I caught up with Aaron Dignan for breakfast at the Soho Grand Hotel in New York. Aaron is the CEO of the digital consulting firm, Undercurrent. Aaron is, however, no ordinary consultant. The first line of his bio explains that he “dressed up like a super hero for 180 straight days of the first grade, which marked the beginning of his life as an iconoclast, observer, theorist, and performer”.

Tariq Krim describes himself as a dreamer and a doer. He is also the founder and CEO of Jolicloud, a pioneer in personal cloud computing. Prior to Jolicloud, Tariq founded Netvibes, the personal startpage used by millions around the world. Tariq and I have been friends for many years, and I was happy to have him as the first guest on my new podcast series, Between Worlds. Sitting in a beautiful courtyard in Paris, enjoying the late afternoon sun - we had a far reaching conversation ranging from the rise and fall of French innovation, the slow-tech movement, culture, luxury, and the future of consumer product design.

I was fascinated with dictionaries as a child. Not just the traditional ones, full of obscure words and mysterious meanings, but the great dictionaries of history, the illustrated medieval texts and secret alchemical treatises. A dictionary is as much a celebration of type as it is a stage for words and meaning. Letters and typography have their own magic, and as I started planning my own book, I wanted to bring that power to life in a new way.

In the digital age, we are all consumers of design. Every screen we look at, every device we interact with, every message or notification has all at some point been considered, tested and designed. And yet, even as we become more data driven, great design resists automation. We can tell the difference between an object or an image rendered by algorithm and one created by an artist. But will that always be the case?

Some of us are lucky enough to do work that we love, but most of us work because we must. And while we like to imagine that we work to live, in fact we end up spending much of our lives at work. Curiously, that’s only part of the problem.