Brainstorm Design 2023: Design’s Next Chapter
Cliff Kuang, Author, User Friendly; UX Designer Katrina Alcorn, Former General Manager, Design, IBM Ben Sheppard, Partner, McKinsey & Company Moderated by: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE
Transcript
00:00 Cliff, I want to start with you a little bit in this conversation, if I could.
00:04 As many of you know, there was a fairly provocative piece that appeared
00:08 almost a year ago in Fast Company that made the argument that this design moment,
00:13 which I sort of alluded to and described in our opening here,
00:17 it has started to ebb a little bit.
00:19 And that over the last sort of two to three years,
00:23 a number of CEOs of large companies have gotten frustrated with design.
00:27 They've started to kind of question its relevance.
00:30 And this article got a lot of discussion, both pro and con.
00:34 And we thought that it would be a kind of interesting way to start our program,
00:38 to just kind of face that question head on.
00:43 We've seen as interest rates have gone up and as the tech crunch has kind of settled
00:48 in, that a lot of firms that were big champions of the value of design and
00:53 putting customers first sort of backed off it a little bit.
00:55 What do you think about that?
00:57 And you have done such a great job in your book of kind of chronicling
01:01 the evolution of design and its rise to kind of be a corporate lever.
01:07 Where do you see design's moment now?
01:08 >> In the selling of it as well.
01:10 I mean, so let me just step back and say, I would argue that I think a lot of
01:14 the sort of disappointment in the design discipline has to do with a couple things.
01:19 One, which is the notion that was sold for a solid 20, 30 years,
01:25 this idea that design was a process as opposed to a product or
01:27 an outcome or a thing that you made at the end of the day.
01:31 It was this attitude that, hey, if I have this process and I hire these consultants
01:35 and I put all the people in the right room, then that should yield innovation, right?
01:41 But of course, it's not that simple.
01:43 And that left out a lot of the scarier notions around design,
01:46 like beauty and all these kinds of things that were subjective.
01:50 And then secondly, I would just say that the other thing is not that many
01:55 businesses are so fluid that they need constant reinvention.
01:58 Like, not every business is going to be one that actually needs to
02:02 introduce new ideas to people on a constant basis.
02:05 And so the way that company needs design might not be the way that another company
02:08 needs design.
02:09 And I think that caused a lot of confusion about,
02:12 what am I supposed to do with this?
02:15 >> Katrina, let me turn to you, because you wrote on Medium,
02:17 you posted this very eloquent rebuttal to this article, which really struck me.
02:22 Respond to Cliff's point a little bit, maybe too many designers were hired and
02:29 people, that you can't just put a bunch of designers in a room and
02:32 expect them to kind of magically make things better.
02:35 >> Yeah, well, the gist of my rebuttal was companies that,
02:41 they embraced design, then they felt like, maybe this isn't working.
02:44 The magic we thought we bought by hiring designers didn't happen.
02:48 That wasn't a failure of design.
02:51 It was a failure to implement design well.
02:54 And this magical thinking that you can just buy a bunch of designers and
02:58 put them in a room and magic will happen, it doesn't work that way.
03:01 You have to create the conditions for design success, and
03:05 that involves the entire company.
03:07 And it usually involves culture change and changing mindsets, and
03:11 that's the hard work.
03:12 But when you do the hard work, you get the results.
03:15 And there's a lot of studies, and in fact,
03:17 McKinsey over here has done some of them,
03:21 showing that there's real profound business benefit when you get it right.
03:26 >> So you had a great line in your post, which is simple but
03:33 very relevant, which is that design is hard.
03:36 And it's especially hard at the C-suite level to kind of figure out how to
03:40 integrate and organize it.
03:42 >> Yeah, and I think unfortunately at the C-suite, at a lot of companies,
03:47 the perception of design is it's still fonts and colors, and it stops there.
03:51 And design is hard because it's the whole thing.
03:54 It's are you solving the right problems for people?
03:57 Are you solving them in an elegant, frictionless way?
04:00 And are you doing it in a way that's aligned to the brand and the values?
04:04 That's hard.
04:04 >> So Ben, you obviously, you speak to a lot of the CEOs that use design.
04:11 You are constantly in touch with chief design officers across a variety
04:16 of different sectors, and you've published all this great research demonstrating
04:20 the value of design, which we've discussed at previous Brainstorm Designs.
04:25 Where do you think we are now, and what are the challenges for
04:32 designers going forward in demonstrating the relevance of design to corporate leaders?
04:38 >> Well, I'll say two optimistic things, and then maybe a caveat to close.
04:43 Optimistic piece number one, we need to remember how far we've come.
04:48 Let's go back, hold my hand, let's go back to 2014, Fortune 500.
04:52 If you look at the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500,
04:56 only 18 had a chief design officer.
04:59 Today it's 36, it's doubled.
05:01 Are we fully there yet?
05:02 Absolutely not.
05:03 As Katrina has pointed out, there are many of those CEOs who still do not
05:07 give full accountability to those chief design officers and still have an integrated
05:11 design as well as they could alongside digital, alongside project management product.
05:16 But we've come so far, we've come so far.
05:18 So that's optimism number one.
05:19 We are on a path and there will be ups and downs along the way.
05:22 Optimism number two, and it's tied to today's theme around AI,
05:28 is the huge opportunity in front of us.
05:31 Bracken Darrell, who many of you know, the CEO of Logitech,
05:34 he stood on this stage only two years ago and he said there are three stages
05:39 to a design-led organisation.
05:41 Stage number one, you make fabulous products and services.
05:46 Stage number two, you go beyond that, you make fabulous end-to-end experiences.
05:51 And then stage number three, you make fabulous everything, every process,
05:54 every tool, everything is touched by design.
05:57 Now Bracken argued that no company has ever reached stage three.
06:03 I think now could be the moment.
06:04 Finally, design, which has always been this scarce resource, innovation,
06:08 creativity, that was always in the hands of a select few.
06:10 It was far too cost exorbitant to be able to bring that to everything
06:15 in an organisation.
06:16 Maybe the age of AI is the time when we could unleash that potential.
06:20 And surely there's no one better than our design leaders who are better positioned
06:24 to unleash that potential.
06:26 So two reasons for optimism.
06:28 Of course, I'll close with a little naughty caveat to go with it,
06:32 which is whilst there is great opportunity, I do think we also have to have
06:37 a moment of humility.
06:39 And if I go back to the Fortune 500, here's a tidbit for you.
06:43 I did a bit of research for today.
06:46 The median number of designers in a Fortune 500 company is 0.7%
06:52 of the total employee basis.
06:54 And I think John Maida put it very well when he said for many years
06:58 in his career, he had been pushing that designers should be seen
07:02 as the best actor.
07:03 Well, maybe that isn't our role right now.
07:05 Maybe our role is as best supporting actor.
07:07 Maybe our role is to be the glue working alongside our friends in data,
07:11 in product, in engineering, in project management, in finance,
07:14 bringing it together.
07:15 So I do think there is a moment for optimism.
07:18 But I know that there is a lot of hurt and uncertainty and anxiety
07:21 in the design industry right now.
07:23 And I think the best thing that we can do is instead of looking
07:26 at our own shoes, we think is what is the role that we can play together
07:30 in that integrative space to unleash that AI potential.
07:33 - That's really interesting.
07:34 So what I hear from both of you and Katrina, you know, on the one hand
07:38 that executives, people that don't come from design backgrounds,
07:43 need to recognize that this is harder than they thought, it's going to take more time
07:46 than they thought, and double down on it rather than just say,
07:50 "Oh, I can't be bothered."
07:52 But that there's also responsibility for designers to not over-claim or kind
07:57 of over-assert what their role might be.
08:00 And I think it's...
08:01 I mean, it's a great observation, especially at this moment when AI
08:05 is so relevant because designers do have special skills for convening people,
08:11 for getting people to collaborate.
08:13 They have special skills for thinking through some of the ethical implications
08:16 of these questions.
08:17 But if they step forward and they say, "Only I can do it," right,
08:21 it just annoys people and no one wants to help them.
08:25 So I think thinking through the nature of that role, I mean, Katrina,
08:28 what do you think about that?
08:29 - Well, I'm smiling because in my early stage of my career, I would talk about being
08:34 design-led and design-led companies, and I don't say that anymore.
08:38 And it's because of what you're calling out here.
08:40 I think, you know, designers never get the job done alone.
08:46 - Yeah.
08:47 - You know, engineers, in theory, can.
08:50 They build stuff.
08:51 Now, should they be designing things as an afterthought?
08:55 Usually not, but they can build stuff and create the product.
09:00 Designers need others to get the work done.
09:02 And so, you know, the most successful engagements that I've seen with designers
09:10 are when there's just this complete mind meld with engineers and product managers
09:15 and whatever the other disciplines are that they need to work with,
09:18 data scientists, more and more with AI, but often sales and marketing.
09:23 I mean, you know, more and more, I feel like we work on really complex problems.
09:28 I've been in the complex software space, and there's never one single person who
09:32 has all the answers.
09:33 - Has all the answers.
09:34 - And you have to have ways to kind of bring the group together,
09:36 and egos get in the way.
09:38 So I completely resonate with what you're talking about.
09:41 - Cliff, let me ask you about Ben's comment about AI and this being a kind
09:46 of crucial moment for design because you work a lot with AI.
09:50 Anybody that has not read Cliff's book, "User-Friendly," I just can't
09:55 recommend it enough.
09:56 It's a great read.
09:58 It's not only that it's just so knowledgeable about design, but it's filled
10:02 with wonderful stories that illustrate just exactly how it's relevant.
10:09 - I wish I had an AI to clone that.
10:12 Clone your presence and follow me everywhere I go.
10:15 - It's a fantastic, really absorbing account and quite rare.
10:20 So AI right now, how does it complicate the role of the designer?
10:25 Does it make designers more relevant, or does it somehow elbow them aside and
10:29 take over what they do?
10:30 - I think more relevant.
10:32 And let me just illustrate exactly what I'm talking about because it can be very
10:36 abstract to hear this word AI and think that AI almost becomes a stand-in for the
10:41 future, which I think is not terribly...
10:45 There's actually much more concrete things that are happening in the
10:47 discipline right now.
10:49 To give you an example, there's a lot of people working right now on something
10:53 called generative UI.
10:55 So we know chatbots that can spit out language and can mimic the presence of a
11:00 human being and mimic the syntax and the eloquence and knowledge of a human being.
11:05 But there's actually a lot of people out there working on this notion that AI can
11:08 draw for you in real time.
11:11 So you could imagine a world in which I can ask for something and have an app
11:15 generated for me on the fly by an AI that has understood what I want and what it
11:20 takes to draw it and what it takes to fill in the boxes, right?
11:24 So imagine a world where that exists, and I'm telling you it's coming.
11:28 People are working on this around the world right now.
11:32 In that world, the designer is much more in the role of designing the system and
11:37 designing the feedback loops and designing the training mechanisms for the AI and
11:43 imbuing that AI with his or her judgment about what works, right?
11:50 And so that transference of what do we as humans find valuable and useful and
11:54 meaningful is one that designers ultimately would need to do.
11:57 I've actually been in the guts of some of these training processes, and these are
12:02 ones in which literally designers have to be there.
12:04 It's not engineers that are in there saying, like, this layout works better than
12:07 this one, right?
12:09 And that's a level of knowledge that was never codified before.
12:13 It was always tacit.
12:15 And so now that becomes like a world of scaling design's impact because it's no
12:21 longer gated on having that one designer do it.
12:23 That designer can now be present in a million different applications.
12:27 - So does that require designers to have different skills than they've had in
12:32 the past?
12:33 - I think so.
12:34 I mean, one of the things that I'm still struggling through, and I mean, this is
12:39 the cutting edge right now, which is, like, how do you balance craft with
12:42 scalability?
12:43 And that's just really hard, right?
12:45 Like, you just don't know what that AI is going to draw.
12:48 You can't know every single instance that it's going to reason through something
12:53 and just say, like, oh, this is the...
12:55 And so, like, that notion that you totally control the experience is one that
12:58 designers are actually having to give up a little because you're designing the
13:01 system of which you may not see all the corners of.
13:04 - If I could add to that, we're designing the rules.
13:09 We're designing the conditions for an AI system to be more successful in creating
13:15 solutions.
13:16 And it is such a mind shift for everyone.
13:19 You know, we're going from a world...
13:20 Think about our relationship to technology forever, until now.
13:25 Our relationship with technology has been, we're the boss.
13:29 And, you know, it's system input to output.
13:33 Machines are operating on their, you know, how they've been programmed to operate,
13:36 and it's very deterministic.
13:38 And with AI, it's completely changing.
13:40 And that's scary in some ways for designers because we have less control of
13:45 the output, like you're saying.
13:47 But what we do have control over are the conditions that determine what the
13:52 output will be.
13:54 So I think this is part of a continuum that I've seen in my career where we've
13:59 been...designers have been asked to take on higher and higher levels of
14:03 abstraction, you know, from simple graphic stuff to, you know,
14:08 information architecture where we're starting to think through workflows and
14:12 how information relates.
14:13 And now with AI, it's just that much more abstract.
14:17 - I mean, could your comments make me think of, you know, say, for example,
14:22 in financial services as we shifted to this world where everything was
14:25 interconnected and suddenly you could move your customer service to the
14:29 Philippines or, you know, India or...and at first, that was supposed to be great
14:35 because it was supposed to create more people that could interact with the
14:38 customer, the service could be more customized.
14:41 But in fact, the initial phase of that was terrible.
14:44 And I think it's still kind of terrible because you get people that really don't
14:49 understand what you actually need.
14:50 There are language issues.
14:51 There are all these hiccups in rolling it out.
14:53 And it sort of feels a little bit like with AI that the initial phase of this,
14:57 they're going to be hallucination, they're going to be, you know,
15:01 this kind of simulacrum of, "Oh, I understand you, but you're really not
15:05 solving my problem."
15:07 And as a customer, I'm just dreading, you know, those kinds of experiences.
15:12 Then I was in Seoul at the McKinsey partner meeting a couple of months ago.
15:17 Some of your colleagues were there talking about their research on AI and what it's
15:21 going to mean.
15:22 And I think I mentioned this earlier, but one phrase that kept coming up was this
15:26 idea of humans in the loop.
15:30 Can you talk a little bit about that and the importance of that and what it means?
15:34 - Yes, happy to.
15:35 The phrase that stuck with me on a similar vein was, "Data is a human artifact."
15:42 - Yeah.
15:42 - And there's such truth in that.
15:45 There was a beautiful example that was given to me by a chief design officer who
15:50 was working on a medical device, and there was a most wonderfully rich new
15:55 data source on people sadly living with cancer.
15:58 And the data analysts were looking at this and thinking, "What does this tell us
16:02 about the people?
16:02 How can we analyze the data?
16:04 What can we learn about leading to better patient outcomes and doing better
16:08 clinical work?"
16:10 And it was the designers who asked the question, "Tell us more about how this
16:15 data was collected.
16:16 Tell us who it was collected from."
16:18 And they discovered that actually the only way to get this very sensitive
16:21 information was from a particular nation which had more lax GDPR regulation,
16:28 and therefore, it was a very non-representative data sample.
16:31 And therefore, this extraordinary work that was being done by the data scientists
16:35 and engineers and then being extrapolated to billions of other people wasn't
16:40 extrapolatable.
16:41 And I think this is one of the areas where, again, we as design leaders have a
16:44 critical role to say we continue to ask, "What is the voice of the user?
16:49 What is the voice of the customer?"
16:51 And yes, the data sets are larger and we have cleverer ways of interrogating
16:54 that data, but there is a similarity still in the activity of how do we gather it?
16:59 Are we getting the right questions?
17:00 What are the unconscious biases in the data that's coming in?
17:03 And actually, can we elevate our role in controlling that and supporting that at
17:07 the very early stages?
17:09 - It's really interesting.
17:10 And, you know, the ethical implications that go along with that too,
17:14 I think, really complicated.
17:16 And we've had some great discussions in the past about the ethics of AI.
17:23 Cliff, I wonder if I could ask you a little bit about that because we've been
17:26 through this really fascinating moment in Silicon Valley with the tussle over Sam
17:31 Altman and open AI.
17:33 And, you know, just kind of the politics of that in the past, we've been obsessed.
17:39 But underlying it, there's this kind of uneasy question of, okay,
17:43 was somebody trying to put the brakes on a breakthrough in technology?
17:47 And did they possibly have good reasons for being worried about it?
17:51 And then, you know, this entity that was created to be a nonprofit in the
17:55 beginning that this tiny little profit-making subsidiary,
17:59 the capitalist dynamics of that overwhelmed the initial ethical
18:04 hesitations and everyone just charged full speed ahead without any regard for,
18:08 let's worry about the ethical implications.
18:10 I mean, maybe you don't want to comment about open AI specifically,
18:14 but how do you perceive the pressures now to just charge forward with this new
18:19 technology without regard to what some of the consequences?
18:22 - I mean, I think if you look at every single one of the companies out there in
18:26 Silicon Valley and at large, right?
18:28 China is not exempt from that.
18:31 - Yeah.
18:32 - There is the sense that if you don't get it right right now,
18:36 you're going to miss the train, right?
18:37 - Right.
18:38 - I think that...but it's an open question.
18:40 I don't know that if we are in a moment where we're renegotiating all the
18:45 platforms on which everything is built, right?
18:48 That's how most people are behaving, that there's a platform up for grabs.
18:52 And that's why people got so excited when, for example,
18:54 people talked about Sam Altman raising money to build a piece of hardware and
18:57 build an operating system, all that kind of thing.
18:59 And so I think the real question now is like, is it going to further harden the
19:06 ecosystem we already have or is it going to wipe away the ecosystem that we have?
19:10 I just don't know.
19:11 And ultimately, like, what's going to be the arbiter of that is people,
19:15 people voting with their feet and people deciding what feels best, right?
19:19 And so, like, I think that that's going to be really interesting to be, like,
19:22 and I think that we may be in a period of overhype where a lot of these things are
19:28 going to...they're just not as close as we want them to be.
19:31 They're like, they're close enough for a demo maybe, but they're not actually like,
19:35 you know, normies like your grandmother are not going to trade their iPhones in
19:39 for some of these things.
19:41 But they might.
19:42 I mean, but I think it's further away than people might think.
19:44 - Huh.
19:45 Huh.
19:47 Then this question of sort of the moment that we're in is a really interesting one
19:52 because we've got all these different technologies that are converging.
19:57 Do you see this as kind of...I mean, it's always dangerous to say this time it's
20:00 different, but does it feel to you somehow that, like, this moment in terms of the
20:05 interaction of both design and technology is really something quite unique?
20:10 - It does.
20:13 And I'm with Cliff.
20:14 I'm going to be humble here and say I don't know.
20:16 In fact, in the UK, there's a very learned leader who's advising the UK government
20:24 on AI.
20:25 He was recently asked, "What are the long-term scenarios for AI?"
20:29 And he quickly said, "There are three scenarios.
20:32 One is that the technology becomes so powerful that like nuclear technology,
20:36 only a very small number of people can hold the key.
20:40 The second one is transhumanism where we become completely augmented and we cannot
20:44 even with our grandmas separate ourselves from the technology.
20:48 And the third one is in just the same way that we have arisen from the primordial
20:52 gloop, so from the compost of humanity where a super intelligent life form
20:57 emerged that will spend about as much time thinking about us as we think about
21:01 single-celled organisms each day."
21:03 And if he who spent the last 30 years thinking about it can give three very
21:08 different scenarios and not point out which one is coming,
21:10 who am I to say where we are headed?
21:13 I do think though in the shorter to medium term, there's an analogy which I'm
21:17 finding quite powerful, which is an analogy of when in the past
21:21 in history, something has gone from scarce resource to commodity.
21:26 Take something like water.
21:27 When we went from an age where a lot of our day was spent going to look for water,
21:32 we didn't know if the water was going to kill us, we had this relationship with
21:36 water and it was critical.
21:38 Now we take for granted that we can turn a tap on, we can have a shower,
21:41 we can do things with water that we could never have dreamed of a century ago.
21:45 And I wonder whether the same is happening with creativity.
21:48 I don't know what the shower of creativity smells like, feels like,
21:52 tastes like, but I think there is an extraordinary moment where creativity
21:56 goes from scarce resource to commodity.
21:58 I think we as design leaders are the ones to shape that future.
22:01 I think there's optimism there, risk but optimism of what we can do.
22:06 - So I want to maybe ask each of you if I can a kind of forward-looking question
22:11 about what people who are interested in design and are thinking of building a
22:16 career in design should be thinking in terms of the skills that they need.
22:21 And we have...you know, there's a period where all designers were expected to be
22:25 able to draw, to be able to fashion beautiful objects.
22:30 So one question is that less relevant now.
22:33 We went through a period where people like John Maeda said, "Oh,
22:37 the problem with designers, designers need to do code, right?
22:40 They need to know more about how to program."
22:42 Well, suddenly we've got AI that can help almost anybody with very basic prompts,
22:48 figure out how to code.
22:49 It democratizes things a lot.
22:51 So I guess my question for sort of each one of you is, what does a designer need
22:56 to know now?
22:56 What are the skills they need to have for a long kind of, you know,
22:59 30, 40-year career if they're just starting out?
23:02 Do you want to start, Katrina?
23:03 - I'll start, yeah.
23:04 Yeah, so I've been talking with a lot of designers about this and speaking at
23:09 design conferences about this.
23:10 And, you know, designers have to be somewhat experts in people,
23:16 and that's not going to change.
23:18 I think actually with AI, if anything, we are going to have to
23:21 understand ourselves better than ever.
23:25 I think we're going to be evolving as this technology evolves.
23:29 And so that continues to be important.
23:31 In addition to being experts in people, designers are going to increasingly need
23:36 to be experts in data and ethics, and those things go together.
23:41 So one of the things we were doing at IBM when I was there was developing a set of
23:46 design thinking methods because this is, you know, this is a way of working for
23:50 designers to figure out how to work with a team when you're actually creating an AI
23:57 system.
23:58 And we developed some new methods, some of them are published on the site now,
24:02 for designers or anyone on the product team, doesn't have to be the designer
24:06 necessarily, to get the team thinking through the data issues of designing an
24:13 AI system.
24:13 Where is the data coming from?
24:15 Do you have the right to use the data, which is a big issue?
24:18 What could go wrong if we use this data?
24:22 And that is one of the most important questions we can ask, and that gets into
24:25 the ethics stuff.
24:26 So become experts in data, become experts in ethics.
24:31 - Cliff?
24:32 - I would say it's still as important as ever for designers to be able to realize
24:36 their ideas, right?
24:37 It's not enough to draw something on a piece of paper.
24:40 I think you actually have to make your ideas real.
24:44 And if that means drawing, if it means coding, so be it.
24:46 But I will say, like, to Ben's point, like, the creativity, what the tools allow
24:51 you to do now is remarkable, right?
24:53 So now you actually don't even have to code in order to build a site.
24:57 All these things are putting the ability to actually make your idea real into,
25:02 or at least prototypable, becoming more and more possible.
25:04 But the second thing I always tell young designers who ask me that same question
25:07 all the time is I say, "You first and foremost need to be a citizen of the
25:11 world," right?
25:12 Because too often, designers look inside their own profession as to what's good,
25:17 instead of looking out in the world for ideas and to be able to diagnose where my
25:22 product and where my idea fits in the broader culture of what we are doing
25:27 as a society, why it matters, why it should exist at all, right?
25:30 What problems is it solving?
25:32 And I think that I often say, like, be a citizen of the world and be curious
25:36 about every single thing you read, or everything you see in the world.
25:39 Read widely.
25:42 Put more stuff in your head so that you can have more influences.
25:46 - That's great.
25:48 Ben?
25:48 - I agree.
25:49 And by the way, I'll add, I do think it's harder to be a designer now than it was
25:54 before.
25:54 There was a beauty and a simplicity, but when you went to the Royal College of
25:58 Art or Stanford D School or ISD, you learned form follows function,
26:02 you came out with a great craft skill set, and you think, "I'm now set for the
26:06 coming 35 years.
26:07 Job done."
26:08 It is harder today.
26:10 And certainly, I think the best designers I know, there is a curiosity,
26:15 a hunger for knowledge.
26:17 And if I could give maybe one piece of advice that we allow to do that,
26:19 particularly for designers earlier in their career, is to ask a set of questions
26:25 very early on whenever working on a new project.
26:29 And I think triple bottom line, four Ps, there are different frameworks out there,
26:35 but that sense of asking questions around purpose, people, profit, planet,
26:40 is a good place for most designers to start.
26:42 Purpose, why are we doing this at all?
26:44 And are we best positioned to do it, or should another organization be
26:47 doing this?
26:49 Profit, does this make any sense financially?
26:51 And actually, I know in my other hat working with Design for Good,
26:54 I'm increasingly clear that good design includes thinking through,
26:59 does this make sense even for a non-profit, for a financial point of view,
27:03 does it make it sustainable?
27:05 From a planet point of view, Ellen MacArthur is very good at talking
27:08 about this.
27:08 The bar has to rise.
27:09 It can't be just as this leave the planet as we found it.
27:13 Can it be regenerative?
27:14 Can we actually leave the planet better with the work that we're doing?
27:17 And last, on the people side, have we thought through not just the end
27:21 users, but the broader communities into which a product or service is going
27:24 to be launched, and the impact it may have on them?
27:27 We should not expect a designer to be trained to answer all of those
27:30 questions, but we should expect them to ask them, and to work with their
27:34 colleagues in marketing, and product, and engineering, and others,
27:37 to collectively work as one cross-functional team, and come up with the right
27:41 product or service as a result.
27:42 - So on the one hand, I'm a little bit daunted by this because we're saying
27:47 that designers have to be, in addition to artists, data scientists,
27:52 they need to be diplomats.
27:54 They need to be citizens of the world, and students of history.
27:58 - Facilitators of hard conversations.
28:02 - And they need to be almost philosophers, in a way, to understand exactly what
28:07 design's role is.
28:09 I think that is a great segue to our next segment, which is going to be
28:13 Sarah Stein Greenberg talking a little bit about how she's thinking through
28:17 these questions at the Stanford Design School, which is fascinating.
28:21 But the common underlying thread that I'm hearing here is this question of coping
28:26 with uncertainty.
28:27 And to me, that seems to be the kind of through line.
28:31 I mean, often, people that come up with a business school background,
28:34 Jean Leitka has this wonderful kind of distinction that she draws between people
28:38 that come from MBA culture, where the emphasis is to get to, you know,
28:42 to see a multiple choice question, A, B, C, D, and figure out which one's the
28:45 right answer as quickly as possible.
28:48 And that, as Ben said, designers are trained not to think that way.
28:52 They're trained to say, "Well, how come the options don't go out to Z,
28:56 and maybe even more, and are we even asking the right question?
29:00 And maybe before we start asking and thinking about questions,
29:04 we should just go hang out with users and understand them better,"
29:08 which is a much more kind of abstract, interesting way of kind of seeing
29:12 the universe.
29:12 But it gets back to, you know, my opening anecdote about Dara.
29:16 It's just hanging out with users, immersing yourself in their world,
29:20 is tremendously powerful.
29:22 So I think we're going to have a variety of different segments throughout the day
29:26 where we see what these new tools can do in real time that'll be exciting.
29:30 But I guess just kind of as a kind of summary remark, I would urge everyone to
29:34 sort of think about this question of, in a world that's coming,
29:37 very uncertain, we don't know what it's going to look like.
29:39 Actually, design is super relevant.
29:41 It's the thing that all of us need to be kind of...the perspective that all of us
29:46 need to embrace.
29:47 So I want to thank all of our panelists for a terrific discussion,
29:50 and I look forward to our next segment.
29:51 Please give them a big hand.
29:52 - Thank you.
29:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]