A couple weeks ago, MaterialUp opened a Material Design dedicated Slack Chat to allow designers and developers to communicate in real-time about Material Design and share feedback, conversations and tips. And it’s been a success, not just in the number of people who joined but most importantly because of how the community, both developers and designers, quickly adopted the platform as a way share their expertise, express their identity and start collaborations — enabling better design and products.

From that, we were lucky to organize an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with Mike Denny, Design Advocate at Google Design. We kept the topic fairly general for this first AMA: Creating and Developing the Material Design Language. Before anything else we found that developers and designers would want to understand how the language came to life, the difficulties of creating a new language and how/why decisions were made.

So we opened an #ask channel for people to submit questions for about 48 hours before the AMA — there was a lot of engagement which was awesome 👍 It means however that we had to make a selection of questions (based on popularity). Users were able to follow the conversation with Mike Denny — but weren’t able to jump in, to let the conversation flow and make the most out of those 30 minutes we had with Mike.

Here is the whole AMA (Ask Mike Anything 😉)