On December 21, 2020, August de Los Reyes passed away due to complications with COVID-19 at the age of 50. Since learning about this, Jp and I have been saddened to hear of his passing. August was a remarkable designer with an amazing intellect. And, he put it to good work making impact in not only the products for Microsoft, Pinterest, Google, and Varo Bank, but August changed the way these companies and teams approached their work. He was a champion of inclusive design.

We had the privilege of meeting and speaking to August in 2019 when we were in San Francisco. During our time together, August spoke of the importance of Inclusive Design and the type of legacy he wanted to leave behind for future generations of designers. He believed this approach to working could dramatically impact the way we live in society. He imagined a world and a process that consciously merges technology, culture, and inclusion for future generations.

August spoke of living a life with no regrets.

When This is Design School started, the intention was to help support students and design practitioners to learn about the different paths and choices that made people the designers they are today. Few of the people we have talked to have had such a prolific career and impact as August De los Reyes.

We send our thoughts and condolences to his husband and family during this time of remembrance. In honor and celebration of his legacy, we’re re-issuing our interview with August to continue to spread his vision. May his spark continue to inspire each of us to seek a life filled with passion, purpose, intention, and inclusion.

---

On this final episode of Year 05, we talk with August de los Reyes, Chief Design Officer at Varo Money Inc., in San Francisco, California. De los Reyes’ career transcends decades of technological shifts and advancements, and includes work with Microsoft, Google, Pinterest, and Philips. In our discussion, August reflects on his career to date, categorizing it into three decades: the how, the why, and the legacy. He speaks about the future and importance of Inclusive Design, the legacy we might leave behind for future generations of designers to build upon, and living a life of no regrets.

---

Chad:

August de los Reyas, thank you for joining on This is Design School today. I feel like there have been a lot of people that I’ve come across in my life that have known you and your name has come up so many times. And so, I’m so excited to be talking to you today.

August:

Well, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

August:

You’re kind of like the godfather of all of our previous guests. It seems like they’re—in, some way, shape, or form—they are they know you, they’ve worked with you, they’ve interacted with you. And when they hear they’re like, “Yes, talk to August!”

August:

Oh, well that’s exciting. I don’t know how I feel about godfather. No one’s asking me for favors.

All:

(laugh)

August:

But, that’s very kind.

Jp:

Yeah. I’d love to start off by hearing a little bit about how did you get into design, and where are you now with design?

August:

Well, I would say but my answer is probably kind of boring, in the sense that I always wanted to be a designer.

Jp:

Really?

August:

Yeah, yeah. When I was a kid, I was pretty precocious at math. But, I was also really strong in the fine arts, and the whole thing just seemed to, kind of, merge together, especially around architecture. And so, I spent most of my childhood thinking that I would become an architect. And then, I got to college and I saw how miserable the architecture students were. And so, I kind of shifted to other design practices.

Jp:

(laughs) Yeah.

August:

But, I’ve been a designer for close to 30 years now. And, I guess you could characterize my design journey into three phases, which are roughly a decade a piece. Where my first 10 years as a designer seemed to be motivated very typically, with other young designers, which is just to create cool, sexy stuff. This kind of lined up with where design was and where I was in the early to mid 90s. That’s how I long ago it was.

Jp:

(laughs) I’m not too far behind. I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.

August:

Yeah. And, I really thought that I would go into magazine publishing. Because I remember, as a kid, I was just fascinated by album covers, and magazine covers, and how so much had to be conveyed on one page in order to compel you to either pick up the magazine, look into it, and buy it.

And, as luck would have it, after I finished undergrad I landed an internship at The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and I was like, “Okay, I’m in it, and I’m setting up interviews at Condé Nast, and I’m ready to embrace the world of magazines.” And, when I arrived at The Atlantic, they asked me to join a special projects team to look into this fun, special project called the web. And, I learned how to do HTML, and I also helped transcode some other content to the AOL platform, and all things digital. Well, long story short, I ended up giving a presentation at Macworld Expo in Boston in 1995. Where some of my college classmates and I had created a CD-ROM, which at that time was like the digital media.

Jp:

Oh, yeah.

August:

Yeah. We had, kind of, figured out organically our work process, and how to storyboard nonlinearly, and really embraced the idea of hypertext and hypermedia, and create this kind of compelling CD-ROM. And, after we gave that presentation in ’95, we all got job offers and I ended up joining a startup and I left the notion of magazine publishing behind and stayed in technology the rest of my career.

So, that was, like, the first decade. So, I packed up my bags and moved to the Netherlands; moved to Amsterdam. And, worked for Philips Design, which is the design arm of Philips Electronics. And, I was there for three years and this is how my time in the Netherlands unfolded.

Year number one I thought, “My god, this is a designer’s paradise! Look at all this Helvetica. Like, look at all these posters and Dunbar and, like, the design systems. It was crazy! And then, my second year out of the three, was just getting really acclimated to the Dutch way of working. And so, my third year, I would characterize as, “All I want to do is go home; go back to the United States.” And so, at that time, I had written a design book for mobile devices. It’s a terrible book. Don’t look it up. (laughs)

Yeah, I was… I got a call from Microsoft, which kind of put me in a bit of a pickle because this was a company that, admittedly, I had held with a bit of disdain. And, I thought to myself, “Well, at least I’ll be back in the United States. I could work there for a year or two, and probably move on to somewhere more interesting. And, that year or two ended up being 14 years. So yeah, I think that the Pacific Northwest was, kind of, the best of both worlds where I had the urgency of a typical American corporate culture in Redmond, and I want to call it European, but there was something about the Pacific Northwest that felt very similar to the vibe that I found in Northern Europe. And, I just ended up staying there. But, I think the second more compelling reason about this second decade of my career is what I learned from Philips, and more so from Microsoft was the scale and the impact that design could have.

There is a story which reminds me of how that kind of impact could have both a positive or a negative outcome. So, one of the first house I was given when I joined Microsoft was to help cobble together an icon, a speaker icon for MSN Messenger.

Jp:

Oh, wow.

August:

Yeah, this is the kind of timeframe here. And so…

Jp:

It was that blue… the light blue?

August:

Yes. Shiny…

Chad:

Yeah. It had a very ethereal quality.

August:

It did! It did.

And, I don’t know if you recall the microphone icon on it. But, I had worked with an illustrator and we threw the thing together literally in half an hour and handed it off thinking, “Oh, this will have to go through all sorts of testing and rigor.” And, the next week it was live in Messenger! And, I talked to my program manager. I said, “How many people are going to see this icon?” It was one of those old fashioned, old timey, pill shaped microphones. And, they said “Oh, about 35 million people?” And, I thought, “Oh, no!”

Jp:

Whoops!

August:

Well, I mean, yes and no. It’s just that, if there are that many people experiencing it, it could have been a bit more thoughtful. But, that was kind of my wake up call of how what could seem as very small decisions on a day-to-day basis could impact literally millions of people. And so, I started thinking about the how of design. How design can actually affect people’s moods. How it generates emotion on a very broad scale. So, that’s about the second decade of my career.

And, I guess, the third decade happened began during my time leading design at Xbox. So, in 2013, I landed my dream job at Microsoft, which was to lead design at Xbox. Up until then, I had really been fascinated with the idea of play, and the idea of emotion, and how technology could generate emotions, a whole range of emotions, in people that interact with it, whether it’s through games, or through other kinds of software and hardware. And so, working at Xbox seemed like the intersection between those interests and, arguably, a really cool product.

And about six months into my tenure at Xbox, actually the weekend when we completed the first draft of the entire design, I had an accident. I fell out of bed. Part of it was, at that time, I learned that… I had read an article that said, “Sleep is the new status symbol.” And, I kind of have an obsessive personality. So, I wanted to get the best possible sleep that I could. And, I really geeked out on bedding, and thread count, and different strains of cotton. I wanted to have a different comforter for each season of the year. And, I had gotten this… It was the beginning of summer, and I gotten this very light, huge, overstuffed, down comforter. And, what it did is it kind of created a misperception of how big my bed was. So, I was falling back into the bed. I thought I was going to relax and actually fell and hit my back on the rail of the bed. And, what ended up happening is I had a small fracture in my back. And, because of other factors including a misdiagnosis and some miscommunication in the emergency room, I ended up paralyzed.

Basically, I was in the hospital, out of work for the next six months. And, during that time, all I wanted to do was get back to work. And, it just so happened, going through rehabilitation and learning my new normal, learning how to navigate the world in my wheelchair, I ended up returning to work on the eve of the launch of the Xbox One. So, in a way, I kind of missed all the the trials and tribulations of engineering, and marketing, and program management design, having trade offs to bring the product to market. But, I ended up coming back to work right when it arrived, and it felt like a double celebration for me.

Listen on

And, while I was gone, during the six months that I was away from work, the entire company had gone through this massive reorg; this huge reorganization. There was a new CEO, and things were moving at the tectonic level. And, when I returned to work, I also returned to a new boss. And, what had happened is all the different heads of design for the products and our division now all reported up to a centralized design organization. So, my peers were now the Head of Windows, the Head of Microsoft Store, the Head of HoloLens, and so on. And, one of the things that our new boss, Albert, asked us to do was to come up with the design agenda. In other words, what are some common threads that all the products in our division could share, given the kind of breadth and impact that we have in everyday lives. And, there were a lot of ideas being tossed around, but the one that I immediately glommed onto was the notion of accessibility.

And, one of my colleagues, one of my peers at the time, her name is Kat Holmes. She and I both, kind of, really embraced the notion of accessibility. And, Kat introduced an approach to accessibility, called Inclusive Design. And so, in a way, Kat helped create the conceptual framework for Inclusive Design. And, part of what I wanted to do, in terms of accessibility and inclusion, was apply it to Xbox as soon as possible.

And so, that began the, kind of, third phase of my design journey, the one that I’m on right now. And, I would argue that this decade of my career is about the why. So, the first was about what, the second is about the how, now it’s about the why. And, what’s interesting about this kind of third phase of design is I’m really obsessed with leaving a bit of a design legacy. And, I want to clarify something. When I say legacy, I don’t mean this is the last thing I’ll ever do. But really, it’s a kind of set of ideas that I hope I could share that other designers can pick up and build off of to help realize the nobility of our profession.

Jp:

Almost like leaving a stamp upon it. What is it that’s going to be that mark upon design or the way that design will be perceived moving forward from there?

August:

Yes. Yeah, precisely.

Jp:

Yeah. And so, where where are you now in relation to this process? You said you’re in the why. What is your thinking about design and about legacy?

August:

I found that in this kind of phase of my journey, I’ve been switching roles more quickly than I have in the prior to. Where in the second decade of design I pretty much had two employers. And before that, two, maybe? And now, I’ve been… I’ve changed roles a couple of times. When you have this, kind of, life changing, life threatening accident, you do start reflecting, and you start thinking about regrets. And, the thing that I’ve learned about my own experience was the things that I had come to regret were things that I hadn’t tried, or hadn’t done. And, what I promised myself was, I wouldn’t resort to regretting things that I hadn’t tried. And so, when I was at Xbox, which, arguably, my original plan was to stay there until I retired. This would be a good place to leave a legacy.

When I got a call to join a startup in the Bay Area, one of the things that I’d always been interested in was coming to work in the Bay Area, and potentially leave a very, arguably, comfortable existence in Seattle.

Jp:

Oh, yeah.

August:

Yeah, and then come here to the land of extremes. (laughs) And, try it out.

But, going back to this whole mantra of no regrets, it’s really like, “Well, let me give it a go.” And so, at the same time, the whole notion of Inclusive Design seemed to have a bit of traction. And, I can get into the mechanics of Inclusive Design in a bit. But, what I found is I wanted to be a kind of Johnny Appleseed in spreading this approach to design and accessibility. Because, if you think about the first two phases in my career, about well, making cool stuff, and then being able to make cool stuff at scale, I think we’re all well aware of the kind of scale that technology presents itself today, which is instant and ubiquitous. In other words, just making one icon and having a couple 10s of million people view it, is nothing compared to the kind of instant and ubiquitous proliferation of ideas, concepts, beliefs that we’re finding now in the 21st century.

So, in thinking that way, well, here’s an opportunity to help shift an approach to design that by its nature is ubiquitous. So, why not design for as inclusive an experience as possible? Because so many times the biases and the opinions that are implicit in the experiences that we design are often perceived as exclusion, or even the word exclusive. It used to be that having something being designer, in the sense that it’s an adjective, also connoted that there was a sense of exclusivity. Designer sunglasses. Designer clothes. You name it. But, there was a sense of exclusion. And, I think part of where we are today is, as as a profession, we need to turn that on its head, in the sense that the notion of exclusive design is an outdated notion, because I don’t think designers 100 years ago would have ever imagined the kind of scale and speed the design of technology would have today.

Jp:

So August, as you are thinking now of the why as part of this third decade of your career, what are some of those things that you’re thinking about? What you mentioned legacy? Where are you now in all of this?

August:

I’m at the point where I’m challenging the definition of accessibility. In other words, Inclusive Design is an approach. Universal Design as an approach. And, the desired outcome of both approaches is accessibility. And, the kind of mental model that we have for accessibility has to do primarily with physical or cognitive abilities, or ability differences. But, when we think about accessibility, or another way to think about it is, who is excluded from an experience? The definition of accessibility can expand to other experiences in which certain groups are excluded for whatever reasons beyond that of an ability difference or cognitive difference. And, that can include gender. That can include socioeconomic background. That can include heritage. You name it. And, in thinking about how to build off of a method for including people of different abilities, and experience, I discovered that this method can scale to other forms of exclusion.

And, the one that I’ve been obsessing about lately, and why I find myself at my current employer, is this notion of financial inclusion. For the first time in my entire career, I’m working in a company where the design problem I’m trying to solve is one that my mother understands easily. On face value, we’re trying to design a bank. And, we’re trying to design a bank for people who are typically excluded or exploited by traditional banking practices.

Jp:

Interesting.

August:

Yeah. Here’s just one example. In 2017, Americans paid over $34 billion in overdraft fees.

Chad:

Wow. Billions?

August:

Billion with a B!

Jp:

Wow.

August:

And, one can kind of interpolate or assume that the people who are paying these fees are probably the people who need that money the most. So, that’s just one example of how to start thinking about what would a banking experience in the 21st century be like? And, how could it help democratize, literally an everyday activity? One that’s also coupled with a bit of stigma. Because one, people don’t like to talk about money. And two, if they do there’s almost imposter syndrome of not even having a, kind of, basic knowledge of personal finance.

Coming here, my parents came here as immigrants. And, part of the promise of living in the United States is anyone can succeed by hard work and wherewithal and tenacity.

Jp:

That the American dream is possible.

August:

Yeah. But, on the flip side of that is, if you do not achieve this kind of very prescribed American dream, it’s also your fault. By whatever reason. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve missed an insurance payment and it’s driven your family into bankruptcy. For some reason, there are certain ideologies that suggest it’s all on you. I think part of that is perception that design can help address. So, I know that sounds audacious. But, I would argue the design team that I’m helping lead today is helping to design a new American dream.

Jp:

That’s so fascinating.

August:

Yeah. So, in just the course of our lifetimes, we see these kinds of assumptions or understood mores kind of shift. And, I think the time is right to, kind of, help shift the mythology of the American dream from a focus on the what, which is certain material things like a house and a car, to more of the how and the why, which is really about creating a state of mind. I think the new American dream is really about how we experience not only our control over our financial lives, but also to the human end goal of what all these activities within our financial lives try to realize, which is; one, a sense of security; two, a sense of freedom, and finally; three, a sense of satisfaction. So, I think the new American Dream is really about instilling a sense of being around security, freedom, and satisfaction. I think the beauty of this, too—the kind of elegance of the solution—is that if one chooses to embrace the classic idea of the American dream, to own a house and a car, and what have you, that still falls within the realm of this new American dream.

Chad:

It just doesn’t have to be that specific.

August:

Yeah.

Chad:

Yeah. I mean, that that specific point around like, redefining happiness is interesting, because I feel like the last few years I have been—even on a personal level—thinking about happiness as like this almost problematic term. Because, if you overlap it into a lot of what we do with design is this idea of simplicity and complexity, right? You can’t have simplicity without complexity, otherwise you wouldn’t know what simplicity is. That’s the same thing with happiness. If we’re constantly searching for happiness, even if we do achieve it, if there is no sadness or opposition to that, we would never know that we are in a state of happiness. So, the idea of pursuing that indefinitely is kind of weird.

August:

It’s a fool’s errand.

Chad:

(laughs)

August:

Like, to use the design terminology, it’s a figure/ground relationship.

Chad:

Right! Yeah, exactly. And so, but changing that to something like satisfaction, it’s something that you can earn out of that broad range of experience.

August:

Yes.

Chad:

Yeah. Should that be design school? Or like, should design have a hand in that?

Jp:

Like, should we be teaching that?

Chad:

Yeah. Well, or like, at what level do we do we get designers involved in that? I mean, when you were talking about Inclusive Design, like, more forward thinking programs is maybe beginning to be discussed. I mean, I think Kat’s book has probably been a big driver in getting that into more people’s hands and minds. But, I guess, how do we do it?

August:

That is precisely the question. I think that is the challenge that design education faces in the coming century. Part of it is, it’s all well and good. We understand the craft of design. But, to stop there is selling the power of design short.

A question I often ask colleagues and designer friends is, what is the unique contribution that design provides in the development of a product or service? And, typical student responses tend to be, “Oh, we’re problem solving.” But, I have to re-emphasize the unique contribution that design has, because arguably other functions are problem solvers, other functions are also creative. What is the unique contribution that design provides? And, my hypothesis, the one that I’m asserting is that design provides, what I call, cultural equity in the experience. In other words, it provides the non-utilitarian, and non economic benefits of any given product or service.

And, it’s not to say at the exclusion of others. But, this is the unique contribution that design provides. In other words, what are the signals—whether they’re visual, auditory, experiential—that ties a given experience to the cultural context in which it’s being experienced? Does that make sense?

Chad:

Mm hmm.

August:

I mean, it’s part of part of the word design.

Jp:

Yeah.

August:

It’s… These are signals that actually make a given experience relevant to the time and place to the person experiencing the design.

Chad:

Before we started recording, we were talking about this conversation of, human and machine evolving over time together, in the state of industrial era, you know, humans began comparing themselves to machines and like doing tasks. And then, you know, later on we started doing that more and more with our brain and our cognitive abilities and comparing that with that. And, you mentioned, right now, that you felt we were on kind of this cusp. And, I think we’ve seen it, of machines being able to either read or, at least begin to have some sort of emotional state, or at least mimic it. So, right now if we’re talking about design being very much tied to this emotion, what then, if machines can accomplish that, then how will that evolve design’s role in the world?

August:

Oh, um. I think part of part of designs role evolves into creating positive emotion. But, really at the end of the day, design is about creating a mood. There’s one architect, I remember listening to her lecture. Her name escapes me. But, she wrote a book called The Function of Ornament. And, during her lecture, she suggested the role of architecture, and arguably design in a broader sense, was really just to create a mood. But, at one end, there were the engineers, and at the other end, there is the civic representation of the government that created the building codes and whatnot. And, kind of like, at that intersection, that overlap between engineering and code, was the role of the designer, the intersection of those two role systems actually produced a mood. And, the thing is, you could either produce a given mood explicitly, or it could just be incidental. And, I think what we found with technology is more and more experiences are becoming commoditized. The thing that distinguishes one action experience from an arguably very similar experience is what kind of mental state does it leave you in?

Jp:

It will be really fascinating to see how this all plays out, August. I guess I’m excited to see, especially since, you know, I come from a small liberal arts school that I teach at. And, we think about this holistic approach to design. Not just a, you know, like you’re a print designer. You’re a web designer. You’re a UX designer. But, you’re a person who is designing for. You’re designing in this mode of, what have you. And, I never thought of it this way, but I think that that’s definitely something that I’m seeing in the field of the way that we are teaching, at least at PLU.

August:

Yeah. I think this is where the notion of Service Design, meaning, design in service of blank comes in. Where the blank is not marketing or program management. But, more of a human angle. Yeah. That is my wish for future design education.

Jp:

It’ll be interesting to see the fourth decade now.

August:

Yes.

Jp:

We usually end the podcast with a recommendation list. And, I was wondering, since we’re in San Francisco with you, if you have any recommendations of things that we should see/do while we’re in town.

August:

Okay. There are three recommendations.

Jp:

Alright. I love it.

August:

The first is, just from a curious designer point of view, there is a nonprofit organization called The Lighthouse, which is a nonprofit that helps the blind community. And, there’s a beautiful building on Market Street, I think its Market and 8th. It’s open to the public and you can go in. And, what’s fascinating about The Lighthouse is the aesthetics of the building were designed to help people with low vision. So, the choice of textures, the choice of lighting, the direction. Every little detail has been optimized to help encourage good wayfinding for people with low vision. And, for those of us who have typical vision, it’s a highly aesthetic building. So, you should go. There’s a whole story behind it. I think, some sort of professional athlete from Seattle left like 100 something million to this foundation and they designed this building.

I think it’s the ninth floor, there’s a gift shop full of everyday objects for people with low vision, and includes like Rubik’s cubes, and board games, and kitchen devices. So, you could arguably do all of this stuff without looking at it. So, that was my first recommendation.

The second one is more of a selfish one, which is, I’ve been obsessed with Szechuan cooking and woks. And, I learned doing my research that one of the best places to buy a wok in North America is right here in San Francisco’s Chinatown, called The Wok Shop. And, I won’t get into the finer points of how, or what to buy, but whatever you decide, you will find it there.

And last one, is in moving to San Francisco, I found the the city has a kind of collective obsession with a particular pastry called the Kouign Amann. And, the best place to get a Kouign Amann arguably is shop called b. patisserie, which is a great place for coffee, too. If you want to get a great Kouign Amann, I recommend b. patisserie.

Jp:

Okay.

Chad:

One recommendation I would ask for is, what’s something like you’ve read recently, whether an article or book or whatnot that you felt made an impact on you that either others hadn’t read enough or should be more widely spread.

August:

This is a bit of a confession. I haven’t really read fiction in decades. And lately, I’ve been reading, I picked up reading fiction again, especially Thornton Wilder.

That aside, if we’re going beyond reading, because you did say whatnot. One thing that I’ve been super obsessed with is the history of House music. And, I’ve been looking at the history of it, and how it was born out of the ashes of disco in the early 80s, and the kind of social impact and social movements that informed it; this kind of parallel movement happening in Europe. And, it’s fascinating. And, I mean, part of it, too is like, I learned that some of the drum machines are kind of the de facto standards in both hip hop and house music. The 808 and the 909 are the de facto standards because they were commercial failures, and the market was flooded with used 808s and 909 drum machines, which were easily acquired. And so, again, it’s a fascinating story about how failures and the death of disco and the end of movements actually spurned something that is even more aesthetic, and novel, and more happy.

Jp:

Any recommendations? I’m trying to get more into coffee. And, I could use some thoughts on good ideas, good… Or, what have you.

August:

The biggest thing that anyone can do to markedly improve the quality of the cup of coffee is not so much in the beans or the method by which you brew, but in the way you grind your beans. So, I would recommend buying a really good grinder.

Jp:

A really good grinder? Okay.

Well, August we greatly appreciate your time and your insight. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

August:

Well, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Jp:

Yeah, thanks.

Chad:

Thank you.