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Insights Unlocked
Is speed is hurting your creativity in design?
00:45:16
Explore design leadership in the age of AI—why slowing down, embracing creativity, and focusing on human insight leads to better product design.
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- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, Jason Giles sits down with design leadership coach Andy Palain to explore what's lost when we prioritize speed over creativity, how AI is reshaping design and why making space for experimentation and what Andy calls noodling is more important than ever. Enjoy the show.
- [00:23]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
- [00:43]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal Content marketing manager at User Testing. Joining us today is host is Jason Giles, User Testing's Vice president of Product design. Hi there, Jason.
- [00:55]
Jason Giles
Hello, Nathan. Hello everyone. It's nice to be back.
- [00:59]
Nathan Isaacs
And our guest today is Dr. Andy Pullain. Andy is a design leadership coach, educator and writer with three decades of experience helping clients transform their organizations and themselves. He is the co author of Service Design From Insight to Implementation. Welcome to the show, Andy.
- [01:17]
Andy Palain
Hello. Thanks for having me. Nice to be here.
- [01:20]
Jason Giles
Andy. This is really exciting to have you on. I can't believe we haven't met before. We've. We obviously know a lot of other folks and I've been really enjoying some of the writing that you do to kind of get us grounded and get started. You know, you've had this really amazing career, spanned a few decades and you know, carving your way through industry, academia and then a lot of work in coaching. And as you look back on that experience, you know, like, are there some specific through lines that you feel like have really shaped how you think about design and design leadership today?
- [02:03]
Andy Palain
Yeah, there are actually. And it came together. I was talking with someone and as I was talking to them, I sort of had this whole thing like, oh, right. And now I see how all these things fit together. I think, you know, my. The beginning of my career was early 90s, very early 90s, before interaction design or UX or any of those things had had the names. And we were working in this new media as it was called then, interactive media and exploring it as a medium, trying to understand it and trying to understand, you know, what is being able to make interactive stuff and put it out there in the world mean now that, you know, non programmers can do it. And we were noodling around doing lots of stuff like that and trying to sort of understand the medium. And out of that came lots of experiments that really helped us explore the affordances, I would say, of interactivity and you know, quite a lot of those. I'M not saying we discovered those independent. Well, we did discover them independently. I'm not saying we sort of invented those. But there are lots of things that we see now in interfaces or every day that were things that we were also discovering as other people were discovering them back then. Um, so there's that aspect of it, of always being interested in, you know, what is this? Not just what is can this technology do, but why is it interesting and may or may not be important kind of culturally. I'd always done a lot of teaching. I was teaching, I was quite good at what I was doing that interactive stuff when I was a student and I was often helping my, my study colleagues. But then straight afterwards I started teaching because there wasn't really anyone to teach that stuff. And I think there was a point when I was the, I was the head of School of Media Arts at the Union University of New South Wales in Sydney and there was a few moments there when I realized some things around leadership. There was some stuff before actually when I worked at a company called Animal Logic where I realized some things around leadership. But in teaching I definitely saw that people blocked themselves a lot. You know, I'd have students come in and they'd be in tears in my office and things. And I realized this didn't really have anything to do with their craft abilities. It was also to do with their relationship to themselves. And then I think, you know, later on I realized that all the stuff around design leadership and leadership in general, I think is, is people stuff. And so that's what all comes together in the, in the coaching. And I've had a long, my ex wife was a, or is a Jungian psychotherapist and we've, we both did many, many years of analysis. Just, you know, can't be married to one without doing it and you can't be one without doing it. And so there's a lot of self discovery and understanding that's come from that over 27, 28 years. And it all sort of flows in together, I think.
- [04:48]
Jason Giles
Do you, do you find that there's fundamentally anything different around the creative pursuits design, the orientation there that is unique in terms of the people skills in unblocking themselves? Or do you, have you found that in general that those tend to be just truths across the various disciplines?
- [05:19]
Andy Palain
There's a thing I talk about called the sort of design leadership dip and I, it's very much the creative leadership dip, but I think it's also goes for, you know, spoken to people in medicine and people and engineers and People like that who talk about this too, which is you build an identity by doing a thing. In design, we make things, we make artifacts. And a lot of our identity at the beginning is how well you can make those artifacts, how quickly you can sometimes make them, you know, and how creative you are and so forth. And at some point you, as you move into a leadership management role, you start doing less of that and it's, you're starting managing and leading people and that's the, that's the people and relationships bit. And it kind of. That bit doesn't get taught in design school, right? I mean, it does in mine. I teach my students that. But it doesn't get taught in design school usually. And if you're lucky, you've had a good role model or mentor, you know, as you've been moving up. And if you haven't, well, if everyone else is unlucky, you've had a really bad one and you copy that person. And so I think that what, what happens there is you, you sort of start to lack confidence in your craft skills and you also a new at the other thing. And that's why I call it a dip. Although I think it's more like a roller coaster. I think there's several dips, but there is definitely the sort of moment of crisis which sort of coincides with a bit of a midlife, mid career crisis anyway, which, you know, pretty much from kindergarten onwards you've kind of been following the script of like, oh, this is the next step, this is the next step. And people have basically been telling you what you need to do and then you hit this thing. Jung called it the sort of the middle passage, this sort of phase between the first and second halves of life where you sort of got to where you're aiming for, right? You're the head of design or whatever you are, design director, and probably didn't think much after that. And then there's this real moment of, huh, well, now I'm here. Is this, is this really what I want? Is this all it all. Is this what it's about? I'm not really sure I like this. And all of that stuff goes on. And so I think it's, I think there's something about making things, creating stuff for a living. I think people who don't do that for a living, where they're in a business role, where they're obviously doing things, but there's something you do in design or any other creative industry where you pull something out of you each time and you put it up for critique. And I think people who don't do that don't know how hard that can be sometimes. And so the sort of cry I think the confidence hit is sometimes a bit stronger because of that, because you build this very strong identity to carry you through that critique. And. And then as you start to dismantle it, it can be quite alarming. And anyway, look, I. I know designers, so that. That's the path I've. I've trod. And so that's why I mostly coach them.
- [08:04]
Jason Giles
It is. What you said just resonates so strongly with me personally. And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, fortunately I've been able to find that working with people that is just. I've reframed it as another design problem, you know, or managing people through change or chaos. And maybe it doesn't quite have the same type of critique factor involved, but that has kept me very engaged. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about what's going on right now is there is a bunch of change being introduced. New technology capabilities are really introducing. Maybe they're challenging some of the ways that we've worked, the way that we've been able to interact with, certainly with computers. But, you know, as you were talking before, you mentioned, you used a couple words in kind of your past of. Of noodling, of experiment. I think you use the word play, and I think, you know, possibly we're in a time where some of that is actually coming back. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more around, you know, why is that exploration important? Why is that play? And possibly how teams, how can they make a space for it without feeling that they're just being unproductive, that they're just goofing around.
- [09:40]
Andy Palain
Yeah. So that, that last bit you just said sort of goes to the heart of it, where I think we are trained and, you know, particularly, I'd argue sort of North American thing, that you should spend every hour of your life being productive. Right. And I don't think that's true at all. You know, and it's quite a modern phenomenon. Right. You know, in. In the. In the past, even if you were sort of subsist subsistence of farming, you're doing that, but there's also quite a lot of doing nothing. And, you know, it's very seasonal too, which is a whole other thing, because you get the time to kind of look inwards and all the rest of it. I think the noodling thing. So the thing that I was talking about, you Know, we, we were experimenting and you need some time to experiment. Like creativity doesn't do very well under pressure, right? Under massive. I mean, it kind of can in the, in the sense of like, you know, a deadline. You know, I'm an arch procrastinator, so sort of deadlines and things like that, they can force creativity. And that's not quite what I mean. I think that, I mean more like that sort of inspirational searching thing that often needs some time. And if the focus is just on sort of moving faster, which is the unspoken or the unquestioned rather kind of value of tech really at least is of digital is, you know, faster is better. And I don't think it always is. And so, you know, I think that time to noodle and explore something, you can't do that if you are under pressure. And when you're under pressure, what people tend to do when they're making stuff is they fall back on two things. They fall back on the stuff they've done before or they've seen others do before, and they also lean into what the technology they're using does well and does easily. So there was a whole bunch of stuff, if you remember the days of Flash and Illustrator and all of that. And partly it was a file size thing, but that whole sort of vector art look that was, arose in the, I guess, sort of late night, late 90s, early 2000s, you know, it was a thing that the tool really left its mark on that stuff. And I, I've, I've attributed this quote to John Mader. I don't, that's who I heard said it, but I've never found it. He said back then, you know, Adobe is the world's art director. And you know, we would have said figma probably a little while ago and probably say Claude now because, you know, the tools leave their mark. They always leave their signature on stuff. You know, this is really the thing that people are saying when they, they talk about slop, right, is that you, you can kind of see the, the marks of the, of the tool. And when you have time to noodle about and you don't have this idea that, you know, I have to be making something that's productive, I have to be making something that has, you know, a commercial value of some kind and you're just exploring, you discover all sorts of other things. And I, I think that, I mean, I said in my newsletter the other day, I think digital product design, and I'd probably argue physical product design has been pretty boring in the last 10, 15 years maybe because it's all got very standardized and it's done, you know, it's been quite useful for a lot of things, right? It's. But it's. But once you've got a design system in place and the sort of back's been broken of that kind of work and you're a sort of junior, mid, even senior designer working with an existing design system and you're being forced to go fast, then you don't have the time to kind of explore the edges of that. You're just churning stuff out and it kind of meant everything got very standardized and the sort of age of average hit, you know, everything starts to look the same, the sort of wind tunnel effect. And I think that's a bit of a shame. And I think that noodling is really, really important. And so one of the things that is kind of happening with AI is that you've got tools, you know, whether it's Claude code or whatever stuff people love about whatever people are using, where people who are non programmers can once again make interactive stuff and put it out there in the world. And I don't mean a sort of clickable figma thing. I mean, you know, something that is, can, can do stuff. Because that all went away when Flash died, basically. Flash and Director and early days of HTML and CSS allowed people to noodle. Daniel Brown used to have a website called Noodlebox and then it all went away and now we sort of need all this massive infrastructure of AI to do it all over again. A bit like we all need kind of hundreds of satellites surrounding the world and the supercomputer in our pocket to do what we used to do with the map. You know, it's kind of a shame in some respects, but I think it's interesting to see people explore again. And you know, that means also non programmers, non designers, that also, you know, so whether it's in the classic trio, whether it's a PM engineer or designer, they all get the chance to noodle again. And I think some interesting stuff might come out of that.
- [14:47]
Jason Giles
Do you, for either practitioners or for leaders of creatives, do you think there's a reframing of experimentation or as you say, noodling or play that is helpful in creating space for that. Do you find that there's practical applications or practical practices that it feels like today? I know, I hear it a lot from my team. I'm like, hey, there's all these opportunities, there's these tools, we make them available to stuff. And yet I am still Driving for delivery and production and quality and all those types of things. Have you. Do you have thoughts on how as individuals or as leaders of teams, creating an environment for that can be effective?
- [15:44]
Andy Palain
Yeah. One of my coaches asked me a really interesting question. I thought the way she framed it was really good, which was she said, what's my response? Responsibility as a leader regarding my team and their usage of AI. She said, I'm not going to just run out and buy licenses for everything, you know, and they have a job to be doing. But at the same time, I don't want to tell them to not touch it either, because clearly for some people it's going to be important in their careers. So we talked about this quite a lot and I guess a lot of my thinking came out of that question. So you said the thing just now, a lot of your jobs focus on delivery and production and quality, but usually the quality suffers. Right. So there's kind of few things I think that are practical about it. One is this thing that designers can actually go back and polish the stuff that, you know is always, oh, yeah, we'll get around to doing that sometime, but not within this sprint. And then it just, you know, I liken it to sort of something dropping off of a speedboat and some people going, oh, well, we'll go back for that in a minute, but not right now. And then by the time you do it, you look behind you and it's so far away, you just kind of get onto the next thing. And so those things, the designers being able to actually do the polish and ship the code themselves, that's kind of an opportunity. I think, with the other stuff, I still question the speed thing. There's a lot of things that don't have to be done fast. I'm not saying everyone goes back to some grindingly slow waterfall process, although a lot of supposedly agile processes in organizations are kind of really waterfall now. Anyway, I think that if you're a large, I mean, Grammarly, the Grammarly debacle was a really good example of if you're an existing brand and not a startup running out of money, it, you know, it makes sense to take two, four, even six to eight weeks longer to do something and get it out there and get it right than it is to throw something out there really quickly and get it wrong. The idea that we need to move fast and break things for an existing brand doesn't make much sense. You know, car companies don't do this for a reason. Right. Because of the safety, apart from Tesla. And look where they're at. And there is a, for a lot of brands. I work with a supermarket in Switzerland and they had this thing going on where they would, you know that they brought out a new app and it was a bit of a rubbish version of the previous one and their customers are really annoyed. Why, why would you do that? Right, there's, there's two main supermarkets in, in Switzerland. There's no real first mover advantage that anyone has. Right. You see it all over the place. I'd much prefer that Zoom, for example, actually fixed a lot of the ux, then just kept adding stuff in. So, you know, we've taken that copy and pasted that sort of startup mentality and applied it to everything. And I think often just going a little bit slower to get it right makes sense. Now the promise of AI is always, well, it's going to free up the time for us to do the more strategic work, to do all of that stuff. And if it does, then great. And I would argue that some of the noodling is an important part of that time. Like here are these tools. What does it enable us to do? What can we do with these things that we couldn't do before? And when I say what can we do, I don't just mean this technical output. I mean how does it shape the way that we work together and you know, as people, how can we have different kinds of conversations due to these tools rather than we're just going to do more of the same, but faster. That seems to be me, to me to be a really lost opportunity to just do more stuff faster.
- [19:27]
Jason Giles
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of to your point. The tools themselves lend themselves to specific applications and that tends to be what gets adopted first and where I get inspired. You know, we've, we've enabled our team pretty freely with, with the tools that they want is the applications that are adjacent or things that I wouldn't have considered before of rethinking entire workflows or turning things on their head. And I really applaud that. And it kind of goes back to the, not just the prioritizing, the time to experiment and play, but to pause a little bit and think about really so many facets of what we're doing is could this be done completely different now? You know, like we were in this habitual mode, whether it's the design process at a macro level or just even on our daily, daily habits or rituals. And I think that's, this is why I love having a, a good sized team of very diverse Designers because they come up with all sorts of really, really cool applications. I'm just like, oh, okay. I think we're just touching the surface. But I wanted to get back to something that you kind of touched on before was with the opportunity for, you know, the technology is enabling many others to get back to the old days of hey, whip up some HTML, build a website or you know, I can use Flash. It's making the, the, the production of something that, where people can actually use it's, it's reduced the barrier there. And I think, and I feel, and I talk to a lot of designers, like a lot are kind of going through a little bit of an identity crisis. You know, this used to be, used to be my stuff. I built my career around my little walled garden of specific capabilities or familiarity with tools. Others haven't had that opportunity. And so I guess, you know, do you think that with these new capabilities that it's actually changing what we're valuing from designers from design work? Does it, does it raise the bar for what should be expected as a designer as they think about their own identity? Have you, you know, do you have thoughts on really what does it mean to be a designer now?
- [22:09]
Andy Palain
I think what it means to be a designer now is actually what it meant to be a designer about 20 years ago. Fifteen, 20 years ago, you know, for all the good stuff that the rise of product and product led companies have done, it did push design down into the kind of assembly line. And prior to that design had spent many decades what becoming, trying to become more strategic and work their way up the food chain. And I think that one of the mistakes that's happened and you know, I kind of understand there's, there's a sort of economic reason why this happened, right? Which is all the highest high paid jobs were in product, whether it's product leadership or product design or whatever else. And everyone kind of rebadged themselves to get those jobs. You know, people say well I've been doing product for 30 years. They just have not because it didn't, you know, it's, it's 17, 18 years old as a, at best in framed in the way that we understand it now. And obviously people have been doing activities that are now done in product design, but they certainly weren't called that. And it kind of munged together a whole bunch of different disciplines, right? If ux, interaction design, information architecture and UI and all of those different aspects, research too. And it kind of munged it all together into one discipline. And I think that has been A real mistake on sort of design's part to do that or to allow that to happen. But like I said, I think there are sort of economic reasons why that happened and sort of power reasons why that happened. I think if you. You know, I remember Flash designers. I remember people saying, you know, I'm a Flash designer. And I remember thinking back then, hey, you know, Flash is going to go away. I remember saying to my students and the world, no, it's never going to go away, Andy. And it's like, you know, I used to build stuff in director, and I know that's going away. You know, that stuff's going to go away one day, and it will. And so if you peg your career on a particular. Being a kind of operator of a particular technology or tool, then, yeah, it's a real problem for you. But if. If really the tools are just a means to execute the stuff that you've been thinking about and the way you think and your ability to articulate those things, then it kind of doesn't really matter. And so all the people I know who have been in this world for quite a long time shifted as the tools have shifted around them. There's a similar thing that went on in the visual effects world, actually, which was. It used to be that visual effects meant buying really expensive computers like the Silicon Graphics, things that look like a fridge that cost, like, you know, a million dollars or something. And basically the economic model of it is you would rent that out at, you know, stupid amount of money per hour. And those people who were working those machines were initially called operators. Like when things like flame and. And Harry and stuff like that, they were flame operators and eventually became called flame artists because of that kind of shift of like, well, it's not just about the tool. It's not just operating a thing. I'm not just the director's pair of hands at the keyboard. And so I think once you kind of escape that and you're able to articulate why you think a certain thing, that your approach, trace it back to some research or whatever it is that you're doing as a designer, that's really the kind of value you bring. And one of the interesting things about AI tools is when that stuff gets embedded in skills, those markdown files, which is really just someone writing out, hey, here's what quality means. And it's kind of fascinating to look at, right? When you look at that stuff and you see the impeccable ones, for example, there's a whole bunch of stuff around rhythm and spacing or in the typography one or there's a whole bunch of different ones. And it's the ability to articulate your decisions that's really, really important. And that's where if you've been down the end of kind of just working with someone else's design system. The thing I wrote in my newsletter is it's a bit making scenes with Playmobil. Right. Yeah. You can make a scene but you can't change. You know, all the fundamental design and creative decisions have already been made. And so I think that's one of the kind of differentiators in terms of people's careers. So in some respects it's. I've seen people saying things like, well, the new thing in design is really about the why. And I'm like, really? That's not, that's not the new thing in design. That's, that's been always been around. And fundamentally design is about looking at the world thinking I think it could be better in a different way and then manifesting that in some way. You know, and there's this mix of, there's always this mix of humility and ego. Right. With, with designing, there's this sort of ego to say I think this could be different and here's my idea for it and I'm going to make it and put it out there in the world. And then there's the humility in that. You really have to, you know, understand other people and work with other people in other disciplines.
- [27:06]
Jason Giles
Yeah. I really love, I really love that framing really resonates where, you know, the tools will continue to change the mediums that we play with. But it's almost the. Is unlocking this opportunity for design to get back to what it always was about, was really deeply understanding humans.
- [27:30]
Andy Palain
Yeah.
- [27:31]
Jason Giles
And creatively providing solutions or opportunities for them to do things in amazing new ways.
- [27:39]
Andy Palain
I mean, one of the things. This is also going to all go away. I mean it's going to change radically as, as we all know there are. There's just the kind of physics of it. The enormous resource consumption of it is an impossible barrier that AI is going to hit. We struggle enough with everything else in the world to cover it with renewables, let alone just adding a kind of massive energy guzzling engine to it. But also financially, it's obviously going to break. I mean the bubble is. I've been around like you probably long enough to have been through a couple of bubbles and the air is already going out of it, I'd suggest. But the AI bubble is definitely going to burst at some point. And I think the question that I keep coming back to is this idea. If. If this stuff was costing us 10 times the amount that it currently costs, which is probably sort of at least what it should, would we be doing the same stuff with it? And my guess is probably not. I think there's a lot of things people go, oh, you know, I'm just. I'm going to do that by hand. There's no point in spending that energy or money doing it. So I'm interested. I know it sounds really negative, but I'm looking forward to the bubble bursting apart from the collateral damage of it with all that sort of money getting sucked out of the system. But from a technology and subculture point of view, whatever comes afterwards will be the interesting stuff.
- [29:03]
Jason Giles
Yeah, no, that's fascinating. It's interesting to see we're already developing skills on how to optimize for credit usage. That's becoming a new skill that. Who would have thought, even a year ago would have been kind of a core competency of using with these tools, which says a lot around.
- [29:24]
Andy Palain
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:26]
Jason Giles
Where we're at as far as within that kind of curve of the bubble. Just want to kind of switch gears one last time and kind of think about, you know, I've been spending a lot of time kind of rejoicing in the sense where, you know, over the past few years, particularly in digital production, you know, shipping was the big. Was the big finish line, and that's the moment that you celebrate, you know, we got this thing out there.
- [29:59]
Andy Palain
And.
- [30:00]
Jason Giles
And increasingly, I've seen it more and more difficult for teams to be like, okay, well, like, how's it actually doing in the market? How is it changing people's lives? Is it being effective or not? And on one side of me, I'm a little bit concerned because now shipping is technically easy. You can get stuff out to market very quickly. Do you have concerns whether there's kind of aspects of what we do as designers, as researchers, as product creators? Are there hard parts that we're kind of starting to skip as part of the way that AI is changing the way that we work?
- [30:45]
Andy Palain
This is really the argument for noodling, actually, because I think some of the deeper thinking happens while you're noodling. And, but. But if I just define noodling, I mean, exploring a. A medium, exploring an idea in different ways and kind of turning it over, I guess, you know, the, the. It's a. A segue from kind of doodling right. When we used to design by Hand, you know, and there's plenty of design professions that still do this. We would do lots and lots and lots of sketches of things and find the form and all of that. And one of my favorite examples of this, because I used to live in Sydney, is the Sydney Opera House, right? You and Utzon's, you can. You can look at it all online, you know, some sketches for this. And there's this iterative backwards and forwards. Like there's. I have it on my desktop, actually, as my desktop picture this kind of quick sketch of the Opera House and these kind of palm leaves as like, oh, this is what. What I kind of want it to look like. And then at some point he goes into quite a lot of detail. He's making prototypes, maquettes and all of these things and drawing up quite detailed plans and then realize that something's not going to work and go back to that sketchy stage of things. And it took him like two years to get the segmenting right on the. On the sales of the Opera House. And. And there's a lot of. There's a guy called John Wariker, he is one of the founders of Tomato, who we used to kind of work with. And. And he said, you know, I used to like it when computers were slower because whilst the progress bar was going along when I was applying some blur or something in Photoshop, I go and make a cup of coffee and think about what I want to do next. And so time, you know, that kind of in between time is really, really useful. And, you know, I think when you are able to go straight from an idea to manifesting it, or worse, sort of half an idea and prompting it and just taking whatever comes back from the prompt, that's the real shortcut. That's the problem, I would say, because you can't unsee it once you've seen it. And you've then skipped a whole load of that kind of working through things and the thinking that goes on. And the thing about design thinking, that was the problem, if you like, was that it made it sound like there was no thought done after that bit of thinking had been done. We think for a. A bit, and then we just make and deliver. And I think that's been the model quite a lot recently in the last 10 years. And I think actually, you know, but two thirds of the thinking happening happens while you're designing, right? That. That thing of as you're sketching. Everyone's had this when they've been sketching a, I don't know, a wireframe sequence or something and they, oh, hang on, I've just, that's not going to work. I've sort of designed myself into a corner here. Now, now that I see it, that's never going to work. How it, because in our, in our heads we have this Platonic ideal, this utopian ideal of how this thing's going to work. And then when we make it manifest it's like, oh, that doesn't work at all. And so I think there's some stuff there that we are in danger of skipping by going straight from sort of half baked thought to prompted output. And I think we like anything else, we have to kind of use those tools. If you're like, no, I have some intent here on what I'm doing with, with this, with this tool here is to try and manifest my intent and I'm going to keep prodding it until I get there or you know, come up with different ideas. That's very different from, you know, just having a half baked thing and just taking whatever is, is delivered by the, the tool in question.
- [34:04]
Jason Giles
Yeah, you know, sometimes I really struggle because some of the efficiencies, there's a clearly a theme around speed and slowness here in this conversation, which I really appreciate, but the efficiencies are, can be so seductive. Just recently, you know, we did a bunch of research and obviously like AI is great at like synthesizing things and I saw something that was a little maybe off and I sat and I watched a whole session and watched this participant interact and like, and it was just interesting. Like there was a moment of like feeling present and, and observing and actually watching this person doing what they're doing. That hit me in a way that I realized in that moment I'm like, oh, I'm going to need to be careful. Like that connection to this, this human who is interacting with this prototype that, you know, one of my designers had, had, was really, was really powerful in a way that the summary or the automated kind of results of this test and so it'll be interesting to see if there's other instances of that. I think there's an importance of mindfulness as we use these new capabilities for losing something that isn't maybe around productivity. It's about something, a deeper connection to meaning, to understanding, to, I don't know, to something real.
- [35:41]
Andy Palain
I think there's definitely, you know, humans are very, very, very sensitive and hardwired for relating and human connection. I think the reason why we have that ick feeling when we are on the receiving end of Slop is. It just feels a little bit off. You know, it's this sort of uncanny valley effect as well. The. The closer we get to it seeming like someone has written this, the. The more we're sensitive to the fact it's not. You know, I, I've had numerous things recently where I've read a thing and I'm like, this has got. This smells of L and M. And when I, When I prod, you know, it is. And the same is watching the stuff, you know, it's really impressive what, you know, the generative, what stuff can be generated or, you know, image wise or video wise. And yet, and yet it's the same thing again. You can see the signature of the tool on it a little bit and it stumps some, gives you that ick feeling. And I think it depends on the context, right? If it's actually someone said it about silly kind of pet videos or animal videos the other day, and there's all these sort of amazing videos or fluke things that happen, you know, and they, you know, become memes and stuff on. On Instagram, a TikTok of a cat doing a kind of interesting, you know, funny thing. And yet as soon as you have a moment of like, oh, no, hang on, that's a. That's an AI that's generated that it completely loses its meaning, right? It's. It's no longer. It's no longer. Isn't it amazing that the animal did that?
- [37:06]
Jason Giles
It's just a stupid video now.
- [37:07]
Andy Palain
It's just a stupid video, right? And. And you know, I think this is the reason why Sora kind of has been shut it actually, because it's kind of interesting at the beginning and then it's just not. It gets boring quite quickly. But I think the connection thing is really important. I've been thinking, you know, my job is to coach people, right? So I've been thinking quite a lot about, you know, why would someone use me instead of using Claude or chat GPD or whatever. Quite apart from the fact that there's no data privacy with those tools. The, you know, when I'm coaching someone, there's stuff that we talk about and someone will say something, you know, a conflict they've got or something they've got going on at work, and then they go, yeah, but, you know, it doesn't really bother me. And then we. We talk about it for another 10 minutes. This actually does bother you because we've been talking about it for 10 minutes or I see someone, I hear the little waiver in someone's voice or where I see their eyes go a little bit glassy or them flush red. You know, all those things that we read as humans because we're such social animals. And it's those things that I'm looking for and going, okay, there's a thing there. I, I, you know, and I'll. Depending on the person and the context, I'll kind of follow that thing up. And it just, it gets lost. It doesn't get just lost because of text, but it also gets lost because of the dynamic of how you're interacting with something that, you know, does a very good facsimile of seeming like it's human and intelligent, but actually there's just nothing behind it. And so, you know, that's, that's why you would come to a human coach instead of, you know, or a human therapist or whatever, instead of using an AI, because you're just missing that human connection. And I think it's, I suspect it's one of those things that the more we engage with it, the more we realize that that's a really important thing.
- [38:52]
Jason Giles
Yeah, I totally concur. There's almost a, I'm developing a spidey sense when I feel disconnected, when I feel like I've been interacting synthetically too much. And I can't put my finger on it yet, but there's just something there. And it's,
- [39:14]
Andy Palain
I think it's like eating, you know, low junk food where I've eaten a lot of stuff, but I actually don't feel nourished at all. Yeah, that's one of the things going on.
- [39:23]
Jason Giles
Well, Andy, I can tell you I've really enjoyed this human to human connection, this, this conversation. Very meaningful. Boy, you have done a lot. You've, you wrote the book on, on service design. You got a second edition coming out there.
- [39:42]
Andy Palain
Yeah, it's, it came out in October. Yeah, last year.
- [39:47]
Jason Giles
Are there any highlights that, you know from, from the book that might relate to this, this age that we are, we're going in?
- [39:58]
Andy Palain
There is actually. No, no, just as you were saying it, I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I mean the first thing is we, we, we went through the whole book. Ashley Laveran. So I have two co authors, Laveran's lovely and Ben Reason and Laverne said, I think we should make it into a pamphlet. I think we should take as much stuff out instead of just adding to it. And of course we, we didn't, it actually has more stuff in than it did, but we did edit some stuff out too. But we went through and we went, you know, when we wrote the first book, it's like 14, 15 years ago. And so, you know, looking back, actually it's not that long ago, 12 years ago, looking back over that time and you know, at the beginning it was like, oh, you know, we think service design could do this. And now being able to look back and go, okay, now we know. Now we've got a whole bunch of case studies. There's service design in, particularly in government, all over the place. And interestingly, I've been seeing quite a lot of service design jobs recently. And I think it's partly that that sort of glue work that service design does to, you know, when you've got kind of quite siloed teams again and some kind of product teams have ended up like that, the service design people can often work sort of horizontally across that. So there's a whole bunch of case studies, the proof of the impact and all those kinds of things are in there. We went through and we rewrote every chapter, but there's a couple of things. One, we had a sort of prediction chapter of the future of service design at the end. So that was interesting to revisit. But we added a new chapter which was about organizational change. And it was the kind of missing bit. And it's the thing that relates to what we were just talking about, which is we realize that we do service design projects and it kind of generally involves an organization becoming service design led, or everyone becoming service designers, if you like, or recognizing that everyone is part of creating and delivering that service in the organization, and it ends up being an organizational change methodology. And so often the organizations weren't really ready to receive the work that we were creating as service designers. And they would get this stuff and they go, we don't know what to do with this. We don't know how to operationalize it. And a lot of the work turned out to be human, relational work. It turned out to be aligning stakeholders, realizing there's a lot of fear and anxiety about this on a really human level, you know, whether it is the senior stakeholders who had commissioned the work or whether it's someone who's working on the front line who you're basically saying, hey, the way you've been working for the last 10 years, we're going to change it now. And that's really makes people really jittery and realizing that, in fact, a big chunk of the service design work is that much more than it is any of the kind of artifacts or whatever that people create. And I think there's a link there. You know, there's some stats in the book which I can't remember off the top of my head, but a large majority is like 3/4 of technology transformation projects fail and they fail because of the human aspect is not taken into account. And this is kind of the same thing all over again with AI.
- [43:10]
Jason Giles
Yeah, 100%. I'm very looking forward to reading the new book for sure. Where would our audience find out more about the book and about just you and what you're up to?
- [43:27]
Andy Palain
So the book is@rosenfeld media.com and you'll find it there. That's the, you know, the, the best place to buy it. But you can also get it on Amazon and the rest of it. And people can find me at perlane.com P-O L A I N E.com if you go to their slash linktree. I think I've got a page that has all my socials everywhere else, but you'll find me on LinkedIn. I kind of hang out on Blue Sky a bit, but I have given up quite a lot of the other social media. So LinkedIn is probably the main bit and my website. And then there's. I have a YouTube channel and a podcast too. The podcast called Power of 10 and the YouTube channel. It's. It's. I have these coaching reflections. Sometimes there's a pattern that comes up in a week or two of like, I'm like, oh, the same thing is coming up with my coaches. And so I usually record a little short video about it and put it up there, but they all go on my website too.
- [44:25]
Jason Giles
Amazing. Well, I will go check those out as well. Andy, thank you for a very human conversation. It's been a real pleasure to meet you and yes, and I'm sure all of the, all the listeners will really enjoy this episode. So thanks for, thanks again for being a guest.
- [44:44]
Andy Palain
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.
- [44:47]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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