Google Designer Says You Don’t Need a Smartwatch, and That’s OK
Matías Duarte, Android’s vice president for design, speaks during the keynote presentation at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco on June 25, 2014.
Photographer: Jeff Chiu/AP PhotoSporting an Android Wear device on his wrist, Google Vice President Matías Duarte made a convincing case for why no one needs the thing he has on. This wasn’t some kind of reverse psychology, but a declaration that the watch computer represents the future, and the future hasn’t quite arrived yet.
Duarte, the design head responsible for Google’s new uniform of baby-blue title bars and reddish-orange “plus” buttons rolling out across its various apps, part of what the company calls its material design, was interviewed onstage at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2015 conference on Tuesday in San Francisco. In a conversation with Bloomberg Digital Editor Joshua Topolsky, Duarte rattled off several analogies comparing technology to historical tools and trades—early cartoonists drawing individual leaves on a tree as 18th century silversmiths, or modern animators as gardeners using computer graphics to quickly churn out scenery.