Laurel Schwulst is a designer, artist, writer, educator, and technologist. She is recognized for her experiential projects-as-worlds, her expanded writing practice, her creative direction leadership, her websites, her innovative learning materials and educational environments, and her ongoing collaborations. Her writing (published in venues including The New York Times, The Creative Independent , and Art in America) has taken the form of essays, perfume reviews, and interviews with other artists. For over a decade, she has taught award-winning design classes and workshops (at universities including Yale and Princeton), and has presented internationally at cultural, academic, and internet-native institutions (at venues including BBC Radio 4, RISD, University of Seoul, Google, and Wikipedia). Laurel currently lives in New York City, serves as director of the gift shop at Are.na (a platform for networked curation), and is working towards a “PBS of the Internet.”

As an instructor and internet designer, Laurel’s thinking has played a major role in my work. Her unique perspective and lightness towards her practice is admirable. She can think deeply about the world while doing it in a playful way. Her vision of the future is refreshing in a time with so much uncertainty, but her love for humanity is what I find most intriguing. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, but in doing so has so much depth and breadth. After our conversation, I asked Laurel if she’d like to contribute a song for the mixtape that comes with the book. Her choice was Your Wildlife by Propaganda.

Noise is about ambience and the environment. It’s interesting to think about the difference between sound and noise. Not that I have a very big definition myself, but to me, sound seems more general than noise. It somehow feels more atmospheric.

White noise, for me, holds a special significance. It’s the primal sound we encounter as infants in the womb, our first auditory experience. In contrast, the outside world seems eerily silent to babies. This notion of enveloping noise, perhaps, is a more natural state for us.

We could think of white noise as the sonic equivalent of the color gray. Although, it’s funny because it’s called white noise. But it’s actually equal levels of these frequencies. Let’s think about the color gray and RGB; it’s an equal R, G, and B. Sometimes it’s easier to start sketching on a gray or brown page as opposed to a white page because it’s more in this middle ground, where we feel like we can go darker or lighter if we have a lighter colored pencil. In high school, I always used to sketch on brown paper.

It also made the colors look nicer. And I often feel that web designers like gray, or at least presenting their work in gray, because so many websites are white by default, and it’s just nice to have some dimensionality to differentiate. It’s fun to think about the background color of websites.

What you’re speaking to is the strength of communication—specific communication without words, or just how communication can be precise but almost more sense-based through the five senses.

Like you said, it’s crazy how accurate or maybe unanimous the red-green one was. I would assume everyone thinks Kiki is red and Bouba is green. In that way, you’re talking about cutting through the noise.

I would say language and speech are kind of our default as humans. So, we have to find other ways of communicating to cut through the noise. Other examples might be sensory ways of communicating—for example, music or other sensory ways to communicate. It’s like, “Yeah that, that’s it.” But we can’t explain in words what “that” is. It’s almost as if it’s some mood. It’s interesting, there’s almost a Kiki mood.

It’s a fun question. Honestly, I think it was because I heard you could turn up the volume. And with the non-digital ones, you can’t turn up the volume because it’s essentially a fan. So, I guess I wanted that control. I also think it was just slightly cheaper. So, it was just an easy purchase on Amazon. It could be more pragmatic. But it’s funny; I only used it for a few years, and I don’t own it anymore. I don’t know what I did with it, but I don’t use a white noise machine anymore.

Do you use one?

Which manual one do you have?

I think this is very related to the problem of our time. As we go on as a human society, informational noise is at an all-time high. Things are coming at us so fast—and all the time. It’s almost expected that we’re not only always available to incoming pings but also able to sift through all the news coming in.

Sometimes, I consider myself a website designer, but I also think about these systems more in the big picture. I guess I’m always thinking about people’s attention. I consider attention to be one of the most valuable “currencies” of our time because paying attention to something means a lot in an ecosystem of many competing, noisy things.

I have an are.na channel called Attention_↗ that I like to tend to sometimes. Whenever I return to it, I realize how important it is.

Yeah, for sure. I wrote an essay called “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?” _↗ I collected some quotes that were then expressed as sparrow memes. The first sparrow meme was by the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, Lewis Rosetto, in the early 90s. He basically says that meaning and context are the ultimate luxury in an age of information overload. It’s so interesting that he said that in 1993. Because it’s like, “Wow, they were feeling it then.”

It’s only going to go up and up, I suppose. This conversation also reminds me of another piece I enjoy. Have you read “The Coming Age of Calm Technology”_↗?

Oh, wow, exciting. Yeah. I love that one. It’s also from the 90s. It’s from 1996. Two researchers at Xerox PARC wrote it. Sometimes, I give this to my students because this piece is almost the history of computing. They talk about how computers were so complex in the early days that they had to be big, like a mainframe. And many people shared one computer. Then we got to the age of personal computers, where every person had one computer. And now, we’re in an age of what they call ubiquitous computing, which is about many computers sharing each of us. I would also say, each of us having many computers. The Internet of things, sort of era. They talk about, okay, if we’re going to go from mainframe to ubiquitous computing, calmness will continue to be an important feeling we need to achieve in the design of computing and the design of the Internet.

They say something interesting to me at the end about something they call the periphery. They say, “We use ‘periphery’ to name what we are attuned to without attending to it explicitly.” They explain how, when you’re driving, you’re always focused on the center of the road. But of course, you’re paying attention to other stuff like if there’s an accident zooming by.

They say something counterintuitive, which is interesting. They say that they think a good strategy to work towards would be like driving when you’re focused but still attuned to the environment. There needs to be more things like this with the design of computers for the Internet—where these are sort of like atmospheric signals. But you’re still focused on your main thing. And they say that if you increase information overload a lot, we’ll have to deal with it. And that stuff is just going to zoom by. And then, maybe because we’re experiencing so much, we will be better at choosing what’s most important, which I find funny. But it’s kind of true in some ways.

So I don’t know. Maybe I just went off the deep end a little bit. But I guess this is always something I think about. I don’t know if it’s enacted in my designs.

I am designing this website for an architecture firm right now. One thing I’ve been thinking about is that they have projects all over the world. And they’re very interested in light websites and the five senses. I’ve been thinking about how it would be neat if there were a way to feel the place of the site when you’re on a certain project. So you could know it was sunset there or something like that.

Even if it’s just the background color shifting some, there needs to be more ways to communicate that that’s on the periphery but still felt.

Yeah, it’s a good question. Maybe I’ve talked about this before, but two things are coming up for me. I think we will continue to see more and more less screen-based things. I’m also very curious about the future of audio just because I find it a bit more of a humane medium. It’s funny. You could have overlapping sounds, but there’s something about the directness and only being able to listen to one stream at a time that feels useful for being a healthy human. I also think about people walking around, looking at their phones, and crashing into each other. Or how their eyesight is eventually going to start to go.

I’m just very interested in a future of more embodied technology that works for people and helps them achieve their goals rather than distracting them further.

This is random and funny, but I was doing a workshop two weekends ago at the University of Tennessee. While I was there, I talked with one of the other faculty members at the University of Tennessee. She has two kids and said that one of her kids is next level and whenever he goes on the Internet or uses Minecraft, he says that he only uses it in peaceful mode. He won’t do anything destructive in Minecraft, and if he sees a violent video, he’ll be like, “No, I’m in peaceful mode.” I feel like the Internet needs some peaceful mode, not just for kids but for humanity in general.

I don’t know if this is actually going to be the future of the Internet, but it’s the future that I would like to see. Of course, if this is actually going to happen, it needs to come from the ground level. But I also think there needs to be some people in positions of power making big decisions who also think about this.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is maybe a kind of an intense view. But I believe many problems would be solved if we had upload and download limits, just in general, on the Internet. I moved last week, and I didn’t have Internet at my house for a few days, and the service was also bad; I only got 2 bars. So when I tried to load Instagram, no videos played. And I was thinking, “Oh, my God! Thank God! Like I didn’t wanna do that, anyway.” Of course, there’s value to Instagram sometimes, and I enjoy being connected to lots of smart and interesting people. But I feel like some limitation that’s imposed for a collective good would be possibly very valuable.

I was talking to some friends last night about how we all think the Light Phone08 is cool. I don’t know if you’ve played with it. It’s like this E-ink phone. Do you know about it?

Yeah, exactly. It has an E Ink display so it looks like a Kindle screen. The idea is that you get one that works in concert with your smartphone. And so if you want to go out on a walk but don’t want all of the functions of your smartphone, you take your Light phone out. Then, you can call and look up maps, text, and essential things. It’s like a way to be more present in the world when you’re mobile. Anyways, all of my friends think it’s cool.

We were thinking, “It’d be awesome if everyone just had the Light Phone because then we wouldn’t have to explain, ‘Sorry, I’m on my Light Phone; I can’t receive images right now.’” It would be more collective. I do know there was an experiment_↗ where one school acquired Light Phones for all the students, measured the results, and said that it was really good for people’s attention levels over time.

I feel that maybe at the school level, more experiments like this should take place. Because these populations are interlinked but still individual, they’re collective but not the size of a nation. Smaller places where you can do experiments like this.

What do you think of all those ideas?

Everyone’s asking about AI, and I think it’s fascinating and insane at the same time. It can be a huge help for a lot of talented people to make their jobs easier. But it’s just good when we work with AI to understand its limitations and what it’s good at and not good at.

There’s an article I’ve been enjoying by Elan Ullendorff. He writes this Substack called Deep Sea Diving, and he wrote a piece called “The New Turing Test.”_↗ This talks about AI in the context of creativity. Actually, this circles back to that Lewis Rosetto quote, which says, “In an age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context.” Elan says, “I have a nontraditional set of standards through which I encourage my students to evaluate their work (curiosity, criticality, communication, conscientiousness).”

It has three simple criteria.

AI to me in general is similar to information overload. I agree with Elan when he says “But for everything else, asking how much AI is in something may be less important than a simpler question: how much humanity is in it?” I don’t know how to answer this regarding a feature of the Internet. I find AI quite helpful in certain contexts. But I think the humanity thing is key and something I’m interested in.

One other thread I’ve been thinking about is, in an age when we’re getting good at talking to computers, basically, in an age when we’re getting good at asking Chat GPT questions, I think it becomes increasingly important for us to learn how to talk to ourselves, and speak to other humans. And I find that conversation being the medium quite interesting. Gordon Brander is working on this enchanted notes app_↗, which is a notes app for yourself. But what it does is it uses AI in the notes app to bring up unexpected connections between things that you’ve written down in the past. I find that a very cool and valuable use of AI to help you understand links in your thinking. To help you become a better human.

I don’t know if I’ve answered the question. But those are some starting thoughts.

My first thought has to do with humanity. One thing I like about working in the digital is that it makes me more aware of how links exist in the physical, especially in terms of networks of people.

Something nice about starting to research this architecture website I’m currently working on is that I’ve been going through all the texts of their books and their practice. As I look through these books, I’m like, “Wow, the website is basically here; in the books, I just have to translate it.” I find that thinking about one’s practice in terms of links of people or structures that are just emergent is valuable, and we don’t need to outsource everything to be digital all the time because links are already inherently human. I hope that’s not too abstract of a piece of advice.

I also think maybe a good piece of advice that calms me a lot is to work with what’s here—that is, what’s already here. I don’t actually need to invent anything new. It might be just about rearranging some stuff or translating some stuff.

In art school, there’s always this pressure to invent, invent, invent. But we can rethink what invention means, and sometimes, it can be about rearrangement or arrangement or translation—a translation to a new age or something like that.

Yes, exactly; I love that.

Okay, maybe last thought, this links to the second half of the semester in my Princeton class. I’m going to be doing a project with everyone called “local website.”

The plan is for everyone to choose a location on campus and make a website accessible only in that location. So, it’s going to start with some site-specificity assignments. It will be about noticing the site and atmospheric attunement. I’m inviting this artist and my friend named Austin Wade Smith into my class, and they’re giving a lecture that I’m excited about called Aeromancy in Everyday Life. Aeromancy is a fancy word that means atmospheric conditions. And so they’ll talk about how their practice is interested in understanding the atmosphere in many different ways.

It’s going to end with a little workshop on how to become more attuned to your site, and then I think we might fly kites after that.

I’m excited.