Seattle Community Spotlight: Interview with Daniel Robbinson
Daniel’s Headshot
Tell us who you are
My name is Daniel Robbins. I'm a Principal Designer at Adobe focusing on 3D, VR, AR, and generative AI and I've been at Adobe for about a year, but I've been doing user interface design for about 25 years, and if you include school even longer than that.
The way I got into it was the very first week of college, there was an ad in the student paper and it said that they needed artists to help out in the research group. I went and checked it out and it turned out they were doing something called computer graphics which was pretty new to me and they needed artists to create content to use the tools that they were developing in the research group.
I started using these tools and I quickly had many suggestions about how to make the tools better. I kept doing that and it turns out that's user interface design, when someone starts giving feedback and direction as to how a digital tool or experience should operate.
It’s important to note, that when I started doing this there was no training, there were no classes, there were no textbooks, so it was all self-taught, lore, and talking to other people who were in the field prior to my entry.
That was both my start in user interface design and 3D interactive computer graphics. In terms of XR design. that also came through that research group, which was working on the cutting edge of 3D computer graphics at the time. In the early 90s, we got access to a very early virtual reality device that we were using in conjunction with NASA for doing a visualization of fluid flow dynamics around spacecraft, and that was very exciting to be able to use the device since the interactions and experience was radically different. I kept working in that area at various places after college, including a VR startup, HTC, who’s a manufacturer of VR hardware, Meta for social VR, and now Adobe for VR projects and generative AI.
Which experience that you mentioned before was a milestone or significant moment in your journey as a designer that has shaped your career?
Even though my career was already pretty far along by 2017, I still encountered meaningful surprises. When I joined the VR startup, back in 2017, what was remarkable about working at that startup, Visual Vocal, was that we were embedded within the architecture firm NBBJ, which meant that we were actually sitting side by side with our potential customers, who were architects. That was amazing to be able to turn to my right and ask one of these architects, someone whose day job was designing the built environment, sometimes on the computer, sometimes on paper, sometimes on physical models, and to ask for their input and feedback on the app we were creating, which at that time was phone-based VR. That was my real introduction to trying to commercialize virtual reality projects. That was a real awakening in terms of what it takes to make practical solutions and what it meant to have direct customer contact.
What challenges have you encountered along the way, and how have you overcome them?
Many many challenges, certainly with VR or larger areas of XR. The challenge is that it’s not a proven market yet. You could argue that we don’t have a product market fit for any of the products, whether it be hardware or software at this point. So we’re all trying, which means that there has to be a lot of experimentation and there are going to be many attempts that don’t succeed. So it takes resilience and it takes the ability to very quickly learn from what works and what doesn’t work. It is also challenging and exciting because there aren’t established best practices and there aren’t design kits. The process requires not only discovery but actual invention, which is very different than say doing typical mobile app design.
Among all the projects you’ve accomplished, which one is your highlight that you’d like to introduce to our community members?
When I was at Meta, I worked on a product called Horizon Worlds, which is a social VR application and service available on the Oculus platform. As part of that, I worked on integrity, which centers on safety and inclusion. There are many difficult problems in working on integrity in a social setting, and even more so when it’s in a virtual reality setting. As you can imagine, there are many unintended interactions between people. Sometimes people have different intents in what they want to do in a space, and we worked very hard to come up with simple ways to let people have more control over their experience, including everything from being able to remove oneself from a potentially harmful situation to go to a calm space, the ability to easily report activities that were undesirable, and the ability to send warnings to people when their behaviors was potentially getting to a negative situation. These were very difficult things to do because when you are in a virtual reality, there are many stimuli that are continually changing. If we are going to pop up an interface to allow certain actions, we have to do it in a way that doesn’t prevent the user from seeing what’s happening in the world, but also is very easy to use in a high-stress situation.
I’m proud of the work I did in that group. The designs are very simple in some ways but they had to deal with many of edge cases that can occur in virtual reality when we have a very diverse set of users and a large number of users in a live space interacting at the same time.
Do you have any particular design principles and philosophies that guide you through your work?
These are not in particular order and not even in particular priority, but I would say that the biggest challenges that most people have are how they deal with scale. It’s very easy to make an interface that deals with a small number of items. It’s very difficult to have an interface that deals with tons of items. But probably the most important thing to be aware of is how to manage user attention. To put it bluntly, we can always make higher resolution screens, bigger batteries, new ways of sensing and presenting, but human attention is a finite resource. So, we need to be able to identify what things are adding stress, bringing joy, where people are trying to give their attention, and when to introduce new stimuli into the environment whether the UI is on a phone, desktop, or even immersed around us. Managing that attention is very very difficult.
A design question I pose to the designers I work with is what I call “past, present, and future". The past is what the user has done, the present shows what the user is doing, and the future shows what a user is able to do. In user interface design, we are pretty good at showing people what they are doing, dragging things around with direct manipulation, and giving that feedback. We are OK at giving hints about what someone can do in the future, what we typically call affordances. But we are terrible at showing people what they’ve already done. If I come to a spreadsheet that someone else made, it’d be very difficult to understand how things are related and what people are already doing in that space. Those are interesting challenges. Now think of these challenges in a 3D immersive app, and the challenges are compounded.
What are some of the most valuable lessons or takeaways you've gained from your experiences as a designer and would like to share with other design peers?
Sure. These may not sound specifically for design but they are helpful when you work with other people. The first one is around compassion. Compassion has so many different dimensions. Not only the compassion for ourselves, like how hard our job is to empower people and enable people but also the compassion for users. We may have an idealized vision about someone using something we make but in the real world, that experience can be very different. Whether it’s someone trying to use their phone while holding 3 grocery bags or their kid’s hand while getting on the bus, that is a situation where we need to give lots of compassion for that person with all the different things pulling their attention and the physical constraints they have to deal with.
The next one is about curiosity. I would say designers are very well served when they move through the world with curiosity. I am someone who when I am out and about, I’m always trying to notice the little surprises. Because behind every surprise is a lesson. When someone uses technology in what we perceive as “the wrong way”, what we think of as the wrong way is actually an opportunity for us to learn about different ways that people use that technology and to understand that the human experience is much richer and more varied than we can anticipate. And then the last one is to really embrace the idea of contradiction, which is that you can also think of this as “yes and…” which is that people often have conflicting desires, for instance, with virtual reality and privacy, people have a desire for automation but they also have a desire for privacy. Understanding that contradiction is really important, and those kinds of contradictions come up all the time in different kinds of design problems.
So those are the three operating principles that I would hope any designer tries to embrace, which are compassion, curiosity, and contradiction.
Do you have any goals or aspirations for your future as a designer in your career that you’d like to share with our community members?
I would say my aspirations fall into a few different domains. One is around mentorship and sponsorship. I really enjoy mentoring people who are trying to enter the field, especially people from underrepresented groups, people whom we don’t normally see at the design table. I would like to sponsor more voices, more diverse voices that represent the world as it is and the world as we want it to be. That’s something I’m very involved in and find very rewarding.
I am also very concerned and active in trying to bring concerns for ethics and equity into design. Many companies, tech companies, and people have a cultural bias that what we create is neutral, that tech is neutral. That tech is neither good nor bad, it just makes good or bad more efficient. I question that assumption. I’m not inventing this idea, but I’d like people to really understand that everything we create has a point of view. Everything we create is political. Everything we create does change the world and everything we create and what facilities we give people really biases the actions that people take. I would hope that we would try to take the moral high ground and what we enable people to do and what we encourage and disincentivize people to do, all while being very honest about the harm our creations can create in the world
So the two main areas, just to restate more briefly, moving forward for me around mentorship and sponsorship and then around bringing ethics and equity into the design process.
Do you have any design resources that we can share with others?
This may be frustrating for this audience, but I don’t have any because I came up in the design world before there were formal design resources. I would say the biggest resource is the real world, to get out in the world and watch how people move through the world, how they use the physical world, how they use their devices around them, who they talk to, who they give attention to. Get out of your car, or apartment, get off Netflix, get out in the real world, and put your phone down. Get on a bus, get on a light rail, get into places where you come into meaningful contact with people who are different than you. Try to make friends with people who are different than you, and be an amateur ethnographer. I think that the most valuable tool for any designer is to learn some basic ethnographic skills.