← DesignThinkers Podcast
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- [00:01]
Narrator
From the association of Registered Graphic Designers. This is the Design Thinkers podcast. Design Thinkers is Canada's largest graphic design conference. Originally launched to mark the conference's 25th anniversary, the podcast now reaches a global audience of designers and creatives. Join our host and RTT president Nicola Hamilton as she connects with Design Thinkers speakers to explore the work and ideas shaping today's design industry.
- [00:29]
Nicola Hamilton
This week on the Design Thinkers podcast, I'm joined by Peter Smart, Chief Experience Officer and Managing Partner at Fantasy. Based in the Bay Area, Fantasy is a creative partner behind some of the world's most widely used digital products, working with companies like Disney, Nike, Spotify, Netflix, Meta and Google. In this conversation, Peter shares how he's thinking about the next shift in digital product design, one where fixed interfaces and screen based experiences may no longer be the default. We talk about what happens when products become more dynamic and more personalized, how AI is reshaping the relationships between brands and users, and why designers may need to redefine their own value. We also get into some of the trends Peter is seeing and why he thinks the most important thing designers can do right now is zoom out to look beyond the tools, understand where value is shifting, and rethink what they're really designing. This episode is for anyone trying to make sense of where design is heading. Maybe you're early in your career or leading a team or simply wondering how to stay relevant in a moment that seems to be changing every single day.
- [01:40]
I am basing this a little bit on your talk description, but this, I'm assuming this idea of you putting forward an idea about the way we've been designing digital products around screens and sort of fixed interfaces and that those ideas might not hold up much longer. And I think that a lot of designers that's both like really exciting but also maybe kind of unsettling.
- [02:04]
Peter Smart
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no, that's cool. I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah. Generative interfaces next next paradigm for digital products. Honestly, I feel like the talk going through my mind for this audience is maybe on the theme of zoom out. And it's something that I think a lot of folks when you're filling your day to day with like LinkedIn and X and feeds of how folks are starting to use Claude and these new tools and these new software development lifecycles and it changes every single day. It's so disconcerting. Like even for someone like me who's trying to stay ahead of it, like what does ahead actually mean? And you feel like you've understood a concept but then the Next day, like there's a brand new protocol or a brand new way of actually being able to, you know, to design. And I think a lot of actually how I spend a lot of my time with, with leaders is helping them to zoom out and think about the locus of their value and what it is that they are actually doing. And I think for designers, I mean, speaking for myself, like the zoom out I think is like the most comforting and rewarding thing that we can do for ourselves because what we do is just always has been, always will be so valuable. How we define ourselves and how we too often ascribe our value to what it is that we produce, like wireframes that can make things feel way more disconcerting than they actually are. But when you take a step back and realize actually what we do as designers is bring creative problem solving to really challenging problems and imbue the things that we touch with more value, that is never going to stop being valuable. It's just about learning the new ways to do that. So yeah, I don't know if like I came up through design thinking, like I. The fact of a conference called the Design Thinking Conference is just so fantastic because these are fundamental skill sets and the fundamental parts of design which don't change. How can we return back to that Is some of the stuff that I'm noodling on and not trying to get too into the weeds. I think for folks on even things like generative interfaces, of course we could go there and that could be really exciting, we could show that. But it will also change and it's about helping folks understand that that's okay. Change is the only constant.
- [04:40]
Nicola Hamilton
There's two things that sort of popped into my brain as you were saying that and the first is that idea that it's going to be valuable and that those fundamental skills of design thinking and creative strategy, like those things are not going anywhere. And I, I think a lot about, I'm a print designer, I'm a magazine designer sort of through and through. And I think one of the things that's been so fascinating is the conversations with other designers who are specializing in more digital products and are so quick to disregard my experience and my skill level. And I, I do a lot of digital work too because the, the actual fundamentals of editorial design are the same fundamentals as ux. User experience and reader experience are the same tool set, they're just different languages. And so I do sometimes think about how quickly we forget about those zoom out skills, like those things that we all share the Ways of thinking, the ability to sort of integrate different perspectives.
- [05:39]
Peter Smart
No, I love it. You're designing for a human being. It's on both sides of the coin. Like, you're designing for a human being who has to navigate a thing and extract value out of it. And by virtue of you putting your creativity into the thing, the artifact, be it a magazine or be it something on digital display, or be it something entirely invisible, but it's just a design system. You have ascribed to it more value than it had before you did that. And so, like, the people who are really talented at this thing called design bring with them all of that value and they emboss it, like, onto that thing and it becomes better for the user using it and it becomes better for the business that you're serving. And so, no, that is completely transferable across every single domain. It's why, really, we're just the same as architects and furniture designers and interior designers. It's all design, like, it's all the same. And, you know, folks can get pretty territorial unnecessarily.
- [06:35]
Nicola Hamilton
Well, and I say that to students too, right. I think like designers who are sort of entering this field at the early stages of their careers, I think they're probably the folks who are the most stressed about what that means because they're sort of thinking about this need to specialize so quickly, this need to sort of pick a lane and stay in that lane, which can be totally helpful for them. But also those lanes are going to change again in another five, 10 years. Like, UI UX wasn't a job title a decade ago.
- [07:02]
Peter Smart
Totally. And it's so funny. And I can so believe that folks who are stepping into this, in this moment are just the most concerned. They should actually be the most confident because they've not just spent 20 years of their career becoming dogmatic about the way things should or should not be done like it is. It's not to do with actually age. It's flexibility. It's your ability to. Again, going back to great design thinking, like, ask yourself first principal questions and be okay with coming up with different answers today than you did like five years ago. And folks who are just entering in can just look at everything with a blank canvas and ask themselves the same design thinking first principle questions about how am I going to solve this problem? What's the right way to gather the best insight? And the answer not be predetermined in their head and biased towards a certain way of doing it. It is a really wonderful position to actually be in. And there's a company called Cloudflare and they're hiring. And I just met that team. And just a great metaphor, I think, for why folks who are entering the industry should have a lot of confidence. They're aggressively hiring interns. Why? Because these are the folks who have the curiosity of mind. They're able to ask, what do we call them, like, dangerously simple questions on why we do it this way and is there a better way? And maybe I can find it. And then people who are willing to experiment and try and fail and not be too perturbed by that, the stakes perhaps are much lower capacity to do it. There's an excitement for it. It's there aggressively. I think it's 1,111 interns that they're trying to bring into the company really, really quickly. I think a lot of companies, there's a strange dialogue happening around kind of more junior and entry level positions, specifically on this topic. And the companies that are smart are the ones who realize that we need to aggressively bring folks in. And the companies who are more kind of defensive and who aren't going to be able to necessarily adapt with the times are the ones who are consolidating and trying to work out how we deliver the same thing, but just with less people. The wrong equation. You need to actually figure out, no, what we deliver is actually going. It's already changed. The question is, are you keeping up? And if you're just constricting what you're already doing, delivering the same old thing just more efficiently or cheaper or whatever, sure, your overhead for a little bit is going to contract, but the market and what it values is already moving away from that thing. You need to bring in the fresh blood. You need to bring in the new ideas, the creativity, the talent, the ingenuity to conceive of the new. And yes, it may come from the organization that you already have, but hey, wouldn't it be amazing to fertilize it with the brilliant minds of this next generation? And I guarantee you mean, I've seen this lived out so many times, like in fantasy. We've gone through waves of hiring interns when we've had the capacity to do so. We're, we're a boutique shop, so not every year can we do it, but like, when we do do it, the amount we learn from folks who are kind of coming in and you know, the way that they think is just so inspiring. I would say my encouragement. Yeah, back to that, like, zoom out concept. It's like you are probably actually some of the most Valuable people on the planet right now. The question is, do you know it? And can you position yourselves to speak to the problems that these companies have and market yourselves accordingly to that need? But now I would have high hopes as someone who's entering into the workforce right now.
- [10:51]
Nicola Hamilton
Are there things, are there certain skills, as you're talking to companies or leaders, are there certain skills that they seem to be looking for? I know that's a big question.
- [10:59]
Peter Smart
No. And it's all kinds of, like, very practical things, like, they're looking for, like, more than anything. So if I just think about some of the recent conversations I've had with like, CDOs, who, who are these kind of forward leading, like, folks I would think about, like Katie, Katie Dill at Stripe, for example, and there are many others kind of in this, in this category. They're looking for people who are going to look at problems just differently. And so I think it is a. If we think about design thinking for a second and we go back to the fundamentals of what we're trying to do, we're trying to come up with novel human insight that allows us to solve a problem better for people. And so the first question you're asking yourself is, well, how are we understanding what people really need? How are we getting that information? Here's the way we typically do it. Is there a better way of doing it? And then people who can go from curiosity, an inquisition to thesis or hypothesis or testing or experimentation and trialing and coming back with answers and saying, actually there is maybe a better way of doing this. Here's three things that I've tried, none of which are perfect, but I think there's something potentially in like, B here which could be further built upon that is worth its weight in gold. It's like looking at what is and questioning, like, what if? And I think that that is just so, so powerful. Then very tactically, you might hear about folks who are talking about, like, agents and agentic workflows. And I think there's a real, there will continue to be a real premium placed on folks who are systems and integrative thinkers if we were to kind of shift the topic more towards generative interfaces. Contextualizing this just for a second, like, the mechanization of design has meant that we've kind of reduced everything down to, like, TEMPL systems. And I mean, I loved the days of print. I came up through print and I just was a time in life where you had a blank page in front of you. There was never going to be that same page again. And in the early days of digital like that spirit was true. But what we've done really over the last like decade and a half is, is mechanized design down to a series of kind of very repeatable templates and components and modules. And there are very good reasons for that. But then when we think about what's happening with AI is you've built effectively a PAT system and that pattern system is learnable and reproducible. So great. That's the current world. What we're moving to though is this new paradigm of agentic centric experiences. Number one, not all of them will be visual, lots of them will be ambient and things which we're experiencing through audio in our ears. But when things are visual, our expectation as human beings is they're going to be deeply personal to us. And so one metaphor kind of when we go back to the skill set is if we imagine I'm interacting with a Patagonia, like the future of the Patagonia, let's call it a website, how it manifests for me is going to be so different, Nicola to how it manifests for you and what you care about. What I care about. That isn't a templating problem anymore. That isn't a like who can design the perfect like rounding of the corner of the button like problem anymore. That's a systems problem. That's a how we, how do we translate what we know about Nicola, what she's willing to share into a deeply human experience specifically for her and make a scalable system where one of a million people could show up and have that exact same like wow, I feel seen and served and supported in this interaction and to deliver on that is going to require brand new forms of systems thinking and I think probably just like real appreciation and adjacent depth of knowledge in what does it actually take to deliver on these things? What are the component parts? So the model that folks often talk about, it's a classic IDEO model. It's just like the T shape. I would actually say like you need more stems on your T's. Like you need to probably have one area you feel like you're fairly good in. But if you are going broad then developing a hands on affinity for what does it mean to translate? I don't know. How does MCP work for example? What does it mean to have a handshake that's secure between MCP and A2UI even? Your thing is I am really good at coming up with experiences that visually are going to just impress upon people this sense of brand fantastic, like go deep, like lean into your superpowers. But knowing that the way that that visual system is going to show up is based on things like A2UI and these other technologies. That's one example. I think you have to go deep and get hands on in a whole bunch of other areas which are now dependent on what it is that you do.
- [16:16]
Nicola Hamilton
Well, there's a couple of things that have sort of like in this sort of generative UI conversation that's happening, there's a couple of ideas that sort of keep bubbling to the surface and one of them is how are we going to handle customer service or help support tech support in some way when there's no way to sort of share the system or the version of that platform that anyone's seeing. Have you thought about that at all?
- [16:39]
Peter Smart
Yeah, no. That's great. So, yes, and I have two. Two things. One, just going to zoom out. I think there's going to be way more people in customer service than less people.
- [16:51]
Nicola Hamilton
Yeah. Can we do it better though? Like can we figure out how to do that better than we've been doing it?
- [16:55]
Peter Smart
Totally. I think volume of people who are looking for human support increases not because things are less easy to use, but because we place a pre. We will place an increasing premium on things that feel trustworthy, human. Right. So that's just number one. Also number two, just like backing that up like just throughout history we always do this. We say the accountants, they're all gone. Like spreadsheets have come along. There was an accounting boom directly after spreadsheets were kind of first launched with VisiCalc. But if we think about the customer service problem of deeply personal experiences and how do you solve it? I do think it's just an extension of CRM and the way that folks understand the interactions that you've had so far. And there's going to be a lot of agent to agent support taking place which I think will be the front line predominantly for, let's call it a percentage of the needs that I might inherently have and support that I might need in a moment where my agent who's traveling with me can be interceding on my behalf to work with the Agentix system, which is ultimately delivering it to me and they can figure it out where things do need to be elevated. I think there's going to be even more sophisticated ways of being able to explain here's the experience that Peter or Nicola have had and here's the issue that we're running into and here's what we're trying to solve. And here's what we've tried in a more kind of automated way. We've not been able to kind of crack the nut. Like it's a very niche problem. We need human intervention here. I think we're going to see really weird situations. I say weird, it feels weird to us right now. But like, imagine if you and I were on this, on this call, but in this like podcast recording. Peter's personal agent was also here and your personal agent was also here. Like, and this is four way conversation taking place. We're going to see a lot of that. Like there's going to be a lot of that. Something for, you know, new grads kind of going into the workforces. The leaders that I work with. A question they're asking themselves are, am I hiring Nicola or am I hiring Nicola and her agent? And is it just one agent? Or does Nicola actually have a team that comes and who am I interviewing in the interview process? Am I literally sitting down and interviewing her agent or am I interviewing just them? Right. Like, it's a really fascinating but very real set of questions that are being asked. And so, yeah, customer support and how ingrained our agents are going to be into our lives is very real.
- [19:29]
Nicola Hamilton
Okay, so that, like that, that very real set of questions that sort of zoom out idea, this idea of the audience can't see my face, but as my eyes were getting wider about this idea of you having a team of agents that are also getting hired, then I start thinking about like so much of what we're experienced right now is, is different technology, it's advancements in technology, it's new innovation, but the pendulum just like keeps swinging from one direction to the other. So this idea that technology took over the field of customer service for so long and now we're going to swing back to the other direction where we're, you know, have this hypothesis that we're going to need a lot more customer service agents in the future. This idea of having like a team of agents, it brings me to the question of do we need to be producing stuff at that capacity? Like this is sort of ultimately my tech question often in is just because we can doesn't mean we should. I think about the pace at which I've been asked to operate in the last 10 years being so much more, so much faster, so much more output. And we're sort of thinking about having our personal agents be able to increase that output in some way or take some of that off of us. But does that take us off of us, do we all just become middle managers in some capacity?
- [20:42]
Peter Smart
Yeah, no, I'm with you. I mean, it just. What is technology? Technology is about creating a tool which allows us to get faster, to more value beyond what our human body is capable of. Like, that is what technology actually is. Through human history, we've just made better and better tools that enable us to do, I think, what you're describing, produce more value and produce it faster. And so we're feeling the ontological shock right now in this moment of, wait, how much more value and how much faster? But the trend is the same. But it's just, hey, the, at least the expectations of what this technology can potentially do for us are just so daunting. Wait a second. Can't we all slow down for a second? And I think rates of change in general are going to send like, even more shocks through society as this proliferates. Like, even more. Like it's not just about productivity. It's going to be about our legal systems, our judiciaries, our education systems. Like, there's just so much that society isn't ready for where there's going to be a lot of. But wait, can we slow down? And I think that's a perfectly, not just perfectly right question. It is a very important question to be asking just in general, the idea of can we produce more and can we do it faster? Hey, I have a comfort with the level of my production like today. Is that not enough? I think that's a really, really difficult question economically. I was listening to Matthew Prince, who is the CEO of Cloudflare. He did a fantastic talk at south by Southwest, I think it was last week. And you know, he's got very strong opinions about, like, where's the world going and what, what does it mean for employment and what's going to happen, like, in the market, like, over the next few years. If you just, if you just think about it from a CFO's perspective. I think it's a very daunting perspective where you're talking about the difference between folks who, to use his analogy manually, are screwing in screws and folks who have figured out how to hold an electric screwdriver. If someone is able to screw in 100 screws in the same time that it takes one person to screw in one, hey, you could be the most artisanal screw in of screws to ever have existed. The flair and the finesse of the way that you do it could just be French kiss like perfection. But I cannot justify paying you the same as someone who can screw in 100 screws in that same time. And I think his point was like, look, it's not that your argument is wrong, it's just purely economic. And I think that if we kind of go back to the premise that technology has come along always to get to greater value faster, I don't think there's any kind of reversing that. I think it's just AI is we're on this bell curve of we've gone from manual to kind of the mechanized mechanization. We've then kind of gone to the information era and now we're going into this like, you know, intelligence era. The rate of change and the amount of impact and the speed with which things are expected is just, it's more of a, I wouldn't go as far as to say like exponential, but maybe exponential is a way of thinking about that, like rate of change. So yeah, no, that's a challenging one, but it's, it's real.
- [23:59]
Nicola Hamilton
What other questions questions are you thinking about? Like when you're sort of doing this zoom out. What are the other questions that are bouncing around in your brain right now? Let's pause here so I can tell you about our next Design Thinkers event. It's happening May 26th and 27th, 2026. Join us in Vancouver or watch live online at this year's event. We'll hear from a star studded lineup of speakers including designer and renowned visual culture critic Elizabeth Good, speed sports branding expert and creative director at major soccer league Roman King, studio founder and typography expert Arian Spanier, and many more. With a mixture of presentations, hands on workshops, intimate roundtables and lots of opportunities to connect with 700 other designers, creative directors, art directors, managers, educators and students. Design Thinkers Vancouver is a journey into the creative process and a site celebration of strategic design thinking. This year's theme is out of Office, so join us as we log off and celebrate unconstrained creativity unburdened by pressure and performance. Tickets for Design Thinkers in Vancouver in Person and live streaming online are on sale now@designthinkers.com
- [25:12]
Peter Smart
so I spent a lot of time with leaders helping them think about their business and where it's all going. A lot of industries are going to and are already facing existential crisis like if we just think about Hollywood. As one example of this, I was at a dinner with the founder of a Production Company, Storytelling Company, 10 people in Indonesia who've just sold their first television series to Netflix. 10 people in Indonesia who have just sold A television series to Netflix, the amount of people cost, research and development, piloting, and you're talking about tens of thousands of people like to would have a hand in the production of a new television series in traditional kind of studio, in the traditional studio model. Now the question is one, it's not the doing which matters most, it's what you're imbuing into it as a, in this case, like a designer, like in the quality of the storytelling, I think is something which is not easily reproducible. But again, purely from an economic standpoint, one can be produced for hundreds, a thousandth, even more, less fractionally. So as one example, across so many different industries, leaders are being faced with this question, if what I do today can now be done by a greater number of competitors who can move more nimbly with more coherence. They're not having to deal with the baggage of a 10,000 person, 100,000 person, like, you know, organization, number one, where are we going? Like, what is the. Where's the new locus of value?
- [26:58]
Nicola Hamilton
Yeah, how do I reinvest in something
- [27:00]
Peter Smart
exactly that, like, and then number two, how do I actually move my organization rapidly, like towards that new future and develop coherence? And so a lot of what I spend my time on is coherence, clarity, vision, strategy, piloting it, building thesis, which you can then go and confirm before you bet the family farm, and then rapidly accelerating like towards that. There's an old African proverb that talks about if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And in an organization you need both. But there's a time for alone, there's a time for together. And I think it's about actually the middle ground between, hey, when you're kind of conceiving of new vision and kind of developing clarity about where you want to go, how are you then cascading that through your organization so that you can advance really, really quickly. There's actually a real problem sometimes with leaders who try to move their entire tanker of an organization. It's not a very efficient way to do it. So on the theme of zoom out, I would say we all just need to zoom out in this moment. Zoom out when we think about what it is that we're doing. Zoom out to understand where is the new value going to be? Not where is it now, where is it going to be and how am I positioning myself for that value. Zooming out and saying, what is the higher order of value? Again, thinking less about final deliverables and more about the Type of problems and challenges that you can solve and how transferable those are, what skill sets do you need for that? And then I would say just to zoom out, to ask ourselves, like, what is the human future that we ultimately want for ourselves and are we designing it? And I think it's so easy to get caught up in the technology and what it's capable of. But the question is, like, what do we want from it? And I think that's really important zoom out question to be asking ourselves.
- [29:00]
Nicola Hamilton
Well, I think that's probably like the underlying anxiety for a lot of people as they're thinking about this is, you know, what does a world that is more generative, that is sort of building things custom for me, which means using my data, which means like sort of all of those questions. But I think some of it is that constant innovation question of like, you know, should we actually do this? Just because we can doesn't mean that we should actually see this through to completion. And I think a lot of designers also understand that these, these tools, like certain, certain applications of these tools will become obsolete in a few years. They're fun and interesting now, and we're going to find out that they're not actually that useful or that we can't generate enough revenue on them, or that they're, you know, flattening a lot of forests unnecessarily.
- [29:47]
Peter Smart
Totally. As a human being of one, what I observe in this moment is that there are just millions of human beings of one who are all trying to figure this out. And the situation is more malleable than perhaps we realize it is. I think, about what's happening in the US when it comes to government contracts, for example, and the way that those conversations have gone, I have no judgment ultimately for the decisions that the US government are going to make and who they're going to choose to partner with. But what's very clear is that it's not a foregone conclusion that AI companies are going to go a certain way and that the culture of companies actually determines a lot of their trajectories. And every individual who is part of a culture has the opportunity and is already inherently shaping it by their presence. The question is, are we going to lean into the amount that we can actually influence the culture that we are already part of? I think that we are being forced to reckon with a lot of, like, very existential questions which feel too big for us to like, fully answer. I think a lot about, again, zooming out, like, just what can we learn from hindsight? Like, what Learn from, you know, right now there's stuff going through the courts here in the us in with, with Facebook and meta and just social media in general, like in zooming out, you know, you're talking about like well intentioned people who genuinely want to do a good job and put like positive things out into the world. Like by and large is that true of everybody? Maybe not. But like often the negative consequences that we see from technology aren't because there's maniacal people behind the scenes. It's people who have good intentions but don't have the foresight or indeed the lessons from history to look back and then willingness or time or space or leadership to make space for exactly the questions that you're asking. So I think that also just again just speaks to the culture of the organizations that you're part of. But one of the things that you can do as a designer really effectively because you're a really good typically, again not to over generalize, but what are some of the common skill sets of, of designers? They tend to be good pattern spotters, they tend to be good, you know, receivers of signal. They tend to like understand human beings and kind of strip away surface and kind of want to go a little bit deeper. And if you can in your own context, be someone who can actually again help others to zoom out and point back to, well look, we can continue to go down this path the same speed, but we should be aware of the fact that if we go down this path, like these are the things that we might be risking little signposts along the way that we might need to look out for to let us know we're going way rather than the right way. The voice of the human centered individuals in companies right now is just like so important, so and so and so, so valuable for I don't know to what extent like I believe this fully, but the optimistic part of me that wants to believe this for these systems, if we're in a flourishing like marketplace where there's lots of competition for the AI systems that we're going to use, the ones that ultimately make your life better and actually serve you in theory should win. Now the extent to which I fully believe that like I don't know, as I look back with hindsight, you know, algorithmic feeds are a form of AI and like how aligned are they to like our human ideals?
- [33:25]
Nicola Hamilton
Like I don't know well anymore. I think that the evolution of those over time, time was driven by things that maybe changed as those businesses got bigger and their aspirations shifted spot on.
- [33:39]
Peter Smart
And what they're measuring and how they're incentivized and the way their economics work. Like, it's, yes, absolutely the way to think about it. But if we were just to think about the context of like a personal, a personal agent, let's imagine there's like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, like 10, hopefully, hopefully like 10 competing companies that are out there that are all trying to imagine. There's lots of different contexts by which you might have different like agents as well. But let's imagine there's this one that you're kind of keeping around like with you and it's got the context of your life. That's an incredibly privileged and important position to be taking up like in someone's life when you're talking about a level of like, awareness of context, which again to us is probably going to feel quite uncomfortable. And so who are we trusting? What are they doing with our data? And then when and if a company ever breaches the social contract that human beings are going to have with those companies, there's going to be like very, very quick, I would say like disenfranchisement, like with those companies and swaps to new. That's true. If you can keep like 10 or 11 of these companies in the marketplace competing. If we end up with like one or two, we might be in more trouble. Let's see.
- [34:51]
Nicola Hamilton
Yeah, well, that's the history repeating itself.
- [34:53]
Right.
- [34:53]
Like, I do think social media becomes that thing to think about. If we had other places to go that had critical mass, I think that would sort of change, change the way we use those platforms. Are there like concrete things? So I'm thinking about. There are likely so many listeners who are working in ad agencies, small studios, big in house creative teams, and a lot of organizations are asking their teams to, to start using onboarding AI in as many ways as possible right now in a variety of different parts of. Are there like concrete takeaways from, from even, you know, talking to leaders in this space and thinking about these things? Are there concrete things people can either be doing, pushing back against, playing around with small activities they can take on if they aren't necessarily empowered to ask the CEO tricky questions?
- [35:41]
Peter Smart
Sure. So I could answer this, like, very practically in the course of like people's like day jobs, I would say probably in 95% of companies you're going to be asked the question of like, you know, what are you doing? So if we just actually start with the most important thing, there is a real deference of leadership in this moment where Actually, leaders aren't creating the right coherence for their teams to be able to answer that question. Number one, that's actually the most important thing that you should look for when you're joining a company isn't if you're being asked the question, like, what are you doing with AI? And it's like this blanket question. You're probably in an environment that has not really got a picture of, like, where it's going and the direction by which you should be experimenting and the type of problems that you're trying to solve for and what you're ultimately looking for through your experimentation and how you're measuring the, the value of your experiment. So the first thing is actually, like, when a company has coherence, it can create the frame for the team to say, hey, we're looking for you to start experimenting with AI to deliver a specific new form of value or to create a new form of experience. We believe it's possible, we just don't know how yet. Or to accelerate a particular process. Things become way more targeted because they can describe the macro narrative at the, like, individual level. As a leader, the thing that I try to instill in people that I meet is that this is for you. It's not for me. That as much as an organization is itself having to try and reinvent, like, where is the value going? Every human has to do the same thing. We kind of go back to the manual versus the electric screwdriver. The recasting of what it is that I am actually producing in the world is very, very real. The thing that you may have specialized yourself, and I think about wireframes all the time, the thing that you might have specialized yourself in and defined yourself in producing, that thing is going to go away. And so when folks talked to any individual about, like, hey, what are you doing? It's sure, like, very selfishly, like, ask yourself that question, like, what am I doing to understand where this new value is moving and readying myself for that new world. Do not sit back. Do not put your head in the sand. Like, do not see it as an organizational responsibility to train you. There are no experts. There are folks who can create better frames for your experimentation. There are folks who can carve out dedicated time for your experimentation, but there are no answers yet. It's not their responsibility to give you answers. I would say it in an encouraging way. It is your personal opportunity to actually make yourself incredibly, like, well suited to this new world that we're stepping into. But only you can do that for yourself. This Isn't like in the way that you want to. Like this isn't going to be a company funded like training program where we sit down for nine seminars and like it's spoon fed to you and like, here's the answers and you've been like trained to this new way. We're in the gap generation. When my kids are three kids, hopefully when they come up, some of the gap that we're experiencing now, like some of this might have been normalized again. There might be a period maybe of like kind of plateauing and new standards that they can be kind of trained into. But these standards are being written in like real time. And so don't look to others to come with the finished solution. You're going to have to lean in yourself. The last thing I would say is when, like specifically when. And again, like it's, it's important that you do it. Especially as about, like, how are you carving out the time to do it at a macro level inside a company? Carving out a team who are dedicated to thinking about some of these things. Super smart, really like a good thing to do. You can be part of that team. Like, oh my goodness, like it's mutually beneficial, right? If you're not part of that team and you find yourself in your day job having to produce what you typically produce and they're saying, but also like, how are you learning? That's a common friction. I would say, like we would experience that at Fantasy. It's, you know, we have our day job going to run this train, but at the same time we have to ready the tracks like over here, like, how are we going to do it? So we're really experimenting with like ways in which we can bring it into our everyday. We've done company retreat, so we've made it the focus. We've done, you know, hackathons like inside the company and just tried like other different ways of carving out that time. I would say it reminds me and I hope that others can like adopt some of this. When I was first learning design, it wasn't my job, it was my joy. Like it was something that I loved and I found the specific parts of design that I loved. It wasn't everything but like what you actually enjoy is the type of thing that like, it doesn't matter if it's like I remember the days of like it's 9pm on a Thursday and what am I doing? Like I'm trying to figure out like Adobe Fireworks and like how to like, you know, export out of that into something called Dreamweaver and two platforms that
- [41:05]
Nicola Hamilton
have fully disappeared totally.
- [41:06]
Peter Smart
And like, again, the rate of change and just zoom out. It's always going to change. The question is like, can you adapt? But. And, and can you realize your real value? It's like, it's not the tools that you know, it's how you're using them. But the, the joy piece, I would say, is something to search for when it feels like a mandate, it can suck all the joy out of it. But there is so much magic in this moment. Like if folks have around with stuff like Claude Bar or Open Claw, whatever we're calling it these days, it's a form of magic. And if that's not your thing, there's other forms of magic which are just being born in this moment. Go and find the things where it just sparks something, all that curiosity that maybe you used to have or hopefully still have. Right? Go and find the things that do that for you, because chances are that's the thing that you'll build your next chapter around anywhere, because it's what you actually enjoy. So, yeah, there's a lot, unfortunately, of no one's going to teach you is your personal privilege in this moment to go and invest into yourself. Do it, do it, do it. But being part of a company culture where there is frames being built around you to direct it and other frames that are trying to create time for you, look out for the companies that are doing that as well.
- [42:27]
Nicola Hamilton
Yeah, no, I think that makes so much sense. I have a million more questions, but I will save them for our time together in Vancouver. Before we let you go, we're opening the mailbag. This is the segment where we ask for questions over Instagram. You can follow along at RGD Canada. And truly, anything goes. Specific questions, big picture questions, super, super niche questions. Let's see what came in. Our first question comes from Alex. And is our design system still useful when products start changing themselves?
- [42:59]
Peter Smart
Absolutely. Are they valuable? Absolutely. Who's producing them? Is the right question. And how big are they? And how are they managed? And how prescriptive will we be in the way that they manifest? Would be all the questions that I would ask. Design systems, though, are a fundamental ingredient of the next form of interface. But the way that they're made, how prescriptive we are. And like, no, the color is green and the radius is a 15 pixels. And there's way more to unpack in that one topic. We could talk for an hour about this one topic.
- [43:33]
Nicola Hamilton
Well, the next one's a little bit of a Follow up for that reason. If AI starts acting as a sort of middle layer. Do brands matter more or less? I think they mean the actual branding. Does that matter more or less?
- [43:45]
Peter Smart
Perfect question, as I'm going to MIT in a couple of weeks to talk about precisely this. What is brand like? Brand is a trust mark which is trying to telegraph value for quality. So like, how much quality am I getting and what is the value that I'm associating with that like, is it, is it worth it? Agents do not care about the same trust marks of brand that humans have been trained on. We think about logos and color and feeling and heritage nostalgia. Like all these things that they think
- [44:16]
Nicola Hamilton
about backlinks and they do think about
- [44:19]
Peter Smart
number of tokens it's going to take to kind of, you know, navigate the product inventory that you've got. They care about rates of return on your products, they care about price, they care about fulfillment speed. There is so much. So if you think about three companies, you've got Walmart, Target and Amazon. All three of them have taken three fundamentally different paths for how they're thinking about agentic commerce. Amazon are like, hell no. Like, agents cannot navigate our platform. I think it's Target who are saying go to town. Like agents can navigate. We're going to design systems to make it really easy for them to navigate. I could be wrong on being targeted. That could be Walmart. But why? If I am, if I'm Amazon, my, my Peter's personal agent come along and find that same lamp by navigating through my inventory, but then figure out who my supplier is and buy for a tenth of the cost might. Peter's agent does not care about the Amazon brand like Peter's agent cares about getting Peter the best lamp for the best part price in the, in the best time frame. And so what brands are going to feel is this trust, not this visibility recession and this ability to influence consumers like this, this wall going up between them. However, however, however, however, human beings still need these trust signals and these brand markets and we are never going to automate the way that we navigate the world entirely to agents. Never. It's not going to happen. Like we are going to want to experience firsthand. We are an experienced being. We crave experiences, we demand experiences. So we're going to come and we are going to interact with brands. What's critical for brands navigating this moment is the expectation of someone like me now coming to a brand experience being. But I need this brand experience to be personal to me because my expectation is now set that everything in my life is now deeply personalized to me. And so when I show up to, yeah, the future of like Patagonia, not even the future like tomorrow is Patagonia or tomorrow's Nike or whoever brand is as much about the experience that you're giving people as it is about the color type, feel, heritage, like all of those things. It's about how can you serve me in the most human and empathetic, empathic way possible. And we talk about technology and we think about empathy and we don't put those things, those things together. Design, like design is the thing when you're talking about designing intelligent systems to be able to connote true signaled understanding about what someone actually needs and react to it and deliver that to them perhaps, perhaps even in advance of them being able to ask for it. Like you can at least mimic and mirror empathy in brand experiences. And so yeah, brands matter the same quite frankly. They matter the same for human beings, they matter less for agents. But how brand manifests is going to get way more complicated and rich. That's a really wonderful place to be as opposed to a negative place to be.
- [47:27]
Nicola Hamilton
Last question, and this one feels like so our duty, our audience will like this question a lot. So Maya's asking, how do you make sure things stay accessible if the interface is always shifting?
- [47:38]
Peter Smart
Yeah, I mean that's just an inherent part of, it's the standard by which we should be judging what a successful interface is in general. And that is true of the physical world that we inhabit, the print that we design and digital interfaces that we create and the non visible interfaces which we're also going to design. So great example of this. We are entering into a world where a lot of the interaction that we, that we have with machines is going to be multimodal and a lot of it will be audio based. But what if I'm not someone who has like the perfect hearing for example? If actually the way that we interact with the world is going to move that way, we're going to need people who are thinking about, about and it's, you know, it's a massive part of the population who don't necessarily hear very well. And so we will need people who are thinking about these new axes for accessibility. When we think about accessibility today, I think we kind of again, we think about design systems and visual displays and we think about, you know, how to ensure that people of all different, you know, needs are able to interact with it. And we've somewhat got the patterns down and it's about can, can we actually get companies to really adopt them? Like, can we get them to like, really lean into it? There's a whole new set of problems that are coming that are going to require deep and like, really thoughtful designers to think about how we're making these experiences accessible for like the most like, number of people. I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating and it's just going to again, place such a premium on people who care about human beings who have creative problem solving ability and can conceive of the new rather than repeat the patterns of the past. I think that that is designers and that's hopefully everyone that we're going to be talking to in Vancouver.
- [49:26]
Nicola Hamilton
Well, that's a perfect place to end this. So thank you so much, Peter, for joining us. And I can't wait to hear more in Vancouver.
- [49:34]
Peter Smart
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you for the time, Nicola.
- [49:37]
Narrator
Design Thinkers is Canada's largest annual graphic design conference. Find out more by visiting designthinkers.com Design Thinkers is produced by the association of Registered Graphic Designers, also known as the rgd. Through the rgd, Canadian designers exchange ideas, educate and inspire, set professional standards, and build a strong, supportive community dedicated to advocating for the value of design. To find out more, visit RGD Cat.