“I have a weird question for you,” I stammered, sitting in a hotel room across from Matias Duarte and Jon Wiley, the Google design leads for Android and Search, respectively. As a reporter, you tend to ask a lot of stupid sounding questions, and it’s generally no big deal. But I was about to ask an extremely stupid sounding question–the type of question that, just by breathing it into the air, might out me as actually stupid, tainting every future conversation we’d have to come. “What is Google?” The question may have been stupid, yes, but it was apropos. Google had just announced a new initiative called Material Design that promised to unify all Google products (and even third-party Android apps) under a common UX tongue. Google seemed to be morphing into something, but what? With Material Design, Google has become a second reality inside touch-screen devices.