Matthew Siu
Matthew is an interface researcher interested in how technology can support deeper understanding and expand human creative capacity.
Interaction designer and HCI research “painting with words” / writer & poet
Latest inspirations?
50s/60s music inspired by The Green Book (Black jazz), mythology and old stories, Rick Rubin
Most surreal project?
Moments of the early stage process, “yes and” brainstorming on pen and paper
Creative habits?
Staying up late... til 2/3am and writing consistently, talking to people
What is your creative process?
Open ended exploration into the ways we interact with the world, curiosity to see how people perceive/feel/understand things - thinking about how things are cool, would wonder how it would feel, developing how it would work, using it as intuition to flesh out the concept
Starting as words, turning into digital interactions
Writing a lot, gathering bits of information in the background, going on a walk, and letting ideas come to mind and filtering ideas on a mundane walk (with nothing else to think about)
Sometimes using a notebook to write down idea/concept, sketch boxes/wireframes, broad strokes
Sit down and make it work - for interaction design, it’s useful because hard to imagine in your head how it’ll feel to interact with it until you put it down / play with it - a sketch doesn’t show how it’ll feel (ie. how a mouse will interact, hover, dragging with Javascript)
For static things - going into Figma to sketch something
Typically let idea sit, then come back and revise
In the process, understand what was exciting about the idea, think it’s cool to use in a particular context, share on Twitter for how to frame it at the end
Document creative work by recording a video, think about how to best convey visual storytelling piece (try many options/routes), thinking through the details
What are the challenges in your creative process?
A better way to document the process & output, very useful in post-creation stage, seeing the bits that lead to the final
Having the process be accessible along the way - looking back to see the fresh pieces
Inspiration that I come across - fleeting and passes, could read or see visual things to feed into the next thing I’m writing, “interesting to see it more often” - things with an initial strong emotional reaction to
Understand how I feel when I see something - what was cool about that, seeing something many many times, getting a better sense of my own taste
Taste - takes so long, could accelerate or help someone develop their taste
If you’ve accumulated five years of something, piecing out a pattern or trend (ie. your design habits have changed, your values - foundational)
How do you hone your taste?
Things that I spend time reading/seeing on Twitter, people’s websites, Wikipedia rabbitholes, but if it’s too much at once it’s numbing
Bookmarking tools can feel good to accumulate stuff but I don’t go back to them - considering spaced repetition so each time a piece of content comes back, you react to it again (taste curation being more intentional)
Put questions from the internet into a tool that would resurface the questions and rank them based on how often they were interacted with (liked a lot, see more often) see how responses change to a question as a development of taste
Map out your creative journey
“Feels like they’re always happening at the same time, different amounts of it”. Could be better at getting more feedback in the process
(1) Pre-creation - 45%
(2) Creation - 45%
(3) Post-creation - 10% spent enough time thinking about it that you generally know, not taking leaps that people wouldn’t be able to follow
Favorite design tools and why?
Pen and paper, language
“If you’re a creative person, the tool is never the problem.”
Figma - limited in interaction, have to do it in code
Are.na - wish it had more feedback loops, collecting ideas but doesn’t surface them (like how Apple Photos does a 1 year ago lookback) / snippets of text mixed in with sketches and diagrams, links (wish you could scroll the links, block representation good for some types of media but not others)
Curius - link collection shows the quotes
Notion - like that it does what it should (link/bookmarks), can get slow
Apple Notes - write random things, simple
Tldraw - used instead of Figma, looked less formal for more hazy work, lower fidelity - set color palette etc. (less decision making) - thinking about general purpose tools and creating a better interface for that context, bunding/unbundling (sketch to interaction)
Hardest thing across all tools is you collect so much but it’s hard to process later, easy to process in the moment, hard to put it all together
Where/how do you do your best work?
Finding the right state of mind
How do you hope to grow as a creative?
Treat every creative act as an opportunity to understand myself, first and foremost