The Soft Labor Questionnaire: Rob Giampetro

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The Soft Labor Questionnaire

The Soft Labor Questionnaire, is simply that: A brief series of questions we’ve asked comrades in the field to answer about their own working experiences.

Today’s respondent is writer, creative director, and current Head of Creative at Notion, Rob Giampetro, who is based in New York. Rob has held leadership roles at Google, MoMA, RISD, Project Projects, and AIGA/NY, and with recognition from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the National Design Awards. Rob’s work focuses on projects at the intersection of design, culture, and technology through strategic inquiry, brand-focused storytelling, and multidisciplinary human-centered design. Readers might recall a conversation we recently ran—”The Museum Interface”—that we had with Rob years ago for Art in America.


Tell us about the first job you ever did for money. 

I painted murals for friends—a dad's music practice room, a school dance backdrop, a kids room, for example.

Is your current work related to what you studied in school? If so, how? Or, how not? 

Yes: I was a Fine Art major and focused on Graphic Design, so it's been a calling throughout my life.

What cultural touchpoint—music, art, literature, etc.—has informed your practice the most? How? 

So many possible answers there, but the one that comes most vibrantly to mind is John Harwood's book The Interface, which is a history of Eliot Noyes's work at IBM and the conditions that gave rise to the work they did before, during, and after his time there. Profound.



How would you characterize your industry? What is the most rewarding aspect of working? 

Fast paced and systematic. I find working with engineers and thinking about what users and customers need and how we can help them to be very inspiring.

Has AI impacted your work? How? 

Yes, everyday—both as a topic and as a tool / technique. I think we're just at the beginning, and we're all still getting our heads around it. I've been fortunate to have a bit of a head start, helping form one of the first AI UX teams at Google in 2017-18 devoted to this topic and working with on-device intelligence (as generative LLMs were leaving the lab and going into the world in the same Research & Machine Intelligence team where the Transformer paper "Attention is all you need" came out in 2017). But since then it's a centerpiece of our work at Notion, both in telling the story of the value of a connected workspace and in the way that we develop creative work to tell that story in ways visible and invisible.

What advice would you give to someone starting a career in your industry? 

I've had to change tools and adapt to new techniques throughout my career. While we're heavily in the hype cycle right now with AI, I also believe it will transform much of how design is done—as it already has in a matter of months. Understanding how code and design relate, and finding creative and generative ways to familiarize yourself with these new and emerging tools is essential to building a career in the coming era of design. 

What are you obsessed with that has little-to-nothing to do with "work"?

Gardening—a late-in-life development, but more rewarding by the year. The ultimate in an interactive system that is much, much bigger than you.