August de los Reyes ’95, Creative Director at Microsoft

August de los Reyes ’95 is a guy with secrets.

All right, perhaps that’s a bit of an overstatement. Let’s try that again:

August de los Reyes is working on projects at Microsoft that will change the way you use computers. But he can’t talk about all of them.

His title at Microsoft is Creative Director, and in the company’s own words, the team he leads is charged with “imbuing our products with ‘spirit’ and ‘magic’.... creating products of simplicity that you will also find intuitive to use.” Heading up the group of designers and managers who make up the Windows Core Platform Innovation team, August figures out ways to make the Windows experience better through thoughtful hardware design.

Chances are you’ve already used some of their handiwork today. “My old boss was the one who was responsible for the scroll wheel on the mouse,” he says. “The guy who sat next to me picked the color of the connectors on the back of PCs.” Scattered throughout Microsoft products—icons and keyboard keys and more—you’ll find evidence of August de los Reyes trying to make your life easier.

“One of the projects I can talk about,” he says, “is touch-based interfaces. Bill Gates is big on this idea of natural computing—allowing people to interact with technology in natural and intuitive ways.” Among other things, August helped to develop the touch-based mode at the heart of HP TouchSmart, an all-in-one home computer with a touch screen interface. “If my team fulfills its mission,” he says, “we won’t need mice and keyboards.”

“If my team fulfills its mission, we won’t need mice and keyboards.”

As student who transferred to Bennington to study creative writing, August surely never expected to end up where he is now. “My big dream was to work in magazine publishing, and I ended up going to Bennington because it was so well known for its literature program. That was also right around the time that Bennington joined the New Media Consortium*, and it turned out that I really enjoyed working in multimedia, so I worked it into my Plan and ended up with two concentrations—creative writing and new media.”

Among that coursework was a class on interface design—“which for 1994 was really, really ahead of the game,” he says, “especially for a liberal arts school.” The first web page he ever created was a final project for that class. To offer some context on how early it was in the development of the internet: “Later, when I went out in the working world, people would look at my coursework and ask me, ‘What’s multimedia? What’s a web page?’”

CD-ROMs were just becoming popular, and a group of Bennington students, including August, got together to create a CD-ROM for Bennington’s Office of Admissions. “There wasn’t any precedent for how it worked, so we just figured it out and gravitated to our natural strengths,” he says. “I came up with the information architecture. We were challenged to think very non-linearly—to take advantage of the fact that we could tell stories in a non-linear way.”

“Later, when I went out in the working world, people would look at my coursework and ask me, ‘What’s multimedia? What’s a web page?’”

That project turned out to be a pivot point. The summer after his graduation, while working as an intern at the The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, he learned that MACWORLD Expo ’95 was also being held in the city. “Bennington had been invited to present our CD-ROM there. So it was kind of a novelty—I remember standing at the booth and just talking about what we did. People were intrigued by this bunch of kids who had figured out how to design a CD-ROM all on their own.

“I ended up getting a job offer for an internet startup, and since then I’ve always worked in technology.”

August is interested in designing things that work for people, creating objects that take our humanity into consideration.

When you look at August’s career path, two things stand out. One: He seems to gravitate to new technologies and ideas—the things that later become hugely popular—while they’re still nascent and mostly unknown. He was working with online communities in 1996, and wireless and mobile technologies in 2001.

And two: He is really interested in designing things that work for people, creating objects that take our humanity into consideration. At the innovative and prestigious Philips Design in the Netherlands, he was part of a mission “to design solutions that harness technology to genuinely improve the quality of people’s lives and make them happier.” Microsoft’s design team puts their goal even more succinctly: “To create products that people love to experience.”

Even for all that, August admits he wasn’t an easy recruit to Microsoft; while still at Bennington, the self-described “Mac chauvinist” used to get into arguments over operating systems with a fellow student who swore by PCs. The first time the company tried to recruit him, he turned them down. But around the time August began to think about returning to the United States, Windows XP was released. “My roommate in Holland was a PC user, and I noticed there were a lot of things about XP that surprised me.” Curious about Microsoft’s new ventures in design, August took a position as a brand designer there, and quickly rose through the ranks.

“Think about your lucky charms, your souvenirs, your favorite whatever."

His professional success hasn’t put a stop to his lifelong learning—as he puts it, “Right now I’m a kind of half-academic, half-professional.” Recently invited to be a visiting associate at Oxford, he has research privileges at the university for a year, which will be helpful in his current project: finishing up his thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. After that, he’ll pursue his PhD in industrial design at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. At the core of his academic work is his ongoing interest in how humans interact with objects.

“I do research on people’s relationships with objects: emotional design,” August says. “Think about your lucky charms, your souvenirs, your favorite whatever. There’s something there that causes those relationships, and I’m trying to take that information and make it useful for designers—so when we make things, they not only fulfill their functional needs, but satisfy us in less rational ways.

“For my thesis, I’m working on a really new way of measuring people’s emotional responses to objects. And that’s all I can say about it until I patent it.”

*        *        *

*In 1993, the New Media Consortium—founded by a group of hardware manufacturers, software developers, and publishers—decided to invest in building New Media Centers at a select group of colleges and universities. Bennington, along with 21 other institutions, was chosen for its "demonstrated competence at using new media technologies," and Bennington’s New Media Center was built shortly thereafter. Bennington was one of the first members of an organization that now has over 250 participating institutions.

In addition to the former New Media Center (now called the Computer Center), which has computers for student use, a help desk and a repair center, Bennington students also have access to:

• The Pod in the Visual and Performing Arts Center (VAPA): a digital arts hub which offers a host of design and multimedia software, wide-format printers, and more.
• The Cage in VAPA: a video editing lab with work stations and video equipment that can be checked out.
• CAD stations for architecture and lighting design students.
• A digital print lab in VAPA with new iMacs, Epson color portrait printers, a large-format flatbed scanner and slide scanners.
• The Crossett Library computer cluster, for word processing and research, with access to extensive research databases.
• Specialized computer stations throughout campus with appropriate software for students in computer science, sound recording, electronic music, puppetry and animation.
• Ethernet access in their rooms and across campus, wireless access in various campus buildings.

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