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Design Better
Bonus Episode: 30 years of design with Wert & Co, live in NYC featuring Paola Antonelli, Mark Wilson,Kate Aronowitz, Mike Davidson, and Meaghan Choi
01:12:14
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- [00:01]
A
On the AI note, it's removed this barrier between, I have this idea, but I don't know how to get it out and express it. And these founders are coming with these amazing ideas, and they're not looking to replace designers. In fact, it almost builds empathy. They're like, I had this great idea for this app. Oh, it doesn't really work, but I expressed it, and now I need design. So I'm actually very optimistic. At these early companies, the role of design is being put into place pretty well and very early.
- [00:29]
B
Today, we celebrate 30 years of Wirt and company, the quiet champions of design who have shaped our field by placing the brightest designers in roles of influence at brands that impact culture, commerce, and community. And to mark the occasion, Design Better is live right here in New York City with an inspiring panel. We'll look back at how design has shaped the world over the past three decades and look ahead to the essential role design has to play as technology reshapes the human experience.
- [01:02]
C
Our conversation begins with Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design and Director of Research Development at the Museum of Modern Art. Paula is one of the most influential voices in contemporary design. We're also joined by Mark Wilson, Global Design Editor at Fast Company. Mark joins the intersection of design, technology, and culture, bringing a journalist's rigor and a designer's eye to stories that reach millions. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willard.
- [01:33]
B
And I'm Aaron Walter. At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. DesignBetter is brought to you by WIX Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop and manage exceptional web projects at scale. Learn more@wix.com studio and now back to the show.
- [02:33]
C
Paulo and Mark, welcome to Design Better.
- [02:36]
D
Hello, guys.
- [02:37]
E
Thanks for having us.
- [02:39]
B
So I was recently thinking about my great grandmother who passed away a while back. She made it to 101. Her life saw a lot of change. She started with horses, and by the end of her life, she was receiving email. But I can't help but think that 100 years and all the change she has seen is not quite as much as what we've seen in the past 30 years. 30 years. If we think back to 1995, where were you? Windows 3.1, Netscape, just getting started. The Internet kind of finding its way to persistent connections and mobile devices and technology reshaping our political systems, our economies. It's significant. What role has design played in significantly reshaping our world? Paula, we'll start with you.
- [03:25]
D
I like to think that design really is the enzyme that makes everything happen. So revolutions might happen in science, in technology, or in sociology, in politics, but designers are the one that transform these revolutions into objects that then touch people and make it all happen. So really without design, revolutions would not get home, you know, would not really touch everyone. So the role has been pervasive and ubiquitous and design really makes everything happen.
- [03:59]
C
Arkit, your role at Fast Company, you talked to a lot of different companies. You've observed companies over the years. How long has Fast Company Design been around?
- [04:07]
E
We've been around for, I want to say about 15ish years. You know, there was a kind of a soft launch in there. So depending at any publication, you know, the lore is always different and all journalists are gossips. It's basically like a game of telephone. I thought what you said earlier was really interesting though, that the idea that the last 30 years has been a bigger change than the last 100 years. And I mean, as you. Paul, the atomic bomb. Yeah, the atomic bomb was the big one for so long, like the horse and buggy, like we had the industrial revolution. I mean, I think the industrial revolution was obviously a big deal, but the word big stands out to me because I think about like that a hundred year period and all the revolutions were really large and then I think about the last 30 years and all the revolutions were relatively flat and immaterial. Right. The one thing I heard from sci fi authors back when I was working on a story was that the thing they had missed was miniaturization. And so it's like the biggest change is almost like the smallest one. Information was shrunk down into computers. Transportation is now Uber. Anyway, I wanted to push back on.
- [05:09]
C
The premise along with the design profession, changing the titles, the types of roles we have has changed. I remember coming out of undergraduate with a degree in product design, I was somewhere between a mechanical engineer, industrial designer, and nobody really knew where to put me. And this is the mid-1990s and that was around the time this term UX design was coined, according to Wikipedia by Don Norman. We could fact check me on that one. But talk a little bit about the evolving roles of design. The titles, the Types of things that design.
- [05:38]
D
The first thing that I was thinking of was the speculative, critical design that was taught at the Royal College of Art. You know, so the RCA in London had this moment, this, like, golden moment at the end of the 90s, and then in the beginning of the next millennium with this speculative, critical design. And it was Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Then at the same time, there was the furniture design or product design course that was also happening parallel to that, that was run by Ron Arad. And Ron always said that the best thing that could happen to any RCA student was to be unemployable. I was thinking it was really interesting because at that particular time, the aspiration of many designers was to be theoreticians, or at least visionaries. They were trying to understand the future consequences of our choices of today. So, yeah, unemployable, but very, very necessary to society. But of course, they would go to school that didn't cost that much, while here in the United States, everybody would come out of school with debt and therefore needing a job immediately. So I think that what happened is that, of course, product became a different word from what it used to be. So the idea of product designer was too vague, and you had to be either an object designer or an interface designer, a furniture designer. You had to specify more. But the problem is that there was not a common core to all of these different practices that designers would stem from. So I think that what happened in the past 30 years, a fragmentation. So many of the designers that are here might not know of the designers that instead, you and I often publish or collect because there's been this kind of disgregation of the profession, which might be exciting, because then designers are everywhere. Right? But I feel that that's what happened.
- [07:25]
E
You know, I think we're seeing a convergence of many disciplines of design into sort of some bigger D design or smaller D design that everybody does a little bit of. I mean, I think about Canva saying everyone's a designer and, like, maybe kind of bigger than that. I do think probably the most impactful piece of design of this time is the most invisible one, which is the algorithm. Technically, that is like a sorting mechanism. I mean, yeah, I get it's coding, and it's a lot of engineering, but. But it's essentially information design just spread across the Internet and every service we have. You know, it shapes our visual and audio experience of everything.
- [08:03]
B
I remember the infectious optimism. Late 90s, early 2000s, I woke up every day excited about what I was going to make and then there was, I think, a point, a reflective point, where I got a little bit past my youth and more into an adult perspective, and I realized that maybe my optimism was a little naive. Have you seen that with design in the past 30 years, where we entered with one idea and found ourselves in a place we didn't expect?
- [08:33]
D
It's hard to generalize, but I can talk to you about my personal experience. And when in 2013, there was the news of the 3D printed gun, and I remember that my jaw dropped not at the 3D printed gun, but at my stupidity and naive taint. Having thought that designed was such a positive force, always right, because I was going around all happy and twiggly, thinking that designers take almost a Hippocratic oath, blah, blah, blah. And then here is my beloved open source that's being used philosophically to spread this instrument of death that can be printed at home. So I started a whole process and a whole project called Design and Violence to explore that. I don't know if that reckoning was just because I had been in the business for so many years and I was waking up, or if it was something that was spread all around. But design, just like any other human activity, can go either way. It can be good and it can be bad, you know, so it's important to understand that it's an application of human creativity. Therefore, it is subject to those vagaries.
- [09:42]
E
When I started really writing about Design Focus as a topic about 14 years ago, I was really drinking the Kool Aid. But I think as I've covered it more, I realized the design is agnostic. It's really just a reflection of the person, you know, using the practice. And in that way, it's exactly the same as technology. You know, it just so happens the two of those have been sort of abused a little bit over the past 30 years. But we've gotten some good stuff, too.
- [10:05]
C
Let's talk a little bit more about design and culture and thinking about how dine has played a role in changing the way that we behave and interact with each other.
- [10:13]
D
I'm from Milan, from Italy. So design plays an important role in culture there, as it plays here, but there it's more recognized and understood by the population at large. So design is everywhere, and it's either picked up from the pile by people, that kind of design culture in different places, or it's not. So in Milan, it really is, and it really was here less. And instead contemporary art is. So that's what I want to say. Design is always there, but it is recognized differently in different places. When you talk about that moment in history, in the 20th century, World War II was very important. Of course, it was this fissure in history. And in the United States, it had the ability to then kind of like, pour all of these amazing materials and technology that had been developed for World War II into the public realm. So Charles and Ray Eames fiberglass chairs or the case study houses. You know, I'm just condensing everything, but it was this just injection of innovation, of new ways of being, new forms and new levels of comforts. Also in Italy, even though we were not the winner, though there was this beautiful percolation. All these architects that had no work during fascism, all of a sudden were released into the wild and started working with amazing manufacturers. So the whole boom of Italian design came from this explosion of creativity that had been repressed during the Fascist era. So that's what happened. And if you recognize it, then you see how it percolates down to how everybody lives, you know, so the boom in the economy and the culture of the United States, I cannot say that it was inspired or pushed, but definitely was hugged and accompanied by design. The role of design here in culture in the United States is funny because the United States has so much strength in design, but it hasn't really learned to position it yet in the dresser in the right drawer. And I used to think that it was a little bit of a complex of inferiority towards Europe that is completely unjustified. But I remember when I moved to New York 31 years ago, and I was looking for a bathroom mirror, and it was almost impossible because either I had to make a pilgrimage to some very rarefied stores where I would be, like, blessed before going in, and I had to leave my shoes out.
- [12:42]
E
I'm sorry. I want to see the mirror so bad. I didn't mean to drop that.
- [12:44]
D
I mean, it's really. It's so normal, or it would be complete crap. Now I remember that there was this impossibility with the amazing tradition of design that the United States has. There was this need for people, normal people like us, to atone before entering design temples, whereas instead, it should be a normal thing. But my goal as A curator at MoMA is to make design be a normal topic of conversation and of critical conversation among citizens and not something that should be aspire to as if it were coming from the sky.
- [13:18]
B
How do you think companies are thinking about design differently today versus, say, 30 years ago? There's so much that's consumer facing that certainly influences or creates more of a need for design. But do you see companies mark, you probably are positioned well to speak to this.
- [13:36]
E
Yeah, I mean, I think everybody in the room knows that Apple's sort of marking of design and execution of design was inspiring to a lot of America. It probably did put design on the map and it America, Target had, you know, similar roles. Those things, I think popularized design. And then basically every company wanted to own a little piece and be a design company. Over my time, you know, fast we. We used to call it co design. Now we call it fast company Design. We were a really unique publication that nobody was really writing about design. And then about four years later, every tech publication was suddenly a design publication. Gizmodo was like by design. The Verge was pushing design. It's like, these aren't design publications. But everybody really wanted in on that. What I think is interesting is, you know, over the past few years, I think everybody heard, you know, the conversations about, like, do designers have a seat at the table? And designers are leading companies and they're partnering with CEOs. You know, that happened to an extent and then it stalled out. And what we saw was the CMO or the chief marketing officer, I think, take over a lot of design teams. And right now we're living within the repercussions of that. And it's all over us. It's all over our social media feeds and it's stuff like Old Spice refrigerated deodorant and other gag gift products. Right now we are in this really strange mainstream collab drop culture that went from being somewhat legitimate to just being totally zany and overplayed. But that's design right now, and I'm really excited for it to change.
- [15:02]
C
If we could talk a little bit more about some of the missed opportunities in design and Aaron and I were talking about Apple and historically some great design happening there, but lots of failures too, for us as parents around things like screen time, which, you know, that's a design problem that could be solved by a company like Apple and maybe attempting it.
- [15:22]
B
You need a PhD to keep your kids out of trouble digitally.
- [15:25]
C
Yeah. So what are examples like that maybe where design could have been used in the last 30 years? The mark has been missed.
- [15:33]
D
That's a question that I would need to prepare for for many, many years. But I think there's been so many. I'm just thinking of like, safety issues. You know, it takes a while and it takes a few bad occurrences before things are implemented. I'm just thinking even of Ralph Nader and his campaign in the 60s for safety belts. So I think it's hard to know beforehand what could be done better, frankly, with some exceptions. But I think that designers are always thinking of the bad situations that they can correct. If these corrections don't happen, it's usually not because of the designers, but it's because some other reason is at play sometimes.
- [16:12]
C
Even so, one famous example that came out of our design program at Stanford is dual founders of Juul. They intended to create a product to.
- [16:20]
F
Get people off cigarettes.
- [16:22]
C
Now they're known for getting teens addicted to nicotine.
- [16:25]
D
Yeah, it's hard to predict how things are going to go. And there are so many stories, and.
- [16:30]
E
Capitalism is kind of a strange carrot along these lines. There are so many cases of just unintended consequences of design and, you know, things gone wrong. You know, I think most prominently about Tesla's doors, which are hard for people to open. And there was recently a report like, people die of fires in their Teslas because someone mandated a certain way to open that door. That's sort of nonsensical, actually. Tesla also had screens that were so dark, people thought their car wasn't on, but it was just dark. Like the screen was just too dark to start your car. But it happens to everyone. Like, and this has happened a lot to Apple too. You know, when they launch airtags, I was one of the only, I think, first journalists to interview different people and ask, could this be used for stalking and domestic abuse? And as it happened, nonprofits instantly responded to me that day. And they're like, yeah, this is really scary. This is terrible. Why is someone doing this? And unfortunately, a lot of data proved out. There's now a large class action suit against Apple, like alleging airtags have been linked to stalking and murder. And that product's still out there. If you look at a company like Apple and not to harp too much on them right now, but, you know, they said, well, we've implemented sort of invisible things we don't really want to explain so that they can't be abused. It's these interventions that we can't audit that become so intensely scary.
- [17:43]
D
But that's why it's very important to make all citizens more knowledgeable and aware of what design is, what's behind it, what the consequences are. That's why I would like it to become more normal in culture, because we need to be able to push back even before a lawsuit is due.
- [18:00]
B
So 30 years is a pretty sizable data set if we're looking at this from an Engineering perspective. And so with 30 years, we can start to see some patterns of behavior, of how we solve problems to our prior question mistakes that we make. What patterns have you seen in the past 30 years in how design is used? And maybe some lessons that we could learn from things that recurrent.
- [18:26]
D
I haven't really seen a linear pattern that did not change from beginning to end. I've seen so many different ways that also flow with culture, right? So I think it's not possible to really think of one line of change. There are so many. We have something that's called humble masterpieces. At MoMA we just use that term because they're the objects that work so well that we don't even notice them anymore. So at MoMA, we just put them on a pedestal and people are like, oh my God. I think that people have, if anything, gotten used to more design or to understanding design and design intention. So maybe that's really the deal. Just like more recognition of design when it's there.
- [19:10]
E
You know, my head just immediately goes to a couple quasi related thoughts, which is that I feel like design we often think about, especially if you think through the lens of fashion or sort of other trends that, you know, we saw these things in decades, but then sort of with social feeds and everything, everything, like I think post Virgil Blow, right? Like everything sort of got remixed and blown up really, really fast. And so it's really hard to know what movement we're in at any time, what's popular, what's not popular, what is culture right now. And then I think about Y2K and we did a package on Y2K, you know, cyclical comeback several years ago. And at the time you were already seeing signs. Like you'd see it in fashion, you could see it in technology, you saw it within UX design quite a bit. And it's sort of hung out. Like Y2K is now hung out for like 5 plus years. And I keep seeing trend pieces acting like it's totally new, but now I'm like, are we just living like, is this it? Is this now just part of our vernacular? Is like the Y2K aesthetic 20% of our live life now or is it 15%? Right? I don't know.
- [20:13]
B
When I think about 2011 in particular, actually it was probably towards south by Southwest Twitter launches and becomes a big thing. I'm looking at Mike Davidson, who was head of design at Twitter and will be up here shortly. Twitter launches. There's like this intense optimism of social media and the word that floated around constantly Was democratization. Everyone's voice can be heard. We can all participate in the town square. This is another metaphor that we used a lot. And there was a sense that because of that, the Arab Springs comes out of that. What could go wrong? Everything is fantastic. And I remember feeling like that was great. And I can't help but feel like that is happening right now. So if we're talking about the past 30 years, we're talking about the last two years of the 30, where AI, it's so optimistic, it's incredible. It's changing our workflow, it's changing how we cook our meals and plan our vacations and do everything day to day. What could go wrong?
- [21:18]
E
Well, I would just say, you know, the democratization is so interesting because we did, we democratized all the tools and we democratized none of the platforms. And that gap is just in a nutshell, kind of what's broken about the individual's ability to communicate. But within that, we've seen a mass undercutting of the media. I don't know if even people in this room, people are often surprised. You know, it's like 70% or more of journalist jobs over the last 20 years have disappeared. And then just in the past few years, Sorry, I'm like really being downer journalist right now. Just in the past few months, since companies like Google have turned on AI summaries, or perplexity has turned on summaries, many, many, many of my peers and most publications can't actually generate sort of the traffic revenue they need and the eyeballs that drive advertisers. And so the entire business has been undercut.
- [22:07]
D
But the funny thing, it's not the tools. AI is extremely interesting and fascinating, and I'm not one of those doomsayers. But I was thinking there's so much horrible going all around us that AI is not able to lift me up. But 2011, by the way, missed Twitter so much, I think by exhibitions. And in 2011 I had curated a show called Talk to Me that was about the communication between people and objects. And it was really full of hope because of all the interfaces and what they could do. Also, from the artistic viewpoint, I feel that, yes, today there's a lot of excitement, but the tools are more powerful and therefore when they're used, in a twisted way, they are more powerfully down. But that has nothing to do with the tool itself. You know, right now, I think a lot about the fact that since deep fakes are so convincing, maybe the only truth is when you can touch the person Next to you, at least for a while, flesh is going to be the final test. But what can happen with AI is beautiful and it doesn't have to be necessarily phantasmagoric. I want to talk about very quickly about a beautiful use of AI that is very simple. I mean, they started with Dall? E and I think that now they're using something, but nothing terrible. Domestic data streamers they're called. They're based in Barcelona and they use AI to create memories, videos and photos of memories that have never been recorded for people that for instance were imprisoned during the war. There are migrants or they are suffering from Alzheimer's. So it's beautiful how this personal truths that are not absolute truths maybe are the best expression of what deep fakes and deep truths can do.
- [23:49]
F
Right?
- [23:49]
C
Well, on that optimistic more or less note, thank you, Paola and Mark. We thank you up here.
- [23:55]
E
Thank you.
- [23:58]
C
All right, so next up we will be shifting our focus to the present and future of design. The teams, the individual contributors and the leaders who are navigating this big evolution in real time. Let's welcome our second panel. Kate Aronowitz, Megan Choi and Mike Davison. Three leaders who have different perspectives on where design's headed and what it means to build meaningful careers in rapidly changing landscape.
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B
Kate Aronowitz is a design partner at GV Google Ventures for those uninitiated where she helps companies of all sizes build design driven cultures. Megan Choi is a product designer at Anthropic focused on developer experiences for emerging technologies like AI and cloud computing, including her work on Claude Code. Mike Davidson is VP of design and User research at Microsoft AI with more than two decades leading design at companies including Disney, Twitter and espn. Kate, Megan, Mike, welcome to Design Better.
- [25:05]
C
Thank you, but we're very excited to have you here. So we were talking about the past 30 years where it already felt like world is changing, things were evolving quickly. But now, if we're thinking about the next five years, feels like we're at the cusp of this even steeper exponential curve where design is, according to some, likely to potentially create a general artificial intelligence, massive changes to the economy and change jobs and culture. So we want to talk a bit about what role design plays in our next chapter.
- [25:36]
A
So I spend a lot of my time with founders. They've got their first idea, they've earned their first round of money from an investment and then it's like time to get serious. They've got the pressure, they've got to scale. They need to really find product, market, fit and Take off. And so while most of us see the consumer result of design, I work with really technical founders. And it's fun to see that every workflow now needs to be well designed. Just about, oh, my phone should look nice. It's like, if I'm a security tech, I want my workflow to feel good and work well. If I'm a lawyer, I want to be able to publish my time card in a better way. So I'm seeing design kind of revolutionize all sorts of workflows, and founders are calling immediately saying how much they want design, and they're doing it in interesting ways. So I used to just place designers immediately with startups, but that got really complicated. Now I connect them with agencies. We can get back to that in a moment. But the design folks that they're looking for, they're looking for systems designers now they're looking for brand designers earlier than I used to see. They're looking for UX research, they're really looking for design to play a strategy role earlier in their startup. And on the AI note, it's removed this barrier between, like, I have this idea, but I don't know how to get it out and express it. And these founders are coming with these amazing ideas and they're not looking to replace designers. In fact, it almost builds empathy. They're like, I had this great idea for this app. Oh, it doesn't really work, but I expressed it and now I need design. So I'm actually very optimistic. At these early companies, the role of design is being put into place pretty well and very early.
- [27:16]
B
Mike, I'm curious about the composition of design teams and roles. They certainly changed a lot over the years. There's a lot more specialization. Also seems like now with AI there's this blurring of boundaries. Can you talk to us about roles and team composition and where things stand today?
- [27:33]
F
Yeah, absolutely. So since the beginning, we've all struggled with this kind of Venn diagram of, like, what does the engineer do, what does the PM do, and what does the designer do and what does the researcher do? Right. And at some companies, the circles don't even overlap. Right. It's like full specialization. And in other companies, they overlap somewhat, but there's always, like, arguments around those overlapping areas. Right. And so I think over the last 30 years, some designers, I feel like, have retreated into the most remote parts of their circle. And they've said, like, I'm not a code person, I don't want to touch that. I could learn HTML and css, but that's not what I do. I'm a designer. And that's been fine, I think, for the most part, so far. Like, there's been enough jobs in the industry so that we can have people who are very technical as designers and people who are not very technical as designers. But one of the really, really nice things over the last couple of years through products like GitHub, Copilot, and Claude code is not only is that not an excuse anymore, but it's fun to actually code your work now. It's fun to have an idea on a Saturday morning on your couch and have a actual working, live product before the weekend is over. Right. Without even knowing code. So what I see is we're moving from an era of specialization to an area of extreme generalization. And at Microsoft, we're starting to call this sort of person the full Stack product maker. And this person could have a product management background. They can have a design background, they can have a research background, they can have an engineering background. But the point is, we can do so much more with smaller groups of people now, and that actually feels better. You know, Kate and I especially have been in this industry for like, what, 25 years now, and we've built these giant apparatuses, Apparati. Apparatum. Apparatus, around product building to the point where it's like, all right, well, let's build this tiny little feature. Then you look around, you're like, there's 30 people building this tiny little feature. You know, there's like two designers and 25 engineers and a couple PMs, and you're like, damn, did we really need all those people to do this little thing? And now we're kind of getting to the point where we can do that all with a really, really small group again, of tightly woven creative people who can do great things very quickly and at high quality. So I'm super, super excited about that.
- [29:35]
C
Megan, you work on Claude code, and I love Claude. I've been using a lot just for things with my kids and then also for our own work. And I'm curious how you think about maybe those designers who are just starting to dip their toes into the development waters or are curious about it. And I think we run workshops with companies where sometimes they just frankly don't have the time. They're too busy with their day job to even play around with it. But I wonder if you think just given that you're so deeply involved with the product, how you've seen folks who are just kind of into it have some desk.
- [30:03]
G
I think there is a little bit of a preconception that code is unaccessible or it's scary. And I think that actually prevents a lot of people from even trying in the first place. And I think that's actually the biggest barrier. It's almost like when you have to go exercise and you really don't want to. It's like the biggest barrier is actually leaving your house to go to the gym. And so for coding, I think it's very, very similar. Once you try using one of these products, you realize it's truly just a conversation. You don't need to know any code, you just need to be able to speak human language. You could even draw a picture, take a picture with your phone and put it into one of these engines and it can produce something very working for you. Something really great, actually. And so my biggest recommendation would be like, be curious, be interested and just try. You'll get somewhere.
- [30:50]
B
We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. DesignBetter is supported by Miro. Eli and I have talked to hundreds of team leaders and visited countless companies, and all of them struggle with the same thing collaboration. Getting people within and across teams to work together is a challenge, but there's a way to make it easier. Miro is the smart canvas that brings everyone together to explore product ideas, lay out your marketing plans, and sort through the details of all your product releases. Miro AI can turn unstructured data like sticky notes or screenshots into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes in minutes. Whether your role is ux, design ops, product management, marketing or anything adjacent, Miro will help you be better at your job because it makes it easier to work together. Help your teams get great done with miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. That's miro.com miro.com Design Better is supported by Masterclass. Eli and I are lifelong learners. Both of us are always reading, expanding our skills and pursuing new interests. And I have a hunch, as a Design Better listener, you're probably the same. The best way to expand your knowledge is with Masterclass, which lets you learn from the best to become your best. Masterclass is the only streaming platform where you can learn from over 200 plus of the world's best, best and brightest people like David Sedaris, Ryan Holiday, Anna Wintour, Shonda Rhimes, Martin Scorsese and the late Jane Goodall. I learned a ton about business strategy from Bob Iger's Masterclass and Eli is a fan of Neil Gaiman's Masterclass. On storytelling. Whether you want to learn to write, improve your public speaking, develop a mindfulness practice, enhance your creativity, or become a better cook. Masterclass has in depth expertise you can tap into anytime and any place. You can access Masterclass on your phone, your computer, your smart TV or even in audio mode. You can just listen to the classes. Right now design better listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com designbetter that's 15% off@masterclass.com designbetter and now back to the show. Here's something we've seen so many times at a lot of different companies that we've visited or worked within is Design has operated on an island and now I think people have found the boats and they found their way to the other islands. They're very closely integrated with product managers, very closely integrated with engineering. And AI is going to accelerate that a lot. I'm curious what you think that relationship is going to look like and or is already looking like, how that's changing.
- [34:00]
F
One of the things that I've always liked to say, especially around large groups of non designers, is designers don't have a monopoly on taste. We don't. We think we do. We're pretty good at it, maybe by default. We might have like better taste than some other professions, but we don't have a monopoly on it. Especially today in the world. There are so many great observers of design culture that are not designers. I remember being in my fifth grade class and using the word. So this was in, I don't know what year this was, let's say like 1989 or something like that. And I used the word font in a paper and my English teacher crossed it out and gave me a demerit for using a word that didn't exist because she had never heard the word font before. I think it means something else but like she hadn't heard it used as like a type. That was the extent of the knowledge of design in the world back then. But like everybody knows what a font is right now. Everybody has a opinions on fonts right now, right? Because we see so many billboards and we see so many websites and we see so many apps, right? And that's how you build taste. Nobody is born with taste. Zero human beings in the history of the world have ever been born with taste. It's all about your ability to observe the world around you and make sense out of it and build and shape new culture out of it. So I think it's really exciting that now we have a Bus full of people, some of whom are designers, some of whom are researchers, some of whom are engineers, some of whom are marketers, some of whom are are different disciplines entirely that can participate in the process of building culture to a degree that hasn't existed before. And the only thing that is required from us as designers is just opening the door and letting people in and not being afraid and not being threatened. Trust me, every discipline is threatened by AI in one way or another. Think about engineers. Code is what engineers do all day, and code is the best thing that AI can do right now. It's so good. Like, if AI could do nothing but code, we'd be fine for the next 30 years. That's how good AI is at code. So, like, don't be threatened by it. You know, have an open mind. Realize that this is the first major change, I think, in the design landscape since the beginning of the Internet, essentially when a bunch of very traditional designers from print and TV and broadcast had to kind of open up their minds and explore this new low resolution at the time world of the Internet. Look how it worked out.
- [36:15]
G
One part too, to focus on in terms of the actual division in between roles is the. Those are really just artificial barriers that we've created to categorize people. There was a point in time when you only had a fixed amount of time, and we still all have that right now. To be able to learn a specific skill set with AI, that actually really reduces the amount of time to get a first draft at something. It doesn't mean you'll be an expert, but it means you can try something new very easily and they get a feel for it. And so in that sense, I think when we think about the teams that build products today, very similar to how Mike said, the makeup of them is actually a lot more fluid. My title might be designer, but I might spend 90% of my time coding for a project because the that's what it calls for. Or my PM's title might be PM, but they actually spend a lot of their time designing because that's actually something that they're really great at and it's a niche or a problem that we're working on that their skill is best at. And so I kind of think of our titles as a starting point that we're all comfortable with and we know right now, but the future framework is going to be a lot more around just being curious about wanting to build something and then pursuing it and then just finding your way there as a collective. One thing I feel very passionate about in building AI products is that I truly think it actually emphasizes human value. We focus a lot on it, emphasizing technology. But in that experience, you actually have to learn what the people you're working with are really good at. I learned that one of my engineers is really good at sound design, and so he made all the sound effects for one of our apps. I learned another one of my product managers is randomly really good at assy art. So he just helped make assy art.
- [37:41]
B
That is amazing.
- [37:42]
G
It's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. And you just learn people beyond their titles, and you get to see people's true expertise at what they're interested in. And so I think it's actually a beautiful emphasis on human creativity in the process, and a little bit less restricting than what we've had to operate until now.
- [37:58]
A
We're thinking about history and kind of barriers coming up and down. It reminds me, 10 years ago, I think Lyft was looking for a new head of design, and a lot of us were coming to visit and see what they had going on, and they were so proud to come and show, and they say, look what we've done. We have built a design studio, and you need a badge to get into it. Only the designers can get into this room. And they were so excited about that. And I was like, oh, my God. Actually, that's really terrible. Like, at the time, we had to signal to design, yes, you're so important that we will build your own studio. And only designers can get. You can imagine. Actually, I think they took the walls down very quickly, and now we've come to this place where the thing I'm looking for for startup designers is you can't be too precious. It doesn't mean don't bring what you have to the table, but if you're too precious and you can't wear many hats and collaborate, it just won't work. I work a lot with the Savannah College of Art and Design, and for the first time, I think in 25 years, they've completely redone their foundations curriculum. So every design student has to take the same four or five core courses, and they've just completely redone it. They're launching it this fall, and they're thinking differently about the core skills that a designer needs to have that won't become automated. It used to be very much like drawing one, drawing two, drawing from real life, deep color theory, and now the curriculum is focused on collaboration, collaboration and teamwork. It's about communication and it's about problem solving, because those are the Three core things that everyone needs to do. So instead of sketching, you know, can you take this plant and make it look like it's on the paper? It's can you draw an idea on a napkin? How quickly can you communicate an idea? How can you use your language to bring other people along for the idea? How can you collaborate cross functionally with teams? I'm really inspired by that, that we're changing what we see as the foundation of what makes a good designer. Now, overlaying all of that, there will be craft, but you'll learn that in your majors. But the idea around communication and idea and curation and bringing people along and together, I think there's just no substitute for that.
- [40:06]
F
I think also if you expanded into like, what products won't be automated, that's interesting as well, right? Like, I just read an article the other day about a company that wants to build this technology so that it can generate like 5,000 automated podcasts a day. Is anybody asking for that? Do we need 5,000 more a day? Like, I feel like there are already too many and the ones that are really good are amazing. And so what I think is going to happen is as a lot of these companies rush to automate everything, it's going to put a higher premium on the human made podcasts like this one, like your favorite one that you listen today. And it's actually going to give more power and influence to the humans who put the care and consideration into that product. Right. And so I'm actually kind of excited about that because I think that's going to be a wave that just kind of like washes over is like gone, which would be nice. But at the same time, there still are nuggets of interestingness in the idea of automatic. I won't even call them podcasts. I'll call them like conversational audio segments. Right? Like there was a town in Massachusetts called Melrose who decided to take all of their like sewer permits, I think, and like land use permits, some police blotter stuff and whatever and just feed it into notebook LLM and create a podcast out of it for the people in the town to listen to. And it's a little like 10 minute podcast and they were kind of entertaining, right. And like you wouldn't have known if you live in this town that's underserved by local news because of what has happened to local news. As Mark said, over the last 10 years, you've turned this really boring, inaccessible format of like government documents into this digestible 10 minute thing where you can kind of like, figure out what's going on in your town now. I just checked on that podcast, however, and they only generated five episodes and they haven't. So I don't think it worked out. But there's like, something interesting in there. I don't think we're going to be in a world of like 5,000 automated podcasts a day, but AI itself is ushering in new formats that may be interesting for us as designers to kind of play with and see what sticks.
- [42:02]
G
One of the most important skill sets is probably to be flexible and nimble. I might be like, kind of cachet to say, but I'll be like, oh, actually don't know. I think we don't know what we're going to need. Like, the industry is actually changing that fast that what skillset is going to be important six months from now? We actually can't predict it. That's how fast these models are changing. That's how fast people are actually adopting them into their lives. One of the biggest transformations I've actually seen having worked in emerging tech for the last 10 years, is how shockingly quickly people, like the general population has adopted and accepted this technology when we know so little about it, so little about how it works, so little that we can't even predict what it's going to do next and where it's going to take us next. We're kind of just along it for the ride. And so I think the most important skill set we can all have is to understand that we probably don't know what we need to hold dear and what is the foundational skill set. And we just need to be a little bit comfortable with being uncomfortable in not knowing. And then we can just be nimble and adapt as time goes and try and correct it and direct it in a direction that we hope is good for the world.
- [43:06]
B
Let's dig into this a little bit more because as we think back of what the discipline of design has been the past 30 years, shaping craft, trying to figure out our workflow together, figure out how we collaborate with engineers, product, et cetera. But it occurs to me that to continue on with our UX and design and research skill set is very myopic that we need to bring something much deeper. Can you think of disciplines that designers need to dig into further? Some that come to mind for me, like philosophy, as we start to consider ethics. Do we need to know more about law? Maybe? There are many other disciplines that I can't even think of right now that designers need to have Some awareness of and proficiency as we start to influence the world more than we have in the past 30 years.
- [43:58]
G
I might be a little biased here, given that I work at Anthropic, but I think the two big disciplines are trade is a big one, and policy. I think physical trade and physical hardware is one of the biggest limitations of technology development. It's like much deeper, cheaper than people typically go, but just physical chips and the physical power that we have access to right now is one of the limiting factors of kind of this invention. And it's more foreign to us, especially in this technological age, that that's kind of where we're couch right now. So understanding where all those resources come from, understanding how those resources get spread across the world, how it affects foreign policy, how it affects local policy, and then also how it shapes what we're building actually is a really, really important part of this process. And then I think we've learned over the past maybe 15 years that technology policy, especially safety and privacy policy, is so important and so hard to walk back after it's out there. And so as we're really just quickly releasing this technology, I think we have a huge responsibility to try and put in the right guardrails. Of course, as was mentioned before, we're probably not going to get it right, but it's worth spending extra time to figure out where the right places might be that we absolutely need to put them in. Or even looking back to our predecessors with all that optimism and wondering, like, oh, if we knew that that optimism would result in this, how can we do it differently? Or how can we learn so that we get to a place where we're finding more before it gets out there? You think about all the people who are using AI as therapy today and OpenAI leading into that, I think that's incredibly positive in some ways, because maybe they wouldn't have reached out to someone otherwise. But I also think it's incredibly negative because an AI bot didn't take the Hippocratic oath. It doesn't know how to reach out for harm. It can't access resources. So I just think policy and trade are just really where I'd focus a lot of my time.
- [45:52]
A
I would say, I mean, as designers, we're supposed to be trained to think about the human on the other side. But I think as things speed up and they get more automated, like, unfortunately, I'm seeing a lot of user researchers, the teams are shrinking, and a lot of them are out of work. As an investment team, we see tools come in all the Time you're like, replace your user researcher. We're going to have an AI bot conduct interviews with humans. But I think it's probably really important for the designers to kind of remember when the human needs to be in the loop and when to get out and actually talk to real people about the real effects of the products that we're having. Because it's going to be very easy to sit behind a screen and just see the data come through and have it digested and analyzed. So I think it's really not losing sight of who we're designing for and making sure there's enough flesh on flesh.
- [46:39]
G
Contact, as Paolo would say.
- [46:41]
C
Megan, you just mentioned the privacy aspect. And I was recently playing around with Comet browser and you flip it on and it immediately wants to take over your entire Chrome profile. And like, whoa, we haven't even gone on a first date yet and you want, like, access to everything. It just feels like way overboard. But I'm just wondering, like, like, you know, how do we frame that? And then how do we also any of you could take either of these directions. Privacy aspect or thinking about how we educate the next generation of designers, think more ethically.
- [47:10]
G
One part of it is recognizing, like, you who you are. And the audience that we need to protect the most are very, very different. In the age of growing up with technology, most people in their 20s or in their teens will click Accept immediately. They'll accept everything. They'll share their entire. They'll share wild things, every single thing you could imagine. It's online and it's great. It builds an entire identity and profile and presence for them. All the things that we used to be concerned about, like, maybe people won't share this data because they're nervous. No, they will share it and they will share it all the time. And I think sharing by default and assuming people will share by default is a very different mental model than trying to get more people to share, because that's where we've been for the past 10 years. And so if we assume that way, then we're going to design these interfaces extremely differently. We're going to approach. Approach building product very differently. And I think we have to kind of pivot our lens. Like, if it was my responsibility and not to teach someone about what it is to use this product safely, if I, like, took the amount of care I would take to someone who I knew personally right beside me and wanted them to be safe out there with this technology, how would I prevent them from going into dangerous directions? How would I frame it? So that they felt optimistic about it, but they also knew kind of the extent of what was possible here, both positive and negative. So I think it's a little bit of a reframing of the conversation and I also think it's remembering that everyone's online, everything's accessible, and that's kind of the default that we live in today.
- [48:34]
F
First of all, click no Eli on that permissions box. I think Megan's absolutely right. Like most people will just click yes and give a lot of permissions away that they probably shouldn't. And we try not to design for that. We try not to take that permission for granted. One thing we like saying at Microsoft AI is that we are on team human, and if we can't help the human beings who use our product flourish, then we're not doing our job. And so you, everybody in this room, everybody in this audience like you, will pick over the next five or ten years which AI tools and which companies you actually trust with your data. We and every other company is asking for a lot more data than we ever have in these products. Right. Most products don't ask for a ton. Right. Like even Google. Google knows a lot about you, but every search is pretty much fresh for the most part. Right. But these products are so intimate with the way that they actually intersect with your life. The therapy use case is one of them. That it's really important for us to not abuse that trust because as soon as that trust is abused, once it's all over, and even worse than that, it doesn't even have to be abused by Anthropic or by Microsoft, it could be abused by another company that is putting themselves out there as a vanguard AI companion company. Right. And if something goes wrong there, that kind of poisons the well for everybody else. The people that are doing it, right. The people that are trying to be very conservative about what we ask for and when. I think technology has never asked to be this close to you before, and it's asking now. And as a user, you should think very, very long and hard about who you trust when it comes to using these products, because they're going to create incredible value in your life, but they are also going to require incredible amounts of trust.
- [50:16]
B
I want to zoom a little bit further into the future and do just sort of little mental exercise with you. Maybe you've heard of Demis Hassabis notion of radical abundance. That with AI constantly being able to do the tedium of production or creating of special things for humans, everyone in theory has access to the Best education and in theory, great medical care and beautiful objects and so forth. So this idea of radical abundance is really going to scramble our brain and our notion, our relationship to the world so things won't be rare. And rarity is a really important concept in the human experience. It's how we signal to one another to say, I'm a potentially good mate, I could be prosperous. I'm into this thing. Let's be birds of a feather and come together. What's going to be rare in five years? What's our relationship to rarity?
- [51:18]
F
I struggle with that question a lot, maybe even every day, honestly, because I feel like it's already too hard to find what's good out there. And especially with so much content being generated at almost zero cost. Even if something good is like right in front of you, sometimes you miss it because of all the other stuff that has been put between you and what's literally like three, four feet in front of you, you know. So I think it comes down to kind of what we talked about earlier. The human beings who are still willing to put their heart and soul into something. Music has had an interesting effect on me in this regard. That might be weird, maybe you guys agree, maybe you don't, but when I saw my first image generated with Dolly, I was like, this is amazing. This is great. This is unbelievable. When I saw my first short video generated by mid Journey, I was like, oh my God, fantastic, Wonderful. I can't wait to use this. When I heard my first song that was fully generated, I was like, I do not want that. A huge music fan, grew up in Seattle during Heart of Grunge. I just picture the process of writing a song and an album as this like months long slog through your emotions that ends up in this beautiful like piece of vinyl that you can listen to for the rest of your life. Some of that musician's life is transferred into you every time you listen to it. I just don't feel that same way about photographs and video for some reason I don't know. But I do feel like music especially is one of those things that is going to survive. It's always been a hard business to be in, but there's something about the human authorship and performance of music that I think will never be replicated by machines.
- [52:48]
A
I just hope that technology does not overwhelm the rareness of. You were saying, Aaron? Just of doing things together. I recently am trying to learn how to needlepoint. I took a pour over coffee with my husband. Like these are the moments that I'M really, really cherishing. My 20 year old son, plays the guitar all the time and I love that he has that. I was just visiting him at Parents Week at school and there is no matter the age, there's still this desire to come together, be together, talk, sit by a fire, do something together. And I think that that will continue to be rare and special, hopefully.
- [53:26]
G
I think rarity is kind of subjective and so I'd probably reframe it as personal. And I think what will not be lost is your personal connection to a thing and just what evolves is how it was created. And so it could have been created by human, it could have been created by AI. It could have been created by both how you respond to it and your reaction to it. And your connection to it is actually the thing that is most important. Important. I always go back to this painting that me and my husband talk about sometimes of just like the big black dot, we all know about it, just a black dot painted with like a hundred layers of black paint. And I look at it and I was like, that's incredible. Like, what an incredible feat of focus, of precision, of art, of just creating a thing that this artist felt really portrayed their motion right now. My husband looked at it, he's like, it's a dot. It is, it's just a dot. I felt like so moved in that moment and he felt absolutely nothing in that moment moment. And I think that's like actually going to continue. Whether or not AI is behind the creation. You could feel incredibly moved. You could not. But it's all about how you as a human are perceiving that experience. And I think that's the piece that we won't really lose too much. And I think that's where design really has a lot of influence, because as designers, we are trying to kind of move people with the work that we create.
- [54:43]
F
I feel like it's harder to be moved now. I feel like we're so overstimulated that it is harder to be moved in a negative way when something terrible happens. It's hard to be moved in a positive way too, when you see great art, because it's all around us in a way that's never been before. So I do worry that we've been desensitized a little bit by all of this stimuli. And we're only just getting started.
- [55:05]
B
We have a wonderful audience here of amazing people and we want to hear questions from you. So we want to transition here and invite Paola and Mark back up to the stage here. So we can receive some audience questions. Questions.
- [55:19]
F
Hi. Great conversation. Thank you. I just wanted to try to tie the beginning and end together because Paula started out talking about Dun and Raby. One of the things that was really exciting to me as a designer when I was young was the design of ideas and that design objects were carriers of ideas and challenging us through that. And then you just talked about Demis Hassabis idea of radical abundance. And I think there's a lot of fear right now that AI will take away designers jobs and all these different very trade based questions. And I remember as a designer, same questions about how do you start a studio with just a laptop and desktop publishing software. When I was starting out, my point is do we think that we'll be able to generate and have so many more ideas because of this technology? And is there a possibility optimistically for a return to making things about ideas when you enable so many more people to have design ideas and make the things that they want to see? So I guess I'm just curious for the panel's perspective on that.
- [56:17]
D
I think there's a lot of possibility to design ideas. And I was agreeing with Aaron when he was asking what designers should study and then he kind of answered because he was like itching to say philosophy, ethics. I kind of do believe that because as there was also the question about the radical abundance and not to be a downer, but I was thinking what's rare is still justice and it's like for some people it's food. And I'm so sorry, you know, I really don't want to be that person. But I think that if designers could remind themselves of what's also in the rest of the world and could sometimes do the exercise of having ideas that are far fetched but that could maybe give different vectors to their profession, it would be fantastic. So radical abundance I think will free time, I hope for us to have big ideas that hopefully will lead us to a better place altogether.
- [57:16]
H
That was fantastic. Thank you. So I've worked in design my whole life and in my more recent jobs, the thing that I've noticed, I've started to think about design and creativity as a spectrum of ways of thinking. I've worked in Silicon Valley, I've worked in the agency world, I've worked in more sort of narrative stuff and I've also worked in spatial thinking and design. So what I've noticed is that on the ends of this spectrum of creativity are two very different sorts of ways of thinking. One is systematic, which is how do I make Things work. And I think those of you who've worked in the Valley, you've worked with engineers who are really truly creative people. They take something that doesn't exist and it comes out of them. But the way they think about the world is, how do I make this work? And on the other end of the spectrum, more empathetic creative disciplines like storytelling and in some cases industrial design and interface design, where the design is asking not just how to make things work, but also how to make people feel something. What's the sort of human interaction between those things? My concern right now is that the separation of these two ways of thinking have got to such a point, and the power and the resources have been sort of eaten up by the systematic thinking. And so I think there's a lot of people in the Valley right now that are making decisions about how we interact as people that are really good at making things work but have no theory of mind. And the other end of the spectrum, we've got people that know how to make people feel but don't have the sort of practical. More in one way to think about it is the spectrum from inventiveness to expressiveness. And my feeling right now, and this is what I'd like the reaction from the panel is it how do we get more of the empathy into the inventiveness?
- [59:03]
F
I think it's spot on. I think that that reached a low maybe 10 years ago. It's still too low. But I do think, to Mark's point, once kind of Apple showed everybody how important feeling is in products. Companies started to slowly, way too slowly, sort of like wake up to the idea that it's not just about. About how it works. It's not just about that you can turn it on and get your task done. Right? And so this is sometimes referred to as like the consumerization of enterprise. You know, like enterprise software used to just be like, really, really hard to use and soulless and like, you know, now some enterprise software is much more fun to use and much more delightful. And it does make you feel better. You didn't mention AI in particular, but I think what you bring up is super, super important in the age of building these AI products because they're being used by so many people and there are not human eyes on every one of those interactions, right? And so a lot of things are going right and a lot of things are going wrong. And we can't ignore what's going wrong. And the only way around that is to bring the user into the room. It's to bring people in to talk to them about their experiences, to invite people to give us more signals. Like if you thumbs down something on Copilot and you submit your report and allow us to look through your conversation, we'll look through your conversations, see where it went wrong. Fix the model so that it's better in the future. Like that feedback loop of always not assuming success, I think is a really important thing. Like we've used over the last, I would say 30 years, as we built for the Internet, we've used these really, really crude ways of measuring success. Right at the beginning of our careers, it was just like server hits. How many hits did you get right? And that was success. And then it became like engagement, you know, and retention. And like now we have much more sophisticated ways of measuring if we did a good job or not. Especially if you're using an AI companion and like Copilot, like ChatGPT, like Claude. The fact that you were on it for an hour doesn't mean it was successful, nor was the fact that you were on it for only one turn mean that it was successful. Sometimes a successful session lasts 10 seconds, sometimes it lasts an hour. The only way that we can know if we were actually successful in helping you through your life was to know if we accomplished that actual task for you. And that requires like really, really deep inspection into what's going on. So that work is going on right now. We need to get better at it it. But it's a recognized opportunity for sure.
- [61:20]
G
Thank you so much. I have a question about this idea of time that comes across in AI. Everything feels like it's been very much optimized right now and that timelines have really kind of like condensed and collapsed to like a day, a week.
- [61:37]
A
And in design, the process is so.
- [61:41]
G
Essential to the outcome and iterating and being really present in that process. And I really wonder from this panel here, how are you justifying process and time to your stakeholders right now when everything is kind of assumed to be so hyper optimized and collapsed in time? It's hard, I think, is the first point. I agree. The creative process, especially one that is intended to be expressive of how you feel, how you want other people to feel. It's not as clinical and easy to define. And I think that's actually why AI has a harder time producing that kind of art, because it's not a set of steps that you can repeat. And so I think the general approach I've been taking, we'll see if it's successful because it changes over time is that everyone who's in this practice and trying to build is creative in their own way. Like, they are building towards a creative process for something that they want to express to other people. It just so happens that on the more inventive side of things, love that framework, that it's a little bit faster and maybe a little bit more linear. And you never really want to prevent someone from being able to express their creativity as well. And so the process I generally take is like, yeah, let's build it. This sounds great. Let's do it. It might take me another month or two to be able to package this or, like to present it or to frame it in the right mental model that I would imagine it that I would want to see it. But let's see where it goes. Let's take this as far as possible. I think in the age of kind of rapid iteration, you don't really want to prevent someone from being able to express themselves that way or to create. The only caveat I would block on is for safety. That's a big one. Where if you see something and you're like, hey, we don't know the right packaging for this and it feels unsafe, or it could lead us to risky territory. That's where I think it's really important to actually take a stand. But in the, like, blurred lines of how expressive you want to be, I think you have a lot more wiggle room. And I think we all need to get a little bit more comfortable releasing things, a little bit more unpolished, I would say, just to see how kind of they're received. And that tight iteration loop is so fast now that you might even get an idea from external to you, and that will inspire you. So it's actually a little bit easier in that sense.
- [63:53]
A
Yeah. I'm thinking of two conversations I recently had with founders that got their products to market very, very quickly and saw very little traction. They thought they were solving a problem. They designed it very quickly, got it out there, and they're coming to me, and they're like, I'm ready to invest in design. Like, I will pay anything for the right designer. I know this is going to take three or four months. It's not going to take three or four weeks. So I'd like to think at the end of the day that switching costs are low and there'll be so much software out there that hopefully the good ones will stick and the junk will get kind of washed out a bit. But I'm definitely seeing, at least on the early Stage front that people do. They're very excited about getting something out very quickly, and they really realize that it doesn't work as well as it should, and they're asking for design to help, which is good.
- [64:42]
C
We just had on Jay park, who leads design for Ford's EV division, Interfaces, and he was talking about how, as designers, creative folks, we face the blank page a lot, and we struggle with that. And sometimes we would walk away and let our subconscious work on our problems. But now we can have AI spit out solutions or writing or music for us. So what might we, as creative folks, be missing when we remove that friction?
- [65:06]
F
We've just turned it into editing, really is what it is. Right. We become editors, which I think is fine. Right. I think what Jay is pointing to is, like, you don't have to create things from scratch anymore. You can generate 50 different concepts really quick to talk about in an hour, we, with your colleagues, and then decide kind of which two or three or four look more promising. So I think that's just as exciting of a part of the process. We've always been editors. You know, we've always wanted to be editors. We've always raised our hand saying, we need more editing in this product, right? Like, we need to remove features. So, you know, you asked earlier, kind of like, what are some of the skills that designers, like, should be building, you know, moving forward? Like, editing is definitely one of them.
- [65:44]
G
I would actually posit that we actually have a blank page, so. But the blank page is actually bigger than ever. I was working with an engineer the other day on, like, a new product that we're exploring, and I was like, oh, like, how do you think it should work? He's like, no, Megan, how would you want it to work? How would you imagine it should work? Like, express to me, like, if this problem we're trying to solve, like, you just. And I will build it. I know I can build it. In your mind, how does this feel like? And it just made me realize, like, oh, wow. With this new technological invention where you can spin an idea so fast, your capability of expression is actually so much broader than it used to be. And the ability to power it is so much bigger that I almost feel like it's almost overwhelming how much you can do now. And it's almost a crutch that we're leaning on our existing patterns. And I do it all the time. We have so much more potential on how to express ourselves now. So I would actually say if it ever feels like you're leaning too heavily on Editing, try and totally remove yourself from that space and imagine, like, if there was no limitation on this thing, how would I want it to behave? And very likely it will be possible now, which is just such a great time to be alive.
- [66:47]
F
Totally. Like, who in this room has had an engineer tell them, no, Everybody, Right? If you work in an environment for too long where people are telling you like, yeah, we can't build that, or yeah, we don't have time to build that. I don't know, I don't know how to build that, or I just don't even want to build that, you stop asking. Those muscles atrophy, right? And you forget what it's like to be this early career designer who thinks they can do anything, you know, And I think we do need to get back to that a little bit and through the magic of this technology, I think what you're saying is we can.
- [67:14]
E
Thank you so much. It's a great conversation. I just wanted to follow up on the question of rareness. It was really hitting my head when I started my career mid-90s. I was working for an amazing firm, and by their own description, they used to say, oh, it's really important that you don't look at other firms works. We don't want you to be copying other people. We don't want you to look derivative of other people. Now fast forward. And this is something of a coincidence, today by circumstance, deck from a competitor came to me a deliverable that they had made to a client almost at the end of a project. And one of their designs was literally a video of a design my firm had created. That's crazy that in the whatever, 30 years I've been working, that's now acceptable practice. Just literally take a video of someone else's project and be like, oh, this is what we're going to develop for you. And it makes me think about this question of rarity and the tools of AI, which are literally composites of all these other ideas put together. And are we making tools? And how can we circumvent the allure of just having the tools spit back to us existing ideas? Which is of course what AI is doing. Right? Because that's what AI is made of. It's compositing lots of other ideas. So are there either practices or mindsets or ways that we can build these tools so that we aren't just passive, responsive editors to existing ideas, but rather being forced or encouraged to generate new ideas? One that's completely a technological stack issue. Right. I would say that as a journalist, right. That's 100% how LLMs and other technologies are designed, that they are finding correlations and auto completing ideas based upon previous ideas and probabilities. So that's why we keep getting Jurassic Park 2, 3, 4 out of ChatGPT when we ask questions. But Jake, what your question makes you think of is another thing that hasn't come up today in this conversation, which is is our insecurity about what happens when it does. What happens when these tools actually do everything we believe they can do when we solve all the problems. This can also be packaged as Will AI ever create a better song than I can? Right. Will AI ever write a better article than I can? And I think we absolutely have human bias. I think that the answer is absolutely yes. Eventually, right? Like that's the end state of all of this. And then what is meaning within that world? And I think the meaning within that world is the act of creation again, and just that we enjoy doing it. And that's sort of the ultimate payoff. And my just last thought about this is we are just so incredibly biased about human creativity even within our own world. Look at how we compare humans to animals, as if we are the only cognitive species on earth, when in fact, like plants are cognitive. I feel like we can kind of get into traps sometimes where we distance ourselves from these AI tools or that we believe that they won't, won't potentially do things better and meaning is actually in us doing it in the first place.
- [70:05]
B
Well, first of all, I want to say, Megan, Kate, Mike, Mark, Paola, thank you so much for being here. Let's give him a round of applause. 30 years of design have brought us to a place of uncertainty, where culture shifts beneath our feet, where work reinvents itself daily, where the very meaning of the human experience hangs in the balance. The ground is moving and it terrifies us, and it probably should.
- [70:38]
C
But in this moment of profound uncertainty lies the opportunity to shape what comes next. Design's never been about making things beautiful. It's always been about making things right and making experiences that connect us, extend our capabilities and bring a human touch. Technology.
- [70:54]
B
The future isn't happening to us. We are happening to the future. Let's ensure that when the next 30 years of design history is written, it tells the story of how we chose wisdom over convenience, connection over efficiency, humanity over everything else.
- [71:11]
C
Thank you again to our guests, Paola, Mark, Kate, Megan and Mike. And thank you to Word & Co. For bringing us together for making design better these past 30 years and for helping to establish design leaders who will help us thrive in this next era of design. That's all of you.
- [71:26]
B
Thank you to Automatic for hosting us. The conversation continues over@designbetter.com where you can subscribe, become a premium member to get access to our library of books, our toolkit, and more. Thank you one and all. Until next time. This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.