How Yuri Suzuki Designs Sound Without Being Able to Read Music

The introverted Pentagram partner talks about finding inspiration, embracing structure, and the importance of listening.

Yuri Suzuki is a contradiction. He’s a sound designer and electronic musician who can’t read a note of music because of dyslexia. It’s no surprise then that some of his best work explores the tension between these two opposites, by allowing people without music literacy to play and explore music. His projects include a robot train that can play music just by tracing lines, an AR app for Google that allows anyone to write music by scanning pieces of paper, and an orchestra of Swarovski crystals conducted by gestures alone.

Born in Tokyo in 1980, Suzuki studied industrial design before moving to London to attend the Royal College of Art. Today, he is not only the head of his own one-man design studio, he’s also a partner at Pentagram. His work can be found in the collections of MoMA, Tate London, Mudam Luxembourg, and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. But despite his accomplishments, Suzuki is modest in all aspects of his work, saying that he ultimately owes his career to powering through his introversion to work with others, and embracing the structure of the workday to tame his innate disorganization.

Embrace structure where you find it

My mornings are quite last-minute and hectic, not organized at all. Unless I have meetings, I wake up at a random time, because I have insomnia. Sometimes I start late, sometimes I start early; there’s no consistency. That’s why it’s good for me to work at a company like Pentagram, which imposes a structure upon me. I feel like some of my best brainstorming comes during these moments of imposed structure, like my 45-minute subway commute into the office, which is one of my only times to concentrate. The same is true for airplanes. I hate to fly, but I do some of my best brainstorming on airplanes. Twelve hours of torture, but there’s nothing to do, so it’s a great creativity tool.

Admirable routines

I admire a lot of routines, even though I could never be structured enough for it. For example, Gilbert & George, a contemporary art duo from the UK, always make sure to go to the same restaurant every day, or my friend Darrell Bishop, who is an amazing interaction designer. He wears the same clothes every day, because he realized he wasting an impressive amount of energy thinking about what he was going to wear. I think what these routines share is they create room for creativity in unexpected places where our brains used to be tasked with mundane busywork.

The value of admin work

When I’m feeling a creative block, it’s just really hard to tell what’s broken. At those moments, I’ll sometimes turn to just the administrative tasks that need to be done, like replying to emails, or working on accounting. I find refocusing on these tasks almost like little meditative moments really helps break blocks I have.

Great ideas come from talking to people

I’m an introvert. I’ve always had difficulty socializing and communicating with other people. I’m just not really good at it, but collaboration is just so important to creativity, I make sure to do it anyway with all my projects. So when I’m looking for inspiration, I talk to everyone I can: friends, team members, even strangers. I go out to museums, or go shopping, or take a walk, and try to talk to people. It might be a little painful, but it does so much more good to me than harm.

Advice to a younger self

If I went back in time to tell myself something 16 years ago, I really don’t think he would have listened to me. But if he did, the key to a great career is to respect other people, and pay attention to how you work with them. That’s the only way I’ve been lucky enough to sustain such a strange design practice for so long.

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