At Paris Art and Design Week, Big Tech Looms–But Humanity Shimmers Beneath It

“Nobody stops at a stop sign and thinks: ‘When are they going to redesign that? It’s so old!’”

So declared Susan Kare, the American artist and graphic designer, during a design panel in Paris for the buzzy digital security company Ledger. Kare, renowned for her pioneering work at Apple—where she created many of the company’s earliest and enduring bitmap icons and typefaces—was brought on by Ledger to “add a little graphic welcome,” via interchangeable plug elements on its latest storage device, the Nano Gen5.

That same company also employs Ian Rogers, former Chief Digital Officer of LVMH (and another Apple alum) and, currently, Ledger’s Chief Experience Officer. A few minutes prior to the panel, he told me that “the more time we spend with technology, the more we’ll value human connect