If you’ve ever been to HOW Design Live, you have no doubt seen a towering 6’8” titan of inspiration and innovation: Stefan Mumaw.
A mainstay of the event, attendees rank his sessions as among the best of the whole show for the way he balances humor with insight and practical takeaways. Mumaw also consistently surprises—and last year we were particularly struck by his discussion of the most humble of food offerings: … a Twinkie and a banana.
WHICH ARE YOU?
Mumaw kicked off “(work)Shoppe of Curiosities” by addressing the sentient robotic elephant in the room: AI.
“In 1988, we were all going to get replaced by computers,” he said. “In 1996, we were all going to get replaced by the web. And today we’re all going to get replaced by AI.”
The reason we didn’t back then and the reason we won’t now: Curiosity. As it turns out, it’s our creative superpower—so long as we use it. And on that front, Mumaw brought up two types of creatives: Those who are like the Twinkie, and those who are like the banana.
First up, the Twinkie. Now, by official counts, Twinkies have a shelf life of around 25 days. But popular mythology holds that they actually last forever (a theory that was tested by Roger Bennatti, a science teacher in Maine who kept one above his chalkboard for 30 years; as he told the Associated Press, “It’s rather brittle, but if you dusted it off, it’s probably still edible”).
Now, the banana: In its own bunch, it’s really only good for a few days once it’s ripe. But, Mumaw said, if you take a ripe banana away and stash it among some unripened bananas, the ripening process slows and it will last longer, owing to the amounts of ethylene in the different states of the fruit.
“There’s a lesson in this,” Mumaw said. “Don’t be the Twinkie. It never changes. It never needs to learn anything more. It says it’s fresh. But it’s really not.”
In other words: Do you want to probably still be good, like Bennatti’s antique blackboard Twinkie?
At some point we came to believe that we had learned enough, that we and our work were good and fine and that was that, new tech and ideas be damned. But that’s what leads to irrelevance. If, say, AI scares you—it shouldn’t.
“Just like at the beginning of computing, just like at the beginning of the internet, it is [us] who define the value of what comes next, just like we did then, and just like we will now. It’s our opportunity to innovate.”
As for how you do that—engage your curiosity, and follow it to the places it leads you. And remember the banana trick.
“Surround yourself with other people that are just as inquisitive,” Mumaw said. “Because it’s contagious. It’s viral—they rub off on you. And they will keep you relevant longer. They’ll challenge your perceptions of things. … This is how we stay relevant. This is how we improve. Curiosity leads to relevance—it leads you to understand what’s possible in the world.”
If there’s one person who could take our childhood lunchbox staples and craft a creative lesson out of them, it’s Mumaw—and you’re going to love what he has in store for you at HOW Design Live 2024. Stay tuned!
For much more, tune into the full session right here!