Liz DanzicoModify

2026-03-15 02:50:02

“Woo” was the sound a 1984 Yamaha electric keyboard makes when a young girl procrastinates practicing piano. Our baby grand with all its keys lived in the living room on display, its repertoire governed by my piano teacher, my mother, recitals, and the expectations of daily practicing. The Yamaha, by contrast, was in my bedroom with buttons and pre-set voices rendering its keys to be possibility.

I would stand over it with the particular frozen-ness of a child confronting freedom thinking, in whatever syntax I had at the time, “Now that choice is infinite, how do I decide what to play?”

It was 20 years before when Robert Moog demonstrated a music-making device, a homemade synthesizer of sorts, at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York, and opened curious maker minds. Where a pianist has 88 keys and three pedals to work with, a Moog player has access to knobs and cables that can produce any sound a human has the imagination to construct. The question was no longer what note? It was: what exactly are you trying to say?

Bob Moog’s badge at the 1964 convention via Bob Moog foundation

The current disruption with generative toolmaking, agentic coding, and rapidly emerging AI-assisted processes create the opportunity to decouple certain kinds of making from the tools. The knobs and cables are invisible, replaced by text fields, but the framework is the same. The questions about what to make and why have just moved upstream.

The first generation of synthesizer musicians, largely responded to this vertigo starting by imitating the thing they already knew. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (a favorite, apparently, when I was three years old) had success by showing machines could replicate Bach. Laurie Spiegel used touch-sensitive plates and sequencers for a more experimental approach and moved the mental model forward. The revolution was not that music machines could sound like a harpsichord. The revolution was that they didn’t have to.

Generative tools for design leave us with a similar question: when we can make anything, what is worth making? The mistake would be to repeat the harpsichord replicator error at scale: to use a tool capable of anything primarily to replicate what already exists, to ask the machine to write in the style of Didion or paint in the manner of Hopper, and call that success. One of the lessons of the synthesizer is that the first generation often imitates. This is not a failure of imagination so much as a necessary stage of grief: mourning the loss of the old constraint, which, it turns out, we confuse with craft itself. 

Coda
This past holiday season, we spent time as a family gathered at my parents’ house. Each holiday, we have a tradition where everyone present must play an instrument or, if not, sing. Because of recent downsizing, the house is without its baby grand, so for the holiday, we rented a digital piano. At the end of a long evening, someone found and pressed the digital piano’s “Demo” button. We sat, while the piano self-played a music recital long into the evening.

Somehow, for that moment in time, it was exactly right.

2025-11-18 00:32:56

Click, silence, clack, silence, silence… is the sound the keyboard makes when a ten-year-old is learning how to code her own game for the first time. 

My Dad showed how ASCII, typed line by line, could make tiny characters resolve, magically, into motion from imagination. Meanwhile, my childhood best friend was at home with her Atari consoles and new games, unaware I was nearby learning how to create “any and all games” I wanted. 

When complete, truthfully, my first game looked a bit different than it did in my imagination, the black letterforms hesitated across a line on a screen, no match for color characters. But it worked. And my Dad seemed to gain an almost-mischievous kick out of our collaboration.

I thought of this time recently when our family rediscovered one of my Dad’s first blogs launched almost 20 years ago. He took to making blogs on WordPress, just like he loved making in his workshop, his garage, and his office. With the newness of blogs, ideas swooshed into reality with a publish button, and my Dad was off writing and creating about things he noticed, with yet another platform to share ideas, on one’s own terms, into the world.

Our parents ran their own business. On the side, our Dad volunteered as a PBS cameraman, hosted his own local politics cable access show at our public library, and served on the boards of Scranton Tomorrow, the local zoo, and more. Our Mom, among countless other things, made time to found the first co-ed soccer league for our surrounding towns and played violin in local orchestras. When other kids got store-bought gifts, my Dad taught us to make our own. Learning to drive in our house also meant fixing the car yourself. We learned the value of making and disrupting. But mostly, how to be whole and kind humans, using noticing as an opportunity for making and making change.

Our Dad passed away one year ago. Finding those early blog posts again is just one small reminder of how grateful I am for so much, including his writing and ideas that live in the open. When I think of us standing together at that rudimentary computer all those years ago, him trying to convince me that each keystroke could become Frogger, he wasn’t teaching me code at all, of course. He was teaching possibility. I’ve tried to be off making since.

2025-10-08 21:32:37

It is a sentence already.

That’s advice from The Education of a Design Writer, a new book edited by Molly Heintz and Steven Heller, designers, writers, and longtime co-conspirators at SVA. Steve has been shaping how we think and write about design for decades, and in this new collection (in full disclosure, I have a short entry in the book), he reminds us that writing, like design, is an act of structure, discipline, and curiosity.

He writes in his Preface:

“Whether long or short form, writing is a discipline. Discipline demands structure. Design is a discipline too.”

I’ve always existed in that parallel, how both writing and design begin as messy acts of noticing, then find their form through attention.

And in the age of AI, this reminder feels especially necessary. Machines can now write with startling fluency, but what they produce isn’t writing in the way Steve means it. It lacks the structure that comes from doubt, the rhythm that comes from rewriting, the decisions that come from a depth of care. Writing is not word generation, however expert; it’s shaping perception. It is design, made visible with/though/by/in language.

Steve then includes a deceptively simple piece of advice, passed down from writer his former editor at The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus:

“You can’t go wrong starting a sentence with ‘It is’ because it is a sentence already.”

The elegance of that advice, of starting with a simple framework, feels almost radical now. Amid all the noise, all the auto-completes and predictive texts, there’s something deeply human about starting with a simple framework.

Design writing, at its best, helps us see the world differently and more clearly. And sometimes, the clearest thing we can say is also the shortest.

A friend recently texted me: “No is a complete sentence.”

It is.

2025-08-26 21:45:19

Designers don’t respond to culture; they anticipate it, question it, and are responsible for shaping its direction. And at this moment, that role feels more urgent than ever.

In his new book, The Design Loft, Albert Shum reflects on design and design leadership and, as a result, invites readers to reflect, reimagine, and rethink the possibility for design in the future. As the role of design education and design leadership shifts toward cultivating intent and frameworks for questioning, this book shares insights into our responsibilities. I am honored to have been part of writing a brief foreword.

At SVA, Albert had introduced a course on Responsible Design in the MFA Interaction Design program, teaching the first of its kind in the curriculum, continuing to challenge what the concept meant to students. Today, design tools are more accessible than they’ve ever been. The “what” is easy to reach. It’s the “why” that makes the difference.

Creative pursuits hold an inherent need for choice, whether we consider our medium design, music, art, literature, dance, buildings, landscape, or fashion. Each project we choose becomes a kind of time capsule, a reflection of what design values at a moment in time. Each one, a tool that provides new kinds of access: to services, to systems, to stories, and each centering the human experience as we move toward new futures.

Chris Ashworth’s soulful design for the cover

The Design Loft invites readers to rethink the possibilities for the future of design. We build on what came before us, acting out experiments and projects so we too can anticipate and open up possibilities. In order to do that, you have to build reference points and material. Now you have a guide.

Consider hurrying off to obtain a copy for yourself and start reflecting forward.

2025-06-10 01:53:08

Pre-iPhone, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram, pre-Slack. Pre-rideshare, pre-blockchain, pre-crypto, pre-Zoom. Pre-Hurricane Sandy, Pre-Women’s Marches, Pre-Covid, Pre-X. It was before any of these behavior-changing products, services, and transformative moments the MFA Interaction Design Program at SVA was launched into the world. And yet, from the start, it was designed for the future — preparing students not just for what was next, but for what they could imagine into being.

Since June 2008, I’ve had the immense privilege of serving as its Founding Chair. The program, co-founded with Steven Heller, helps shape the evolving relationship between people and technology. Over these years, human’s relationship with technology has transformed dramatically — interfaces have become infused with intelligence, and intelligence has increasingly dissolved into our behaviors and environments, giving rise to new disciplines and designers’ vital role in responsible AI, ethics, and centering humanity in technology. And with it, the program has evolved.

I’m delighted to share that Adriana Valdez Young has taken on the role of Chair of the MFA Interaction Design to bring the program into its next chapter. She invests a rare and critical blend of creative foresight, thoughtful leadership, and vision rooted in equity, inclusion, and creative innovation. I’ll remain Founding Chair, Advisor to the Chair, and part-time faculty member — supporting the next era of this remarkable community. 

It’s a meaningful milestone. Adriana is a remarkable leader: formerly as Director of Programs and faculty member, she helped evolve the design curriculum — launching needed initiatives in emerging technologies. She partnered with me as Interim and Associate Chair, advancing learning models to include capacities in ethics, AI, spatial computing, and founding a Spatial Computing Lab. Her leadership ensures students can continue the program’s vision, evolved for 2025 forward.

MFA Interaction Design original identity, designed by The Heads of State in 2008

Students have shaped the foundation of a digital design landscape. Faculty have taught me more than I can express. And as a community, we uphold the values of SVA’s co-founder Silas Rhodes who challenged us: “An idea is just an idea until you make it real.” Adriana’s leadership continues this legacy — ensuring students have the tools to build the future only they can envision.

It has been the privilege of a lifetime to lead this program through a time of transformation and expansion. My first office was in a converted facilities closet! Today, we occupy a beautiful studio space in Chelsea, NYC — and a Visible Futures Lab that we helped shape — that has hosted countless classes, crits, celebrations, and moments of transformation and discovery. Over the past 17 years, our community has journeyed from Governor’s Island to the Arctic Circle. I couldn’t be prouder of what our faculty, students, alumni, and staff have accomplished.

Here’s to the future — and the ideas, platforms, and futures students will make real. There’s a profound and inspiring future ahead of this program, and I can’t wait to see what the community builds together.

2025-03-25 22:29:58

I returned home to visit with my Mom last weekend. “Home” is how I’d referred to the place for years. Yet slowly there becomes a tension between the place you lived and the place you live, the “were” and the “is,” the past, the present, and perhaps the future.

Tenses get tangled. Nouns don’t flow. The contours of a geography redrawn. 

You tilt the energy toward the present; slide all the feelings toward the future, pretend you can sift out the sad parts, the bad parts, the hard parts. Keep only the “is” and the happy so it “will be” in the future. The reflective bits gleaming forward. 

In fact, the path to home is people. No matter where she is in the world, the geography of that home I’d always known is where my mother is, where my broader family is.

No matter the changes, there is always a path back home. And “home,” a four-letter word of a different kind — “poof” — transformed.