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Darin Fisher is a little older than the fresh-faced, newly minted PhD types you see roaming the well-appointed floors at OpenAIs second location in San Franciscos Mission Bay district. Before arriving at the AI super-startup, he spent 25 years working on some of the most important web browsers in the history of the web: He worked on Netscape Navigator, which helped define the early consumer internet. He worked on the popular Firefox browser at Mozilla, then went to Google, where he was a member of the Chrome team. After Google, he wanted to explore alternative browsers; he did so first at Neeva (which offered an ad-free experience), then at the Browser Company, which built the influential Arc browser. The opportunity to come to OpenAI and infuse the AI model into all of this and to think about how that can really transform the experience was all kinds of super interesting to me, Fisher says. In OpenAIs new ChatGPT Atlas browser, all tasks start with a prompt to the AI models working in the background. As the user accesses the web, the chatbot, which rides along at the right of the screen, can see the content of each webpage, answer questions about it, or take actions on it. An agent mode allows the AI to perform complex, multi-step tasks like filling out forms or shopping on the user’s behalf. We asked Fisher about the choices, trade-offs, and innovations that went into designing OpenAI’s AI-first browser. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What’s the core philosophy behind Atlas? One of the most important features of Atlas is really that chat is at the heart of it. You should start your journey with ChatGPT. Not because we work at OpenAI, but because I actually realize so many times, I kick myself why didn’t I just ask the model first? It would save me time. It should be the thing that’s there on autocomplete in the browser. It should be there so conveniently, effortlessly. This is the feedback we hear from people who’ve gotten to try Atlas. How did you approach the design challenge of getting people to adopt new habits? There’s this dance of the familiar as well as moments when you can optimize some things. I worked on browsers that have tried much more radical takes on browser UI, for good reasons, because there’s frustrations with a traditional browser UI. When you have all these little tabs at the top, at some point that starts to break down and you’re like, “Well, I guess I have to clean up now.” We really tried to get the basics right because people live in this thing. Not only are they used to it, but you’re working. You don’t want to be frustrated by it. One of the big challenges of browser design is tab management. Can you explain Atlass scrolling tabs feature? We built a classic tabs mode which works just like Chrome, but we also have a scrolling tabs mode in Atlas. What it does is it makes the tabs stay a fixed width and they start to scroll. But importantly, for this to work, new tabs enter at the left, which can be very disorienting for people. But once you get used to it, it’s kind of neat because what it means is new tabs are always opening on the left, old tabs are going off to the right. Your area of focus and what you’re working on stays on the left and all the tabs are nice and visible. What’s really cool is once you get used to this, you start accumulating a bunch of tabs and you can use the tab search feature Command+Shift+A. It’ll find your tab, and then you can zoom it back to the left. How did you approach building on Chromium while maintaining design freedom? [Chromium is a Google-developed open-source browser project that provides the foundation of several major browsers, including Google Chrome itself.] When people build on top of Chrome, you’re sort of constrained in some ways to the shape that it takes and the structure that it has. Not because you couldn’t change a lot of stuff, but because the more you change, the harder it is to update Chrome. What we really wanted to do was have our cake and eat it too. We came up with this clever way of essentially running Chrome almost unmodified, projecting the contents of the web pages into a Swift app [Swift is an Apple-developed programming language for building apps for Apple devices.] So Atlas could just be a pure Swift app, a relatively small app actually. It means we had this blank canvas on which to make anything look like anything we want. We were very free from a design perspective to rethink how so many things work. The main constraint is what people think a browser is and how they think it should work. Can you walk me through the side chat feature? When you click on links inside of ChatGPT inside of Atlas, it does this transition of moving the chat into side chat and opening the web page. This side chat . . . is now connected to the site that you’re on. You can ask questions about the site. [While shopping for couches at a retail site, for example] it could be things like, “What is the price range of your couches?” or “Who else sells something like this?” The model can go and look at the internet and tell you about all that stuff and you can just ask it a very simple question. Sometimes these websites are so cluttered too. A good example is a recipe site. You might say, “Can you just tell me the recipe?” You just ask the model to do that for you. Even on the recipe, you can be like, “I actually want to make this for four people, not six. Adjust the amounts of each portion.” When you open a new tab, you dont immediately see the chat sidebar. You see a chat window right in the middle of the page. Why did you do it like that? We really went with this idea of one box. You should feel like it’s a simpler, cleaner experience. When we did this, we got a lot of feedback where people were like, “Where’s my URL bar?” We discovered that we could put one thereyou just have to hover and then it will be there. Or if you’re a keyboard user and you did Command+L, it would activate. One of the innovations with Chrome was one box where you can enter URLs or searches. But if you go to Chrome and you open a new tab, you’ll actually see there are two boxesone at the top and one in the middle. We’re like, “Well, can we have one instead of two?” It was remarkable that it didn’t have to actually be in your face for that to be true. Everybody was happy. Everybody has no problem finding it. Using agent mode, you might, for example, ask Atlas to go out and find the best deal on a plane ticket, or even go further toward a purchase. You’re definitely asking this thing to go do stuff on your behalf, but you want to feel in control too. There’s a stop button that’s very prominent. There’s a take control button. The model is tuned to understand that it should present you with results at a certain point and now you can take it to the next step, review its work, see what it’s doing. The model can open multiple web pages in the background to do its work. Also prominently, you can choose, “Do I want this to use my authentication, my cookies, or no?” [This might be your username and password at Google, and your preferences stored as cookies.] This is actually huge because aybe you just don’t trust it yet and you want to develop some trust. You want to see what it’s going to do and you want to try it out in a safe way. How do you think about ChatGPT search versus traditional search engines? Google, full stop, is amazing. It’s an amazing tool. But at the same time, it works the way it works. It works a certain way. People are used to it as the tool that it is. This AI stuff is different and it’s a different kind of interaction. What we’ve done to improve ChatGPT search capabilities inside of Atlas was not just because it was important for ChatGPT, but also because it’s kind of essential when you’re approaching it from a browser lens. Sometimes you’re typing in that box because you have high navigational intent. Like, “I want DNS for the web” or “I want to go look at a product on Amazon.” I don’t need anything else other than just get me there. Google’s outstanding at that, but ChatGPT with these capabilities does a great job at that, too. What did Sam Altman and the leadership team tell you about wanting to build a browser when they brought you in? The focus was squarely on bringing ChatGPT to more people more readily and having it be just core to that experiencerealizing that in a browser traditionally you’re like Open tab, Go to ChatGPT.com. There’s just an extra clunkiness to that. The time’s right, you want a more streamlined experience, let’s go build it. Sam was super clear about that, which actually I really appreciate. This is a company that is rapidly putting out features. We’re often in the mode of “what can we do this month?” But this is an investment, because it’s not just what we’re going to do in Januaryit was what are we going to do in January to unlock what we could do in November? We spent all that time building a foundation and now we’re on a weekly cadence of putting out new features and new things and building on this foundation. How did you approach testing and getting feedback during development? We are an opinionated bunch, that’s for sure. But you want to validate your ideas. We had the internal population of OpenAI, which is not the most representative samplethese are really heavy tech folks. The kind of features that people are asking for internally would be things that we know from past experience might not be what everybody wants. We also brought in trusted testers. We brought in friends and family. There was this cohort of students and other cohortswe got feedback from different folks to help inform and understand just how people experience this. We had this guiding principle that people can only learn so many things differently. You’ve got to start out with the familiar. What’s been the feedback since launch? I think we’ve gotten an enormous amount of positive feedback. There’s general excitement around these agentic browsers. Maybe some degree of people wanting to just kick the tires and see what it’s all about and maybe some level of skepticism too, but also enthusiasm, generally . . . The feedback really hasn’t been surprising at all. For example, we know that it’s a lot to ask for people’s habits to change on anything. Bringing ChatGPT front and center in the experience is a big change actually. For many people, early tech adopters, this feels very natural and they actually remark at how comfortable it feels that they’re [the browser and the AI] side by side. But I think for most people, they’re still early on that journey to be honest. What features are you working on for the future? Every week we put out a new version addressing feedback. We’ve already addressed some of the top feedback that we got. There’s a lot of stuff that was in the hopper that we paired back because we didn’t want to just go outwe wanted to go out with as polished of an experience as we could. Adding a model picker in the side chat was onethey already added that. Vertical tabs is another feature that we’re getting a lot of requests for. What was the biggest design challenge in Atlas? Thematically, probably one of the biggest arguments was just, “Is this in or out? How do you keep it simple?” Pretty soon if you’re not careful, you have the kitchen sink, you have the Swiss Army knife. You’re trying to satisfy everybody, but you satisfy nobody. You don’t want to overwhelm at the start. You want it to be familiar, easy. They [users] can do things that maybe aren’t the most efficient, but that’s okay. Then they can start to learn how to leverage more efficient ways. As a user, it keeps you in control. When I want to use chat, it’s there for me. But if I don’t want to be using chat on a web page, I don’t have to. I think that’s very important. You should feel empowered. How do you design a product that has a deep set of features but still looks simple? There’s this idea of progressive disclosure in design. [We] have a new product that can do all these things and maybe you’re really eager to try to tell everybody about it, but if when they open the product the first time, it’s telling you about all the things you can do, suddenly you’re like, “I don’t know what to even do.” Progressive disclosure can mean that as you use the product it might advertise progressively different features, but I also think of it as there’s a bunch of Easter eggs for you to discover. What do they do? They give you superpowers and help you feel like you can do better, but they aren’t in your face so you still get a product that’s approachable. Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of Atlas? This is the beginning of a journey. It’s going to continue evolving. I think it’s also going to continue evolving as ChatGPT itself evolves. All these things are being built in tandem by different teams at OpenAI. A lot of ChatGPT’s best features, including things like deep research and study modeall of those are in Atlas too. There’s all these modesmodel picker, tools that you can invoke. At some level, those are powerful toolsbut do you want to try them out? But over time, the model absorbs some of that. There’s a natural tension there. You give people a palette of things, but you also want to keep it simple. Ultimately, it’s just meant to be ask the model to do stuff for you.
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Every year, the $463 billion global footwear industry make 20 billion pairs of shoes for just 8 billion humans. Since virtually none of them are recyclable, they will end up clogging up landfills around the world. For decades now, the fashion industry has been on a mission to make products recyclable. But shoes have been a much harder puzzle to crack than clothing. While garments are made from just a handful of materials, shoes are far more complex objects. A sneaker can be made of 50 different materials from foam insoles to leather exteriors to cotton laces, all glued together with adhesives. A handful of brands have prototyped one-off recyclable shoes, like Adidas’s Futurcraft Loop or Nike’s IPSA Link Axis. But the shoe industry is far from recycling at scale. But change is on the horizon. A group of sustainability experts wants to make shoe recycling as widespread as recycling paper or aluminum. Their solution: Radical collaboration among the biggest shoe rivals in the world. Yuly Fuentes-Medel, a fashion sustainability expert who runs MIT’s Climate Project, has just launched The Footwear Collective (TFC), a non-profit devoted to building circular solutions for the footwear industry. She’s convened eight founding shoe companiesincluding Brooks, On, New Balance, and Steve Maddenand is recruiting more. It has also partnered with Goodwill to collect large quantities of shoes at scale. The sustainability teams within these organizations meet with each other on a regular basis to tackle a pipeline of 50 different projects with achievable goals, like working with industrial recyclers to develop the technology to recycle shoes and finding secondary markets for the resulting recycled materials. “The shoe industry is competitive, and these brands are rivals,” says Fuentes-Medel. “But by sharing costs, data, and infrastructure, they can achieve the sustainability goals that have eluded them for years.” [Photo: Footwear Collective] Collaboration is Crucial The fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world. Over the past three decades, fast fashion has driven down the price of both clothing and shoes, allowing consumers to cycle through products quickly. Extracting large quantities of raw materials and shipping them to factories all over the world to turn them into products results in roughly 8% of global carbon emissions, accelerating climate change. For years, the industry has realized that circularity is one solution. Recovering the materials in old shoes and clothes, then transforming them back into materials for the fashion industry would dramatically reduce both waste and carbon emissions. But to achieve this circular system, you need a lot of infrastructure. First, you need to build out large, high-tech factories that can process these materials, and then you need to develop ways of collecting old products from consumers. In the world of clothing, companies like Circ have only just developed the technology to recycle polyester cotton blends, the most common material in the apparel industry, and is now building out factories around the world. But the shoe industry is much farther away from a similar solution. Fuentes-Medel observed that the footwear industry was struggling with this challenge. So in 2023, she hosted a footwear circularity summit at MIT, and was surprised by how much interest there was: Sustainability experts from 45 different shoe brands showed up. As they discussed possible solutions, Fuentes-Medel wrote up a “Footwear Manifesto” that laid out the obstacles to circularity and how to overcome them, such as building markets for recycled materials and ways of collecting old shoes. But one thing was clear from this summit: None of this could happen without collaboration. “This approach makes sense,” says Katherine Petrecca, GM of footwear innovation at New Balance. “We’re working together on pre-competitive spaces. All of us will win if we have the infrastructure to collect and recycle shoes.” After the event, brands were clamoring to continue this work. So Fuentes-Medel launched The Footwear Collective, with eight founding brands who pay dues to fund the project. Sustainability teams within these organizations meet every week with one another, as well as with other companies, to work towards solutions across seven pathways, including getting more value from waste, designing for circularity, and influencing consumer behavior. And together, they have come up with projects to work on, including finding a use for a particular recycled material to creating marketing materials that get consumers excited about recycling shoes. [Photo: Footwear Collective] The Problem of Scale Many footwear brands have been on a mission to become more sustainable. But when a brand is going at it alone, there are many hurdles to achieving goals. “Recycling can only work at scale,” says David Kemp, director of corporate responsibility at Brooks. For one thing, it will require a lot of work to develop the technology to automate the disassembly of shoes at scale, then recover their component materials. “Shoes companies hire teams of engineers to design and develop their products,” says Fuentes-Medel. “You really can’t think of them in the same category as clothing. They have to live up to much higher technical performance standards.” Kemp says that the recycling industry isnot incentivized to invest in developing this kind of high tech recycling facility because there isn’t a big market for the recycled materials that would come out of this process. For footwear brands, this would mean working with their factories to start using recycled foams, and leather, and hardware. “Recyclers are for-profit businesses,” he says. “Through the Collective, we can finally show recyclers that there’s business volume here worth investing in.” A Pilot Program Then, there’s the problem of how you collect large volumes of old shoes to recycle. Some brands, like Brooks, invite customers to bring back their old shoes once they’ve reached the end of their life. But Kemp says that participation in these programs is very low. “Historically, only around 3% of customers bring their shoes back to us,” he says. “This isn’t enough volume to bring to a factory to ask them to develop a recycling program for us.” Again, Fuentes-Medel believes that the solution is to collect shoes from across many brands. And there’s already an organization that is doing this: Goodwill. TFW has decided to work with Goodwill’s California division, since the state has strong Extender Producer Responsibility (ERP) laws which mandate that companies fund and manage the collection, recycling, and reuse of their products. As a result, California can fund more sophisticated recycling operations. With this new project, consumers are invited to drop off shoes from any brand at participating Goodwill locations in California. Shoes that cannot be resold will be sent to three recyclers, where they will be shredded. The shredded material will be separated by weight and density, so they can be sorted by material. (Rubber, foam, and cotton all have different densities.) Then the recycler can determine what materials can be recycled and sold. “We’re aligning with California, since we can help put their legislative policy into practice,” says Petrecca, of New Balance. This is just one of many projects that TFC is working on right now. Other groups are working on changing the way brands design shoes to make them easier to disassemble, without losing any of their performance qualities. “We’re running two offenses,” Petrecca says. “We’re designing for what’s next, but we also need to figure out what to do with the billions of shoes that are already out there.” For Fuentes-Medel, collecting data is crucial throughout all of these early pilots and tests. From all her years immersed in MIT’s quantitative approach to sustainability, she believes it is important to track exactly what happens so that they can measure impact. “We if don’t base our strategy on data, it’ll be just another greenwashing initiative that gets press but changes nothing,” she says. But ultimately, Fuentes-Medel is optimistic that this small but committed collective is building a movement. So as TFW continues to grow and communicate with consumers, it wants to make circularity exciting and tangible, thanks to good storytelling. “Movements are built on joy,” she says. “Collective action depends on everyone feeling motivated to do their little bit, from sending in one pair of shoes to telling one friend.”
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E-Commerce
The newest plaza in Valencia, Spain, has everything one might expect from a public space in a temperate seaside Spanish city. Its five acres contain green space, a playground, ball courts, and walking paths, and the plaza connects to a new market hall, with restaurants and bars serving a wide range of local specialties. Next to all thisand the real reason for any of it existing at allis Roig Arena, the new multipurpose stadium built for the men’s and women’s professional basketball teams of the Valencia Basket Club. The basketball arena is hardly the second thought here, but it’s much more a piece of this broader civic space than the typical pro sports facility. Especially compared to the U.S., where the stadium is often the only element of such a project, Roig Arena and its public amenities offer a refreshing take on a form of urban development that favors the “development” over the “urban.” [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] Open since September, the project was designed by the international architecture firm Hok and Valencia-based Erre. With a fluid, scaly facade of precisely angled ceramic tiles, the arena has an unmistakable presence in a neighborhood just outside the center of the city. But because it was sunk down into the ground, the arena is actually much shorter than most of the surrounding neighborhood, softening the unavoidable intrusion of such a big building. There’s room inside for more than 15,000 people during basketball games, and upwards of 20,000 when the venue is used for concerts, which, according to its business plan, represents a large chunk of its calendar. Even more significant is the market hall, which is open every day, even when there’s no basketball game or concert happening. [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] In contrast to stadiums in the U.S., Valencia’s was a relative bargain at 400 million, or about $461 million. (The Intuit Dome, the flashy new home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, for instance, cost more than $2 billion.) The project was financed entirely by Juan Roig, owner of the Valencia Basket Club and majority owner of Spain’s largest supermarket chain, Mercadona. It’s a unique financial arrangement in Spain, where most sports arenas are publicly financed. The Valencia basketball arena’s design was led by Erre partner Amparo Roig, who also happens to be the daughter of Juan Roig. “He wanted to do something important for Valencia and for Spain,” she says. “It was very important to be sustainable economically.” [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] More than an arena Making it financially sustainable required focusing on ways the arena could be more than just a sports venue. In the U.S., arenas typically host professional basketball and hockey teams as their anchor users, with concerts and performances as a substantial side business, and fine dining and other concessions adding to the bottom line during events. [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] In Spain, hockey is not part of the mix, which meant the arena had to be designed to make concerts and events sit on almost equal footing as basketball games, and have concessions that would actually draw more than just the captured audience of a sports game or concert. One sit-down restaurant in the complex specializes in paella and grilled fish. Another offers croquettes and Valencian flatbreads. “We’re not doing hot dogs here,” Amparo Roig says. [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] In other ways, the arena is a typical sports and concert venue, with priority given to spectators’ view lines, easy ingress and egress, and comfort inside the space. Roig took the designer’s prerogative and included more restrooms for women than men. Specially designed piping systems allow beer vendors to operate on the floor level during concerts. “Subtle things like that make sure that it is very much a party building when it’s in party mode,” says John Rhodes, director of sports and entertainment at Hok. The venue also has its share of luxury lounges. But unlike the stuffy, windowless lounges inside most arenas, Roig Arena’s were designed to stretch to the exterior edge of the building, much of which is open to the usually warm air of Valencia. “What we tried to do was actually ensure that the lounges were almost connected with the outside, with this beautiful climate,” Rhodes says. [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] An outdoor arrangement That connection to the outside extends throughout the building. Its facade, made of 8,600 ceramic scales, was carefully configured to block the intensity of the sun while still allowing coastal breezes to enter the building. This partially cools the building, cutting down on its energy use. A rooftop solar array also reduces its energy demands. [Photo: Hufton + Crow Photography] The openness of the Valencia basketball arena’s facade raised some concerns from locals. This, after all, is an existing neighborhood; a local school was relocated to create room for the project. As such, the designers focused heavily on community outreach, and on addressing issues that residents raised. The big one was noisea challenge that forced Madrid’s main stadium to cancel concerts after the roar of a Taylor Swift concert spilled out across the surrounding neighborhood. “We made a lot of effort that the sound didn’t go outside, not through the roof and not through the facade,” Roig says. It’s part of the project’s civic gesture. In the end, it’s still a big event venue that will always stick out a bit in a city with thousands of years of history. But among the sports stadiums being built around the world, it does at least try to soften the impact, and possibly add more than it takes. “As a designer, it’s very, very rare that you get to introduce such significant public realm into a heritage city,” Rhodes says.
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