00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.100Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:01:45.760Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:51.160There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:02:03.700I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:02:08.940Did you know the trash can logo, the sad Mac icon, and all the other Apple logos and typography0.88
00:02:14.460that made up the look and feel of early personal computing was actually designed by a woman?
00:02:18.760On the Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast, where I'm a tech correspondent, we did an episode for Women's History Month that was really fun because I got to talk about Susan Kerr, an influential Apple designer and one of my favorite women in tech.
00:02:31.260And I had such a good time that I wanted to share it with all of you.
00:02:34.320Listen to me alongside Stuff Mom Never Told You co-hosts, Annie and Sam, for a deep dive into the lasting legacy of Susan Kerr, the artist behind Apple.
00:02:42.820hey this is annie and samantha and welcome to stephan never told you production of iheartradio
00:03:01.860today we are so thrilled to be joined in the virtual studio space by our friend and colleague
00:03:08.960Bridget Todd. Hello, Bridget. Hello. I'm so excited to be back here with you all.
00:03:13.820Jose, we missed you. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. I missed you too, as always.
00:03:18.840You're so busy, though. We know. We know. You're constantly going.
00:03:22.960Well, I can always make room for my two favorite ladies.1.00
00:03:25.780Oh, yes. We were discussing before this. We're very excited for this topic,0.99
00:03:32.740particularly because we have different levels of experience when it comes to
00:03:36.620computers and technology. And in this case, Samantha, you're saying you don't know Mac very
00:03:42.320well. No, I am so not in the loop. I've never used the Mac. I don't have an iPhone. I'm so far away
00:03:49.820from those products. And I'm a little scared of it. Because every time I've been on Friends,
00:03:54.420I literally look at it and touch a button, something goes wrong, and I hand it right back.
00:03:57.880I'm like, I'm sorry. You're like, I launched a missile. I don't know what the f*** it is. I'm
00:04:02.140pretty sure I just started a war somewhere. I'm so sorry. I feel like that too, though,
00:04:07.480because my phone is a swipe. And one time my friend handed me her phone and was like,
00:04:11.360can you text this message? And it was not a swipe. And I stared at it like,
00:04:14.800this makes no sense to me. I cannot figure this out.
00:04:21.960Yeah. When it becomes like technology, when you're used to one way and then you try and
00:04:26.480figure out something else, I feel like it's a trap. It's so true. It's so true. So I use an iPhone.
00:04:32.140Most of my friends do not use iPhones.
00:04:59.600mostly because it's Women's History Month.
00:05:01.460And so I think it's a good time to honor women who, you know, maybe don't always get a lot of the loud public support.
00:05:09.220And also the fact that Susan Kerr, despite being very much part of tech history, she's still alive.
00:05:15.060She's still with us. I'm a big believer in giving people their flowers while they're still alive to smell them.
00:05:20.460And so not waiting until someone is no longer here to be like, oh, I loved their work.
00:05:25.860I loved their work. But celebrating their achievements and their legacy while they're still here.
00:05:30.280She's very much still in tech, making tech history as we speak.
00:05:34.840And I also just feel like sometimes I come on the show and I bring topics that are a little negative because, let's face it, sometimes being a woman on the Internet is not that fun.
00:05:44.320But there's also lots of fun, joyous, cool, perky aspects of it as well.
00:05:49.580So I'm super excited to talk about Susan Kerr.
00:05:51.780Yes. And I never heard about her story. And I loved it so much because I know we've talked before on the show a lot about women in technology space and how there is often that these negative aspects to it are being intimidated off of it in various ways.
00:06:10.700And as somebody who's really creative, like we're in my cosplay closet, as I call it in here.
00:06:17.360But like, I love the application of how she got into technology.
00:06:26.640I mean, so if you've ever spent any time around, not just Macs, but computers in general, you've probably encountered Susan Kerr's work or her legacy.
00:06:34.240So first and foremost, I should say, if you have not seen a picture of her, there's an iconic picture of her with this like awesome 80s blown out curly hair and a sweatshirt and these like amazing New Balance sneakers with her sneakers kicked up on her desk at her old school computer.
00:06:52.580Y'all, please Google a picture of her because it is iconic.
00:06:55.780And truly, just this one picture, I saw it on the subreddit old school cool.
00:07:58.320Like this outfit looks so comfortable.
00:08:00.080But again, yeah, she looks so freaking stylish that I'm like, I don't want to be back here in this fashion because I did wear that once upon a time.
00:08:08.000And that was when it was supposed to be cool when I was a young baby.
00:08:13.860So Susan Kerr, she designed a huge part of the digital infrastructure of using a Mac computer back in the 80s.
00:08:21.500And so I'm talking all of the fonts, all of the typography and all of the little icons.
00:08:26.640And so if you ever remember the little happy Mac, when you booted up a computer, like the little computer with a smiley face, that was Susan Kerr.
00:08:34.080The concept of the icons for your computer sort of matching up with the thing that you were going to do.
00:08:39.340even if you don't use a Mac, even if you use a PC, that's still a concept that we use today.
00:08:44.500So she really was an early architect of how being online sort of looked and felt. And then also
00:08:50.160just sort of the concept of it, sort of how we conceptually move around when we're using a
00:08:54.540computer. And it's funny because I had also never heard of her. I've been using a Mac for most of
00:09:00.760my life. It was like the first computer that we had in our home when I was a kid, like in what
00:09:05.740my parents called the computer room where like you could you could never bring a snack or a drink
00:09:11.600or my dad would kill you was a Mac and I had never even heard of her even though she had shaped such
00:09:17.220a big part of my online experiences both as a child and today so really excited to be you know0.98
00:09:22.640giving her a little bit of shine because that's that's so iconic that she you know was the
00:09:28.520architect of that right yeah a little story that I had about this like this happy Mac and the one
00:09:34.020reason i kind of know what that is uh now i've seen the other things i've seen the watch little
00:09:38.820icon before i think a lot of these are associated to me as something bad is about to happen because
00:09:43.960i did something wrong signs usually because the one episode that i remember with uh insects in
00:09:50.560the city and we're gonna go you know what i'm talking about where her mac crashes and she gets
00:09:55.700a sad mac and the dude keeps telling her you got the sad mac sorry you can't fix it and this whole
00:10:02.220conversation about the sad Mac and I'm like why does it have to be a sad Mac and then the dead
00:10:07.740Mac because it's got the X's on the eyes and about how angry it looks I was like yeah that does not
00:10:13.240make me want to get a Mac yeah if he I feel like that episode probably scared a lot of people
00:10:19.320also fun fact this is how deep my sex in the city knowledge goes the guy who tells her that at the
00:10:24.040computer store Asif Mondi from The Daily Show yes yes yes so I was like oh he's a comedian I love
00:13:51.980It could not be more clear that you have done something incorrect.
00:13:55.500Or when something is good, you know, when you would boot up a Mac, you would see a smiley face.
00:13:59.340All of that was intentionally designed by Care to make people who might have been using a computer for the first time, who might have been a little bit skittish about using a computer, help them sort of shepherd them through the experience in ways that are like super easy to understand, which I really appreciate as someone who, even as someone who enjoys tech, can sometimes be a little bit like tech challenged, shall we say.
00:21:16.440But actually, women have been at the start of computing since the beginning.1.00
00:21:19.180And so it's like rightfully our domain.
00:21:20.860We are not trying to break in anywhere.
00:21:22.220Like it is our landscape and that some of the reasons why women kind of get pushed out of tech, both, you know, in terms of like careers, but also just in terms of like who gets remembered, who doesn't, who goes overlooked.
00:21:34.580First of all, just to be clear, a lot of it is just good old fashioned sexism, like nothing's nothing special about that.
00:21:42.200But then another aspect of it is exactly what you were saying, is that a lot of times the contributions that women have made to computers and technology are things that are a little bit harder to preserve.
00:21:53.140And so, you know, if you if you make an actual computer that can go in a museum, that's that's a solid, tangible thing.
00:22:00.900If you design a concept or, you know, do something cool on a message board or develop an icon or, you know, something graphic that is less tangible, those things are harder to preserve and sort of more ephemeral.
00:22:14.100And so a lot of that work throughout the years has been associated with women and feminization, this idea that like women are a lot of the times the ones who are building the things that are a little more difficult to hold on to.
00:22:27.080And thus these contributions can really go overlooked unless we make intentional efforts to preserve them, to highlight them, to amplify them, all of that.0.81
00:22:38.680Yes. I mean, here we are talking about it. And because I'll take every opportunity to bring it up, I do think, too, if you look at something like fan fiction, the website AO3 was one of the biggest coding projects of its time.
00:22:51.680And it was women who did it, but it doesn't get a lot of respect because it's women and marginalized people who did it.
00:22:56.700And it's seen as this kind of weird corner of women fandom and not therefore not worth the respect as something else more masculine.
00:23:06.760Right. Technology is nothing without people using it for something right without users. And so those people who were who were building that they were architects of something important and like that we would not even see that as worthy of preservation or like mentioning is a real crime.
00:23:23.520And I think we really do have to go back and look at history and say, well, where are the times where because this was associated with women or marginalized people just doing something geeky on the Internet?
00:23:33.720You know how women are, whether it's fan fiction or, you know, recipe blogs or anything like that.
00:23:39.580Why do those things not deserve to be remembered in the same way that some of the other more obvious contributions to computing and technology in our digital landscape?0.69
00:23:49.640Like, I completely agree that we need to have a whole scale sort of rethinking of what what is worthy of preservation, because I'm not down to just live in a world where the stuff that we make that marginalized people that women make is just not worthy of preservation.0.77
00:24:12.100But I also think it's a good like correlation to Susan Kerr's story where there is this sort of like creative, non-technical thing that she was involved with.
00:24:23.640And she was able to translate that into technology because there was this need.
00:24:31.200And I think also like, again, having to kind of predict what people's concerns would be and like predict what would soothe those concerns and be clear.
00:24:42.100like coming perhaps coming from a different background actually helped her with that I think
00:24:47.520so I love that point I think so so she said that when she first got the call to design things for
00:24:53.360Apple she was just like I don't know what any of this is I love this little detail she was in the
00:24:57.660middle of working on a life-size sculpture of a hog when she got a which like if that doesn't
00:25:02.660if that doesn't tell you all you know about her hair I feel like that really
00:25:06.520oh I want to know if she finished it yes oh that's a good question I want to know I want
00:25:15.340to see this picture of what she was working on did she get to finish it yes I need a picture
00:25:20.820please elbow deep in hog right like yes she gets this call from Andy Hertzfield who she had
00:25:31.180gone to high school with and he was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team
00:25:35.920during the 80s. And he asked her to hand draw some icons and fonts to help inspire what was
00:25:41.100going to be this like Mac interface. This was a completely new concept to her. She's like,
00:25:44.960I had no idea what I was doing. But luckily, Andy had an idea because he knew that she worked with
00:25:49.860design and graphics. He told her to go out and buy the smallest, tiniest graph paper that she
00:25:55.540could find and then use it to block out 32 by 32 inch squares and build them with color to kind of
00:26:00.920come up with the designs. Because what she would be designing would be a matrix that was essentially
00:26:05.040a grid so again back to that sort of needlepoint embroidery um upbringing that she had which
00:26:11.760really helped her work in this grid function like truly probably could not have provided a better
00:26:17.060basis or education for the work that she would go on to be doing that she had no idea you know
00:26:22.040that she would be so foundational in and luckily these skills really came to her rescue she says
00:26:29.480bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo digital art forms all of which
00:26:34.840I had practiced before going to Apple. This is what she told somebody in an interview in 2000.
00:26:38.600So again, like you never know what skill is going to apply later in your life. Like I'm sure when
00:26:45.420her mom was teaching her needlepoint, she probably was like, this is really fun and awesome. She
00:26:49.740probably was not thinking, and I will go on to revolutionize personal computing because you
00:26:54.540taught me how to do needlepoint, mom. Yeah. So I run a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and I use
00:27:04.320Python coding to run it so basically Python is a bunch of if then statements but I think you can
00:27:12.880you can take like a really creative non-technical thing and you can construct it in a way where you
00:27:20.220can like make it work in that sense because if you think about like conversation if x then y like
00:27:27.380you can I don't know I there's something I find really interesting that you can take those things
00:27:32.780and you can experiment with them in that way.
00:27:37.280You could take Needlepoint and think about it
00:39:47.600Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:39:52.140I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:39:56.700I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:40:04.140They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:40:08.100But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:40:11.540They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:40:14.680Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:40:29.320So at the top, you said that Care is still alive today. What's she up to?
00:40:35.100So that's my favorite thing about this story is that I feel so often when we're talking about somebody who had a great impact, we're talking about them after they have, you know, aged out of whatever they're doing or they've passed away.
00:40:48.580Not Care. Care is still very much alive and very much involved in tech.
00:40:53.280So today she works at Pinterest, where you are probably familiar if you use Pinterest with some of her current designs.
00:40:58.960She designed the image on Pinterest that is modeled after the pushpin that symbolizes pinning an item.
00:41:04.500So again, that kind of idea of having the icon be kind of a visualization of what the user is supposed to be doing and the spinning button that appears on Pinterest when you refresh.
00:41:16.320So very much still a person involved in imagining what tech looks like today.
00:41:23.020The tech that we use all the time, if you use Pinterest, she's in your, her designs are in your pocket, you know, which I just, I just love.
00:41:29.280You can also find her notebooks today. They're part of the permanent collections at the New York and San Francisco Modern Art Museum, which the one in New York is my favorite art museum on the planet. It's so cool. Cannot wait to get back there when COVID is over. And one was included in the recent London Design Museum exhibit called California Designing Freedom. So, yeah, she still is this, you know, representing this past and present and perhaps future of design when it comes to tech, you know, still out there, still shaping how we conceptualize the tech that we use every day.
00:47:50.660I was awed by being able to collaborate with such creative, capable, and dedicated engineers.0.58
00:47:55.780And I think it's really awesome that she was holding it down on this group of engineers as a non-technical woman doing her thing and really building out a lasting, enduring legacy in a field where things don't often last and don't often endure in this way.
00:48:12.820So I think it's really important to recognize her work.
00:48:14.980I do, too. And I think, you know, even looking back at the time when she was doing this and being a woman in this non-technical space and I don't know, creating these things that have lasted.0.98
00:48:29.280It's just very, very inspiring. And I'm glad I'm glad that you brought this story to our attention, Bridget.
00:48:35.720Thank you for giving me the space to nerd out on this.0.99
00:48:39.120Honestly, it truly is because I saw that badass picture of her on Old School Cool on Reddit.
00:48:44.020So whoever put that on Reddit, thank you.
00:48:46.980Listeners, please, if you have not seen that picture, look it up.