Austin, August 4th, 2020

Based in Austin, Texas, Modernist Studio is a strategy, experience design and innovation consultancy, helping its clients build great products, services and teams.

Modernist Studio identifies insights about behavior, design new products and services, and spreads knowledge of its process through formal training and coursework.

Clients like Bank of America, Dell, Microsoft, Booz Allen, and LegalZoom have trusted Modernist to generate insights that genuinely transformed their businesses.

Jon Kolko, a partner and chief operating officer at the company, has played a big role helping to carry such projects.

In an interview with TIA, Jon described his personal journey after living for 14 years in Austin and explained what made Modernist stand out from the rest. At the same time, he looked at the challenged brought in by the pandemic and analyzed the future of the company.

Why is your city a great place to live and work?

I’ve lived in Austin for 14 years, and there’s really no other place I would rather experience as home. Texas is special—it’s wide open, beautiful, hot, and slow. And the city of Austin is bright and beautiful: food, drink, parks, creativity. For me, a city isn’t about the “tech scene” or the “design scene”—it’s a place where work is done. Austin happens to have many similarly minded people working here. I feel at home.

Tell us about your personal journey. How do you recall your first steps in the industry?

My experience, like everyone’s, feels purposeful, but is only that way in retrospect. I made decisions that felt right at the time, along the way, and I made them loudly. That confidence seems critical to having turned situations I had no permission being a part of, into opportunities that have substantially shaped my career.

I was loud and direct in school, and it drew the attention of a recruiter, who brought me to my first job. I was competent and thoughtful at my first job, and that brought me to my next. And so-on. In each case, my actions, personality, and approach paired with a serendipity of being around the right people, in the right place at the right time. Perhaps the best career decision I ever made was to become a teacher at a young age. I learned more teaching than I did in my first few jobs, and was able to leverage that in each professional experience I’ve had since.

What makes Modernist Studio stand out?

At Modernist, we help companies build an optimistic future. We’re not so much prescient than we’re opinionated: we have a strong perspective on what the future should look like. With our technical proficiency and craft, we have the ability to draw that future. Combine those skills with our team’s unique intellect, creativity, and playfulness, and we are distinctly able to help companies plot a practical roadmap towards that future north star.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

Like other consultancies, we’re working through the pros, cons, and complexities of an entirely remote, distributed team. Our work relies on immersive conversation, real-time decision making through whiteboard sketching, and impromptu creative sessions. Technology mediates some of these well, and some very poorly. We’re making progress, but it’s not without some challenges.

When did you realize you wanted to pursue a career in design?

When I was six, my parents enrolled me in a summer program at a local museum, focused on ceramics. I took to it, and worked with ceramics until I was 18. That set me upon a love of and respect for a creative process, material, form, and craftsmanship. At that time, I also had a love of money: not of buying things, but of seeing a clear relationship between the work we do and the tangible externalization of success. The two, combined, led me to a career in design.

From your experience, how will COVID-19 change schools in the long run?

Our stay-at-home experience seems to be accelerating an educational trend that was already upon us: learning through technology. I was skeptical of that change prior and am even more skeptical now, as we see the fragileness of tools like Zoom emerge when pushed to the front-lines of day-to-day use by non-technical parents and teachers.

These tools will evolve, and over time, they will become easier to use. Simultaneously, teaching generations that are more comfortable with technology will find ways to utilize tools in innovative ways. I hope that the deficiencies in online, digital learning—lack of emotional and human connection, layer of abstraction between teacher and student, challenges for impromptu, unplanned teaching and learning, and difficulties in project-based collaborative learning—will be eliminated, or these deficiencies will be overshadowed by new and unexpected benefits of these new technologies.

Please share some educational apps that inspired you lately

I’ve been impressed with how natural some of the more advanced digital/collaborative whiteboarding tools (like Miro) have become. Seeing people’s thoughts emerge in real-time, tracking their mouse pointer, seeing text emerge, erase, and emerge again—these have begun to erode some of the rough edges of technology that makes it so visible, obvious, and obnoxious.

Can you name a fun-fact people would be surprised to learn about you?

I grew up listening to classical Indian music, and I play the sitar. I’m not great at it, but I’m good enough that people don’t want to leave the room when I play.

Thanks Jon!

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Jon Kolko