Technology’s Role in Supporting the Very Human Need to Create

Georg Petschnigg doesn’t think of himself as purely a designer, yet he has spent a career building products like Paper and Paste that helps us all create more beautiful things in the course of our work and fun. “It’s human potential,” says Petschnigg. “It’s always been about augmenting the human and their capabilities.” Where Petschnigg has come at design over the course of his career at Microsoft, at the startup FiftyThree which he co-founded, and now as part of WeTransfer, is from the vantage of point of a trained engineer. “I come from the church of tech,” he says. “I believe in technology from stick to stone, to printing press, to servers in the cloud. Technology is a huge enabler. For me the driving force has always been is technology should enable a richer human experience. “The most important thing it means to be alive is to create. So, supporting people’s creative pursuits, in whatever shape or form they come, is the best application of my engineering training.” Petschnigg walks us through how he uses Paste, a visual collaboration tool he and his team developed that accelerates team communication and also transparency, why you should organize your Slack channels more than already do, and when you are building anything you need to have a really good answer of why you are doing it and how it fits within the culture of the organization you are developing it.