K. K. Barrett

Oklahoma native K.K Barrett is an Academy Award–nominated production designer known for his collaborations with Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola. He has worked on movies such as Her, Lost in Translation and Where the Wild Things Are.

Introduction

In Nov. 2014, I hosted a design conference in San Francisco, and one of our keynote speakers was K.K. Barrett, the production designer for the Spike Jonze movie Her. Deeply unsettling and yet so believable, the movie pointed to a compute-intensive future with an invisible interface. Her was a peek into a world where invisible computing machines and artificial intelligence act as surrogates for some of our human connections.

K.K. and I were hanging out backstage and started talking about a whole bunch of things, many of them too abstract to remember. Fortunately I recorded some of our conversation on my iPhone. Here we are talking about Her, design, dating and the