listening to a record and recreating it until you sound exactly like it. This is me doing my homework: I'm transcribing this solo played by Paul Chambers. But doing this can help you with anything, like when you want to be better at prototyping. Here's Robin's [?] card transition animation that I really like, so I tried to recreate it, and this is my recreation. Doing this is painful. I've been working on this Paul Chambers transcription for months now. But it's one of the few proven ways to improve your skill set. And one of the most valuable lessons that jazz taught me is to not be afraid to look at something, find something that speaks to me, try to recreate it and learn from that.

Detach your ego, and unfamiliar is not difficult

[00:15:03] It also taught me to detach my ego. Sometimes your work gets shredded in design crit, and sometimes you get your butt kicked when you're playing music with other people. But you have to detach your ego from your playing or your designs to get better at it. I used to get super nervous in design crit early in my career, because my self-worth was attached to my work. But learning jazz has taught me to record myself, objectively perceive what I'm producing by listening back to it, face how I actually sound, and improve what I lack by going down a grocery list. So no ego, no self-worth, just a simple grocery list. It also taught me to be kind to myself and pick myself back up when I feel like I sound terrible, which is pretty much all the time.

[00:15:52] One of the lessons is to see things as unfamiliar, not difficult. In this book I read, the author, who is a jazz pianist, talked about the jazz standard All the Things You Are, and asked why many musicians find a particular section to be hard. It's because it's in E major, and that's a key that's not commonly played. And he asked: is one less talented in E major? Are you less creative in E major? Is E major a harder key, or is it just less familiar? Identifying something difficult as something that you're not yet familiar with offers a simple solution to make it not difficult, which is that you just familiarize yourself with it.

[00:16:35] You can do this in everything. You can do this in design. Sometimes you find something that you're not good at, or something that you don't know yet. Instead of letting it frustrate you, you understand that you're just not familiar with it yet, and you familiarize yourself. I found that to be really, really helpful whenever I face something that's challenging.

Instill feelings into your work

[00:16:58] Jazz also taught me to instill feelings into my work. Jazz is almost entirely about how it makes you feel, and we constantly ask ourselves what makes certain music feel the way it does. For example, what makes Bill Evans' playing feel so gut-friendly [?]? It could be the chord voicings, the spacing, the tone, or all of the above, everything that makes up what you hear. And I also ask myself, can I bring some of that feeling into my work? Can we evoke feelings with our work as well?

[00:17:34] I have a Steve Jobs quote: "I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world." The point I'm trying to make here is that we should try to look outside of our industry, which feels kind of bland sometimes, and find what makes us feel something and bring that into our work. Like Theo Jansen, who took inspiration from evolutionary biology and aerodynamics. Nikola Tesla, who drew from poetry and Eastern philosophy. Dalí, who took inspiration from quantum physics and psychoanalysis. So I want to leave you with this: what inspires you? What makes you feel something? And can you bring that into your work? That's all, and thanks for tuning in. And please say hi.

Q&A

[00:18:31] Host: Thank you very much, Haley. It was really nice. To be honest with you, jazz is not something I'm super familiar with, so it was really interesting to get that side of it as well. And I think the lessons that you shared almost apply to any industry, in terms of just being out there, focusing on practice, not letting it get to you and not tying yourself to your job. So thank you for sharing.

[00:19:07] Haley: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:19:08] Host: As I say, everyone, if you have any questions for Haley, please do send them in. While we're waiting, just double-checking that there are no questions at the moment: what do you think is the hardest part of detaching yourself? Because that's the one I've always struggled with. I know mentally: don't attach your self-worth. They're commenting on the process or they're commenting on the output, they're not commenting on your abilities, that kind of thing. What do you use to actually do that, though? Because it's easy to say, and I don't think it's as easy to put into practice.

[00:19:51] Haley: Yeah. I'm not sure if I have an answer to that. I think, as with any mental restructuring, you just keep telling yourself that you're getting better. And I think it just takes practice and time, trying to perceive your work like it's someone else's. When you practice, everyone will tell you to record yourself and then listen back to it, because that way you're detached from the moment of your playing and the things that you feel when you're playing it. When you're playing it, you think you sound like a master. And then you listen back to it, and the first few times you feel terrible, because it sounds terrible. But if you keep doing it, you are able to just objectively hear what you're hearing. I think it just takes repetition, and I don't think there's a fast way around it.

[00:21:05] Host: Excellent. No, it's a great analogy. I think you mentioned as well taking a step back from your work and then seeing it again. So many times I think, that looks great, and you come back and you're like, oh, that does not look very good.

[00:21:22] Haley: Yeah. When you try to face your work, you just get used to this feeling of, oof, that looks terrible. And then over time you just get past that feeling of feeling terrible, because you're used to it. And you're able to see this work and write down a grocery list of problems that need to be addressed.

[00:21:51] Host: Brilliant. And just taking one step back, actually, to, I can't remember the word you used exactly, it was the one responsible individual or something like that.

[00:22:01] Haley: Yeah, the directly responsible individual.

[00:22:04] Host: Directly responsible. How does that work in practice? As you were saying, it's quite different on each team. Is that a team-decided thing, or does it just work organically with how people work together on a team?

[00:22:19] Haley: Yeah. I think there is a shared guideline, or a shared model, within the organization that says, here's the product development process. During the development period, engineers are the DRIs. During the solutioning period, the designers are the DRIs. It's more of a guideline. In practice, people don't really think about who the DRI is, but I just found that to be a good mental model to have when you're collaborating with other people.

[00:22:53] Host: And sorry, just as you described it there: I know it's not waterfall, but by saying somebody happens to be the lead in that area, does that approach instill a little bit of waterfall-style thinking? Because, okay, researchers own this, and then the designer owns this, and then engineers own this. Is there a little danger in that?

[00:23:16] Haley: Yeah. Now that you mention it, it feels like there could be that danger. But the way it's implemented, or the way we think about it, it's more about who takes responsibility for this part going well. Everyone plays a part, but if you have to go to one person, that designated person is the directly responsible individual. It's more about accountability than about who is doing the actual work.

[00:23:58] Host: That's great. No, it's just interesting. I'm always intrigued at how different companies tackle that very similar problem. There's a festival on at the moment, if you can hear the fire. And I guess just on to your jazz career: what are your goals there? Are you taking this full-time, or not full-time, but are you trying to break into the jazz scene?

[00:24:21] Haley: Sort of. I approach it more as: my goal is to sound good, not, oh, I want to play at this venue, or I want to play with these people. That would be great; there are so many people that I want to play with. But my goal is, in so-and-so years, I want to be able to sound as good as this person. Or I want to be at a level where I can express myself freely. Or I want to get to a level where I hear my solo and don't feel like, oh, that sounds terrible.

[00:25:07] Host: I'm sure you're too harsh on yourself.

[00:25:10] Haley: Every jazz musician is harsh on themselves. That's just what I've felt. For example, I heard my friend's teacher, who was a jazz pianist, tell my friend that he sounds corny, and that's what he hears all the time. And it's just that you accept that when you're starting out, you sound corny, and then your goal is to sound less corny over time. Everyone just accepts it and says, oh, I need to practice, oh, I sound terrible. Accepting that, I think, is kind of healthy, because everyone sounds terrible. Everyone has a goal to be better than themselves, than how they played yesterday.

[00:26:09] Host: Yeah. I think that's a great analogy for everything in life. It's always just about getting better. But I think that actually takes us to time. So I want to thank you very much once again, Haley, for sharing your amazing analogy. I hope everyone enjoyed it out there as much as I did.

[00:26:29] Haley: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I had fun.