 What if we could design for the materials of the future instead of the materials of today? And that future is right around the corner. Google has a new design language. It's going to be used across all its products going forward, starting with Android. But it's more than just a new idea about how software should look. It's a new idea of what software actually is. It's called material design. What if pixels didn't just have color, but also depth? What if there was an intelligent material that was as simple as paper, but could transform and change shape in response to touch? And this led us to a way of thinking that we call material design. Material design started with Google's designers thinking and debating about the look and feel of its software. What, they asked, would happen if you treated the bits on the screen as more than just icons that show information? What if they were real things? That's where it started. The idea actually came from a discussion that John Wiley and Nicholas Jitkoff were having when they were really asking themselves in one of their explorations, what happens when you slide this surface out of the way? What's underneath? And they're like, well, what is underneath? Well, I don't know. What's it made of? And it sounds like an innocent question. And yet it was such a powerful spark. We didn't realize its power until we kind of started using it and leaned into it. But the metaphor helped bring everybody together. It starts with these pretty high-minded ideas, creating a metaphorical substance that defines the rules for how software looks and acts. But in practical terms, it doesn't seem like that radical of a change. We're seeing it first on Android L and Android Wear, and it amounts to clean white cards that you can move around like paper, bright colors, animations that give you a sense of location and space, and yes, consistent drop shadows. It will come to all of Google's products and even third-party apps, but it's going to take a while. In the meantime, Google's design team is trying to spread the word of what these design principles are so that everybody can learn how to design with material. The metaphor was not just useful for unifying ourselves and how we thought about doing stuff. We could say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't feel right, not because it violates paragraph C sub-clause A of our design philosophy, but because it just doesn't feel right. It also means that we use that metaphor to connect with our audience. The human mind is built to build models. That's what makes us capable of being in the world and learning and doing things and putting people on the moon, building smartphones. And so we're constantly building models of the world and predicting how that world will work. When you have a digital world that has no rules, where every time you do something it behaves in a new and different way, it's surprising, but it's also really stressful. Your mind can't build any models. It makes it hard. Everything is an adventure. Well, when you're just trying to get something done, you don't want an adventure, right? You want things to behave in a predictable way. It would be like sometimes I put something on the table, and instead of sitting there, it flies up to the ceiling. But material design is more than just a set of physics for software elements. This paper is able to morph itself into different sizes with animations designed to help you understand how software transitions from one thing to the next and back again. We're not hurtling you through space at high speeds. We're not puncturing your hand with invisible, impossible surfaces. We're trying to limit animation to kind of a depth that is appropriate to the thing that you would hold in your hand. We're trying to make the motion be just enough to help you understand where things have gone and where they're coming from. Beyond animation, this metaphorical material has other abilities. It's smart, based on Google Now's ability to know what you want to see and when you want to see it. It means you have to trust Google with all of your data and hope that it turns into something you want. It's all done in the name of simplicity. Instead of making you hunt for information, it just gives it to you. I think we're approaching it in that we want to have the system as intelligent as possible in terms of ranking information. So if things seem to be out of order, that's a mistake of the system that we need to rank it better. As opposed to approaching the problem as, we're going to solve it by just requiring the users to reorder things. We did it in order to come up with the most simple solution. One of the design practices that we like to follow is try to design the simplest possible thing for the user first. See if you can get away with that. Prove that you need more complexity before you just add it. Material design is all about algorithms doing the work, finding and presenting the information you need instead of making you look for it. We could have said we want to unlock this by giving you control over how you're going to rank things. But instead we said, let's enable rankers to exist. Let's create an ecosystem where rankers can get to know you, learn you, and help you not have to put in that effort. Elevate the things that you should care about, suppress the things that maybe can wait for later. And I think that's the key to unlocking this seeming conundrum between power and simplicity. We want to find ways to do more, be smarter, but at the same time put less burden on the user. Recents is a perfect example of how material design is software that involves things that feel real, but follow their own virtual rules instead of trying to directly imitate physical objects. There's logic, but it's not based on things that came before. It's native to now, to whatever device you're holding in your hand. The brilliant work that Xerox PARC did with windows that could overlap and mice that could point and click, groundbreaking. It really helped people use computers and part of the way it helped is that it had object relationships. Some people didn't understand, actually I'm not sure anybody understood, why that was valuable. The reason why the computer desktop works with overlapping windows representing documents is not because it looks like your physical desk, but because when you work on your physical desk, the same physical things happen. You put the important things on top because those are the ones that you're paying attention to. Then you're like, oh wait, I need something else. You pull that out, it sits on top. Now it has your attention. It's an interaction congruity. It's a functional congruity. It happens to have a visual congruity as well, but that's not the essential part. As we come to smaller screens, we want to actually have that same congruity of the things that you've used recently are at your fingertips. Whether material design turns out to be the most radical rethinking of what software represents since a desktop, or if it's just a fancy term for drop shadows, it has given Google a fresh way to think about its products. It's added new metaphors, new possibilities, but most of all, new constraints. It's that last part that's most intriguing. Design is all about finding solutions within constraints. If there were no constraints, it's not design, it's art.